WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate on Wednesday confirmed Kelly Craft, a Republican donor who is currently ambassador to Canada, as ambassador to the United Nations, despite opposition from Democrats who criticized President Donald Trump’s nominee as not having sufficient experience for the post.
The Senate backed Craft 56 to 34, largely along party lines, moving to end seven months without a permanent U.S. envoy to the world body.
U.N. ambassador is one of several high-level positions in the Trump administration held for months by temporary appointees as the White House struggles to deal with a chronic high turnover of top administration officials.
The Senate last week confirmed Army Secretary Mark Esper, a former lobbyist, as secretary of defense, ending a record seven-month period in which the Pentagon lacked a permanent top official.
This week, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats announced his resignation.
Trump nominated Craft, 57, for the U.N. post after a receiving a recommendation from Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who represents her home state of Kentucky.
She had faced fierce opposition from some Democrats. Senator Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, accused Craft of lacking the “seriousness and professionalism” for the post at the world body.
Craft, the wife of a billionaire coal industry executive, generated controversy shortly after assuming her post in Ottawa by telling the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that she believed “both sides” of the climate change debate.
However, she acknowledged during her confirmation hearing that climate change is a global threat and pledged to recuse herself from any U.N. talks on the issue involving coal because of her husband’s position.
Menendez on Wednesday released a report that said Craft spent the majority of her time as ambassador to Canada outside the country.
Craft’s backers called her a tough negotiator on a trade deal with Canada and Mexico who had established decent working relationships with both Republicans and Democrats.
Craft will have the difficult job of defending Trump’s “America First” foreign policy and navigating his criticism of the United Nations while getting global diplomats to back U.S. policies.
Trump’s first U.N. ambassador, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, announced her resignation in October and left the position at the end of last year.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his guest, director of the World Food Program David Beasley, planted tree seedlings on Tuesday in a salute to Ethiopia’s Green Legacy Initiative, which seeks to combat climate change through mass tree planting. Volunteers in the Horn of Africa state planted 350 million trees in the past week in an effort to curb climate change effects.
Boat cruises on the Potomac River in the Washington, D.C. area are a popular way to see famous monuments and other landmarks. But a special cruise gives dogs a chance to relax on a scenic trip with their owners. VOAs Deborah Block takes us on a cruise for canines.
The first night of the second round of Democratic presidential candidate debates took place in Detroit Tuesday. The candidates answered questions on a range of issues, including health care, recent mass shootings, immigration and foreign trade.
Here are some quotes from each candidate:
Steve Bullock, in responding to a discussion on gun violence, discussed a personal story, saying: “I’m a gun owner, I hunt, like far too many people in America, I have been personally impacted by gun violence. I had an 11-year-old nephew, Jeremy, shot and killed on a playground. We need to start looking at this as a public health issue, not a political issue.”
Pete Buttigieg, who as South Bend, Indiana, mayor has been criticized for his handling of a recent racially tinged shooting, said about race: “As an urban mayor serving a diverse community, the racial divide lives within me. I’m not saying that I became mayor and racism or crime or poverty ended on my watch. But in our city, we have come together repeatedly to tackle challenges like the fact that far too many people were not getting the help they needed in their housing and so we directed it to a historically underinvested African American neighborhood. Right now in the wake of a police involved shooting, our community is moving from hurting to healing by making sure that the community can participate in things like revising the use of force policy, and making sure there are community voices on the board of safety that handles police matters.”
John Delaney, in criticizing health care plans by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, said: “We don’t have to go around and be the party of subtraction and telling half the country who has private health insurance that their health insurance is illegal. It’s also bad policy. It’ll under-fund the industry, many hospitals will close, and it’s bad politics. … Folks, we have a choice. We can go down the road that Senator Sanders and Senator Warren want to take us with bad policies like Medicare for All, free everything, and impossible promises that will turn off independent voters and get (President Donald) Trump re-elected.”
John Hickenlooper, in criticizing Senator Sanders’ health care plan, said: “I’m saying the policies of this notion that you’re going to take private insurance away from 180 million American, who many of them don’t want to give it, many of them do want to get rid of it, but some don’t, many don’t. The Green New Deal makes sure that every American’s guaranteed a government job if they want, that is a disaster. You might as well FedEx the election to Donald Trump. I think we have to focus on where Donald Trump is failing.”
Amy Klobuchar, answering a question on infrastructure, discusses the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, said: “I was just in Flint, and they are still drinking bottled water in that town, and that is outrageous, and my plan, and I am the first one that came out with an infrastructure plan and I did that because this is a bread and butter issue for people that are caught in traffic jams. I truly believe that if we’re going to move on infrastructure, climate change, you need a voice from the heartland.”
Beto O’Rourke, who lives in the border town of El Paso, Texas, in explaining his stance on decriminalizing border crossings by undocumented immigrants, said: “In my administration, after we have waived citizenship fees for green card holders, more than 9 million of our fellow Americans, free Dreamers who many fear of deportation, and stop criminally prosecuting families and children for seeking asylum and refuge, and for-profit detention, and so that no family has to make that 2,000-mile journey, then I expect that people who come here follow our laws and we reserve the right to criminally prosecute them.”
Tim Ryan, who said he agrees in part with President Trump’s use of tariffs against China, saying: “I think President Trump was onto something when he talked about China. China has been abusing the economic system for a long time. They steal intellectual property. They subsidize goods. They eroded manufacturing. We transfer our wealth of the middle class either up to the top 1% or to China for them to build the military. So I think we need some targeted response against China.”
Bernie Sanders, in explaining his climate change agenda, said: “To win this election and to defeat Donald Trump, which by the way, in my view is not going to be easy, we need to have a campaign of energy and excitement and of vision. … I get a little bit tired of Democrats afraid of big ideas. Republicans are not afraid of big ideas. They could give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to billionaires and profitable corporations. … On this issue, my friends, there is no choice, we have got to be super aggressive if we love our children and if we want to leave them a planet that is healthy and is habitable. … What that means is we got to take on the fossil fuel industry.”
Elizabeth Warren, on a night when North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles, explained her position on the use of nuclear weapons, saying: “The United States is not going to use nuclear weapons preemptively. We need to say so to the entire world. It reduces the likelihood someone miscalculates or misunderstands. Our first responsibility is to keep ourselves safe. And what’s happening right now with Donald Trump is they keep expanding the different ways we have nuclear weapons. The different ways they can be used puts us all at risk.”
Marianne Williamson, in defending her plan to offer up to $500 billion in reparations to the U.S. descendants of enslaved Africans, said: “It is time for us to simply realize that this country will not heal. All that a country is a collection of people. People heal when there’s deep truth-telling. We need to recognize when it comes to the economic gap between blacks and whites in America, it does come from a great injustice that has never been dealt with. That great injustice has had to do with the fact that there was 250 years of slavery, followed by another 100 years of domestic terrorism.”
As U.S.-China trade talks are set to begin, U.S. President Donald Trump is warning China against negotiating a deal after the 2020 U.S. presidential election — declaring a delayed agreement would be less attractive than a deal reached in the near term.
“The problem with them waiting … is that if & when I win, the deal that they get will be much tougher than what we are negotiating now … or no deal at all,” Trump said in a post Tuesday on Twitter.
…to ripoff the USA, even bigger and better than ever before. The problem with them waiting, however, is that if & when I win, the deal that they get will be much tougher than what we are negotiating now…or no deal at all. We have all the cards, our past leaders never got it!
The tweet came as U.S. and Chinese officials gathered in Shanghai to revive talks, with both sides trying to temper expectations for a breakthrough.
The world’s two largest economies are engaged in an intense trade war, having imposed punitive tariffs on each other totaling more than $360 billion in two-way trade.
The negotiations come after Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed at June’s G-20 summit to resurrect efforts to end the costly trade war over China’s technology ambitions and trade surplus.
China is resisting U.S. demands to abolish government-led plans for industrial leaders to enhance robotics, artificial intelligence and other technologies.
The U.S. has complained China’s plans depend on the acquisition of foreign technology through theft or coercion.
Days prior to the Shanghai meeting, Trump threatened to withdraw recognition of China’s developing nation’s status at the World Trade Organization. China responded by saying the threat is indicative of the “arrogance and selfishness” of the U.S.
The U.S. delegation in Shanghai will be represented by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. They are due to meet with a Chinese delegation led by Vice Premier Liu He, who serves as the country’s economic czar.
A top U.N. official warned Monday that Yemen’s devastating five-year civil war has knocked the country back 20 years in terms of development and access to education.
Yemen was already the Arab world’s poorest nation before the war, which has killed tens of thousands of people. In 2014, rebels known as Houthis took over the capital, Sanaa, prompting a Saudi-led military intervention. The stalemated conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives, thrust millions to the brink of famine and spawned the world’s most devastating humanitarian crisis.
“Much of the Yemeni economy has collapsed. People literally do not have any money to buy food,” Achim Steiner, U.N. Development Program administrator, told The Associated Press.
“Thousands of schools are closed, millions of children aren’t able to attend school, missing a generation of education,” he said. “Yemen has lost… 20 years of development.”
Steiner recently returned from a visit to Yemen, including the strategic port city of Hodeida. He waned that one in every three Yemenis are at risk of starving to death, out of a population of 30 million.
In Hodeida, he said the U.N. Development Program has been working to remove land mines from Hodeida’s port, which handles 70 percent of Yemen’s food imports and humanitarian aid. He said he met with local authorities to create an agreement on “the priorities that are now needed in terms of repair spare parts, technologies that are needed in order to be able to allow the port to function again.”
Both sides of the conflict agreed in December to withdraw from Hodeida, considered an important first step toward ending the war. But the implementation of the U.N.-brokered deal has since been delayed, as the agreement was vague on who would control Hodeida’s key port facilities after the withdrawal, saying only that a “local force” would take over.
Steiner urged both sides to help U.N. agencies “deliver fast and with little obstruction, the kinds of services, support, food, medicines” that ordinary Yemenis need.
A boy and his sisters watch graffiti artists spray on a wall, commemorating the victims who were killed in Saudi-led coalition airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen, May 18, 2015.
“We would like to see that port up and running again in a matter of months. It can be done but only with the full cooperation of both sides,” he said.
Steiner said the UNDP in Yemen faces financial difficulties, as the pledges for humanitarian support in Yemen were close to $3 billion this year, but less than $1.1 billion has been delivered.
“We will have to stop programs, we will have to cut rations, and probably in the next two to three months, 21 support programs in the country have to be stopped,” he warned.
Former Tehran mayor Mohammad Ali Najafi was sentenced to death after being convicted of murdering his wife, the judiciary said Tuesday, after a high-profile case that received extensive media coverage.
A prominent reformist, Najafi was found guilty of shooting dead his second wife Mitra Ostad at their home in the capital on May 28, said Iran’s judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili.
According to Iranian media reports, her body was found in a bathtub after Najafi, 67, turned himself in and confessed to killing her.
“The charge sheet included premeditated murder, battery and possession of an illegal firearm,” Esmaili said, quoted by the judiciary’s official news agency Mizan Online.
“The court has established premeditated murder and passed the execution sentence,” he added.
Najafi was acquitted of the battery charge but received a two-year jail sentence for possessing the illegal firearm, the spokesman said without elaborating.
“The sentence is not yet final and can be appealed at the supreme court,” said Esmaili.
Ostad’s family had appealed for the Islamic law of retribution to be applied — an “eye for an eye” form of punishment which would see the death penalty served in this instance.
Najafi’s trial received detailed coverage in state media where scandals related to politicians rarely appear on television.
A mathematician, professor and veteran politician, Najafi had previously served as President Hassan Rouhani’s economic adviser and education minister.
He was elected Tehran mayor in August 2017, but resigned the following April after facing criticism from conservatives for attending a dance performed by schoolgirls.
Najafi married Ostad without divorcing his first wife, unusual in Iran where polygamy is legal but socially frowned upon.
Some of Iran’s ultra-conservatives said the case showed the “moral bankruptcy” of reformists, while reformists accused the conservative-dominated state television of bias in its coverage and highlighting the case for political ends.
A Tanzanian investigative journalist, Erick Kabendera, was abducted Monday from his home on the outskirts of Dar es salaam, the country’s business capital.
A leading Tanzanian newspaper Mwananchi reports that Kabendera who writes for local and international newspapers was abducted Monday evening by people who are said to be police officers. Police have immediately denied being involved.
The journalist’s wife Loy Kabendera, told Mwananchi newspaper that the journalist was “picked up by six people who forcibly stormed into the house and left with a Toyota Alphard” car. She said the people identified themselves as police but refused to produce their badges. They also left with cellphones belonging to Kabendera and his wife.
In November 2017 a Tanzanian journalist Azory Gwanda disappeared mysteriously while investigating a series of killings of local government officials and police officers by unidentified assailants near Kibiti in Pwani region. He has not been since.
In early July, Tanzania’s Foreign Minister Palamagamba Kabudi said during an interview with BBC that Gwanda had “disappeared and died.” He later retracted his statement.
Iraqi officials are displaying stolen artifacts from the country’s rich cultural heritage that were recently recovered from Britain and Sweden.
Many archaeological treasures from Iraq, home of the ancient “fertile crescent” considered the cradle of civilization, were looted during the chaos that followed the 2003 U.S. invasion and whisked out of the country.
Now Iraq is making a massive effort to bring these pieces home, working closely with the U.N. cultural organization.
The artifacts on display Monday at the foreign ministry in Baghdad include archaeological and historical items, such as pottery fragments and shards with writing dating back at least 4,000 years to the ancient Sumerian civilization.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed al-Hakim said his country is determined to recover its lost heritage, whatever it takes.
The International Monetary Fund says the cumulative decline of the Venezuelan economy since 2013 will surpass 60% and is among the deepest five-year contractions the world has seen over the last half century.
Alejandro Werner is director of the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department. He describes the Venezuelan decline as a “historical case” because it is unprecedented in the hemisphere and also because it is the only one of the top global five-year contractions that is unrelated to armed conflicts or natural disasters.
The IMF on Monday also adjusted its 2019 forecast for the South American country to a contraction of 35% — up from the 25% decline expected back in April — due to a sharp fall in the oil production, which has already plunged to its lowest level in seven decades.
Cuban government and Communist Party officials attended funeral services for Roman Catholic Cardinal Jaime Ortega on Sunday in a testament to his success in elevating the Church’s position on the Caribbean island after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Cuban First Vice President Salvador Mesa and two other top leaders on the Communist Party Politburo attended the Requiem Mass along with other officials.
Religious leaders from other countries including Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, Puerto Rico Archbishop Roberto Gonzalez Nieves and Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley of Boston also attended the event in the colonial district’s Havana Cathedral.
Ortega, who died on Friday aged 82, was buried afterwards in the city’s Colon cemetery.
A labor camp inmate in the 1960s when Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government was rounding up religious figures and other perceived enemies, Ortega became archbishop of Havana in 1981 at a time when Cuba was still officially atheist.
For the more than three decades that followed, as Castro’s stance on the Church softened, Ortega raised its visibility and power, building a working relationship with the government thanks to his nonconfrontational style and opposition to U.S. sanctions.
Ortega earned the wrath of hardline exiles and some dissidents on the Caribbean island with his stance.
“His work helped a lot to bring closer the ideas of the Cuban government and the Catholic church,” retiree Maria Green, said, standing outside the Cathedral.
“He managed to solve many things and opened the way for many, many Cubans,” she added.
Ortega hosted three popes and negotiated the release of dozens of political prisoners in 2010 and 2011.
When Raul Castro became president in 2010, Ortega backed his attempts to open up the country and restore relations with Western nations.
At a critical moment in secret talks between Cuba and the United States that led to a detente in December 2014, it was Ortega who relayed messages among Pope Francis, Castro and then-President Barack Obama.
Ortega met with hundreds of U.S. lawmakers, religious figures and businessmen over the years.
John Kavulich, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, worked with Ortega in the 1990s to channel medical aid to the country and said members of his organization provided some logistics for Pope John Paul II’s historic visit in 1998.
“With Cardinal Ortega, there was never a “can’t do it,’ or ‘we must wait,’ or ‘no’,” Kavulich said.
Boko Haram militants killed at least 65 people at a funeral in northeastern Nigeria, local officials said Sunday, revising the earlier death toll of 23.
“It is 65 people dead and 10 injured,” said Muhammed Bulama, the local government chairman. Bulama said he thought the attack was in revenge for the killing of 11 Boko Haram fighters by the villagers two weeks ago.
Nigerians last week marked the 10-year anniversary of the rise of the Boko Haram insurgency, which has killed more than 30,000 people, displaced millions and created one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises. The extremists are known for mass abductions of schoolgirls and putting young women and men into suicide vests for attacks on markets, mosques and other high-traffic areas.
The insurgent group, which promotes an extreme form of Islamist fundamentalism and opposes Western-style education, has defied the claims of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration that the insurgency has been crushed. The violence also has spilled into neighboring Chad, Niger and Cameroon.
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 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.
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.
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.”
