SEOUL: Former South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan, whose iron-fisted rule of the country following a 1979 military coup sparked massive democracy protests, died on Tuesday at the age of 90, his former press aide said.
Chun had multiple myeloma, a blood cancer which was in remission, and his health had deteriorated recently, his former press secretary Min Chung-ki told reporters. He passed away at his Seoul home early in the morning and his body was moved to a hospital for a funeral later in the day.
A former military commander, Chun presided over the 1980 Gwangju army massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators, a crime for which he was later convicted and received a commuted death sentence.
His death came about a month after coup co-conspirator and succeeding President Roh Tae-woo, who played a crucial but controversial role in the country’s troubled transition to democracy, died at age 88.
An aloof, ramrod-straight Chun during his mid-1990s trial defended the coup as necessary to save the nation from a political crisis and denied sending troops into Gwangju.
“I am sure that I would take the same action, if the same situation arose,” Chun told the court.
Chun was born on March 6, 1931, in Yulgok-myeon, a poor farming town in the southeastern county of Hapcheon, during Japanese rule over Korea.
He joined the military straight out of high school, working his way up the ranks until he was appointed a commander in 1979. Taking charge of the investigation into the assassination of President Park Chung-hee that year, Chun courted key military allies and gained control of South Korea’s intelligence agencies to headline a Dec. 12 coup.
“In front of the most powerful organizations under the Park Chung-hee presidency, it surprised me how easily (Chun) gained control over them and how skilfully he took advantage of the circumstances. In an instant he seemed to have grown into a giant,” Park Jun-kwang, Chun’s subordinate during the coup later told journalist Cho Gab-je.
Chun’s eight-year rule in the presidential Blue House was characterised by brutality and political repression. It was, however, also marked by growing economic prosperity.
Chun resigned from office amid a nationwide student-led democratic movement in 1987 demanding a direct electoral system.
In 1995, he was charged with mutiny, treason and was arrested after refusing to appear at the prosecutors’ office and fleeing to his hometown.
At what local media dubbed the “trial of the century,” he and Roh were found guilty of mutiny, treason and bribery. In their verdict, judges said Chun’s rise to power came “through illegal means which inflicted enormous damage on the people.”
Thousands of students were believed to have been killed at Gwangju, according to testimonies by survivors, former military officers and investigators.
Roh was given a lengthy jail term while Chun was sentenced to death. However, that was commuted by the Seoul High Court in recognition of Chun’s role in the fast-paced economic development of the Asian “Tiger” economy and the peaceful transfer of the presidency to Roh in 1988.
Both men were pardoned and freed from jail in 1997 by President Kim Young-sam, in what he called an effort to promote “national unity.”
An association of survivors’ groups said at a news conference on Tuesday that it was lamentable that Chun died without apologizing for the coup and Gwangju “massacre,” vowing to continue seeking the truth and “justice of history.”
Chun made several returns to the spotlight. He caused a national furor in 2003 when he claimed total assets of 291,000 won ($245) of cash, two dogs and some home appliances — while owing some 220.5 billion won in fines. His four children and other relatives were later found to own large swaths of land in Seoul and luxurious villas in the United States.
Chun’s family in 2013 vowed to pay off the bulk of his debt, but his unpaid fines still totalled some 100 billion won as of last December. Seoul city said last week that his unpaid taxes exceeded 980 million won.
In 2020, Chun was found guilty and received an eight-month suspended sentence for defaming a late democracy activist and Catholic priest in his 2017 memoirs. Prosecutors have appealed, and Chun had faced a trial next week.
Chun had wished to be cremated and buried near the border with North Korea, but his family would make a final decision when his youngest son, living in the United States, arrives, Min said. ($1 = 1,188.3000 won)
Former South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan dies at 90
https://arab.news/j6nwy
Former South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan dies at 90
- His death came about a month after coup co-conspirator and succeeding President Roh Tae-woo died at age 88
- Chun’s eight-year rule in the presidential Blue House was characterised by brutality and political repression
Uganda’s president seeks a seventh term that would bring him closer to 5 decades in power
Museveni, 80, has defied calls for his retirement, as critics warn that he as veered into authoritarianism with virtually no opposition even within his ruling National Resistance Movement party.
He was welcomed by a large crowd of supporters as he went to collect nomination papers from the offices of the ruling party in Kampala, the Ugandan capital.
Museveni first took power as head of a rebel force in 1986. He has since been elected six times, though recent elections have been marred by violence and allegations of vote rigging. His main opponent in the last election was the popular entertainer known as Bobi Wine, who has also declared his candidacy in the polls set for January 2026.
Wine, whose real name is Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, has seen many associates jailed or go into hiding as security forces cracked down on opposition supporters.
Museveni has dismissed Wine as “an agent of foreign interests” who cannot be trusted with power. Wine has been arrested many times on various charges but has never been convicted. He insists he is running a nonviolent campaign.
Decades ago, Museveni himself had criticized African leaders who overstayed their welcome in office. In Uganda, lawmakers did the same thing for him when they jettisoned the last constitutional obstacle — age limits — for a possible life presidency. His son, army chief Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has asserted his wish to succeed his father, raising fears of hereditary rule.
A long-time opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, has been jailed since November over alleged treason charges his lawyers say are politically motivated. Besigye, a physician who retired from Uganda’s military at the rank of colonel, is a former president of the Forum for Democratic Change party, for many years Uganda’s most prominent opposition group.
The East African country has never seen a peaceful transfer of power since independence from Britain in 1962.
Belgrade braces for another anti-government protest, calling for an early parliamentary election
- Tensions have soared ahead of the protest organized by Serbia’s university students, a key force behind nationwide anti-corruption demonstrations that started after a renovated rail station canopy collapsed
BELGRADE: Belgrade is bracing for yet another student-led protest on Saturday to pressure Serbia’s populist President Aleksandar Vucic to call for a snap parliamentary election after nearly eight months of rallies that have rattled his firm grip on power in the Balkan country.
Tensions have soared ahead of the protest organized by Serbia’s university students, a key force behind nationwide anti-corruption demonstrations that started after a renovated rail station canopy collapsed, killing 16 people on Nov. 1.
Many blamed the concrete roof crash on rampant government corruption and negligence in state infrastructure projects, leading to recurring mass protests.
Vucic and his right-wing Serbian Progressive Party have refused the demand for an early vote and accused protesters of planning to spur violence at orders from abroad, which they didn’t specify.
In a show of business as usual, the Serbian president handed out presidential awards in the capital to people, including artists and journalists, he deemed worthy, as his loyalists, camping in a park in central Belgrade, announced they would hold a “literary evening.”
“People need not worry — the state will be defended and thugs brought to justice,” Vucic told reporters on Saturday.
Serbian presidential and parliamentary elections are due in 2027.
Saturday marks St. Vitus Day, a religious holiday and the date when Serbs mark a 14th-century battle against Ottoman Turks in Kosovo that was the start of hundreds of years of Turkish rule, holding symbolic importance.
Police earlier this week arrested several people accused of allegedly plotting to overthrow the government and banned entry into the country to several people from Croatia and a theater director from Montenegro without explanation. Serbia’s railway company halted train service over an alleged bomb threat in what critics said was an apparent bid to prevent people from traveling to Belgrade for the rally.
Authorities made similar moves back in March, ahead of what was the biggest ever anti-government protest in the Balkan country, which drew hundreds of thousands of people.
Vucic’s loyalists then set up a camp in a park outside his office, which still stands. The otherwise peaceful gathering on March 15 came to an abrupt end when part of the crowd suddenly scattered in panic, triggering allegations that authorities used a sonic weapon against peaceful protesters, which they have denied.
Vucic, a former extreme nationalist, has become increasingly authoritarian since coming to power over a decade ago. Though he formally says he wants Serbia to join the European Union, critics say Vucic has stifled democratic freedoms as he strengthened ties with Russia and China.
What’s next for birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court’s ruling
- US President Trump’s executive order, signed in January, seeks to deny citizenship to children who are born to people who are living in the US illegally or temporarily
WASHINGTON: The legal battle over President Donald Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship is far from over despite the Republican administration’s major victory Friday limiting nationwide injunctions.
Immigrant advocates are vowing to fight to ensure birthright citizenship remains the law as the Republican president tries to do away with more than a century of precedent.
The high court’s ruling sends cases challenging the president’s birthright citizenship executive order back to the lower courts. But the ultimate fate of the president’s policy remains uncertain.
Here’s what to know about birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court’s ruling and what happens next.
What does birthright citizenship mean?
Birthright citizenship makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally.
The practice goes back to soon after the Civil War, when Congress ratified the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, in part to ensure that Black people, including former slaves, had citizenship.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,” the amendment states.
Thirty years later, Wong Kim Ark, a man born in the US to Chinese parents, was refused re-entry into the US after traveling overseas. His suit led to the Supreme Court explicitly ruling that the amendment gives citizenship to anyone born in the US, no matter their parents’ legal status.
It has been seen since then as an intrinsic part of US law, with only a handful of exceptions, such as for children born in the US to foreign diplomats.
Trump has long said he wants to do away with birthright citizenship
Trump’s executive order, signed in January, seeks to deny citizenship to children who are born to people who are living in the US illegally or temporarily. It’s part of the hard-line immigration agenda of the president, who has called birthright citizenship a “magnet for illegal immigration.”
Trump and his supporters focus on one phrase in the amendment — “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” – saying it means the US can deny citizenship to babies born to women in the country illegally.
A series of federal judges have said that’s not true, and issued nationwide injunctions stopping his order from taking effect.
“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” US District Judge John Coughenour said at a hearing earlier this year in his Seattle courtroom.
In Greenbelt, Maryland, a Washington suburb, US District Judge Deborah Boardman wrote that “the Supreme Court has resoundingly rejected and no court in the country has ever endorsed” Trump’s interpretation of birthright citizenship.
Is Trump’s order constitutional? The justices didn’t say
The high court’s ruling was a major victory for the Trump administration in that it limited an individual judge’s authority in granting nationwide injunctions. The administration hailed the ruling as a monumental check on the powers of individual district court judges, whom Trump supporters have argued want to usurp the president’s authority with rulings blocking his priorities around immigration and other matters.
But the Supreme Court did not address the merits of Trump’s bid to enforce his birthright citizenship executive order.
“The Trump administration made a strategic decision, which I think quite clearly paid off, that they were going to challenge not the judges’ decisions on the merits, but on the scope of relief,” said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor.
Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters at the White House that the administration is “very confident” that the high court will ultimately side with the administration on the merits of the case.
Questions and uncertainty swirl around next steps
The justices kicked the cases challenging the birthright citizenship policy back down to the lower courts, where judges will have to decide how to tailor their orders to comply with the new ruling. The executive order remains blocked for at least 30 days, giving lower courts and the parties time to sort out the next steps.
The Supreme Court’s ruling leaves open the possibility that groups challenging the policy could still get nationwide relief through class-action lawsuits and seek certification as a nationwide class. Within hours after the ruling, two class-action suits had been filed in Maryland and New Hampshire seeking to block Trump’s order.
But obtaining nationwide relief through a class action is difficult as courts have put up hurdles to doing so over the years, said Suzette Malveaux, a Washington and Lee University law school professor.
“It’s not the case that a class action is a sort of easy, breezy way of getting around this problem of not having nationwide relief,” said Malveaux, who had urged the high court not to eliminate the nationwide injunctions.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who penned the court’s dissenting opinion, urged the lower courts to “act swiftly on such requests for relief and to adjudicate the cases as quickly as they can so as to enable this Court’s prompt review” in cases “challenging policies as blatantly unlawful and harmful as the Citizenship Order.”
Opponents of Trump’s order warned there would be a patchwork of polices across the states, leading to chaos and confusion without nationwide relief.
“Birthright citizenship has been settled constitutional law for more than a century,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, a nonprofit that supports refugees and migrants. “By denying lower courts the ability to enforce that right uniformly, the Court has invited chaos, inequality, and fear.”
Russian strike on Ukraine’s Odesa kills two, wounds 14
- Moscow has stepped up drone and missile attacks on Ukraine
- Ukraine has launched retaliatory strikes on Russia throughout the war
KYiV: A Russian drone strike on Ukraine’s southern port city of Odesa killed two people and wounded 14, including children, local authorities said on Saturday.
Moscow has stepped up drone and missile attacks on Ukraine and peace talks initiated by the United States to end the three-year conflict have stalled.
“Rescuers pulled the bodies of two people from the rubble who died as a result of a hostile drone strike on a residential building,” Odesa Governor Oleg Kiper said on Telegram.
The night-time strike wounded 14 people, Kiper said, adding that “three of them children.”
Separately, authorities in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region said one person was killed and three others were wounded in Russian strikes over the past day.
“Russian troops targeted critical and social infrastructure and residential areas in the region,” the Kherson’s governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said on Telegram early on Saturday.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in Russia’s offensive, which has forced millions from their homes and devastated much of eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine has launched retaliatory strikes on Russia throughout the war.
The Russian defense ministry said on Saturday its air defense had shot down 31 Ukrainian drones overnight.
Moscow also said it had captured another village in the Donetsk region, which the Kremlin has claimed as part of Russia since late 2022.
Russia has demanded Ukraine cede more land and give up Western military support as a precondition to peace – terms Kyiv says are unacceptable.
Europe bakes in summer’s first heatwave as continent warms
- Scientists have long warned that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels is heating up the world with disastrous consequences for the environment
MARSEILLES: Sweating Europeans braced on Saturday for the first heatwave of the northern hemisphere summer, as climate change pushes the world’s fastest-warming continent’s thermometers increasingly into the red.
Temperatures are set to rise to 37 degrees Celsius (99 degrees Fahrenheit) in Rome, driving the Eternal City’s many tourists and Catholic pilgrims to the Vatican alike toward the Italian capital’s some 2,500 public fountains for refreshment.
With residents of the southern port city of Marseille expected to have to cope with temperatures flirting with 40C (104F), authorities in France’s second-largest city ordered public swimming pools to be made free of charge to help residents beat the Mediterranean heat.
Two-thirds of Portugal will be on high alert on Sunday for extreme heat and forest fires with 42C (108F) expected in the capital Lisbon, while visitors to — and protesters against — Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos’s Friday wedding in Venice likewise sweltered under the summer sun.
“I try not to think about it, but I drink a lot of water and never stay still, because that’s when you get sunstroke,” Sriane Mina, an Italian student, told AFPTV on Friday in Venice.
Meanwhile Spain, which has in past years seen a series of deadly summer blazes ravaging the Iberian peninsula, is expecting peak temperatures in excess of 40C (104F) across most of the country from Sunday.
Scientists have long warned that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels is heating up the world with disastrous consequences for the environment, with Europe’s ever-hotter and increasingly common blistering summer heatwaves a direct result of that warming.
With peaks of 39C (102F) expected in Naples and Palermo, Sicily has ordered a ban on outdoor work in the hottest hours of the day, as has the Liguria region in northern Italy.
The country’s trade unions are campaigning to extend the measure to other parts of the country.
The heatwave comes hot on the heels of a series of tumbling records for extreme heat, including Europe’s hottest March ever, according to the EU’s Copernicus climate monitor.
As a result of the planet’s warming, extreme weather events including hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves like this weekend’s have become more frequent and intense, scientists warn.
By some estimates 2024, the hottest year in recorded history so far, saw worldwide disasters which cost more than $300 billion.
