Indonesia Warns Messaging Apps to Drop Same-Sex Emoticons

Human Rights Watch on Friday urged Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo to protect gay and lesbian rights, a day after his government told instant messaging apps to remove stickers featuring same-sex couples in the latest high-profile attempt to discourage visible homosexuality in the socially conservative country.

In a letter to the president, the New York-based group said the government should publicly condemn officials who make "grossly discriminatory remarks" against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. People of such sexualities are commonly known by the abbreviation LGBT.

"President Jokowi should urgently condemn anti-LGBT remarks by officials before such rhetoric opens the door to more abuses," said Graeme Reid, LGBT rights director at Human Rights Watch. "The president has long championed pluralism and diversity. This is an opportunity to demonstrate his commitment."

The government move against instant messaging apps comes after a social media backlash against the popular smartphone messaging app Line for having stickers, which are an elaborate type of emoticon, with gay themes in its online store.

But the coordinating minister for politics, law and security Luhut Pandjaitan told reporters Friday that society should not respond to differences among people with discrimination, social exclusion or violence.

LGBT people "are citizens who have the right to be protected in this dignified nation," Pandjaitan said. "Don't be quick to judge people, we must reflect on ourselves first because we cannot guarantee it will not happen to your children and grandchildren in the future."

Homosexuality is not illegal in Indonesia, but is a sensitive issue in the Muslim-majority nation of more than 250 million people. Official responses range from calls for tolerance to outright condemnation. At the same time, most of Indonesian society, which follows a moderate form of Islam, is tolerant, with gay and transsexual entertainers often appearing on television shows.

Information and Communication Ministry spokesman Ismail Cawidu said Thursday that social media and messaging platforms should drop stickers expressing support for the LGBT community.

"Social media must respect the culture and local wisdom of the country where they have large numbers of users," he said.

Line on Wednesday said it had removed all LGBT-related stickers from its local store after receiving complaints from Indonesian users. Twitter and Facebook had exploded with criticism of Line and its competitor WhatsApp for containing gay content.

Ismail said the government would tell WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, to do the same as Line.

Last month, Research, Technology and Higher Education Minister Muhammad Nasir said openly gay students should be banned from the University of Indonesia's campuses. His statements followed controversy over news a sexuality research center planned to offer counselling services for students.

Nasir's statement sparked debate in Indonesia for weeks, with objections from human rights groups but support from the Indonesian Ulema Council, an influential board of Muslims clerics.

Gay rights advocate King Oey urged the government to respect international treaties signed by Indonesia protecting the rights of minorities and women.

"Gays and lesbians are not illegal in Indonesia," Oey said. "We urge people who are concerned with human rights to not sit by silently."

In 2014, lawmakers in Aceh, a conservative Indonesian province, passed a law that punishes gay sex by public caning and subjects non-Muslims to the region's strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law.

And in October 2015, Sharia, or Islamic law, police in Aceh arrested a pair of young women for "hugging in public."

With abc NEWS

Nigerian Suicide Bomber Gets Cold Feet, Refuses to Kill

Strapped with a booby-trapped vest and sent by the extremist Boko Haram group to kill as many people as possible, the young teenage girl tore off the explosives and fled as soon as she was out of sight of her handlers.

Her two companions, however, completed their grisly mission and walked into a crowd of hundreds at Dikwa refugee camp in northeast Nigeria and blew themselves up, killing 58 people.

Later found by local self-defense forces, the girl's tearful account is one of the first indications that at least some of the child bombers used by Boko Haram are aware that they are about to die and kill others.

"She said she was scared because she knew she would kill people. But she was also frightened of going against the instructions of the men who brought her to the camp," said Modu Awami, a self-defense fighter who helped question the girl.

She was among thousands held captive for months by the extremists, according to Algoni Lawan, a spokesman for the Ngala local government area that has many residents at the camp and who is privy to information about her interrogation by security forces.

"She confessed to our security operatives that she was worried if she went ahead and carried out the attack that she might kill her own father, who she knew was in the camp," he told the AP on Thursday.

The girl tried to persuade her companions to abandon the mission, he said, "but she said she could not convince the two others to change their minds."

Her story was corroborated when she led soldiers to the unexploded vest, Awami said Thursday, speaking by phone from the refugee camp, which holds 50,000 people who have fled Boko Haram's Islamic uprising.

The girl is in custody and has given officials information about other planned bombings that has helped them increase security at the camp, said Satomi Ahmed, chairman of the Borno State Emergency Management Agency.

The United States on Thursday strongly condemned the bombings. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the U.S. remains committed to assisting those afflicted by the conflict and supports efforts to provide greater protection for civilians and the regional fight against terrorism.

Boko Haram's 6-year-old Islamic insurgency has killed 20,000 people, made 2.5 million homeless and spread across Nigeria's borders.

The extremists have kidnapped thousands of people and the increasing number of suicide bombings by girls and children have raised fears they are turning some captives into weapons. An army bomb disposal expert has told the AP that some suicide bombs are detonated remotely, so the carriers may not have control over when the bomb goes off.

Even two days later, it's difficult to say exactly how many people died at Dikwa because there were corpses and body parts everywhere, including in the cooking pots, Awami said.

"Women, children, men and aged persons all died," he said. "I cannot say the exact number as some cannot be counted because the bodies were all mangled."

The latest atrocity blamed on Boko Haram extremists was committed against people who had been driven from the homes by the insurgents and had spent a year across the border in Cameroon.

Some 12,000 of them had only returned to Nigeria in January when soldiers declared the area safe. The scene of the killings is 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the border with Cameroon and 85 kilometers (53 miles) northeast of Maiduguri, the biggest city in the northeast and birthplace of Boko Haram.

Such attacks make it difficult for the government to persuade people to return home. The extremists have also razed homes and businesses, destroyed wells and boreholes and stolen livestock and seed grains that farmers need to start their life again.

Associated Press

Mentally disabled Canadian man who went missing in 1986 and hurt his head was found after he recalled his lost identity

                                                           NORTH AMERICAN MISSING PERSONS NETWORK

Edgar Latulip was 21 when he vanished from his Ontario home.

A mentally disabled Canadian man who went missing in 1986 and hurt his head was found after he recalled his lost identity, reports revealed Thursday.

Edgar Latulip vanished from his family’s Kitchener, Ontario home when he was 21 years old, possibly taking a bus to the nearby Niagara Falls area, accordingto the North American Missing Persons Network. He was discovered three decades later in the Canadian border town of St. Catherines.

“I had hopes that he was out there somewhere,” Waterloo Regional Police Detective Constable Duane Gingerich told the Waterloo Region Record. “For us as investigators, this is great, this is awesome. It's satisfying because most of these cases don't turn out this way. You expect the worst when a person is missing for that period of time.”

Latulip’s mom told the local newspaper in a 2014 feature she thought he may have committed suicide and said she had given up hope of ever seeing him again. Yet DNA tests confirmed a 50-year-old man in a group home who said he’s Latulip is indeed the long-missing man.

“What had occurred was a head injury, shortly after arriving in St. Catherines a number of years ago. And so, effectively, he forgot who he was,” Gingerich told CTV News.

Latulip, whose developmental delays give him the mental capacity of a 12-year-old, started remembering his identity in sessions with a social worker last month. Police hadn’t found a trace of Latulip since a reported sighting in the town of Hamilton between Kitchener and St. Catherines in 1993.

“Pieces of his memory started coming back. Then the social worker found something on the Internet that led them to believe this was something more,” Constable Philip Gavin of the Niagara Regional Police told the Record,

Lusia Dion of Ontario’s Missing Adults wrote in a Facebook post that the story is “nothing short of amazing.”

Latulip’s case reinforces that “locating the missing is more likely when we recognize that everyone can help in the search for the missing,” she said.

“It can mean sitting with a friend who is dealing with a missing loved one to show your support. It may mean passing along a resource guidebook that you found online. (Respectful) conversations about the missing can lead to an amazing number of eyes helping in the search.”

Protest: Yaba College of Technology has suspended academic activities in the school for four weeks

The management of the Yaba College of Technology has suspended academic activities in the school for four weeks as students continued protesting against the death of a final year student of the institution, Comfort Dazan, on Thursday.

The angry students went on the rampage in the college, shutting all its entrances and singing solidarity songs to protest against Dazan’s death, which they claimed was as a result of the poor state of the medical facility in the school, The PUNCH reported.

It was reported that Dazan, a Higher National Diploma II student of the Office of Management Technology department, passed on after she fell ill and was rushed to the college’s medical centre, which allegedly demanded N35,000 before she could be attended to.

It was learnt on Thursday that though the protest continued, the presence of riot policemen at the school entrances, prevented the students from marching to the streets.

It was gathered that apprehension made the management to suspend academic activities for four weeks.

The Head, Public Relations Unit, Charles Oni, said in a statement that the suspension of academic work was to mourn Dazan.

He said, “The academic board of the college has suspended academic activities in the school for four weeks to allow the management, workers and students to mourn the loss of Dazan, who died on Wednesday.

“To forestall further destruction of the school property, students are to vacate halls of residence latest at 12pm on Thursday, February 11. The management has pledged to attend to other issues and requests by students in due course.”

It was learnt that the students, during the protest, vandalised the college’s medical centre’s ambulance, burnt a 5KVA generator, and damaged some vehicles belonging to the school and individuals.

Meanwhile, the authorities of the Federal Medical Centre, Oyingbo also on Thursday, admitted that Dazan died in the hospital.

In a statement by the FMC Head, Clinical Services, Dr O.T. Aseru, FMC said 27-year-old Dazan died just 10 minutes after arriving at the centre from the school medical centre.

Aseru added that Dazan was “very pale, cold, clammy, anxious and gasping” when she arrived at the hospital about 1am on Wednesday with a nurse from the college.

Also, at the University of Lagos, normalcy had returned with huge police presence observed at about 12.30pm on Thursday.

Some medical students of the university and their parents had on Wednesday disrupted academic activities, alleging that the school management deliberately introduced an academic promotion policy that would frustrate them from proceeding to the university’s College of Medicine, Idi-Araba, to continue their programme.

EFCC:Tompolo declares wanted

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission on Thursday declared a former Niger Delta militant leader, Government Ekpemupolo, alias Tompolo, wanted.

The anti-graft agency, in an advertorial signed by its Head of Media and Publicity, Wilson Uwujaren, said it decided to declare Tompolo wanted following two bench warrants issued against him by a Federal High Court in Lagos, where he has been charged with a N45.9bn fraud.

In the said advertorial, which carried a photograph of Tompolo, the EFCC described him as a 47-year-old, dark-complexioned man from Okerenkoko, Gbaramotu Kingdom in the Warri South-West Local Government Area of Delta State, according to The PUNCH.

Tompolo, whose address was given as No. 1, Chief Agbanu Street, DDPA Extension, Warri, Delta State, speaks both Izon and English languages, according to EFCC.

The public announcement issued by Uwujaren read in part, “The general public is hereby notified that Government Ekpemupolo (a.k.a. Tompolo), whose photograph appears above, is wanted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission in relation to the offence of conspiracy and illegal diversion of the sum of N34,000,000,000.00 and N11,900,000,000.00 belonging to the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency.”

Justice Ibrahim Buba of a Federal High Court in Lagos had issued a bench warrant against Tompolo on January 14 after he shunned a summons dated January 12, 2016 issued by the judge to appear in connection with the fraud charges filed against him and nine others by EFCC.

Justice Buba had ordered the law enforcement agencies to produce Tompolo before him on February 8 for him to answer the charges, but rather than appear in court on January 8, Tompolo brought an application seeking to quash the bench warrant and arrest order.

The judge, who dismissed the application for lacking in merit, renewed the arrest warrant and directed all law enforcement agencies to produce Tompolo before him on February 19.

Tompolo’s lawyer, Mr. Tayo Oyetibo (SAN), after failing to get the bench warrant vacated, turn down the responsibility of undertaking to produce his client in court.

Oyetibo said it was the responsibility of the prosecution to produce the suspect in court.

The EFCC filed 40 counts against Tompolo and nine others, including the immediate-past Director-General of NIMASA, Patrick Akpobolokemi.