Month: July 2021

U.S. President Joe Biden hosts Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi at the White House Monday, with the future of U.S. troops in Iraq expected to be a focus of their discussion. 

Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein told VOA’s Kurdish Service last week he expected the two sides to agree on an end to the U.S. combat mission in Iraq.

The United States has about 2,500 troops in Iraq as part of the U.S.-led coalition effort to battle the Islamic State group that began in 2014. 

The two countries agreed in April to change the American troops’ mission, focusing on training and advisory roles assisting Iraqi security forces, but there was no timeline for completing the transition. 

Iraq declared victory against the Islamic State militants in 2017. However, the group has maintained a presence in the region, including carrying out a suicide bombing at a market in Iraq last week that killed at least 30 people.

Monday’s meeting also comes amid continued attacks against U.S. military positions in Iraq that the United States blames on Iran-linked militias. On July 24, a pro-Iranian militia commander issued a statement threatening to attack U.S. forces inside the country and calling for withdrawal of troops. A drone attack Saturday hit a military base in Iraqi Kurdistan that hosts American troops.

The presence of U.S. troops is a polarizing subject in Iraq, with some citing the need for U.S. military support for Iraq’s security forces and others, including Iran-linked political factions, calling for the American troops to leave. 

In addition to the military, Biden and al-Kadhimi are also expected to discuss topics looking at future cooperation on political, economic, health, education and cultural matters. 
…

NBC says an estimated 17 million people in the United States watched the opening ceremony for the Tokyo Olympics, down 36% from the kickoff to the Rio de Janeiro Games five years ago.

Nielsen says the 17 million includes people who watched the ceremony live on NBC or online when it aired Friday morning and those who saw an edited version on NBC in prime time that night.

NBC was unable to break down how many people watched live and how many saw the prime-time version. The 26.7 million who saw the Rio opening ceremony included both television and online viewership.

Nine years ago, when the Summer Olympics were held in London, the opening ceremony drew a record U.S. audience of 40.7 million people.

Masks off, masks on

The faces of victory will be a bit more visible for the rest of the Tokyo Olympics.

On Sunday, the International Olympic Committee relaxed its health rules and said medalists can remove their masks on the podium for photos — for 30 seconds.

This, says the IOC, acknowledges “a unique moment in their sporting career.”

Health protocols agreed to ahead of the Tokyo Olympics to control COVID-19 infections had required all medalists to keep masks on for the whole ceremony.

But it’s not all freedom and exposed mouths from here on out. Athletes have to stay on their own podium step. And group photos on the top step? Masks back on, please.

 
…

The men’s Olympic triathlon suffered a rare and embarrassing false start on Monday as half the field dived in while the others were blocked off by a boat, leading to some frantic action from associated craft to get the message over to the initially unaware swimmers.

Fifty-six men lined up on a pontoon in Tokyo Bay for the 6:30 a.m. local start but as the starter sent them away for the opening 1,500-meter swim leg, around a third found their way blocked by a camera boat.

With those left on the pontoon stranded, a small flotilla of boats and jet skis flew into action to head off the group, with around half of them still ploughing on regardless despite the alert horn sounding repeatedly.

Eventually two jet skis combined to stop the leaders, who returned slowly to the start having undergone a more vigorous 200 meter warm up than they had expected.

The race got underway safely around 10 minutes later.

 
…

Robert Parris Moses, a civil rights activist who endured beatings and jail while leading black voter registration drives in the American South during the 1960s and later helped improve minority education in math, has died. He was 86.  
 
Moses worked to dismantle segregation as the Mississippi field director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement and was central to the 1964 “Freedom Summer” in which hundreds of students went to the South to register voters.
 
Moses started his “second chapter in civil rights work” by founding in 1982 the Algebra Project thanks to a MacArthur Fellowship. The project included a curriculum Moses developed to help poor students succeed in math.
 
Ben Moynihan, the director of operations for the Algebra Project, said he spoke with Moses’ wife, Dr. Janet Moses, who said her husband had died Sunday morning in Hollywood, Florida. Information was not given as to the cause of death.
 
Moses was born in Harlem, New York, on January 23, 1935, two months after a race riot left three dead and injured 60 in the neighborhood. His grandfather, William Henry Moses, had been a prominent Southern Baptist preacher and a supporter of Marcus Garvey, a Black nationalist leader at the turn of the century.  
 
But like many black families, the Moses family moved north from the South during the Great Migration. Once in Harlem, his family sold milk from a Black-owned cooperative to help supplement the household income, according to “Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots,” by Laura Visser-Maessen.
 
While attending Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, he became a Rhodes Scholar and was deeply influenced by the work of French philosopher Albert Camus and his ideas of rationality and moral purity for social change. Moses then took part in a Quaker-sponsored trip to Europe and solidified his beliefs that change came from the bottom up before earning a master’s in philosophy at Harvard University.
 
Moses didn’t spend much time in the Deep South until he went on a recruiting trip in 1960 to “see the movement for myself.” He sought out the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta but found little activity in the office and soon turned his attention to SNCC.
 
“I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe,” Moses later said. “I never knew that there was (the) denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States.”  
 
The young civil rights advocate tried to register Blacks to vote in Mississippi’s rural Amite County where he was beaten and arrested. When he tried to file charges against a white assailant, an all-white jury acquitted the man and a judge provided protection to Moses to the county line so he could leave.
 
He later helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to challenge the all-white Democratic delegation from Mississippi. But President Lyndon Johnson prevented the group of rebel Democrats from voting in the convention and instead let Jim Crow southerners remain, drawing national attention.
 
Disillusioned with white liberal reaction to the civil rights movement, Moses soon began taking part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War then cut off all relationships with whites, even former SNCC members.
 
Moses worked as a teacher in Tanzania, Africa, returned to Harvard to earn a doctorate in philosophy and taught high school math in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  
 
Later in life, the press-shy Moses started his “second chapter in civil rights work” by founding in 1982 the Algebra Project.  
Historian Taylor Branch, whose “Parting the Waters” won the Pulitzer Prize, said Moses’ leadership embodied a paradox.  

“Aside from having attracted the same sort of adoration among young people in the movement that Martin Luther King did in adults,” Branch said, “Moses represented a separate conception of leadership” as arising from and being carried on by “ordinary people.”

 
…

Madrid’s tree-lined Paseo del Prado boulevard and the adjoining Retiro park have been added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list.

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee, holding an online meeting from Fuzhou, China, backed the candidacy on Sunday that highlighted the green area’s introduction of nature into Spain’s capital. The influence the properties have had on the designs of other cities in Latin America was also applauded by committee members.

“Collectively, they illustrate the aspiration for a utopian society during the height of the Spanish Empire,” UNESCO said.

The Retiro park occupies 1.2 square kilometers in the center of Madrid. Next to it runs the Paseo del Prado, which includes a promenade for pedestrians. The boulevard connects the heart of Spain’s art world, bringing together the Prado Museum with the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and the Reina Sofía Art Center.

The boulevard dates to the 16th century while the park was originally for royal use in the 17th century before it was fully opened to the public in 1848.

“Today, in these times of pandemic, in a city that has suffered enormously for the past 15 months, we have a reason to celebrate with the first world heritage site in Spain’s capital,” said Madrid Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida.

The site is No. 49 for Spain on the UNESCO list.

Also on Sunday, the committee added China’s Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan, India’s Kakatiya Rudreshwara Temple, and the Trans-Iranian railway to the World Heritage list.

World Heritage sites can be examples of outstanding natural beauty or manmade buildings. The sites can be important geologically or ecologically, or they can be key for human culture and tradition.

 
…

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said that he was aiming to begin a dialogue with the country’s political opposition next month in Mexico facilitated by Norway, a process he hoped the United States would embrace.

In May the opposition changed strategy and indicated its willingness to return to negotiations to resolve the political crisis in OPEC member Venezuela.

Maduro has overseen an economic collapse in once-prosperous Venezuela since taking office in 2013, and stands accused by his domestic opponents, the United States and the European Union of corruption, human rights violations and rigging his 2018 re-election. Maduro denies the accusations.

In June, top diplomats in Washington, Brussels and Ottawa said they would be willing to revise their sanctions on Maduro’s government if the dialogue with the opposition led to significant progress toward free and fair elections.

“I can tell you that we are ready to go to Mexico,” Maduro said in an interview on the state-funded Telesur television network late on Saturday. “We have begun to discuss a complicated, difficult agenda.”

Venezuela’s opposition, led by Juan Guaido, has accused Maduro of using previous rounds to buy time in the face of diplomatic and sanctions pressure by the United States and others. Guaido is recognized by Washington and several other Western democracies as the country’s rightful leader.

Opposition groups have said they are willing to negotiate the conditions for presidential and parliamentary elections with Maduro’s government.

Maduro, in turn, has said he wants the negotiations to focus on the lifting of U.S. sanctions targeting the financial and oil sectors.

He added that the negotiations would include “all the oppositions,” a reference to opposition politicians who broke with Guaido’s call to boycott the 2020 parliamentary elections, which were won handily by Maduro’s ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

 
…

Ethiopia’s Amhara state on Sunday called on “all young people” to take up arms against Tigrayan fighters who are battling the federal government military and forces from all of Ethiopia’s other nine regions.

The call for mass mobilization against Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) fighters – whom Amhara’s military said were now attacking the state – expands the eight-month-old war and instability in the Horn of Africa country.

“I call on all young people, militia, non-militia in the region, armed with any government weapon, armed with personal weapons, to join the anti-TPLF war mission from tomorrow,” Agegnehu Teshager, president of Amhara regional government was quoted as saying by the region’s state media.

Calls to TPLF spokesman Getachew Reda, for a comment were not answered.

War erupted between the Ethiopian military and the TPLF, which rules Ethiopia’s northernmost region, in November.

Three weeks later, the government declared victory when it captured Tigray’s capital Mekelle, but the TPLF kept fighting. At the end of June, the TPLF seized control of Mekelle and most of Tigray after government soldiers withdrew.

This week, the Tigrayans pushed their offensive to Afar, their neighboring state to the east, where they said they planned to target troops from the Amhara region fighting alongside the federal military in the area.

Afar is a strategic region for landlocked Ethiopia because the main road and railway linking the capital, Addis Ababa, with the seaport of Djibouti runs through it.

On Saturday, Amhara’s special forces commander, Brigadier General Tefera Mamo, was quoted by the region’s state media as saying the war had expanded to the state.

“The terrorist group has started a war in the Amhara and Afar regions and is also harassing Ethiopians,” Tefera said, referring to TPLF. “Amhara Special Forces are fighting in coordination with other security forces.”

Thousands of people have died in the fighting, around 2 million have been displaced and more than 5 million rely on emergency food aid.

 
…

Flames racing through rugged terrain in Northern California destroyed multiple homes Saturday as the state’s largest wildfire intensified and numerous other blazes battered the U.S. West.

The Dixie Fire, which started July 14, had already leveled over a dozen houses and other structures when it tore through the tiny community of Indian Falls after dark.

An updated damage estimate was not immediately available, though fire officials said the blaze has charred more than 73,200 hectares in Plumas and Butte counties and was 20% contained.

The fire was burning in a remote area with limited access, hampering firefighters’ efforts as it charged eastward, fire officials said. It has prompted evacuation orders in several small communities and along the west shore of Lake Almanor, a popular area getaway.

Meanwhile, the nation’s largest wildfire, southern Oregon’s Bootleg Fire, was nearly halfway surrounded Saturday as more than 2,200 crew members worked to corral it in the heat and wind, fire officials said. The growth of the sprawling blaze had slowed, but thousands of homes remained threatened on its eastern side, authorities said.

“This fire is resistant to stopping at dozer lines,” Jim Hanson, fire behavior analyst, said in a news release from the Oregon Department of Forestry. “With the critically dry weather and fuels we are experiencing, firefighters are having to constantly reevaluate their control lines and look for contingency options.”

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency for four northern counties because of wildfires that he said were causing “conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property.” The proclamation opened the way for more state support.

Such conditions are often from a combination of unusual random, short-term and natural weather patterns heightened by long-term, human-caused climate change. Global warming has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years.

On Saturday, fire crews from California and Utah headed to Montana, Gov. Greg Gianforte announced. Five firefighters were injured Thursday when swirling winds blew flames back on them as they worked on the Devil’s Creek Fire burning in rough, steep terrain near the rural town of Jordan, in the northeast part of the state.

They remained hospitalized Friday. Bureau of Land Management spokesperson Mark Jacobsen declined to release the extent of their injuries, and attempts to learn their conditions Saturday were unsuccessful. Three of the firefighters are U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service crew members from North Dakota, and the other two are U.S. Forest Service firefighters from New Mexico.

Another high-priority blaze, the Alder Creek Fire in southwest Montana, had charred over 2,750 hectares and was 10% contained Saturday night. It was threatening nearly 240 homes.

Elsewhere in California, the Tamarack Fire south of Lake Tahoe continued to burn through timber and chaparral and threatened communities on both sides of the California-Nevada state line. The fire, sparked by lightning July 4 in Alpine County, has destroyed at least 10 buildings.

Heavy smoke from that blaze and the Dixie Fire lowered visibility and may at times ground aircraft providing support for fire crews. The air quality south of Lake Tahoe and across the state line into Nevada deteriorated to very unhealthy levels.

In north-central Washington, firefighters battled two blazes in Okanogan County that threatened hundreds of homes and again caused hazardous air quality conditions Saturday. And in northern Idaho, east of Spokane, Washington, a small fire near the Silverwood Theme Park prompted evacuations Friday evening at the park and in the surrounding area. The theme park was back open on Saturday with the fire half contained.

Although hot weather with afternoon winds posed a continued threat of spreading blazes, weekend forecasts also called for a chance of scattered thunderstorms in California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and other states. However, forecasters said some could be dry thunderstorms that produce little rain but a lot of lightning, which can spark new blazes.

More than 85 large wildfires were burning around the country, most of them in Western states, and they had burned more than 553,000 hectares. 
…

As Zhengzhou residents wonder if the toll from record rainfall in China’s Henan province will exceed the latest tally of 58 deaths, authorities were estimating the province has incurred $10 billion (65.5 billion yuan) in economic losses in the manufacturing center.

Torrential rains have inundated the province since last weekend. As a result, supply chains have been disrupted for the region’s many factories, including a complex in Zhengzhou where almost half of Apple’s iPhones sold worldwide are produced. That’s why Zhengzhou is sometimes referred to as “iPhone City.”

Hon Hai Technology Group, a Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturer better known as Foxconn, operates the Zhengzhou complex. Nikkei Asia reported that Foxconn Chairman Young Liu told the company’s annual shareholders meeting in Taiwan that the floods have had a limited impact on the complex.

A source familiar with Hon Hai Technology Group who was not authorized to speak to the press told VOA Mandarin that one of the group’s three plants in Zhengzhou had been flooded. The flooded plant produced PC connectors, not mobile phones, according to the VOA Mandarin source, who added that iPhone production was unlikely to be interrupted because no machinery was damaged and Foxconn maintains a full stock of required materials and parts.

Apple is scheduled to release the iPhone 13 in September, according to numerous press reports tracking the company. But as long as transportation resumes soon, the new iPhone 13 will not be delayed, the source said.

However, transit cleanup may be delayed by the scope of the devastation, and an analyst told VOA Mandarin that iPhone 13 production depends on whether the local transportation recovers quickly.

Travel snagged

Qiu Shi-Fang, senior analyst at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research, told VOA Mandarin that iPhone components are usually shipped to the assembly plant in July and the first batch of iPhones is finished in August. She said the arrival of components would affect subsequent shipments of new phones.

However, streets have been turned into rivers, and flights and trains in many parts of Henan have also been suspended, creating uncertainty about iPhone production.

Foxconn has more than 90 production lines with about 350,000 workers at its Zhengzhou plants. Qiu said Foxconn is facing difficulties in hiring workers from outside Zhengzhou because of flood-related transit snarls.

Qiu said if Zhengzhou fails to return to normal by the end of July, iPhone 13’s production may be delayed.

The floods also damaged thousands of cars in Henan province. Multiple reports from the local car insurance industry suggest the floods damaged 30,000 to 80,000 cars, which may cost insurance companies more than $154 million (1 billion yuan) in compensation.

Throughout Henan province, 11 insurers had received claims for almost 32,000 damaged cars by Thursday, according to Reuters.

Zhengzhou, a traditional automotive industry hub, produces about 500,000 vehicles annually, accounting for about 3% of China’s output from large manufacturers, such as Yutong Bus, Haima Motor and Zhengzhou Nissan.

Agriculture in Henan was also hard hit by the rains, with more than 200,000 hectares of farmland underwater, according to Reuters. 

Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
…

Guatemala’s top anti-graft investigator, Juan Francisco Sandoval, fled the country Saturday hours after he was fired, a move that sparked international backlash, a human rights official said.

Guatemalan Ombudsman Jordan Rodas accompanied Sandoval to the Salvadoran border “in light of the difficult decision to leave the country to safeguard his life and integrity due to recent events,” according to the Central American country’s human rights body.

Sandoval had been fired from his post as head of Guatemala’s Prosecutor Against Corruption and Impunity (FECI) on Friday by Attorney General Consuelo Porras.

Sandoval said he had encountered many obstacles in his work at FECI and that he was told not to investigate President Alejandro Giammattei without the attorney general’s consent, something he said went “against the autonomy and independence” of FECI.

The Attorney General’s Office said he had been let go because of “constant abuses and frequent violations” of the institution and that attempts had been made to “undermine” the “work, integrity and dignity” of Porras.

His firing sparked criticism from the U.S. State Department, which has called him an “anti-corruption champion,” as well as outcry from humanitarian groups, civil society and businesses.

Julie Chung, the acting assistant secretary for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, condemned Sandoval’s sacking in a tweet on Friday, saying it was “a significant setback to rule of law.”

“It contributes to perceptions of a systemic effort to undermine those known to be fighting corruption,” she added.

The Center against Corruption and Impunity in the North of Central America also criticized Porras’ decision, saying it would create “setbacks in the fight against corruption in the region.”

FECI was initially created to work alongside the U.N. International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala to combat corruption and impunity, but the body’s work was stopped in 2019 under a decision by then-President Jimmy Morales, after he was singled out by both entities for electoral corruption.
…

Several states scaled back their reporting of COVID-19 statistics this month just as cases across the country started to skyrocket, depriving the public of real-time information on outbreaks, cases, hospitalizations and deaths in their communities.

The shift to weekly instead of daily reporting in Florida, Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota marked a notable shift during a pandemic in which coronavirus dashboards have become a staple for Americans closely tracking case counts and trends to navigate a crisis that has killed more than 600,000 people in the U.S.

In Nebraska, the state stopped reporting on the virus altogether for two weeks after Governor Pete Ricketts declared an end to the official virus emergency, forcing reporters to file public records requests or turn to national websites that track state data to learn about COVID statistics. The state backtracked two weeks later and came up with weekly reports of some basic numbers.

Other governments have gone the other direction and released more information, with Washington this week adding a dashboard on breakthrough cases to show the number of residents who contracted the virus after getting vaccines. Many states have recently gone to reporting virus numbers only on weekdays.

When Florida changed the frequency of its virus reporting earlier this month, officials said it made sense given the decreasing number of cases and the increasing number of people being vaccinated.

Cases started soaring soon afterward, and Florida cases earlier this week made up one-fifth of the country’s new coronavirus infections. As a result, Florida’s weekly releases — typically done on Friday afternoons — have consequences for the country’s understanding of the current summer surge, with no statewide COVID stats coming out of the virus hotspot for six days a week.

In Florida’s last two weekly reports, the number of new cases shot up from 23,000 to 45,000 and then 73,000 on Friday, an average of more than 10,000 day. Hospitals are starting to run out of space in parts of the state.

With cases rising, Democrats and other critics have urged state officials and Governor Ron DeSantis to resume daily outbreak updates.

“There was absolutely no reason to eliminate the daily updates beyond an effort to pretend like there are no updates,” said state Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from the Orlando area.

Alarming trend

The trend of reducing data reporting has alarmed infectious-disease specialists who believe that more information is better during a pandemic. People have come to rely on state virus dashboards to help make decisions about whether to attend large gatherings or wear masks in public, and understanding the level of risk in the community affects how people respond to virus restrictions and calls to get vaccinated.

“We know that showing the data to others actually is important because the actions that businesses take, the actions that schools take, the actions that civic leaders take, the actions that community leaders take, the actions that each of us individually take are all influenced by our perception of what the risk is out there,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, who leads the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California-San Francisco.

Reporting the numbers weekly still allows people to see the overall trends while smoothing out some of the day-to-day variations that come from the way cases are reported. And experts have long advised that it makes sense to pay more attention to the seven-day rolling average of new cases because the numbers can vary widely from one day to the next.

And Florida health officials say that they have not curtailed the sharing of data with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Overwhelmed staff

Maintaining daily updates on the virus does require significant resources for states. For instance, Kansas went to reporting virus numbers three times a week in May because the state health department said providing daily statistics consumed too much of its overwhelmed staff’s time.

In Nebraska, officials decided that continuing to update the virus dashboard daily wasn’t the best use of state resources now, partly because there had been a steady decline in the number of views of the website, indicating less interest in the numbers, spokeswoman Olga Dack said. The state could return to providing daily updates if the governor’s office decided that was needed, she said.

State health departments have a long history of providing the public regular updates on other diseases like flu and West Nile, but those viruses have none of the political baggage associated with COVID-19.

In Florida, a former health department employee was fired last year after publicly suggesting that managers wanted her to manipulate information on coronavirus statistics to paint a rosier picture. The employee, Rebekah Jones, did not allege any tampering with data, but her comments sowed doubts about the reliability of the metrics.

Weekly updates, no updates

Infectious-disease specialist Dr. David Brett-Major said that for many people, national websites such as the one run by the CDC can be a good source of data on the latest state trends, and that weekly updates could be OK. The World Health Organization often uses weekly updates, but he said they do that for practical data management reasons, not political ones.

He said the message Nebraska sent when it ended its dashboard — that the state emergency was over and conditions were returning to normal — was troubling.

“The main problem is that it reflects a disinterest in pandemic risk management,” said Brett-Major, with the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, said part of the problem is that public health officials generally don’t have sophisticated data systems, which makes it more labor intensive to produce the daily dashboards. Even though public health agencies have money for operations at a time when pandemic government spending is flush, they haven’t necessarily had the chance to upgrade.

“It would be great if daily reporting could be made widely available, but public health would have to be funded better to do that and right now that is just not the case,” Hamilton said.

And even in states where virus numbers aren’t being reported publicly every day, health officials are still looking at the latest data, Hamilton said.

But at a time when the delta variant is, in the words of the CDC director, “spreading with incredible efficiency,” Bibbins-Domingo said it is important that everyone can see the latest trends and understand the risks.

“Even if we know that they are available to decision-makers on a daily basis, there is considerable value to providing the data to the public,” she said.
…

Authorities in Afghanistan on Saturday enforced an indefinite nighttime curfew across most of the country as government forces struggle to curb Taliban advances.

The Islamist insurgent group has made rapid battlefield gains in recent weeks, bringing it close to capital cities of all 34 Afghan provinces and the nation’s capital, Kabul.

A spokesperson for the Afghan interior ministry told VOA that all provinces have been placed under the 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. curfew with the exception of Kabul, Nangarhar and Panjsher provinces.

“Terrorist groups often undertake terrorist and other subversive acts late in the night, so a nighttime restriction on public movement has been enforced to curb the violence,” said Ahmad Zia Zia.

The Taliban unleashed a widespread offensive in early May, when the United States and NATO allies began pulling their last remaining troops from Afghanistan. Since then the insurgents have overrun more than half of roughly 420 Afghan districts, without a fight in many cases.

As of last week, the U.S. military said 95% of its withdrawal had been completed and the process is on track to finish by the end of next month.

Stepped up Taliban attacks have forced the U.S. military in recent days to launch airstrikes to enable Afghan security forces to contain insurgent advances.

The Afghan government has blamed its battlefield losses on a lack of U.S. air support for security forces on the ground since May.

The Taliban denounced the latest U.S. airstrikes as a breach of the group’s February 2020 agreement with Washington that paved the way for the foreign forces’ withdrawal after nearly 20 years of war in Afghanistan.

“It is a clear violation of the signed agreement that will have consequences,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid warned in a statement.

U.S. officials have described Taliban offensives as a violation of the Islamist group’s agreement to support a peacefully negotiated resolution of the conflict, as outlined in that same February 2020 agreement.

General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Wednesday that about 212 district centers are currently in Taliban hands, and insurgent forces are advancing on the outskirts of 17 provincial capitals.

“Strategic momentum sort of appears to be sort of with the Taliban,” Milley told reporters during a briefing at the Pentagon.

“What they’re trying to do is isolate the major population centers,” he added. “They’re trying to do the same thing to Kabul, and roughly speaking … a significant amount of territory has been seized.”

The Afghan fighting largely subsided, as usual, during this week’s three-day Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha that ended on Thursday.

But both warring sides have since resumed attacks against each other.

Afghan Defense Ministry officials claimed Saturday that security forces killed nearly 300 insurgent fighters across several provinces in the past 24 hours, though Taliban and government officials routinely offer inflated battlefield claims.

U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday assured Afghan counterpart Ashraf Ghani of Washington’s diplomatic and humanitarian support.

A White House statement said the two leaders in a phone call “agreed that the Taliban’s current offensive is in direct contradiction to the movement’s claim to support a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”

Biden told Ghani that his administration would remain diplomatically engaged “in support of a durable and just political settlement” to the Afghan war.

The U.S. State Department noted on Friday the ongoing violence in Afghanistan was largely driven by the Taliban and called for an immediate end to it.

“We call on the Taliban to engage in serious negotiations to determine a political roadmap for Afghanistan’s future that leads to a just and durable settlement,” Jalina Porter, principal deputy spokesperson, told reporters in Washington.
…

Cameroon’s government has sent Defense Minister Joseph Beti Assomo, to the border between the English- and French-speaking regions amid increasing English-speaking separatist incursions into French-speaking towns and villages.

Officials say many businesses have been abandoned and construction work on government buildings halted due to the increased separatist attacks.

Scores of people watch as members of the Cameroon military display military weapons in Foumban, a French-speaking town on the border with Cameroon’s English-speaking North-West region. 

Warrant Officer Bouba Dawanga Syraye, the ranking officer at the military post in Foumban., says the weapons were seized from suspected rebels.  

He says government troops arrested 10 suspects and recovered guns, ammunition and several locally made explosives. He says all the suspects and their accomplices have denied accusations of arms trafficking.

The military says arms proliferation in the French-speaking West region, where Foumban is located, has been on the rise since 2017. The military says English-speaking rebels fighting to create an independent state they call Ambazonia in French-majority Cameroon infiltrate French-speaking towns and villages with weapons.

The government says at least 40 deadly separatist incursions have been reported in the West region since 2017. Bamboutos, Noun and Menou administrative units, also known as divisions, bordering the North-West region are the hardest hit by the separatist fighters.

Awah Fonka, the governor of Cameroon’s West region, says the fighters attack and kill government troops, loot shops and destroy schools. He says the rebel incursions and killing have halted work on some government projects.  

“We have recorded attacks at the level of several projects which would have helped in the development of the region,” said Fonka. “The case of Babadjou, Bamenda, Bambotos [road projects], as well as the road leading from Kuikong to Bandjoun and especially the divisions bordering the [English speaking North-] West region and the South-West region.”

Fonka said the military has been deployed to protect engineers on roads whose construction has been abandoned. He pleaded with civilians to help stop separatist incursions by reporting strangers in their towns and villages.

Fonka did not say how many government troops, rebels and civilians have been killed, but said the military was deployed this week to stop the incursions.

On July 15, Cameroonian officials said anglophone rebels were disguising themselves as military troops and launching attacks on villages and towns in the West region.

This week, Cameroonian President Paul Biya sent Assomo to lead a high-profile military delegation to French-speaking areas bordering the English-speaking North-West and South-West regions.

During a meeting with local military officers and governors of the North-West and West regions on Friday, Assomo said he was asked to encourage troops fighting the separatists. He said the government adopted a new strategy to fight the rebels but did not say what the new strategy entails.

Rodrique Sufor, who sells chicken in Mbouda, where Assomo and his delegation visited, says he is one of the many people who have relocated their businesses from the town of Galim because of regular separatist incursions and killing there.

“When we hear Ambazonians [separatist fighters] beheading soldiers, the situation cannot leave [allow] us that we can stay in peace, so we want the government to take the situation seriously by reinforcing the security around the area,” said Sufor.

Sufor says many people have also fled from the town of Babadjou to safer French-speaking towns.

The government is asking the fleeing civilians to return and assuring them that the military will assure their security and safety.

Cameroon’s separatist conflict has cost more than 3,000 lives and forced 550,000 people to flee to French-speaking regions of Cameroon or into neighboring Nigeria, according to the United Nations.
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Kohei Uchimura, Japan’s top male gymnast, looking to end his long career in glory, instead slipped and fell Saturday during his high bar qualifying event.  Known for winning all-around gymnastic championships for years, the 32-year-old athlete was looking to compete only in the high bar this year, but his fall leaves him out of the competition.  

Tropical Storm Nepartak is headed for Japan, bringing the threat of heavy rains and strong winds. Olympic officials are rescheduling some rowing events to take place earlier than originally planned.     

Richard “The Locomotive” Carapaz is taking home the gold for cycling, Ecuador’s first cycling medal.  

The International Judo Federation has suspended Algerian athlete Fethi Nourine and his coach Amar Benikhlef after they both withdrew from the games to avoid a match against an Israeli athlete and in support of the “Palestinian cause.”   

Nourine told Algerian television, “We worked a lot to reach the Olympics, but the Palestinian cause is bigger than all this.”

The federation has confirmed the men’s withdrawals from the games and said in a statement, “The immediate response of the IJF Executive Committee was to form an investigative commission, which confirmed all the facts, leading to a temporary suspension of the athlete and the coach and assigning the case to the Disciplinary Commission of the IJF for further investigation, judgment and final sanctioning beyond the Olympic Games.”

The youngest Olympic athlete is out of the competition in Tokyo after losing her first match Saturday. Twelve-year-old table tennis athlete Hend Zaza of Syria lost to 39-year-old Liu Jia of Austria.  

Zaza told People magazine, “The main lesson was the loss of this match, especially in the first match so next time I will be working hard to pass the first, second, third round,” the youngster said. “Because I want to be in this competition longer, not only for the first round.”
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