Sunday, October 11, 2020
EDITORIAL BOARD #NYT - Elect Joe Biden, America
Joe Biden has vowed to be a president for all Americans, even those who do not support him. In previous elections, such a promise might have sounded trite or treacly. Today, the idea that the president should have the entire nation’s interests at heart feels almost revolutionary.
Mr. Biden has also vowed to “restore the soul of America.” It is a painful reminder that the country is weaker, angrier, less hopeful and more divided than it was four years ago. With this promise, Mr. Biden is assuring the public that he recognizes the magnitude of what the next president is being called upon to do. Thankfully, he is well suited to the challenge — perhaps particularly so.
Kathleen Kingsbury, acting editorial page editor, wrote about the choice to endorse Joe Biden for president in a special edition of our Opinion Today newsletter. You can read it here.
In the midst of unrelenting chaos, Mr. Biden is offering an anxious, exhausted nation something beyond policy or ideology. His campaign is rooted in steadiness, experience, compassion and decency.
A President Biden would embrace the rule of law and restore public confidence in democratic institutions. He would return a respect for science and expertise to the government. He would stock his administration with competent, qualified, principled individuals. He would stand with America’s allies and against adversaries that seek to undermine our democracy. He would work to address systemic injustices. He would not court foreign autocrats or give comfort to white supremacists. His focus would be on healing divisions and rallying the nation around shared values. He would understand that his first duty, always, is to the American people.
But Mr. Biden is more than simply a steady hand on the wheel. His message of unity and pragmatism resonated with Democratic voters, who turned out in large numbers to elevate him above a sprawling primary field.
His team has put together a bold agenda aimed at tackling some of America’s most pressing problems. The former vice president is committed to working toward universal health care through measures such as adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act — which he played a significant role in passing — lowering the age for Medicare eligibility to 60 years old and cutting the cost of prescription drugs. He recognizes the fateful threat of climate change and has put forward an ambitious, $2 trillion plan to slash carbon emissions, invest in a green economy and combat environmental racism.
Mr. Biden will not be morphing into an ideological maximalist any time soon, but he has acknowledged that the current trifecta of crises — a lethal pandemic, an economic meltdown and racial unrest — calls for an expanded governing vision. His campaign has been reaching out to a wide range of thinkers, including former rivals, to help craft more dynamic solutions. In midsummer, he rolled out an economic recovery plan, dubbed “Build Back Better,” with proposals to bolster American manufacturing, spur innovation, build a “clean-energy economy,” advance racial equity and support caregivers and educators. His plan for fighting the coronavirus includes the creation of a public health jobs corps. Progressives who want even more from him should not be afraid to push. Experience is not the same as stagnation.
Mr. Biden has a long and distinguished record of accomplishment, including, as a senator, sponsoring the landmark Violence Against Women Act of 1994 and, as vice president, overseeing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, passed in response to the Great Recession. In a 2012 interview on “Meet the Press,” his remarks in support of gay marriage — which blindsided the Obama White House and caused a public kerfuffle — proved a watershed moment for the cause of equality. In 1996, Mr. Biden had voted as a senator in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriages, making his evolution on the issue particularly resonant.
He has an unusually rich grasp of and experience in foreign policy, which, as traditionally understood, has not played a central role in the presidential race — though the pandemic, the climate crisis, a more assertive China and disinformation wars against the American public argue strongly that it should. The next president will face the task of repairing the enormous damage inflicted on America’s global reputation.
Mr. Biden has the necessary chops, having spent much of his career focused on global concerns. He not only took on thorny diplomatic missions as vice president, he also served more than three decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Aware that an “America First” approach in reality amounts to “America alone,” he would work to revive and refurbish damaged alliances. He has the respect and trust of America’s allies and would not be played for a fool by its adversaries.
Certainly, not all of Mr. Biden’s foreign policy decisions through the decades look sage in hindsight, but he has shown foresight in key moments. He fought a rear-guard action in the Obama White House to limit the futile surge in Afghanistan. He was against the 2011 intervention in Libya and skeptical of committing American troops to Syria. He opposed renewing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2007 and 2008 because it gave the government too much power to spy on Americans. He’s supported closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay. Little wonder that he has the backing of a who’s who of the foreign policy community and national security officials from both parties.
Mr. Biden is not an ideological purist or a bomb-thrower. Some will see this as a shortcoming or hopelessly naïve. Certainly, it’s unlikely that if Republicans retain control of the Senate, their leader, Mitch McConnell, will abandon his policy of fanatical obstructionism of any Democratic president.
That said, as the emissary often dispatched by President Barack Obama to deal with Republican lawmakers during tough legislative fights, Mr. Biden has intimate experience with the partisan gridlock crippling Congress. He knows how the levers of power work on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and he has longstanding relationships with members from both parties. More than any of this cycle’s other presidential hopefuls, he offered weary voters a chance to see whether even a modicum of bipartisanship is possible.
He is also offering a glimpse of the Democratic Party’s future in his choice of running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California. Ms. Harris would become a number of firsts — a woman, a Black person and an Asian-American — as vice president, adding history-making excitement to the ticket. A former prosecutor, she is tough, smart and can dismantle a faulty argument or political opponent. She is progressive, but not radical. In her own presidential campaign, she presented herself as a unifying leader with center-left policy proposals in a mold similar to Mr. Biden, albeit a generation younger. Mr. Biden is aware that he no longer qualifies as a fresh face and has said that he considers himself a bridge to the party’s next generation of leaders. Ms. Harris is a promising step in that direction.
If he wins election, Mr. Biden will need to take his governing agenda to the people — all of the people, not just his party’s loudest or most online voices. This will require persuading Americans that he understands their concerns and can translate that understanding into sound policy.
Mr. Biden has a rare gift for forging such connections. In his younger days, he, like so many senators, could be in love with the sound of his own voice. Time and loss have softened his edges. He speaks the language of suffering and compassion with a raw intimacy. People respond to that, across lines of race and class — ever more so in this time of uncertainty. The father of the police-shooting victim Jacob Blake described his phone conversation with Mr. Biden as full of “love, admiration, caring,” in one of many recent examples of the former vice president’s hard-earned empathy.
Mr. Biden knows that there are no easy answers. He has the experience, temperament and character to guide the nation through this valley into a brighter, more hopeful future. He has our endorsement for the presidency.
When they go to the polls this year, voters aren’t just choosing a leader. They’re deciding what America will be. They’re deciding whether they favor the rule of law, how the government will help them weather the greatest economic calamity in generations, whether they want government to enable everyone to have access to health care, whether they consider global warming a serious threat, whether they believe that racism should be treated as a public policy problem.
Mr. Biden isn’t a perfect candidate and he wouldn’t be a perfect president. But politics is not about perfection. It is about the art of the possible and about encouraging America to embrace its better angels.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/opinion/joe-biden-2020-nytimes-endorsement.html
Pakistan's Former President Asif Zardari shifted to hospital after feeling unwell
Former president and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari has been shifted to hospital after his condition deteriorated.
According to sources, doctors are conducting medical check-up and various tests of former President Zardari.
It may be recalled that Bilawal Bhutto had said in a press conference last year that doctors had instructed his father to undergo an important test for heart, while the bail application filed by Farooq H.Naik said that three stunts have been inserted in the heart of former President Zardari.
Zardari has a disease called ischemic , in this disease heart does not get enough blood and oxygen.
#Pakistan - Rootless PTI regime discrediting country, demolishing economy and discouraging meritocracy, says Bilawal Bhutto Zardari
Chairman Pakistan Peoples Party Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has said that incompetent and selected government of Imran Ahmed Niaz become a burden on the country as well its masses and the economy hence it should step down before the public ire kicks this dispensation into the dustbin of the history.
Presiding over a meeting of Party’s Karachi Coordination Committee at Bilawal House today, the PPP Chairman said that PDM Jalsa on the occasion of anniversary of Shuhda-e-Karsaz in Karachi would be a referendum against the puppet regime from the country’s commercial capital on October 18. “The Imran regime imposed on the people through stolen mandate has destroyed everything in the country and people are fed up with its anti-people policies of promoting unemployment, inflation, diplomatic isolation and economic assassination of Pakistan,” he added.
He said that PTI regime has no roots among the people and it has been selected to demolish and discredit the country and discourage meritocracy in every field.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari asked the KCC to facilitate the people of Karachi to reach the venue of the public meeting without any hindrances and organize the Party’s and other democratic workers of PDM for better arrangements of the mammoth gathering.
The KCC Coordinator Waqar Mehdi, PPP Karachi Division President Saeed Ghani, MNA Qadir Patel, Lal Bux Bhutto, Najmi Alam, MPA Sajid Jokhio, Khalid Lateef, Ghulam Mohammed Samoon and others were present at the meeting.
https://www.ppp.org.pk/pr/23899/
Fair trial concerns plague world’s largest death row in Pakistan
By Asad Hashim & Asad HashimCourts handed out record 632 death sentences last year in a country where the criminal justice system lacks an international standard, legal experts say. When the judge read out a sentence of death, 17-year-old Muhammad Iqbal could scarcely believe it, and reached out for his brother. As guards converged upon him to escort him away from the courtroom and back to prison, the teenager was desperate to speak to his family. “The words ‘sentenced to death’, I didn’t know much at that time about appeals and everything else,” he recalls, sitting on a rope bed in the winter sunshine in his native Mandi Bahauddin, in central Pakistan. “I thought they were going to execute me [right then]. “My brother was in the courtroom at the time of the verdict, I called to him, to see him one last time and to say goodbye to him.” Iqbal, now 39, would spend 21 years on death row before a court ruled earlier this year that he had been sentenced incorrectly, commuting his sentence and releasing him on June 30. During his trial, where he was convicted for murder, he says he was largely unaware of how the legal proceedings functioned, a concern that is emblematic of fair trial concerns in a country where the death penalty is applied widely, according to lawyers and activists. Pakistan is one of 56 countries worldwide who retain the use of the death penalty in law and practice. In 2019, it continued to hold the world’s largest recorded death row population, with more than 4,225 people awaiting execution, according to rights group Amnesty International. Pakistan’s penal code carries the death penalty for at least 33 crimes, ranging from murder, gang rape and kidnapping to blasphemy, adultery, treason and various narcotics charges. The Pakistani government is currently considering a proposal to expand the use of the penalty and to add public hanging as a form of execution. “The reason [for expanding the scope for rape cases] is that there is no deterrence,” says Faisal Javed Khan, a senator for the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party. “We want severe punishments for rapists because there is no deterrence whatsoever.” In 2019, Pakistan held the record for the most death sentences handed out by its court system, with more than 632 convicts sentenced to death, which is 27.3 percent of all death sentences worldwide, according to Amnesty’s data. For prisoners like Iqbal, accused of murder, the problems begin right from the moment of arrest. ‘Needed to escape that hell’ “They tortured me, telling me to confess to the crime,” he says, of the days after he was arrested by police in connection with a robbery near his home in which a man was killed.“Under torture, I confessed that I had done it, I was so desperate that I accepted responsibility for it. I just needed to escape that hell somehow.”Pakistani police deny the use of torture officially, but rights groups have documented its routine use by police across the country, particularly in cases of violent crime. Iqbal, whose family owns a small farm where they grow rice, wheat and fodder for their five buffaloes, did not have the resources, or knowledge of the justice system, to hire a competent lawyer, and his trial was conducted swiftly, taking no note of his allegations of a confession obtained under torture. “I had […] the kind of lawyer who just files 13 bail applications a day. My father didn’t have the money to hire anyone else,” he says. “He never met me. I only saw him many months later during a hearing, to know that this man is my lawyer.” Access to the right lawyer, in a justice system like Pakistan’s, where a case depends greatly on proceedings at the trial court level, can be the difference between life and death, say experts.“It really does make a huge difference – if you have a committed lawyer or if you have a lawyer who knows the judges, which comes with a heavy price tag,” says Reema Omer, South Asia legal adviser for the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ).“Who you are plays a huge role in the kinds of lawyers you will get, how quickly the case is decided, the kind of facilities you get in prison, and whether you are even aware of your rights as an accused or a convict.”The Pakistani legal system mandates the right to a legal defence for those who cannot afford lawyers, but does not state guidelines or qualifications for lawyers to be appointed by the state.“The majority of people on death row are from indigent backgrounds and so they have state-appointed counsels,” says Sarah Belal, executive director of legal aid organisation Justice Project Pakistan (JPP). “That state counsel has no money to do investigations, he never meets you, he gets the file a few days before [the hearing] and goes and argues the case. There is no minimum standard applied for what effective legal representation means.” For many death row convicts, Iqbal says, that results in a situation where they have never spoken to their lawyers during the trial, and are often unaware of what the charges against them are, or their fundamental legal rights.“There are some people who don’t even know when their case is being heard,” says Iqbal, of prisoners he was jailed with. “Elderly parents, their child in jail, who have no idea that there is a hearing or that they need to get a lawyer.”At one stage, Iqbal says, his appeal had been suspended pending a response from a lower court, but his lawyer told his father that the appeal had been rejected. For almost a decade, as he remained on death row, Iqbal believed that this was the case, and his family pursued the matter no further. ‘Felt my life had ended’ “In Punjabi we have a saying: ‘Even the most friendly dog, if you tie it up it will go mad’,” says Iqbal, of the mental toll that being on death row takes. “It makes a man more irritable and makes you very frustrated. Any person who has been a victim of injustice, he starts to think that even those working for his betterment are trying to cheat him.”Death row prisoners in Pakistan are held in cells that are, on average, roughly eight feet (2.4 metres) wide by 10 feet (three metres) long, with at least five prisoners held to a single cell. Conditions, Iqbal says, are difficult. “There was just one daal, [and] it was black as night. Other than two times in the week … that was all that was cooked,” he says. “Sometimes I would even find insects crawling in it.” Pakistani prisons have separate sections for those sentenced to death. “We would be shut in the cell for 23 hours a day,” says Iqbal, who was incarcerated in three different prisons during his 22 years in jail. “Half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening, we would be let out, but with handcuffs on.” The afternoons, he says, were the hardest. “In my experience, from the morning until the early afternoon, you are passing your life in routine. You can [pass the time], or speak to other people, or someone new comes in or someone leaves.” He pauses, his eyes darting from left to right. “But when the jail is shut, and no one is entering or leaving, that’s a very heavy time for a convict. You spend it just thinking. Thinking about where you are trapped, what will happen to you.” In 2016, a prison officer came to his cell on one such afternoon, informing him that death warrants had been issued for his execution, in four days’ time. He was swiftly shifted to another prison, one equipped with a gallows to carry out the sentence.“I had fought so many cases, so many writ [petitions], so many appeals, thinking that through some appeal or writ my voice would be heard. I felt like my life had ended.”He was escorted to a small cell, where he was alone, and under strict guard to prevent him from doing any possible harm to himself. “The time passed very slowly,” he says. “Each day felt like a year. It was very difficult. The nights felt very long, and the days felt long as well.” Hours before he was due to be executed, the Supreme Court issued a stay of execution, as it considered a petition lodged by his lawyers. ‘I had stopped climbing’ Pakistan’s Supreme Court is the court of final appeal in the country’s justice system, and hears dozens of cases a day. Lawyers and activists say the country’s overloaded justice system places a huge burden on the higher courts to overturn trial court verdicts that may be faulty due to inadequate police investigation, faulty evidence or incompetent legal representation. Omer, the adviser at the ICJ, says the legal system does not have clear sentencing guidelines or standards for when the death penalty is to be applied. “Judges have taken polar opposite positions, with some judges who believe that the death penalty should be the norm in the murder cases, while other judges have said it should only be applied in serious aggravating circumstances,” she says. “It’s very problematic because the justice system should be a lot more consistent and you should be able to predict the penalty someone is given. In death penalty cases, it’s crazy, because it’s a case of someone’s life.” Belal, of JPP, agrees that there is a lack of standardisation of how the law is applied in capital cases. “Trial court is like breakfast, it’s like the most important meal of the day. They are the most important forum. They have the time and ability to hear all the evidence and call all the witnesses. You need to invest more in ensuring that we have better standards for the trial court.” The data on criminal proceedings in capital cases appears to bear out the assertion that trial courts in Pakistan often get it wrong. According to a 2019 report by rights group Reprieve, prepared in consultation with Pakistani legal aid organisation the Foundation for Fundamental Rights (FFR), an overwhelming majority of capital cases are either overturned or commuted on appeal at the Supreme Court. From a dataset of 310 capital crime cases heard by the Supreme Court between 2010 and 2018, Reprieve and FFR found that 73 percent resulted in acquittals, commutations or orders for a review by the lower court. In 2018, the latest year included in the dataset, the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty in only three percent of cases. For Iqbal, whose sentence was commuted in February ahead of his release later in the year, the intervention of the high court was something he could scarcely believe. “My mind couldn’t accept it, that my case had really changed,” he says. “Because look, a man is constantly beaten down, beaten down, and he keeps climbing, keeps climbing in the belief that he will reach the top of the mountain eventually. “At that time, I was exhausted, and I had stopped climbing.” He spent his last day in prison on June 30, before he walked out into freedom. One thing, he says, stood out for him, and continues to fascinate him every day. “It was amazing, to see the open sky. I have spent most of my life within a few feet, and when I came out I felt like I was seeing the open sky for the first time in my life.” https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/10/9/fair-trial-concerns-plague-worlds-largest-death-row-in-pakistan