Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Monday that the U.S. is using Afghanistan as a weapons testing ground, calling the recent use of the largest-ever non-nuclear bomb “an immense atrocity against the Afghan people.”

Last week, U.S. forces dropped the GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb in eastern Nangarhar province, reportedly killing 95 militants. Karzai, in an interview with The Associated Press, objected to the decision, saying that his country “was used very disrespectfully by the U.S. to test its weapons of mass destruction.”

The office of President Ashraf Ghani said following the bomb’s usage that there was “close coordination” between the U.S. military and the Afghan government over the operation, and they were careful to prevent any civilian casualties.

But Karzai harshly criticized the Afghan government for allowing the use of the bomb.

“How could a government of a country allow the use of a weapon of mass destruction on its own territory? Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, how could they allow that? It just unimaginable,” he said.

The strike was carried out Thursday morning against an Islamic State group tunnel complex, carved into a mountain in Nangarhar province, that Afghan forces had tried to assault repeatedly in recent weeks, according to Afghan officials.

U.S. and Afghan forces have been battling the Taliban for more than 15 years. But the U.S. military unveiled the largest conventional bomb in its arsenal against the Islamic State group, which has a far smaller but growing presence in Afghanistan. U.S. President Donald Trump has publicly vowed to aggressively confront IS.

Trump called the operation a “very, very successful mission” but Karzai had harsh words for the new U.S. leader.

“My message to President Trump today is that he has committed an immense atrocity against the Afghan people, against fellow human beings,” he said. “If the American government sees us as human beings, then they have committed a crime against fellow human beings, but if they treat us as less than human beings, well, of course they can do whatever they want.”

The U.S. estimates 600-800 IS fighters are in Afghanistan, mostly in Nangarhar. American forces have has concentrated on fighting them while also supporting local Afghan forces against the Taliban.

 
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Washington is focused squarely on North Korea after Pyongyang’s latest missile test and the public display of what could be new long-range and submarine-based missiles. The medium-range missile failed, exploding seconds after its launch, but demonstrated North Korea’s continued defiance of outside pressure to halt its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
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Democratic voters still hurting from their party’s 2016 presidential election loss hope a special election to fill the seat vacated by President Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, Tom Price, will send a message of disapproval to President Donald Trump. VOA’s Katherine Gypson traveled to Georgia to see if Trump’s narrow election win in the traditionally Republican 6th Congressional District will be enough to favor Democrats on April 18th.
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The U.S. Supreme Court is set this week to hear a closely watched case testing the limits of religious rights, and new Justice Neil Gorsuch’s judicial record indicates he could tip the court toward siding with a church challenging Missouri’s ban on state funding of religious entities.

Trinity Lutheran Church, which is located in Columbia, Missouri and runs a preschool and daycare center, said Missouri unlawfully excluded it from a grant program providing state funds to nonprofit groups to buy rubber playground surfaces.

Missouri’s constitution prohibits “any church, sect or denomination of religion” from receiving state taxpayer money.

Gorsuch, who embraced an expansive view of religious rights as a Colorado-based federal appeals court judge, on Monday hears his first arguments since becoming a justice last week. He will be on the bench on Wednesday when the justices hear the Trinity Lutheran case, one of the most important of their current term. Gorsuch, appointed by President Donald Trump, restored the Supreme Court’s 5-4 conservative majority.

Trinity Lutheran wanted public funds to replace its playground’s gravel with a rubber surface made from recycled tires that would be safer for children to play on.

The U.S. Constitution calls for a separation of church and state and guarantees the free exercise of religion.

At the very least, a victory for Trinity Lutheran would help religious organizations nationwide win public dollars for certain purposes, such as health and safety.

But it also could bolster the case for using public money for vouchers to help pay for children to attend religious schools rather than public schools in “school choice” programs backed by many conservatives. For example, Colorado’s top court in 2015 found that a Douglas County voucher program violated a state constitutional provision similar to Missouri’s.

Trinity Lutheran’s legal effort is being spearheaded by the Alliance Defending Freedom conservative Christian legal activist group, which argues Missouri’s policy violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of free exercise of religion and equal protection under the law.

If the church wins, “religious organizations cannot be excluded from general public welfare benefits that apply to everybody,” said Erik Stanley, an alliance lawyer representing the church.

Referring to Gorsuch, Stanley said, “He has definitely been a friend of religious liberty. So we are hopeful that will continue when he’s on the court, and we’re grateful he gets to participate on this important case.”

In 2013, Gorsuch sided with the evangelical Christian owners of arts-and-crafts retailer Hobby Lobby and allowed owners of private companies to object on religious grounds to a provision in federal healthcare law requiring employers to provide medical insurance that pays for women’s birth control.

Gorsuch wrote in a concurring opinion that Hobby Lobby’s owners faced a choice “between exercising their faith or saving their business.” The Supreme Court later affirmed the ruling.

Missouri said there is nothing unconstitutional about its grant program.

“Trinity Lutheran remains free, without any public subsidy, to worship, teach, pray and practice any other aspect of its faith however it wishes. The state merely declines to offer financial support,” the state said in legal papers.

The church has drawn support from the religious community including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Mormon Church and Jewish groups.

‘Open the floodgates’

Groups filing legal papers opposing Trinity Lutheran, including the American Civil Liberties Union, said government funding of churches is precisely what the Constitution forbids.

“Forcing states to provide cash to build church property could open the floodgates to programs that coerce taxpayers to underwrite religion,” said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU’s program on freedom of religion and belief.

Mach said three-quarters of the U.S. states have provisions like Missouri’s.

Alliance Defending Freedom, which also opposes gay marriage, transgender protections and abortion, has another major case involving religion that the Supreme Court could take up in its term beginning in October. It represents a Colorado bakery’s Christian owner who argues the Constitution’s promise of religious freedom means he should not have to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.

Trinity Lutheran sued in federal court in 2012. The St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2015 upheld a trial court’s dismissal of the suit. The appeals court said

accepting the church’s arguments would be “unprecedented,” noting the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in the case Locke v. Davey that upheld a bar on Washington state scholarships for students preparing for the ministry.

The justice who Gorsuch replaced, the late fellow conservative Antonin Scalia, was one of two dissenters in the Locke ruling. When a state withholds a generally available benefit solely on religious grounds, it is like an unconstitutional “special tax” on religion, Scalia said.

Judicial observers have described Gorsuch as very much in the mold of Scalia.

Missouri’s grant program was meant to keep tires out of landfills while also fostering children’s safety. The church’s brief to the high court stated, “A rubber playground surface accomplishes the state’s purposes whether it cushions the fall of the pious or the profane.”
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The United States is calling on regional countries, including Russia and Pakistan, not to support the Taliban in their bid to “perpetuate the very long war” in Afghanistan.

U.S. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster made the remarks Sunday after talks with Afghan leaders on his first trip to Kabul since taking office.

Afghan officials said the discussions focused on bilateral security matters, fighting regional terrorism and strengthening the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, or ANDSF.  

McMaster told local TOLOnews that Taliban insurgents who refuse to engage in a government-led peace and reconciliation process must be defeated on the battlefield. He said the United States is committed to strengthen Afghan forces to enable them to achieve that objective.

He would not say whether President Donald Trump will send more troops to Afghanistan once his administration concludes its review of the Afghan policy.

McMaster’s visit follows calls by U.S. military commanders for adding “a few thousand” more troops to the roughly 8,400 American troops already in Afghanistan.

“No one should support the Taliban. No one should support armed resistance against the Afghan government and the Afghan people,” the adviser said when asked to comment on Russia’s overt contacts with the Taliban.

“What we would like is all countries in the region to play a productive role, a positive role and to help the Afghan people rather than to try to perpetuate this very long conflict,” he said.

McMaster said, without elaborating, that those who are perpetuating and helping cause the Afghan violence “ought to be exposed and held accountable.”

Russia last week hosted a new round of multi-nation talks on security and peace prospects for Afghanistan. Pakistan, China, Iran, India, Afghanistan and five former Soviet Central Asian states were among the participants. The meeting ended with Moscow offering to host peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, though the insurgent group had already dismissed the conference as an event motivated by the political agendas of the organizers.

The American adviser on Monday will travel to neighboring Pakistan, which is accused of harboring Taliban sanctuaries on its soil and covertly supporting the insurgents. He emphasized the need for Islamabad to pursue its interests in Afghanistan through diplomacy and not through violence.

“As all of us have hoped for many many years, we have hoped that Pakistani leaders will understand that it is in their interest to go after these groups less selectively than they have in the past, and the best way to pursue their interests in Afghanistan and elsewhere is through diplomacy, not through the use of proxies that engage in violence,” McMaster said.

Responding to Thursday’s massive bomb attack by the U.S. military against the stronghold of Islamic State in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar, McMaster said the terrorist group threatens all civilized people and must be defeated.

“Well, it is not just the bomb but it is really what our soldiers are doing every day alongside courageous Afghan soldiers, fighting Daesh, ensuring that these people who victimized women, who shoot people in hospital beds, we cannot tolerate the existence of that kind of an organization,” he said.

 
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The former governor of Mexico’s Veracruz state who is accused of running a corruption ring that allegedly pilfered millions of dollars from state coffers was detained in Guatemala after six months as a fugitive and high-profile symbol of government graft in his country.

Javier Duarte, pale and visibly tired, was brought Sunday to a prison at a military base in the Guatemalan capital

A statement from Mexico’s federal Attorney General’s Office said Duarte was detained Saturday with the cooperation of Guatemalan police and the country’s Interpol office in Panajachel, a picturesque tourist town on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala’s highlands.

It said he is wanted on suspicion of money laundering and organized crime, and prosecutors directed the Foreign Relations Department to request Duarte’s extradition via its Guatemalan counterpart.

Manuel Noriega, deputy director of Interpol in Guatemala, said Duarte was located at a hotel where he was staying with his wife. He was asked to leave his room, did so voluntarily and then was arrested without incident in the lobby.

Noriega said Duarte would be presented before a judge to consider his possible extradition.

At least two dozen policemen guarded Duarte as he arrived at Guatemala City’s Matamoros prison.

“I have no comment, thank you,” he said to a question from The Associated Press.

Duarte, 43, was governor of Veracruz from 2010 until he left office Oct. 12, 2016, two months before the scheduled end of his term, saying he was doing so in order to face the allegations against him.  

At the time he denied having links to phantom businesses that allegedly won state contracts, and said he had not stolen a single peso of state money or diverted government funds overseas.

“I don’t have foreign accounts,” he said last year. “I don’t have properties anywhere.”

Duarte promptly disappeared and had been sought by Mexican authorities ever since. Earlier this year, Interpol issued a notice for his capture.

The Mexican government has found millions of dollars purportedly linked to Duarte, frozen more than 100 bank accounts and also seized property and businesses tied to the former governor. A reward of 15 million pesos ($730,000) had been offered for his capture.

The detention comes a week after Tomas Yarrington, the former governor of Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, was arrested in Italy, also on allegations of organized crime and money laundering.

Another ex-governor, Cesar Duarte of Chihuahua state, is also wanted on suspicion of corruption and is said to have fled to El Paso, Texas. He is not related to Javier Duarte.

All three ex-governors were members of the ruling Institutional Revolution Party, or PRI, of President Enrique Pena Nieto.

The party, which expelled Javier Duarte on Oct. 25, 2016, and has sought to distance itself from him, applauded the arrest.

“The PRI calls for all the relevant investigations to be carried out and, respecting due process, for the ex-governor of Veracruz to be punished in an exemplary fashion, as well as anyone who is confirmed to have taken part in his criminal ring,” the party said in a statement.

Duarte became a powerful symbol of alleged corruption during midterm elections last year in which the PRI lost several governorships, including Veracruz, that it had held uninterrupted since its founding in 1929.

Duarte also has been widely criticized for rampant violence in the state during his administration, as drug cartels warred for territory and thousands of people were killed or disappeared into clandestine graves in cases that mostly remain unsolved. The dead include at least 16 journalists slain in Veracruz during his six years in office.
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A federal judge Saturday blocked Arkansas’ plan to execute six inmates over the course of ten days.

The State had initially planned to execute eight inmates over eleven days just two weeks before its supply of midazolam, a lethal injection drug, is set to expire. But another judge granted stays to two of the inmates.

Nine death row prisoners brought the case to the state, arguing that midazolam could expose them to “severe pain.”  

Federal District Judge Kristine G. Baker in Little Rock also stated in her ruling that the execution team did not have antidotes on hand in case something went wrong with the executions – a possibility, she noted, which has already happened in cases in Alabama, Arizona, Ohio, and Oklahoma when using the same drug.

“The schedule of imposed on these officials, as well as their lack of recent execution experience, causes concern” Baker wrote in her order Saturday.

The Arkansas attorney general’s office said the decision strayed from previous rulings by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as well as the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It is unfortunate that a U.S. district judge has chosen to side with the convicted prisoners in one of their many last-minute attempts to delay justice,” Jude Deere, an office spokesman, said.

The state of Arkansas has not executed an inmate since 2005 due to drug shortages and legal challenges.
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