Pakistan’s ousted prime minister moved on Saturday to install his younger brother as his successor, less than 24 hours after he was forced aside in the wake of a corruption scandal. The ruling party that Nawaz Sharif headed until a court ruling disqualified him from office nominated his brother, Shahbaz, to eventually take over as leader – although he must first have to stand for election to the national assembly. Sharif also put forward Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, a staunch ally, to serve as interim prime minister while his brother contests a byelection.

The move was immediately condemned by the opposition leader, Imran Khan, who likened Pakistan’s tradition of political dynasties to “a form of monarchy”. “Political parties don’t have democracy in them. They are family parties … Actually, it’s like a form of monarchy.” Sharif revealed the succession plan in a televised speech. In an emotional appeal, he pleaded for support for his brother. He said he had tried his best to put Pakistan on the path of progress, but said he was being unfairly penalised by his disqualification.(theguardian)…[+]

Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard said on Saturday that US navy ships came close to its vessels in the Gulf and shot flares.

The USS Nimitz and an accompanying battleship drew close to a rocket-bearing Iranian vessel on Friday and sent a helicopter near a number of vessels close to the Resalat oil and gas platform, the Guard said in a statement published by its official news site, Sepah News. “The Americans made a provocative and unprofessional move by issuing a warning and shooting flares at vessels,” the statement said. “Islam’s warriors, without paying attention to this unconventional and unusual behaviour from the American vessels, continued their mission in the area and the aircraft carrier and accompanying battleship left the area.”

The US navy’s Bahrain-based fifth fleet said the incident happened while one of its helicopters was on a routine patrol in international airspace. The aircraft saw several Guard vessels approaching US ships “at a high rate of speed” and sent out flares after receiving no response when it tried to establish communications, the navy said. That prompted the Iranian boats to halt their approach.(theguardian)…[+]

An Australian state MP has been prevented from entering the United States, and fellow travelling politicians have been given no reason for the move. Lebanon-born Khalil Eideh, a Labor MP in Victoria, was stuck in Vancouver on Friday after a United Airlines staffer told him he was not allowed to board a flight to Denver with the rest of the group. “The United Airlines staff knew he had been denied entry to the US before any of us,” the Sex party MP Fiona Patten told AAP from Denver on Friday. “He was incredibly upset … disbelieving.” Patten said Eideh was not told why he wasn’t allowed on the plane.

Labor MP Natalie Suleyman said Eideh was originally told he was not booked on the flight before the check-in staff broke the bad news. “They said “you’ve been denied entry to the States,” Suleyman said. Eideh was given no explanation, she said.
Eideh was born in Tripoli in Lebanon to Syrian parents who follow the Alawite Islamic faith. He moved to Australia in 1970 aged 15 and later became a mail officer with Australia Post. From the 19 years up until he entered parliament in 2006 he was managing director of Bluestar Logistics, a trucking company based in Melbourne’s west.(theguardian)…[+]

Donald Trump’s new communications director has launched an extraordinary, foul-mouthed tirade against two senior colleagues, raising the prospect of all-out civil war at the White House. Anthony Scaramucci told an interviewer that Chief of Staff Reince Priebus is “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic” who will be asked to resign, and that Scaramucci is not like Steve Bannon, the chief strategist, because “I’m not trying to suck my own cock”.

The profane language was shocking even by the standards of the Trump era and suggested that a major staff shake-up is imminent. New Yorker correspondent Ryan Lizza wrote that Scaramucci called him on Wednesday night, angry that Lizza had tweeted that the communications director was having dinner at the White House with Trump; his wife, Melania; Fox News host Sean Hannity; and former Fox News executive Bill Shine. “Who leaked that to you?” Scaramucci demanded, according to Lizza’s account. When the journalist refused to disclose his source, Scaramucci allegedly threatened: “What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over.”(theguardian)…[+]

Pakistan’s supreme court has removed the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, from office in a unanimous verdict over corruption allegations that will further upset the country’s unstable political landscape. The verdict by the five-member court caps a year of political controversy over corruption allegations unleashed by the 2016 Panama Papers leak.

The governing party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), said Sharif had stepped down immediately. The party must now choose an interim prime minister to be accepted by parliament. The ruling will throw the governing party and the country at large into turmoil ahead of elections due next year. The 10-year disqualification of Sharif cut short the third tenure of a man who has been a leading figure in Pakistani politics for nearly three decades since his first term from 1990 to 1993. It is the most serious political ramification yet of the Panama Papers leak, which detailed financial dealings of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.(theguardian)…[+]

Russia has said new US sanctions against it approved by the House of Representatives on Tuesday will take relations between the two countries into “uncharted territory”, and said it is close to taking retaliatory measures.

The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favour of imposing new sanctions on Moscow and requiring Donald Trump to obtain lawmakers’ permission before easing any sanctions. The sanctions package, which also targets Iran and North Korea, “tightens the screws on our most dangerous adversaries in order to keep Americans safe,” the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, said after the bill passed by 419 votes to three. It now heads to the Senate before Trump faces the choice of whether to veto the bill, which has been opposed by the White House. Moscow had initially hoped Trump would work to repair a relationship that has slumped to a post-cold war low, but has watched with frustration as allegations that it interfered with last year’s US presidential election and concerns over Trump associates’ Russia ties have killed off hopes of detente. Russia denies the meddling accusations.(theguardian)…[+]

Brussels has accused EU member states of offering a “measly” level of funding for efforts in north Africa to halt the migration crisis. The European commissioner for migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, said the €200m produced so far was too little. “The member states need to get serious on this,” he said.

On Wednesday the European court of justice backed attempts by Austria and Slovenia to deport asylum seekers back to their point of entry in the EU. The court ruled that a law requiring refugees to seek asylum in the first country they reach applied even in exceptional circumstances. The case could affect the future of several hundred people who arrived in 2015-16. But Avramopoulos said he was pleased by an increase in the number of refugees relocated from Italian and Greek camps to other states, and a sense of growing solidarity within the bloc. A record number of refugees were transferred in June, and the total number of relocations under an initiative agreed in 2015 now stands at 24,676 – 16,803 from Greece and 7,873 from Italy – with “almost all member states pledging and transferring regularly”, the commission said.(theguardian)…[+]

For the past seven months, Abu Hassan, an army medic, has treated the damaged and desperate people of the Iraqi city of Mosul as they arrived from the cauldron of war.

Soldiers, women and children often trembled in fear in front of him, hours after escaping the bloody clashes, as Iraqi forces battled to wrest control of the city from Islamic State fighters. But not nine-year-old Mohammed. “He wasn’t a normal boy – he didn’t seem scared,” Hassan said shortly after treating Mohammed, one of the last to flee west Mosul earlier this month. “I chatted with him. I asked him normal questions, like: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ He said: ‘I want to be a sniper.’”“I was shocked,” said Hassan. “It’s not a normal thing for a child to say. I asked him: ‘What did your dad do?’ He said he was a sniper emir – the emir of snipers.

“[Later] I received a lot of information from people from Mosul saying his father was important. The special forces found the boy in a basement with several [dead] Isis fighters. The soldiers brought the boy to me.” Since the recapture of Iraq’s second city earlier this month, the toll the terror group’s occupation took on the city’s residents – and especially its young – has begun to emerge.(theguardian)…[+]

Senior EU figures have have hit back at Liam Fox’s “ignorant and indigestible” claim that lowering UK food standards to allow the import of chlorinated chicken from the US is an insignificant detail.Fox accused the media on Monday of being obsessed with concerns about chlorine-washed chicken being sold in Britain as part of a potential trade deal with the US after Brexit.

During his visit to Washington, he suggested it was a minor matter, which would be settled at the end of lengthy talks, adding that “Americans have been eating it perfectly safely for years”. In Brussels, his comments were met with withering contempt from officials and politicians alike, who accused Fox of failing to understand the implications should the UK lower its standards compared with the EU, where chlorinated chicken is banned.(theguardian)…[+]

Shinzo Abe is fighting for his future as Japan’s prime minister as scandals drag his government’s popularity close to what political observers describe as “death zone” levels. Apart from clouding Abe’s hopes of winning another term as leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) when a vote is held next year, the polling slump also undermines his long-running push to revise Japan’s war-renouncing constitution.

Abe, who returned to the prime ministership four and a half years ago, was long seen as a steady hand whose position appeared unassailable – so much so that the LDP changed its rules to allow Abe the freedom to seek a third consecutive three-year term at the helm of the party. “He is no longer invincible and the reason why he is no longer invincible is he served his personal friends not the party,” said Michael Thomas Cucek, an adjunct professor at Temple University Japan.(theguardian)…[+]