Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and Austria’s Peter Handke have been awarded the Nobel Literature Prize.
The award was not given last year, so Handke won the 2019 prize for “an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience” while Tokarczuk won the 2018 prize “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”
Each author will receive a $918,000 cash award.
The Swedish Academy did not name a winner for the prize last year following accusations of sexual abuse and other wrongdoing by people connected to the academy.
The coveted Nobel Peace prize will be awarded on Friday.
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Russian authorities say they intend to add an opposition-run anti-corruption foundation to a list of so-called “foreign agents” operating in the country — potentially curtailing the operations of one of the Kremlin’s fiercest critics.
In a statement released Wednesday, Russia’s Justice Ministry said an audit of the Anti-Corruption Foundation — a non-governmental organization run by opposition leader Alexey Navalny — showed the organization was receiving foreign funding to maintain its operations.
The move puts the group, commonly known by its Russian acronym FBK, afoul of Russia’s so-called “foreign agents” law — a controversial 2012 measure the Kremlin says is necessary to protect Russian sovereignty and that civil society leaders argue tars NGOs as traitors and spies.
Formally, the designation opens up the FBK to increased scrutiny by authorities — as well as fines and possible suspension of its operations.
While the ministry statement provided no details on its audit, an Interfax news agency report said regulators had found two undeclared foreign donations to the FBK — one from the U.S. and another from Spain.
Their total: just over $2,000.
FBK members rejected the foreign agent charge outright, arguing the organization had always relied on local “crowdfunding” to maintain its work.
“The foundation is sponsored inclusively by citizens of Russia, by you,” wrote FBK Director Ivan Zhadanov in a Facebook post.
“This is simply an attempt to strangle the FBK,” added Zhadanov.
The group’s founder, opposition leader Alexey Navalny, went further — arguing the move reflected the foundation’s growing influence thanks to a series of video investigations targeting corruption by Kremlin insiders close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Putin is terribly afraid of the FBK,” wrote Navalny in a post on Twitter. “He can only rely on thieves, bribe takers, and corruptioneers.
“We expose corruption” added Navalny, “and we won’t stop no matter what.”
An NGO in the crosshairs
The announcement comes amid an intensifying assault against the FBK with overt political overtones.
A longtime thorn in the Kremlin’s side, the FBK’s troubles began in earnest again this summer.
After opposition candidates — including members of the FBK — were banned from local Moscow elections en masse, the group worked to organize street protests in response.
The result: a series of mostly peaceful demonstrations that saw over 2,500 arrests — many at the hands of truncheon-wielding police and aggressive OMON (federal government) riot police security forces.
Next, authorities launched an investigation into money laundering by the FBK — accusing the organization’s members of over $15 million in illicit transactions. Coordinated raids of FBK offices across the country ensued.
At the time, Navalny insisted the raids were prompted by an FBK plan called “smart voting” — an election tactic that coordinated voter anger around candidates who had managed to clear registration barriers.
The strategy was credited with aiding significant losses for pro-Kremlin candidates in Moscow local elections.
FBK members say they plan to expand the strategy in regional political races in 2020 — a move that observers say may have prompted renewed efforts to cripple the organization.
Indeed, the FBK has most recently drawn authorities’ ire in the form of court fines.
This week, Moscow police announced they would sue Navalny and other key FBK members for $300,000 in damages — a sum intended to cover expenses incurred by security forces while policing the rallies.
A Moscow restaurant and several other city services have piled on with similar lawsuits.
Now faced with the prospect of the new foreign agent label, Navalny and other FBK members took to social media to plead for renewed donations nationwide.
Throughout the day, the requests ricocheted around the internet, prompting reaction from pro-Kremlin voices online as well as public expressions of support.
“I haven’t done that in a while,” wrote user @DaniilKen in a post on Twitter that showed a screenshot of a money transfer to the FBK. “But it was hard not to respond to the Justice Ministry.”
Just how many more Russians might follow now remains the key question going forward.
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Women from across Africa are meeting at the annual Women in Tech Africa Week, hoping to bring more women into the tech industry and combat inequalities in technology use and access, especially for economic empowerment.
Francesca Opoku remembers having to physically send workers to deliver messages or documents when she started her small social enterprise in Ghana 10 years ago. Today, she works to keep up with fast-developing technology to grow her business that produces natural beauty products. She also trains women she works with in financial literacy, such as using simple mobile technology to manage their money.
“As a small African business, as you are growing and as you aspire to grow globally and your tentacles are widening, the world is just going techy,” Opoku said. “Business in the world is going techy. It’s especially relevant in small business. It’s the best way to make what you are doing known out there.”
She was at the launch of Women In Tech Africa in Accra, with events in six other countries including Germany, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Opoku said she wants to learn more about how she can use technology to make her business grow and to ensure she is not left behind in the technology divide.
Across Africa, this divide means women are 13% less likely to own a mobile phone and 41% less likely to use mobile internet than men.
Women In Tech Africa founder
Ethel Cofie, founder of Women In Tech Africa, an NGO that started in 2015, said addressing this gap is crucial. Her network of 5,000 women across 30 African countries is pushing the conversation about women in technology and leadership.
“There is a huge gender gap, and that is part of the conversation,” Cofie said. “When we are out here showing the world we actually exist, are doing things, what it does is, it provides avenues for us to support other women. One of the things Women in Tech has done is work with the Ghanaian Beauticians Association and Ghana traders associations. Even though these women are not necessarily as educated, they also need to be able to use tech to build their businesses.”
Cofie says the digital gap between men and women in Africa is a consequence of poverty and economic disparities. Men usually have higher incomes, and better access to mobile phones and internet data.
Education
Increasing digital access starts with education. At the G-7 summit this year, members pledged to work with developing countries to promote inclusion, equity and access for girls and women to quality education, including Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
Faiza Adams, a network engineer, started Girly Tech this year to inspire underprivileged Ghanaian girls into STEM careers. She’s training young girls in web development, programming and robotics in Accra.
“Imagine where girls don’t embrace tech, then in five years to come, we have only males who are in the tech space — there is no diversity,” Adams said. “So, in the decision making, they tend to use the male, male, male ideas instead of female. So, when we have inclusion, or there is diversity — I bring my idea, and the guy also brings his idea from the male perspective — we come together and solve societal problems.”
Cofie and Adams both say more women in tech will mean more problems solved in their own communities. But Cofie adds that half the battles — like the gender divide — could be overcome with the right policies in place.
Three U.S. House of Representatives committees are set to question Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, on Tuesday to find out more about the interactions between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian officials.
The closed-door deposition is part of the ongoing impeachment inquiry in the House, which Trump on Monday again rejected as a “scam” perpetrated by Democrats who do not want him to win a second term in office next year.
Sondland has become a prominent figure in the probe because of his efforts to get Ukraine to commit to investigate Trump’s potential presidential rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Biden’s son, Hunter.
A whistleblower complaint that launched the impeachment inquiry says the day after Trump spoke by telephone with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Sondland and U.S. envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker met with the Ukrainian leader and other political figures.
The whistleblower said that according to readouts of those meetings recounted by U.S. officials, “Ambassadors Volker and Sondland reportedly provided advice to the Ukrainian leadership about how to ‘navigate’ the demands that the President had made of Mr. Zelenskiy.”
Speaking to reporters Monday at the White House, Trump returned to his repeated defense of the conversation with Zelenskiy as a “perfect call.” When asked if he is worried about what might emerge now that a second whistleblower has come forward, Trump replied, “Not at all.”
He described the call as “congenial” and said there was “no pressure.”
The House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees have been leading the inquiry with depositions and subpoenas seeking documents from members of the Trump administration and the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
They issued fresh subpoenas Monday, demanding Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and Office and Budget and Management Acting Director Russell Vought turn over documents by Oct. 15 relating to Trump’s decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine.
Part of the investigation includes examining whether or not Trump’s decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine was tied to his request for a Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens.
No evidence of corruption by the Bidens in Ukraine has been found.
read moreIraqi President Barham Salih has condemned attacks on anti-government protesters and media after a week of demonstrations and related clashes left more than 100 people dead and 6,000 wounded.
He called those committing the violence criminals and enemies, and used a televised address Monday to call for a halt to the escalation.
Salih said Iraq had experienced enough destruction, bloodshed, wars and terrorism.
The military admitted earlier Monday to using “excessive force” in confronting protesters in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad.
The government took the step of removing security forces from the area and handing over patrols to police. Officials also pledged to hold accountable any member of the security forces who “acted wrongly.”
The protests in Baghdad and in several southern Iraqi cities have grown from initial demands for jobs and improved city services, such as water and power, to calls now to end corruption in the oil-rich country of nearly 40 million people.
Iraq’s cabinet issued a new reform plan early Sunday in an effort to respond to the protests that have taken authorities by surprise.
After meeting through the night Saturday, cabinet officials released a series of planned reforms, which addressed land distributions and military enlistments as well as increasing welfare stipends for poor families and training programs for unemployed youth.
Iraq’s Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi told his cabinet late Saturday in televised remarks that he is willing to meet with protesters and hear their demands. He called on the protesters to end their demonstrations.
Former Shi’ite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who leads the largest opposition bloc in parliament, called Friday for the government to resign and said “early elections should be held under U.N. supervision.”
read moreThis article originated in VOA’s Persian Service.
Published reports say a Chinese state energy company that appears to have pulled out of a natural gas project in Iran had been under pressure to do so because of U.S. sanctions against Tehran.
Iranian oil minister Bijan Zanganeh announced the departure of China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) from the joint venture to develop Iran’s South Pars offshore gas field in comments Sunday reported by his ministry’s website.
Zanganeh said Iranian company Petropars, which originally had partnered with CNPC and France’s Total on the project, will develop the gas field on its own.
Total initially held a 50.1% stake in the joint venture announced in 2017, while CNPC had 30% and Petropars had 19.9%. Total withdrew from the project in August 2018 as the U.S. began reimposing sanctions on Iran to pressure it to negotiate a new deal to end its nuclear and other perceived malign activities.
Neither CNPC nor the Chinese government made any comment about the South Pars project on Monday, a public holiday in China.
But a Wall Street Journal report said CNPC executives previously had acknowledged that the company was struggling to find banks to transfer funds to Iran due to U.S. pressure. The article said CNPC’s own bank, Bank of Kunlun, had told customers that it was no longer processing trades with Iran while publicly asserting that it intended to keep its business with Tehran going.
The South China Morning Post reported that CNPC also “could have cause for concern when it comes to (U.S.) sanctions” because the company’s website says it has a four-year-old U.S.-based subsidiary that has made a “significant financial investment” in the United States.
The Trump administration has been unilaterally toughening sanctions on Iran since last year, calling on other nations not to do business with its energy and financial sectors and imposing secondary sanctions on foreign companies and individuals who defy those warnings.
U.S. officials sanctioned several Chinese shipping companies and executives last month for importing Iranian oil in defiance of a total ban on Iranian oil exports imposed by the U.S. in May.
A Bloomberg report said CNPC’s role in the South Pars project had been uncertain for several months. It said Zanganeh had complained in February that CNPC had not carried out any of its share of the work. The report said CNPC was in negotiations to remain a partner in the project as recently as August, according to the head of Iran’s Pars Oil and Gas Co.
read moreUS Energy Secretary Rick Perry warned Monday that the controversial Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline would increase Russia’s political influence on European Union foreign policy.
On a visit to Lithuania to promote US energy ties with Eastern European nations, Perry said the pipeline carrying Russian gas to Germany “would deliver a stunning blow to Europe’s energy diversity and security.”
“It would increase Russia’s leverage over Europe’s foreign policy and Europe’s vulnerability to a supply disruption,” Perry told an energy forum in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.
Perry said the Baltic sea pipeline, together with the TurkStream pipeline — which will supply Russian gas to Turkey via the Black Sea — “would enable Moscow to end gas transit through Ukraine by the close of the decade.”
“Nord Stream 2 is designed to drive a single source gas artery deep into Europe and [to drive] a stake through the heart of European stability and security,” Perry said.
He said the United States “were ready, were willing and were able” to increase European energy security by providing alternative sources, notably liquified natural gas and civil nuclear capabilities.
“We support multiple routes to deliver energy across Europe. Along with energy choice we support free and open markets… we oppose using energy to coerce any country,” he said.
Vilnius university professor Ramunas Vilpisauskas said that while the US criticism of Nord Stream was part of Washington’s drive to increase its own exports to Europe, it was also in line with the interests of a region dependent on Russian supplies.
“A commercial aim to increase US exports to Europe seems to be the main reason for the criticism of Nord Stream and Turkstream,” Vilpisauskas told AFP.
“But from the point of view of Lithuania and other central European EU members, it is a win-win situation because they have been actively looking for possibilities to diversify sources of their imports.”
The controversial 11-billion-euro ($12-billion) Nord Stream 2 energy link between Russia and Germany is set to double Russian gas shipments to Germany, the EU’s biggest economy.
Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states fear it will increase Europe’s reliance on Russian energy which Moscow could then use to exert political pressure.
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Pope Francis urged South American bishops on Monday to speak “courageously” at a high-profile meeting on the Amazon, where the shortage of priests is so acute that the Vatican is considering ordaining married men and giving women official church ministries.
Francis opened the work of the three-week synod, or meeting of bishops, after indigenous leaders, missionary groups and a handful of bishops chanted and performed native dances in front of the main altar of St. Peter’s Basilica.
Led in procession by the pope, the bishops then headed to the synod hall to chart new ways for the Catholic Church to better minister to remote indigenous communities and care for the rainforest they call home.
Among the most contentious proposals on the agenda is whether married elders could be ordained priests, a potentially revolutionary change in church tradition given Roman rite Catholic priests take a vow of celibacy.
The proposal is on the table because indigenous Catholics in remote parts of the Amazon can go months without seeing a priest or receiving the sacraments, threatening the very future of the church and its centuries-old mission to spread the faith in the region.
Another proposal calls for bishops to identify new “official ministries” for women, though priestly ordination for them is off the table.
Cardinal Claudio Hummes, the retired archbishop of Sao Paulo and the lead organizer of the synod, said the priest shortage had led to an “almost total absence of the Eucharist and other sacraments essential for daily Christian life.”
“It will be necessary to define new paths for the future,” he said, calling the proposal for married priests and ministries for women one of the six “core issues” that the synod bishops must address.
“The church lives on the Eucharist, and the Eucharist is the foundation of the church,” he said, citing St. John Paul II.
Francis opened the meeting by extolling native cultures and urging bishops to respect their histories and traditions as they discern ways to better spread the faith.
History’s first Latin American pope has long held enormous respect for indigenous peoples, and denounced how they are exploited, marginalized and treated as second-class citizens and “barbarians” by governments and corporations that extract timber, gold and other natural resources from their homes.
Speaking in his native Spanish, Francis told the bishops how upset he became when he heard a snide comment about the feathered headdress worn by an indigenous man at Mass on Sunday opening the synod.
“Tell me, what is the difference between having feathers on your head and the three-cornered hat worn by some in our dicasteries?” he said to applause, referring to the three-pointed red birettas worn by cardinals.
Francis urged the bishops to use the three weeks to pray, listen, discern and speak without fear.
“Speak with courage,” he said. “Even if you are ashamed, say what you feel.”
The synod is opening with global attention newly focused on the forest fires that are devouring the Amazon, which scientists say is a crucial bulwark against global warming. It also comes at a fraught time in Francis’ six-year papacy, with conservative opposition to his ecological agenda on the rise.
Francis’ traditionalist critics, including a handful of cardinals, have called the proposals in the synod working document “heretical” and an invitation to a “pagan” religion that idolizes nature rather than God.
To that criticism, Hummes denounced Catholic “traditionalism” that is stuck in the past versus the church’s true tradition, which always looks forward.
“The church cannot remain inactive within her own closed circle, focused on herself, surrounded by protective walls and even less can she look nostalgically to the past,” he said. “The Church needs to throw open her doors, knock down the walls surrounding her and build bridges.”
In keeping with the meeting’s environmental message, the synod organizers themselves are taking measures to reduce their own carbon footprint.
Organizer Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri told the bishops there would be no plastic cups or utensils at the meeting, that synod swag such as bags and pens were biodegradable, and that the emissions spent to get more than 200 bishops and indigenous from South America to Rome — estimated at 572,809 kilograms of carbon dioxide — would be offset with the purchase of 50 hectares of new growth forest in the Amazon.
read moreTwo Americans and a British scientist have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of “how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”
The Nobel Committee said Monday the award is shared by William Kaelin, Gregg Semenza and Peter Ratcliffe.
They will each get an equal share of the $918,000 cash award.
The committee said the men “established the basis for our understanding of how oxygen levels affect cellular metabolism and physiological function.”
It said the advances will help lead to new ways to fight anemia, cancer and other diseases.
read moreA group of eleven key Taliban prisoners is reported to have been released from the U.S.-run Bagram military base in Afghanistan in exchange for three Indian hostages.
Insurgent sources said Sunday the swap took place in the northern province of Baghlan and two former Taliban provincial governors were among those freed. Taliban men could be seen being welcomed by insurgent fighters in video images released via social media.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid when asked for his comments on the reported swap told VOA “I have not received the details. I am trying to get them and will share with you.”
There was no immediate reaction from U.S. officials or the Afghan government.
The Indian hostages were abducted last year along with four other countrymen while they were working on a project in Baghlan for the construction of a power generation station. One of them managed to escape and returned to India this past May while the fate of the rest was not known.
Many of the districts in the troubled Afghan province are either controlled or hotly contested by the Taliban.
U.S.-Taliban Meetings in Pakistan
Sunday’s reported prisoner exchange followed last week’s informal meetings between American and Taliban negotiators in neighboring Pakistan.
It was not immediately known, however, whether the prisoner swap was an outcome of the contacts, the first since early last month when U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly called off the year-long dialogue with the Taliban.
Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister Idrees Zaman, while commenting on the Taliban’s visit to Pakistan, said on Saturday the insurgents were discussing with U.S, envoys the release of two Western hostages and not the resumption of the stalled dialogue.
Zaman was referring to an American professor and his Australian colleague who were kidnapped more than three years ago in Kabul. Kevin King, 60, and Timothy Weeks, 48, from Australia were teaching at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) in the capital city before gunmen took them hostage near the campus in August 2016.
Neither U.S. nor insurgent officials publicly acknowledged the two sides held meetings during their last week’s stay in Pakistan, though officials of the host government had confirmed such meetings would take place.
American chief negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, deputy Taliban chief for political affairs, led their respective delegations at “several” interactions in Islamabad, according to insurgent sources.
General Scott Miller, the U.S. commander of NATO-led foreign troops in Afghanistan, also accompanied Khalilzad at the meetings, the sources said.
The U.S. embassy in Islamabad had insisted while confirming Khalilzad’s presence in the country that he was visiting for bilateral “consultations” with Pakistani officials.
U.S. and Taliban negotiators were said to be on the verge of signing a peace agreement after nine long rounds of negotiations hosted by Qatar before Trump declared the process “dead” citing continued insurgent deadly attacks on Afghan civilians and American troops in Afghanistan.
read moreHundreds of thousands of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group celebrated in Addis Ababa on Saturday at the start of an annual thanksgiving festival which was marred by violence in 2016.
Security was high for Irreecha, which is celebrated by the Oromo people to mark the start of the harvest season.
On Friday and Saturday thousands of people dressed in traditional white costumes arrived in buses, cars and by foot from all over the Oromia region to celebrate on the streets of the capital with dancing, singing and flag waving.
“This festivity is a symbol of a transition from darkness to a light,” said Zewidu Megrarobi, 65, a farmer from Yeka, a village located on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, who was present during the 2016 clashes.
Security was high, with a visible presence from security forces including snipers. Ethiopian Federal Police said nine people had been arrested on the eve of the festival for attempting to smuggle weapons within the capital.
The peaceful start was in contrast to 2016 when a stampede triggered by a clash between police and protesters left more than 50 people dead.
“This time everything is peaceful. We are all happy as this represents the unity of Oromos,” said Megrarobi after performing his thanksgiving ritual that involves touching water with yellow flowers and grass.
The festival is usually held in Bishoftu, a town located in the Oromia region, about 40 km (25 miles) south of Addis Ababa.
The celebrations, which returned to the capital for the first time in 150 years, are due to be followed by a larger event on Sunday in Bishoftu.
The Oromo, who make up about a third of Ethiopia’s population of more than 100 million, have long complained of being marginalized during decades of authoritarian rule by governments led by politicians from other smaller ethnic groups.
Prime Minister Abiy has pursued a reconciliation strategy since taking power in April 2018. He has implemented a series of radical economic and political reforms including releasing political prisoners and restoring relations with arch-foe Eritrea.
The reforms have opened up what was once one of Africa’s most repressive nations but also stoked violence as emboldened regional strongmen build ethnic powerbases and compete over political influence and resources.
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North Korea has angrily walked away from working-level nuclear talks with the United States. Pyongyang’s top negotiator said he was “greatly disappointed” with Washington’s inflexible approach.
The first substantive nuclear negotiations in months between North Korea and the U.S. broke down after just one day in Stockholm, Sweden.
North Korea’s top nuclear envoy says the talks failed because the U.S. would not abandon its old approach.
The U.S. quickly disputed that characterization, saying the 8-and-a-half-hour talks went “good” and that the U.S. brought “creative ideas.”
The breakdown raises the possibility North Korea will intensify its provocations, days after testing a new medium-range ballistic missile.
But the North’s decision could also amount to a negotiating tactic meant to raise pressure on Washington.
U.S. President Donald Trump appeared to use a similar tactic this February in Vietnam, when he abruptly walked away from a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
After that summit, both sides quickly said they would eventually like to resume diplomacy. But neither have indicated they will substantially change their negotiating stance.
U.S. officials say they accepted a Swedish invitation to return to the talks in two weeks. It’s not clear whether North Korea will show up.
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Jordan’s government said Sunday it has reached a pay deal with the teachers union to end a one-month strike, the country’s longest public sector strike that disrupted schooling for more than 1.5 million students.
The deal came after the strike threatened a deepening political crisis when the government last week began legal steps against the unions after they rejected meager pay hikes they said were “bread crumbs” and the government said it could not afford to give more.
The pay deal that raises allowances from 35% to 60% to teachers from next year comes after weeks of deadlock with the government intransigent over meeting an original 50% pay rise demanded by the unions it said would strain the heavily indebted country’s finances.
Officials said King Abdullah had ordered the government to reach the hefty wage deal which tests the ability of Prime Minister Omar al Razzaz to stay on track in implementing tough fiscal reforms backed by the International Monetary Fund aimed at reducing a record $40 billion public debt.
The government fears new pay demands by other public sector employees, including doctors, and pension increases for retired soldiers would wreck efforts to restore fiscal prudence needed for a sustained economic recovery.
Dozens of activists from the powerful teachers union, whose members succeeded in forcing the government to agree to substantial pay hikes after a four-week standoff, celebrated in front of their headquarters in Amman.
“The teachers got their demands,” said Nasser Al Nawasrah, deputy head of the Jordanian Teachers Syndicate. He called on his organization’s 100,000 members to immediately resume teaching pupils in around 4,000 public schools that had been affected by the strike.
Many parents had kept their children at home out of solidarity with the striking teachers.
In many of the country’s rural areas and smaller cities, traditional heartlands of support for the monarchy, the strike also became a protest against successive governments’ failure to deliver on promises of economic growth.
Growing disenchantment among ordinary Jordanians over tough IMF austerity measures and high taxes spilled into large street protests in the summer of 2018 that railed against corruption and mismanagement of public funds.
Officials say Jordan can no longer afford to sustain a public sector in which salaries eat up much of the central government’s $13 billion budget in a country with some of the world’s highest government spending relative to its economy.
The debt is due, at least in part, to the adoption by successive governments of an expansionist fiscal policy marked by job creation in the public sector.
Extra layers of security, intense on-screen action and a frightening incident inside a New York theater combined to create an unsettling experience for some moviegoers who went to see “Joker” on its opening weekend.
A young man who was loudly cheering and applauding on-screen murders sent some people heading toward exits in a crowded theater in Manhattan’s Times Square on Friday night. Other patrons yelled at the man, who spit on them as they left early, said Nathanael Hood, who was in the theater.
“I was scared. I’m sure a lot of other people were,” Hood said in an interview conducted by private messages.
Social media users posted photos of police, security sweeps and safety notices at theaters in California and Florida. And in Tennessee, a drive-in theater banned moviegoers from wearing costumes to a screening of the R-rated “Joker,” which scored an October box-office record with $13.3 million in earnings.
The Warner Bros. film, directed by Todd Phillips, presents the backstory of the man who becomes Batman’s classic foe. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, it probes the journey of a disturbed man with a penetrating laugh into a killer.
While Phillips has said he hopes the film inspires discussions about guns, violence and the treatment of people with mental illness, some feared the movie could inspire violence, particularly after a mass shooting killed 12 at a Colorado theater during a screening of another Batman movie in 2012.
Hood, who attended an afternoon viewing of “Joker” at AMC Empire 25 in Times Square, said a disruption began in the seats when the action on the screen grew intense.
“About halfway through when Joker started killing people and monologuing about how society is evil he started clapping really loudly and incessantly for a good minute. People started yelling for him to shut up, but he kept clapping and cheering like mad,” Hood said.
The man started clapping and cheering again “really loudly” during a climatic gunfight, he said, and got “belligerent” when people told him to quit.
“Finally security came and got him. He was still being interrogated outside the theater when we came out,” said Hood. Plenty of police were around the theater, he said.
Another moviegoer, Etai Benson, said the loud man was sitting beside him at the start of the movie and poured what appeared to be a full bottle of alcohol into a drink. The man’s behavior “combined with the carnage happening onscreen got people nervous,” he said.
“This was most likely a harmless drunk guy, but all the nervousness built around the film made what happened (Friday) night really unsettling,” Benson said in an interview conducted by private messages.
A spokesman for the Kansas-based AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., which operates AMC Theatres, did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
The FBI told local police agencies to monitor potentially threatening online posts related to the film.
Photos posted on social media showed officers and a police dog outside a theater where “Joker” was being shown in Orlando, Florida, and a police SUV was parked on the sidewalk outside a cinema in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, during a screening.
In Bristol, Tennessee, the owner of the Twin City Drive-In Theater, Danny Warden, posted a warning on Facebook that anyone wearing a costume or mask to see “Joker” wouldn’t be allowed in, and anyone who smuggled in an outfit would be asked to leave.
Warden told WJHL-TV that the decision was “common sense” after the film sparked concerns about its violent content.
read moreHundreds of climate activists barricaded themselves into a Paris shopping center Saturday as security forces tried to remove them, ahead of a planned series of protests around the world by the Extinction Rebellion movement.
Campaigners faced off against police and some inconvenienced shoppers as they occupied part of the Italie 2 mall in southeast Paris.
They unfurled banners with slogans like “Burn capitalism not petrol” above restaurants and the window displays fashion boutiques.
The protest comes ahead of planned disruption to 60 cities around the world from Monday in a fortnight of civil disobedience from Extinction Rebellion (XR), which is warning of an environmental “apocalypse.”
As the center tried to close in the evening, security forces ordered the protesters to leave the area, activists told AFP.
According to images broadcast on social networks, police then tried to enter the building, while protesters blocked entrances with tables and chairs.
“I am with XR to say stop this crazy system before it destroys everything,” one young woman told AFP, giving only her first name Lucie.
Other campaign groups also joined in with the Paris shopping center demonstration, including some members of the “yellow vest” anti-government protest group.
Non-violent protests are chiefly planned by XR from Monday in Europe, North America and Australia, but events are also set to take place in India, Buenos Aires, Cape Town and Wellington.
Another protest was held in Berlin Saturday, with campaigners setting up camp near the parliament building.
“To governments of the world: we declared a climate and ecological emergency. You did not do enough. To everybody else: rebel,” XR said on its website ahead of its International Rebellion wave of activism.
“You can’t count on us or Greta to do this for you,” it said, referring to teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. “Look inside yourself and rebel.”
Extinction Rebellion was established last year in Britain by academics and has become one of the world’s fastest-growing environmental movements.
Campaigners want the government to declare a climate and ecological emergency, reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2025, halt biodiversity loss and be led by new “citizens’ assemblies on climate and ecological justice.”
The town of Minden, West Virginia looks like many small American towns, yet it is unique in that it is one of the most toxic places in the United States. Here, between 1970s and mid-1980s, the Shaffer Equipment Company used harmful chemicals to build electrical equipment. Those chemicals have been banned since 1979, but traces still remain. Daria Dieguts went there to find out more and filed this report narrated by Anna Rice.
A U.N. human rights expert has expressed concern over the working conditions of North Korean workers abroad in response to VOA’s report that uncovered North Korea’s illicit labor activities in Senegal.
“It’s quite revealing about this situation of the system that exists in North Korea regarding workers abroad,” Tomas Ojea Quintana, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, said during an interview with VOA Korean Service Thursday.
Quintana said the VOA report reflects that “the system remains as it was conceived since the outset.”
Human rights groups have often accused North Korea of sending its citizens to foreign countries for forced labor to sustain its economy since the inception of the regime. The country is known to violate international labor practices when sending workers abroad, putting them to work under harsh conditions.
The VOA report revealed that approximately 30 North Korean workers were laboring under poor conditions at various construction sites in the Senegalese capital of Dakar in September. The North Koreans were doing construction work for private Senegalese companies such as Patisen in violation of international sanctions.
The workers were paid about $120 a month after having to remit a significant portion of their salary to the North Korean government, according to documents reviewed by VOA. Typically, North Korean government takes approximately 70% of workers’ salaries.
The workers were subject to heavy surveillance by North Korean authorities while working and off duty. They had limited communications with locals, internet access, and ability to travel, according to the VOA report.
Quintana said poor labor conditions of overseas North Korean workers are “the responsibility of North Korean government.”
Quintana continued, “The best way to address this issue is to engage with those countries who hosted these workers and to engage those private actors and companies who also have a responsibility.”
The U.N. expert said he recognizes the importance of international sanctions placed on North Korea in an attempt to prevent the country from sending its workers abroad to earn hard currency that could be used for its nuclear weapons program.
At the same time, Quintana believes it is equally important to find ways to protect the rights of North Korean workers who want to work abroad and to create acceptable labor conditions.
Acknowledging that the North Korean system of overseas workers has shortcomings, Quintana said, “We also know that the families of these North Korean workers benefit a lot from the income, even the low income that they receive working abroad.
“So this is something we need to bear in mind when we address the issue of overseas workers,” he continued.
Quintana said he plans to reach out to Senegalese authorities and urge them to comply with basic labor standards.
The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution in August 2017 banning member states from forming joint entities with North Korea in their territories and hiring North Korean workers, in an effort to curb North Korea’s nuclear weapons program
A month later, the Security Council passed another resolution asking members to close any existing North Korean entities in their territories. Then in December of that year, the council urged members to return all North Korean workers home by December 2019.
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The flu season has started in the Northern Hemisphere. Although it’s still very early in the season, two deaths have been reported. One was a child, the other an adult with a chronic illness, but seemingly healthy people can also die from the flu.
Those most likely to die from the flu are the very young and the very old. But seemingly healthy people die as well.
Jen Ludwin was one of those seemingly healthy people when she caught the virus. She was young — 23 years old with no underlying conditions.
“I figured, ‘You know what, I’ll spend seven days in bed and just fight it off and I’d be OK.’ But I was totally wrong,” she said.
Ludwin’s organs to begin to fail.
“I was already in septic shock, and that my organs were starting to fail,” she said. “On top of that I had ARDS, which is a respiratory distress syndrome, and then DIC, which caused me to bleed internally and clot in my extremities. And all of those complications together led to gangrene in my limbs, and so I became an amputee.”
Dr. Eric Adkins at the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center says when a virus attacks the body, it’s like an all-out war.
“The body’s response to infection is basically a big inflammatory response that can cause all kinds of problems in the various organs,” he said.
A clue in a protein
It’s a mystery why otherwise healthy people have severe complications from the flu. But researchers at Ohio State University College of Medicine uncovered a clue. Jacob Yount specializes in the study of microbial infection at Ohio State. He says the researchers found a link between a heart complication as a result of getting the flu and a protein that’s critical to fighting it.
“We make this protein and it inhibits viruses from entering our cells,” he said.
But, Yount says, some people have a genetic mutation that blocks the production of that protein, and without it, the flu is more likely to infect the heart and lead to heart failure.
“It can actually block the electrical current that’s traveling through the heart,” he said.
The study found that the mice without this gene were more likely to have heart complications after being infected with the flu virus. Adkins says this finding may help doctors care for flu patients in the future.
“If you know that they’re missing the gene ahead of time, then you may tailor your medical therapy differently,” he said.
Millions affected
The researchers say that millions of people worldwide are likely to have this genetic mutation, including about one-fifth of those of Chinese descent.
Now that scientists understand what might be causing the problem, they are searching for treatments that might prevent or reverse these heart complications in the future. Right now, though, the best protection is getting a flu shot
Iraq’s Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi promised to listen to people’s grievances in a televised address after three days of deadly protest in Baghdad and several other cities. Hundreds of protesters rallied in the capital for a third consecutive day Thursday, defying a curfew, to call for jobs, improved services and an end to widespread corruption. About 30 people have been killed so far and hundreds others have been injured in clashes between the police and protesters. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports the authorities authorities have extended a curfew in several southern cities as the death toll rises.
By the late 19th century, slavery was over, but the American South was still rife with discrimination and injustice for rural African American sharecroppers.
“They could only shop at one store, the country store, where prices were high,” says Louis Hyman, an economic historian and assistant professor at Cornell University.
“It often was the case that the landlord also owned the store, and their lives were ruled by credit. They basically could only shop at that store because their accounts would not be reconciled until the cotton crop came in. Because of that, they didn’t really have cash, and they really didn’t have an alternative way to get credit.”
Enter Sears, the department store chain founded by Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck in 1893, which had a catalog that offered black sharecroppers an alternative. Sears let customers buy on credit, which gave African Americans the option to bypass the local country store, where black customers had to wait until the white customers were served.
“They couldn’t buy the same clothes as white people. They couldn’t buy the same food as white people…This was part of the sort of everyday white supremacy of Jim Crow,” Hyman says. “And so, the Sears catalog allowed them a way to buy clothes that were nicer than were available in that country store, to buy food that the white people ate… It offered them a choice where they didn’t have to feel second-class in their shopping lives.”
The Jim Crow laws, which were in effect from the 1880s to the 1960s, were state and local mandates that enforced racial segregation in the American South. The most common types of these laws outlawed intermarriage and required businesses and public institutions to separate their black and white patrons.
Sears, the department store founder, was not motivated by social justice. As a businessman, he was in it for the money. Once Sears realized that African Americans were using the catalog to avoid discrimination at the hands of white supremacists, he took steps to make sure they could continue to shop the catalog.
Sears set up systems that gave black patrons the option to go directly to the postal carrier, completely bypassing the country store, which in some cases, was also the post office.
Rumors spread that Sears and Roebuck were black, presumably to convince white shoppers that they shouldn’t shop at Sears. Sears and Roebuck published pictures to prove they were white.
“It’s easy to think of Jim Crow as just taking away the vote from African Americans, but it was part of an everyday kind of experience of difference that legitimates a kind of hierarchy,” Hyman says, adding that African Americans have always had a less equal access to the market.
“This is what racial segregation is all about. You see that today. Where are the food deserts? In cities. Why don’t black people have access to the same kinds of stores that white suburbanites do? And a lot of the experience of black people is an experience of monopoly, not being able to get to a bank, having to rely on a check-cashing place, not being able to get to that slightly better-paying job because they’re isolated in terms of transportation or neighborhood.”
Last October, Hyman tweeted about the Sears catalog’s role in battling white supremacy. The thread went viral on Twitter and was seen by millions. Actor LeVar Burton was among those who retweeted it.
“I think the reason it connected with people is that people still shop while black, they still get trailed through stores,” Hyman says. “We still have this daily experience of not being welcome and being forced to feel second-class.”
Hyman says it’s not a coincidence that the Sears catalog began to decline after the end of the Jim Crow era. Some on the Twitter thread suggested that Amazon shopping can play a similar role for African American customers today as the Sears catalog did more than a century ago.
read moreOn a recent day in a remodeled brick church in the Rio Grande Valley, a caregiver tried to soothe a toddler, offering him a sippy cup. The adult knew next to nothing about the little 3-year-old whose few baby words appeared to be Portuguese. Shelter staff had tried desperately to find his family, calling the Brazilian consulate and searching Facebook.
Nearby, infants in strollers were rolled through the building, pushed by workers in bright blue shirts lettered “CHS,” short for Comprehensive Health Services, Inc., the private, for-profit company paid by the U.S. government to hold some of the smallest migrant children.
Sheltering migrant children has become a growing business for the Florida-based government contractor. More than 50 babies, toddlers and teens were closely watched on this day inside this clean, well-lit shelter surrounded by chain link fences.
A joint investigation by The Associated Press and FRONTLINE has found that the Trump administration has started shifting some of the caretaking of migrant children from mostly religious-based nonprofits to private, for-profit contractors.
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Editor’s Note: This story is part of an ongoing joint investigation between The Associated Press and the PBS series FRONTLINE on the treatment of migrant children, which includes an upcoming film.
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So far, the only private company caring for migrant children is CHS, owned by beltway contractor Caliburn International Corp. In June, CHS held more than 20% of all migrant children in government custody. And even as the number of children has declined, the company’s federal funding for their care has continued to flow. That’s partly because CHS is still staffing a large Florida facility with 2,000 workers even though the last children left in August.
Trump administration officials say CHS is keeping the Florida shelter on standby and that they’re focused on the quality of care contractors can provide, not about who profits from the work.
“It’s not something that sits with me morally as a problem,” said Jonathan Hayes, director of the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. “We’re not paying them more just because they’re for-profit.”
Asked about AP and FRONTLINE’s investigation during a White House visit Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar pushed back and said the findings were “misleading.” But he did not address the government’s ongoing privatization of the care for migrant children.
Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly joined Caliburn’s board this spring after stepping down from decades of government service; he joined the Trump administration as secretary of Homeland Security, where he backed the idea of taking children from their parents at the border, saying it would discourage people from trying to immigrate or seek asylum.
Critics say this means Kelly now stands to financially benefit from a policy he helped create.
Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said the retired general told him first-hand that he believed enforcing a “zero tolerance” policy would serve as a deterrent.
“What’s really the motivator, the deterrence or the dollar?” said Acevedo, who signed an Aug. 14, 2019, letter with dozens of law enforcement leaders asking Trump to minimize the detention of children. “I would question that if he’s getting one dollar for that association.”
Kelly did not respond to requests for comment. But in a statement, Caliburn’s President Jim Van Dusen said: “With four decades of military and humanitarian leadership, in-depth understanding of international affairs and knowledge of current economic drivers around the world, General Kelly is a strong strategic addition to our team.”
Earlier this year after leaving government, Kelly was widely criticized by activists who spotted him in a golf cart at Homestead. The facility was at least temporarily shut down in August after numerous lawmakers said holding that many children in a single facility was abusive.
Meanwhile, CHS was getting more business housing migrant children. Today it’s operating six shelters including three “tender age” shelters that can house the youngest, infants and toddlers, in the Rio Grande Valley. And the company has plans underway to run another 500 bed shelter in El Paso, the company said.
Melissa Aguilar, the executive director of CHS’s shelter care programs, said they’re not separating children, they’re caring for children.
“We’re doing the best that we possibly can,” she said. “The children are borrowed. They’re borrowed for our purpose, right? So a lot of times when something is borrowed, you take care of them better than you would something that is your own.”
Overall, the federal government spent a record $3.5 billion caring for migrant children over the past two years to run its shelters through both contracts and grants.
During that time, CHS rapidly moved into the business of caring for migrant children, an AP analysis of federal data found. In 2015, the company was paid $1.3 million in contracts to shelter migrant children, and so far this year the company has received almost $300 million in contracts to care for migrant kids, according to publicly available data. The company also operates some shelters under government grants.
So far this fiscal year, ORR funded 46 organizations running more than 165 shelters and foster programs to care for over 67,000 migrant children either separated from their parents or caregivers at the border, or who came to the U.S. on their own.
The Obama administration also grappled with how to handle large numbers of children crossing the border. In fiscal year 2014, some 68,000 migrant kids were apprehended at the border, as compared to 72,000 this year, but Obama’s head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection Gil Kerlikowske said five years ago they were quickly reunited, almost always with their families or other sponsors.
The numbers of children in shelters grew under Trump in part because of new requirements to screen every adult in a potential home significantly slowed reunifications.
Confidential government data obtained by the AP shows that in June about one in four migrant children in government care was housed by CHS. That included more than 2,300 teens at Homestead, Florida, and more than 500 kids in shelters in southern Texas.
Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, who until recently helped run adult custody programs at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said some former ICE staffers now at HHS have brought the agency the concept of privatizing migrant child detention. He said it mirrors a similar shift that occurred with ICE’s adult immigration detention centers, where populations soared after immigrants were moved from county jails and into for-profit, private facilities.
After 18 years of government service, he recently quit in frustration about the agency’s actions including the treatment of migrant children. He went to work for nonprofit Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services which places migrant children in foster homes.
“These aren’t commodities,” he said. “This isn’t Amazon.com. You can’t just order up migrant care.”
read moreGroups of women had traveled for days to find care for their starving children in Chad, blankly staring in exhaustion and with little hope. But other women smiled, relieved to see their children “fattened” by a new and simplified initiative for hunger.
In an interview with The Associated Press, actress Mia Farrow recounted the scene during her visit to the Central African nation’s Mangalme area as an envoy for the International Rescue Committee.
“Once you see a child dying of hunger in a world where it isn’t necessary, in a world of abundance … you have frustration,” she said. “When I saw this simple solution … I said yes, there is an answer.”
She is promoting the IRC’s approach to treating severe and moderate acute malnutrition, one that contrasts with the widespread method using two different products administered by two different agencies.
UNICEF provides a fortified peanut butter treatment to children with severe acute malnutrition, while the World Food Program, another United Nations agency, provides a blended flours treatment to children with moderate acute malnutrition. A child with moderate acute malnutrition could arrive at a facility that only serves severe cases and not receive treatment.
Efficiency, cost
In Chad, about 350,000 children are suffering from acute malnutrition. That number could grow as the landlocked Sahel nation faces a growing extremist threat in its Lake Chad region and refugees continue to arrive from neighboring countries. Rapid desertification exacerbates the hunger and poverty.
Chad ranks 186th of 189 countries in the 2018 Human Development Index and has one of the world’s highest levels of hunger, according to the World Food Program. More than 66% of the population of 15.5 million lives in severe poverty.
The IRC hopes to make treating malnutrition more efficient and less costly. CEO David Miliband has said the new approach could save millions of lives over the next decade since only 20% of some 50 million acutely malnourished children worldwide have access to treatment.
The IRC hopes its pilot programs in Chad and Mali can help inform World Health Organization guidelines on treating malnutrition and allow health workers to deliver the treatments within communities and not just at clinics.
“We don’t have to watch children die,” Farrow said.
‘Promising’ approach
World Food Program spokesman Herve Verhoosel said the agency “fully supports testing and building the evidence for simplified approaches such as the one being put forward by IRC. The approach shows promise, and we’re enthusiastic about it as one of the strategies that may help improve treatment of acute malnutrition.”
Malnutrition is a major cause of maternal and child illness and death in Chad, he said. He acknowledged that in remote settings some women and children may walk for hours or days to a clinic only to find treatment for one type of malnutrition available — and could be turned away if they don’t fit the criteria.
“Simplified protocols could provide a promising solution to these issues,” he said. For them to be effective, “we need to ensure that these services are also available in communities, not just in health clinics.”
He noted that some evidence gaps remain on the effectiveness of the approach but said U.N. agencies are working with the IRC to generate needed data.
The IRC pilot in Chad is being carried out in partnership with Chad’s health ministry, WFP and UNICEF. Nearly 2,000 malnourished children already have been admitted.
As political tensions flare back home, Hong Kong students on U.S. college campuses say they have been ostracized and in some cases threatened by fellow students from mainland China, and they suspect they are being watched from afar by Beijing.
Some say they see the hand of the Chinese government working in ways that threaten academic freedom.
“Even though many Chinese students are studying right here, sometimes they are all being monitored. They’re not really free of their minds and expression in this country,” said Hong Kong democracy activist Nathan Law, a 26-year-old graduate student in Asian studies at Yale University.
Law said he was told by a fellow student that other Chinese at the Ivy League school are avoiding contact with him for fear it will be reported back to the Chinese Embassy and they or their families back home will face consequences.
“There will be staring, spotting me and discussing among themselves, and pointing at me in an unfriendly manner,” said Law, whose continuing political work has included visits to Washington to meet with members of Congress.
Chinese students in US
Hong Kong has been beset with huge pro-democracy demonstrations since June that have triggered clashes with riot police in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory and stirred fears of a violent crackdown from Beijing.
More than 360,000 students from mainland China attended U.S. colleges and universities in the 2017-18 school year, compared with about 7,000 from Hong Kong, according to the Institute of International Education.
At Emerson College in Boston, student Frances Hui, of Hong Kong, faced threatening language from classmates from mainland China after she published a column in the student newspaper headlined “I am from Hong Kong, not China.”
She said she was unnerved by comments online by people who said they had seen her on campus and described her as short, which made her feel as if she were under surveillance. And she panicked when an Emerson student posted her column on Facebook along with a comment that any opponents of China “must be executed.”
Hui, 20, said she alerted the Emerson administration.
Emerson spokeswoman Sofiya Cabalquinto said the college supports “the rights of our students’ voicing their opinions and doing so free from threats.” She said the college put a plan in place to address Hui’s concerns, but she would not say whether disciplinary action was taken against the student who made the online post.
Death threats
Law gained prominence as a student protest leader before winning election to Hong Kong’s legislature in 2016 but was later expelled as a member and jailed for several months for his activism.
He said he started getting death threats of unknown origin online soon after he arrived in August, including warnings that people with guns would go looking for him at Yale and suggestions that Chinese students in the U.S. assault him. He said he was also subjected to insults echoing a Chinese Communist Party campaign labeling him a criminal.
He reported the threats to police and the Yale administration. He said the harassment has subsided since Yale police began monitoring the online threats.
He said he hasn’t faced anything so overt from Yale students, although he said people have circulated his information in a group for Chinese students at Yale on WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, and urged people to say “hi” to him — a gesture he saw as vaguely threatening.
A Yale spokeswoman, Karen Peart, said only that the university police department takes appropriate action whenever a campus community member faces an unsafe situation.
Beijing watching
A report this year by Human Rights Watch said Chinese students at times remain silent in their classrooms out of fear their comments will be reported to Chinese authorities by other students. The organization described the monitoring as one of several ways the Chinese government undermines academic freedom on foreign campuses.
“Schools need to get very clear about these problems and they need to get policies to respond to them,” said Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s China director.
At universities in Australia and New Zealand, students on either side of the political divide have built up and torn down displays advocating autonomy for Hong Kong.
And there have been signs of tensions at other U.S. campuses, including Georgetown University in Washington, which has seen dueling chalk messages on the Hong Kong protests, and Columbia University in New York, where Hong Kong democracy advocates were greeted last month by protesters holding China’s flag at a lecture hall where they were giving a talk.
read moreA white Dallas police officer was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison for killing her black neighbor in his apartment, which she said she mistook for her own unit one floor below.
Amber Guyger didn’t appear to show much reaction, at least from the angle of a live camera stream, as the judge read the jury’s sentence. It came a day after the jury convicted her of murder in the September 2018 killing of Botham Jean.
Guyger’s sentence was met with boos and jeers by a crowd gathered outside of the courtroom, with one woman saying, “It’s a slap in the face.”
But there was a very different tenor to the post-verdict scene inside the courtroom, where Jean’s brother, Brandt Jean, was allowed to address Guyger directly from the witness stand.
Brandt Jean said he forgave Guyger and that he thinks his brother would want her to turn herself over to Christ.
“I love you as a person. I don’t wish anything bad on you,” he said to the 31-year-old Guyger, before adding, “I don’t know if this is possible, but can I give her a hug?”
The judge said he could, and Brandt and Guyger both stood up, met in front of the bench and embraced while Guyger sobbed.
As Jean’s family walked out of the courtroom, the group that had been outside began a chant of, “No justice! No peace!” Two young black women hugged each other and cried.
Prosecutors had asked jurors to sentence Guyger to at least 28 years, which is how old Jean would have been if he was still alive.
The jury could have sentenced the former officer to up to life in prison or as little as two years.
The basic facts of the unusual shooting were not in dispute throughout the trial. Guyger, returning from a long shift that night, entered Jean’s fourth-floor apartment and shot him. He had been eating a bowl of ice cream before she fired.
Guyger said she parked on the wrong floor and mistook Jean’s apartment for her own, which was directly below his, and mistook him for a burglar. In the frantic 911 call played repeatedly during the trial, Guyger said “I thought it was my apartment” nearly 20 times. Her lawyers argued that the identical physical appearance of the apartment complex from floor to floor frequently led to tenants going to the wrong apartments.
But prosecutors questioned how Guyger could have missed numerous signs that she was in the wrong place. They also asked why she didn’t call for backup instead of walking into the apartment if she thought she was being burglarized and suggested she was distracted by sexually explicit phone messages she had been exchanging with her police partner, who was also her lover.
The shooting drew widespread attention because of the strange circumstances and because it was one in a string of shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers.
One of the Jean family lawyers hailed the verdict as “a victory for black people in America” after it was handed down Tuesday.
The jury was largely made up of women and people of color.
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Following months of political instability after the ousting of longtime President Omar al-Bashir, the new interim government in Sudan is now seeking to remove the country from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.
The move would help Sudan overcome economic challenges facing the African country after al-Bashir was overthrown in April following months of street protests, Sudanese officials said.
The removal of Sudan from the U.S. list is key to the new government’s efforts to stabilize the country in the transitional period, Abdalla Hamdok, the interim prime minister of Sudan, said in an interview with U.S. funded Alhurra TV on Tuesday.
Hamdok, who was appointed prime minister in late August, also used part of his speech at the U.N. General Assembly last week to urge the U.S. to remove Sudan from the list, saying sanctions imposed by Washington were causing “tremendous suffering” to the Sudanese people.
Imposed on former regime
The U.S. government added Sudan to its list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1993 over charges that then-President Bashir’s Islamist government was supporting terrorism. The country was also targeted by U.S. sanctions over Khartoum’s alleged support for terror groups, including al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah.
“It was the former regime that supported terrorism and the Sudanese people revolted against it. These sanctions have caused tremendous suffering to our people,” said Hamdok.
“Therefore, we call on the United States to remove Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and to stop punishing the people of Sudan for crimes committed by the former regime,” he added.
Suspended talks
In 2017, the U.S. government initiated talks with the former Sudanese government aimed at normalizing relations between the two countries, but Washington suspended those discussions in April of this year after the overthrow of al-Bashir.
U.S. officials said the suspension remains in place despite renewed talks with the new interim government in Khartoum.
“There’s a number of things we’re looking forward to engaging with a civilian-led government,” David Hale, U.S. Under Secretary for Political Affairs, said when asked about this issue during a press conference in Khartoum in August.
The designation of Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism bars the country from debt relief and financing from international financial lenders such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
“The problem is that this designation has prevented other U.S. allies and world organizations from cooperating with Sudan,” said Durra Gambo, a local journalist based in Khartoum.
“So this has had far more consequences on the Sudanese people than the U.S. probably intend it to have,” she added.
Gambo told VOA the United States currently has no political argument to keep the designation in place “now that Sudan has a civilian-led leadership and is transitioning from dictatorship to democracy.”
Continued efforts
Although U.S. officials have expressed support for the new Sudanese government, removing Sudan from the State Department list requires approval from U.S. Congress after a six-month-long review.
Experts have voiced confidence that such process could begin soon by the U.S. government, given the ongoing financial crisis in Sudan.
“I’m confident the U.S. administration is considering the removal of Sudan from that list,” Moiz Hadra, a Khartoum-based lawyer who closely follows the developments, told VOA.
“In fact, some foreign leader such as President [Emmanuel] Macron [of France] have expressed their willingness to urge the Americans to start the process of delisting Sudan,” he said.
Hadra noted that the U.S. could play a major role in Sudan’s economic and political recovery following nearly three decades marked with repression and poverty under al-Bashir’s rule.
“Removing Sudan from the list will certainly open up Sudan for financial aid and foreign investment,” Hadra said, adding that, “A prosperous and stable Sudan should be the ultimate objective for all international stakeholders.”
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