Brazil deployed police to a remote Amazon village on Sunday after reports it had been overrun by armed miners following the murder of an indigenous leader, officials and tribal chiefs said.
The violence in an area of the northern Amapa state controlled by the Waiapi tribe comes as Brazil’s indigenous people face growing pressures from miners, ranchers and loggers under pro-business President Jair Bolsonaro, who on Saturday called for the “first world” to help exploit the “absurd quantity of minerals” in the Amazon rainforest.
Last Monday, a Waiapi indigenous leader was killed and his body found the following day in a river, the Amapa attorney general’s office (AGO) said in a statement.
While none of the Waiapi witnessed the “violent” killing, a council of village chiefs said on Facebook a search of the area found “trails and other signs that the death was caused by non-indigenous people.”
On Friday, a group of “armed non-indigenous” overran the nearby village of Yvytoto, prompting residents to flee, the council said. Local media called them “garimpeiros,” a term for armed miners active in the Amazon, and said they numbered 50.
After reports of the attacks emerged Saturday, members of the federal police and a military police special forces unit were dispatched, the AGO said, arriving in the village some 300 kilometers (186 miles) from the state capital Macapa on Sunday.
The indigenous affairs agency FUNAI said its officers were also on the ground monitoring the police investigation.
“Law enforcement officials have reported that no hypothesis for the murder has been ruled out, nor can they can say at this time who carried out the crime,” the AGO said, as it announced the establishment of a crisis management group to oversee the investigation.
“The alleged presence of garimpeiros and other groups in the region is being investigated.”
‘Environmental psychosis’
Rich in gold, manganese, iron and copper, the Waiapi’s territory is deep inside the Amazon, making communication difficult, police said.
The Waiapi council said some of the tribe’s fighters had stationed themselves near the village occupied by the miners.
“The situation is urgent,” said Randolfe Rodrigues, an opposition senator from Amapa, on his official Facebook page.
The Brazilian Bar Association issued a statement calling on the government to protect the Waiapi’s land and ensure perpetrators of criminal offenses were “punished.”
The tribe’s territory is one of hundreds Brazil’s government demarcated in the 1980s for the exclusive use of its 800,000 indigenous inhabitants. Access by outsiders is strictly regulated.
Since taking office in January, Bolsonaro has been accused of harming the Amazon and indigenous tribes in order to benefit his supporters in the logging, mining and farming industries.
“We are experiencing a real environmental psychosis,” Bolsonaro said recently.
He’s also pledged to crackdown on what he’s called radical environmental activism, and also questioned the latest official figures showing deforestation increasing by 88 percent in June compared with the same period last year.
The woman slated to replace Puerto Rico’s governor after he steps down next week said on Sunday she does not want the job.
“I reiterate, I have no interest in occupying the position of governor,” Justice Secretary Wanda Vazquez wrote on Twitter. “It is a Constitutional dictum. I hope that the governor identifies and submits a candidate for the position of secretary of state before Aug. 2 and I have told him so.”
Governor Ricardo Rossello on Wednesday announced that he would step down on August 2 after nearly two weeks of massive protests triggered by a leaked obscenity-laced chat in which Rossello and close advisers insulted people including women and victims of Hurricane Maria.
Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello speaks as he announces his resignation in San Juan, Puerto Rico, early July 25, 2019.
By law, Secretary of State Luis Rivera Marin would have replace Rossello, but he too was involved in the chat scandal and resigned earlier this month.
If a new secretary of state isn’t approved in time, the line of succession after Vazquez falls to Secretary of Treasury Francisco Pares and Secretary of Education Eligio Hernandez.
The U.S. territory has been rocked by protests since the leak of almost 900 pages of chats between the governor and several island officials. The chats, on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, shocked islanders for their vulgarity and crassness and raised questions about possible conflicts of interest and violations of the law.
The remaining signatories to the Iran nuclear deal will meet in Vienna on Sunday to try again to find a way of saving the accord after the U.S. pulled out, amid mounting tensions between Tehran and Washington.
Envoys from Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia and Iran will take part in the meeting, which comes a month after a similar gathering failed to achieve a breakthrough.
Tensions between Tehran and Washington have escalated since last year when U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the accord that was aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program, and imposed punishing sanctions.
In retaliation, Iran said in May it would disregard certain limits the deal set on its nuclear program and threatened to take further measures if remaining parties to the deal, especially European nations, did not help it circumvent the U.S. sanctions.
FILE – A picture from Iranian News Agency ISNA, June 13, 2019, reportedly shows fire and smoke billowing from Norwegian owned Front Altair tanker said to have been attacked in the waters of the Gulf of Oman.
Tension in Middle East
Pressure has continued to mount in the region with a string of incidents involving tankers and drones.
The U.S. has said it brought down one and possibly two Iranian drones last week, and blamed Tehran for a series of mysterious attacks on tanker ships in strategic Gulf waters.
Iran shot down an unmanned U.S. aircraft in June, after which Trump announced that he had called off retaliatory air strikes at the last minute because the resulting death toll would have been too high.
The U.S. and Gulf powerhouse Saudi Arabia have accused Iran of being behind multiple attacks on tankers in the Gulf in June, which Iran denies.
On July 19, a British-flagged tanker was impounded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards with its 23 crew aboard in the Strait of Hormuz.
The seizure was seen by London as a tit-for-tat move for British authorities detaining an Iranian tanker off the U.K. overseas territory of Gibraltar in early July.
Efforts to save deal falter
Efforts by European powers, notably France’s President Emmanuel Macron, to salvage the nuclear deal have so far come to nothing.
The remaining signatories, however, have pledged to work toward a breakthrough at a future ministerial meeting, for which no date has yet been fixed.
Referring to the need for a “preparatory meeting before the ministerial level meeting that will be necessary,” one European diplomat told AFP it was “imperative to talk to the Iranians after the proven violations of their commitments.”
The European Union said earlier this week the extraordinary meeting would be chaired by the secretary general of the European External Action Service, Helga Schmid.
It said the talks were requested by Britain, France, Germany and Iran and would examine issues linked to the implementation of Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), under which the 2015 deal is implemented.
Protesters and police prepared Sunday for a likely showdown in central Hong Kong, one day after clashes led to 11 arrests and left at least two dozen injured in an outlying district toward the border with mainland China.
A midafternoon rally has been called at Chater Garden, an urban park in the financial district and about 500 meters (yards) west of the city’s government headquarters and legislature.
Police have denied a request from protest organizers to march about 2 kilometers (1.4 miles) west to Sun Yat-sen Memorial Park, but at least some of the demonstrators may still try to push forward.
Protesters react as tear gas is released by police during a faceoff at the entrance to a village at Yuen Long district in Hong Kong, July 27, 2019.
Seven weeks of protests
Hong Kong has been wracked by protests for seven weeks, as opposition to an extradition bill has morphed into demands for the resignation of the city’s leader and an investigation into whether police have used excessive force in quelling the protests.
Underlying the movement is a broader push for full democracy in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory. The city’s leader is chosen by a committee dominated by a pro-Beijing establishment, rather than by direct elections.
In denying the march, police cited escalating violence in clashes with protesters that have broken out after past marches and rallies.
“The police must prevent aggressive protesters from exploiting a peaceful procession to cause troubles and violent clashes,” said Superintendent Louis Lau of the police public relations branch.
The police had denied permission for Saturday’s march in Yuen Long, where a mob apparently targeting demonstrators had beat people brutally in a train station the previous weekend.
Ghost paper money usually tossed at funerals is left by protesters at the entrance to a village in Yuen Long district in Hong Kong, July 27, 2019.
Protests into the night
Protesters and police faced off in the streets well into the night, as they’ve done repeatedly during the summer’s pro-democracy protests.
Police said that protesters removed fences from roads to make their own roadblocks and charged police lines with metal poles. One group surrounded and vandalized a police vehicle, causing danger to officers on board, a police news release said.
Officers fired tear gas and rubber bullets as demonstrators threw bricks and other objects and ducked behind makeshift shields.v Later, police wearing helmets charged into the train station where a few hundred protesters had taken refuge from the tear gas. Some officers swung their batons at demonstrators, while others appeared to be urging their colleagues to hang back. For the second week in a row, blood was splattered on the station floor.
Police said in a statement they arrested 11 men, between the ages of 18 and 68, for offenses including unlawful assembly, possession of offensive weapon and assault. At least four officers were injured.
The Hospital Authority said 24 people were taken to five hospitals. As of Sunday morning, eight remained hospitalized, two in serious condition.
Riot police block a road into Yuen Long district in Hong Kong, July 27, 2019. Hong Kong police on Saturday fired tear gas and swung batons at protesters who defied warnings not to march in a neighborhood where earlier a mob brutally attacked people.
Police criticized
Amnesty International, the human rights group, called the police response heavy-handed and unacceptable.
“While police must be able to defend themselves, there were repeated instances today where police officers were the aggressors,” Man-kei Tam, the director of Amnesty International Hong Kong, said in a news release.
Police said they had to use what they termed “appropriate force” because of the bricks and other objects thrown at them, including glass bottles with a suspected corrosive fluid inside.
When Ugnius Zilinskas came to Kenyon College in Ohio to play on the basketball team, he was welcomed with open arms.
“They kind of take you as a family member,” said the student from Kedainiai, Lithuania.
Zilinskas, a junior, is one of roughly 27,000 foreign students who play on U.S. college sports teams, out of more than 1 million foreign students who attend school in the U.S. Stars like basketball player Hakeem Olajuwon of Nigeria and soccer player Christine Sinclair of Canada began as international students at American colleges before competing professionally in the United States.
Zilinskas was welcomed by Kenyon College, a Division III National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) school in Gambier, Ohio. He has played basketball since he was a child in his home country and understood the ladder of college sports. But if a student comes to study in the U.S. with no knowledge of college sports, the system can seem complicated.
Here’s a breakdown.
FILE – The NCAA logo is seen at center court in Pittsburgh, Pa., March 18, 2015.
The basics
The NCAA is one of three major associations that govern college and university athletics:
These nonprofit organizations determine student eligibility, establish sport guidelines, and oversee competition among schools across North America. For instance, the NCAA issues rules that define a foul in basketball, as well as prohibiting NCAA student athletes from endorsing commercial products.
The NCAA generates billions of dollars through media rights, ticket sales, merchandise and membership fees. The revenue goes to athletic scholarships, NCAA employee salaries, and to run competitions like March Madness, a wildly popular tournament broadcast across the country.
NCAA college athletes are banned from being paid to play while enrolled in schools to ensure amateur competition in college. Critics say the big sports associations use favors, trips, free meals and gear to compensate players in other ways. Not everyone considers these actions amateur, while others say the players deserve to be paid outright for their talent and skills.
Schools are sorted into divisions: Division I schools, such as the University of Virginia and University of Michigan, generally have large student populations and many teams. The University of Virginia, for example, has more than 16,000 undergraduate students. Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, a Division II school, has a little more than 6,000 undergraduate students. Kenyon College, a Division III school, has nearly 2,000 students.
Division I and Division II institutions are highly competitive with robust athletic programs and may have athletic budgets of millions of dollars to pay for athletic scholarships, coaches, sport facilities, athletes’ medical needs and transportation.
Division I provides the largest athletic scholarships. Athletes who receive athletic scholarships in soccer or basketball, for example, may get some or all tuition waved in addition to some room and board. Division III focuses on academics and offers merit scholarships or financial aid, not athletic scholarships.
Zilinskas said a benefit of competing in college sports was playing basketball while fully engaging in his studies.
The National Junior College Administration (NJCAA) operates differently and only at two-year colleges, organizing its member institutions into three divisions. Division I members, such Bismarck State College’s basketball team in North Dakota, offer larger athletic scholarships than Division II. Member institutions decide the division in which it wants to compete.
For similar reasons as the NCAA and NAIA, NJCAA Division III members do not provide athletic scholarships to their students.
Getting ready to compete
How do students get eligibility to play at U.S. schools?
Student athletes register through the NCAA Eligibility Center online. The $150 fee can be waived for students with financial needs. School transcripts, SAT or ACT scores and country-specific documents are required in English and according to the American grading system. (The NCAA offers country-specific information on its website.)
Students must also prove their amateur status.
Once eligibility is established and a U.S. college or university offers a student athlete a scholarship, they sign a National Letter of Intent to attend and compete for one academic year.
The application process to an NCAA Division III institution is less formal. A student does not need to register officially through the NCAA. Instead, grade and credit regulations are set by each school. Students should contact the team’s coach for school-specific requirements. Again, NCAA III does not offer student sports scholarships.
The process for international student athletes interested in competing on an NAIA or NJCAA Division I or Division II are similar.
While Zilinskas had hoped to play basketball at a Division I school, that dream seemed impossible after he suffered an injury.
“No one takes a player that cannot run and sits on the bench the whole year,” Zilinskas said. “So I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m packing my stuff, I’m going home.’ But then Kenyon gave me good financial aid. And I’m still here.”
“I would say that international students, if they’re really into athletics or doing some sports they should definitely try to do something with sports. … School is not everything, so there is a lot of different paths to go,” he said. “You can find a lot of different groups of people and academic sides and sports sides, music whatever. Meeting new people — that’s really big.”
More information about competing through the NCAA, NAIA or NJCAA can be found on the associations’ websites.
Canned soup, canned tuna, and pasta, among other things — everything you’ll find in an average American pantry, yet these little pantries are not in someone’s home but in the streets, open and accessible to anyone who needs them. Free Little Pantry is behind this initiative, a grassroots organization that was founded Arkansas two years ago, but has spread across the country. For VOA, Nataliya Leonova visited a few of these little pantries in the Washington area. Anna Rice narrates her story.
Indonesia’s president said in an interview that he wants to see the speedy construction of a giant sea wall around Jakarta to prevent the low-lying capital from sinking under the sea, lending renewed backing and a sense of urgency to a slow-moving and politically contested mega project.
President Joko Widodo and his government are up against a tight timetable, including a forecast by experts that at the current rate, one-third of Jakarta could be submerged by 2050.
The existential crisis facing the city is the culmination of decades of unfettered development, almost nonexistent urban planning and misrule by city politicians who have served private interests over those of the public.
City sinking
Lacking a comprehensive piped water network, industry and homeowners have tapped into the city’s aquifers, causing rapid subsidence in northern Jakarta, home to several million people.
In this area, the swampy ground has been sinking at an average of about 10 centimeters (4 inches) a year. Rising sea levels from a heated-up planet will compound the problem in decades to come.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo smiles as he talks to The Associated Press during his visit at the newly revitalized 18th century Kali Besar Canal at the Old Town in Jakarta, Indonesia, July 26, 2019.
Widodo told The Associated Press on Friday that it’s time to move ahead with the sea wall, a project the government first began to consider a decade ago.
“This huge project will need to be done quickly to prevent Jakarta from sinking under the sea,” he said in the interview at a humble restaurant serving spicy Indonesian dishes.
He also addressed other ambitious plans for Jakarta, a congested, polluted and sprawling metropolis of 10 million that swells to three times that number when counting those living in the larger metropolitan area.
A new capital
Widodo reiterated that wants to build a new capital, suggesting it should be outside Indonesia’s main island of Java, where 57 percent of the country’s nearly 270 million people are concentrated.
“We want to separate the capital, the center of government and Jakarta as a business and economic center,” he said. “We don’t want all the money existing only in Java. We want it to be outside Java as well.”
Jakarta’s vulnerability to flooding and earthquakes is also a factor, Widodo said.
“We need to make sure our capital is safe from disasters,” he said, without naming the location for the new capital.
People walk near a giant sea wall that prevents sea water from flowing into Jakarta, Indonesia, July 27, 2019.
Visible threat
The threats facing Jakarta are most visible in Muara Baru, a waterfront slum in the northwest of the city.
A sea wall along the shore is meant to protect the area’s makeshift shacks against the waters of the Java Sea, but the concrete barrier _ raised and reinforced after a major flood more than a decade ago _ has developed cracks.
A steady trickle of seawater leaks through it, covering the street running alongside the wall with a shallow brackish brew. A half-submerged mosque on the bay side of the wall serves as a stark reminder of what could be in store for the entire area. Two women in the neighborhood said their homes are flooded frequently.
Jakarta has been described as one of the world’s fastest sinking cities, a result of geographic misfortune and mismanagement. The city sits on swampy ground, with 13 heavily polluted rivers running through it. The main cause for the sinking is the over-extraction of groundwater. The weight of taller buildings being constructed in recent years further compresses the ground.
Heri Andreas, an earth scientist at Indonesia’s Bandung Institute of Technology, said that in some parts of northern Jakarta, the ground is already 2 to 4 meters (7 to 13 feet) below sea level and is sinking by as much as 20 centimeters (8 inches) a year.
“Jakarta keeps sinking,” said Andreas, an expert in geodesy, or the measuring of the shape of the earth. “If subsidence continues at the same rate, 95 percent of northern Jakarta will be underwater by 2050.”
He said water would cover about one-third of the city.
Andreas said it took time for his alarming forecasts to be taken seriously by Indonesian government officials, but that planning for a giant sea wall encircling Jakarta Bay began about a decade ago.
Women walk near a giant sea wall used to prevent sea water from flowing into Jakarta, Indonesia, July 27, 2019. Indonesia’s president wants to see the speedy construction of the giant sea wall to save the capital from sinking under the sea.
$42 billion project
The $42 billion project envisions three stages, starting with strengthening 30 kilometers (18 miles) of existing coastal dams and creating 17 artificial islands. This would be followed by building giant sea walls on the western and eastern sides of the bay.
However, implementation has been slow amid political arguments over the cost of the project and possible harm to the local fishing industry.
Andreas, who is occasionally consulted by the authorities and met with government officials last week, said he expects a scaled-back version of the giant sea wall to be built for less than the initial budget.
In this scenario, a 20-kilometer-long (12-mile-long) wall would enclose part of the bay to protect the most vulnerable area, rather than a loop that was intended to be three times as long. This would buy time for the government to deal with the other areas later.
Local concerns
Local fishermen view the mega project with suspicion, fearing it will rob them of their livelihood.
In Muara Angke, a small fishing port in northern Jakarta, 63-year-old Pandi dismissed the warnings by scientists, arguing that occasional flooding is part of life on the waterfront.
Pandi, who uses a single name, catches mussels for a living, in an operation that provides a livelihood for about 30 people.
On Saturday, several men scooped their catch from a small boat into large vats they placed on open fires nearby. Once the mussels were cooked, the men dumped them onto the ground, where women removed the shells, preparing the mussels for sale.
Pandi said land reclamation underway in the bay forced him to sail farther away from shore in search of mussels. He said he fears a giant sea wall could drive him out of business for good.
“If we can’t work, we will suffer for a long time,” he said. “Sinking” below water, he said, “is just part of the risk.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Two-month-old Lahya Kathembo became an orphan in a day. Her mother succumbed to Ebola on a Saturday morning. By sunset her father was dead, too.
They had been sick for more than a week before health workers finally persuaded them to seek treatment, neighbors said. They believed their illness was the work of people jealous about their newborn daughter, a community organizer said, and sought the guidance of a traditional spiritual healer.
The Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo is ravaging Beni, a sprawling city of some 600,000, in large part because so many of the sick are choosing to stay at home. In doing so, they unknowingly infect caregivers and those who mourn them.
Two-month-old Lahya Kathembo is carried by a nurse waiting for test results at an Ebola treatment center in Beni, Congo, July 17, 2019.
“People are waiting until the last minute to bring their family members and when they do it’s complicated for us,” says Mathieu Kanyama, head of health promotion at the Ebola treatment center in Beni run by the Alliance for International Medical Action, or ALIMA. “Here there are doctors, not magicians.”
Nearly one year into the outbreak which has killed more than 1,700 and was declared a global health emergency this month, a rise in community deaths is fueling a resurgence of Ebola in Beni. During a two-week period in July alone, 30 people died at home.
Health teams are now going door-to-door with megaphones trying to get the message out.
“Behind every person who has died there is someone developing a fever,” Dr. Gaston Tshapenda, who heads the Ebola response in Beni for Congo’s health ministry, told his teams.
Fear of treatment centers
Many people still don’t believe Ebola is real, health experts say, which stymies efforts to control the disease’s spread.
Ebola symptoms are also similar to common killers like malaria and typhoid, so those afraid of going to a treatment center often try to self-medicate at home with paracetamol to reduce fever.
But Ebola, unlike those other illnesses, requires the patient to be kept in isolation and away from the comfort of family.
Dr. Maurice Kakule, who became one of this outbreak’s first Ebola patients after he treated a sick woman at his clinic, is now trying to make it easier for those who are ill to get help in and around Beni, near the border with Uganda.
He and other survivors, who are now immune to the disease, run a motorcycle taxi ambulance. After receiving a phone call for help they go to homes, reassure the sick and take them for medical care without infecting others.
People’s most common fear is that they will only leave an Ebola treatment center in a body bag, Kakule says.
An Ebola treatment center is seen next to the hospital in Beni, Congo, July 13, 2019.
“Some have heard of the problem of Ebola but there have been no survivors in their family,” he said. “Since they had relatives die at a treatment center, they think people are killed there and that’s why they categorically refuse to go.”
Humanizing care
They fear, too, that they will die alone, surrounded only by health care personnel covered in protective gear from head to toe.
To try to humanize the care of patients in isolation, ALIMA’s Ebola treatment center in Beni places some patients in their own transparent room called a “CUBE,” where they can see visitors from their beds. Others share a room with one other patient and a glass window where loved ones can gather.
While there is no licensed treatment for Ebola, patients in eastern Congo are able to take part in clinical trials. That’s a welcome change from the 2014-2016 outbreak in West Africa when many patients entered Ebola centers never to come out alive again. More than 11,000 people died.
Still, the measures needed to keep Ebola from spreading remain difficult for many people to accept.
“We cannot be oblivious to the fact that when you’re sick with Ebola you’re put somewhere away from your family, with a 50% chance of dying alone from your loved ones,” said Dr. Joanne Liu, president of Doctors Without Borders, which is helping to fight the outbreak. “I don’t blame people for not finding this attractive, despite the fact that we have a clinical trial going on.”
The day after the deaths of baby Lahya’s parents, a morgue team in protective clothing carried their carefully encased bodies to a truck for a funeral procession to a Muslim cemetery on the edge of town.
In the background was the sound of workers hammering away as they built more space at the nearby treatment center to accommodate the growing caseload.
Lahya developed a fever but has tested negative for Ebola. The infant with round cheeks and gold earrings is in an orphanage for now, while her 3-year-old sister is being cared for by neighbors who hope to raise them both.
But the sisters will have to wait a bit longer to be reunited — their adoptive father and former nanny both have tested positive for Ebola and are being treated.
‘I lost my entire family’
The fateful decision to avoid treatment centers haunts survivors like Asifiwe Kavira, 24, who fell ill with Ebola along with eight of her relatives.
Health teams came to the house in Butembo, trying to persuade them to seek treatment. Most of the family, though, said they wanted to treat their fevers at home. After three days of negotiations, Kavira finally agreed to seek help, believing she was on the brink of death.
She would be the only one to survive.
Her mother, grandmother, brother and four other relatives all died at home. An older sister joined her at the treatment center, but medical care came too late.
“I tell people now that Ebola exists,” Kavira says, “because that is how I lost my entire family.”
The U.S. Justice Department said on Friday it is approving T-Mobile US Inc’s $26 billion takeover of rival Sprint Corp, clearing a major hurdle to a deal that would merge the nation’s third and fourth largest wireless carriers.
The companies have agreed to divest Sprint’s prepaid businesses including Boost Mobile to Dish Network Corp in order to move ahead with the merger, which was announced in
April 2018.
But the deal still faces a significant challenge. A group of U.S. state attorneys general have filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York to block the merger on antitrust grounds,
arguing that the proposed deal would cost consumers more than $4.5 billion annually.
T-Mobile Chief Executive Officer John Legere, who will be the CEO of the combined company, said it would deliver a 5G network with lower prices, better quality and thousands of jobs, while unlocking $43 billion in synergies.
“We are pleased that our previously announced target synergies, profitability and long-term cash generation have not changed,” Legere said.
On Friday, the Justice Department and five state attorneys general said they were filing suit to enforce the settlement conditions that also include selling Virgin Mobile and Sprint prepaid and providing Dish with access to 20,000 cell sites and hundreds of retail locations.
Dish has agreed to acquire spectrum in a deal valued at $3.6 billion from the merged firm and pay $1.4 billion for Sprint’s prepaid business that serves about 9.3 million customers. Dish will get access to the combined firm’s network for seven years while it builds out its own 5G network.
Shares of T-Mobile, which is about 63 percent owned by Deutsche Telekom AG, were up 3.7% at $82.90. Shares of Sprint, which is about 84 percent owned by Softbank Group
Corp, were up 6.5% at $7.92.
Prepaid wireless phones are generally sought by lower-income people who cannot pass a credit check.
T-Mobile, the third largest U.S. wireless carrier with about 80 million customers, pursued the deal in order to seek scale to compete with bigger rivals Verizon Communications Inc and AT&T Inc. Sprint has about 55 million customers.
T-Mobile US on Thursday beat analysts’ estimates for second-quarter net new phone subscribers who pay a monthly bill, boosted by the U.S. mobile carrier’s wireless plans aimed at fending off its bigger rivals. The mobile carrier said it added a net 710,000 phone subscribers in the three months ended June 30.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has given his blessing to the merger in principle and said in a statement on Friday he would soon circulate a formal order.
The FCC is expected to give Dish more time to use spectrum it previously acquired but also impose strict penalties if it fails to create a consumer wireless network within a set
timeframe.
A top Sudanese editor who heads the main journalists’ union has been detained, the union said Thursday, calling on Sudan’s military rulers to free him or put him on trial.
The detention of Sadiq al-Rizaigi came as the military said it had arrested a top general, several security officers and Islamist leaders over a failed coup attempt announced earlier this month.
The Sudanese Journalists’ Union called on the ruling Transitional Military Council to “immediately release” its head Rizaigi, a prominent Islamist and editor of Al-Sayha newspaper, or that he be put on trial.
A senior journalist with Rizaigi’s newspaper told AFP that security forces had taken him away from outside the newspaper’s premises.
“We do not know where he is being held or the reasons for his detention,” said Awad Jad Al-Sayid, news editor of Al-Sahya.
On Wednesday, the military announced several arrests in connection with a failed coup attempt.
It said it had arrested General Hashim Abdel Mottalib, the head of the joint chiefs of staff, and a number of officers from the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) along with leaders of the Islamic Movement and the National Congress Party.
On July 11, the military announced it had foiled a coup attempt without specifying when it took place.
Sudanese media also reported that among those arrested was General Bakri Hassan Saleh, a former first vice president and prime minister and a prominent figure in the 1989 coup that brought now ousted president Omar al-Bashir to power.
Also arrested was Ali Karty, a former foreign minister and Zubair Ahmed Hassan, an ex-finance minister, according to the reports.
During Bashir’s three-decade rule, the press was severely curtailed, according to media activists.
NISS agents cracked down regularly on journalists or confiscated entire print-runs of newspapers for publishing articles deemed critical of Bashir’s policies.
Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) recorded at least 100 cases of journalists being arrested during the months of protests that finally led to Bashir’s ouster in April.
RSF ranks Sudan 175th out of 180 countries in its 2019 World Press Freedom Index.
The U.N. refugee agency says up to 150 refugees and migrants are believed to have lost their lives Thursday in a shipwreck on the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya.
If confirmed, the UNHCR says the shipwreak will be the biggest on the Mediterranean Sea since May 2017, when 156 people died off the coast of the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
Close to 140 survivors, mainly Eritreans and Sudanese, were pulled from the water.
Migrants watch the body of their fellow migrant who died after a wooden boat capsized off the coast of Komas, a town east of the capital Tripoli, Libya, July 25, 2019.
UNHCR spokesman Charlie Yaxley says the latest tragedy comes weeks after more than 50 people were killed when a detention center in Tajoura, on the outskirts of Tripoli, was hit in an airstrike.
“In addition to the shipwreck … a further 87 people were brought back to Libya by the Libyan coast guard, and 84 of them were transferred to Tajoura,” Yaxley said. “The total population in Tajoura now numbers nearly 300. This is completely unacceptable, and we call for their immediate orderly release.”
There were no search-and-rescue boats operated by nongovernmental organizations in the sea Thursday when the migrant boat ran into trouble, as hard-line governments such as Italy prohibit them from conducting these life-saving missions.
Yaxley says the crucial role of NGO boats must be acknowledged, and their efforts in saving lives must not be stigmatized nor criminalized.
“There also must now be a return of EU state search-and-rescue vessels to the Mediterranean,” he said. “We reiterate once again that no return of refugees and people rescued on the Mediterranean should be to Libya because it has no ports of safety.”
The UNHCR is calling for more action to arrest and prosecute smugglers and traffickers who profit from people’s desperation by facilitating their doomed voyages.
ISLAMABAD — A key presidential candidate in Afghanistan urged President Donald Trump on Friday to test the U.S. military power against Russia instead of threatening the “oppressed” Afghans.
Politicians and the public in the war-ravaged country continue to express their anger at Trump for claiming his military plan, if executed, could win the Afghan war within 10 days, killing 10 million people and wiping Afghanistan “off the face of the Earth.”
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a presidential hopeful and former anti-American warlord, denounced Trump’s assertions while addressing thousands of his supporters in Kabul. The crowd of fewer than 10,000 chanted “Death to America, Death to Trump” during the speech.
“We ask Mr. Trump that if you have the courage and strength, and you believe in your military power, then test it against [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and not the oppressed Afghans,” Hekmatyar said.
“The same Putin who is said to have meddled in America’s election, enabling you [Trump] to reach the White House to become the president,” Hekmatyar went on to mock Trump.
Ghani government criticized
He also criticized President Ashraf Ghani’s coalition government for seeking “clarification” from Washington rather than denouncing Trump’s remarks. Hekmatyar and his fighters fought alongside the Taliban against U.S. and NATO forces until two years ago, when he entered into a peace-and-reconciliation deal with the U.S.-backed government in Kabul.
Trump, while speaking Monday to reporters at the White House together with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, explained why he needed Islamabad’s help “to extricate ourselves” from Afghanistan.
“I have plans on Afghanistan that, if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone. It would be over in, literally, in 10 days. And I don’t want to do — I don’t want to go that route,” Trump remarked.
FILE – Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai prepares to attend a meeting in Moscow, Russia, May 28, 2019.
Most Afghan presidential candidates and former President Hamid Karzai also have slammed Trump for his controversial statement. Karzai told VOA the American president’s statement came from a “criminal mindset” and showed “contempt” toward Afghanistan and the Afghan people.
Hekmatyar, who heads his Hezb-e Islami political group, called for all Afghan stakeholders to accept “all reasonable” demands by the Taliban for ending the war.
“Foreigners and the government they have installed [in Afghanistan] must both accept their [Taliban’s] demands. … Hezb-e-Islami is determined not to compromise on peace, and if we are forced, we will alone find a settlement with the Taliban,” Hekmatyar cautioned.
The United States is engaged in direct talks with the Taliban, and they are said to have come close to signing a peace deal.
The insurgents say they are seeking a troop withdrawal timetable from Washington in exchange for assurances that Taliban-controlled areas will not become a sanctuary for international terrorist groups. U.S. officials, however, say a final agreement also would require the Taliban to engage in intra-Afghan peace negotiations, including representatives of the Kabul government.
The insurgent group remains strongly opposed to any talks with the Ghani government, dismissing it as illegitimate and a U.S. puppet.
Defense of U.S. efforts
When asked for her comments about Afghan outrage over Trump’s remarks, State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said Thursday that she would remind Afghans about the large number of fighters from the U.S. and NATO allies who have been killed in Afghanistan.
“Not just the number of lives lost but the billions of dollars that have spent there. … So I think that the people of Afghanistan should know that for almost 20 years, Americans have lost their lives and have spent their hard-earned taxpayer money to see the people of Afghanistan have a choice for their own future,” Morgan told reporters.
“And that commitment has not been a small commitment. That has been a vast and sweeping commitment by the American people,” she emphasized.
The conflict aimed at stabilizing Afghanistan — the United States’ longest foreign military intervention — has cost Washington an estimated $1 trillion and more than 2,400 lives.
The U.S. is still paying about $4 billion annually to Kabul, mostly for salaries and training of Afghan security forces battling the Taliban.
The thigh bone of a giant dinosaur was found this week by French paleontologists at an excavation site in southwestern France where remains of some of the largest animals that ever lived on land have been dug up since 2010.
The two-meter long femur at the Angeac-Charente site is thought to have belonged to a sauropod, herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks and tails which were widespread in the late Jurassic era, over 140 million years ago.
“This is a major discovery,” Ronan Allain, a paleontologist at the National History Museum of Paris told Reuters. “I was especially amazed by the state of preservation of that femur.”
“These are animals that probably weighed 40 to 50 tons,” he said.
Allain said scientists at the site near the city of Cognac have found more than 7,500 fossils of more than 40 different species since 2010, making it one of the largest such finds in Europe.
