Rivers are a source of irrigation, drinking water, recreation … and flooding. Scientists say the threat of flooding will increase as the climate changes. Here in the United States, scientists are preparing for that future with a variety of technology, including drones, supercomputers and sonar, to manage flood control projects and to try to predict and prevent floods. Faiza Elmasry has the story narrated by Faith Lapidus.
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Month: May 2019
Some States Trying to Close Marital Rape Laws Loopholes
Witches were still being burned at the stake when Sir Matthew Hale came up with his legal theory that rape could not happen within marriage. The 17th century English jurist declared it legally impossible because wedding vows implied a wife’s ongoing consent to sex.
Three and a half centuries later, vestiges of the so-called “marital rape exemption” or “spousal defense” still exist in most states, remnants of the English common law that helped inform American legal traditions. Legislative attempts to end or modify those exemptions have a mixed record but have received renewed attention in the #MeToo era.
Minnesota acts
The most recent efforts to roll back protections for spouses focus on rapes that happen when a partner is drugged, unconscious or otherwise incapacitated. Minnesota is the latest to take action. Its Legislature this week voted to eliminate the exemption, which had prevented prosecutions in those cases.
“No longer will this antiquated and shameful law be on our books,” Gov. Tim Walz said as he signed the bill into law Thursday. “The concept of a pre-existing relationship defense should have never been part of our criminal statutes.”
A fight in Ohio
In Ohio, determined opponents plan to re-introduce a marital rape bill this month, after two earlier attempts failed.
Former lawmaker and prosecutor Greta Johnson was the first to introduce the Ohio legislation in 2015. She said having to address whether a woman was married to her attacker as part of sexual assault prosecutions struck her as “appalling and archaic.”
“Certainly, there was a marital exemption lifted years ago, but it was just for what in the prosecutorial world we call the force element — by force or threat of force,” she said. “You could still drug your spouse and have sex with them, and it’s not rape. You could commit sexual imposition against your spouse, and it’s not a crime. It was really troubling.”
All 50 states had laws making marital rape a crime by 1993, whether as a result of the two preceding decades of activism by women’s rights groups or because of a pivotal court ruling. Nearly 9% of women and 0.8% of men have been raped by an intimate partner, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National surveys have placed the percentage of women raped within marriage between 10% and 14%.
Still, many states’ marital rape laws have loopholes, not only involving the victim’s capacity to consent, but related to age, relationship, use of force or the nature of the penetration. Some impose short timeframes for victims to report spousal rape.
Skeptical in Maryland
A recent Maryland bill sought to erase the marital exemption for all sex crimes.
During discussion of the bill, one skeptical male lawmaker wondered whether a spouse might be charged with sexual assault for “smacking the other’s behind” during an argument. Maryland Del. Frank Conaway Jr., a Baltimore Democrat, raised religious concerns.
“If your religion believes if you’re married, two are as one body, then what happens? Can you get a religious exemption?” he asked.
“No, I would actually say that the First Amendment would prevent the state from getting entangled in that sort of judgment,” replied Lisae Jordan, executive director of the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault. “So you would have to rely on your faith and your commitment to that to not bring those charges. But that’s no place for the General Assembly.”
The bill died in March.
Common rationales
Professor D. Kelly Weisberg of the University of California Hastings College of the Law said the Maryland debate touched on some of the common rationales for the marital rape exemption over the centuries.
One is Hale’s premise from the 1670s that marriage implies irrevocable consent and even property rights by the husband over his wife and her body. Those ideas have never truly disappeared, said Weisberg, author of a new reference book on domestic violence law.
She said other arguments for such laws are that marital privacy is a constitutional right, as when spouses can’t be forced to testify against one another in court, that marital rape isn’t serious enough to criminalize and that it would be difficult to prove.
For those and other reasons, Weisberg said marital rape laws have not kept pace with other domestic violence laws. That means in some cases an unmarried domestic partner has more legal protections against attack than a spouse.
One woman’s story
Changing attitudes — and laws — about marital rape is what drove Jenny Teeson to go public this year with her story.
The 39-year-old from Andover, Minnesota, was going through a divorce in 2017 when she discovered a flash drive with videos taken by her husband. They showed him penetrating her with an object while she lay drugged and unconscious. In one, their 4-year-old lay next to her on the bed.
Teeson turned the videos over to the police. After an investigation, her husband was charged with third-degree criminal sexual assault against an incapacitated victim. Charges were brought in the morning, but dropped by afternoon because of the state’s marital rape exemption.
“I was beside myself,” she told The Associated Press.
Her ex-husband ultimately pleaded guilty to a gross misdemeanor charge of invading her privacy and served 30 days in the county jail. Still shocked that he could not be charged with a felony because of the state law, Teeson decided to take action.
“I thought if I can’t have the law be in place to keep myself, my kids and my community safe, I could wallow in it, or I could do something about it,” she said.
The AP does not normally identify victims of sexual assault, but Teeson has shared her story publicly, including during testimony before legislative committees. Democratic state Sen. Karla Bigham credited Teeson’s advocacy for persuading lawmakers to pass the bill.
“She had to relive the trauma every time she shared her story,” Bigham told her colleagues during a debate in the Senate chamber this past week. “Her voice speaks loudly to those women who deserve justice. Let’s do the right thing. Let’s right this wrong.”
17 states
AEquitas, a resource for prosecutors, reported last month that 17 states still maintain some form of the exemption for spouses who rape partners when they are drugged or otherwise incapacitated: Alabama, Alaska, Connecticut, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Washington and Wyoming.
In Ohio, state Rep. Kristin Boggs, a Democrat, said she’s not optimistic the upcoming version of the marital rape bill will be any more successful in the Republican-controlled Legislature than it has been in the past.
But at least one past opponent — the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association — has evolved on the issue. Executive Director Lou Tobin said he expects the group will support a bill that seeks to eliminate the exemption.
“In the past, I know that there’s been some concern that these cases are difficult to prove; they can be a lot of he-said, she-said back and forth,” Tobin said. “But sorting through those things is what prosecutors are for.”
Boggs’ bill would again call for removing references to the marital exemption throughout Ohio’s criminal code. Her argument in favor of it is straightforward.
“Our rationale for introducing this legislation is simply that your legal relationship to another human being shouldn’t give you permission to rape them,” she said.
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Secretive Blogger Rips Into Kremlin, One Click at a Time
He is wheelchair-bound and has limited use of his hands, but Alexander Gorbunov, the author of hugely popular social media accounts in Russia, has emerged as one of President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics.
Diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy and using his right index finger to type, the 27-year-old author of StalinGulag skewers the “hypocrisy” of Putin’s system and the everyday injustices ordinary Russians face.
Known for his dry wit and generous use of profanities, StalinGulag has built a near 1.5 million strong army of followers on Twitter and Telegram, with a total media outreach believed to include several million more.
For years the StalinGulag author’s identity remained one of Russia’s best-kept secrets, but Gorbunov blew his cover after authorities began harassing his 65-year-old mother and 80-year-old father last week.
Gorbunov, an intelligent, soft-spoken man with a goatee, said he and his wife have been on tenterhooks.
“They can easily arrest and put in prison anyone,” Gorbunov told AFP in an interview, saying that even a short stint in jail could kill him. “They don’t care,” he said.
In an increasing crackdown on dissent, Putin in March signed laws that allow courts to fine and briefly jail people for showing disrespect toward the authorities and to block media for publishing “fake news.”
‘Damn hero’
Gorbunov, who is a successful self-taught financial trader by day, dreads publicity but this week revealed his identity to BBC and later spoke to AFP after gun-toting police inspected his parents’ home in the North Caucasus city of Makhachkala.
His relatives in Moscow have also been intimidated, he says.
“If the authorities are afraid of what I write they are worthless,” he said.
Gorbunov’s story has stunned Russia.
“This person is a damn hero,” said screenwriter Andrew Ryvkin, while author Denis Bilunov called Gorbunov “the person of the year.”
In a show of solidarity, Pavel Durov, the self-exiled founder of the Telegram messenger app, verified the StalinGulag account and offered his author help in moving abroad.
Neither hero nor activist
Gorbunov said he was heartened by the outpouring of support from Russians who have flooded him with offers of help and money. He has chalked up some 40,000 new followers over the past week.
The blogger insisted he was neither a hero nor an opposition activist. He said he merely puts in writing his thoughts on everything from Russia’s foreign policy blunders to the excessive lifestyle of Putin’s inner circle.
“What’s happening in the country is terrible,” Gorbunov said. “Injustice is what angers me the most.”
In a 2018 post, he issued a dark warning to his readers.
“Really scary times are coming,” he said, urging Russians to look out for each other. “This is the reality and not everyone will get out alive.”
Gorbunov lives with his partner of seven years in a comfortable Moscow apartment, employs two drivers and a live-in aide and enjoys an active social life.
He does not want to reveal his income but says he forks out around 400,000 rubles ($6,145) every month just to cover his rent and pay his helpers.
He refuses to take any medication, saying his condition is incurable and he had no illusions about his future.
“I don’t want to turn my life into a silly battle,” he said. “It’s a battle I am going to lose.”
‘Not an optimist’
A lawyer by training, he works more than 10 hours a day, sometimes waking up at night if the market moves. He writes posts for his StalinGulag accounts when the mood strikes him and he needs a short break from work.
He appears to take some of his inspiration from his favorite book, “Journey to the End of the Night” by French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
The 1932 World War I classic filled with profanities expresses disgust with the hypocrisy of society and laments the misery of human existence.
Get on with his life
Gorbunov is fiercely protective of his wife, who sometimes holds his hand as he speaks to AFP and helps him drink from a cup. They met seven years ago but refuse to reveal details about their relationship.
His story has generated huge media interest in Russia, but Gorbunov hopes the buzz will soon subside. He wants to get on with his life, watch the last season of “Game of Thrones” and keep trading and writing his blogs.
He travels sometimes but has never been to Europe.
Not that he plans to leave Russia, even though life for people with disabilities here is a relentless daily struggle, saying he wants to be with his loved ones.
For all his dark humor and keen intelligence, Gorbunov refuses to make any predictions about the future of the country — or his own.
He has a feeling however that he will not see a change of leadership in his lifetime.
“I am not an optimist in this sense,” he said.
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Runoff Presidential Vote Begins in North Macedonia
Polls have opened in North Macedonia, where voters will elect a new president Sunday in a runoff election dominated by deep divisions over a change in the country’s name agreed to with Greece that has opened the path to NATO and European Union membership.
Greece had for decades demanded that the tiny ex-Yugoslav republic change its name from Macedonia, arguing that it implied a territorial claim on a northern Greek province also called Macedonia. The new name was formally ratified earlier this year.
But the accord continues to divide Macedonians and has eclipsed all other issues during campaigning for the presidential election, when about 1.8 million voters will choose between two candidates who got through to the second round.
The ruling coalition’s candidate, a long-serving public official and academic, Stevo Pendarovski, and his main rival, the candidate of the nationalist VMRO-DPMNE, Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, finished neck and neck in the first round two weeks ago.
Additional support
In the runoff, political analysts give the advantage to Pendarovski, who is expected to win support from voters of the second-largest Albanian party, whose candidate, Blerim Reka, came in third in the first round.
“We are halfway to full NATO membership, and in two months we expect a date to begin membership talks with the EU,” Pendarovski told supporters at a rally. “After 10 years Macedonia deserves to have a president who will speed up every positive government policy.”
Siljanovska-Davkova, a university professor, opposes the name change accord but is also pro-EU. She has accused the government of dragging its feet on economic reforms.
The presidency is a largely ceremonial post in North Macedonia but he or she is the supreme commander of the armed forces and also signs off on parliamentary legislation.
The refusal of outgoing President Gjeorge Ivanov, a nationalist, to sign some bills backed by parliament has delayed the implementation of key laws, including one on wider use of the Albanian language — 18 years after an ethnic Albanian uprising that pushed Macedonia to the brink of civil war.
But Ivanov had no authority to block the constitutional amendments passed earlier this year by a two-thirds majority of parliament that enabled the name change to North Macedonia.
Threat of low turnout
The main concern is that if voter turnout falls below 40 percent in the second round, the election will be declared invalid. In that case, the speaker of parliament would become interim president and new elections would have to be held.
“The ruling coalition voters are disappointed with the pace of reforms, while opposition supporters see that their candidate is not set to win, so many people are likely to stay at home,” said Petar Arsovski, an analyst.
Turnout in the first round of voting was 41.6 percent.
Some opponents of the name change planned to boycott Sunday’s vote.
“Vote? Why? Voting means I’m giving legitimacy to the name change. No thanks,” said Dejan Temelkovski, 47, a dentist. “By not choosing a president, we are sending a message to all politicians that it is enough.”
Polling stations will be open until 7 p.m. (1700 GMT), with the first preliminary results expected two hours later.
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Four Hurt as Protesters, Army Clash in Darfur
Violence erupted Saturday when crowds of protesters from a camp for displaced people in Darfur clashed with soldiers and paramilitary forces, wounding four security personnel, state media reported.
The incident occurred in Nyala, the provincial capital of South Darfur state, the official SUNA news agency said, quoting the state’s governor, Hashim Khalid.
About 5,000 people staged a peaceful march from Attash camp, but they soon unleashed “violence on a unit of armed forces” in Nyala, Khalid said.
Four members from the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Force were left “critically wounded,” he said, adding that there were no casualties among the protesters.
After attacking the armed forces, protesters tried to seize vehicles belonging to the armed forces, Khalid said.
He said the protesters had come out to join an ongoing sit-in held outside the region’s military headquarters and organized by the group spearheading the nationwide protest movement that has rocked Sudan for months.
The umbrella group leading the protests, the Alliance for Freedom and Change, gave a different version of events and called for nationwide protests and marches to condemn what it said was an attack by the army on protesters.
It called on supporters to “reject the acts of the regime in its new version, its security apparatus and its militia, and condemn the attack on peaceful protesters in Nyala.”
Protest leaders have regularly called for sit-ins outside regional military headquarters, similar to the one held at the main army headquarters in central Khartoum for weeks.
Thousands remain camped outside the Khartoum army complex, demanding that the country’s army rulers hand over power to civilians.
A 10-member military council took power after the army toppled longtime leader Omar al-Bashir on April 11 after months of protests.
Sudan’s western region of Darfur was torn by years of conflict that erupted in 2003 when ethnic minority rebels took up arms against Khartoum’s Arab-dominated government, accusing it of economic and political marginalization.
The United Nations says about 300,000 people have been killed in Darfur since 2003 and another 2.5 million people displaced.
Bashir is wanted by the Hague-based International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and genocide charges in Darfur. He denies the charges.
In recent years violence has dropped in Darfur, but on April 13 there were clashes reported in Camp Kalma that left 14 people dead, according to state media.
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Gabon Court Rejects Call for Health Check of President
A Gabonese court has thrown out a bid by opposition activists to force President Ali Bongo Ondimba to have medical checks to see whether he is still fit to rule.
The court in Libreville rejected the request as “inadmissible,” according to the ruling seen Saturday by AFP.
Only the government or the two chambers of parliament had the power to go to the Constitutional Court to get a ruling removing the president from power, it said.
But the activists behind the legal bid denounced the ruling.
“This judgment reinforces our doubt about the capacity of Ali Bongo to still carry out his presidential duties,” activist Marc Ona, who leads one of the groups behind the bid, said.
Bongo spent five months abroad in Morocco, recovering from a stroke he suffered Oct. 24 while visiting Saudi Arabia.
During that period, he returned to Gabon twice, his long absence stoking concern about a power vacuum. A brief attempted coup by renegade soldiers in January was quickly ended.
But on his return to Gabon at the end of March, some opponents of the president called for a judicial inquiry into his state of health.
Thursday’s court decision appears to have blocked that bid.
Ali Bongo has ruled the oil-rich central African country since 2009, following the death of his father, Omar Bongo, who had ruled since 1967.
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Libyan Officials: Militant Attack Kills 9 Troops at LNA Base
Libyan officials say militants have killed at least nine soldiers in an attack on a training camp for the self-styled Libyan National Army in the country’s southwestern desert.
The officials said militants clashed Saturday with guards near an air base seized earlier this year by the LNA in the town of Sabha. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack.
Sabha is 650 kilometers (400 miles) south of the capital, Tripoli, where Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s LNA forces are fighting to take control of the city from militias affiliated with a weak U.N.-supported government.
The U.N. humanitarian agency said Friday that the monthlong assault on Tripoli has displaced nearly 55,000 people.
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Syrian Forces Intensify Bombardment of Rebel-Held Area
Syrian government bombardment of rebel-held areas in the country’s northwest has killed and wounded dozens and forced thousands to flee their homes, further endangering an eight-month truce in the last major rebel stronghold, opposition activists said Saturday.
The recent escalation of violence is the most serious in Idlib province and nearby areas since Russia and Turkey negotiated a cease-fire in September. The shaky truce had averted a major government offensive on the last major rebel stronghold in Syria.
On Saturday, government forces were sending new reinforcements toward Idlib, including tanks, armored personnel carriers and hundreds of troops.
Over the past weeks, government forces have bombarded rebel-held areas while al-Qaida-linked militants attacked army positions around Idlib killing more than two dozen troops and pro-government gunmen over the past week.
“The command’s orders were given to bring these big reinforcements to respond to violations,” a Syrian officer who asked that his name not be made public told The Associated Press. “We are waiting for orders to begin a military operation, God willing, soon.”
The opposition’s Syrian Civil Defense said 22 civilians have been killed and more than 60 wounded in airstrikes and shelling since Friday morning.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, reported more than 115 strikes against rebel-held areas on Saturday alone. It said six civilians were killed on Saturday raising to 67 the number of civilians and insurgents killed since Tuesday when the government began its new campaign.
Syria’s state news agency SANA reported that government forces targeted positions of the al-Qaida-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, the most powerful group in Idlib.
In violence in other parts of northern Syria, Turkey’s defense ministry announced one Turkish soldier was killed and one lightly wounded in northwestern village of Tel Rifaat when Syrian Kurdish fighters shot at Turkish troops. The ministry said Turkish troops launched a counter-attack.
The attack was believed to have been carried out by the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, which Turkey considers a terrorist organization with links to Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey.
The attack came days after YPG militants carried out an attack in a Turkish-controlled region in northern Syria killing a soldier and wounding three others.
your ad hereReports: Iran to Keep Enriching Uranium Despite US Move
Iran will continue with low-level uranium enrichment in line with its nuclear deal with world powers, Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani was quoted as saying on Saturday, despite a U.S. move to stop it.
Washington acted on Friday to force Iran to stop producing low-enriched uranium and expanding its only nuclear power plant, intensifying a campaign aimed at halting Tehran’s ballistic missile program and curbing its regional power.
“Under the (nuclear accord) Iran can produce heavy water, and this is not in violation of the agreement. Therefore we will carry on with enrichment activity,” the semi-official news agency ISNA quoted Larijani as saying. The Fars agency carried a similar report.
Heavy water can be employed in reactors to produce plutonium, a fuel used in nuclear warheads.
The United States also scrapped its sanctions waiver that had allowed Iran to evade a 300-kg limit on the amount of low-enriched uranium it can store under the nuclear deal at its main nuclear facility of Natanz.
Washington said the move was aimed at forcing Tehran to end its production of low-enriched uranium, a demand Iran has repeatedly rejected as it says it uses the uranium to help produce electricity.
Until now, Iran was allowed to ship low-enriched uranium produced at Natanz to Russia before it hit the 300-kg limit, an expert said.
The United States also said it would no longer waive sanctions that allowed Iran to ship to Oman for storage heavy water produced at its Arak facility beyond a 300-ton limit set in the 2015 nuclear deal.
Separately, President Hassan Rouhani said live on television on Saturday that Iran must counter U.S. sanctions by continuing to export its oil as well as boosting non-oil exports.
“America is trying to decrease our foreign reserves … So we have to increase our hard currency income and cut our currency expenditures,” Rouhani said.
“Last year, we had we non-oil exports of $43 billion. We should increase production and raise our [non-oil] exports and resist America’s plots against the sale of our oil.”
Friday’s U.S. move, which Rouhani made no direct reference to, was the third punitive action Washington has taken against Iran in as many weeks.
Last week, it said it would stop waivers for countries buying Iranian oil, in an attempt to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero. It also blacklisted Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The Trump administration’s efforts to impose political and economic isolation on Tehran began last year when it unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal it and other world powers negotiated with Iran in 2015.
your ad here48 Parties Aiming for Parliament in South Africa Poll
It’s going to be a colorful election in the Rainbow Nation.
Whether you’re a Leninite, a free-market capitalist, a right-winger, an outspoken lefty, a Shariah-law fundamentalist or just a dedicated pot smoker, South Africa’s May 8 ballot spans the entire political spectrum, offering something for nearly every type of voter.
Forty-eight political parties are contesting this year’s national election, leaving voters spoiled for choice beyond the top three: the African National Congress, the Democratic Alliance and the Economic Freedom Fighters parties.
The smaller, newer parties have wildly different aims — some, like the African Transformation Movement, are church-based and say their platform revolves around human rights. Others are aligned with more traditional political views, or have niche issues to push in national government.
But they all seem to share one thing: dissatisfaction with the political status quo. The head the ATM party, Vuyo Zungula, says they couldn’t get the change they wanted through partnership with the ruling ANC. So they started their own party, through the South African Council of Messianic Churches in Christ.
The party, Zungula says, is pro-gay-rights and doesn’t want to change existing laws that allow abortion. Instead, he says, the party wants to show South Africans the meaning of service.
“We believe that what the people of South Africa truly need now, they need people who will genuinely serve them,” the 31-year-old presidential candidate told VOA as about 100 of his followers packed into a hall in Soweto for the party’s final rally.
While it’s likely the large, powerful ANC will dominate this election, analysts say the small parties play a valuable role in government. South Africa’s system of proportional representation means small parties don’t need a large number of votes – as few as 50,000 are all it takes – to get one of 400 parliamentary seats.
That may include the scrappy Dagga Party – “dagga” is local slang for marijuana. The pro-legalization party was behind a widely celebrated, headline-grabbing Supreme Court ruling last year that saw the decriminalization of cannabis in South Africa. But the party missed the election registration deadline this year, so it instead joined forces with the brand-new African Democratic Change party, which is on the ballot.
Professor and analyst Ivor Sarakinsky says it’s this diversity that makes South Africa’s parliament great.
“Those parties might be springboards to ask tough questions to the new parliament and the new administration after the election,” he told VOA. “If they get support, they won’t necessarily get big numbers, but their presence will add some real spice to the parliament that’s going to be formed shortly.”
That’s exactly what the tiny, six-week-old Capitalist Party hopes to do. The party is only fielding 10 candidates — not enough to dictate terms on their own, but enough, their leader, Kanthan Pillay, believes, to play a valuable role in government because of their candidates’ wealth of business experience.
“All of the political parties out there are offering variations on the same recipe,” he said. “They’re all promising that government is going to create more jobs, they’re all promising that they’re going to cut back on government spending, and they’re all promising better levels of education. We don’t believe that they have the capability to deliver on any of those things, simply because they lack the expertise to do so.”
On the opposite side of that spectrum is another new entrant, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party, which is part of the nation’s largest single trade union, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa. Unions have traditionally backed the ANC, but spokeswoman Phakamile Hlubi-Majola says this party was born of frustration with the ruling party.
“We are the only political party in South Africa that is fighting for the destruction of the capitalist system,” she told VOA. “We believe that we represent the aspirations of the 23 million members of the working class of South Africa whose aspirations have, frankly, been ignored by the capitalist ANC government for the last 25 years.”
At the end of the day, says analyst Angelo Fick, the ANC will win more seats than any other party. But the varied opposition, he says, is a reflection of a healthy democracy.
“The plethora of choices in front of the South African electorate is not, for me, a sign of too much, too soon,” he said. “It is, in fact, a sign of the vibrancy of the contestation around ideas.”
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DRC Ebola Outbreak ‘Worsening;’ Over 1,000 Dead
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) says the outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo is “worsening” and has killed more than 1,000 people.
IFRC said Saturday that in the past week, 23 cases were reported in one day, a record number since the start of the outbreak in 2018.
The DRC health ministry said Friday the Ebola death toll has risen to 1,008.
Violence helps cases spike
Violence has complicated efforts to contain the second most deadly Ebola virus outbreak in history, as the number of new cases increases each time treatment and prevention work is disrupted.
Many people are afraid to go to Ebola treatment centers because of the violence. They may instead choose to stay home where they run the risk of infecting their caretakers and neighbors.
“We are at a critical juncture where we need to step up our support to communities that are facing greater risk of infection, yet Ebola responders face massive security challenges and a lack of resources for the response,” said Nicole Fassina, IFRC Ebola Virus Disease Coordinator. “An under-resourced operation creates a very real risk of an international spread of Ebola,” she added.
“We are dealing with a difficult and volatile situation,” said Michael Ryan, the World Health Organization’s executive director of emergencies program. “We are anticipating a scenario of continued, intense transmission.”
Insecurity has become a “major impediment,” Ryan said.
The most deadly Ebola outbreak occurred in West Africa in 2014. More than 11,000 people had been killed by 2016.
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Putin Demands a Role in Eurasian Part of Belt and Road
Russia appears to be shifting its stance on China’s Belt and Road development initiative in Eurasia, envisioning a bigger role for itself in the process, in what could be a sign that Moscow is worried about waning influence among its neighbors.
When Vladimir Putin traveled to Beijing last month for China’s Belt and Road Forum, he described Russia-China relations now as “the best they have been in their entire history.” He also said the Belt and Road initiative is “intended to strengthen the creative cooperation of the states of Eurasia.”
But Putin’s enthusiasm for participating came with a polite demand, asking China to accommodate Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). It was originally meant to be a Russia-led alliance on political, trade and infrastructure construction issues in Eurasian countries. But the plan has suffered because of Moscow’s paucity of funds.
From Russia with love
In his speech, Putin indicated that Russian cooperation is essential to overcome challenges to BRI in the Eurasian region.
“(Furthermore,) it is necessary to eliminate infrastructure restrictions for integration mainly by creating a system of modern and well-connected transport corridors. Russia with its unique geographic location is willing to engage in this joint activity,” Putin said in his speech.
Putin proposed an integration between different programs and institutions like EAEU, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and One Belt, One Road (old name of Belt and Road Initiative).
Mohan Malik, professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies at Honolulu, said Putin insists on calling the Chinese plan by the old name to expose China’s attempt to show that all roads lead to Beijing.
“By drawing attention to Moscow’s own EAEU initiative and stressing the need for OBOR to partner with the EAEU, the SCO and the ASEAN, Putin is indirectly criticizing Beijing’s ‘go it alone’ approach which is already facing global backlash,” he said.
It is also a reminder from Putin that Russia still has a significant presence in Central Asia, especially on security issues but also in trade and investment, said Zach Witlin, senior analyst at Eurasia Group.
Analysts said Putin is engaged in political posturing and some amount of bargaining for Chinese investments, but he does not have the deep pockets to match Beijing’s clout and implement Moscow’s Eurasian initiative.
Bargaining game
“It is a sign of just how little bargaining leverage he has that he has to make such a plea in public and lump Russia together with all the rest as supplicants,” said Stephen Blank, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council.
“Implicitly he is also trying to induce China to invest in the Arctic and other major infrastructure and transportation projects in Asia,” he said.
China included a road link passing through Russia when Chinese President Xi Jinping first announced the Belt and Road plan in 2013. It took six years of wrangling before Russia recently agreed to implement the project, which is the Russian section of the Meridian toll highway. The road is meant to link China’s western neighbor Kazakhstan with Belarus.
But Putin did not mention the project in public discussions during his Beijing visit last month.
In Russia, the project has been given least importance with just one line being mentioned in the 110-page blueprint on “National Projects” published last February: “By the end of 2024, the Russian section of the Meridian toll highway will be built.”
The Chinese have been patient with Moscow for their own reasons.
“Russia is very important for the Belt and Road, you need its cooperation to achieve success with Eurasian countries,” Bloomberg quoted Wang Yiwei, a former Chinese diplomat and now professor at Renmin University in Beijing. “You cannot bypass Russia.”
But bargaining with Beijing for collaboration in other parts of Eurasia and South East Asia would not yield much result.
“China will not cede primacy to Russia anywhere in the BRI,” Blank said.
US role
The U.S. sent a relatively low-ranking delegation to the Belt and Road Forum meeting and issued a press release criticizing the BRI on several counts. Some analyst believe Washington is making a tactical mistake by allowing high-powered growth of the Chinese program in crucial areas like Eurasia.
Malik said the Obama administration had outlined its “New Silk Road” vision for joint investment projects and regional trade in the region.
“However, Washington dropped the ‘New Silk Road’ plan under pressure from Beijing,” he said adding that the Obama administration largely ignored China’s growing outreach in Central Asia.
“In contrast, the Trump administration has reassessed the challenge that OBOR poses and turned extremely critical and hostile to it,” Malik said.
U.S. officials routinely warn countries that China’s infrastructure deals can carry long-term financial costs that countries can struggle to repay.
When Italy signed on to Beijing’s development plan in March, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told U.S. lawmakers that such deals with China ultimately hurt the country signing onto them.
“It may feel good in the moment: You think you got a cheap product or a low-cost bridge or road built. And in the end there will be a political cost attached to that which will greatly exceed the economic value of what you were provided,” he said.
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Dwarf Goats Are Stars of Party Life in Los Angeles
New party animals in Los Angeles are literally, well, animals. Parties with dwarf goats are quickly gaining popularity in the City of Angels. Angelina Bagdasaryan crashed one such party to see what it is like to hang out with goats. Anna Rice narrates her story.
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Inside the KGB, New York’s Famous Literary Venue
It’s very unlikely that anyone would willingly walk into a bar named the KGB, but writers and book lovers in New York do it all the time. Iuliia Iarmolenko visited what is actually a lively literary venue and talked to its owner about its peculiar history. Anna Rice narrates her story.
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EU Research Vessel Testing Carbon Capture Theory
Scientists are conducting a large-scale, underwater experiment in the North Sea, testing for carbon dioxide leaks in what they say is world first. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports the researchers are testing a plan to pump some of the world’s excess carbon into depleted underwater wells.
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Virginia Mosque Trains Members How to Respond to Active Shooter
Members of an Arlington, Virginia, mosque are being trained on how to respond to an active shooter. Worshippers are learning how to take security measures to protect themselves and save the lives of others. The training follows mass shooting at houses of worship around the world, including one in New Zealand that killed 51 people at a mosque, and another one at a Pittsburgh Synagogue that claimed 11 lives. VOA’s Nilofar Mughal has more from Arlington.
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Ethiopia Cautiously Embraces New Era of Press Freedom
This story originated in the Amharic service. Salem Solomon contributed to the story.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA — Ethiopia’s historic strides toward democracy and openness have given journalists in the country hope for greater freedom to report the news.
In a speech at the African Union headquarters to commemorate World Press Freedom Day, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed encouraged journalists to “seize” the moment.
But he also cautioned restraint.
“We need to ensure that the opening up of the media space does not facilitate misinformation, the spread of hate speech and fake news,” Abiy said. “The pivotal moment that Ethiopia is in right now to help into its true potential can only be realized when those who are tasked with a duty to inform are aware of the responsibilities that come with such freedoms.”
A delicate balance
Last year, Abiy made worldwide news when he released all journalists held in Ethiopian jails. It marked the first time in 14 years that no journalists were behind bars in the country, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported.
Ethiopia also opened up internet access and unblocked about 260 websites.
Ethiopian journalists attending the event, organized by UNESCO, said working for more press freedom while dealing with the threat posed by irresponsible media is a difficult balancing act.
Tsedale Lemma, the editor-in-chief of Addis Standard, a weekly independent magazine, said the press must meet high standards and report with integrity in the wake of newfound freedoms.
“For far too long, we’ve been asking the government to liberalize the media, to lift its pressure on the media, its suppression on the media. A lot of sacrifices have been paid by many, many journalists throughout the past many years, and now that that time arrived, it sort of caught us unprepared,” she said.
Tsedale worries about the rise of what she calls “populist media” that sensationalizes news and stirs up ethnic hatred in the country. She said it is the job of the press to police itself, with government assistance.
“It is a delicate balance that we need to diligently thread through, and the government needs to pay attention not in a way of bringing back its suppression but in a way of supporting genuine journalists who are trying hard to do professional journalism,” she said.
Ethiopia offers hope
Worldwide, about 100 journalists were killed in the past year, and more than 300 remain in prison.
But some international attendees at the conference found hope in Ethiopia’s achievements.
Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist, told VOA’s Amharic service that he did not expect to find Ethiopia hosting an event to commemorate press freedom.
“It was a great surprise for me that, in just one year, in 2018, Ethiopia was a country where lots of journalists were behind the bars,” he said. “When the Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came into power, he liberalized the media. He released all political prisoners, and many journalists they were also released.”
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European, US Authorities Bust Major Darknet Site
European and American investigators have broken up one of the world’s largest online criminal marketplaces for drugs, hacking tools and financial-theft wares in raids in the United States, Germany and Brazil.
Three German men, ages 31, 22 and 29, were arrested after the raids in three southern states on allegations they operated the so-called “Wall Street Market” darknet platform, which hosted about 5,400 sellers and more than 1 million customer accounts, Frankfurt prosecutor Georg Ungefuk told reporters in Wiesbaden on Friday.
A Brazilian man, the site’s alleged moderator, was also charged.
The three Germans, identified in U.S. court documents as Tibo Lousee, Jonathan Kalla and Klaus-Martin Frost, face drug charges in Germany on allegations they administrated the platform where cocaine, heroin and other drugs, as well as forged documents and other illegal material, were sold.
They have also been charged in the United States with conspiring to launder money and distribute illegal drugs, according to a criminal complaint filed in Los Angeles federal court.
“The charges filed in Germany and the United States will significantly disrupt the illegal sale of drugs on the darknet,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan White told reporters in Germany. “We believe that Wall Street Market recently became the world’s largest darknet marketplace for contraband including narcotics, hacking tools, illegal services and stolen financial data.”
Two-year operation
Ungefuk said Wall Street Market was at least the second biggest, refusing to name others for fear of jeopardizing other investigations.
In the nearly two-year operation involving European police agency Europol and authorities in the Netherlands as well as the U.S. and Germany, investigators pinpointed the three men as administrators of the platform on the darknet. It is part of the internet often used by criminals that is hosted within an encrypted network and accessible only through anonymity-providing tools, such as the Tor browser.
Transactions were conducted using cryptocurrencies, and the suspects took commissions ranging from 2% to 6%, Ungefuk said.
The site trafficked documents such as identity papers and driver’s licenses. But an estimated 60% or more of the business was drug-related, he said.
Caught during ‘exit scam’
Authorities swept in quickly after the platform was switched into a “maintenance mode” April 23, and the suspects allegedly began transferring funds used on the platform to themselves in a so-called “exit scam,” Ungefuk said.
The U.S. Department of Justice said the administrators took about $11 million in the exit scam from escrow and user accounts.
The U.S. identified a fourth defendant as Marcos Paulo De Oliveira-Annibale, 29, of Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was not clear if he had been arrested, and federal police in Brazil wouldn’t comment.
Annibale, who went by the moniker “MED3LIN” online, faces federal drug distribution and money laundering charges in the United States for allegedly acting as a moderator on the site in disputes between vendors and their customers. He also allegedly promoted Wall Street Market on prominent websites such as Reddit, the Justice Department said.
Brazilian authorities searched his home Thursday after investigators linked his online persona to pictures he posted of himself years ago, U.S. officials said.
Impact will be short-lived
A University of Manchester criminology researcher who follows activity on dark web markets, Patrick Shortis, said the takedown was widely anticipated after Annibale leaked his credentials and the market’s true internet address online.
Knocking out Wall Street Market is unlikely to have a lasting impact on online criminal markets, though law enforcement officials make it clear they are going after sellers and customers, Shortis said.
In Los Angeles, two drug suppliers were arrested, and authorities confiscated about $1 million cash, weapons and drugs in raids. They were only identified by their online monikers, “Platinum45” and “Ladyskywalker,” and characterized as “major drug traffickers” dealing methamphetamine and fentanyl.
Other darknet busts
After the first big takedown of such a marketplace, Silk Road in 2013, it took overall trade about four to five months to recuperate, Shortis said. And after law enforcement took out Hansa and AlphaBay in 2017, it took about a month, he said.
Shortis said one threat he does see to the market, in the short term at least, are so-called denial of service cyberattacks that effectively knock web servers offline by flooding them with traffic.
“An extortionist is currently targeting Empire and Nightmare, who are both in the running to replace Wall Street as the top market,” he said.
The raids in Germany culminated Thursday with the seizure of servers, while federal police confiscated 550,000 euros ($615,000) in cash, Bitcoin and Monero cryptocurrencies, hard drives, and other evidence in multiple raids.
Because of the clandestine nature of the operation and the difficulty of tracing cryptocurrencies, Ungefuk said it was difficult to assess the overall volume of business conducted by the darknet group. But he said that “we’re talking about profits in the millions at least.”
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Reports: Iran’s Intel Agents Detain Journalist Arrested at May Day Rally
Reports from Iran say a correspondent for a state-approved newspaper has been detained in a Tehran prison ward run by intelligence agents after she attended a rally by labor activists outside parliament.
In a series of tweets posted Thursday and Friday, colleagues of Marzieh Amiri at Iran’s Shargh Daily newspaper, which labels itself reformist, said she had been detained at Evin Prison’s Ward 209. The ward is run by Iran’s intelligence ministry.
Shargh Daily correspondent Sudabeh Rakhsh posted a Thursday tweet saying Amiri, whom she described as a friend, was arrested Wednesday at a rally held by thousands of labor activists outside Iran’s parliament to mark International Workers’ Day, also known as May Day.
In a Wednesday report, VOA sister network RFE/RL’s Radio Farda cited eyewitnesses as saying Iranian security forces arrested at least 35 people as they broke up the rally, beating some of those detained. Radio Farda said most of those detained were labor rights activists who had gathered peacefully to demand better working and living conditions.
In a report published Thursday, Iran’s Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA) named Amiri as one of those who had been detained at the rally and transferred to Evin Prison’s Ward 209.
The Shargh Daily’s official Twitter account confirmed Amiri’s detention at the May Day rally in a Friday tweet, but said the newspaper still was trying to determine her location.
A reporter with another Iranian state-approved news outlet, Mohammad Bagherzadeh of the Shahrvand newspaper, posted a Thursday tweet saying Amiri had been arrested for doing her job as a journalist.
There did not appear to be any comments from Iranian officials about Amiri’s case in state media by late Friday.
In its annual report published last month, media rights group Reporters Without Borders said Iran slipped further toward the bottom of its World Press Freedom index because of an increase in arrests of Iranian journalists and citizen-journalists.
This article originated in VOA’s Persian service.
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4 Palestinians Killed, 2 Israeli Soldiers Hurt in Gaza Violence
Four Palestinians, including two Hamas militants, were killed in an Israeli airstrike and protests Friday as gunshots from the Gaza Strip wounded two Israeli soldiers, officials said, in a new flare-up that shattered a monthlong easing of hostilities that Egypt had mediated.
The calm along the Gaza-Israel frontier was in exchange for Israel’s scaling back restrictions on the territory. However, Gaza’s Hamas rulers accused Israel of not honoring the deal.
Leaders from the Islamic militant group were in Egypt on Friday for further talks. Cairo has hoped negotiations could lead to a long-term cease-fire.
The Israeli army said the soldiers who were shot were moderately and lightly wounded, respectively. Israeli aircraft hit a Hamas militant site in response, killing two Hamas gunmen and wounding three others, Gaza’s health ministry and Hamas’ armed wing said.
The escalation in violence came as thousands of Palestinians demonstrated along Gaza’s perimeter fence with Israel on Friday.
50-plus injured
The health ministry said a 19-year-old Palestinian protester died shortly after he was injured in southern Gaza Strip. Early Saturday, the ministry added that second demonstrator, 31, had succumbed to his wounds. More than 50 Palestinians suffered various injuries during protests at several sections of the frontier.
Hamas has hoped that Egyptian mediators could alleviate the blockade that Israel and Egypt imposed after it violently seized full control of Gaza in 2007 from the Western-backed Palestinian Authority.
More than 200 Palestinians and an Israeli soldier have been killed in the border protests that Hamas has led since March last year.
Last month, Israel allowed Gaza fishermen to sail up to 15 nautical miles off the enclave’s coast, but retracted the decision this week, scaling it down to the longtime previous limit of nine miles after rockets were fired from Gaza.
Hamas also says Israel delayed the transfer of Qatari money for cash-strapped public institutions in the territory of 2 million people and did not take more measures to ease the grinding power shortage in Gaza.
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UN Rights Chief ‘Appalled’ by Iran Execution of Two Minors
The UN human rights chief voiced outrage Friday at Iran’s execution of two 17-year-old boys charged with rape and robbery, stressing that executing children is banned under international law.
Mehdi Sohrabifar and Amin Sedaghat were executed on April 25, after a trial that the UN rights office said appeared to have “seriously breached fundamental due process guarantees.”
“I am appalled,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said in a statement, urging Tehran to immediately halt all executions of people accused of committing crimes while children.
“The prohibition of executions of child offenders is absolute under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and under the Convention on the Rights of the Child,” she said.
Iran is party to both those treaties.
Bachelet said the cases of Sohrabifar and Sedaghat were particularly deplorable since “both boys were reportedly subjected to ill-treatment and a flawed legal process.”
The two boys were 15 years old when they were arrested and accused of rape and robbery in 2017.
The UN rights office said it had received information that they were held in police detention for two months, and were initially deprived of their right to a lawyer and had been beaten.
It also pointed to reports that the boys, who originally denied all charges, had reportedly been coerced into making false confessions, before they were convicted and sentenced to death.
The boys’ families had brought the case to the Supreme Court, which overturned the lower court’s sentence and ordered a retrial.
The lower court again convicted the boys and sentenced them to death.
“Apparently, neither the victims nor their families were aware that the executions were going to take place,” the rights office said.
The two were reportedly flogged before their execution, it said, stressing that flogging amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and possibly torture under international law.
“I once again call on the authorities to halt all executions of juvenile offenders, and to immediately commute all such death sentences,”Bachelet said.
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European Security Chiefs Alarmed at Threat From Far-Right Terrorism
When British police first visited 41-year-old Steven Bishop at his home in the ethnically-diverse London suburb of Thornton Heath he told them he was planning a fireworks display.
But officers, who had been alerted by one of Bishop’s co-workers who feared his colleague was making a bomb, examined the fireworks and discovered they had been tampered with.
Last month, Bishop, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, pleaded guilty to terror charges, including planning an attack on a nearby mosque in revenge — as he saw it — for the 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bombing by a radical Islamist that left 23 dead and 139 wounded, half of them children.
From Germany to Britain, alarm is rising across Europe about the terror threat from fringe far-right groups and their supporters. Analysts and intelligence officials say the groups are studying the tactics of jihadist factions, like the Islamic State terror group, and copying their bomb-making methods and social-media propaganda techniques, using YouTube and messaging platforms to radicalize others.
This week, German authorities said the number of far-right extremists and fringe groups has jumped by 50 percent over the past two years.
In Britain, intelligence agencies are now being drafted to help police tackle the far-right terror threat with authorities saying four attacks have been foiled since 2017. The country’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Center, which is coordinated by Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5, has been tasked to assess the threat posed by militant right-wing terrorism.
Britain’s interior minister, Sajid Javid, told reporters last month, “The marked shift in the nature of extreme right-wing activity, and in the organization of such groups and their reach, from being small groups mainly focused on promoting anti-immigration views and white supremacy to actual engagement in terrorist activity, has resulted in this aspect of the threat presenting a higher risk to national security than it previously has.”
The alarm in London, Berlin and other European capitals has jumped since the live-streamed shootings in April at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch, which left 50 dead and 50 wounded. It emerged after the massacre that the 28-year-old assailant had ties to so-called Identitarian (white nationalist) groups in Europe, having sent donations to France’s far-right anti-immigrant movement Génération Identaire and to an Austrian affiliate.
In an analysis of far-right extremist activity, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, warned that monitoring far-right militants with violence in mind is becoming increasingly challenging and labor-intensive. Traditional extremist groups have fragmented into even more shadowy and secretive factions. The potential for ‘lone-wolf’ attacks has increased dramatically, the agency warned.
“They are developing in different currents and spectra of the right-wing extremist scene, but also on the fringe or entirely outside of organized right-wing extremist tableaus,” the report said. Online surveillance must be increased to try to keep tabs and head off attacks in the early stages of planning, the agency counseled.
The overall assessment of the threat from right-wing terrorism and violence has changed dramatically. Until two years ago, analysts were reporting that the number of deadly incidents perpetrated by far-right militants had declined considerably between 1990 to 2015, although they noted that that in most Western democracies, the number of deadly attacks motivated by far-right beliefs was higher than those motivated by Islamism, including in the United States.
Writing in the academic journal Perspectives on Terrorism in 2016, Jacob Aasland Ravndal, a Norwegian analyst of militant activism and political violence, noted the decline was puzzling given that the conditions commonly assumed to stimulate such violence were plentiful. “These conditions include increased immigration, enhanced support to radical right parties, Islamist terrorism, and booming youth unemployment rates,” he wrote.
But intelligence officials across the Continent now say jihadists and the far-right militants are feeding each other, using similar methods to radicalize people quickly and to inspire loners to carry out copy-cat attacks. A London court heard last year how Darren Osborne, who drove a van into pedestrians in the capital’s Finsbury Park neighborhood near a mosque, had been radicalized in a matter of weeks. Osborne was cited by the Christchurch attacker as an inspiration.
“Evolving technologies and increasing exploitation of social media for the purpose of spreading terrorist material and radicalizing others poses a particularly difficult challenge,” Javid told reporters in London last month. Analysts say social media can indeed help turn political extremists into violent ones and the fear is that the trajectory may be shifting and that right-wing motivated violence may be heading back up.
Researchers at the University of Maryland, who compile the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism database (START) on terrorist attacks in North America, Western Europe and Oceania say “a spate of right-wing terrorist attacks broke out after a lull in the early-to-mid 2000s, just as social media began to gain popularity.”
your ad hereTrump, Putin Discuss Venezuela, Other Hotspots in Phone Call
VOA’s Nike Ching at the State Department and Carla Babb at the Pentagon contributed to this report.
WHITE HOUSE — The crisis in Venezuela was among the topics discussed in a Friday phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The president reiterated the need for a peaceful transition” in Venezuela, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters.
Tension has grown in recent days between Washington and Moscow over the increasingly destabilizing events in Caracas. The Trump administration has accused the Russians of preventing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from giving up power and fleeing the country.
“This is our hemisphere,” national security adviser John Bolton said Wednesday. “It’s not where the Russians ought to be interfering.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in a phone call earlier this week, told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of “grave consequences” should there be further aggressive steps in Venezuela, interpreted as a warning to Washington not to intervene militarily.
Pompeo and Lavrov are scheduled to talk on the sidelines of an Arctic Council ministerial session in Finland next week, and Venezuela is almost certainly to be discussed.
“They will have an opportunity, obviously, to meet and review whatever topics they choose to,” a senior State Department official told reporters on a conference call previewing Pompeo’s trip.
The president’s national security team, including Bolton, acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood and the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Navy Adm. Craig Faller, met Friday in a secure Pentagon room that is reserved for top-level discussions of sensitive issues and military operations.
Defense officials said they discussed options on Venezuela.
“The president is going to do what’s necessary,” Sanders replied to a question from VOA about whether that meeting had moved the ball on U.S. military intervention in Venezuela.
She repeated that “all options continue to be on the table,” something administration officials have stressed for weeks.
Trump issued a couple of tweets Friday afternoon about the call with Putin:
Shanahan told reporters that the meeting reviewed the situation in Venezuela and was to ensure there is alignment within the administration on the South American country.
The United States and most other Western countries no longer recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, having switched interim recognition to Juan Guaido, the president of Venezuela’s democratically elected national assembly.
In Friday’s Trump-Putin phone call, which Sanders said lasted more than an hour, the U.S. president also asked the Russian leader to pressure North Korea to denuclearize.
Also discussed, according to Sanders, was the possibility of a new nuclear agreement involving the United States, Russia and China, or extending the current pact.
The two leaders, said Sanders, also talked about the situation in Ukraine.
In addition, the White House press secretary said the Mueller report examining Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was raised “very, very briefly,” with the president conveying that the investigation was over.
Sanders did not go into detail about what Trump said to Putin about U.S. government concerns that Moscow continues efforts to tamper with the American election process, saying on meddling in general, “We’re going to do everything we can to prevent it from happening.”
your ad hereMalawi Tests Election Results System Amid Network Challenges
An election governing body in Malawi has done its first test of a system that tallies election results, as a May 21 poll draws near. Testing of the Results Management System is meant to find weaknesses and glitches, as officials hope Tuesday’s exercise will help calm fears of election rigging.
Officials placed staff and equipment at election centers across Malawi to transmit results to the main tally center in Blantyre.
Jane Ansah, chairperson for the Malawi Electoral Commission, says the test exercise is meant to calm fears that election results might be tampered with.
“This is one of the issues of transparency. We invited people to come and witness this test run, and I believe, as they witness the test run, they will be assured that there is no reason or any basis for any fears of hacking the system,” Ansah said.
However, the test did uncover network glitches in the Results Management System, especially at voting centers in rural areas.
The test exercise began nearly an hour late because of connectivity problems. Some tallying centers in southern Malawi — like Nsanje district — failed to transmit results to the main tally center.
Kenneth Phiri, who represented the main opposition Malawi Congress Party during the exercise, expressed satisfaction with how the system was working, but noted concerns about connectivity issues.
“We will have challenges like maybe when sending information from remote areas. Obviously, phones will be off or network problems. So instead of relying on scanning documents, we should have [another] way of sending that from polling station to the main tally center,” Phiri said.
Election official Ansah vowed that the glitches found during the test run will be fixed by the time voters go to the polls May 21.
“Apart from that, the system is still paper-based. So it’s not only that [electronic document] which is transmitted but we have a fallback position because our ballots are paper. So, we believe that since the representatives of political parties are here, they will be able to relay the information to their principals and people fears of rigging will be allayed,” Ansah said.
Incumbent President Peter Mutharika is seeking a second term, and his own vice president, Saulos Klaus Chilima, is seeking to unseat Mutharika. During the campaign, both men have been accusing each other of planning to rig the elections.
Mutharika claims Chilima is conniving with local telecommunication companies, a charge Chilima denies.
Meanwhile, the vice president has accused Mutharika’s government of buying a machine it allegedly plans to use to rig the upcoming poll, a claim the president has denied.
Richard Cox, chief technical adviser for electoral support with the United Nations Development Program, told VOA that politicians themselves can generate fears about election rigging.
“What we say is where there are genuine, provable concerns on electoral fraud, we should use institutions and processes that are already in place to address those. But where the accusation is not grounded in a reality or proven reality, please be cautious because what you are doing is you are disenfranchising the electorate by doing that,” he said.
Cox said the Results Management System tested in Malawi has been used in other countries in Africa, like Zambia.
“There was no issue in which the tally sheets were [fraudulently] scanned and transmitted. So we are confident that the system should yield results in terms of reliability, efficiency and security that should inspire some confidence,” Cox said.
The election commission plans another more targeted test run at sites that experienced problems before voters head to the polls.
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