Missouri Governor Eric Greitens warned Sunday that his administration will deal harshly with those responsible for violent protests in St. Louis over the death of a black man.

A small band of protesters began breaking windows and throwing objects at police late Saturday during the second night of protests over the acquittal of a white police officer charged with murder in the man’s death. More demonstrations were expected later Sunday.

At least nine people were arrested during Saturday’s violence, which was focused in the upscale Delmar Loop area of the St. Louis suburb University City. The Loop is home to more than 100 specialty shops, including restaurants, galleries, clothing boutiques, gift shops and entertainment venues.

Police in riot gear quickly brought the disturbance under control, but not before demonstrators had left a path of broken glass.

“Saturday night, some criminals decided to pick up rocks and break windows,” Greitens said Sunday, vowing that those responsible would face felony charges. “They thought they’d get away with it. They were wrong. Our officers caught ‘em, cuffed ‘em, and threw ‘em in jail.

“These aren’t protestors, these are criminals,” Greitens said. “Criminals, listen up: you break a window, you’re going to be behind bars. It’s that simple.”

Earlier Saturday, several hundred people walked through two malls in suburban St. Louis. Protesters shouted “Black lives matter” and “It is our duty to fight for our freedom,” as they marched in a mostly peaceful demonstration.

The organizer of a regional food festival at one of the malls welcomed the protesters, the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported. Mike Kociela told the demonstrators, “There should be no difference in how anybody is treated… I want to be part of the solution. I’m glad you are here. You are welcome.”

The band U2 announced Saturday morning that it was canceling a concert planned for Saturday night, in St. Louis, saying they did not believe city police would be able to adequately protect the event.

British singer Ed Sheeran’s representatives said they were concerned about the “safety of the fans” when they announced the cancellation of a Sunday concert.

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra canceled the Saturday “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” concert.

Friday’s protests began after the acquittal of Jason Stockley, a former St. Louis police officer who had been charged with the fatal shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith after a car chase in December 2011.

Prosecutors also alleged Stockley planted a gun on Smith’s body. Prosecutors said the gun had only Stockley’s DNA on it. During the car chase, Stockley can be heard on the video from his car saying that he was going to kill Smith, prosecutors said.

Police said 23 people were arrested and nine police were injured in skirmishes with protesters.

Mayor Lyda Krewson released a statement early Friday urging compassion, despite differing opinions on the acquittal. “We are all St. Louisans. We rise and fall together,” she said.

Protests started peacefully on Friday, with hundreds gathering in the streets of St. Louis holding signs and chanting “No justice, no peace.” Some made their way to police headquarters, calling for police resignations.

By the end of the night, demonstrators had broken a window and splashed paint on the mayor’s home, prompting police in riot gear to move the protesters away from the residence.

“We are saddened [about the acquittal], we are frustrated,” St. Louis Alderman John Collins-Muhammad told the St. Louis Post Dispatch. “Until black people in this city get justice, until we get a seat at the table, there will be no peace in this city.”

Damone Smith, a 52-year-old electrician, told the newspaper, “I think the verdict is disgusting.”

“Time and time again, African-American men are killed by police and nobody is held accountable,” he said.

Racial tension in the area is not new. One of the suburbs of St. Louis is Ferguson, Missouri, where two weeks of protests began in August 2014 with the shooting death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, by a white police officer.

That November, the decision not to indict the police officer sparked another week of protests, and the anniversary of the shooting in 2015 was the occasion of a third protest.

Brown’s father told a St. Louis television station after Friday’s verdict, “You all know this ain’t right and you all continue to do this to us. Like we don’t mean nothing, like we’re rats, trash, dogs in the streets… my people are tired of this.”

The incidents in Missouri were followed by police shootings and protests in a number of American cities, among them Baltimore, Maryland; Charlotte, North Carolina; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says the United States is considering closing its embassy in Cuba following a number of “health attacks” on American diplomats there.

“We have it under evaluation and it is a very serious issue with respect to the harm some individuals have suffered,” Tillerson said on the CBS show “Face the Nation.”

At least 21 Americans have suffered what the State Department calls “incidents” that have lead to a variety of symptoms, including hearing loss, concussions, headaches, ear-ringing, and even problems with concentration and common word recall.

Though investigators have explored the possibility of sonic waves or an electromagnetic weapon, no culprit or device has yet been identified, the Associated Press reports.

Lawmakers in Washington have raised alarm over the incidents. On Friday, five Republican senators wrote Tillerson to call for both closing the Havana embassy and expelling all Cuban diplomats from the United States.

Former President Barack Obama re-established ties with the Caribbean island nation two years ago, a move that has been criticized and threatened by his successor Donald Trump.

 
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New York police and a host of federal agencies are preparing for the annual traffic and security nightmare known as the United Nations General Assembly, featuring a week of speeches by U.S. President Donald Trump and a parade of other dignitaries.

The meeting of the world’s top leaders and diplomats, scheduled to begin on Tuesday, will bring street closures, thousands of police officers and hundreds of protesters to midtown Manhattan, an area already plagued with gridlock on an average weekday.

“It’s the equivalent of the Super Bowl of security,” said J. Peter Donald, a spokesman for the New York City Police Department.

Trump will be on hand on Monday and Tuesday, when he will address the body of world leaders for the first time. It was not immediately clear whether he would stay at his Manhattan penthouse about a mile away from United Nations headquarters or sleep at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The event also comes just days after a homemade bomb on a packed commuter train in London injured 22 people, though it failed to fully explode.

A handful of anti-Trump protests in New York have been scheduled, with more sure to come. A march on Monday to combat “white supremacy” will start from Grand Central Terminal, while the left-wing activist group Code Pink has organized a Tuesday march to the U.N. to protest Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Other protesters will gather outside the U.N. to call out specific countries, including a rally against Iran President Hassan Rouhani.

The NYPD’s elite counterterrorism unit, along with detectives from the intelligence bureau and officers from the aviation, harbor, highway and traffic units, will be on hand throughout the week. Donald said the department has plenty of “muscle memory” from previous years.

“It’s a full assortment of personnel from nearly every part of the police department,” Donald said. “We’ll be prepared for anything. We’ll have backup plans and backup plans for the backup plans.”

The U.S. Secret Service, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and various other federal agencies are also involved in providing security during both Trump’s visit and the general assembly.

Vast swaths of the area near the United Nations, on the far east side of midtown Manhattan, will be closed to vehicle traffic, and the Coast Guard will heavily restrict boat traffic on the East River.

Police did not immediately offer an estimate on how much the week’s security and traffic measures would cost.
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Advances in North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are pushing the international community to respond with increasingly strict sets of sanctions, with the latest round, passed this week, capping the country’s oil imports while banning its lucrative textile exports.

Despite the pressure, the Kim Jong Un regime continues to pursue the development of a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could strike the continental United States, among other targets.

On Friday, for the second time in a month, the regime launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. It traveled about 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) before falling into the Pacific Ocean, the farthest a North Korean missile has ever flown. Within hours, the U.N. Security Council condemned the “highly provocative” missile launch.

Why is the North continuing its launches? Jenny Lee of VOA Korean spoke with former CIA Director James Woolsey to discuss the latest developments.

Lee: North Korea’s missile launch on Friday came days after the passage of a new sanctions package by the U.N. Security Council. What do you think were Pyongyang’s intentions?

Woolsey: The North Koreans wanted to shove themselves forward and say, “I am not intimidated by any sanctions. Leave me alone. I am a powerful nuclear power.” That’s their message.

​Q: How likely is it that the Kim regime has developed a functional ICBM and a miniaturized warhead?

A: Probably not fully yet. But it doesn’t matter because they don’t need an intercontinental ballistic missile in order to attack directly the United States. They can do so with a satellite launch and [they] have nuclear weapons contained in the satellite that continues to circle the Earth a couple of times a day. … So it does not take an intercontinental ballistic missile to reach the United States. You can do it fine with a weapon on a satellite.

Q: You seem to be describing a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. Could you describe how it works, and do you think the North Koreans currently have the capacity to carry out such an attack?

A: I think it’s likely that they do. The destructive mechanism would be, it would not go directly against people, but would destroy the electric grid. It uses a detonation up above the Earth. It would not be targeted at a specific location, a specific building or an ICBM silo or something. It would knock out the grid generally. That means there would be no food, no water, no telecommunications and no hospitals. It would be a hideous situation. So that could be even more devastating than a nuclear attack that was targeted on individual locations.

But having an ICBM that can be targeted on individual locations would give them more flexibility, and so I am sure they would like to have it. They are working on it, but in the meantime, in their hip pocket, I would say it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they could use a nuclear detonation on a satellite in orbit to create the electromagnetic pulse.

Q: Do you think North Korea is posing a serious threat at this point in time?

A: I think it’s quite serious because it’s relatively easy to do. Orbiting a satellite is the easiest thing … and a simple nuclear weapon that is about the size of a golf bag … is not hard to fit on a small satellite like that. With a satellite you don’t have to worry about re-entry, re-entry shields, accuracy and a lot of other things that you have to worry about with ICBMs.

Q: North Korea threatened to lob a missile at Guam at one point, and as recently as this Friday, it threatened to use nuclear weapons to “sink” Japan and reduce the United States “to ashes and darkness” for supporting new U.N. sanctions. Why is the North behaving this way? What are its intentions?

A: They want to intimidate everybody else into making sure they get to hold on to their weapons, because they are convinced that that’s the only way that the Kim family can stay in power. They look at the history of Saddam Hussein, and the history of [Moammar] Gadhafi, and their conclusion is if we do anything to get rid of our nuclear weapons, we are doomed. So make sure we hold on to our nuclear weapons, and the best way to do that is to intimidate everyone and make them think that we’re right on the verge of using them.

Q: When it comes to dealing with the North Korean nuclear issue, the Trump administration has emphasized its willingness to resolve it through diplomacy but also has left room for military options, such as preemptive strikes against North Korea. So, do you think the U.S. currently is on the right track?

A: It’s hard to be on any other right now than to try diplomacy and hold military in reserve. … You can’t think of an overall approach that would be superior to what we are doing now. But in the future, if things get worse, would we consider using force against them and could we do so successfully? The answer is — I don’t know.

Q: The Trump administration is spearheading the effort to expand sanctions against North Korea and thereby isolate the country diplomatically and economically. Do you think they are sufficient to rein in the regime’s nuclear weapons program?

A: It probably won’t get the job done, but they should do as much as they can. As the Russians and the Chinese move them off of their almost total embargo of oil to 30 percent embargo, they could continue to press to get more of it — an oil embargo. I think we’ve got to work with China and figure out how, together, we could get something done here, because the Chinese are the mainstay of the North Korean government. They are powerful and they are right next door to North Korea. And they have at least some inclination to work with us — not as much as I would like. So we are really left with China. There’s not much to do other than to try to work with them and bring them along into tougher sanctions and tougher positions.
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Hurricane season roared on Saturday as Jose threatened heavy surf along the U.S. East Coast, Tropical Storm Norma edged toward Mexico’s resort-studded Baja California Peninsula, and Tropical Storm Maria formed in the Atlantic and was expected to strengthen into a hurricane, taking aim at some already battered Caribbean islands.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Lee formed in the Atlantic far from land.

A tropical storm warning was in effect for the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula because of Norma, which the U.S. National Hurricane Center reported had weakened into a tropical storm on Saturday, with maximum sustained winds of 100 kph (65 mph).

Norma was 355 kilometers (220 miles) south of Cabo San Lucas and moving north at 4 kph (2 mph), with forecasters saying it could approach waters southwest of the peninsula late Sunday or early Monday.

The peninsular region that’s home to the twin resort cities of Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo was hit about two weeks ago by Tropical Storm Lidia, which flooded streets and homes and killed at least four people.

The Baja California Sur government readied storm shelters and canceled classes for Monday as well as a planned military parade in the state capital, La Paz, amid Mexican Independence Day celebrations.

In the Atlantic, Hurricane Jose was far from land but generating powerful swells that the center said were affecting coastal areas in Bermuda, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and the U.S. Southeast.

East Coast cautioned

The center added that tropical storm watches were possible for the U.S. East Coast later in the day and advised people from North Carolina to New England to monitor Jose’s progress.

The hurricane had maximum sustained winds of 130 kph (80 mph). It was located about 775 kilometers (485 miles) south-southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and was heading north at 9 kph (6 mph).

Also Saturday, Tropical Storm Lee formed in the eastern Atlantic with sustained winds of 65 kph (40 mph). The storm was about 1,160 kilometers (720 miles) west-southwest of the Cape Verde Islands and posed no immediate threat to land.

To the west, Tropical Storm Maria formed and is expected to strengthen, prompting hurricane watches for Antigua, Barbuda, St. Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat — some of which were devastated by Hurricane Irma.

The hurricane center said Maria was about 1,000 km (620 miles)  east-southeast of the Lesser Antilles. It had maximum sustained winds of 85 kph (50 mph) and was heading west at 31 kph (20 mph). It should approach the Leeward Islands on Tuesday.

The death toll from Irma in the Caribbean was 38.
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Protests gathered in St. Louis, Missouri, for a second day Saturday, sparked by the acquittal of a white police officer charged with murder in the death of a black man.

Several hundred people walked through two malls in a suburban area of the city. Protesters shouted, “Black lives matter,” and “It is our duty to fight for our freedom,” as they marched in a mostly peaceful demonstration.

The band U2 also announced Saturday morning that it was canceling a concert, planned for Saturday night in St. Louis. The musicians said they did not think city police would be able to adequately protect the event.

Friday’s protests began after the acquittal of Jason Stockley, a former St. Louis police officer, who had been charged with the fatal shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith after a car chase in December 2011. Prosecutors also alleged Stockley had planted a gun on Smith’s body. Prosecutors said the gun had only Stockley’s DNA on it.

Police said 23 people were arrested and nine police were injured in skirmishes with protesters.

Mayor’s statement

Mayor Lyda Krewson released a statement early Friday urging compassion, despite differing opinions on the acquittal. “We are all St. Louisans. We rise and fall together,” she said.

Protests started peacefully on Friday, with hundreds gathering in the streets of St. Louis holding signs and chanting, “No justice, no peace.” Some made their way to police headquarters, calling for police resignations.

By the end of the night, demonstrators had broken a window and splashed paint on the mayor’s home, prompting police in riot gear to move the protesters away from the residence.

“We are saddened [about the acquittal], we are frustrated,” St. Louis Alderman John Collins-Muhammad told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Until black people in this city get justice, until we get a seat at the table, there will be no peace in this city.”

Damone Smith, a 52-year-old electrician, told the newspaper, “I think the verdict is disgusting.”

“Time and time again, African-American men are killed by police and nobody is held accountable,” he said.

Brown shooting

Racial tension in the area is not new. One of the suburbs of St. Louis is Ferguson, Missouri, where two weeks of protests began in August 2014 with the shooting death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, by a white police officer.

That November, the decision not to indict the police officer sparked another week of protests, and the anniversary of the shooting in 2015 was the occasion of a third protest.

Brown’s father told a St. Louis television station after Friday’s verdict, “You all know this ain’t right and you all continue to do this to us. Like we don’t mean nothing, like we’re rats, trash, dogs in the streets. … My people are tired of this.”

The earlier incidents in Missouri were followed by police shootings and protests in a number of American cities, among them Baltimore, Maryland; Charlotte, North Carolina; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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The European Union’s top energy official says the United States has signaled that it may be willing to re-engage in the Paris climate pact, despite President Donald Trump’s announcement in June that the U.S. would withdraw in order to renegotiate the deal.

Miguel Arias Canete, European commissioner for climate action and energy, said Saturday that the shift came during a meeting in Montreal of more than 30 ministers, led by Canada, China and the European Union.

The Montreal meeting took place in preparation for the annual U.N. General Assembly, the main events of which begin Tuesday.

“The U.S. has stated that they will not renegotiate the Paris accord, but they will try to review the terms on which they could be engaged under this agreement,” Canete said after the meeting.

Stance ‘has not changed’

However, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted a different message shortly after Canete’s statement was released. “Our position on the Paris agreement has not changed.,” she said. “@POTUS has been clear, US withdrawing unless we get pro-America terms.”

Trump drew international criticism when he declared the U.S. would pull out of the Paris Agreement and seek a renegotiation.

The Paris Agreement is a U.N.-negotiated deal signed in 2015 by every nation except Syria and Nicaragua. A withdrawal by the United States is seen as a possible catalyst for withdrawals by other nations.

The agreement seeks a global response to curb carbon dioxide emissions.

The United States produces the world’s second-highest level of greenhouse gas emissions, next to China.
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