House Republicans have intensified their dissent against an impeachment inquiry of U.S. President Donald Trump, protesting that the House Intelligence Committee is questioning witnesses in hearings closed to the public and other lawmakers. The protest is part of Republicans’ strategy of attacking the process by which House Democrats probe allegations Trump sought foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election. VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson reports from Capitol Hill.
Torrential rain that caused flooding and mudslides in towns east of Tokyo left at least nine people dead and added fresh damage in areas still recovering from recent typhoons, officials said Saturday.
Rescue workers were looking for one person still missing in Chiba. Another person was unaccounted for in Fukushima, farther north, which is still reeling from damage caused by Typhoon Hagibis earlier this month.
The death toll included eight people in Chiba and one in Fukushima.
Chiba inundated
While rains and floodwater subsided, parts of Chiba were still inundated. About 4,700 homes were out of running water and some train services delayed or suspended.
In the Midori district in Chiba, mudslides crushed three houses, killing three people who were buried underneath them. Another mudslide hit a house in nearby Ichihara city, killing a woman. In Narata and Chonan towns, three drivers drowned when their vehicles were submerged.
“There was enormous noise and impact, ‘boom’ like an earthquake, so I went outside. Then look what happened. I was terrified,” said a resident who lived near the crushed home in Midori. “Rain was even more intense than the typhoons.”
A street is flooded by heavy rain, Oct. 25, 2019, in Narita, east of Tokyo.
In Fukushima, a woman was found dead in a park in Soma city after a report that a car was washed away. A passenger is still missing.
Rain also washed out Friday’s second round of the PGA Tour’s first tournament held in Japan, the Zozo Championship in Inzai city.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held an emergency task force meeting Saturday morning and called for “the utmost effort in rescue and relief operations.” He also urged quick repairs of electricity, water and other essential services to help restore the lives of the disaster-hit residents.
Month’s worth of rain in half a day
The Prime Minister’s Office said the average rainfall for the entire month had fallen in just half a day Friday.
The downpour came from a low-pressure system above Japan’s main island of Honshu that moved northward later Friday. Power was restored Saturday at most of the 6,000 Chiba households that had lost electricity.
Two weeks ago, Typhoon Hagibis caused widespread flooding and left more than 80 people dead or presumed dead across Japan.
Yoshiki Takeuchi, an office worker who lives in a riverside house in Chiba’s Sodegaura city, said he had just finished temporary repairs to his roof after tiles were blown off by the September typhoon when Friday’s rains hit hard.
“I wasn’t ready for another disaster like this. I’ve had enough of this, and I need a break,” he told Kyodo News.
The Trump administration is banning U.S. flights to all Cuban cities except Havana in the latest move to roll back the Obama-era easing of relations, officials said Friday.
Supporters of the ban said it would starve the Havana government of cash and limit its ability to repress Cubans and support Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom the U.S. wants to overthrow.
Opponents said prohibiting flights would simply make it harder for Cuban-Americans to visit their families outside the capital, without making a significant impact on the Cuban government.
The State Department said JetBlue flights to Santa Clara in central Cuba and the eastern cities of Holguin, Camaguey would be banned starting in December. American Airlines flights to Camaguey, Holguin and Santa Clara, the beach resort of Varadero and the eastern city of Santiago are also being banned.
Flights to Havana, which account for the great majority of U.S. flights to Cuba, will remain legal.
“This action will prevent the Castro regime from profiting from U.S. air travel and using the revenues to repress the Cuban people,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Twitter. Raul Castro stepped down as president last year but remains head of the Communist Party, the country’s highest authority.
Another stated reason for the move is to prevent tourism to Cuba, which is barred by U.S. law. But it is not clear how many people take the banned flights for tourism purposes. Many are used by Cuban-Americans visiting relatives in cities far from Havana by road.
“Eager to punish Cuba’s unbreakable defiance, imperialism is going after regular flights to various Cuban cities. It doesn’t matter that they’re affecting family relations, or the modest pocketbooks of most Cubans in both countries,” Carlos F. de Cossio, head of Cuba’s department of U.S. affairs, said on Twitter. “Our response isn’t changing.”
Charter flights to destinations outside Havana are apparently not affected by the ban, but those flights tend to be more expensive and far less convenient. The other remaining legal option is a flight to Havana and then a road trip that could last as much as eight to more than 12 hours over rutted, unsafe roads, in the case of Cuba’s eastern cities.
FILE – American Airlines planes arrive at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, July 17, 2019.
JetBlue and American issued brief statements saying they would comply with the decision.
The announcement coincided with an event in Miami calling for regime change in Cuba and featuring U.S. officials, Organization of Americans States President Luis Almagro, and a variety of Cuban-Americans and Cuban dissidents.
“This is a step forward,” said Cuba-born barber Ernesto Regues, who said he left the island in 2012 and still has family in Havana. “ow they need to stop the flights to Havana.”
Carrie Filipetti, deputy assistant secretary for Cuba and Venezuela in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, said Havana would serve as the gateway for Cuban-Americans wanting to see their relatives.
“We want to make sure that Cuban-Americans do have a route to their families. You need to enter. Havana is currently carved out for this,” she said.
She warned, however, that “we will continue to increase sanctions” and said other countries should do the same.
“It is a long path with many steps along the way,” she said to a standing ovation.
Lourdes Diaz, a retired Cuban-American who arrived in the U.S. one year after Castro’s Revolution, said she disagrees with the current sanctions, feeling they help Cuba’s communist government more than hurt it.
“The only thing that suffers is the people,” Diaz said.
FILE – Tourists ride inside a vintage car as they pass by the Norwegian Sky cruise ship, operated by Norwegian Cruise Lines in Havana, Cuba, May 7, 2019.
The Trump administration has been regularly tightening the six-decade-old embargo on Cuba in recent months with the stated purpose of cutting off income to the Cuban government and forcing it to cut ties to Venezuela and grant more human rights to Cuban citizens. Washington has barred U.S. cruise ships visiting Cuba, sanctioned oil tankers moving petroleum from Venezuela to Cuba and permitted lawsuits against foreign companies profiting from their use of properties confiscated from Americans or from Cubans who later obtained American citizenship.
The measures have contributed to the Cuban government’s chronic shortages of hard currency and were blamed for several weeks of fuel shortages on the island, but so far there is no indication that the Trump policy is having its desired effect. Cuba’s security services continue to detain and harass dissenters and human rights groups say freedom of expression, assembly and other rights remain highly curtailed.
The Cuban and Venezuelan government remain tightly aligned and both have declared their intent to become even closer allies in the face of the Trump measures.
The Pentagon awarded Microsoft a $10 billion cloud computing contract , snubbing early front-runner Amazon, whose competitive bid drew criticism from President Donald Trump and its business rivals.
Bidding for the huge project, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, pitted leading tech titans Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and IBM against one another.
The giant contract has attracted more attention than most, sparked by speculation early in the process that Amazon would be the sole winner of the deal. Tech giants Oracle and IBM pushed back with their own bids and also formally protested the bidding process last year.
Oracle later challenged the process in federal court, but lost .
Trump waded into the fray in July, saying that the administration would “take a very long look” at the process, saying he had heard complaints. Trump has frequently expressed his ire for Amazon and founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post. At the time, he said other companies told him that the contract “wasn’t competitively bid.”
FILE – U.S. Secretary for Defense Mark Esper waits for the start of a meeting of NATO defense ministers at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, Oct. 24, 2019.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper recused himself from the controversial bidding process earlier this week, citing a conflict of interest because his son works for one of the companies that originally bid.
The JEDI system will store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the U.S. military to use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities.
A cloud strategy document unveiled by the Defense Department last year called for replacing the military’s “disjointed and stove-piped information systems” with a commercial cloud service “that will empower the warfighter with data and is critical to maintaining our military’s technological advantage.”
The Pentagon emphasized in an announcement that the process was fair and followed procurement guidelines. It noted that over the past two years, it has awarded more than $11 billion in 10 separate cloud-computing contracts, and said the JEDI award “continues our strategy of a multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment.”
The latter statement appeared designed to address previous criticism about awarding such a large deal to one company.
The deal is a major win for Microsoft’s cloud business Azure, which has long been playing catch-up to Amazon’s market leading Amazon Web Services. Microsoft said it was preparing a statement.
Amazon said Friday it was surprised by the decision.
“AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly lead to a different conclusion,” Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said in a statement. “We remain deeply committed to continuing to innovate for the new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure.”
According to a July report from the research firm Gartner, Amazon holds almost 48% of the market for public cloud computing, followed by Microsoft in second place with close to 16%.
Over the last year, Microsoft has positioned itself as a friend to the U.S. military. President Brad Smith wrote last fall that Microsoft has long supplied technology to the military and would continue to do so, despite pushback from employees.
Oracle and IBM were eliminated earlier in the process, leaving Microsoft and Amazon to battle it out at the end.
Google decided last year not to compete for the contract, saying it would conflict with its AI ethics principles. Google employees have been especially vocal in protesting the company’s involvement with government contracts.
“It’s a paradigm changer for Microsoft to win JEDI,” said Dan Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities. “And it’s a huge black eye for Amazon and Bezos.”
Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other tech giants have faced criticism from their own employees about doing business with the government, especially on military and immigration related projects.
North Korea has proposed that Seoul discuss the removal of its facilities from the North’s resort of Mount Kumgang, a key symbol of cooperation that Pyongyang recently criticized as “shabby” and “capitalist,” the South’s officials said on Friday.
In the latest sign of the neighbors’ cooling ties, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has urged that the South’s “backward” and “hotchpotch” facilities at the infrequently used resort be taken down and rebuilt, the North’s KCNA news agency has said.
On Friday, North Korea sent notices to the South’s Unification Ministry, which handles issues between the two sides, and Hyundai Group, whose affiliate Hyundai Asan Corp built resort facilities, asking for the demolition and seeking discussion through the exchange of documents, the ministry said.
“The government will prepare a creative solution to the Mt. Kumgang tourism project” by protecting the property rights of South Korean people while considering the international situation, inter-Korean agreements and domestic consensus, Unification Ministry spokesman Lee Sang-min said in a briefing.
Any withdrawal of South Korean relics from the scenic resort would be another setback for President Moon Jae-in’s campaign to end confrontation between the old foes, including efforts to resume stalled business initiatives.
“The North asking the South to discuss the issue ‘in writing’ means they don’t even want to talk about other things,” said Cheong Seong-chang, a senior fellow at South Korea’s Sejong Institute.
Mt. Kumgang is on North Korea’s eastern coast, just beyond the demilitarized zone separating the two countries. It was one of two major inter-Korean economic projects, along with the Kaesong industrial zone, and an important token of rapprochement during decades of hostilities following the 1950-53 Korean War.
Kim, on a visit to a nearby province, hailed a new tourist resort being built there as a striking contrast to Mt. Kumgang’s “architecture of capitalist businesses targeting profit-making from roughly built buildings,” KCNA said.
However, the South’s Unification Minister Kim Yeon-chul said he did not see the North’s proposal as a bid to exclude the South, because Kim Jong Un had said he would welcome South Koreans if it was properly rebuilt, the Yonhap news agency said.
Tourism has become increasingly key to Kim’s policy of “self-reliant” economic growth, as it is not directly subject to U.N. sanctions aimed at curbing the North’s nuclear programs, though they ban the transfer of bulk cash to Pyongyang.
There have been no South Korean tours to Mt. Kumgang since 2008, although there have been infrequent events such as the reunions of families from both sides separated by the war.
Kim has called for Mt. Kumgang to be refurbished in “our own style” alongside other tourist zones, such as the Wonsan-Kalma coastal area and the Masikryong ski resort.
The Wonsan beach resort, one of Kim’s pet projects, is seen nearing completion by early 2020 after “remarkable construction progress” since April, 38 North, a U.S.-based project that studies North Korea, said in a report, citing satellite imagery.
At least two demonstrators were killed in renewed anti-government rallies in the Iraqi capital on Friday, officials said, as security forces unleashed tear gas to push back thousands from Baghdad’s high-security Green Zone.
The protests were the second phase of a week-long movement in early October demanding an end to widespread corruption, unemployment and an overhaul of the political system.
Activists called Iraqis to go out on the streets again on Friday, which marks a year since Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi came to power. It is also a deadline set by the country’s top Shiite authority for him to enact desired reforms.
But the rallies began early, with hundreds gathering in the capital’s iconic Tahrir (Liberation) Square on Thursday evening.
On Friday, many crossed the bridge to mass near the Green Zone, which hosts government offices and foreign embassies, but security forces used a volley of tear gas to push them back.
“Two demonstrators died, with preliminary information indicating they were hit in the head or face by tear gas canisters,” said Ali Bayati, a member of the Iraqi Human Rights Commission.
He said nearly 100 more people were wounded.
There were no reports of live fire being used to disperse protesters.
‘We want dignity!’
“We’re not hungry — we want dignity!” a protester shouted in Baghdad on Friday morning, while another lashed out at “the so-called representatives of the people who have monopolised all the resources”.
One in five people lives in poverty in Iraq and youth unemployment sits around 25 percent, according to the World Bank.
The rates are staggering for OPEC’s second-biggest oil producer, which Transparency International ranks as the 12th most corrupt state in the world.
“I want my share of the oil!” another protester told AFP.
Rallies were also rocking the southern cities of Diwaniyah, Najaf and Nasiriyah, where demonstrators said they would remain in the streets “until the regime falls”.
Iraq’s highest Shiite authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has backed reforms, urged protesters Friday during his weekly sermon to use “restraint” to stop the demos descending into “chaos”.
But the real test will be the afternoon, when many are expecting supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr — an influential cleric who controls the largest parliamentary bloc — to hit the streets.
His supporters have breached the Green Zone in previous years. This week, he called on his supporters to protest and even instructed members of his own paramilitary force to be on “high alert.”
They could be seen in parts of Baghdad on Friday in a clear show of force.
PM snipes at Sadr
The movement is unprecedented in recent Iraqi history both because of its spontaneity and independence, and because of the brutal violence with which a torrent of protests on October 1-6 was met.
At least 157 people were killed, according to a government probe published on Tuesday, which acknowledged that “excessive force” was used.
A vast majority of them were protesters in Baghdad, with 70 percent shot in the head or chest.
In response, Abdel Mahdi issued a laundry list of measures meant to ease public anger, including hiring drives and higher pensions for the families of protesters who died.
The beleaguered premier defended his reform agenda in a scheduled televised appearance early Friday, telling watchers it was their “right” to demonstrate as long as they did not “disturb public life”.
But he also said political figures demanding “reform” had themselves failed to enact it, in an apparent reference to Sadr’s “Alliance towards Reform” bloc.
Some have backed the government, including the powerful Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary force whose political branch is the second-largest parliamentary bloc.
And Iraq’s mostly-Kurdish north and Sunni west have stayed out of the protests.
Iraq has been ravaged by decades of conflict that finally calmed in 2017 with a declared victory over the Islamic State group.
Thus began a period of relative calm, with security forces lifting checkpoints and concrete blast walls and traffic choking city streets at hours once thought too dangerous.
Restrictions had even softened around the Green Zone but were reinstated as the October demonstrations picked up in Tahrir, which lies just across the Tigris River.
Authorities also imposed an internet blackout, which has been mostly lifted although social media remains blocked.
From making so-called side deals with Ukraine to pulling U.S. forces from northeastern Syria, U.S. President Donald Trump has gone his own way when it comes to conducting U.S. foreign policy. But the Syria decision has sparked widespread opposition in Washington and in the case of Ukraine, critics say Trump sidestepped career U.S. diplomats to further his own interests against a potential election rival.
Despite criticism, U.S. President Donald Trump is standing by his decision to move U.S. troops from the Syrian-Turkish border, where they fought alongside longtime Kurdish allies.
“They stayed for almost 10 years. Let someone else fight over this long, bloodstained sand,” Trump said.
This, as the top U.S. official to Syria appeared to distance himself from Trump’s decision.
“Were you consulted about the withdrawal of troops as was recently done?” Senator Bob Menendez, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked James Jeffrey, the U.S. Special Representative for Syria.
Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, other diplomats testified about the Trump administration’s delay providing approved U.S military assistance to Ukraine.
A written statement by one described how the White House bypassed normal diplomatic channels to press Ukraine to investigate Democrats and the Bidens in return for military aid.
“The idea that vital military assistance would be withheld for such a patently political reason, for the reason of serving the president’s re-election campaign is a phenomenal breach of the president’s duty to defend our national security,” said Democrat Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Trump’s actions on Ukraine could threaten his presidency as the impeachment inquiry continues.
“We have agencies, we have tasked areas along government, whose job it is to investigate those. And if President Trump wanted the Bidens investigated for their activities there, it should have been done through the diplomatic channels,” said Shannon Bow O’Brien of the University of Texas at Austin.
Those normal diplomatic channels have set the United States apart from countries whose policies are set by autocratic leaders, says terrorism expert Mike Newton.
“The checks and balances, where agencies push back against each other, and really experienced, smart policy makers wrestle with choices and consequences and diplomatic fallout and maybe military best practices,” Newton said.
When this process is bypassed, experts say, U.S. credibility around the world is damaged.
“If there are doubts about the President’s decisions which there are in the State Department and the Pentagon, and the intelligence community as well as in the Congress, there’s real questions about cohesiveness of U.S. foreign policy and whether we have a real strategy,” said Mark Simakovsky of the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank.
Donald Trump was elected on promises to break with traditional U.S. foreign policy, and his supporters show no sign of abandoning him.
But the impeachment inquiry and outcry over his Syria policy show there are limits to his approach.
China called on Britain on Friday to seek “severe punishment” for those involved in the deaths of 39 people, believed to be Chinese nationals, found in a truck container near London, while British police quizzed the driver on suspicion of murder.
Post-mortem examinations of 11 of the deceased began as police and forensic experts sought to identify the dead, how they had died and who was involved in the suspected human trafficking ring.
Detectives were continuing to quiz the 25-year-old truck driver from Northern Ireland who was arrested after the grim discovery of the bodies in the back of his refrigerated truck on an industrial estate near London in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
He has not been formally identified but a source familiar with the investigation named him as Mo Robinson from the Portadown area of the British province. Detectives will decide later whether to charge him with an offense, release him or ask a court for more time to quiz him.
Late on Thursday, British authorities moved 11 of the victims – 31 men and eight women – to a hospital mortuary from a secure location at docks near to the industrial estate in Grays about 20 miles (30 km) east of London where the bodies were found.
Police have said the process of identifying those who died would take some time while autopsies were carried out to determine how exactly they died.
“This is the largest investigation of its kind Essex Police has ever had to conduct and it is likely to take some considerable time to come to a conclusion,” Essex Chief Constable Ben-Julian Harrington said.
His force has said their priority was ensuring respect and compassion for the victims.
The Chinese Embassy in London said it had sent a team to Essex, and Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said police had not yet been able to verify the nationalities of the deceased.
“We hope that the British side can as soon as possible confirm and verify the identities of the victims, ascertain what happened and severely punish criminals involved in the case,” she told a daily news briefing.
For years, illegal immigrants have attempted to reach Britain stowed away in trucks, often from the European mainland.
In 2000, 58 Chinese were found dead in a tomato truck at the port of Dover.
China’s Global Times, which is published by the ruling Communist Party’s official People’s Daily, said in a Friday editorial that Britain should bear some responsibility for the deaths.
“It is clear that Britain and relevant European countries have not fulfilled their responsibility to protect these people from such a death,” the widely read tabloid said.
It added that Britain appeared not to have learned its lesson from the Dover incident two decades ago.
“Could the British and European people ask themselves why they have not been able to avoid a similar tragedy … Did they take all the serious remedial action that they could have?” it said.
Truck’s movements
The focus of the police investigation is on the movement of the trailer prior to its arrival at Purfleet docks near Grays little more than an hour before the bodies were found and who was behind the suspected human trafficking.
Irish company Global Trailer Rentals said it owned the trailer and had rented it out on Oct. 15. The firm said it was unaware of what it was to be used for.
The refrigeration unit had traveled to Britain from Zeebrugge in Belgium and the town’s chairman, Dirk de Fauw, said he believed the victims died in the trailer before it arrived there.
The Times newspaper reported that GPS data showed the container had arrived at the Belgian port at 2.49 p.m. local time on Tuesday before later making the 10-hour trip to Britain.
Police said the cab unit of the truck was driven over from Dublin on Sunday, entering Britain in North Wales. It picked up the trailer in Purfleet shortly after midnight on Wednesday.
The National Crime Agency, which targets serious and organized crime, said it was helping the investigation and working urgently to identify any gangs involved.
The head of the Road Haulage Association said traffickers were “upping their game” and closer cooperation with European nations was needed, although that may be complicated by Britain’s potential exit from the European Union.
Botswana’s incumbent president has been re-elected as the leader of one of Africa’s most stable countries.
Mokgweetsi Masisi has won another five-year term, the chief justice announced Friday.
The Botswana Democratic Party, which has ruled the diamond-rich southern African nation since gaining independence from Britain in 1966, faced a strong challenge from the opposition Umbrella for Democratic Change coalition, led by Duma Boko.
The opposition received a boost from ex-President Ian Khama, who is feuding with the president.
Masisi was Khama’s hand-picked successor when the latter stepped down last year, but the two split over Masisi’s policies, including a decision to scrap a ban on elephant hunting imposed by Khama.
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.
