European Union (EU) leaders have chosen the new heads of the 28-nation bloc’s institutions for at least the next five years, breaking a three-day deadlock triggered by deep EU divisions.
European Council President Donald Tusk said Tuesday German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen was named president of the European Commission and Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel as the council president.
FILE – German Minister of Defense Ursula von der Leyen speaks in Athens, March 5, 2019.
French monetary expert Christine Legarde was appointed chief of the European Central Bank and Spanish Acting Foreign Minister Josep Borrell was selected as the EU’s foreign affairs chief.
Lawmakers are set to choose the president of the European Parliament on Wednesday in Strasbourg.
The selections capped days of talks aimed at finding a compromise on who should be appointed to the coveted positions.
EU leaders were challenged with naming new leaders who represent the bloc’s political affiliations, population size and the EU’s various regions.
Hundreds of Israelis are protesting across the country against alleged police brutality against the country’s Ethiopian community following the killing of an Ethiopian Israeli teen by an off-duty police officer.
Demonstrators blocked a main highway in central Tel Aviv and major thoroughfares around the country on Tuesday. They have been voicing frustration over perceived systemic discrimination against the community’s roughly 150,000 members. Police say officers arrested at least three protesters at a demonstration outside Haifa that turned violent.
On Sunday, an off-duty police officer shot and killed Ethiopian Israeli teen Solomon Teka. Police said the officer was arrested and placed by a court in protective custody.
Thousands of people attended Teka’s funeral at a cemetery near Haifa on Tuesday.
Col. Turki al Maliki, spokesman for Saudi-led coalition forces in Yemen, said that a Houthi drone struck the Abha Airport for the third time in less than a month, wounding nine people in an attack during the early hours of the morning Tuesday.
Amateur video shows taxi drivers surveying damage to vehicles outside the main airport terminal building.
Saudi media quoted al Maliki as saying that nine civilians were wounded in the drone attack, which he called a “terrorist act.” Maliki also stated that the attack on a civilian target might qualify as a “war crime.”
It was the third Houthi drone attack on Abha Airport in less than a month.
Drone targets pipeline
A drone attack on Saudi oil pumping stations in May temporarily shut down the Yanbaw oil pipeline to the Red Sea.
Yemen’s Houthis also claimed responsibility for that attack, although U.S. military sources think the drones used in the attack might have come from Iraq, rather than Yemen.
“Beginning of escalation”
Hilal Khashan, who teaches political science at the American University of Beirut, said he thinks attacks on Saudi targets, like the ones on Abha Airport, are “clearly related to the situation with Iran,” and he argues they are more likely to escalate than to taper off given the current tensions between Washington and Tehran.
“I think this is the beginning of escalation,” Khashan said. “The Iranians are increasing their enrichment of uranium and … I am bracing for further developments and further military action in the region. The Iranians operate under the assumption that the Trump Administration does not want war, [that] Trump is focused on the economy and on getting re-elected. So, the Iranians calculation may be that they will do anything in order to derail his efforts.”
Khashan went on to underscore that the “Houthi attacks on Saudi airspace and Abha and Jizan Airports point to the frailty of Saudi defenses,” despite the country’s hefty military budget.
“Raises the stakes”
Washington-based Gulf analyst Theodore Karasik tells VOA that attempts by Houthi drones to hit southern Saudi Arabia are becoming a daily occurrence and the “threat to civil aviation … raises the stakes dramatically.”
Karasik notes that U.N. Yemen envoy Martin Griffiths is currently visiting the UAE, after a trip to Moscow, and he says there is “a growing consensus that the threat must be dealt with quickly.”
‘Saudi TV indicated the kingdom “may respond to the Houthi attack” on Abha Airport, but it provided no further details.
A package that officials thought might contain the deadly nerve agent sarin at a mail facility near Facebook’s headquarters has been declared safe, according to the FBI and local authorities.
The package initially tested positive for sarin at a mail facility on Facebook’s campus on Monday. Four buildings near the facility were evacuated and two individuals were tested for exposure to the substance.
Workers at the mail facility reported no injuries or side effects.
On Tuesday, the FBI said in a statement it had, alongside local authorities, “thoroughly tested the items in question and determined them to be non-hazardous.”
Sarin is a chemical that can hurt a person’s nervous system and has been used as a chemical weapon. Exposure to sarin can cause paralysis and death.
A Mexican official says about 70 Central American migrants who’d been returned to Ciudad Juarez to await the outcome of their U.S. asylum claims are being bused back to their countries.
The official with the Foreign Relations Department says the bus left Juarez on Tuesday morning. All the people are said to have volunteered, and all are from El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras.
The official isn’t sure what impact their decisions might have on their asylum claims in the United States.
The person adds that similar busings are expected “soon” in Tijuana and Mexicali, two other cities that have been taking in returnees from the United States under the program.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement had not yet been made public.
After investigating the nature of a mysterious and apparently cigar-shaped object called ‘Oumuamua spotted in 2017 speeding through our solar system, astronomers remain uncertain over how to classify it, but are confident it is not an alien spaceship.
Its odd shape and motion had prompted some scientists to wonder whether ‘Oumuamua, the first object from another star system found passing through our solar system, was some sort of alien technology perhaps exploring the cosmos. But after poring over the data, an international team of researchers wrote that “we find no compelling evidence to favor an alien explanation.”
Scientists tracked the reddish-colored ‘Oumuamua from Oct. 14, 2017, until Jan. 2, 2018, after which it became too faint to detect even using the most powerful telescopes. It is estimated to be a half-mile (800 meters) long, tumbling through space.
Consistent with natural origin
“Our key finding is that ‘Oumuamua’s properties are consistent with a natural origin and an alien explanation is unwarranted,” said University of Maryland astronomer Matthew Knight, co-leader of the research published in the Nature Astronomy.
“Yes, if it made a sudden, unexplainable turn that would certainly have warranted further exploration,” Knight added.
‘Oumuamua was first detected by the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope. Its name in the native Hawaiian language means a messenger arriving from a great distance.
Knight said it is not easy to fit ‘Oumuamua into familiar classifications such as a comet or asteroid.
“We have tried to avoid putting it in one of those boxes and prefer to call it more generically an ‘object,’” Knight said. “In simple terms, asteroids are rocky and devoid of ices, while comets are a mixture of rock and ice, so-called ‘dirty snowballs,’” Knight added.
Planetary building block
‘Oumuamua was somehow ejected from a distant star system, traversing through interstellar space and through our solar system. It deviated slightly from a path that would be explained purely by the Sun’s gravitational pull because of what some researchers said was apparently a very small emission of gas from its surface, indicative of a comet, though any such emission was so slight as to be undetected. It lacked a dust tail or gas jets, characteristic of comets.
The researchers wrote that a “straightforward explanation for ‘Oumuamua is that it is a planetesimal” — a planetary building block, or a fragment of one — formed in faraway star system.
Its composition remains a mystery, including whether it is just rock or includes some metal or other ingredients. It is currently beyond Saturn, dashing out of our solar system.
Despite rising incidence of far-right violence in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Justice Department continue to deprioritize investigating the violence and prosecuting its perpetrators, according to a report released Monday.
While a handful of high-profile cases are sometimes designated as acts of “domestic terrorism” and receive the law enforcement agencies’ full investigative attention, the overwhelming majority are treated as hate crimes, gang violence and run-of-the-mill homicides, pushing them down the agencies’ list of priorities, the report says.
The report was prepared by the Brennan Center for Justice a nonpartisan law and policy institute at New York University School of Law.
Labels matter
The label the FBI chooses to characterize an act of violence is important in determining the amount of resources devoted to the case and how wide an investigative net is cast, according to the report. Investigating terrorism currently tops the FBI’s list of eight priorities and is well resourced. Hate crimes rank fifth while gang violence comes in sixth.
FILE – A person pauses in front of Stars of David with the names of those killed in a deadly shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue, in Pittsburgh, Oct. 29, 2018.
“Under current Justice Department policies, how far-right violence targeting people based on race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability gets categorized is often arbitrary,” report authors Michael German and Emmanuel Mauleon write in “Fighting Far-Right Violence and Hate Crimes.” “But it has significant consequences for how federal officials label these crimes in public statements, how they prioritize and track them, and whether they will investigate and prosecute them.”
The report follows a string of high-profile far-right attacks that have highlighted the problem of right wing violence in the United States. Last October, white supremacist Robert Bowers burst into a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue, gunning down 11 worshippers and wounding six others. In April, another far-right extremist, John T. Earnest, walked into a San Diego synagogue, shooting four people, one fatally, just weeks after setting fire to a nearby mosque.
FILE – A makeshift memorial was placed by a light pole a block away from a shooting where one person was killed at the Congregation Chabad synagogue in Poway, north of San Diego, Calif., April 27, 2019.
Yet the FBI doesn’t keep track of the casualties, which serves to keep analysts and policymakers in the dark about the extent of the problem and how best to tackle it.
“It’s astonishing that with the FBI transitioning into an intelligence agency (in the post-9/11 era), it doesn’t know how many people white supremacists kill across this country every year,” said German, a former FBI undercover agent.
The FBI publishes an annual tally of hate crimes by race, religion, gender and a host of other categories. Last year, the bureau reported a total of more than 7,000 hate crimes in 2017.
Handing off hate crimes
The Brennan Center report also criticized the Justice Department for deferring the vast majority of hate crime investigations to state and local authorities who “are often ill-equipped or unwilling to properly respond to these crimes.” The report recommended that the FBI “treat all hate crime cases where deadly violence is involved among its top investigative priorities.”
The Justice Department prosecutes about 25 hate crime cases a year.
Asked for comment on the report, a Justice Department spokeswoman cited recent statements by top Justice officials that prosecuting hate crimes and domestic terrorism remains a top priority for the Justice Department.
FILE – Eric Dreiband testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Sept. 6, 2017, regarding his nomination to be Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division.
“Anyone who commits a crime motivated by hatred for the race, color, religion, national origin or other protected trait of any person should be on notice: The United States government will use its enormous power to bring perpetrators to justice, and we will continue to do so for as long as it takes to rid our nation of these vile and monstrous crimes,” Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband said in a statement Friday after a federal judge imposed a life sentence on James Alex Fields Jr., who drove his car into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, murdering a civil rights activist.
The FBI did not respond immediately to a request for comment on the report.
In May, Mike McGarrity, the FBI’s top counterterrorism official, told U.S. lawmakers that the bureau doesn’t “differentiate between a domestic attack we’re trying to stop or an international terrorism attack.”
“It’s a terrorist attack we’re trying to stop,” McGarrity testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security.
Cattleman Laurentino Cortizo was sworn in as Panama’s president Monday, saying he will work during his five-year term to boost the economy and bring transparency in contracting for public works projects.
The 66-year-old won an election two weeks ago that was the tightest in Panama’s recent history, triumphing with only 31 percent of the vote as the candidate of the Democratic Revolutionary Party.
Cortizo, who succeeds Juan Carlos Varela, said he would stoke the economy by pushing for public-private partnerships for infrastructure projects and also address corruption in government contracting.
“We have monumental challenges,” Cortizo said. “We’re coming off a decade lost to corruption. There’s no place for indifference in the country.”
Noting that some 700,000 of Panama’s 4 million citizens live in poverty, Cortizo said, “What a tremendous responsibility we have to those who have been left behind.”
Cortizo inherits a slowing economy and growing frustration among Panamanians about official corruption. The economy grew 3.7% last year and unemployment reached 6%.
The new president said he would create next week a Unit for the Competitiveness of International Services to make sure Panama is the top business services and logistics center in Latin America.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and the presidents of Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic were among those at the ceremony. Ross said he had met with Cortizo on Sunday and discussed a desire to grow their economies together.
Cortizo also said he would work to repair Panama’s image as a fiscal haven that has not effectively cooperated in the fight against money laundering.
“This is a new beginning … (to) rescue Panama,” he said after being sworn in by the new leader of congress at a Panama City convention center. “Our country has been disrespected and mistreated. … It stops here! It stops today!”
Some analysts said the new president will have to focus on an internal cleanup regarding recurring scandals, some of them of international scope, such as a regionwide bribery case involving Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht.
“If Cortizo wants to improve Panama’s international reputation, he will have to attack corruption at home,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialoge in Washington. “If he has success on that internal front, that will help repair the Panama’s image.”
Cortizo sent a strong message on corruption, savaging previous administrations in particular.
“We come from a lost decade … of corruption, of improvisation, of stealing money from Panamanians,” he said, though his party, which was last in power a decade ago, has also been implicated in scandal.
The battle for Tripoli may have hit a turning point over the weekend with the capture of a key town. But with the future of the country at stake, fighting between the warring parties is likely to escalate, as VOA’s Heather Murdock reports from Libya.
The sudden summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arose out of their common desire for “perpetuating the illusion of denuclearization” even though their divergent definitions of denuclearization remain unchanged, said experts.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Monday hailed Sunday’s summit at the inter-Korean border village of Panmunjom, and reported the next step would be denuclearization talks with Washington, marking an about-face for Pyongyang.
“The top leaders of the two countries agreed to keep in close touch in the future, too, and resume and push forward productive dialogues for making a new breakthrough in the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and in the bilateral relations,” said KCNA.
Trump tweets invitation
After some very important meetings, including my meeting with President Xi of China, I will be leaving Japan for South Korea (with President Moon). While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!
Trump, whose schedule in South Korea included a visit to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) tweeted an invitation to Kim on Friday, suggesting they meet at the border separating the two Koreas. Kim greeted Trump on Sunday and invited him to the North Korean side of the border.
After crossing to the South Korean side of the DMZ, the two leaders spent an hour at Freedom House. Trump said at a press briefing with South Korean President Moon Jae-in that working-level talks with North Korea would resume within weeks. Talks between Trump and Kim stalled after their February summit in Hanoi.
That Kim’s meeting with Trump received a positive reception, as did the promise of future talks with Washington, marks a dramatic turnaround from remarks made by Kim to his top generals in April. In his speech to the Supreme People’s Assembly, Kim said he would not meet with Trump again unless Washington changes its position by the end of the year. At the Hanoi summit held in February, the U.S. conditioned North Korea’s request for sanctions relief on Pyongyang taking steps toward full denuclearization.
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry also echoed Kim in its statement posted on its website on May 24 saying,”Unless the United States puts aside the current method of calculation and comes forward with a new method of calculation, the DPRK-U.S. dialogue will never be resumed and by extension, the prospect for resolving the nuclear issue will be much gloomy.”
North Korea’s official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un stand on the North Korean side in the Demilitarized Zone, June 30, 2019 at Panmunjom.
No change in U.S. position
Kim met Trump at the border even though Washington had made no public change to its position on how North Korea could obtain sanctions relief.
Kim shares a common interest with Trump in preserving the talks in order to perpetuate “the illusion of denuclearization” but for different reasons, according to Evans Revere, acting assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific Affairs during the George W. Bush administration.
Revere said Kim is motivated to continue the denuclearization talks because they give him a cover under which he can build more weapons without having to face extreme measures from the U.S.
“For Kim, the goal is to keep the denuclearization illusion in play so that he can continue to build and deploy nukes and missiles, which he is doing,” said Revere.
“For Trump, who is overseeing an increasingly chaotic, feckless, and failing foreign policy agenda, the point is to convince American voters that at least one thing is working” ahead of his campaign for re-election for the 2020 presidential election,” Revere continued.
Lot to gain by both sides
Scott Snyder, a senior fellow for Korea Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said both Kim and Trump had a lot to gain by meeting at the border.
The North Korean leader “is reaping enormous gains from a relationship that bolsters Kim’s legitimacy and normalizes him as an international leader,” said Snyder. “Every Trump-Kim meeting distracts from Kim’s reputation for ruthlessness, demands for unquestioning political loyalty, and subjugation of his population, while taking North Korea one step closer to acceptance as a nuclear state.”
For Trump, the talks with Kim have political value by “maintaining the drama of the relationship with Kim as a foil,” said Snyder. “The relationship is valuable regardless of what it accomplishes because it keeps people interested in the plot line: Will Trump win over Kim to a big deal on denuclearization?”
Yet even as Trump and Kim speak of keeping the talks alive and extoll their “great relationship”, the official differences on denuclearization remain.
Revere said, “The reality, however, is that North Korea has not changed its position opposing the U.S. definition of denuclearization.”
North Korea’s concept of denuclearization has been to remove the U.S. nuclear umbrella over the Korean Peninsula while the U.S. defines it as dismantling North Korea’s nuclear weapons and facilities.
Robert Manning, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said, “For all the talks of great relationships, the word denuclearization’ was not spoken.” He continued, “And is not that the central point of diplomacy with North Korea? The U.S. and DPRK still do not have a common definition for denuclearization. So how can it happen?”
