Malaysia's PM faces party amid debilitating scandals

Kuala Lumpur - Malaysia's beleaguered prime minister faces a crucial test as his political party's general assembly kicked off on Tuesday with criticism mounting over corruption allegations and an unexplained $700m payment that landed in his private bank account.

Prime Minister Najib Razak has been under fire since the "donation" came to light, along with billions of dollars in debt built up by state investment fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).

The scandals have transfixed Malaysians for months.

Despite a profusion of domestic and international investigations - including by the FBI and Hong Kong police - there have been few answers.

The prime minister has denied any wrongdoing at 1MDB. He insists the $700m payment - originating from the Middle East and was first reported in July - is legitimate.

Najib was questioned for the first time by the Anti-Corruption Commission on Saturday. Despite it all, the prime minister has remained steadfast and has rejected calls for his resignation.

"Yes [my conscience is] absolutely clear. I have done what I feel with full responsibility and I am confident that after the investigation is completed, the truth will prevail. InsyaAllah," he was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

At the end of July, he reshuffled his cabinet and removed those who knew the most about 1MDB, including Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin. Najib appointed Nur Jazlan Mohamed - a party backbencher chairing a parliamentary inquiry into 1MDB - as deputy minister.

Najib also replaced the attorney general who was leading an investigation into 1MDB.

"See what a powerful prime minister can do," Terence Gomez, a professor at the University of Malaya, told Al Jazeera. "Where is the check and balance? Even the speaker [of parliament] has refused to debate it."  

Over the coming days, Najib will face his party - the three million strong United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) - whose annual assembly opened on Tuesday. The event has often been the scene of pivotal moments in Malaysian politics.

Even before the 1MDB scandal broke, the party had struggled to maintain its previous levels of support. In the 2013 election, it lost the popular vote for the first time.

Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad continues to pressure Najib from the sidelines. There have been rumblings too from ordinary members. With the potential for trouble, indications are that the proceedings, and media coverage, will be tightly controlled.

"Najib is trying to survive and I think he will survive for quite some time," said Oh Ei Sun, a fellow at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies, who once worked in Najib's office. "There's no [party] election, but he does not want to risk any sabotage or people making sudden statements."

Mahathir, who stepped down from office in 2003 after 22 years in power, was questioned by police last month over his comments about Najib and 1MDB. But that has not deterred him and the 90-year-old continues to use his blog to lambast a man he once groomed for office.

"It is not just the amount of money," Mahathir said in an interview with Al Jazeera at his office in Putrajaya. "It's the people involved that has created this kind of atmosphere of fear, of a loss of faith in the government. I think he needs to go. There are too many things he has done which are wrong."

Mahathir said he has "no confidence at all" in the ongoing investigations. "It can only be found out if Najib has no power. In other words, if he steps down."

Some local UMNO leaders have also been making life difficult for the prime minister.

Anina Saadudin, a party official from the resort island of Langkawi, was expelled after calling for Najib to explain the donation, and launching a lawsuit against him.  

The financial scandals have come at a difficult time for Malaysia.

Over the past year, economic growth has eased, hurt by the slowdown in China and the falling price of commodities. The economy expanded in the third quarter at 4.7 percent; the slowest in two years. The ringgit remains Asia's worst performing currency this year and many Malaysians are feeling the pinch from the rising cost of living.

A survey released in October by the pollster Merdeka Center showed deep dissatisfaction with the government. Its overall approval rating slumped to 23 percent, the worst since the survey started in 2012.

Worse, only 31 percent of ethnic Malay voters - UMNO's core constituency - said they were satisfied with the government. 

For Saifuddin Abdullah - a former deputy minister in Najib's cabinet who once sat on UMNO's supreme council - the events of the past few months triggered his final break with the party he thought he would never leave.

"It is not just about one person," Saifuddin told Al Jazeera. "The party seems to be okay with it [the scandals]. That is a problem when the whole world is saying it is not okay."

Saifuddin also resigned his position as CEO of the Global Movement of Moderates, a group founded by Najib.

"I went through my own soul-searching," he explained of his decision to join the opposition. "There are some of us who believe in certain ideals, policies and ways of doing things. It so happens that most of the leaders in the opposition believe the same thing.

"Unfortunately for me, most of the leaders in UMNO do not."

Burglar Who Hid From Police Killed By Alligator

Matthew Riggins, 22, had told his girlfriend he would be in Barefoot Bay to carry out a series of burglaries with another suspect.

Brevard County Sheriff's Major Tod Goodyear said authorities received calls on 13 November about two suspicious men dressed in black walking behind homes in the area.

Deputies said Riggins called his girlfriend to tell her they were being chased and were hiding after they responded to the calls along with a police dog.

Riggins was reported missing the following day. His body was found on 23 November floating in a pond. He had suffered injuries consistent with an alligator attack, Mr Goodyear said.

He told Bay News 9: "He probably went into the lake to hide from the officers and the dog, and came across that gator.

"To hide somewhere to try and get away, and then meeting up with an animal like that, no, I've never had that happen before."

Authorities said Riggins had drowned and the alligator, which behaved aggressively toward divers, was later trapped and euthanised.

The suspect's hand and foot were reportedly found inside the alligator's stomach.

Investigators have said another man thought to have been with Riggins has refused to co-operate. He has not been charged.

Failing To Find Users, Dropbox Will Shut Down Mailbox In February 2016

Dropbox, the file hosting and cloud storage company with 400 million users, has been struggling to hold up its $10 billion valuation in the face of scrutiny from investors and observers, and now it looks like the other shoe is dropping as the company streamlines its business. The company is shutting down Mailbox and Carousel, its email and photo apps. Sources tell us the plan will be to focus on its core product and developing other new productivity tools, such as its still-private collaboration app, Paper.

Mailbox will shut down in Februrary 26, 2016, and Carousel will stop working in March 31. The reason for the month extension on Carousel is in part because of a feature that is being built: an export tool that gives existing Carousel users a way to move conversations and content from existing shared albums into Dropbox. Also it will give time for users to migrate their photos. Mailbox was a client that sat on Gmail so shutting it will not affect your data on the service.

We’d been tipped off to the closures by a source close to the company, and also saw murmurs of Mailbox getting shut down elsewhere, and Dropbox now finally confirmed the news with a blog post with details this morning.

“Building new products is about learning as much as it’s about making,” Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi write in the blog post. “It’s also about tough choices. Over the past few months, we’ve increased our team’s focus on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together. In light of that, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Carousel and Mailbox.”

But even as late as today, Dropbox was sending out messages to users claiming that no decision had been made:

“Thanks for reaching out to us. I understand how frustrating it can be when you aren’t able to receive updates about a product that you feel passionate about using,” said a note sent this morning to a reader. “Mailbox hasn’t been abandoned. It is still being developed while we determine which direction is best. As our developers don’t share there roadmaps with support, I’m unable to share them with you. If there is anything else I can help you with please let me know.”

Even without official confirmation, there were a lot of signs that the products were going the way of the dodo bird.

Mailbox had not been updated since July, and if you dig through Dropbox’s support forums, a lot of questions from frustrated users were going unanswered. Carousel actually had an update a bit more recently, in September, but essentially saw very little development soon after its initial release in 2014.

Neither app, according to App Annie, were seeing anything like sustained popularity beyond their initial releases. Mailbox currently ranks 233 in the “productivity” category in the U.S. iTunes store and is not popular enough to make the general rankings. Carousel is ranked at 271 in the photos category in the same store.

Dropbox started life as a place to store and access files in the cloud, but for years now it has been looking for traction around other services to grow usage — and paying users — on its platform, whose business model is based on offering free storage tiers and upselling people to pay for more space.

As part of that, Dropbox has been making a gradual shift to focus increasingly on sectors that are more likely to pay, such as enterprises. In November, it honed its pitch to business users in an event where it disclosed 150,000 paying business users.

Businesses are a minimum of five individuals, and sometimes many more, but still the proportion out of 400 million users underscores the uphill battle ahead for Dropbox in converting more business users, or building out the business with new customers.

It’s a sad ending for both. When Mailbox first launched in 2013, it was with a huge amount of hype, in part because of the scarcity created by a million-plus people desperate to get off the app’s waiting list, and in part because the app created a simple (and, at the time, unique) interface for reading email (initially on mobile) with gestures to quickly dismiss or archive items in your inbox.

Carousel, meanwhile, was the product of multiple startup acquisitions of promising mobile photo apps. Mailbox co-founder Gentry Underwood has already left Dropbox and Scott Cannon, the other co-founder, is staying on as an advisor for a short period of time.

Pistorius Bailed Ahead

The athlete's initial conviction of culpable homicide (or manslaughter in other countries) was overturned last week by the Supreme Court of Appeal, after five judges unanimously ruled that Judge Thokozile Masipa had made a judgement which was "fundamentally flawed".

With the courts about to go into Christmas recess and no new sentencing date for his murder conviction set, there was confusion about what would happen to Pistorius in the meantime - whether he would remain under house arrest at his uncle's home, in one of Pretoria's most exclusive neighbourhoods.

The runner was granted bail in March 2013, a month after he shot Reeva dead on Valentine's Day at their home, and in October this year, he was released from jail after serving 12 months of his five-year sentence behind bars.

This time, prosecutors emphasised that Pistorius may pose a higher flight risk because he now faces a further, lengthier spell in jail. But they have agreed that electronic monitoring would provide some security with regards to his whereabouts.

Deputy Judge President Aubrey Ledwaba said he did not find Pistorius to be a flight risk but one of the conditions of his bail is that he hand over any passports and will not be allowed to apply for any further passports or travel documents until the case has been dealt with.

Other conditions include that he will be under house arrest and electronically monitored. He will be allowed to leave the house between 7am and midday but will only be allowed to travel within a 20km radius, after the judge said it was not "in the interests of justice" to ban him completely from leaving the house.

Sky's Special Correspondent Alex Crawford was in court and said Pistorius appeared "extremely relaxed".

She added: "He was smiling a lot, laughing and joking with his friends and the defence team."

It's understood Pistorius intends to go to the Constitutional Court as a final resort against his new murder conviction and both sides have agreed to return to court on 18 April for an update on whether the court will hear the appeal.

If leave is not granted to appeal, a date will be set at the High Court for sentencing on the murder conviction.

Any appeal could take many months and run well over a million rand and it is not clear who would pay for this, as Pistorius's lawyer told the court the athlete was struggling financially and bail was set at 10,000 rand.

The 29-year-old now faces a minimum sentence of 15 years, but Ms Steenkamp said: "I really don't care how long it is, as long as he pays for what he's done and takes responsibility for what happened."

Pistorius has always insisted he shot his girlfriend dead after mistaking her for an intruder, but the appeal panel said it was irrelevant who was behind his toilet door.

The judges said his experience with firearms meant he should have been aware that death was an inevitability after firing four times into such a confined area, which had left Reeva Steenkamp with "nowhere to hide".

Sentencing, when a date is decided upon, will be conducted by Judge Masipa - even though her original judgement was overturned on appeal.

She has been given this responsibility as she presided over the original trial and is familiar with the intricacies of the case, which went on for months.

Air France Flight Diverted After Threat

(PARIS) — An Air France flight from San Francisco to Paris has been diverted to Montreal after an unspecified anonymous threat, and all passengers have landed and disembarked safely.

The airline said in a statement Tuesday morning that the crew of Flight 83 decided to divert “as a precautionary measure” and landed just before midnight Montreal time.

Canadian authorities are verifying the plane, passengers and baggage, and an investigation will be carried out into the origin of the threat, the airline said. It said it would take all measures to send passengers safely to their destinations.

France is in a state of emergency since Islamic extremist suicide bombings and shootings in Paris on Nov. 13 that killed 130 people, the deadliest attacks on French soil in decades.

Meet the First Woman to Lead a Mexican Drugs Cartel

The Arellano Felix brothers, a clan of infamous drug traffickers in the border city of Tijuana, have a history of meeting sticky ends during festivities. The eldest, Francisco Rafael, was killed at a party by an assassin dressed as a clown. His brother Ramon, known for his brutal torture techniques, was shot dead by police during a seaside carnival. A nephew, Luis Fernando Sanchez Arellano, was arrested while watching Mexico beat Croatia in the soccer World Cup. Now after seven male members have gone to their graves or prison cells, the clan may have done what is unthinkable for many in the macho cartel world – let a woman take the helm.

One of the sisters, Enedina Arellano Felix, could be running the remnants of the Tijuana Cartel that traffics cocaine, marijuana, heroin and crystal meth over the world’s busiest border crossing into California, American and Mexican agents say. The 54-old trained accountant is said to be less of a party animal or sadistic killer than her male relatives and more business focused. She is believed to have taken control after Sanchez Arellano, who is reported as being either her son or her nephew, was arrested last year. While there have been other female drug traffickers since the 1920’s, Enedina, known as La Jefa, or the boss, could be the first to head an entire cartel.

Rising to the top in an industry dominated by extremely violent chauvinist men is no east feat, says Javier Valdez, a Mexican journalistwho interviewed female traffickers for his book Miss Narco. “This is a world where men behave like animals. Many women in it are used, abused and then killed by the same traffickers they worked with,” Valdez says. “The women who rise high in it are very rare. They have to be extremely intelligent, talented and brave.”

Furthermore, Enedina Arellano Felix has not only survived the fall of her brothers but a slew of takedowns of cartel bosses across Mexico. Under President Enrique Pena Nieto, police and soldiers have rounded up kingpins across the country including the “world’s most wanted man,” Joaquin, “Chapo” Guzman and Miguel Trevino, head of the paramilitary Zetas. La Jefa is one of the last women, or men, standing.

The Arellano Felix brothers moved from inland Mexico to Tijuana in the eighties, carving out their trafficking empire in blood and cocaine-fueled parties. Their antics inspired characters in the movie Traffic. But while the brothers were taking over nightclubs and burning corpses in barbecues, Enedina Arellano-Felix was reported to be studying accounting at a private university.

As her brothers fell in the 2000s, Enedina rose up in the organization, running its money laundering operations by creating front businesses such as pharmacies. From 2002, the U.S. treasury blacklisted her and her companies under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Act. Any American doing business with them can be fined up to a million dollars. By 2006, Mexico’s then attorney general Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said in a news conference she had become the chief financial operator for the cartel.

In 2008, the Arellano Felix brother Eduardo led the cartel into a brutal turf war that left piles of bodies around Tijuana. But after police arrested him after a shoot out, Sanchez Arellano took over with Enedina by his side, says Mike Vigil, the former head of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration. As number two and now number one in the cartel, the Jefa has helped reduce violence and got back to the traditional business of smuggling drugs to Americans, Vigil says.

“She is not into the wars of her brothers. She is into making alliances and making money,” says Vigil, who spent 13 years in Mexico, often undercover. “Her beauty may also have helped her make alliances with powerful traffickers such as Chapo Guzman.”

But while purportedly making her drug trafficking fortune, little is known of the Jefa. There are few photos of her besides some family portraits from the 1980s. She married and divorced at least twice, with one husband also alleged to be a money launderer, but her present marital status is unknown. Instead, myths of this Tijuana boss are spread in song and film. Among drug ballads that appear to be inspired by her legend is one called La Jefa de Tijuana. “A very powerful female, brave and decisive,” croons the singer to accordions and a polka beat. A low budget narco movie was also released with the same name, showing the fictional Jefa as a beautiful women who is not afraid of a gunfight.

Such a mix of fantasy and reality permeates the role of females in Mexican drug trafficking. Women, often with obvious plastic surgery, pose with guns in slinky clothes in many drug ballad music videos. One woman, Claudia Ochoa Felix, who looks like Kim Kardashian, posed with weapons on social media, sparking accusations in local newspapers that she was the head of a group of assassins. She denied it at a news conference.

These videos and social media create a distorted idea of what it is like for most women in the cartel world, say the journalist Valdez. It is not a glamorous life of mansions and jewels, but of brutality, rape, prison and death, he says. Drug traffickers will get girlfriends to have excessive plastic surgery to make them fit their fantasies but later, they may leave them to rot behind bars or murder them. “They want to control women’s bodies as a way to have power over them,” Valdez says. “But in the end, most of them see women as vulnerable and disposable.”

US confirms death of top Islamic State leader in Libya

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Monday confirmed the death of the Islamic State's senior leader in Libya, known as Abu Nabil, who was targeted in a Nov. 13 U.S. air strike carried out by F-15 aircraft on a compound in the city of Derna.

Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis also confirmed that a senior leader of the al Qaeda-affiliated group al Shabaab was killed in a U.S. military air strike in Somalia carried out on Dec. 2. The Pentagon named him as Abdirahman Sandhere, also known as "Ukash," and said the strike represented a significant blow to the group.