Uganda’s Health Ministry on Friday evening repatriated five Congolese people who had contact with a 9-year-old girl with Ebola to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The girl, also of Congolese origin, traveled with her mother Wednesday from Goma in the DRC and entered Uganda through the Mpondwe border post for medical care.
She was subsequently isolated and transferred to the nearby Bwera hospital Ebola Treatment Unit, where a blood test confirmed Thursday that she was positive for the Ebola virus.
Dr. Joyce Moriku Kaducu, Uganda’s state minister for primary health care, said even though Bwera’s Kasese district has the capacity to handle a disease outbreak, including an Ebola outbreak, it was too late to save the girl.
“Unfortunately, the girl passed on early in the morning today. Upon the request of the father, plans are underway to repatriate the body to DRC for safe and dignified burial,” Kaducu said.
Five return to DRC for care
Since June, Uganda has vaccinated 8,000 health workers who have been in the proximity of infected patients. Kaducu said health workers observed the appropriate practices regarding infection, prevention and control while the girl was under treatment, but the Uganda surveillance teams listed five people who had come into contact with the girl. Three shared the Ebola treatment unit with the girl, while two were tending to the patients, including the girl’s mother.
“All these five people, they are of Congolese origin. And they were transported in the same ambulance with the confirmed case from Mpondwe point of entry to Bwera hospital. Four of these contacts have been taken back to DRC for vaccination and for appropriate and effective follow-up,” Kaducu said.
The fifth contact, the mother of the confirmed case, is scheduled to return to DRC for burial of her daughter.
Vaccine in limited supply
While Uganda has managed to control Ebola from spreading beyond Kasese district, availability of the vaccine, manufactured by the U.S. firm Merck, is limited.
WHO Country Representative to Uganda Yonas Tegegn Woldemariam said that after the latest case, 300 doses were delivered to Kasese on Friday.
“Currently, there is a shortage of the Merck vaccine globally,” Woldemariam said. “So, we are using it with a strict criteria of who is at risk, so that we can protect those people. And, it is also a tool to interrupt if there’s any sustained transmission in a population.”
The Health Ministry has reassured the public that the current threat poses no major risks to the rest of the country. A rapid-response team has been dispatched to Kasese to support the district teams to continue with the various Ebola response activities, including case management, community engagement, contact tracing, psychosocial support and vaccination.
Twitter said Friday the account of chief executive Jack Dorsey had been “compromised” after a series of erratic and offensive messages were posted.
The tweets containing racial slurs and suggestions about a bomb showed up around 2000 GMT on the @jack account of the founder of the short messaging service before being deleted.
Some of the tweets contained the hashtag #ChucklingSquad, which was believed to indicate the identity of the hacker group. The same calling card was left behind during recent hacks of other high-profile social media personalities.
The messages contained racial epithets, and included a retweet of a message supporting Nazi Germany.
“We’re aware that @jack was compromised and (are) investigating what happened,” a Twitter spokesperson said.
Tweets up for 30 minutes
The San Francisco-based firm followed up midafternoon with a Twitter post saying Dorsey’s account was secured and there was “no indication that Twitter’s systems have been compromised.”
It appeared that tweets posted on Dorsey’s account by the hacker were up for about a half-hour before they were removed.
Pinned atop Dorsey’s account was a tweet from early last year saying: “We’re committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.”
A barrage of comments fired off on the platform questioned why the Twitter co-founder didn’t secure his account with two-factor authentication, and how disturbing a sign it was that the service wasn’t to keep its own chief safe on the platform.
“If you can’t protect Jack, you can’t protect … jack,” one Twitter user quipped.
The Twitter logo is displayed above a trading post on the floor of the NY Stock Exchange, Feb. 8, 2018.
Cleaning up content
The news comes with Dorsey and Twitter moving aggressively to clean up offensive and inappropriate content as part of a focus on “safety.”
“This might be the only way to get rid of racist tweets on this platform,” a Twitter user commented.
British-based security consultant Graham Cluley said the incident highlighted the importance of two-factor authentication, where a user must confirm the account via an external service.
“Everyone should ensure they have 2FA enabled, use unique password, and double check what apps they’ve linked to their accounts,” Cluley tweeted. “Hard to say at moment how he was compromised, but one of those reasons most likely.”
Cloudhopper
Cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont said the account appeared to have been hijacked “via a third party called Cloudhopper, which Twitter acquired about 10 years ago and had access to his account.”
Cloudhopper enables users to send tweets on their phones via SMS.
University of Hartford communications professor Adam Chiara was keen to learn whether the breach resulted from Dorsey’s negligence or a breakdown of security at Twitter.
“While it’s tempting to laugh at the irony of it, the real-world consequences don’t make it funny,” Chiara said of Dorsey’s account being hacked. “Twitter can tell us that they are becoming more diligent with our privacy and security, but actions speak louder than words.”
The incident raised fresh concerns about how social media users, even prominent ones, can have their accounts compromised and used for misinformation, a point highlighted by Canadian member of parliament Michelle Rempel Garner.
“Between bots, trolls and abuse, I’ve been skeptical about @Twitter as a viable platform for some time now,” Rempel Garner wrote. “But the fact it took the platform’s owner (@jack) about 30 min to get his hacked account under control is deeply problematic, and makes me worry as an elected official.”
Valerie Harper, who scored guffaws and stole hearts as Rhoda Morgenstern on back-to-back hit sitcoms in the 1970s, has died. She was 80.
Longtime family friend Dan Watt confirmed Harper died Friday, adding the family wasn’t immediately releasing any further details.
Harper was a breakout star playing the lovable sidekick on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” then as the funny leading lady of the spinoff series “Rhoda.”
In March 2013, she revealed that she had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. She had battled lung cancer in 2009, and her husband-manager said recently that he’d been advised to place her in hospice.
Harper appeared on Broadway and in feature films, including “Freebie and the Bean” and “Chapter Two.”
The WHO announced Thursday it will create a global registry to track research into human genetic manipulation, after a call to halt all work on germline genome editing, used in China last year to genetically modify twin baby girls.
“New genome editing technologies hold great promise and hope for those who suffer from diseases we once thought untreatable,” the World Health Organization’s Director General for told the body’s genome editing oversight committee meeting in Geneva.
“But some uses of these technologies also pose unique and unprecedented challenges — ethical, social, regulatory and technical,” he added.
He Jiankui, a Chinese researcher, center, speaks during the Human Genome Editing Conference in Hong Kong, Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2018. He made his first public comments about his claim to have helped make the world’s first gene-edited babies.
Chinese scientist He Jiankui’s announcement last November that he had altered the DNA of twins girls in southern China by using molecular scissors, ostensibly to prevent them from contracting HIV.
He was then fired from his university, put under police investigation and ordered to halt his work.
But his announcement provoked a global backlash from scientists saying the untested procedure was unethical and potentially dangerous and in December the WHO set up an expert committee to look into the matter.
About 30 nations have legislation directly or indirectly barring all clinical use of germline editing.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus emphasised that countries should not allow any further work on human germline genome editing “until the technical and ethical implications have been properly considered,” the WHO said in a statement.
Accepting the recommendation of its 18-member expert committee, WHO announced plans for an initial phase of the registry to include both germline and somatic clinical trials.
Somatic mutations occur in a single body cell and cannot be inherited while germline mutations can be passed onto offspring.
Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong was arrested Friday ahead of another weekend of planned protests in the Chinese-ruled city that is grappling with its biggest political crisis since its handover to Beijing more than two decades ago.
Wong, the face of Hong Kong’s push for full democracy during protests in 2014 that paralyzed parts of the city for 79 days, was released from jail in June after serving a five-week term for contempt of court.
“He was suddenly pushed into a private car on the street,” Wong’s political party Demosisto, which advocates for greater democracy in Hong Kong, said on its official Twitter account.
“He has now been escorted to the police headquarters in Wan Chai,” it said, adding its lawyers were working on the case.
Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Extradition bill was trigger
Unrest in Hong Kong escalated in mid-June over a now-suspended extradition bill that would have allowed people to be sent to mainland China for trial in Communist Party-controlled courts.
It has since evolved into calls for greater democracy under the “one country, two systems” formula, which guarantees freedoms not enjoyed on the mainland, including an independent judiciary.
On Thursday, China brought fresh troops into Hong Kong in what it described as a routine rotation of the garrison.
Chinese state media stressed the troop movement was routine, and Asian and Western diplomats watching the People’s Liberation Army forces in the former British colony had been expecting it.
Chinese soldiers stationed in Hong Kong are not there merely for symbolic purposes and they will have “no reason to sit on their hands” if the situation in the city worsens, an editorial in the China Daily newspaper said Friday.
Police have refused permission for a pro-democracy march on Saturday, but organizers have appealed the decision.
The protest would mark five years since Beijing ruled out universal suffrage for Hong Kong and comes as Hong Kong faces its first recession in a decade, with all its pillars of growth under stress.
North Korea’s parliament has approved changes to the country’s constitution to solidify leader Kim Jong Un’s role as head of state, official state media said Thursday.
The move came after Kim was formally named head of state and commander in chief of the military in a new constitution in July that analysts said was possibly aimed at preparing for a peace treaty with the United States.
North Korea has long called for a peace deal with the United States to normalize relations and end the technical state of war that has existed since the 1950-53 Korean War, which concluded with an armistice rather than a peace treaty.
‘Monolithic guidance’
Kim’s legal status as “representing our state has been further consolidated to firmly ensure the monolithic guidance of the Supreme Leader over all state affairs,” state news agency KCNA quoted Choe Ryong Hae, president of the presidium of the supreme people’s assembly, as saying.
The presidium president had historically been the nominal head of state. But the new constitution said Kim, as chairman of the State Affairs Commission (SAC), a top governing body created in 2016, was the supreme representative of all the Korean people, as well as “commander in chief.”
A previous constitution simply called Kim the “supreme leader” who commanded the country’s “overall military force.”
Thursday’s constitutional amendments appear to confirm that North Korea’s legal system will now recognize Kim as head of state.
The new constitution authorizes Kim to promulgate legislative ordinances and major decrees and decisions and appoint or recall diplomatic envoys to foreign countries, KCNA said.
FILE – Senior military officials watch a parade as portraits of the late North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are seen at the main Kim Il Sung square in Pyongyang.
“With the amendment, Kim Jong Un is reviving his grandfather’s head of state system,” said Cheong Seong-chang, a senior fellow at the Sejong Institute. “He has become a de facto head of state.”
In reality, Kim, a third-generation hereditary leader, rules North Korea with an iron fist and the title change will mean little to the way he wields power.
The back-to-back constitutional revisions are unprecedented, and Kim is emerging as perhaps the most powerful leader since his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, who founded North Korea, said Rachel Minyoung Lee, an analyst with NK News, a website that tracks North Korea.
“By further bolstering the SAC chairman’s authority, Kim Jong Un is now on par with Kim Il Sung,” she said.
Other analysts noted that the moves simply codified the power Kim Jong Un already wields as supreme leader.
“This is more a matter of shuffling the card deck and clarifying a few lines of authority,” said Michael Madden, an expert on North Korean leadership and a fellow at the U.S-based Stimson Center.
“There is no question that Kim Jong Un is the regime’s key and — on strategic policy — sole decider,” he said.
Little progress toward denuclearization
There has been scant progress in the U.S. aim of getting North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program despite three meetings between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un.
Trump has said he and Kim agreed at their last meeting to resume working-level talks, although this has yet to happen.
North Korea has since conducted multiple missile tests, while accusing Washington of breaking a pledge to stop joint military exercises with South Korea.
Democratic U.S. Senators Chris Coons and Chris Van Hollen last week endorsed taking action to head off a possible Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, lauded an innovative Ugandan approach to resettling war refugees, and called for greater political openness in Uganda.
The senators spoke to VOA after traveling to Uganda earlier this month. The Aug. 12-15 trip occurred as Ebola was spreading in the neighboring DRC. During the last pandemic, Coons said, “we made a critical investment in protecting Liberia, West Africa and frankly the world, and we could and should do that again in the Democratic Republic of the Congo today.”
Senator Chris Van Hollen, left, walks with CARE President and CEO Michelle Nunn, while touring refugee settlements in Uganda, Aug. 14, 2019.
The two also met with refugees fleeing South Sudanese and Congolese conflicts, and Coons praised Uganda’s response to the refugee influx. Refugees in Uganda live in settlements resembling villages and are granted small land plots and the immediate right to work. They are also more deliberately integrated into local communities, which includes access to local schools. This is in contrast to most parts of the world, where refugees are housed in camps.
“This is a compelling model that reduces tensions between the refugees and the host communities,” Coons said of settlements he toured in Bidi Bidi and Lobule in northern Uganda. Such arrangements “make it possible for refugee families to grow and develop until there’s a time when their host countries are safe enough for them to return. And it’s a model that’s being made possible by some significant support from the United States.”
A woman’s fingerprints are scanned before receiving a cash voucher at the Lobule refugee settlement in Uganda. August 14, 2019 (T. Krug/VOA)
In between rain showers, Coons and Van Hollen toured the Lobule refugee settlement, where refugees were receiving cash vouchers through the World Food Program to be used in local markets. In its use of vouchers, increasingly employed as an alternative to the delivery of bulk food, the WFP has been building on a pilot program implemented in 2014 of providing cash vouchers to refugees.
According to an email from Stephan Deutscher, a program policy officer for cash-based transfers at the WFP, as of this month, WFP Uganda was providing “monthly unconditional unrestricted cash transfers to more than 360,000 refugees in eight settlements across the country,” including Lobule, with the hope of reaching up to 500,000 refugees by the end of the year.
“The cash transfer value is equivalent to the value of the food basket refugees would otherwise receive in kind,” Deutscher wrote, currently 31,000 Ugandan shillings (about $8.40) per month.
With that money, refugees were able to immediately gain access to — and invest in buying and reselling of — produce in local markets. One group of women standing around a stand that sold fish and vegetables, several yards from where the cash vouchers were distributed, said that while the money was not enough, it helped.
Coons said he was encouraged at how the food assistance had developed even since he visited Uganda in 2017 with former Republican Senator Bob Corker.
Coons praised the program, calling it “a more flexible, more cost-effective, more sustainable model for delivering food assistance.”
Uganda’s Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda addresses the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly, Sept. 27, 2018, at the United Nations headquarters.
In addition to meeting with refugees in the northern Ugandan settlements at Lobule and Bidi Bidi, one of the world’s largest refugee settlements, Coons and Van Hollen met with Ugandan Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda, raising the issue of criticism of President Yoweri Museveni, who has been widely criticized domestically and globally for overstaying his time in office and suppressing opposition.
Coons called the relationship with the Ugandan government, which works with Washington in the fight against al-Shabab, “complex.”
“There have been significant actions by the government, by President Museveni, who has been president for decades, to constrain civil society, to harass or threaten political opponents, to shut down news outlets, and to pass legislation that narrows the space for civil society in Uganda,” Coons said.
“While it certainly is not the most oppressive regime in Africa, it clearly needs to create more open political space in the country for dissenting voices and opposition views,” Van Hollen said. “I raised that issue with the prime minister, especially as it related to providing the growing youth population an opportunity to express themselves politically, and they have adopted this new law that says that people can engage in protests, but in order to do so, they have to get these government permits, and the government uses that device to suppress dissent.”
Earlier this month, the academic Stella Nyanzi was sentenced to jail for 18 months for “cyber harassing and offensive communication” for a poem she wrote and posted on Facebook last year, in which she wished that the president had burned up in his mother’s birth canal.
Pop star, minister of parliament and presidential hopeful Bobi Wine, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi, was charged this month with “annoying” the president after Wine and other opposition leaders allegedly stoned the president’s convoy in August 2018.
“I thought it was important that we met with Bobi Wine,” Van Hollen said of a brief meeting toward the beginning of the trip, “and not because the United States should take a position or support any particular candidate. We should not do that, but we should support a process that creates more political space and room for dissent within the democratic process.”
In a separate encounter later that week, Van Hollen added that while debarking in Nairobi on a flight from Uganda, he and Coons ran into Wine, who was in Kenya to record music.
“He was worried that the Ugandan authorities would crack down on the music studio if he tried to record it in Uganda,” Van Hollen said.
“That’s just another example of fear of government suppression, and it’s not without reason.”
Teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg arrived in New York on Wednesday after crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a zero-emissions sailboat to attend a conference on global warming.
The 16-year-old Swede set sail from Plymouth, England, on Aug. 14. At 4 a.m., she tweeted:
Thunberg came to the U.S. for the U.N. climate summit and chose to sail rather than fly to avoid the greenhouse gas emissions that come with commercial jet travel.
Thunberg said she first learned about climate change when she was 8 years old and became very concerned about the future of humanity.
A few years later, she was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and selective mutism. “That basically means I only speak when I think it’s necessary,” she told the audience at a TED Talk last year. “Now is one of those moments.”
In August 2018, Thunberg stopped attending school on Fridays and took to protesting alone outside the Swedish parliament. She called it a strike intended to draw attention to climate change.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg sails into New York harbor aboard the Malizia II, a zero-emissions yacht, Aug. 28, 2019.
The boat carrying Thunberg, the Malizia II, has the hashtag #FridaysForFuture under “UNITE BEHIND THE SCIENCE” inscribed on the sails.
The sailboat’s onboard electronics are powered by solar panels and underwater turbines. It has no toilet or fixed shower aboard, no windows below deck and only a small gas cooker to heat up freeze-dried food.
Thunberg’s boat was greeted by a flotilla of 17 sailboats representing each of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals on their sails.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres welcomed Thunberg on Twitter:
Thunberg will speak at the U.N. Climate Action Summit next month and then attend a climate summit in Chile in December. She is taking a year off from school to pursue her activism.
Actress Keira Knightley turns to the 2003 Iraq War for her latest film “Official Secrets,” in which she portrays a British government employee who was fired for leaking a secret U.S. memo in the run-up to the conflict.
The 34-year old plays Katharine Gun, a former translator at Britain’s global spy center who was charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act for leaking a U.S. memo seeking London’s help in spying on the United Nations.
Knightley spoke to Reuters about the role. Below are edited excerpts of the interview.
Q: Very few people know Gun’s story.
Knightley: “I remember the lead up to that conflict really well and I do not remember anything about this story…I thought wow, this is a really interesting thing to shine a light on, particularly when you look at the conflict in Iraq in terms of history, you think well that’s a piece of the puzzle that feels very important and that I think people should know more about.”
Q: Why is it important for people to know more about it?
Knightley: “It’s the questions that it brings: government accountability, legality of conflict and if perhaps conflicts are not legal, who is held accountable for that? How do we want our societies to work?”
Q: How much of it was a wakeup call to our generation to pay more attention to politics and foreign affairs?
Knightley: “Definitely within my friendship group it was such a moment of disillusionment because we all went to the streets…and the idea…that they weren’t listening…and that feeling of disillusionment and that feeling of shock at certain political figures maybe not telling the truth, I think has had a major impact.”
Q: Being a mother, how do these things play on your mind for the next generation?
Knightley: “It’s going to be climate change isn’t it? It seems pretty apparent and if you read anything about climate change it seems that they’re going to be the massive things that younger generations are going to be hugely fighting against. The question really for our generation is are we doing enough?”
Q: How has the film helped you to understand what it takes for someone to risk everything by whistle blowing?
Knightley: “There will be many people that don’t believe what Katharine did was right. There will be many people who do believe what Katharine did was right. What you can’t question is her courage. The idea that somebody has a moral reaction to something and puts everything on the line…for something she believed was right in order to…save lives is an extraordinary thing. Would I have the courage to do that? I don’t know.”
French rescuers picked up 22 migrants — including 11 children — whose vessel broke down as they tried to cross the Channel in a bid to reach Britain, French maritime authorities said Tuesday.
A British fishing boat had alerted French officials on Tuesday afternoon after spotting the boat in distress.
The migrants were eventually brought back to Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France and handed over to border police.
Migrants are taking ever greater risks to reach Britain from France, which has taken an uncompromising approach toward so-called economic migrants who come to Europe in search of a better life.
Since January, some 1,450 migrants have been rescued either by British or French coast guards — more than double the number who tried to cross the busy shipping lane in the whole of 2018, according to official French figures released Monday.
France has attributed a recent spike in attempts to good summer weather, which has emboldened more migrants to make the journey.
However, such crossings remain dangerous given the heavy maritime traffic in the Channel as well as strong currents.
The body of an Iraqi migrant who tried to swim across the Channel from France to Britain on Monday was found off Belgium’s coast, wearing a makeshift life jacket made of empty plastic bottles.
Officials believe the 48-year-old drowned after setting off from a beach in northern France, with currents dragging him into Belgian waters.
British interior minister Priti Patel is set to discuss the issue of illegal migration on Thursday with her French counterpart Christophe Castaner.
OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP and its owners, the Sackler family, are in discussion to settle more than 2,000 opioid lawsuits against the company for $10 billion to $12 billion, two people familiar with the matter said Tuesday.
Purdue is among several drugmakers and distributors that have been sued for fueling an opioid addiction crisis in the United States, which claimed 400,000 lives from 1999 to 2017, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The lawsuits have accused the Stamford, Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma of aggressively marketing prescription opioids while misleading prescribers and consumers about risks from their prolonged use. Purdue and the Sacklers have denied the allegations.
Purdue said it was actively working with state attorneys general and other plaintiffs to reach a resolution, without specifying a settlement amount.
There is currently no agreement and the settlement discussions could collapse, the sources said.
FILE – Purdue Pharma offices are seen in Stamford, Connecticut, May 8, 2007.
Representatives for Purdue and the Sackler family held discussions with cities, counties and states on the contours of the potential multibillion-dollar settlement last week in Cleveland, said a person familiar with the matter.
During the meeting, Purdue outlined a plan to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as a mechanism for implementing the settlement, which the company hopes will address the lawsuits, the person said.
The Sacklers would cede control of Purdue under the settlement terms discussed last week, the person said.
All the parties face a Friday deadline to update a federal judge on the status of the negotiations, the person said.
The company has said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved labels for OxyContin that warned about risk and abuse associated with treating pain. The Sacklers have argued they were passive board members who approved routine management requests rather than micromanaging the marketing of OxyContin.
Restructuring
The settlement offer was first reported by NBC. Paul Hanly, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, in an email, replied only “Made up. Ridiculous,” when asked to confirm NBC’s report. Asked to clarify after Reuters confirmed the report, he did not respond.
Representatives for the Sackler family declined to comment and a representative for the state attorneys general did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The plan under discussion envisions Purdue restructuring into a for-profit “public benefit trust” that would last for at least a decade, one of the people familiar with the matter said.
Purdue would contribute between $7 billion and $8 billion to the trust, with some of the money coming from the sales of its drugs, including those that combat opioid overdoses, the person said. Three experts would be approved by a bankruptcy judge as trustees who would select board members to run the trust, this person said.
The Sackler family, which has amassed an estimated $13 billion fortune over the years, is also weighing a possible sale of another pharmaceutical firm it owns called Mundipharma, with some of the proceeds potentially going toward the settlement under discussion, the person said.
David Sackler, one of a handful of family members who previously sat on Purdue’s board, was present for the discussions in the meeting last week, which included at least 10 state attorneys general, the person said.
Purdue is set on Oct. 21 to go on trial for the first time over about 2,000 federal lawsuits, largely by local governments, accusing several drug makers and distributors of fueling the epidemic.
Other companies set to face trial include drugmakers Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd and Johnson & Johnson and drug distributors McKesson Corp, Cardinal Health Inc and AmerisourceBergen Corp.
U.S. District Judge Dan Polster in Cleveland, Ohio, who oversees the lawsuits, has been pushing for settlements that could “do something meaningful to abate this crisis.”
Bankruptcy protection
Purdue, the Sacklers and the communities involved face high-stakes negotiations and Purdue has been preparing for filing for bankruptcy protection in case it cannot reach an agreement.
Going into Chapter 11 would give Purdue the exclusive right for several months to propose a reorganization plan, which if approved by a U.S. bankruptcy judge could be forced on any local governments who decide to hold out.
Some state attorneys general have said they will resist any attempt by Purdue to use bankruptcy.
New York Attorney General Letitia James subpoenaed Wall Street banks, Purdue corporate entities and family offices in mid-August for records related to the Sackler family’s finances, according to court records.
In a letter to a judge in an earlier lawsuit, her office characterized payouts to the Sacklers from Purdue as fraudulent conveyances, a legal designation for clawing back money during bankruptcy proceedings.
“The opioid epidemic has ravaged American communities for over a decade, while a single family has made billions profiting from death and destruction,” James said in a statement. “We won’t let up until we have delivered justice.”
A lawyer representing the Sackler family said in a statement that the New York attorney general’s “current claims are without merit and the subpoenas are improper.”
A collection of 27 outfits worn by Hollywood legend Olivia de Havilland is going up for auction next month, some of which she wore on screen during her acting career more than 50 years ago.
The Sept. 17 online auction at Chicago-based Hindman also includes haute couture designs by Christian Dior that de Havilland, who turned 103 in July, wore at movie premieres and galas between 1954-1989.
De Havilland, a double Oscar winner who is best known for playing Melanie Wilkes in “Gone with the Wind,” sold the bulk of her Dior collection at a London auction in 1993.
FILE – U.S. actress Olivia de Havilland poses during an interview, in Paris, June 18, 2016.
The items up for sale next month are being sold by her family, Hindman auctions said on Monday.
They include a green Dior dress the actress wore in the 1964 movie “Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte,” a belted day dress she was photographed in the day before her 1954 wedding to her second husband, Pierre Galante, and eight evening gowns.
Prices for the outfits, some of which include shoes, range from $300-$5,000.
De Havilland made her last screen appearance in the 1988 TV movie “The Woman He Loved” and now lives quietly in France.
The U.S. government plans to launch a program in roughly one month that narrowly focuses on protecting voter registration databases and systems ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
These systems, which are widely used to validate the eligibility of voters before they cast ballots, were compromised in 2016 by Russian hackers seeking to collect information.
Intelligence officials are concerned that foreign hackers in 2020 not only will target the databases but attempt to manipulate, disrupt or destroy the data, according to current and former U.S. officials.
“We assess these systems as high risk,” said a senior U.S. official, because they are one of the few pieces of election technology regularly connected to the internet.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, a division of the Homeland Security Department, fears the databases could be targeted by ransomware, a type of virus that has crippled city computer networks across the United States, including recently in Texas, Baltimore and Atlanta.
FILE – Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Christopher Krebs testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 22, 2019.
“Recent history has shown that state and county governments and those who support them are targets for ransomware attacks,” said Christopher Krebs, CISA’s director. “That is why we are working alongside election officials and their private sector partners to help protect their databases and respond to possible ransomware attacks.”
Demands for payment
A ransomware attack typically locks an infected computer system until payment, usually in the form of cryptocurrency, is sent to the hacker.
The effort to counter ransomware-style cyberattacks aimed at the election runs parallel to a larger intelligence community directive to determine the most likely vectors of digital attack in the November 2020 election, according to current and former U.S. officials.
“It is imperative that states and municipalities limit the availability of information about electoral systems or administrative processes and secure their websites and databases that could be exploited,” the FBI said in a statement, supporting the Homeland Security initiative.
CISA’s program will reach out to state election officials to prepare for such a ransomware scenario. It will provide educational material, remote computer penetration testing, and vulnerability scans as well as a list of recommendations on how to prevent and recover from ransomware.
These guidelines, however, will not offer advice on whether a state should ultimately pay or refuse to pay ransom to a hacker if one of its systems is already infected.
“Our thought is we don’t want the states to have to be in that situation,” said a Homeland Security official. “We’re focused on preventing it from happening.”
Over the last two years, cyber criminals and nation state hacking groups have used ransomware to extort victims and create chaos. In one incident in 2017, which has since been attributed to Russian hackers, a ransomware virus was used to mask a data deletion technique, rendering victim computers totally unusable.
That attack, dubbed “NotPetya,” went on to damage global corporations, including FedEx and Maersk, which had offices in Ukraine where the malware first spread.
Threat ‘far from over’
The threat is concerning because of its potential impact on voting results, experts say.
“A pre-election undetected attack could tamper with voter lists, creating huge confusion and delays, disenfranchisement, and at large enough scale could compromise the validity of the election,” said John Sebes, chief technology officer of the ESET Institute, an election technology policy think tank.
The databases are also “particularly susceptible to this kind of attack because local jurisdictions and states actively add, remove, and change the data year-round,” said Maurice Turner, a senior technologist with the Center for Democracy and Technology. “If the malicious actor doesn’t provide the key, the data is lost forever unless the victim has a recent backup.”
Nationwide, the local governments that store and update voter registration data are typically ill-equipped to defend themselves against elite hackers.
State election officials told Reuters they have improved their cyber defenses since 2016, including in some cases preparing backups for voter registration databases in case of an attack. But there is no common standard for how often local governments should create backups, said a senior Homeland Security official.
“We have to remember that this threat to our democracy will not go away, and concern about ransomware attacks on voter registration databases is one clear example,” said Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos. “We’re sure the threat is far from over.”
A Brazilian Supreme Court justice believes jailed ex-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva deserves a retrial after leaked social media conversations appeared to show the judge hearing Brazil’s largest-ever corruption case collaborated with prosecutors.
Justice Gilmar Mendes said in an interview with Reuters that the so-called Car Wash investigation was a success in battling the “metastasis of corruption” in Brazil but it became politicized and prosecutors went too far.
Lula is serving a 12-year prison sentence for taking bribes, and the judge who convicted him, Sergio Moro, is now Brazil’s justice minister in right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro’s cabinet.
Mendes’ views could influence other judges on the 11-member Supreme Court, which has postponed a politically charged ruling on whether Moro was impartial when trying Lula. If it rules he was not, Lula would face retrial and could be exonerated. The Bolsonaro government and its supporters fiercely oppose any move by the court that could result in Lula’s freedom.
Mendes said there are doubts about whether due process was followed in Lula’s trial and whether he was actually complicit in the huge corruption scheme uncovered by Car Wash that involved bribes and political kickbacks on contracts with oil company Petrobras and other state-run companies.
“We owe Lula a fair trial,” Mendes said in the interview on Thursday in his Supreme Court offices.
Mendes has been a main critic of the excessive use of plea bargains and provisional detentions of suspects in the sprawling Car Wash investigation that led to the jailing of high-profile politicians and construction executives. He has previously been vocal about perceived irregularities in the prosecution of Lula.
Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, center left, is greeted by supporters as he arrives to the Federal Justice building in Curitiba, Brazil, May 10 2017.
Lula, a popular leftist leader, was tried for receiving a beachside apartment and a country house from engineering firms in return for their winning lucrative state contracts under his Workers Party’s government.
The leaking of conversations between Moro and prosecutors by the news website The Intercept was a positive step, according to Mendes, as it could be the nail in the coffin of the Car Wash investigation that had come to “monopolize” Brazil’s war on corruption.
“Car Wash had become a sort of Holy Trinity: They investigated, they judged, they convicted and they made the laws,” Mendes said.
Moro and lead Car Wash prosecutor Deltan Dalagnol have denied any wrongdoing in their communications.
Mendes said the leaked conversations suggest Moro and prosecutors behaved improperly without oversight from other institutions.
The leaks revealed that prosecutors went as far as planning to investigate Mendes, his family and the Supreme Court’s current Chief Justice Dias Toffoli for tax irregularities.
“But things are being put back in their place,” Mendes said, referring to pushback from politicians in Congress, where lawmakers – many of whom have been probed for graft – passed a bill that curtails the investigative powers of prosecutors and judges.
Brazil’s Justice Minister Sergio Moro talks during an interview with Reuters in Brasilia, Brazil, Aug. 12, 2019.
Congress also blocked Moro’s plan to move to his ministry the Council for Control over Financial Activities Control (COAF), a key tool for flagging suspicious funds moving through the banking system. It has now been put under the Central Bank’s responsibility.
Mendes said the attempt to move the COAF was part of a political plan to gain access to tax and other information that could be leaked or used against critics, even to blackmail them.
Whoever controls such information has “immense political power,” he said.
He provided no evidence to support this. The Justice Ministry did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Nigeria’s agency for combating human trafficking is repatriating and re-settling women who have been subjected to forced labor and prostitution after being smuggled into Europe on false promises of working at well-paying jobs. Thousands of Nigerian women have been trafficked in recent years, though some were lucky enough to be able to return to their country. Timothy Obiezu takes a closer look at the story of some human trafficking victims who are now back in Nigeria rebuilding their lives.
Opera legend Placido Domingo was greeted with a standing ovation in Salzburg, Austria, at his first appearance on stage since nine women accused him of sexual harassment dating back three decades.
Even before he sang a single note, Domingo was greeted with a thunderous applause that grew to a crescendo until most of the house was on its feet.
“Wonderful public, good performance all,” the Spanish-born singer said as he signed autographs after the performance of Verdi’s tragic opera Luisa Miller. “I mean, so much love from the public.”
The Associated Press reported last week that nine women accused Domingo of using his position as general director at the Los Angeles Opera and elsewhere to try to pressure them into sexual relationships. Several of the woman said he offered them jobs and then punished them professionally if they refused his advances. Allegations included repeated phone calls, invitations to hotel rooms and his apartment, and unwanted touching and kisses.
In a statement to the AP, Domingo called the allegations “deeply troubling and, as presented inaccurate” and that he believed his interactions with the women were consensual.
Two U.S. opera houses, in Philadelphia and San Francisco cancelled performances by Domingo after the allegations surfaced, while others, including New York’s Metropolitan Opera, took a wait-and-see attitude pending an investigation.
As of Sunday, Domingo was still booked to star in Macbeth at the Met in New York next month.
Hong Kong police drew their guns and fired a warning shot Sunday night after protesters attacked officers with sticks and rods, and brought out water cannon trucks for the first time, an escalation in the summerlong protests that have shaken the city’s government and residents.
The day’s main showdown took place on a major drag in the outlying Tsuen Wan district following a protest march that ended in a nearby park. While a large crowd rallied in the park, a group of hard-line protesters took over a main street, strewing bamboo poles on the pavement and lining up orange and white traffic barriers and cones to obstruct police.
After hoisting warning flags, police used tear gas to try to disperse the crowd. Protesters responded by throwing bricks and gasoline bombs toward the police. The result was a surreal scene of small fires and scattered paving bricks on the street between the two sides, rising clouds of tear gas and green and blue laser lights pointed by the protesters at the police.
The protesters eventually decided to abandon their position. Two water cannon trucks and a phalanx of police vehicles with flashing lights joined riot police on foot as they advanced up the street. They met little resistance. Television footage showed a water cannon being fired once, but perhaps more as a test, as it didn’t appear to reach the retreating protesters.
Officers pulled their guns after a group of remaining protesters chased them down a street with sticks and rods, calling them “gangsters.” The officers held up their shields to defend themselves as they retreated. Police said that one officer fell to the ground and six drew their pistols after they were surrounded, with one firing the warning shot.
Some protesters said they’re resorting to violence because the government has not responded to their peaceful demonstrations.
“The escalation you’re seeing now is just a product of our government’s indifference toward the people of Hong Kong,” said Rory Wong, who was at the showdown after the march.
One neighborhood resident, Dong Wong, complained about the tear gas.
“I live on the 15th floor and I can even smell it at home,” he said. “I have four dogs, sneezing, sneezing all day. … The protesters didn’t do anything, they just blocked the road to protect themselves.”
Police said they arrested 36 people, including a 12-year-old, for offenses such as unlawful assembly, possession of an offensive weapon and assaulting police officers.
Earlier Sunday, tens of thousands of umbrella-carrying protesters marched in the rain. Many filled Tsuen Wan Park, the endpoint of the rally, chanting, “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong,” the South China Morning Post newspaper reported.
The march in Hong Kong’s New Territories started near the Kwai Fong train station, which has become a focal point for protesters after police used tear gas there earlier this month. Police with riot gear could be seen moving into position along the march route.
Protesters have taken to the semiautonomous Chinese territory’s streets for more than two months. Their demands include democratic elections and an investigation into police use of force to quell the protests.
A large group clashed with police on Saturday after a march in the Kowloon Bay neighborhood, building barricades and setting fires in the streets. Police said they arrested 29 people for various offenses, including unlawful assembly, possession of offensive weapons and assaulting police officers.
The clashes, while not as prolonged or violent as some earlier ones, ended a brief lull in the violence. The protests, which began in early June, had turned largely peaceful the previous weekend, after weeks of escalating violence.
In nearby Macao, another Chinese territory, a pro-Beijing committee chose a businessman as the gambling hub’s next leader with little of the controversy surrounding the government in Hong Kong.
Ho Iat-seng, running unopposed, will succeed current leader Chui Sai-on in December. Asked about the protests in Hong Kong, the 62-year-old Ho said they would end eventually, like a major typhoon.
Protesters in Hong Kong have demanded that the city’s leader, Carrie Lam, also chosen by a pro-Beijing committee, step down, though that demand has evolved into a broader call for fully democratic elections.
U.S. President Donald Trump is in Biarritz, France, for the G-7 summit, where he will be meeting world leaders who oppose his stances on many issues, including tariffs, Brexit, climate protection, China, Iran and Russia.
But in this meeting of the leaders of the world’s major industrialized countries, there could be areas of cooperation where Trump is willing to offer support, or at least not resist: women’s empowerment and Africa.
French President Emmanuel Macron, as the G-7 2019 president and summit host, has chosen combating inequality as the theme, with gender equality and partnership with Africa as key issues. He will be pushing several initiatives, including the Biarritz Partnership for Gender Equality and Partnership for the African Sahel. Macron also will be calling for renewed support for Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa.
Despite Trump’s skepticism of foreign aid and his rejection of globalism, including his famous statement in front of the 2018 U.N. General Assembly that the U.S. “will not tell you how to live or work or worship,” his administration has indicated it may support at least some of these initiatives, noting that the White House has launched similar efforts.
On Sunday Trump will participate in a G-7 working lunch on inequality and a session on the partnership with Africa later in the afternoon.
FILE – Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of U.N. Women, speaks during the opening ceremony of the Women’s Forum Americas in Mexico City, May 30, 2019.
Biarritz partnership for gender equality
Earlier this year, Macron formed a G-7 Gender Equality Advisory Council whose members include Executive Director of U.N. Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and gender equality activist and actor Emma Watson. The council is tasked with identifying legislative measures worldwide to combat gender violence and discrimination, as well as to improve girls’ access to education and support women’s economic empowerment.
Macron is pushing countries to join the partnership and adopt the laws and public policies identified by the council.
He also will call for renewed support for African women’s credit financing through the Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa initiative, a pan-African mechanism to reduce the cost of accessing credit and bridge the $42 billion financing gap being faced by women on the continent.
The White House has not announced whether it will sign on to any of the G-7 initiatives on gender equality. But a senior administration official told reporters that global women’s empowerment is a “huge priority for this administration” and a message “we really want to drive home this weekend in France,” citing the launch of the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) initiative and commitment as a founding member to We-Fi, a partnership hosted by the World Bank Group to finance women entrepreneurs.
W-GDP was launched by the White House in February 2019, and it is billed as “the first whole-of-government effort to advance global women’s economic empowerment.”
The president’s daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump, is leading the administration’s efforts on global women’s empowerment.
Renewed focus on Africa
Africa is Europe’s immediate neighbor, and instability on the southern side of the Mediterranean has an impact on the northern side, with the migrant crisis being the most visible example.
With that in mind, Germany and France are proposing a new partnership with Africa, including an initiative to enhance international commitment for the Sahel, a region facing multiple challenges ranging from the impact of climate change to the threat of terrorism.
The G-5 Sahel countries are Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger.
Macron also has invited Senegal, Egypt, Burkina Faso, South Africa and Rwanda to join the G-7 countries in discussions about issues important to the continent.
The formal invitation of African partners to the G-7 “opens an opportunity to drive forward key items on the African agenda, where priorities should be placed, how they should be financed, what the necessary coalitions for success are,” Yvonne Mburu told VOA. Mburu is founder and CEO of Nexakli, a global network of African health professionals and member of Macron’s Presidential Council of Africa.
Mburu said the litmus test would be whether there will be measurable outcomes from the G-7 deliberations, and whether there is an accompanying mobilization of financial resources.
Sahel Alliance
At the summit, G-7 leaders will be encouraged to join the Sahel Alliance, which seeks to economically develop the region and strengthen support for members’ national security.
The U.S. government has already expressed doubts about financing a new U.N.-backed mission in the Sahel, but it might be open to the new format of cooperation that the French team wants to discuss, said Karoline Postel-Vinay, a research professor at the Paris-based institute Sciences Po. “However, as we now know, American foreign strategy seems predictably unpredictable,” she added.
Ivanka Trump leaves the African Women’s Empowerment Dialogue, with Overseas Private Investment Corp. acting CEO David Bohigian, right, and security staff, April 15, 2019, at the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa building in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Despite not outwardly obstructing the G-7 agenda on Africa, it’s unclear how much substantive support the administration would provide.
A White House statement ahead of the summit applauded the efforts of partners and the international community to promote peace and stability in Africa but did not mention whether the U.S. would provide additional economic or security assistance in the Sahel as called for by Macron.
The White House instead pointed to its Prosper Africa private-financing initiative and the BUILD Act as proof of the administration’s commitment. The law was passed in 2018 and aims to facilitate private capital in developing low-income economies.
Analysts say the administration’s policy on Africa is focused more on investment, in particular in the context of countering China.
While it hasn’t abandoned any of the pillars of focus that previous administrations have had on the continent, the Trump administration is “doing less with less,” said Judd Devermont, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The administration is running the traps on some of the security stuff,” said Devermont, “but without the same robustness of previous administrations and certainly not anywhere near where we were in democracy and governance.”
He added that Trump does not have the personal connection that President Barack Obama had with the continent, nor the interest in development that President George W. Bush had.
On Thursday, Trump scrapped a proposal to freeze more than $4 billion in foreign aid after objections from lawmakers of both parties and his own Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Divisions elsewhere
While there may be some consensus on gender equality and Africa, there clearly are deep divisions between members.
For the first time in its history, this summit will not produce a joint communique amid deepening divisions between leaders over myriad issues.
Six people were injured Saturday when lightning struck a 60-foot pine at the Tour Championship where they were taking cover from rain and showered them with debris, Atlanta police said.
A pine tree is stripped of bark after being hit by lightning at East Lake Golf Club during the third round of the Tour Championship golf tournament, Aug. 24, 2019, in Atlanta.
The third round of the season-ending PGA Tour event at East Lake Golf Club had been suspended for about 30 minutes because of storms in the area, and fans were instructed to seek shelter. The strike hit the top of the tree just off the 16th tee and shattered the bark all the way to the bottom.
Ambulances streamed into the private club about 6 miles east of downtown Atlanta. The players already had been taken into the clubhouse before the lightning hit.
Brad Uhl of Atlanta was among those crammed under a hospital tent to the right of the 16th hole that was open to the public.
“There was just a big explosion and then an aftershock so strong you could feel the wind from it,” Uhl said after the last of the ambulances pulled out of the golf course. “It was just a flash out of the corner of the eye.”
Atlanta police spokesman James H. White III said five men and one female juvenile were injured in the lightning strike. He said they were taken to hospitals for further treatment, all of them alert, conscious and breathing.
The PGA Tour canceled the rest of golf Saturday, with the round to resume at 8 a.m. Sunday, followed by the final round.
Last week at the BMW Championship in the Chicago suburbs, Phil Mickelson was delayed getting to the golf course when lightning struck the top of his hotel, causing a precautionary evacuation.
When a “Himalayan tsunami” roars down from the rooftop of the world, water from an overflowing glacial lake obeys gravity. Obliterating everything in its path, a burst is predictable only in its destructiveness.
“There was no meaning in it,” one person who withstood the waters in India’s Himalayas told a Public Radio International reporter. “It didn’t give anyone a chance to survive.”
Christian Huggel, a professor at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who specializes in glaciology and geomorphodynamics (the study of changing forms of geologic surfaces), said thousands of cubic meters of water moving down a mountain “is really quite destructive and it can happen suddenly.”
That water comes from glacial lake outburst floods, or GLOFs, which are increasing in frequency as climate change increases the rate of glacial melting. This catastrophic lake drainage occurs wherever there are glaciers in places such as Peru and Alaska.
The most devastating GLOFs occur in the Himalayan regions of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal and the Tibetan Plateau. When combined, the area has the third-largest accumulation of snow and ice after Antarctica and the Arctic.
Melting glaciers
In the Himalayas, climate change melted glaciers by a vertical foot and half of ice each year from 2000 to 2016, according to a study released in June’s Science Advances by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.
That is twice the rate of melting from 1975 to 2000.
Local people have noticed the change. In a 2016 interview from the Everest basecamp, Dr. Nima Namgyal Sherpa told VOA that in the past, the glacial streams in the mid-Everest region started flowing in May, but the Sherpas now see the flow beginning in April.
That melted snowpack seeps down to fill mountainside indentations to form glacial lakes. As global warming accelerates the melting, the lakes are expanding, as is their number and threat, monitored in some areas with automated sensors and manual early warning systems by army and police personnel with communication gear.
“Bigger lakes may increase the risk of catastrophic dam failure,” Joseph Shea, a glacier hydrologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, told the magazine Science.
The retreating ice of the Pastoruri glacier is seen in the Huascaran National Park in Huaraz, Peru, Aug. 12, 2016. The melting of glaciers has put cities like Huaraz at risk of what scientists call a “glof,” or glacial lake outburst flood.
Today, there are more than a thousand glacial lakes on the Tibetan Plateau, with more than 130 larger than 0.1 square kilometer in Nepal alone. The lakes threaten the livelihoods and lives of tens of thousands of people who live in some of the world’s most remote areas.
On June 12, 2016, a GLOF near Mount Everest sent 2 million cubic meters of water toward the Nepalese village of Chukhung, which lost just one outhouse to the torrents, in part because scientists warned residents in the area about the approaching danger.
Weeks later, on July 5, a GLOF near the village of Chaku registered on seismometers, which had been installed after an earthquake the year before, as a “huge pulse of energy,” Kristen Cook, a geologist at the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences, told EOS, an online site that covers earth and space science news.
Examining satellite images, Cook and her colleagues found the GLOF moved boulders as large as 6 meters in diameter.
Early warning systems
This year, on July 7, a GLOF early warning system of weather monitoring stations and river discharge sensors saved lives in Pakistan’s Golain Valley, which has more than 50 glaciers and nine glacial lakes.
“Our standing crops [and] apple and apricot orchards have been completely destroyed,” Safdar Ali, whose shop was heavily damaged as the water swept away livestock, stored grain, irrigation channels and micro hydropower plants, told Reuters.
“I see no loss of human life this time as a positive,” Amanullah Khan, assistant country director for the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) told Reuters. “It shows our training has been a success.”
The UNDP program, which helped establish flood protection systems in the area starting in 2011, has installed small-scale drainage systems and mini-dams, and taught people in the remote region survival skills, such as simple first aid, because the arrival of skilled emergency help can be delayed by the rugged topography.
Local governments are taking preventive measures, such as removing loose rocks and debris that make the bursts of water even more destructive. Authorities are also draining glacial lakes to reduce the amount of water released by a breach, and they are discouraging settlement in GLOF hazard zones.
“If the lakes burst above the villages up in the Everest area, up between 12,000 to 13,000 feet, there are villages all the way downstream and they will wipe [away] some of these villages,” said Norbu Tenzin Norgyal, whose father, Sherpa Tenzin Norgyal, summited Mount Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953. “The danger is real.”
Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province, a stronghold of Islamic State’s Khursan branch, was hit with more than a dozen bomb blasts recently, wounding more than 120 people, including 30 children. Among those children was Basharyar, who fled Afghanistan with his family years ago to neighboring Pakistan. VOA’s Zia Urahman Hasrat reports from Nangarhar.
Work crews in Arizona and New Mexico forged ahead Friday with construction of taller border fencing funded through a national emergency declaration by President Donald Trump.
The work on his hallmark campaign promise involves mostly replacement fencing along a 46-mile stretch of desert west of Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and on 2 miles of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona.
At the New Mexico site, about 20 workers placed rebar frames for concrete footers along the path of the wall. A 50-foot crane towered over the site, standing out on the treeless brushland and cracked washes that stretch for miles in every direction.
Workers broke ground between Columbus and Santa Teresa — small towns near ports of entry along the border between New Mexico and the state of Chihuahua, Mexico.
In Arizona, crews were installing 30-foot (9-meter) steel fencing to replace older barriers next to a border crossing known as Lukeville Port of Entry.
Funds redirected from Defense Department
Both projects are being funded with money initially allocated to the Defense Department that was redirected by Trump’s executive order.
Use of the money was previously frozen by lower courts while a lawsuit proceeded. Last month, however, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the use of about $2.5 billion.
A border wall was a keystone of the president’s 2016 election campaign, but Congress has resisted funding all of it. This year it allocated $1.4 billion, but the president wanted much more.
The administration has awarded $2.8 billion in contracts for barriers covering 247 miles (390 kilometers), with all but 17 miles (27 kilometers) of that to replace existing barriers instead of expanding coverage.
Various forms of barriers already exist along 654 miles (1,046 kilometers) — about a third — of the border.
The construction comes as immigrant apprehensions have fallen sharply over the past two months due to the summer heat and a clamp down in Mexico.
Tens of thousands of people have come to the U.S. over the past year. Most are Central American families with children who turn themselves in to agents instead of trying to dodge them.
Environmentalists turn to courts
Environmentalists have sued over some of the construction contracts for the fencing, saying the government unlawfully waived dozens of laws so it could build on protected lands.
Conservationists say a wall — and its construction— would be detrimental to wildlife habitat and would block the migration of animals such as bighorn sheep and wolves. Two cases are pending in U.S. courts.
“It’s astonishing and sad to see Trump’s border wall being built through the most spectacular Sonoran desert ecosystem on the planet,” Laiken Jordahl, borderlands campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity, said Thursday.
Jordahl hoped the courts would step in to protect Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
The vast park is known for its oddly shaped cactuses that resemble organ pipes and for its many saguaros.
Vistors warned
Signs all over the park warn visitors that they might encounter smuggling activity. Until five years ago, large swaths of the park were closed to the public due to dangerous conditions and following the 2002 shooting death of Kris Eggle, a park ranger who died while pursuing suspected drug cartel members.
Groundbreaking occurred Thursday along the portion of existing fencing that stretches west from Lukeville Port of Entry, Border Patrol spokesman Jesus Vasavilbaso said.
Many Arizona residents use the crossing on their way to Rocky Point, a beach destination in Mexico.
Construction is expected to take about 45 days. The government then plans to tackle two other projects in Arizona, including nearly 40 miles (64.4 kilometers) of fencing in other parts of the national monument and areas of Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area.
Comedian Dave Chappelle plans to host a special block party and benefit concert in Ohio for those affected by the recent mass shooting.
Chappelle will be among national and local entertainers planned for the main stage at the “Gem City Shine” event in Dayton Sunday.
WDTN-TV reports the City of Dayton along with the Downtown Dayton Partnership and the Chamber of Commerce will help organize the tribute.
The organizers say the event will be an effort to reclaim the entertainment district after 24-year-old Connor Betts’ 32-second rampage in front of Ned Peppers that killed nine people and left dozens injured Aug. 4.
Chappelle, a resident of nearby Yellow Springs, urges attendees to “live in the moment” by enjoying the experience live rather than recording it on their cellphones.
President Donald Trump presented 91-year-old basketball legend Bob Cousy with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Thursday, praising the Boston Celtics star as “one of the all-time greats in the history of sports.”
Cousy played for the Celtics from 1950 to 1963, winning six league championships and the 1957 MVP title. The Bob Cousy Award, given to the country’s best point guard in men’s college basketball, is named for him. He is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and played a pivotal role in founding the NBA Player’s Association.
After hanging up his No. 14 jersey, the 13-time NBA All-Star went on to coach basketball at Boston College.
“This acknowledgment allows me to complete my life circle,” Cousy said during the Oval Office awards ceremony. “I can stop chasing a bouncing ball. The Presidential Medal of Freedom allows me to reach a level of acceptance in our society I never once ever dreamed of.”
Trump spoke of Cousy’s childhood during the Great Depression and discovering his talent for basketball at a young age. The president said Cousy never forgot his first mentor’s advice to never be predictable, and jokingly added: “Hey, I’ve heard that lesson, too.”
The president recognized Cousy’s achievements on and off the court, lauding his support for underprivileged young athletes and speaking out against racism.
Cousy, who is white, ardently supported his black teammates who faced discrimination during the civil rights movement. Still, Cousy lamented in Gary Pomerantz’s biography “The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End,” that he didn’t do more for his black teammates, including 2011 Medal of Freedom recipient Bill Russell.
The Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, celebrates individuals for their “especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the U.S., to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”
Trump credited West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin for suggesting the medal be given to Cousy.
Previous recipients
Cousy is the second Medal of Freedom recipient this year. Trump presented the award to golfer Tiger Woods in May.
Cousy is the 10th honoree under Trump, who is Cousy’s candidate of choice in the 2020 presidential election.
In a recent interview with NBA.com, Cousy described himself as politically moderate. He said that although he disagrees with some of the president’s actions, he plans to vote for Trump next year.
During the award ceremony, Cousy said the medal was made all the more special because it had been presented by the “most extraordinary” president in his lifetime.
“I know in your world, you’re well on your way to making America great again,” Cousy told the president. “In my world, it’s been great for 91 years. Only in America could my story have been told.”
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said on Thursday it would invite Boeing 737 Max pilots from across the world to participate in simulator tests as part of the process to recertify the aircraft for flight following two fatal crashes.
Earlier, Reuters reported that the agency had asked the three U.S. airlines that operate the Max to provide the names of some pilots who had only flown the 737 for around a year, including at least one Max flight.
In a statement, the FAA said it had not specified the number of required hours of flight experience, but said the candidates would be a cross-section of line pilots and must have experience at the controls of the Max.
Boeing Co’s latest 737 narrow-body model, the Max, was grounded worldwide in March after two crashes within five months in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people.
Boeing has been reprogramming software for a stall-prevention system at the center of both crashes, which the FAA must approve before the plane flies again commercially.
The FAA said it has not yet specified a firm schedule for the tests.
