Day: July 27, 2019

Pakistan’s military says militant attacks in the country’s northwest and southwest have killed 10 soldiers.

The military says both attacks took place on Saturday. The first attack targeted a military patrol near a security post in the Gurbaz area of North Waziristan.

It says the shooting came from across the Afghan border and left six soldiers dead.

The second attack, during a search operation, killed four troops from the paramilitary Frontier Corps near Turbat in southwestern Baluchistan province.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the North Waziristan attack, a region that still sees attacks though the military says it’s cleared tribal areas of militants.

There was no claim for the Baluchistan attack. The province has been the scene of a low-level insurgency by Baluch separatists. Islamic militants also operate there.

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The head of a Sudanese investigative committee said on Saturday that 87 people were killed and 168 wounded on June 3 when a sit-in protest was violently broken up by security forces.

Fath al-Rahman Saeed, the head of the committee, said 17 of those killed were in the square occupied by protesters and 48 of the wounded were hit by bullets.

More Deaths Reported in Sudan Protests

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets Sunday in the capital Khartoum and other areas demanding a return to civilian rule

Saeed said some security forces fired at protesters and that three officers violated orders by moving forces into the sit-in.

He also said an order was issued to whip protesters.

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Georgia allowed its election system to grow “way too old and archaic” and now has a deep hole to dig out of to ensure that the constitutional right to vote is protected, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg said Friday.

Now Totenberg is in the difficult position of having to decide whether the state, which plans to implement a new voting system statewide next year, must immediately abandon its outdated voting machines in favor of an interim solution for special and municipal elections to be held this fall.

Election integrity advocates and individual voters sued Georgia in 2017 alleging that the touchscreen voting machines the state has used since 2002 are unsecure and vulnerable to hacking. They’ve asked Totenberg to order the state to immediately switch to hand-marked paper ballots.

But lawyers for Fulton County, the state’s most populous county that includes most of Atlanta, and for state election officials argued that the state is in the process of implementing a new system, and it would be too costly, burdensome and chaotic to use an interim system for elections this fall and then switch to the new permanent system next year.

A law passed this year and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp provides specifications for a new system in which voters make their selections on electronic machines that print out a paper record that is read and tallied by scanners. State officials have said it will be in place for the 2020 presidential election.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued Friday that the current system is so unsecure and vulnerable to manipulation that it cannot be relied upon, jeopardizing voters’ constitutional rights.

“We can’t sacrifice people’s right to vote just because Georgia has left this system in place for 20 years and it’s so far behind,” said lawyer Bruce Brown, who represents the Coalition for Good Governance and a group of voters.

Addressing concerns about an interim system being burdensome to implement, plaintiffs’ lawyers countered that the state put itself in this situation by neglecting the system for so long and ignoring warnings. Lawyer David Cross, who represents another group of voters, urged the judge to force the state to take responsibility.

“You are the last resort,” he said.

Georgia’s voting system drew national scrutiny during the closely watched contest for governor last November in which Kemp, a Republican who was the state’s top election official at the time, narrowly defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams.

The plaintiffs had asked Totenberg in August to force Georgia to use hand-marked paper ballots for that election. While Totenberg expressed grave concerns about vulnerabilities in the voting system and scolded state officials for being slow to respond to evidence of those problems, she said a switch to paper ballots so close to the midterm election would be too chaotic. She warned state officials that further delay would be unacceptable.

But she seemed conflicted Friday at the conclusion of a two-day hearing.

“These are very difficult issues,” she said. “I’m going to wrestle with them the best that I can, but these are not simple issues.”

She recognized that the state had taken concrete steps since her warning last year, with lawmakers providing specifications for a new system, appropriating funds and beginning the procurement process. But she also said she wished the state had not let the situation become so dire and wondered what would happen if the state can’t meet its aggressive schedule for implementing the new system.

The request for proposals specifies that vendors must be able to distribute all voting machine equipment before March 31, which is a week after the state’s presidential primary election is set to be held on March 24. Bryan Tyson, a lawyer representing state election officials, told the judge the state plans to announce the new system it’s selected in “a matter of days.”

Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science and engineering professor, testified Friday that the state election system’s vulnerabilities and that the safest, most secure system would be hand-marked paper ballots with optical scanners at each precinct.

Four county election officials, three of whom will oversee elections this fall, testified that it would be difficult to switch to hand-marked paper ballots in time for those elections. They cited difficulties getting enough new equipment, as well as challenges training poll workers and educating voters. They also said they’d have trouble paying for the switch unless the state helps.

The two groups of plaintiffs agree that the whole system is flawed and has to go. They also believe the ballot-marking devices the state plans to implement have many of the same problems, and they plan to challenge those once the state announces which vendor has won the contract. But they disagree about what the interim solution should be.

The plaintiffs represented by Brown are asking the state to use hand-marked paper ballots along with its existing election management system and to use the ballot scanners it currently uses for paper absentee and provisional ballots for all ballots.

The plaintiffs represented by Cross want the state to implement its new election management system in time for the fall elections and to use ballot scanners along with paper ballots.

Totenberg did not say when she would rule.

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Bahrain has executed two men convicted of terrorism offenses.

The executions were carried out despite objections from international human rights groups.

The French news agency AFP reports that the two men were killed by firing squad Saturday.

Rights groups have identified the men as Ahmad al-Malali and Ali al-Arab.

Human Rights Watch says both men were Bahraini citizens who were convicted on the terrorism charges last year “in a mass trial marred by allegations of torture and serious due process violations.”

A third man was also reported to have been killed by firing squad Saturday. His conviction, however, was not connected to the al-Malali and al-Arab cases.

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As civilian casualties mount in Syria’s north-western province of Idlib, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights says she is alarmed that the continued carnage in this war-torn country is no longer on the international radar. 

In the last three months, UN Human Rights Chief Michele Bachelet has documented nearly 500 civilian deaths in Idlib, including more than 100 in the past 10 days.  

Her spokesman, Rupert Colville, says the High Commissioner is alarmed at the apparent international indifference to the rising civilian death toll caused by a succession of airstrikes.

He says the latest bombing campaign by the government and its Russian allies has caused enormous damage to civilian infrastructure.  He says some 40 health facilities, at least 50 schools and other civilian infrastructure such as markets and bakeries have been attacked.

“These are civilian objects, and it seems highly unlikely, given the persistent pattern of such attacks, that they are all being hit by accident,” said Colville. “Intentional attacks against civilians are war crimes, and those who have ordered them or carried them out are criminally responsible for their actions.”

Syrian Airstrikes Kill 14 Civilians in Idlib Province

The area is supposed to be protected from a major regime assault by a September deal between Moscow and Ankara

Last year, Russia, Turkey and Iran agreed to create a buffer zone between opposing forces in Idlib.  This was aimed at preventing the government and armed rebel groups from fighting, thereby protecting some three million civilians trapped in the province with nowhere to go.

However, the status quo has been waning.   Russia’s discontent with elements of the agreement and the government of Assad al-Bashir’s desire to retake this last opposition stronghold have led to the recent escalation of fighting.

Bachelet warns this will have dire human rights and humanitarian consequences for the millions of civilians trying to survive in Idlib.  She is calling on powerful States to use their influence to halt the current military campaign and bring the warring parties back to the negotiating table.

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