Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg says Facebook’s policy to not filter out phony political ads is “a mistake” and he says breaking up big tech companies should be “on the table.”
The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, made the comments to reporters after a campaign stop in New Hampshire. Days before, his campaign confirmed hiring staff recommended by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.
Zuckerberg has come under criticism from other Democratic candidates, especially Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for Facebook’s hands-off policy regarding campaign ads, and they’ve called for the company’s breakup.
Buttigieg says that should be considered but shouldn’t “be declared in advance by a politician.”
Fewer reports of vaping illnesses are coming in, but U.S. health officials say they are not sure what to make of it.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 125 additional cases were reported in the last week, bringing the total to 1,604 in this year’s outbreak. That includes 34 deaths, one more than last week.
The outbreak is still happening, but the count of new cases has dropped for three straight weeks. A CDC spokeswoman said reporting delays could be one explanation.
The outbreak appears to have started in March. No single ingredient, electronic cigarette or vaping device has been linked to all the illnesses. Most who got sick said they vaped products containing THC, the high-inducing ingredient in marijuana.
Former President Jimmy Carter is out of the hospital where he was treated after fracturing his pelvis in a recent fall.
The Carter Center said in a statement Thursday that the former president had been released from a hospital and was recovering at his home in Plains, Georgia.
The 95-year-old Carter is the oldest living former president in U.S. history.
Kurdish people in northeastern Syria are mourning the loss of lives and territory as they try to regroup after recent battles and ponder an uncertain future. VOA’s Heather Murdock has this report from Qameshli and Tal Tamer in Syria
Cuba’s state airline Cubana says it is canceling routes to seven international destinations because of Trump administration sanctions on companies that lease planes to the national carrier.
The Trump administration said last Friday that it was revoking licenses of companies that lease aircraft to Cuban state-owned airlines because the airlines use the planes to take tourists to Cuba. U.S. regulations prohibit Americans from engaging in tourism in Cuba. Travel with special purposes, like visiting religious institutions or supporting private businesses and civil society, is allowed.
Cuban state media reported Thursday that companies in third countries that rented planes to Cubana had canceled contracts, forcing the cancellation of routes to the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Venezuela, Haiti, Martinique and Guadeloupe. Domestic routes will also be affected. Cubana said passengers will receive refunds.
The House approved legislation Wednesday to better protect the country’s elections from foreign interference, the third major bill the Democratic-controlled chamber has passed this year addressing problems that arose in the 2016 presidential election.
The 227-181 vote came as lawmakers continued to pursue an impeachment inquiry centered on allegations that President Donald Trump improperly solicited election help from Ukraine ahead of the 2020 vote. It also came months after special counsel Robert Mueller finished his report on 2016 election interference, finding numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia but not enough evidence to establish a conspiracy between the two. Democrats want to prevent such actions in the future and ensure that campaigns know they are illegal.
The Stopping Harmful Interference in Elections for a Lasting Democracy Act, or SHIELD Act, would require that candidates and political committees notify the FBI and other authorities if a foreign power offers campaign help. It also would tighten restrictions on campaign spending by foreign nationals and require more transparency in political ads on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Ban on exchanges with foreigners
And it would explicitly prohibit campaigns from exchanging campaign-related information with foreign governments and their agents. The latter provision was aimed at reports that officials in Trump’s 2016 campaign shared polling data with a person associated with Russian intelligence.
Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who was the bill’s chief sponsor, said it would close loopholes that allow dishonest behavior, increase disclosure and transparency requirements, and ensure that anyone who engages with foreign actors to influence the outcome of an election will be held accountable by law.
“Most Americans know that foreign governments have no business interfering in our elections,” said Lofgren, who chairs the House Administration Committee. “We should all be able to agree that we need to protect our democracy — and with a sense of urgency. This is not a partisan opinion. Nothing less than our national security is at stake.”
FILE – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky voices opposition to a House-passed election reform bill as Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Ill., listens at left, March 6, 2019.
But Illinois Representative Rodney Davis, the top Republican on the Administration panel, called the bill a thinly disguised bid by Democrats to prop up impeachment. “That’s why we’re here today: not to make real, legislative progress on preventing foreign interference in our elections, but to push partisan politics for the Democratic agenda,” he said.
The White House threatened to veto the bill if it reached the president’s desk, saying it was redundant, overly broad and unenforceable. The bill’s “expansive definitions seem designed to instill a persistent fear among Americans engaged in political activity that any interactions they may have with a foreign national could put them in legal jeopardy,” the White House said.
Davis called the bill’s language on social media overly broad and said Facebook and other private companies were already taking significant steps to help prevent election interference on their platforms. As written, the Democratic bill poses a threat to the First Amendment, he said, noting that it is opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups.
‘Wrong balance’
The ACLU said in a statement that the SHIELD Act “strikes the wrong balance, sweeping too broadly and encompassing more speech than necessary to achieve its legitimate goals” of preventing foreign interference in U.S. elections.
The bill came as a bipartisan Senate committee said Russia’s large-scale effort to interfere in the 2016 election was a “vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood.”
In a report earlier this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee described Kremlin-backed social media activities as part of a “broader, sophisticated and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society.”
Senators urged Trump to warn the public about efforts by Russia and other countries to interfere in U.S. elections — a subject he has largely avoided — and to take steps to thwart attempts by hostile nations to use social media to meddle in the 2020 presidential contest.
The House approved a separate bill in June that would require paper ballots in federal elections and authorize $775 million in grants over the next two years to help states secure their voting systems.
Lawmakers also approved a bill in March aimed at reducing the role of big money in politics, ensuring fair elections and strengthening ethics standards. The measure would make it easier for people to register and vote, tighten election security and require presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns.
Republicans called the bill a power grab that amounts to a federal takeover of elections and could cost billions of dollars. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said the proposal was dead on arrival in the Senate. McConnell has declined to bring up a stand-alone bill on election security, though he supported an effort to send $250 million in additional election security funds to states to shore up their systems ahead of 2020.
House Democrats are conducting an impeachment inquiry into Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, including his request on a July phone call for the country to open an investigation into potential 2020 Democratic rival Joe Biden and his family. Trump said he did nothing wrong and called the conversation “perfect.”
Bolivian President Evo Morales said Wednesday his opponents are trying to stage a coup against him as protests grow over a disputed election he claims he won outright, though a nearly finished vote count suggests it might head to a second round.
The leftist leader needs a 10 percentage-point margin over his closest rival to avoid a December runoff in which he could risk being defeated by a united opposition in his bid for a fourth consecutive term in office.
The vote count Wednesday had him with a 9.48 percentage point lead with 3.22% of the votes from Sunday’s election left to count. He led former President Carlos Mesa 46.49% to 37.01%.
Mesa has warned of fraud and international vote monitors have expressed concern at an earlier unexplained daylong gap in reporting results before a sudden spurt in Morales’ vote percentage. Opposition backers have staged rowdy protests since the vote.
Authorities said Wednesday that the count had been stalled again because attacks on vote-count centers in three regions had prevented final tabulation of results.
Bolivia’s President Evo Morales speaks during a press conference at the presidential palace in La Paz, Bolivia, Oct. 23, 2019. International election monitors expressed concern over Bolivia’s presidential election process Tuesday.
Morales claims conspiracy
Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president and the region’s longest-ruling leader, repeated his claim that he won outright and said his opponents were conspiring to oust him.
“I want to denounce to the people and the world that a coup d’etat is underway,” Morales said at a news conference at which he did not take any questions. “The right wing has prepared it with international support.”
Morales did not specify where the alleged international support for the coup is coming from, but he regularly rails against U.S. imperialism in Latin America.
He cited the burning by protesters of electoral offices in two cities where votes are being tallied as proof of the coup. Protesters also burned ballots in a third city.
“We are waiting for a report from the Electoral Tribunal, although the TREP (a quick count) has already said that we won,” the president said.
The tribunal’s quick count webpage, whose results are not binding, showed Morales with a 10.1 percentage point lead over Mesa, with about 96% of polling place counts verified Wednesday.
Bolivia’s opposition presidential candidate Carlos Mesa speaks during a press conference in La Paz, Bolivia, Oct. 23, 2019.
‘Gigantic fraud going on’
“If there is anyone who breaks the constitutional order it is Evo Morales,” Mesa said later in the day. “It’s clear that there’s a gigantic fraud going on.”
Opposition leaders have called on Bolivians to defend “the citizen vote and democracy” in the streets against suspicions of fraud by Morales’ party, while backers of the president marched in the capital Wednesday to show their support for the leader.
Suspicions of electoral fraud rose when officials abruptly stopped releasing results from the quick count of votes hours after the polls closed Sunday with Morales topping the eight other candidates, but also falling several percentage points short of the percentage needed to avoid the first runoff in his nearly 14 years in power.
Yet, the president claimed an outright victory late Sunday, telling supporters that the votes still to be counted — largely from rural areas where he is most popular — would be enough to give him an outright victory.
Twenty-four hours later, the body suddenly released an updated figure, with 95% of votes counted, showing Morales just 0.7 percentage point short of the 10-percentage point advantage needed to avoid a runoff.
Vote monitors concerned
That set off an uproar among the opposition and expressions of concern by international monitors.
The observer mission of the Organization of American States asked for explanations and the European Union and the U.N. expressed concern about the electoral process and called for calm. The United States and Brazil, among others, also expressed concerns.
Michael G. Kozak, acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, warned Wednesday that Bolivian authorities will be held accountable if the process isn’t fair.
“I think you will see pretty strong response from the whole hemisphere, not just the U.S.,” Kozak said during a House hearing.
Support from Maduro
In Caracas, Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolas Maduro, voiced support for his ally Morales.
“It is a coup d’etat foretold, sung and, one can say, defeated,” he said.
The crisis was aggravated by the resignation of the vice president electoral council, Antonio Costas, who said he disagreed with the decision to interrupt transmission of the vote count.
On Tuesday, the Andean nation saw a second night of violent protests in several cities. Then Wednesday, a strike that mostly affected transportation erupted in Santa Cruz, the most populous eastern region and an opposition stronghold, while Morales supporters clashed with his foes in one of the city’s slums.
Protesters in other regions announced that they would join to demand respect for the vote.
Nearly 1,000 people have been freed in the past month from Islamic schools in northern Nigeria where they reportedly experienced abuse.
In one such case, police sources said hundreds of men and boys had been freed from a school in Katsina, many of whom had been chained to walls, beaten and sexually abused.
The four raided schools, all in predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria, have much in common. All had managers who portrayed themselves as Islamic clerics teaching students how to be good Muslims.
All the facilities also operated as reform centers to discipline misbehaving children. And all were in poor communities, drawing little attention — until now.
Activists have sought regulation of private Islamic schools for years, but strong traditions have stood in the way.
A 15 year-old-boy, one of hundreds of men and boys rescued by police from an institution purporting to be an Islamic school, reveals scars on his back at a transit camp set up to take care of the released captives in Kaduna, Nigeria, Sept. 28, 2019.
One such tradition involves a concept among Nigerian Muslims called almajiri.
“Almajiris, according to Islam, means those who migrated to somewhere in search of Islamic knowledge,” said cultural historian Bukar Chabbal. “That is the original conception — one under a strict teacher who teaches them.”
Almajiris are usually boys. A parent will send a son to live with an Islamic scholar, known as a mallam, for many years in the hope that the child will receive a sound education in Islamic doctrine.
There are an estimated 10 million almajiris in Nigeria, often seen on the streets begging for food. According to their Islamic teachers, begging helps the students learn humility.
But Chabbal and others say parents are abusing the system, giving their children away to Islamic clerics because they can’t afford to raise them themselves.
Discipline
Sending unruly children to Islamic schools to be disciplined is another traditional practice.
Children rescued from captivity by police are fed by officials at the Hajj transit camp in Kaduna, Nigeria, Sept. 28, 2019.
Aliyu Mohammed Tonga, an activist for almajiri children, said that “as I can recall, when we were young, what our parents used to tell us is that someone has been taken to so-and-so person and has been corrected.”
Muslim groups in Nigeria are condemning the raided schools, saying the owners are not real clerics and the schools are not true almajiri schools.
Activists like Aliyu say regulation is necessary, to separate the good from the bad.
“Anybody can come in, even the criminal can come in in disguise and say, ‘I’m a mallam,’ and he can do what he can do, and that is what happened,” Aliyu said.
President Muhammadu Buhari has directed Nigerian police to find abusive so-called Islamic schools and disband them.
Some information for this report came from Reuters.
Once again, Syrian President Bashar Assad has snapped up a prize from world powers that have been maneuvering in his country’s multi-front wars. Without firing a shot, his forces are returning to towns and villages in northeastern Syria where they haven’t set foot for years.
Assad was handed one victory first by U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from northeastern Syria, analysts said. Then he got another from a deal struck between Turkey and Russia, Damascus’ ally.
Abandoned by U.S. forces and staring down the barrel of a Turkish invasion, Kurdish fighters had no option but to turn to Assad’s government and to Russia for protection from their No. 1 enemy.
For once, the interests of Damascus, Moscow and Ankara came into alignment. Turkey decided it was better having Assad’s forces along the border, being helped by Russia, than to have the frontier populated by Kurdish-led fighters, whom it considers to be terrorists.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses a conference of parliament speakers in Istanbul, Oct. 11, 2019.
On Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin that allows Syrian troops to move back into a large part of the territory and ensure Kurdish fighters stay out.
The Kurds once hoped an alliance with Washington would strengthen their ambitions for autonomy, but now they are left hoping they can extract concessions from Moscow and Damascus to keep at least some aspects of their self-rule.
Turkey, which had backed rebels trying to oust Assad, has now implicitly given the Syrian leader “de facto recognition,” said Lina Khatib, head of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House.
“Assad and Russia see this recognition as the beginning of international community normalization with the Assad regime, and as such an indication of their victory in the war,” she said.
It’s a method that Assad has used successfully before, positioning himself as the lesser of two evils in the eyes of those who might want him gone. Throughout Syria’s civil war, he has presented the conflict as a choice between him and jihadis. Fear of the extremists watered down enthusiasm in Washington and other Western governments for fully backing the rebels.
“Assad has been benefiting from two narratives: shaping the Syrian uprising as a regional war and reminding that there is no viable alternative to his rule,” said Joe Macaron, a resident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington D.C.
Trump’s “America First” policy, with its sometimes chaotic and impulsive shifts, has been a godsend for Assad.
President Donald Trump speaks at the 9th annual Shale Insight Conference at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Oct. 23, 2019, in Pittsburgh.
Last year, Trump called Assad an “animal” following a suspected chemical weapons attack near Damascus, carrying out limited airstrikes as punishment.
But the U.S. president has repeatedly said he’s not interested in removing Assad from power or keeping American troops involved in “endless wars” in the region’s “blood-soaked sands.” He has welcomed having Russia and Assad’s government fill the void.
Backing from Russia and Iran also has enabled Assad to simply outlast his opponents. With the help of Russian airstrikes since 2015, the Syrian military has recaptured town after town from the rebels. Abandoned and exhausted, the insurgents have repeatedly submitted to deals with Assad that allowed them to leave their besieged enclaves with safe passage to the north.
But the Russian-Turkish agreement is not all good news for Assad.
It allows Turkey to keep control over a significant chunk of northeastern Syria, a belt of land 120 kilometers (75 miles) wide and 30 kilometers (19 miles) deep that it captured in its invasion. Turkey already holds a larger piece of the border in the northwest, captured in previous incursions.
Syrian forces will move into the rest of the border zone. But in a strip immediately at the border, Russian and Turkish forces will hold joint patrols, with only Syrian “border guards” in place, suggesting a presence in limited numbers.
FILE – Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow, Russia, Oct. 16, 2019.
Elsewhere, a large wedge of eastern Syria remains in the hands of the Kurdish-led fighters. That includes the bulk of Syria’s oil fields, depriving Damascus of control over a crucial resource and giving the Kurds a major bargaining chip. Trump has said some U.S. troops will remain there to help Kurds “secure” the oil fields.
“Given where the regime was a few months ago, the regime is expanding its control,” Macaron said, but it has to live with its opponents’ presence on its soil and with Russia preventing any confrontation with them.
Politically, Tuesday’s images of the leaders of Turkey and Russia poring over maps and drawing up the future of northern Syria illustrated just how irrelevant Damascus is when it comes to negotiations.
Perhaps intentionally, Assad for the first time visited areas captured from rebels in Idlib province, the last enclave they held in Syria. State TV showed Assad greeting military commanders and watching troops fire artillery. He talked of rallying “popular resistance” against Turkey “to expel the invader sooner or later.”
But the new agreement almost certainly made Syrian military action against Turkish forces impossible.
More likely, Assad will wait them out and maneuver for an opportunity to regain the rest of the land.
A political bargain that achieves that somewhere down the line is not completely far-fetched. Assad and Erdogan once had a close working relationship. In 2004, Assad became the first Syrian president to visit Ankara, helping overcome decades of animosity over territorial disputes, water resources and Damascus’ support at the time for Kurdish separatists in Turkey.
Erdogan then switched sides and backed the rebels in Syria’s civil war. In recent years, however, he has been more concerned with recruiting rebel factions to fight the Kurds. Last year, Ankara signaled it would consider working with Assad once again if he won free and fair elections.
Now Turkey is entrusting the border in part to Assad.
Other countries similarly have concluded they have no other choice.
Calls have increased from Arab countries to readmit Syria to the Arab League. The United Arab Emirates reopened an embassy in Damascus, the most significant Arab overture yet toward the Assad government, almost certainly coordinated with Saudi Arabia. Bahrain followed suit the next day,
The Sunni Muslim Gulf countries hope to curb their Shiite-led foe, Iran, which saw its influence expand rapidly in Syria’s war.
“Assad will use the developments in northeast Syria to continue to pursue his strategy of presenting himself as the winning de facto authority in Syria who the international community has no choice but to cooperate with against extremist groups,” Khatib said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is reversing course months after threatening six-figure fines against immigrants taking sanctuary at churches.
Seven women have been notified that ICE, using its discretion, is withdrawing its intent to pursue fines of $300,000 or more for their refusal to leave the country as ordered, according to the National Sanctuary Collective, a coalition of attorneys, organizers and other advocates for them. They count it as a victory.
“We knew that these exorbitant fines were illegal and were nothing more than a tool to scare our clients and retaliate against them for fighting back and standing up to this administration,” attorney Lizbeth Mateo, who represents a Mexican woman living at an Ohio church, said in a statement. Mateo said immigration officials should exercise the same discretion “to release sanctuary families.”
The immigrants have remained in the U.S. in violation of the law and still are subject to removal orders that ICE will enforce “using any and all available means,” agency spokesman Richard Rocha said in an email. He said ICE also could reassess the fines.
FILE – This photo shows the bedroom of Maria Chavalan-Sut of Guatemala, who sought sanctuary at a United Methodist church in Charlottesville, Va. She and other immigrants taking sanctuary had received letters threatening them with huge fines.
Immigrants have sought relief from deportation at houses of worship because immigration officials consider them “sensitive locations” and avoid enforcement action at such sites. Maria Chavalan-Sut, an indigenous woman from Guatemala seeking asylum, moved into a United Methodist church in Charlottesville, Virginia. Another woman has lived in sanctuary with her 11-year-old son in Austin, Texas, for more than two years.
Mateo’s client, Edith Espinal, has stayed at a Columbus church for the past two years. She was notified in June that she faced a fine of nearly $500,000.
In a statement, she said ICE’s reversal on the fines was “an example of what speaking out and organizing can accomplish.”
The agency said it issued nine notifications in June about its intent to pursue fines. It said Wednesday that eight of those had been withdrawn and one still was being pursued. It didn’t identify those cases or name the immigrants involved.
Top priority for Trump
The six-figure penalties were another reminder of how President Donald Trump has made cracking down immigration, legal and illegal, a top domestic priority.
Immigrants who are free on bond but ordered to leave the country are typically given a date to report to immigration authorities for removal. Others are ordered to check in with authorities, which, under former President Barack Obama-era policies, generally didn’t result in deportation unless the person was convicted of a serious crime in the United States.
Trump lifted those restrictions almost immediately, causing people to get deported when they reported to ICE offices as instructed and discouraging others from coming.
