A French naval base in Abu Dhabi will serve as the headquarters for a European-led mission to protect Gulf waters that will be operational soon, France’s defense minister said on Sunday.
France is the main proponent of a plan to build a European-led maritime force to ensure safe shipping in the Strait of Hormuz after tanker attacks earlier this year that Washington blamed on Iran.
Tehran has denied being behind the attacks on tankers and other vessels in major global shipping lanes off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in May and which increased tensions between the United States, Iran and Gulf Arab states.
“This morning we formalized that the command post will be based on Emirati territory,” Defense Minister Florence Parly told reporters at a French naval base in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE.
The command center will host around a dozen officials representing the countries involved, she said. In a speech to French military personnel, she said the next time she visited the base she hoped the mission would be operational and thanked the UAE for supporting it.
The UAE has tempered its reaction to the attacks and has called for de-escalation and dialogue with Iran.
On Saturday, Parly said the initiative could start early next year and around 10 European and non-European governments would join, pending parliamentary approval.
First announced in July, the plan is independent of a U.S-led maritime initiative which some European countries feared would make U.S.-Iranian tensions worse.
Parly said the two missions would coordinate in order to ensure safety of navigation in an already tense area.
“We hope … to contribute to a navigation that is as safe as possible in a zone which we know is disputed and where there has already been a certain number of serious incidents,” she said. She also condemned Iran’s latest violations of a 2015 nuclear deal.
On Saturday, Parly said Paris was sending Saudi Arabia defense equipment to confront low-altitude attacks after Riyadh requested help following a September assault on the kingdom’s oil facilities which Washington and Riyadh have also blamed on Iran. Tehran has denied involvement.
“We have not had an equivalent request from the UAE,” she said on Sunday.
Security forces opened fire on protesters in southern Iraq, killing at least five people and wounding dozens others, police and medical sources said, as weeks of unrest in Baghdad and some southern cities continue.
Protesters had gathered overnight on three bridges in the city, and security forces used live ammunition and tear gas canisters to disperse them, killing three, police and hospital sources said.
More than 50 others were wounded, mainly by live bullets and tear gas canisters, in clashes in the city, they added.
Two more people were killed and over 70 wounded on Sunday after security forces used live fire to disperse protesters near the country’s main Gulf port of Umm Qasr near Basra, police and medical sources said.
Hospital sources said the cause of death was live fire, adding that some of the wounded are in critical condition.
The protesters had gathered to demand security forces open roads around the port town blocked by government forces in an attempt to prevent protesters from reaching the port’s entrance.
On Friday, Iraqi security forces dispersed by force protesters who had been blocking the entrance to the port and reopened it, port officials said.
Umm Qasr is Iraq’s largest commodities port and it receives imports of grain, vegetable oils and sugar shipments that feed a country largely dependent on imported food.
At least 330 people have been killed since the start of mass unrest in Baghdad and southern Iraq in early October, the largest demonstrations since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Protesters are demanding the overthrow of a political class seen as corrupt and serving foreign powers while many Iraqis languish in poverty without jobs, healthcare or education.
The unrest has shattered the relative calm that followed the defeat of Islamic State in 2017.
Medical authorities evacuated infants and children from a hospital in central Nassiriya overnight after tear gas spread inside hospital courtyards, two hospital sources said.
Protests continued in Nassiriya on Sunday, with some government offices set on fire, sources said.
Elsewhere in southern Iraq, hundreds of protesters burned tyres and blocked some roads on Sunday in Basra, preventing government employees from reaching offices, police said.
Iraqi security forces also wounded at least 24 people in the Shi’ite holy city of Kerbala overnight after opening fire on demonstrators to prevent them from reaching the local government headquarters, medical and security sources said.
Twenty-two people have died from measles in Samoa.
All the deaths, except one, were of children younger than five years old, according to Reuters.
The South Pacific island has declared a state of emergency, with nearly 2,000 cases of measles reported.
The government has initiated a mass mandatory vaccination program.
Samoa said Saturday that 153 cases had been reported in the last 24 hours.
One mother who lost her two-year-old son to the disease told an Australian Broadcasting Company crew that her three oldest sons had been inoculated against the disease, but she was too poor to afford to have her two year old inoculated.
As climate change ramps up weather extremes, good forecasts are increasingly important. A new system makes weather predictions anywhere in the world with the same high resolution that previously was only available in wealthy countries. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
“What do you want government to do for your life?” That’s the question Peggy Huang asks prospective voters at a Starbucks in Yorba Linda, California. Huang is a Republican running against first-term U.S. Representative Katie Porter, who last year became the first Democrat ever elected in California’s conservative 45th district.
Since then, Porter has gained national recognition through her sharp questioning of CEOs and government officials during congressional hearings in Washington.
“She’s more national,” admits Huang, but says in California, “we know politics and in all things, politics is local.”
Republican Challenger Greg Raths meets with his Campaign Manager Blake Allen to plan door-to-door canvassing in California’s 45th District.
Greg Raths, a retired United States Marine Corps fighter pilot, is another Republican candidate running against Porter. He says Porter doesn’t “fit the mold” of the area. Raths, the mayor of the largest city in the district, Mission Viejo City, contends it’s a “very conservative” district where “all 10 cities are run by Republican mayors and councils.”
Reelection realities
For a freshman member of the House of Representatives, it can be a shock having to concentrate on reelection before the first year ends. Already six Republicans and one Democrat have filed election papers to run against her, but one of those Republicans has already dropped out because of lack of funding.
According to third-quarter reports from the Federal Election Commission, Porter leads the pack with $2,461,688 raised for her campaign, three times that of her closest competitor.
California Rep. Katie Porter is facing a number of challengers. According to third-quarter reports from the Federal Election Commission, Porter leads the pack with $2,461,688 raised for her campaign.
Impeachment vs conservative area
During her first year, Porter has proved to be a formidable force. In her first interview with VOA at the beginning of this year, she said she wanted to champion “issues of economic opportunity for working families, and for working parents, including thinking about how people can afford homes, build wealth, save for college, and save for retirement.”
As she arrived in Congress and was named to the House Financial Services Committee, she carved a niche for herself through tough, blunt questioning, often playing the role of a low- to middle-income American to highlight the witnesses’ inattention to regular citizens. This earned her kudos from the House Democratic leadership and an aspect of fame through regular appearances on cable TV news programs.
Porter connected to her constituents by regularly conducting town halls during the first half of the year, but has held them less frequently since then. She told VOA it is a challenge to find “venues that are large enough to accommodate everybody who would like to attend.”
WATCH: Rep. Porter Reflects on Successes, Failures of First Year
Rep. Porter Reflects on Successes, Failures of First Year video player.
In June, Porter became the first freshman House member from California to announce her support of an impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump. Her competitors accused her of sowing seeds of divisiveness with her Twitter announcement. They predict it will cost her the election.
Ted Denney owns Synergistic Research, a niche research and technology company that employs 30 and has annual sales of $10 million. He says if Porter wins the district again in 2020, he will move his audio business elsewhere, part because of her support of impeachment.
“I don’t want this wall of resistance against the president,” Denney says. “I support his policies. Is he a perfect guy? No, but I don’t care. He’s effective.”
In a videotaped message to constituents, Porter acknowledged that launching an impeachment inquiry would be divisive but said she believes it is necessary.
“I know deeply what this means for our democracy,” she said. “But when faced with a crisis of this magnitude, I cannot with a clean conscience ignore my duty to defend the [U.S.] Constitution.”
Rep. Katie Porter with her guest for the State of the Union speech, constituent Helen Nguyen. Nguyen’s husband Michael — a small businessman in Porter’s district — has been held by the Vietnamese government since June 2018. (Carolyn Presutti / VOA)
Courting the young vote
Heidi Hu is asking about a clipboard. She’s sitting at an iron table outside a coffee shop in Santa Ana, California, learning about voter registration. She is being trained by Field Team 6, a nationwide group of volunteers, registering new voters for Democrats in 2020.
Hu drove an hour south from Los Angeles to sign up college students at the University of California at Irvine. Young voters helped propel Porter to victory in 2018. State figures show voters ages 18 to 24 rose by nearly 20% more than the previous midterm election in 2014.
Hu says the key to Porter’s reelection will be again turning out large numbers of college students.
“Their values are more aligned with the Orange County of the future,” Hu said.
Porter prevailed in Orange County, an historically conservative portion of the 45th Congressional District, but Hu knows that Porter is vulnerable in that area and must build up her Democratic support among college students to offset Republican voters.
One of those students is Bryan Pham who will be voting for the first time in 2020. He says even though his family is conservative, “I have certain beliefs of my own and I identify with the Democratic party.”
Bills sponsored
In less than a year, Porter, a former law professor, has sponsored 23 bills in the House. In last year’s congressional session, the average for a first-year representative was 14 and the most introduced was 31, so Porter is well ahead of the curve.
One of Porter’s bills has passed the House but has yet to be introduced in the Senate. The “Help America Run Act” would give candidates more freedom to use campaign funds for child care, health care premiums and elder care. Porter, a single mother of three children younger than 12, said the bill would have helped her when she was a candidate.
“The goal here is to make our Congress more diverse and to make it possible for any American who’s qualified and wants to serve in the U.S. Congress to have the opportunity to do that,” she said.
Porter report card
A number of special interest groups — conservative and liberal — have sharply criticized Katie Porter’s voting record.
For first-year representatives, these are the first grades published during their two-year tenure. For Porter, the first two grades run along party lines. The conservative Heritage Action for America, typically aligned with Republicans, rates members’ votes on key conservative legislation. It gives Porter a zero.
Freedom Works, another conservative group, gives her a score of 8 out of 100, based on her votes on issues dealing with economic freedom.
The surprise was an “F” given by the group Progressive Punch, based on a formula that compares the voting record of a control group of 33 dominant progressive members of Congress with the representative’s voting record.
Most other groups will wait to publish grades at the end of the year.
Competitors will typically use the voting record and bills sponsored in their challenge to the incumbent. The incumbent uses the voting record to show how they are supporting the constituent needs in the district.
Reflecting on a hectic first year in Congress, Porter said, “I feel like I’m getting my sea legs under me … there is a learning curve to this job. And there should be. This is a big task [legislating] that the American people have trusted us with.”
The California primary to determine Katie Porter’s Republican challenger is in early March with the general election in November 2020.
