Month: March 2018

UN Security Council to Meet on Ignored Syria Cease-Fire

Posted on by SeeEA

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is calling on all parties in Syria to implement a nationwide cease-fire, as the U.N. Security Council prepares to meet Wednesday to discuss the ignored 30-day halt in fighting it demanded in a resolution nearly two weeks ago.

The cease-fire’s failure prompted Britain and France to request the closed door meeting. 

The council’s resolution was meant to give humanitarian workers a chance to bring food and medical supplies to areas where seven years of conflict has left millions of Syrians badly in need of help.

An attempt Monday by the United Nations, Syrian Arab Red Crescent and International Red Cross to deliver aid in the eastern Ghouta area had to be abandoned due to continued violence. The agencies also reported the Syrian government blocked rescue workers from loading most of the medical supplies they had planned to transport.

“The Secretary-General commends the courage of all humanitarians working tirelessly to ensure that people in need throughout Syria receive life-saving humanitarian aid,” Guterres spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement. 

Guterres said there is a particular need to ensure that Thursday’s planned deliveries to the Douma part of eastern Ghouta go through, “as previously agreed with the Syrian authorities.”

In the resolution, the council expressed “outrage at the unacceptable violence” in several parts of the country as well as at the “insufficient implementation” of seven of its resolutions regarding Syria dating back to 2014.

Heavy fighting continued Tuesday in eastern Ghouta, a rebel-held suburb of Syria’s capital that government forces have held under siege since 2013. It is one of the last remaining areas under opposition control near Damascus.

A Russian plane crashed in Syria as it was attempting to land, killing 39 Russian servicemen. Russia’s defense ministry said the crash was caused by technical error and was not shot down.

Earlier Tuesday, Russia’s defense ministry said that Syrian rebels, in addition to civilians, are free to use evacuation corridors to leave eastern Ghouta.

A ministry statement said the fighters could take their guns and their families, but did not specify where they would go.

Syrian forces backed by Russia have been pressing an offensive to retake control of eastern Ghouta, and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the pro-government side now controls one-third of the territory. More than 800 people have been killed during three weeks of fighting.
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Drought-hit Kenyans Find Gold in Tea Trees – But for How Long?

Posted on by SeeAF

At Sweet Waters, a village in central Kenya, Veronicah Nyambura stands under the hot sun between two fields. One is full of lush plants – but the other has crops so wilted that their leaves have curled up.

The green land is planted with tea tree, an Australian native that thrives in this semi-arid part of Kenya. Opposite is a field of maize, which suffers in years of poor rains and high temperatures.

“Maize is very disappointing. You plant but you’re never sure whether you’ll harvest anything,” said Nyambura, who has planted a quarter-acre of tea trees.

The 65-year-old said she harvests 900 kg of tea tree branches every six months from that bit of land. When it was planted to maize, she got about 270 kg of grain every nine months, she said.

Many farmers in this part of Laikipia County – like farmers in many parts of the world – cannot afford to buy seeds for alternative crops better suited to drought, so keep planting maize.

But Nyambura and about 800 other small-scale farmers were sold tea tree seedlings on credit by a company called Earthoil that also guaranteed to buy their harvest. Each seedling cost 3.5 Kenyan shillings, or about 3 cents.

Earthoil, which buys the branches for between 17 Kenyan shillings ($0.17) and 19 Kenyan shillings ($0.19) a kilogram, extracts the tea tree oil at its local distillery and exports it to British skin-care company, The Body Shop.

Dairy cows and a TV

To meet the demands of buyers, Martin Thogoto Mwambia, 68, uses mulch – not chemical fertilizers or pesticides – on his 1.75-acre tea tree farm in Ngarariga village, in neighboring Nyeri county.

“I am mulching them with cow-dung and dried leftovers of tea tree,” he said with a smile while rubbing the dirt off his hands.

The farmer said he has reaped a fortune from the crop, which means he does not have to spend his old age working in menial jobs.

“Handling 50,000 Kenyan shillings ($490) and sometimes 100,000 Kenyan shillings ($990) is a miracle to me. Tea tree has given me that privilege,” said Mwambia, who worked as a guard in a local firm before he began growing tea trees.

Prior to tea tree he grew maize – but even in good years he earned far less, he said.

“Sometimes when the drought is at its worst I would harvest a tin (a kilogram) or two,” said Mwambia who is now harvesting an average of 10,000 kgs of tea tree branches annually from his farm.

The proceeds have enabled him to buy two dairy cows, get connected to electricity and buy a television set.

“Life is better for us now. I am happy,” said his wife, Jane Gathigia.

The drought-tolerant tea trees come with the advantage of a ready market, the farmers said.

“Marketing maize is a headache. The prices fluctuate from time to time and farmers end up making losses,” said Alice Wanja, 42, at her quarter-acre tea tree farm at Sweet Waters, about 1.5 km from Nyambura’s home.

“There is nothing like that with tea tree. The buyer is already at the waiting end and the buying price is good,” she said.

Long-term risks

The Laikipia County project came about through a grant from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), administered by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and implemented by a local charity, Kenya Organic Agriculture Network (KOAN), which partnered with Earthoil.

Although projects of this kind guarantee farmers a reliable buyer, they do not necessarily offer security in the longterm since the buyer may go out of business or move elsewhere, warned Tom Nyamache, professor of economics at Turkana University College.

On the flip side, the buyer is also at risk of closing shop if the farmers’ productivity falls or fails completely, he said.

It is important that farmers plant an alternative crop that also can thrive in the changed climate conditions to serve as a fallback should their tea tree ventures fail, he said.

Earthoil’s project manager, Martin Wainaina, said there is such a big demand for tea tree oil that they are making aggressive plans to expand production.

The Body Shop wants 30 tons of oil from the firm each year, but Earthoil can currently only supply 8 tons, he said.

Expanding the pool of farmers is a challenge. The plants have to be grown near the distillery, as tea tree branches are bulky and difficult to transport, he said.

The tea tree thrives in the volcanic soil and high altitudes in this region near Mount Kenya, Wainaina said.

Expanding production to other parts of Kenya with similar arid and semi-arid climates will only be possible through research and investment in more tea tree processing, analysts say.

Nancy Chege, country program manager at GEF-UNDP, Kenya, said scaling up tea tree farming also would depend on continuing to look for new markets, both locally and internationally.

But “most (such) community projects … are usually sustainable because trade goes on even after the project (ends),” she said.

($1 = 101.1700 Kenyan shillings)
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Turkey to Set up Camps in Syria for Displaced People

Posted on by SeeEA

Turkey says it will establish camps for 170,000 displaced people in the Idlib province and in Turkish-controlled areas to the east of it ahead of a possible refugee influx from Afrin, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hami Aksoy said in a press conference Tuesday.

The camps will be established in nine different regions. Turkey has been one of the main relocation points for refugees fleeing Syria since war erupted in early 2011. However, Ankara’s increasing involvement in the war has worsened the refugee crisis, especially in the north of Syria where Ankara is battling Kurds with the aim of pushing them back to the west of the Euphrates. 

Dubbed “Olive Branch”, the operation was launched in late January to clear the city of Afrin and the surrounding areas from Kurdish militants of the YPG group. The Afrin operation has largely failed to reach its objectives while it is strongly opposed by the United States, an ally of the Kurdish forces, and the Syrian government, which views the campaign as a violation of its sovereignty.

Aksoy said Turkey, Iran and Russia will hold a trilateral summit in Istanbul in early April aimed at discussing the Syrian crisis. Officials of the three countries will meet in Astana on March 16 for preparatory talks ahead of the summit, he added.

Syrian Refugees in Turkey

Turkey currently hosts Syrians in 21 temporary shelters set up in 10 cities. According to Turkish interior ministry’s Bureau of Migration numbers, there are 228,197 Syrians currently living in these shelters. Aside from these, 3,312,451 Syrian citizens, dependent on state benefits and NGO donations, are dispersed throughout different towns and cities.

There is a total of 3,540,648 Syrians currently living in Turkey. 1,621,363 of them are women and 1,919,285 are men. The number of Syrian children 18 and under is 1,614, 601. The number of girls is 769,297.
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Porn Star Sues Trump Over Nondisclosure Agreement

Posted on by SeeUS

A porn star who has said she had sex with President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to invalidate a nondisclosure agreement that she signed days before the 2016 presidential election, which prevented her from discussing the alleged sexual encounters.

 

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges that the agreement is “null and void and of no consequence” because Trump didn’t personally sign it.

 

Adult film actress Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, said she wanted to go public with the details of her alleged sexual relationship with Trump in the weeks leading up to the election, according to the lawsuit. Clifford and Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen signed the nondisclosure agreement on Oct. 28, 2016.

 

Clifford alleges that she began an “intimate relationship” with Trump in 2006 and that it continued “well into the year 2007,” according to the lawsuit. She said the relationship included encounters in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, and Beverly Hills, California.

 

Trump married his current wife, Melania Trump, in 2005.

 

Clifford has claimed she had sex with Trump once and then carried on a subsequent yearslong platonic relationship. She has also, through a lawyer, denied the two had an affair. Cohen has denied there was ever an affair.

 

Cohen has said he paid the porn actress $130,000 out of his own pocket as part of the agreement. He has also said that “neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly.”

 

The lawsuit charges that the “hush agreement” is legally invalid because it was only signed by Clifford and Cohen. The agreement refers to Trump as David Dennison and Clifford as Peggy Peterson, but an attached exhibit details their true identities.

 

Clifford’s lawsuit also alleges that Trump and Cohen “aggressively sought to silence Ms. Clifford as part of an effort to avoid her telling the truth, thus helping to ensure he won the Presidential Election.”

 

“To be clear, the attempts to intimidate Ms. Clifford into silence and ‘shut her up’ in order to ‘protect Mr. Trump’ continue unabated,” the lawsuit said. Clifford alleges that as recently as last week, Trump’s attorney tried to initiate an arbitration proceeding against her.

 

Neither Cohen nor the White House immediately responded to requests for comment Tuesday evening.

 

NBC News first reported the existence of the lawsuit.
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Coalition: Israel, Myanmar Must Go on Children’s Blacklist 

Posted on by SeeEA

An international coalition advocating for children in conflict zones urged Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday to put government security forces from Israel, Myanmar and Afghanistan on a U.N. blacklist for killings and other violations of children’s rights.

Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict also called on the U.N. chief to add several rebel groups in the Central African Republic, Congo’s national police force, a rebel group in Mali, and the main opposition force in South Sudan to the blacklist.

The global network of human rights and humanitarian organizations said Guterres should also determine whether the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and several Kurdish groups in Iraq, the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia, international coalitions in Syria, and the armed forces in the Philippines should be added.

Mission to Ukraine

Watchlist also recommended in a report that an assessment mission be sent to Ukraine to investigate which parties committed grave violations.

The secretary-general’s annual report on children in armed conflict contains a blacklist of government forces and rebel groups that recruit, use, kill, maim, rape, sexually abuse or abduct children in armed conflict or attack schools and hospitals.

Watchlist’s U.N. Advocacy Officer Dragica Mikavica said the list is “an indispensable tool for stopping heinous crimes against children — but it can only remain credible if it lists all the guilty parties.”

She said parties are so concerned about not finding themselves on the list “that they would go the length of threatening to pull funding from U.N. programs in blackmail.”

In 2016, the Saudi-led coalition fighting Houthi Shiite rebels in Yemen was put on the blacklist by then Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon but then removed. Ban said coalition supporters threatened to stop funding many U.N. programs and he had to consider “the very real prospect” that millions of other children in the Palestinian territories, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen and many other places “would suffer grievously” if U.N. programs were defunded.

Last year’s report, the first by Guterres, who succeeded Ban, was delayed until October and changed the blacklist. For the first time, it listed governments, rebel groups and other parties to conflicts that are taking action to protect children — and those combatants that aren’t doing anything.

Saudi Arabia is on the list of parties that are taking action, but Watchlist questioned what actions it has taken in the past year, citing coalition bombings that have killed children.

The coalition also asked Guterres to state whether countries designated as taking action would still need to take the same measures as the others to get off the blacklist, namely signing a plan of action with the U.N. with time-bound steps to end violations against children — and being violation-free for a year.

The report also raised the issue of budget cuts in U.N. peacekeeping operations, which are reducing staff assigned to protect children’s rights and to investigate violations. Watchlist’s Mikavica said these are being pressed by the United States and China.

Injuries to Palestinian children

In its recommendation to list the Israel Defense Forces for the first time this year, Watchlist pointed to U.N. figures on the killing and wounding of Palestinian children by soldiers in attacks, alleged attacks and clashes in 2017. It cited dozens of injuries and 13 youngsters killed by mid-August 2017.

Mikavica said in response to a question that the coalition used Guterres’ 2017 report, which focused on the Israeli Defense Forces but not Hamas, for its recommendation to list the military force.

As for Myanmar, the report cites numerous reports of the killing, burning and beating to death of Rohingya Muslim children by government forces, known as the Tatmadaw. And it recommended listing the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces and pro-government militias, for killing and raping children and for attacking schools and hospitals.

In its recommendation to further investigate international coalitions in Syria, Watchlist noted that Guterres reported 533 verified child casualties from airstrikes in 2017, including by international forces supporting the government, which include Russia, and the U.S.-led international coalition fighting the Islamic State extremist group.

Jo Becker, head of Human Rights Watch’s children’s rights division who heads Watchlist’s advisory board, said the coalition looks forward to this year’s U.N. report being “as accurate and comprehensive as possible, with no political interference.”

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said that “the report is on track to be on schedule, probably in late June.” 
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EU Tax Haven Blacklist Set to Shrink Further

Posted on by SeeEU

European Union states are set to remove Bahrain, the Marshall Islands and Saint Lucia from a list of tax havens next week, leaving only six jurisdictions on it, an EU document shows.

The planned removals from the EU list drew criticism from an anti-corruption watchdog on Tuesday. The decision is also likely to bring more disapproval from lawmakers and activists who had strongly criticized a first delisting in January that cut the number of jurisdictions named to nine from 17.

The latest decision was taken by the EU Code of Conduct Group, which includes tax experts from the 28 member states, according to an EU document seen by Reuters.

EU finance ministers are expected to endorse the proposal at their regular monthly meeting in Brussels on March 13.

The jurisdictions that remain on the blacklist are American Samoa, Guam, Namibia, Palau, Samoa and Trinidad and Tobago.

Bahrain, the Marshall Islands and Saint Lucia are to be delisted after they made “specific commitments” to adapt their tax rules and practices to EU standards, the document says.

Those commitments are not public.

“This ever-decreasing list of tax havens will soon be so short it will be able to fit on a Post-it. It’s time for the EU to publish how it chooses which countries go on the list and why,” said Elena Gaita, of Transparency International EU, an anti-corruption watchdog.

Panama

In the last cut, EU governments decided to remove Barbados, Grenada, South Korea, Macau, Mongolia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Panama.

Panama’s delisting caused particular outcry. The EU process to set up a tax-haven blacklist was triggered by publication of the Panama Papers, documents that showed how wealthy individuals and multinational corporations use offshore schemes to reduce their tax bills.

Ministers said January’s delisting signaled that the process was working as countries around the world were agreeing to adopt EU standards on tax transparency.

All delisted countries have been moved to a “gray list,” which includes dozens of jurisdictions that are not in line with EU standards against tax avoidance but have committed to change their rules and practices.

These countries can be moved back to the blacklist if they fail to respect their undertakings.

Blacklist

Blacklisted jurisdictions could face reputational damage and stricter controls on their financial transactions with the EU, although no sanctions have been agreed by member states yet.

The blacklist was set up to discourage the use of shell structures abroad, which in many cases are legal but may hide illicit activities.

It took nearly a year for EU experts to screen an initial 92 jurisdictions around the world before identifying 17 in December that could favor tax avoidance.

EU countries were not screened. They were deemed to be already in line with EU standards against tax avoidance, although anti-corruption activists and lawmakers have repeatedly asked for some EU members such as Malta and Luxembourg to be blacklisted.
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Prosecutors Ask for 15 Years in Prison for Ex-Pharmaceutical Chief

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Prosecutors have asked a federal judge to sentence ex-pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli to a stiff 15 years in prison for investment fraud.

U.S. attorneys say Shkreli, who hiked the price of the anti-parasitic drug Daraprim by more than 5,000 percent, has shown no genuine remorse for his crime.

Shkreli is “a man who has consistently chosen to put profit and the cultivation of a public image before all else, and a man who believes the end always justify the means,” the attorneys said.

In a letter to the court, Shkreli expressed contrition. “I was wrong. I was a fool. I should have known better,” he said.

His lawyers are asking for a relatively light sentence of no more than 18 months, calling Shkreli a “misunderstood eccentric.”

Shkreli is set to be sentenced Friday by Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, who has already ordered Shkreli to forfeit $7.3 million in assets.

Along with cash, Shkreli was ordered to relinquish the only copy of an album recorded by the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, which he claims he bought at auction for $2 million.

He was also ordered to surrender a Picasso painting and other valuables.

Shkreli was found guilty in August of defrauding investors by lying about the performance of two hedge funds he ran. Hedge funds are complicated high-risk funds that can result in huge financial returns or huge losses. 

Shkreli’s lawyers argued that investors actually made money when he paid them off in drug company stocks.

Matsumoto revoked Shkreli’s bail in September when Shkreli offered $5,000 to anyone who could produce a lock of former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s hair.

Shkreli earned the nickname “Pharma-Bro” for hiking the price of the medication and for sarcastic remarks and courtroom antics during his trial.
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Boston Pays Tribute to Immigrant Grandmothers

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She is known as “nonna” in Italian, “abuelita” in Spanish and “Grandma” in English. But across cultures, the grandmother is the matriarch and foundation on which the family unit is built.

In ethnically diverse East Boston, home to a large immigrant community, a new mural serves as a visual tribute to grandmothers and the values that residents of what is known as “Eastie” share across ethnic lines.

“It makes me feel identified,” Salvadoran-native Guadalupe Gonzalez said of the mural, known as “Immigrant Grandmothers,” which stands tall underneath an overpass along a park known as the East Boston Greenway.

“I identify with these grandmothers that came with nothing, [like me], that came with a dream,” said Gonzalez, a 59-year-old mother of two and grandmother of four. She shares a powder-blue, triple-decker home with two other immigrant families from El Salvador in what is now an area comprising mainly immigrants from Latin America.

Gonzalez’s East Boston neighborhood, located about a kilometer from the mural, reflects the changing demographics throughout the port city’s history. 

Heidi Schork, director of the Mayor’s Mural Crew of the City of Boston, conceived of the idea for the mural after noticing more elderly women on the streets than in other areas of the city — “going to market, sweeping the sidewalks and going to medical appointments.”

“I noticed, in looking over a lot of reference photos, that the posture of making tortillas and making pasta is exactly the same,” Schork said, an example that transpired into three centerpiece grandmothers.

Among other motifs are local churches, a topic Schork said “broke the ice immediately” among Italian and Central American grandmothers, along with polka-dotted dresses — “the international grandmother outfit.”

Left of the mural’s center, one such immaculately dressed older woman stands proudly beside her young granddaughter, who is wearing an organza dress to celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation, a rite of passage in the Catholic Church.

“It had these little pleats in the front of it, and you had the little white gloves,” Diane Modica, an East Boston-based lawyer, said of an outfit she once wore when she was a child, in the company of her grandmother. “My grandmother standing next to me, it evokes such memories.”

WATCH: Women with Ties to Mural Discuss its Significance

​United by purpose

Modica, the granddaughter of early 20th-century Sicilian immigrants, lives in the same house that her family bought in 1922. Although the immigrants of her diverse neighborhood come from vastly different origins than a century ago, Modica says they are united by their reasons for settling.

“They’re not doing anything different than what we did,” Modica said, “which is come over, work hard, raise their family, take care of their family and hope for a better future.”

The completed artwork presents typical East Boston homes, together with villages of southern Italy and Central America. It is one of a series of City of Boston mural projects inspired by a larger national campaign “To Immigrants With Love.”

“People here are really linked to where they came from, even if it was generations ago,” Celina Barrios-Millner, Immigration Integration Fellow at the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement, told VOA.

“We want to connect that pride and that love for today’s immigrants, as well.”

Like the women in the mural and near her Boston home, Gonzalez believes in the value of hard work, and looks up to labor leaders and civil rights activists such as Dolores Huerta and the late Cesar Chavez.

She credits her achievements as a house cleaner to provide for her youngest son’s education in El Salvador, and now — she hopes — the next generation, too.

But for those achievements to be possible, she counts longevity among her blessings.

“[Life] doesn’t take years away,” Gonzalez said. “The years give you life!”
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Israeli Shepherdess Uses Modern Sheep Breed to Revive Ancient Shofar Sound

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The piercing note of a shofar – a ram’s horn used in Jewish religious ceremonies – cuts through the mountain air of the Galilee.

Here in northern Israel, shepherdess Jenna Lewinsky is raising a flock of Jacob Sheep, pictured here, as a religious calling.

With anything up to six horns on each animal, the breed is ideally suited for the manufacture of the horn traditionally blown during the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

The spotted breed of Jacob Sheep was bred in England in the 17th and 18th centuries, and this flock was brought to Israel from Canada by Lewinsky in 2016.

But sheep have been recorded since antiquity across the Middle East, and the modern breed’s name echoes the ancient Biblical story from Genesis in which the patriarch Jacob took “every speckled and spotted sheep” as wages from his father-in-law, Laban.

Turning her flock’s horns into shofars is part of God’s plan, says Lewinsky, who calls herself a “traditional and God-fearing Jew.”

“The Jacob Sheep horns can probably be processed anywhere in the world but what makes the horns special is that we are processing them in Israel, which gives them a holiness,” she said.

Robert Weinger, a shofar-maker who works with the horns from Lewinsky’s farm, said that a ram’s horn made from the breed can sell for $500 to $20,000 or more, depending on its sound quality, as it produces a wider range of musical notes than other shofars.
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Nor’easter Packing Heavy Snow, Wind Threatens New Outages

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Utility workers took advantage of milder temperatures and sunshine Tuesday in their scramble to restore power to thousands of customers around the Northeast, as another snowy, blowy nor’easter threatened a new round of outages.

The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning that stretched from eastern Pennsylvania to most of New England, from late Tuesday night into Thursday morning.

Heavy, wet snow and gusting winds could take down trees and snap power lines already weakened from last week’s storm, adding to stress for customers who’ve gone days without power.

The outages turned to outrage for a New Jersey man whose home had been without electricity since Friday, who threatened to kidnap a utility company employee and blow up a substation. Robert Winter, 63, was charged with making terroristic threats, according to police in Vernon.

More than a foot of snow is forecast for some interior areas, the weather service said. Pennsylvania’s Poconos Mountains and parts of western Massachusetts could see up to 18 inches.

Damaging winds are in the forecast with gusts of up to 60 mph at Cape Cod, 45 mph at the Jersey shore and 30 mph around suburban Philadelphia.

Depending on the storm’s track, communities along the Interstate 95 corridor could see either lots of rain, heavy snow, or a mix of each.

Transportation departments in Philadelphia and Boston loaded up salt trucks and pre-treated roads Tuesday afternoon, and some airlines already were waiving ticket change fees for airports in the storm’s projected path, such as Newark, Philadelphia, Boston and New York’s JFK.

Amtrak said it was canceling some train service Wednesday, and regional rail trains in Philadelphia will operate on a weekend schedule on Wednesday. 

School districts and municipal operations around Pennsylvania and Connecticut already were announcing they would close Wednesday. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf declared states of emergency.

The National Weather Service said travel is not recommended Wednesday and urged people to stay off the roads to allow emergency crews and clean-up crews to do their jobs. Some areas will get as much as 2-3 inches an hour.

Workers in a coastal Massachusetts town hit particularly hard by last week’s nor’easter were working frantically to head off further damage from another severe storm coming this week.

Public works crews and private contractors in Duxbury reinforced the town’s crumbling seawall with truckloads of large rocks on Tuesday, but Department of Public Works Director Pete Buttkus called it a short-term fix. 

Rene Read, town manager of the community about 30 miles (48 kilometers) south of Boston, said the seawall “is in crisis and is in the process of failing.”

A slight consolation is that the storm is not expected to bring the coastal flooding like the one last week. Some New England and New Jersey coastal communities still are underwater from the earlier storm.

 
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CDC: Rate of Opioid Overdoses Increasing, Especially in Midwest

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“We’ve got an emergency on our hands,” said acting director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control Anne Schuchat, as the agency released a report saying emergency room visits due to opioid overdose have increased an average of 30 percent nationwide.

The CDC released its report Tuesday, noting the Midwestern state of Wisconsin saw a 109 percent increase in emergency department visits due to opioid overdose between the third quarters of 2016 and 2017.

The East Coast state of Delaware followed with a 105 percent increase. Pennsylvania had an 81 percent increase.

The agency said its new numbers could help hospitals play a larger role in mitigating the opioid crisis by widening the availability of the drug naloxone, which has been shown to reverse the effects of overdose in time to save lives. It also recommended more effort be put into getting overdose patients into drug-addiction treatment and mental health services.

Part of that task is teaching emergency department staff to recognize the signs of drug overdose and drug addiction, so patients can be directed toward appropriate help.

It also suggested that state and local health departments use the new findings in efforts to persuade lawmakers to devote more funding and attention to conquering the opioid crisis.

Schuchat told reporters Tuesday that opioid addiction numbers are “relatively stable,” but added that the substances people are taking are “more dangerous than five years ago.” In addition, she said, the supply of the more dangerous drugs — including those taken recreationally — is growing fast in some parts of the country.

U.S. President Donald Trump recently declared that the use of addictive opioid painkillers is a national emergency.

However, such a declaration means little unless new funds are made available to fight the problem, Andrew Kolodny of Brandeis University told National Public Radio on Tuesday.

“There’s been a lot of talk from Congress and from the administration and a recognition that we need to do something about this problem,” he said. “But nothing yet has happened.”

The CDC analysis was based on approximately 91 million emergency room visits between July 2016 and September 2017.

Treating pain

The World Health Organization has placed some of the blame for the United States’ opioid epidemic on health care providers and pharmaceutical companies, saying the epidemic is fueled by increased prescribing and sales.

The CDC says about 40 percent of opioid overdose deaths involve a prescription drug.

A separate study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that treating pain with opioids worked no better than non-opioid medications when used over a 12-month period.

The prescribing of opioids for pain ramped up in the late 1990s, the CDC’s Schuchat said, increasing the incidence of opioid addiction in the United States. Addiction to prescribed painkillers can lead to use of more potent “recreational” drugs like heroin and fentanyl, which are illegally manufactured and thus of unpredictable potency.

Today, Schuchat said, even if the number of people using opioids is no longer growing, the increase in potency makes overdose more likely, and the use of opioids more dangerous.
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More Protests Planned in Kenya Over Railway Through National Park

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Demonstrators said Tuesday after losing a court battle that they planned to protest against a railway line being built inside Nairobi National Park, which they say threatens wildlife and people in Kenya.

A court said it could not stop construction of a 6-kilometer (4-mile) railway bridge, which the China Road and Bridge Corporation started building last month through the capital’s sprawling sanctuary for lions, giraffes and zebras.

“We have found that we have no jurisdiction on the matter,” Mohammed Balala of the National Environment Tribunal (NET) ruled Tuesday. “A similar case is pending in the High Court.”

Kenya’s game parks draw tourists from across the globe but its wildlife are facing increased pressure to share their space with infrastructure projects and people seeking more land to farm and live on.

Campaigners said that the Chinese company was defying a June order by NET to halt construction in Kenya’s oldest park, which is the second phase of a $13.8 billion project linking the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa to Nairobi and Uganda.

But NET said Tuesday that the order was no longer valid because the Chinese company had since lodged a case in the High Court, which is a superior court.

Human settlements and activity have long encroached on the park, which was established in 1946 on the city limits.

More protests

Activists who demonstrated in Nairobi last week said they would return to the streets and might appeal to the High Court.

“We intend to do another demo next week when the Chinese premier will be visiting,” said Reinhard Bonke, a spokesman for Friends of Nairobi National Park, a conservation group that was party to the petition.

The railway has divided opinion. The government has said that it is better to route the line through park rather than build in populated areas, which would require land seizures.

Activists said the raised railway through the park would affect animals’ routes and breeding grounds.

But Paul Gathitu, a spokesman for the government’s Kenya Wildlife Service, said human encroachment was more of a concern to animals than the railway line, which will be at least 8 meters off the ground and painted to blend with nature.

“There’s a lot of land use changes with people encroaching on their routes,” he said.
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EU Cool Toward British ‘Associate Membership’ in Bloc’s Agencies

Posted on by SeeEU

The European Union is cool to the idea of Britain’s “associate membership” in various agencies of the bloc as proposed by London to make Brexit less disruptive for British business.

Britain started a process to leave the EU last year because it no longer wants to accept the authority of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the free movement of workers, and it does not want to contribute to the EU budget.

But it is keen to keep most of its other links with the EU, especially unfettered access to the EU’s market.

EU officials call this approach “cherry-picking,” where London chooses the areas it wants for closer association but does not accept the obligations linked to it in other areas. 

Last Friday, Prime Minister Theresa May floated the idea of Britain’s remaining an associate member of the European Medicines Agency, the European Chemicals Agency and the European Aviation Safety Agency after Britain leaves the EU in March 2019.

She said London understood this meant abiding by the rules of those agencies and financial contributions. But EU officials involved in the negotiations on the terms of Britain’s exit from the bloc and deciding on the future trade relationship were not impressed.

“It is not so much ‘how’ they participate. That’s a technicality. The bigger question is ‘if’ they should participate. Why would we let them in?” one official said.

“The bottom line is that the U.K. approach is cherry-picking.

“The EU has a vast number of agencies, and I think we’d think twice to let the U.K. ‘associate’ itself with a selected number they choose because they have an interest,” the official said.

Brussels officials pointed out that an “associate membership” — a status that does not exist yet and would have to be created especially for Britain — would not give London the kind of access to the EU single market it sought.

“It is not possible to accept ECJ oversight in only some segments of business in the EU and not in others,” a second EU official said. “The single market is not made of bits and pieces you can pick and choose.”

An “associate membership” status would also likely involve complex legal work in the EU to create it.

“The willingness to change regulations in order to accommodate the U.K.’s wishes … is limited because it entails lengthy legislative procedures,” a third official said.

The chairman of EU leaders, Donald Tusk, will present draft guidelines for the EU’s future trade deal with Britain in Luxembourg on Wednesday.

‘Freedom implies responsibility’

The closest to an “associate membership” the EU has now is with countries in the European Economic Area but not EU members — Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland — which can take part in meetings, but they do not have voting rights.

Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, said last November that the work of the EU agencies was based on EU laws, which Britain no longer wants to accept and should then go on and build its own.

“The same people who argue for setting the U.K. free also argue that the U.K. should remain in some EU agencies. But freedom implies responsibility for building new U.K. administrative capacity,” Barnier said.

“On our side, the 27 will continue to deepen the work of those agencies, together. They will share the costs for running those agencies. Our businesses will benefit from their expertise. All of their work is firmly based on the EU treaties, which the U.K. decided to leave,” he said.

May argued in her speech last week that every trade agreement, which focused on some aspects of an economy more than on others, was some form of “cherry-picking.”

“With all its neighbors the EU has varying levels of access to the single market, depending on the obligations those neighbors are willing to undertake,” she said.

“What would be cherry-picking would be if we were to seek a deal where our rights and obligations were not held in balance. And I have been categorically clear that is not what we are going to do,” she said.

But EU officials said that Britain would get the trade agreement it sought with the EU only if it agreed to balance the rights and obligations in a way that would not pick apart the EU single market.

The bloc would also have to make sure that the deal is less attractive than EU membership.

“Nobody asked after the EU trade agreement with Canada, or Korea: ‘Why can’t we be like Canada or Korea?’ The point is that also after Brexit, nobody should ask themselves: ‘Why can’t we be like Britain?’ ” the second official said.
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US Coalition Asks for Pause in Hostilities in Northwest Syria   

Posted on by SeeEA

The U.S.-led coalition battling the Islamic State (IS) is asking for a pause in fighting in Northwest Syria where the Turkish government and its allied Syrian militias are fighting Kurdish forces in the town of Afrin.

“We call on all parties to take measures to de-escalate violence, avoid endangering civilians, and maintain focus on the fight against Daesh,” U.S. Army Col. Thomas Veale, a spokesperson for the coalition told VOA, using the Arabic acronym for IS.

Veale said the call for the cessation of violence is in line with the UN Security Council’s vote last week calling for a 30-day break across Syria.

“The Coalition will stand by our SDF partners through a U.N.-led peace process in Syria,” he added.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) is an umbrella organization of several Syrian militias who played a key role in the U.S.-led fight against IS in Syria. Kurdish fighters, known as the People’s Protection Units or the YPG, are the backbone of the SDF.

“We call for international dialogue that reduces regional frictions and restores everyone’s focus to achieving the lasting defeat of Daesh, which has been and continues to be a significant threat to all our homelands,” Veale said.

Operational pause

Veale’s comments come on the heels of the  Pentagon’s announcement Monday that the Turkish offensive in Afrin has led to an “operational pause” in eastern Syria where the Kurdish YPG fighters are fighting against IS. It said Kurdish fighters have started shifting attention to northwest Syria to repel the Turkish attacks.

The SDF on Tuesday said it was deploying around 1,700 members from frontlines against IS in the middle Euphrates river valley to Afrin in an effort to defend against the ongoing Turkish offensive in the region. 

“Today we regretfully make a difficult decision of moving our fighters from the east of the Euphrates and the rural areas of Deir al-Zour, who are stationed in the face of terrorist threats, to the frontlines of Afrin,” Abu Omar al-Idlibi, an SDF commander, said in a press conference. 

“We would not have taken this decision if it was not for the failure of the international community to restrain the Turkish aggression,” al-Idlibi added. 

The Turkish air and ground operation, code-named Operation Olive Branch, started in January against the YPG. Ankara says the operation is to protect its borders from the group, which has gained control over large swaths of land across northern Syria.

Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organization, alleging the group is an extension of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which has been fighting for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey for decades. The U.S. and EU also consider the PKK a terrorist group.

But the U.S. denies the connections between the PKK and the YPG  and considers the YPG to be a key ally in the ongoing campaign against the Islamic State.

U.S stance on Afrin

Washington has repeatedly asked Turkey to show restraint and has warned that the assault on Afrin could hinder the efforts to drive IS completely out of Syria.

Last week, the U.S. State Department asked Turkey to suspend the operation.  France and Germany have made similar demands to Ankara. 

Those calls have been forcefully rejected by Turkish officials who say the resolution does not apply to their cross-border offensive.

“There some people confusing Operation Olive Branch that we have been conducting in Afrin with East Ghouta.  It is obvious that the U.N. Council’s resolution refers to East Ghouta,” Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told the Turkish parliament last Thursday.

The U.N. resolution demands all parties to “cease hostilities without delay” across the country to allow “safe, unimpeded and sustained delivery of humanitarian aid and services and medical evacuations of the critically sick and wounded.”
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Vatican Signals Concern Over Populist Rise in Italy Elections

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The Vatican on Tuesday signaled its concern over the results of Italy’s national election, which saw sharp gains for populist and anti-immigrant parties.

The biggest winners were the League — the largest party in a center-right grouping that employed the most fiery anti-migrant rhetoric during the campaign — and the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, was asked on the sidelines of a conference on immigration if the Holy See was worried about the results.

“The Holy See has to work in whatever conditions arise. We can’t (always) have the society that we would like to have, or the conditions that we would like to have,” he told the Catholic news agency SIR.

It was the Vatican’s first public reaction to the results and its most authoritative because Parolin, its top diplomat, ranks second only to Pope Francis in the Holy See’s hierarchy.

During the campaign, League leader Matteo Salvini clashed with the pope several times over immigration.

When Francis backed a proposed law that would have granted Italian citizenship to children born in Italy of immigrant parents — something the League vehemently opposed — Salvini said Francis could house the children in the Vatican if he wanted to.

Political squabbling blocked discussion of the law before parliament was dissolved ahead of the elections.

Salvini also criticized the pope for promoting dialogue with Islam. Many of the Africans who made the dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean to reach Italy are Muslim.

Parolin said at the conference that the Vatican realized that the election results meant it would have to continue “a work of education” about the dignity and rights of immigrants.

Surveys show Italians are increasingly uneasy after more than 600,000 migrants reached Italy by boat in four years. Last month, a neo-Nazi wounded six migrants in a shooting spree in central Italy.

“Citizens must feel safe and protected but at the same time we can’t slam doors in the faces of people who are fleeing violence and threats,” Parolin said.

The pope, who was born in Argentina of Italian immigrant stock, has championed the cause of migrants since taking office in 2013.

Last year he called for a radical change of attitude towards immigrants, saying they should be welcomed with dignity and denouncing the “populist rhetoric” he said was fueling fear and selfishness in rich countries.

The center-right has vowed to deport hundreds of thousands of migrants if they are able to form a government. 5-Star has also vowed to step up deportations of illegal immigrants.
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21 Libyan Migrants Feared Drowned in Bid to Reach Italian Shores 

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At least 21 Libyan migrants who were trying to make the dangerous Mediterranean Sea journey to Italy late last week are missing and feared drowned. 

The U.N. migration agency said Tuesday that they were part of a large group who had set off from Libya aboard a wooden boat and a rubber dinghy and had to be rescued at sea.

Survivors said there was a panic on one of the vessels and people fell overboard, but the details of what happened were unclear.

The Libyan Coast Guard returned some to Libya while a Cypriot commercial ship picked up others. They arrived at the Italian port of Pozzallo on Tuesday.

The number of migrants trying to reach European Union nations from Libya is down substantially from the same time last year, in part because of an agreement between Libya and Italy to immediately return most of those picked up at sea.

U.N. migration officials said 421 people had died trying to sail to Italy so far this year, compared with 521 at the same time in 2017.

But they said more than 100 had died trying to reach Spain in an equally dangerous western sea journey.
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France Proposes Setting 15 as Legal Age of Sexual Consent

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The French government has proposed a law to set 15 as the age of consent for sex following two high-profile cases in which men escaped rape convictions despite having intercourse with 11-year-old girls.

France currently has no age of consent. However, adult sex with a minor younger than 15 is classified as sexual assault or molesting, punishable by up to five years in prison, compared with 20 years in prison for rape. In order for an incident to qualify as rape, prosecutors have to prove the victim was forced.

In November, a 30-year-old man was cleared of rape after the court found that the victim had not been subjected to “constraint, threat, violence or surprise.”

In the other case, charges against a 28-year-old man, also accused of raping an 11-year-old girl, were downgraded to “sexual relations with a minor.”

France has long had a relatively laid-back attitude to relationships between teens and adults. President Emmanuel Macron met his future wife, Brigitte, when he was around 14 and she was 38 and a teacher at his school. The two started dating when he was 16.

In December, Macron said he would push for the age of sexual consent and the presumption of rape to both be set at 15, saying: “Our criminal law contains intolerable ambiguities.”

Equality Minister Marlene Schiappa said the government “has decided to set the age at 15,” after consultations with the public and an expert panel.

The change is part of a wider law “against sexist and sexual violence” that will be presented to the council of ministers on March 21.
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Pentagon Waiting to Release Results of Investigation into Deadly Niger Ambush    

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U.S. lawmakers are no closer to getting a look at the completed report on an ambush by an Islamic State-affiliated group that killed four U.S. special forces soldiers last October in Niger.

The Pentagon report and its recommendations are being reviewed by U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford.  Defense officials say they will also first brief family members of the soldiers who were killed before sharing the results with lawmakers.

The commander of U.S. Africa Command, Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, told members of the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday he would brief them on the findings as soon as possible.  When asked when that would happen, Waldhauser said, “I don’t know.”

U.S. officials familiar with the report told the Associated Press that while the investigation into the ambush did not find a single point of failure, the 12-member Army Special Forces team never got approval from senior commanders to join Nigerien forces and go after a high-level IS militant (Doundou Chefou).

As a result, the officials said the team was unable to adequately assess the risks associated with the mission.

Four U.S. soldiers and four Nigerien troops were killed on Oct. 4 near the village of Tongo Tongo, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of the Nigerien capital Niamey, after they were attacked by as many as 100 heavily armed, IS-linked fighters.

On Monday, Islamic State supporters posted a nine-minute long video of the ambush online.

It shows three U.S. soldiers trying to fight off dozens of militants armed with machine guns and grenades.  Part of the recording appears to be taken from the helmet camera of one of the fallen soldiers.  At the end of the video, the helmet camera shows the soldier surrounded by militants as they open fire and kill him.

“The release of these materials demonstrates the depravity of the enemy we are fighting,” the Pentagon said in a statement Monday.

Army Sergeant La David Johnson and Staff Sergeants Bryan Black, Jeremiah Johnson and Dustin Wright were killed in the ambush. 

There are about 7,500 American troops and contractors in Africa, with about 800 in Niger.

AFRICOM Commander Gen. Waldhauser told  lawmakers Tuesday that U.S. soldiers serving in Niger should be receiving additional pay due to the dangerous situation on the ground.

“We have made that request a while back,” Waldhauser said when asked about whether U.S. troops there were getting what is referred to as Imminent Danger Pay (IDP).

“We submitted that with Niger and other countries in the area, where it is dangerous, several months ago to OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense),” Waldhauser said.  “My understanding is it is at OMB (Office of Management and Budget) for reconciliation.”
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AMISOM Warns of Increased Al-Shabab Ambushes

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Al-Shabab attacks against African Union peacekeepers and Somali government forces could worsen as troops try to reopen Somalia’s main supply roads, currently cut off by the militants, a spokesman for the peacekeepers warns.

Lieutenant Colonel Wilson Rono said the African Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) troops and Somali National Army forces are trying to reopen the highway linking the capital, Mogadishu, to Baidoa, 240 kilometers (150 miles) to the west.  It’s one of three main roads linking Mogadishu the south, southwest and central regions.

Rono spoke to VOA’s Somali service this week after al-Shabab militants ambushed an AMISOM supply convoy about 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Mogadishu on Friday, killing at least 10 soldiers and destroying most of the 20 trucks. It was the latest of many deadly attacks the militant group has waged against the AU forces.

Al-Shabab was pushed out of Mogadishu in 2011 and in following years lost control of almost all the country’s major towns.  It had to resort to “difficult” guerrilla tactics, Rono said.

Rono said AMISOM soldiers repulsed another al-Shabab ambush Friday near the town of Fafahdhun in Somalia’s Gedo region.

He said the soldiers killed 23 Al-Shabab fighters.  Mohamed Hussein al-Qadi, the district’s deputy governor, put the Shabab death toll at five.

“We learn from each incident,” Rono said.  “But the nature of the asymmetrical warfare and fighting of insurgency makes you certain that this kind of thing will happen” again.

Bal’ad ambush

The deadly attack Friday occurred near the town of Bal’ad.  At least five armored AMISOM vehicles were escorting a convoy transporting supplies to Jowhar, the main headquarters of the Burundian peacekeepers operating in the Middle Shabelle region. 

Rono said the militants were hiding in thick vegetation along the road when they detonated explosives then attacked the convoy with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire.

Just three weeks ago after an attack on a military checkpoint killed several Somali soldiers,  AMISOM and Somali troops cleared vegetation along the road to improve visibility and remove possible militant hiding spots. 

Al-Shabab claimed it killed 23 Burundian soldiers, a figure Rono disputes.  

“We lost three of our troops and six of them are injured and are here in Mogadishu,” Rono said.

But other sources put the AU death toll higher.  Burundi Vice President Gaston Sindimwo told VOA’s Central Africa Service that five of his country’s soldiers had died.

At least 10 AU peacekeepers were killed in the ambush on Friday, according to three separate Somali officials. If correct, that makes the ambush one of al-Shabab’s deadliest attacks on AMISOM since the AU mission arrived in Somalia 11 years ago. 

Withdrawal?

AMISOM currently has over 20,000 peacekeepers in Somalia.  Last year, the mission announced plans to gradually reduce its troop strength.  The Mission says eventual withdrawal will be “conditions-based,” but has made it clear to Somali leaders it wants to see concrete progress in building a national force to take over security responsibilities.

Few soldiers have actually been withdrawn, on the grounds that Somalia’s army needs more time to strengthen and cohere in order to hold off al-Shabab. 

Hussein Arab, former Somali defense minister and current head of the Parliamentary Defense Committee, welcomed the plan to rebuild Somali forces and improve their coordination with AMISOM.

“The important thing is that we focus on our forces that will be taking over the security,” he told VOA Somali.

Soon after his February 2017 election as Somalia’s president, President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo vowed to build a capable Somali army within two years.  Farmajo, a dual U.S.-Somali citizen, now has less than a year to meet that deadline.
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In Reversal, Former Trump Aide Says He’ll Probably Cooperate with Mueller Probe

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A former Trump campaign aide spent much of the day promising to defy a subpoena from special counsel Robert Mueller, even throwing down the challenge to “arrest me,” then backed off his defiance by saying he would probably cooperate in the end.

In an interview Monday night with The Associated Press, Sam Nunberg said he was angry over Mueller’s request to have him appear in front of a grand jury and turn over thousands of emails and other communications with other ex-officials, among them his mentor Roger Stone. But he predicted that, in the end, he’d find a way to comply.

 

“I’m going to end up cooperating with them,” he said.

 

It was a reversal from his tone throughout the day, when he lashed out at Trump and his campaign and threatened to defy Mueller in a series of interviews.

 

“Why do I have to do it?” Nunberg told CNN of the subpoena. “I’m not cooperating,” he said later as he challenged officials to charge him.

 

In the earlier interviews, Nunberg said he thought Mueller may already have incriminating evidence on Trump directly, although he would not say what that evidence might be.

 

“I think he may have done something during the election,” Nunberg told MSNBC of the president, “but I don’t know that for sure.” He later told CNN that Mueller “thinks Trump is the Manchurian candidate.” A reference drawn from a Cold War novel and film, a “Manchurian candidate” is an American brainwashed or otherwise compromised to work on behalf of an adversarial government.

 

Shortly after Nunberg lobbed the first allegation, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders rebuffed him during the White House press briefing.

 

“I definitely think he doesn’t know that for sure because he’s incorrect. As we’ve said many times before, there was no collusion with the Trump campaign,” Sanders said. “He hasn’t worked at the White House, so I certainly can’t speak to him or the lack of knowledge that he clearly has.”

 

Nunberg also said he thinks former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page, a key figure in the Russia investigation, worked with the Kremlin. “I believe that Carter Page was colluding with the Russians,” Nunberg said on CNN. “That Carter Page is a weird dude.”

 

Page called Nunberg’s accusations “laughable” in a comment to The Associated Press.

 

The Justice Department and FBI obtained a secret warrant in October 2016 to monitor Page’s communications. His activities during the presidential campaign that raised concerns included a July 2016 trip to Moscow.

 

In the interviews, Nunberg said he believes the president probably knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his eldest son, top campaign staff and a team of Russians, which Trump has denied. And he blamed Trump for the investigation into Russia meddling, telling MSNBC that he was “responsible for this investigation … because he was so stupid.”

 

A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.

 

During his afternoon tirades, Nunberg detailed his interview with Mueller’s investigators, mocking them for asking such questions as if he had heard Russian being spoken in Trump Tower. He then said he would reject a sweeping demand from Mueller for communications between him and top Trump advisers.

 

“I think it would be funny if they arrested me,” Nunberg said on MSNBC.

 

He later added on CNN: “I’m not going to the grand jury. I’m not going to spend 30 hours going over my emails. I’m not doing it.”

 

Nunberg said he’d already blown a 3 p.m. Monday deadline to turn over the requested communications. He said he’d traded numerous emails a day with Stone and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and said spending 80 hours digging through his inbox to find them all was unreasonable.

 

But in his call with the AP, Nunberg said he might be more willing to comply if Mueller’s team limits the scope of its request.

 

“I’m happy if the scope changes and if they send me a subpoena that doesn’t include Carter Page” he said, insisting the two had never spoken.

 

He also said he believes the only reason he’s being asked to testify before the grand jury is to provide information that would be used against Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, which he says he won’t do.

 

Nunberg is the first witness in the ongoing federal Russia investigation to openly promise to defy a subpoena. But he’s not the first to challenge Mueller: Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort filed a lawsuit in January challenging Mueller’s authority to indict him.

 

It’s unclear how much Nunberg would know about the inner workings of the Trump campaign or the White House. He never worked at the White House and was jettisoned from the Trump campaign early on, in August 2015, after racist social media postings surfaced. Trump filed a $10 million lawsuit against Nunberg in July 2016, accusing him of violating a nondisclosure agreement, but they settled the suit one month later.

 

John Dean, a White House counsel to President Richard Nixon during Watergate, tweeted Monday that Nunberg can’t flatly refuse to comply with a grand jury subpoena.

 

“This is not Mr. Nunberg’s decision, and he will be in criminal contempt for refusing to show up. He can take the Fifth Amendment. But he can’t tell the grand Jury to get lost. He’s going to lose this fight.”

 

Nunberg appeared pleased by his performance, telling the AP that he was “doing something I’ve never seen.”

 

“They don’t know what’s going on,'”he said, speculating that Mueller would not appreciate his comments and suggesting the authorities might send police to his apartment.

 

His usual cockiness, however, did appear, at times, to ebb. At the end of an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Nunberg asked whether the TV anchor thought he should instead cooperate with Mueller.

 

“If it were me, I would,” Tapper responded, telling Nunberg: “Sometimes life and special prosecutors are not fair, I guess.”

 

 

 
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Russian Military Says Syrian Rebels Can Leave Ghouta

Posted on by SeeEU

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday that Syrian rebels, in addition to civilians, are free to use evacuation corridors to leave the besieged eastern Ghouta area.

A ministry statement said the fighters could take their guns and their families, but did not specify where they would go.

Continuing violence has undercut a U.N.-demanded nationwide cease-fire in Syria, as well as Russia’s self-declared daily “humanitarian pause” meant to allow civilians to leave eastern Ghouta.

On Monday, an international convoy of humanitarian aid trucks cut short its mission to deliver supplies in eastern Ghouta after government forces continued their aerial bombardment and ground assault. The United Nations says another attempt is planned for Thursday.

Monday’s convoy of 46 trucks left the region’s main town of Douma Monday evening to return to Damascus without being able to fully unload its supplies due to the violence.

“We delivered as much as we could amidst shelling,” UNHCR’s Syria representative Sajjad Malik tweeted. “Civilians are caught in a tragic situation.”

U.N. officials said all the aid workers are safe.

In addition to the shortened mission, the United Nations and International Red Cross said the Syrian government blocked rescue workers from loading most of the medical supplies they had planned to transport and would not allow them to be replaced by other items.

It was the first aid shipment to reach the area outside Damascus since mid-February, when a deadly Russian-backed assault began on the rebels, branded as “terrorists” by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 68 people were killed Monday. That pushed the death toll to 760 in the last three weeks.

Syrian troops have reclaimed a third of eastern Ghouta, according to the Observatory, and are advancing further in an apparent attempt to split the rebel stronghold in two.

The United Nations says 400,000 people are trapped in besieged eastern Ghouta, which it says was already running out of food and medical supplies before air strikes began two weeks ago.
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Russia: Ready to Help Britain Investigate Former Spy’s Illness

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Russia said Tuesday it has not been contacted, but stands ready to cooperate with British authorities investigating the case of a former Russian spy who was hospitalized in critical condition after being exposed to an unknown substance.

British media have identified the man as Sergei Skripal, who was given refuge in Britain after a spy swap between the United States and Russia in 2010.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that what happened is tragic and that the Russian government has no information about the cause.

The 66-year-old Skripal and a woman in her 30s were found unconscious on a bench at a shopping center in the town of Salisbury on Sunday afternoon.

Local police only identified the two by their approximate ages and said “the pair, who we believe are known to each other, did not have any visible injuries and were taken to Salisbury District Hospital.”

Craig Holden, temporary Assistant Chief Constable of the Wiltshire Police, said: “They are currently being treated for suspected exposure to an unknown substance. Both are currently in a critical condition in intensive care.”

Holden said because the investigation is in its very early stages, “we are unable to ascertain whether or not a crime has taken place.” 

Skripal was convicted in Russia of spying for Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency and was sentenced in 2006 for betraying Russian agents to British intelligence. He was pardoned in 2010 as part of a U.S.-Russian spy swap. 

Relations between Britain and Russia have been strained since former KGB-agent Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London in 2006. A British inquiry concluded Litvinenko was probably killed on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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Kenyan Coffee Risks Losing Significance as Production Struggles

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Kenyan coffee has an international reputation for good quality. But Kenya’s coffee industry is struggling as production levels have dropped and a younger generation shows little interest in farming. VOA’s Daniel Schearf reports from Kirinyaga County, Kenya.
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Sierra Leone Votes for New President, Parliament

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Sierra Leone heads to the polls Wednesday to elect a new president, members of parliament and local council representatives. Incumbent President Ernest Bai Koroma is ineligible to run having served two terms, and a new opposition party sees an opportunity to redraw the political landscape. For VOA, Jason Patinkin reports from the campaign trail in Sierra Leone.
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