Thailand’s parliament voted Thursday to delay deciding on whether it will amend the country’s constitution, and anti-government protesters continued the daily demonstrations they have been staging for more than two months, calling for more democracy and reform of the monarchy.Rather than vote on the amendment, lawmakers dominated by government supporters opted to set up a committee that will study various plans to amend the charter written by a military-appointed panel after a 2014 coup. Critics of the current government say the constitution was drafted to ensure the country’s current prime minister remained in power after the election last year.The decision is expected to delay the process by another month, agitating the thousands of protesters who gathered outside the parliament to put pressure on lawmakers to implement constitutional change and remove Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha, a former junta leader, from office.Parliament member Wiroj Lakkhanaadisorn from the opposition party said in a tweet that as a result of the delay to form a committee, if the motion to amend the constitution is rejected in a month’s time, then members of parliament will not be able to propose another motion until next year.“It’s part of their tactics to delay the process because they want to hold on to their power,” said Punchada Sirivunnabood, an associate professor of politics at Mahidol University near Bangkok. “The protest movement will likely escalate from this point, with more people, including the opposition parties, joining the movement.”Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn has not publicly commented on the protests that have demanded the monarchy’s power be reduced — a movement that challenges a decadeslong taboo of not criticizing the monarchy.Prayuth has called for patience on the amendment, saying the country must be peaceful in order for the government to be able to “continue our work, especially on the economy.”
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Month: September 2020
Sweden Keeps Ban on Large Gatherings as COVID-19 Cases Rise
Sweden’s prime minister said Thursday that he would keep a ban on large gatherings after the nation recorded its largest spike in new daily COVID-19 cases since July.Sweden’s approach to the pandemic has been controversial in that it never implemented a mandatory national lockdown. Instead, it called for personal responsibility, social distancing, masks and good hygiene to slow, rather than eradicate, the virus.The results have been mixed. Sweden’s COVID-19 caseload has been much lower than those of many other European countries, with 90,289. But its number of deaths — 5,878 as of Thursday — is significantly higher than those of its Nordic neighbors Finland and Norway, but low compared with figures from countries like Spain, Italy or Britain.Sweden has recorded a gradual rise in new COVID-19 infections in recent weeks, and 533 new cases were reported Thursday, the highest daily number since early July.FILE – Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Lofven leaves the European Council building at the end of an EU summit in Brussels, July 21, 2020.Too relaxedAt a news briefing Thursday, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said Swedes had become too relaxed about heeding anti-COVID-19 guidelines, and while they plan to lift a ban on visits to elder care homes, he said the government would not hesitate to implement further restrictions if new cases continued to rise.Lofven blamed the recent spike in cases on people letting their guard down. He said, “The caution that existed in the spring has more and more been replaced by hugs, parties,” and for many, an attempt to return to “normal life.”At a separate news conference Thursday, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, told reporters he believed the country has not seen the rapid spread and resurgence of the virus that other European countries have seen because the restrictions it did implement were left in place. Other countries, like Spain, locked down completely, then reopened.Tegnell said it was also possible Sweden could experience the same type of surge in a few weeks.
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Helsinki: Coronavirus-sniffing Dogs Could Provide Safer Travel
Helsinki Airport is getting creative when it comes to operating safely in the age of COVID-19. Beginning this week, travelers arriving at Finland’s busiest international airport will have the opportunity to take a voluntary coronavirus test that takes 10 seconds and is entirely painless — but it’s not the test that is unusual, rather, it’s who is conducting it.The new state-funded pilot program uses coronavirus-sniffing canines to detect the presence of the virus within 10 seconds with shocking accuracy. Preliminary results from the trial show that the dogs, who have been used previously to detect illnesses such as cancer and malaria, were able to identify the virus with nearly 100% accuracy.FILE – Sniffer dog Miina, being trained to detect the coronavirus from the arriving passengers’ samples, works in Helsinki Airport in Vantaa, Finland, Sept. 15, 2020.Many of the dogs were able to detect the coronavirus long before a patient developed symptoms, something even laboratory tests fail to do.After passengers arrive at Helsinki from abroad and have collected their luggage, they are invited to wipe their necks with a cloth to collect sweat samples that are then placed into an intake box. In a separate booth, a dog handler places the box alongside several cans containing various scents and the canine goes to work.Researchers have yet to identify what it is exactly the dogs sniff when they detect the virus, but a preliminary study published in June found there was “very high evidence” that the sweat odors of a COVID-19-positive person were different from those who do not have the virus. This is key, as dogs are able to detect the difference thanks to their sharp sense of smell.If the dog flags the sample as positive, the passenger is directed to the airport’s health center for a free PCR virus test.While there have been instances that an animal contracts the coronavirus, dogs do not seem to be easily infected. There is no evidence that dogs can pass the virus on to people or other animals.Sniffer dogs Valo, left, and E.T., who are trained to detect the coronavirus disease from the arriving passengers’ samples, sit next to their trainers at Helsinki Airport in Vantaa, Finland, Sept. 22, 2020.Scientists in other countries, such as France, Germany and Britain, are engaging in similar research, but Finland is the first country in Europe to put dogs to work to sniff out the coronavirus.Finnish researchers say that if the pilot program proves to be effective, dogs could be used to quickly and efficiently screen visitors in spaces such as retirement homes or hospitals to help avoid unnecessary quarantines for health care workers.Representatives from the University of Helsinki, who are conducting the trial, said Finland would need between 700 and 1,000 specially trained coronavirus-sniffing dogs in order to cover schools, malls and retirement homes. For broader coverage, even more trained animals— and their trainers— would be required.
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Zimbabwe’s Rescued Wildlife Joins Jerusalema Dance Challenge
The Jerusalema Dance Challenge, a South African internet craze, is sweeping the African continent.As the Jerusalema spreads across Africa, in Zimbabwe, the wildlife is joining in. Staff at Zimbabwe’s Wild is Life sanctuary for rescued wildlife have seen their online dance video with elephants, giraffes and other animals go viral.The song “Jerusalema,” by South African DJ and record producer Master KG and vocalist Nomcebo, went viral during the coronavirus lockdown.Dancers, both professional and amateur, began posting their performances to the song online – including with some wildlife. Roxy Danckwerts, the founder of Wild is Life, said they used their phones to record the video.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
Roxy Danckwerts, founder of Wild is Life, is seen in at a computer, in Harare, Zimbabwe, Sept. 23, 2020. (Columbus Mavhunga/VOA)Danckwerts said she hopes it will help support Zimbabwe’s wildlife tourism industry.South African tourist Phillipa Meek said she decided to visit the Wild is Life center with her friend Ben Fowler after seeing the video online.South African tourist Phillipa Meek says she decided to visit the Wild is Life center in Harare after seeing the video online, Sept. 23, 2020. (Columbus Mavhunga/VOA)”I have been watching a few of the Jerusalema videos, and the Wild is Life one was absolutely amazing. With all the animals and baby elephants, they were so cute, the giraffes and all the spirit in the video was absolutely fantastic, and I thought it was one of the best Jerusalema videos that is out there and it really encouraged me, because I am from South Africa, to come here and I just see it for myself,” Meek said.Like much of Africa, Zimbabwe’s tourism industry has been suffering since the pandemic began in March. But even before the pandemic, Zimbabwe struggled to attract visitors.Godfrey Koti, the spokesman for the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority, said the pandemic has brought the industry worldwide to “ground zero” and it is time for Zimbabwe to take off.Godfrey Koti, spokesman for Zimbabwe’s Tourism Authority says he wants to see tourism’s contribution to the country’s GDP increase from the current 8% to between 15%-18%, for a total $5 billion, in Harare, Sept. 23, 2020. (Columbus Mavhunga/VOA)”And we are starting with domestic tourism, making sure that everything is in place from a domestic perspective. For us to be successful, we need a sound domestic product, then we can go to the region and effectively send it to the international market and increase our arrivals, thereby increasing our contribution to the GDP, which is currently at 8%. We are looking at maybe between 15% and 18% and obviously, this will give us a very healthy $5 billion contribution to the fiscus,” Koti said.Zimbabwe has seen triple-digit inflation, adding to the country’s economic problems. Tourism is one of the industries Zimbabwe hopes will revive the country’s struggling economy.
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Kenya’s Chinese-Built Railway Proves Pricey
Kenyan lawmakers want the operating costs of a Chinese-built railway nearly cut in half and have called for renegotiating the Chinese loan to finance the line’s construction. Parliament’s Transport Committee says huge operating losses and debt to Chinese banks are straining taxpayers already hit by the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Members of the National Assembly’s Transport Committee unveiled a report Wednesday asking lawmakers to push for reduced costs on the railway line, known as the Standard Gauge Railway, or SGR.
The head of the committee, David Pkosing, says legislators also want the government to seek new terms for the $4.5 billion in loans used to build the railway.
“We also recommended that the entire loan framework should also be renegotiated, the original loan framework now with COVID-19 and, of course, Kenya and the world will never be the same again with this effect of COVID-19. That loan should be renegotiated downwards or agreed on even extending the time upon which we should have paid the loan,” Pkosing said.
The railway carries goods from the port of Mombasa to Nairobi. In 2019, it transported 9 million tons of goods.
Kenya currently pays $1 million every month to China’s Africa Star Railway Operation Company to run the railway. Since 2017, Kenya failed to meet the monthly payment for 21 months.
Parliament wants the monthly cost to be brought to $600,000 and wants to engage China on how to pay the loan.
Tony Watima, an economist based in Kenya, says China may be reluctant to negotiate a deal with Kenya.
“The latest update we have seen that China has renegotiated debt with Angola, but circumstances are different. Angola debt is commodity-backed – they export commodity, especially oil…. So, for Kenya, those debts were not commodity-backed, they were just given debt for investment projects, so the risks are high on the China side, and they will look [at] Kenya as a country, not like Angola, and renegotiating those terms will be a big problem, it means China has to take a lot of risks. That’s one of the things we have not seen China engage in any African country on that,” Watima said.
Between 2010 and 2018, China lent over $150 billion to African nations for projects mainly related to its ‘Belt and Road’ infrastructure initiatives.
In June, Kenya’s court of appeal ruled that the Kenya Railways Corporation, as the procuring entity of the Standard Gauge Railway, failed to meet the constitutional threshold of fairness and transparency.
Okiya Omtata, an activist who has pushed the government to make the details of its deal with China public since 2013, questions the legitimacy of the whole agreement.
“I think what the parliament should be saying is that we are not going to pay China for [that] illegal contract, and that’s the end of the day. They have crooks in Kenya and crooks in China who are in power and negotiated this thing, and the people of Kenya cannot be burdened with what they are not benefiting from,” Omtata said.
The railway carried more than 19,000 passengers and 421,000 tons of cargo between Nairobi and Mombasa in July, following a hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Trump Pays Respects to Late Justice Ginsburg
U.S. President Donald Trump was met with boos and chants of “vote him out” as he and his wife, Melania, appeared Thursday at the Supreme Court to pay respects to late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.The president, wearing a face mask, made no remarks as he stood briefly a short distance from Ginsburg’s casket as she lay in repose at the top of the court building’s steps.Ginsburg was honored Wednesday with a private ceremony in the Supreme Court’s Great Hall attended by her family and fellow justices. Her casket was then moved to the front steps for the public to file past and pay their respects until Thursday night.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline.Download File360p | 5 MB480p | 7 MB540p | 9 MB720p | 16 MB1080p | 34 MBOriginal | 44 MB Embed” />Copy Download AudioFriday, there will be another tribute to Ginsburg, as her casket will be taken across the street to the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall, where it will rest on the same wooden platform built for the casket of President Abraham Lincoln after his assassination in 1865. Ginsburg will be the first woman to lie in state at the Capitol.Civil rights icon Rosa Parks lay in honor in the Capitol’s historic Rotunda after her death in 2005, a distinction given to eminent private citizens. A statement by the U.S. Supreme Court said Ginsburg will be buried next week in a private ceremony at Arlington National Ceremony.Chief Justice John Roberts offered the court’s “heartfelt condolences” on the loss of Ginsburg, which he said “is widely shared, but we know that it falls most heavily on the family. Justice Ginsburg’s life was one of the many versions of the American dream.”Ginsburg died last Friday at age 87 of metastatic pancreatic cancer, ending a 27-year tenure on the nation’s highest court. Her status as leader of the court’s liberal minority, along with her pre-jurist work seeking legal equality for women and girls in all spheres of American, made her a cultural icon, earning her the nickname “The Notorious R.B.G.”Her death has sparked a political battle over her replacement. Trump and Senate Republicans vowed to name and confirm a new justice before the Nov. 3 presidential election, which would give the court a solid 6-3 conservative majority. Trump announced Tuesday that he will name his nominee for the lifetime appointment on Saturday.
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US Unemployment Benefit Claims Remain High
The U.S. Labor Department reported Thursday that 870,000 workers filed for unemployment compensation last week, a slight increase from the week before and another sign that the coronavirus pandemic is continuing to impede the American economic recovery.Millions of workers remain unemployed in the United States, with the jobless rate at 8.6% in mid-September, and economists saying the figure could remain elevated for months. Only about half of the 22 million U.S. jobs lost in the coronavirus pandemic has been recovered, with the world’s biggest economy adding 1.4 million jobs in August.Weekly initial claims for jobless benefits seemed to have stabilized somewhat below 900,000 in recent weeks. Last week’s 870,000 figure was up 4,000 from the revised level of the week before.The recent weekly claims figures are well below the 6.9 million record number of claims filed in late March as the coronavirus swept into the United States but remain above the highest level before this year in records going back to the 1960s.U.S. employers have called back millions of workers who were laid off during mandatory business shutdowns earlier this year, yet some hard-hit businesses have been slow to ramp up their operations again or closed permanently, leaving workers idled or searching for new employment.During the worst of the pandemic, the U.S. unemployment rate topped out at 14.7% in April.With six weeks to go before the November 3 presidential and congressional elections, President Donald Trump and Republican and Democratic lawmakers in politically fractious Washington have been unable to reach an agreement on extending federal unemployment benefits and how much should be paid.Until the end of July, the national government sent an extra $600 a week to unemployed workers on top of less generous state jobless benefits. The Republican-controlled Senate two weeks ago tried to win approval of $300-a-week payments through the end of the year, but Democrats blocked the proposal as too small and continued to call for resumption of the $600 weekly payments.The rejected Republican coronavirus relief package would have cost between $500 billion and $700 billion, on top of the $3 trillion approved months ago at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.Trump has urged his Republican colleagues in Congress to approve more spending in another coronavirus aid deal. A week ago, he said on Twitter, “Go for the much higher numbers, Republicans, it all comes back to the USA anyway (one way or another!).”The top two congressional Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, praised Trump’s stance.“We look forward to hearing from the president’s negotiators that they will finally meet us halfway with a bill that is equal to the massive health and economic crises gripping our nation,” Pelosi and Schumer said.But no deal has been reached as the country’s world-leading coronavirus death toll topped 200,000 this week.Democrats have called for a $2.2 trillion relief package, but possibly could settle for less than that. Whatever figure, if any, is agreed on is likely to come soon. Lawmakers want to leave Washington to return to their home states for a month of campaigning for re-election ahead of the elections.As the first round of unemployment payments expired in July, Trump signed an executive order calling for $400 a week in extra payments for a few weeks. But not all states delivered the reduced payments to jobless workers, and now that money is running out.While the U.S. has been adding more jobs in recent months, the pace of the recovery has seemed to slow. The 1.4 million jobs added in August included the Census Bureau’s temporary hiring of about 240,000 workers to help conduct the once-a-decade count of the U.S. population.
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Hunger Stalks Thousands in Northern Mozambique as Conflict Escalates
The U.N. World Food Program warns northern Mozambique’s volatile Cabo Delgado province is facing a hunger crisis as escalating conflict forces thousands to flee their homes and abandon farms.An armed insurgency in Mozambique’s oil-rich northern province of Cabo Delgado has displaced more than 300,000 people since 2017. As fighting has intensified in recent months, thousands have fled to neighboring Tanzania, raising fears of a regionalization of the conflict.Most of the displaced have no means to feed themselves, and WFP spokesman Tomson Phiri says many are totally dependent on international food aid for survival.“We know that Cabo Delgado is a farming area,” said Phiri. “This is a region that produces both crops for commercial as well as for the subsistence of the farmers there. And, we know that when there is violence and if the farmer is not guaranteed to be there to harvest, they hardly put any seeds into the ground.” The WFP plans to send food aid to reach 310,000 people in Cabo Delgado, Nampula, and Niassa. But it notes insecurity, poor infrastructure and restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and lack of money are threatening the operation.Phiri says the agency urgently requires $4.7 million a month to assist the internally displaced. He tells VOA the WFP will be forced to cut back on rations as early as December, if it doesn’t receive the needed funds. This, he adds will have serious consequences.“When you cut rations, the adults, particularly the mothers in the family—they start skipping meals,” said Phiri. “They start reducing the meal portions in order to stretch whatever resources are available for the children to have something…We are also concerned because Cabo Delgado has very high malnutrition rates.”Cabo Delgado has the second highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the country with more than half of children under age five chronically malnourished. The U.N. agency has enough money in its coffers to feed the internally displaced over the next couple of months. The WFP, however, warns it may be forced to suspend its life-saving operation if the funding shortage persists beyond the end of the year.
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FACTBOX – Criminal Charges in Police Killings of Black Americans
Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, is one of multiple Black Americans killed by police.Here is a summary of some police shooting cases and their outcomes:
Michael Brown, a Black teen killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
Settlement: $1.5 million.
Criminal charges: None.
Eric Garner, a Black man who died after repeatedly crying, “I can’t breathe,” while placed in a chokehold by a New York City cop during an attempted 2014 arrest.
Settlement: $5.9 million.
Criminal charges: None.
Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy who was holding a toy gun when shot dead by a Cleveland, Ohio, police officer in 2014.
Settlement: $6 million.
Criminal charges: None.
Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old African-American, was shot dead by Chicago police as he was walking away from them during an attempted arrest in 2014.
Settlement: $5 million
Criminal charges: A jury found white police officer Jason Van Dyke guilty
Freddie Gray, a Black man who died from injuries he sustained while in handcuffs and leg irons after being thrown into the back of a Baltimore police van in 2015.
Settlement: $6.4 million.
Criminal charges: The six officers criminally charged in Gray’s death were acquitted or the charges were dropped.
Walter Scott, an unarmed Black man shot in the back while fleeing on foot from a traffic stop in North Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Settlement: $6.5 million.
Criminal charges: The officer pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Philando Castile, a Black man shot and killed during a 2016 traffic stop in a St. Paul, Minnesota, suburb after telling police he had a gun in the vehicle.
Settlement: Close to $3 million.
Criminal charges: A jury acquitted the officer on charges of felony manslaughter and reckless discharge of a firearm.
Stephon Clark, an unarmed Black man killed by Sacramento, California, police in 2018 after they chased him into his grandmother’s back yard.
Settlement: Clark’s two children received $1.2 million each. Claims by other family members are pending.
Criminal charges: None.
Atatiana Jefferson, a Black woman shot dead by a Fort Worth, Texas, officer in 2019 while standing in her home with a handgun after hearing noises outside.
Settlement: No lawsuit filed yet.
Criminal charges: The officer, who resigned, is awaiting trial for murder.
Botham Jean, a 26-year-old Black PwC accountant, was shot dead by a police officer who accidentally walked into his apartment thinking it was her own in 2018.
Settlement: None
Breonna Taylor, a Black, 26-year-old emergency room technician, was killed on March 13, 2020, by Louisville, Kentucky, police who burst into her home with a battering ram. Taylor’s boyfriend fired his gun at the intruders who returned fire, killing Taylor.
Settlement: Louisville paid $12 million
Criminal charges: Detective Brett Hankison was terminated in June and indicted on Wednesday for wanton endangerment of Taylor’s neighbors, a charge with a maximum sentence of up to five years. Two other officers faced no charges because their use of force was justified, the state’s attorney general said.
George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who was reported for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill, died on May 25, 2020, while handcuffed after Minneapolis police knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
Settlement: A wrongful death suit filed against Minneapolis and four police officers is pending.
Criminal charges: One officer is charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter. Three others have been charged with aiding and abetting.
Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, was shot twice in the back on June 12, 2020, as he ran from Atlanta police and fired a Taser at one officer, a non-deadly weapon he had seized from a second officer to escape a drunk-driving arrest.
Settlement: None.
Criminal charges: One Atlanta police officer was fired and charged with murder. A second was placed on administrative duty and charged with aggravated assault. The city’s police chief resigned.
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Sir Harold Evans, Crusading Publisher and Author, Dies at 92
Sir Harold Evans, the charismatic publisher, author and muckraker who was a bold-faced name for decades for exposing wrongdoing in 1960s London to publishing such 1990s best-sellers as “Primary Colors,” has died, his wife said Thursday. He was 92.
His wife, fellow author-publisher Tina Brown, said he died Wednesday in New York of congestive heart failure.
A vision of British erudition and sass, Evans was a high-profile go-getter, starting in the 1960s as an editor of the Northern Echo and the Sunday Times of London and continuing into the 1990s as president of Random House. Married since 1981 to Brown, their union was a paradigm of media clout and A-list access.
A defender of literature and print journalism well into the digital age, Evans was one of the all-time newspaper editors, startling British society with revelations of espionage, corporate wrongdoing and government scandal. In the U.S., he published such attention-getters as the mysterious political novel “Primary Colors” and memoirs by such unlikely authors as Manuel Noriega and Marlon Brando.
He was knighted by his native Britain in 2004 for his contributions to journalism.
He held his own, and more, with the world’s elite, but was mindful of his working class background: a locomotive driver’s son, born in Lancashire, English, on June 28, 1928. As a teen, he was evacuated to Wales during World War II. After serving in the Royal Air Force, he studied politics and economics at Durham University and received a master’s in foreign policy.
His drive to report and expose dated back to his teens, when he discovered that newspapers had wildly romanticized the Battle of Dunkirk between German and British soldiers.
“A newspaper is an argument on the way to a deadline,” he once wrote. He was just 16 when he got his first journalism job, at a local newspaper in Lancashire, and after graduating from college he became an assistant editor at the Manchester Evening News. In his early 30s, he was hired to edit the Daily Echo and began attracting national attention with crusades such as government funding for cancer smear tests for women.
He had yet to turn 40 when he became editor of the Sunday Times, where he reigned and rebelled for 14 years until he was pushed out by a new boss, Rupert Murdoch. Notable stories included publishing the diaries of former Labour Minister Richard Crossman; taking on the manufacturers of the drug Thalidomide, which caused birth defects in children; and revealing that Britain’s Kim Philby was a Soviet spy.
“There have been many times when I have found that what was presented as truth did not square with what I discovered as a reporter, or later as an editor, learned from good shoe-leather reporters,” he observed in “My Paper Chase,” published in 2009. “We all understand in an age of terrorism that refraining from exposing a lie may be necessary for the protection of innocents. But ‘national interest’ is an elastic concept that if stretched can snap with a sting.”
Meanwhile, the then-married Evans became infatuated with an irreverent blonde just out of Oxford, Tina Brown, and soon began a long-distance correspondence — he in London, she in New York — that grew intimate enough for Evans to “fall in love by post.” They were married in East Hampton, New York, in 1981. The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee was best man, Nora Ephron was among the guests.
With Brown, Evans had two children, adding to the two children he had with his first wife.
Their garden apartment on Manhattan’s exclusive Sutton Place became a mini-media dynasty: He the champion of justice, rogues and belles lettres, she the award-winning provocateur and chronicler of the famous — as head of Tatler in England, then Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and as author of a best-selling book about Princess Diana.
Evans emigrated to the U.S. in 1984, initially serving as editorial director of U.S. News & World Report, and was hired six years later by Random House. He published William Styron’s best-selling account of his near-suicidal depression, “Darkness Visible,” and winked at Washington with “Primary Colors,” a roman a clef about then-candidate Bill Clinton that was published anonymously and set off a capitol guessing game, ended when The Washington Post unmasked magazine correspondent Joe Klein.
Evans had a friendly synergist at The New Yorker, where Brown serialized works by Monica Crowley, Edward Jay Epstein and other Random House authors. A special beneficiary was Jeffrey Toobin, a court reporter for The New Yorker who received a Random House deal for a book on the O.J. Simpson trial that was duly excerpted in Brown’s magazine.
Evans took on memoirs by the respected — Colin Powell — as well as the disgraced: Clinton advisor and alleged call girl client Dick Morris. He visited Noriega’s jail cell in pursuit of a memoir by the deposed Panamanian dictator. In 1994, he risked $40,000 for a book by a community organizer and law school graduate, a bargain for what became former President Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father.”
Evan’s more notable follies included a disparaged, Random House-generated list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century, for which judges acknowledged they had no ideal how the books were ranked, and Brando’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me.”
As Evans recalled in “My Paper Chase,” he met with Brando in California, first for dinner at a restaurant where the ever-suspicious actor accused Evans of working for the CIA. Then they were back at Brando’s Beverly Hills mansion, where Brando advocated for Native Americans and intimated that he had sex with Jacqueline Kennedy at the White House.
After a follow-up meeting the next afternoon — they played chess, Brando recited Shakespeare — the actor signed on, wrote what Evans found a “highly readable” memoir. He then subverted it by kissing CNN’s Larry King on the lips, “stopping the book dead in its tracks,” Evans recalled.
Evans left Random House in 1997 to take over as editorial director and vice president of Morton B. Zuckerman’s many publications, including U.S. News & World Report and The Atlantic, but stepped down in 2000 to devote more time to speeches and books.
More recently, he served as a contributing editor to U.S. News and editor at large for the magazine The Week. In 2011, he became an editor-at-large for Reuters. His guidebook for writers, “Do I Make Myself Clear?”, was published in 2017.
“I wrote the book because I thought I had to speak up for clarity,” he told The Daily Beast at the time. “When I go into a cafe in the morning for breakfast and I’m reading the paper, I’m editing. I can’t help it. I can’t stop. I still go through the paper and mark it up as I read. It’s a compulsion, actually.”
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Quarantine Ordered for 2,500 Students at Elite Swiss School
Swiss health authorities have ordered a quarantine for a staggering 2,500 students at a prestigious hospitality management school in the city of Lausanne after “significant outbreaks” of the coronavirus that are a suspected byproduct of off-campus partying.
Authorities in Switzerland’s Vaud canton, or region, said all undergraduates at the Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne, known as the Lausanne Hospitality Management University in English, have been ordered to quarantine both on- and off-campus because the number of COVID-19 outbreaks because targeted closures were not possible.
The World Health Organization, national health authorities and others have cautioned that young people, who tend to have milder COVID-19 symptoms than older demographic groups, have been a key driver for the continued spread of the coronavirus in recent weeks, particularly in Europe.
“Significant outbreaks of infection have appeared at several levels of training, making a more targeted closure impossible that that involving the 2,500 students affected,” the Vaud regional office said in a statement. “Until Sept. 28, the students must stay home. For some, that means not leaving their housing on the hospitality school site.”
It noted that an early investigation showed that “one or more parties was at the origin of these many outbreaks of infection,” and reiterated authorities previous call for a “responsible attitude” among party-goers such as by wearing masks, tracing their contacts, keeping alert for symptoms, and “social distancing.”
School administrators were taking “all necessary measures” to ensure that classes were continuing online, the statement said.
University spokesman Sherif Mamdouh said Thursday that the situation was “not ideal” but that the university took precautions in recent months. He said that 11 students had tested positive for the coronavirus and none required hospitalization.
Mamdouh said the quarantine affects 2,500 undergraduates. The university has a total student body of about 3,500, including people pursuing advanced degrees. He said hundreds of students living in on-campus dormitories on campus will be subject to the quarantine.
Switzerland is not alone. The latest government figures in neighboring France show that 22% of the country’s currently active virus clusters emerged at schools are universities. The United States has also seen clusters linked to college students.
World Health Organization spokeswoman Margaret Harris said that while it is “unfair to just put it on the young people,” it’s also unsurprising that teenagers and young adults might assume they don’t need to worry about succumbing to the virus.
“Perceptions do indicate that they don’t feel they are as at-risk as older groups” Harris said, particularly in the wake of data showing younger people typically have less-severe cases of COVID-19.
“The message they have heard is: ‘You are out of jail, go out and play,'” she said. “We don’t want to be the fun police, but we want people to have fun safely.
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Millions Newly Displaced by Escalating Conflict, Violence this Year
Mid-year stocktaking by the Switzerland-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre finds escalating conflict and violence in the first half of this year have triggered an upsurge in the numbers of people fleeing their homes and becoming newly displaced within their own countries. Around 14.6 million people in 127 countries have been newly displaced between January and July because of natural and man-made disasters. This is about one million more than in the first half of last year. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre report finds conflict and violence have sparked around one third or 4.8 million new displacements, mainly in Africa and the Middle East. IDMC director Alexandra Bilak says Syria tops the rank of countries with the highest increase in newly displaced. She says the military offensive in the country’s northwest province of Idlib has prompted more than 1.4 million civilians to flee their homes. FILE – Civilians displaced by recent fighting between Congolese army and M23 rebels carry their belongings as they walk along a road in Munigi village near Goma in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Sept 1, 2013.“DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo that also has seen a sharp increase in violence and armed violence and insecurity, particularly in its northeastern province of Ituri, which has also led to, as Syria 1.4 million new displacements,” she said. Displaced people, who fled from attacks of armed militants in Roffenega, are engulfed in dust as they sit at the camp built by the German NGO HELP in Pissila, Burkina Faso, Jan. 24, 2020.Bilak says Burkina Faso, with nearly a-half million newly displaced, has become the worst displacement crisis in West Africa as armed conflict has expanded across the region. She expresses alarm at the rapidly deteriorating situations in Cameroon, Mozambique, Niger and Somalia. She says growing conflict and violence in these countries have resulted in more new displacements in the first half of this year than in all of 2019.
But she notes the situation of Yemen, currently considered the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, remains of particular concern. “Although the numbers for Yemen are low, the reported numbers are low, we are highlighting the triple crisis that Yemen faces right now in the form of, of course, this ongoing and persistent conflict that has been exacerbated by high infection rates of COVID-19, as well as more recently some of the worst floods that the country has experienced in years,” she said.Indeed, the report finds slow and sudden onset of natural disasters around the world have triggered 9.8 million new displacements. It reports cyclones in India and Bangladesh, floods and swarms of locust in East Africa, devastating wildfires in Australia and the United States have resulted in the forced evacuations of millions of people in fear of their lives.
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Hong Kong Dissident Arrested
Prominent Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong was arrested Thursday for taking part in a protest at the height of the city’s pro-democracy unrest last year, but he vowed to continue resisting China’s crackdown on dissent.
The arrest of the territory’s most high-profile dissident is the latest in a string of arrests of government critics and comes after China imposed a sweeping new national security law on Hong Kong in late June.
Wong was arrested for “unlawful assembly” over a 2019 demonstration against a government ban on face masks that was imposed before the coronavirus pandemic, his lawyer said.
The 23-year-old , who now faces three separate cases, said after being bailed that he was also held for violating the “draconian” anti-mask law, which has since been ruled unconstitutional.
Wong’s lawyer told AFP he was re-arrested when he reported to a police station concerning another case currently being tried.
“Wong is accused of participating in an unlawful assembly on October 5 last year, when hundreds marched to oppose an anti-mask ban the government rolled out,” lawyer Jonathan Man said.
A police spokesman confirmed a 23-year-old was arrested for “knowingly participating in unauthorised assembly” while violating the mask ban.
Wong told reporters after he was bailed: “No matter what happens, I will continue to resist and hope to let the world to know that how Hong Kongers choose not to surrender.”
At the time of the October 5 march, Hong Kong had already been battered by four months of increasingly violent pro-democracy protests.
The city had ground to a halt following a night of chaos in which hardcore protesters trashed dozens of subway stations, vandalised shops with mainland China ties, built fires and blocked roads.
Hundreds of protesters, almost all masked, staged the unsanctioned demonstration through the popular shopping district of Causeway Bay, a day after the city’s leader Carrie Lam outlawed face coverings by invoking colonial-era emergency powers not used for half a century.
Under Hong Kong’s current anti-virus measures, face masks are now mandatory in all public places.
Jailed twice
China’s security law, which was imposed in late June, was designed to stamp out the demonstrations and targets acts deemed to be secession, subversion, terrorism and foreign collusion.
Beijing has described it as a “sword” hanging over the heads of its opponents as it pushes to return stability. Critics say it has blanketed the city in fear, and UN rights experts warned its broad wording posed a serious risk to Hong Kong’s freedoms.
Wong – who spent most of his teenage years leading protests and has twice been jailed – recently told AFP he constantly wonders how long it will be before the police’s new national security unit comes for him.
The security law has already swept up two of his closest comrades.
Fellow former student leader Nathan Law has fled to Britain and is now wanted for national security crimes, according to Chinese state media.
Agnes Chow — who has led protests alongside Wong since they were just 15 — is one of 22 people arrested under the new law so far. She has been released on bail.
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Australian Bank Agrees to Record Penalty for Mass Breaches of Money Laundering Laws
Australian bank Westpac has agreed to pay a record fine for the nation’s biggest breach of anti-money laundering laws. The case was brought by the government’s Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Center, known as AUSTRAC. It said the penalty of more than $900 million sent a strong message to the financial industry to take compliance seriously. Westpac was accused by government investigators of 23 million breaches of money laundering and counterterrorism financing laws. Australia’s second-largest bank was found to have allowed transactions that were potentially linked to child exploitation in the Philippines and in other countries despite being specifically warned of the risks. If approved by the federal court, the $920 million fine will be easily the biggest in Australian corporate history. The bank had set aside $630 million to pay the penalty, but that figure was rejected as insufficient by the financial crimes watchdog. AUSTRAC investigators said the bank’s noncompliance was “serious and systemic.” Australian Attorney General Christian Porter said he believes the agreed-to settlement, which he described using the Australian dollar amount, is fair. “My very strong view, and the government’s strident view was that the early appropriations that Westpac made, and the figures that were being put early in negotiations with AUSTRAC were totally inadequate, and that this 1.3 billion [Australian] dollar amount more properly reflects both the seriousness of the offending that Westpac had engaged in, but also an acceptance of the fact that these represent some of the greatest failures of a corporate entity in Australia’s history to abide by Australian law,” Porter said.Westpac has apologized for its “failings.” Chief executive Peter King said the bank was “committed to fixing the issues to ensure that these mistakes do not happen again.” The bank’s former chief executive and chairman left their positions last year over the scandal. Opposition politicians are demanding the government push ahead with reforms to further strengthen Australia’s anti-money laundering legislation. Last year Australia’s banking industry was scrutinized by a royal commission – the highest form of public inquiry – that exposed widespread dishonesty in the sector.
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Somalia Parliament Approves New Prime Minister
Political newcomer Mohamed Hussein Roble became Somalia’s prime minister Wednesday after getting unanimous approval from lawmakers. Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed was in attendance when all 215 members of parliament cast their votes in favor of his appointee. Roble is promising to create an effective government that addresses some of the key issues facing the country, including having fair presidential and parliamentary elections. Roble’s predecessor, Hassan Ali Khaire, was ousted by parliament in July in a no confidence vote tied directly to his failure to present a roadmap to holding democratic elections due before February 2021.
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West African Countries May Lift Mali Sanctions After Interim President Sworn in Friday
The leader of a delegation representing a bloc of West African countries is hoping that crippling sanctions against Mali will be lifted following Friday’s inauguration of an interim president a month after a military coup. Nigeria’s former president, Goodluck Jonathan, who is the envoy for the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, praised the junta’s leadership on his arrival in Mali Wednesday. Jonathan told reporters, the soldiers who have taken power are doing a job in line with what the ECOWAS leaders wanted. Jonathan stopped short of giving an ECOWAS endorsement to Colonel Bah Ndaw, the former defense minister who leads the junta that seized power after deposing President Boubacar Ibrahim Keita. Colonel Assimi Goita is set to become Mali‘s next vice president. Jonathan said, Mali doesn’t need sanctions which are not beneficial for the region and the rest of the world.
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N. Korea Shoots, Cremates S. Korean Civilian at Sea, Says Seoul
North Korea shot, killed, and immediately cremated a South Korean civilian official who went missing earlier this week near the two countries’ disputed western sea border, according to South Korea’s military. Seoul’s National Defense Ministry said Thursday the man was questioned in North Korean waters, before being shot to death, doused with oil, and then set on fire by troops wearing gas masks, apparently all on orders from a superior. South Korean officials did not reveal how they knew those details, citing only “diverse intelligence.” “Our military strongly condemns this brutal act and strongly urges the North to explain this and punish those responsible,” Lt. Gen. Ahn Young-ho of the South Korean military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff told a press briefing. “We also warn North Korea that all responsibility for this incident lies with it.” North Korea’s military has not responded to Seoul’s request for more information, according to South Korean defense officials. Pyongyang has not publicly commented on the incident. The unidentified 47-year-old official, who worked for the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, disappeared Monday while on duty aboard a patrol boat off the South Korean border island of Yeonpyeong. He was reported missing about 10 kilometers south of the Northern Limit Line, the de facto inter-Korean sea border. The circumstances of the man’s disappearance are not clear. South Korean military officials believe he may have been trying to flee to North Korea. The report did not say why the man would have defected to the North. Past incidents Earlier this week, South Korean police said they arrested a defector who was trying to return to North Korea via a military training site in the border town of Cheorwon. In July, a 24-year-old man who had fled North Korea successfully swam back into the country, after being accused of rape in South Korea. That incident prompted the North to lock down a border area, ostensibly because of coronavirus concerns. Earlier this month, the top U.S. commander in South Korea, General Robert Abrams, said North Korea had issued “shoot-to-kill” orders to prevent the coronavirus from entering the country from China.FILE – Visitors wearing masks to avoid the spread of COVID-19 fill out a form which is mandatory to get into a hospital in Seoul, South Korea, Aug. 26, 2020.The coronavirus-related security zones were first reported by the Daily NK, a Seoul-based news website with sources in North Korea. The outlet said the new rules stipulated that anyone “breaking rules or disrupting public order near the border will be shot without warning.” The rules apply to all areas of the country, it said. Raises tensions The shooting incident is awkwardly timed for South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who this week used a video speech at the United Nations General Assembly to call for an end-of-war declaration between North and South Korea. The left-leaning Moon, who desperately wants to improve ties with Pyongyang before he leaves office in 2022, has been trying to convince the North to return to the dialogue and cooperation that marked the beginning of his five-year term. North Korea earlier this year cut communications channels with the South and blew up the two countries’ de facto embassy after complaining about South Korean activists who launched balloons filled with anti-Pyongyang propaganda across the border. The two countries have been in a technical state of war, since their 1950s conflict ended in a truce and not a peace treaty. Though tensions sporadically break out, deaths – especially involving civilians – are rare. The last time a South Korean civilian was shot dead in North Korea was in 2008, when a North Korean soldier killed a South Korean tourist who had wandered into a restricted area at a mountain resort.
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Gas Tanker Truck Accident in Nigeria Kills More than Two Dozen People
Authorities in Nigeria say a gas tanker truck exploded Wednesday, killing at least 28 people, including school children and university students in the central state of Kogi. Initial reports indicate the driver lost control of the truck carrying fuel when the brakes failed, causing the truck to overturn and explode, setting fire to multiple vehicles on the Lokoja-Zariagi highway. President Muhammadu Buhari suggested in a statement that police and transport agencies need to be more serious in enforcing safety standards, saying, “Nigeria is not having a shortage of laws and regulations, but the problem is a lack of zeal to enforce those laws and regulations for the sake of public safety.” Buhari did not speak directly to concerns that road accidents are common in Nigeria because roads are not well maintained. The Daily Post said 25 people died in another crash on the same of Lokoja-Zariagi highway last year.
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House Holds Hearing on USAGM, Former Executives to Testify
Lawmakers in Washington will hold an oversight hearing Thursday examining the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of Voice of America and other U.S.-funded media networks.House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat, has issued a subpoena for Michael Pack, the USAGM CEO, to appear and answer lawmakers’ questions. Pack has indicated he has a scheduling conflict and cannot attend.FILE – Michael Pack, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, is seen at his confirmation hearing, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Sept. 19, 2019. Pack’s nomination was confirmed June 4, 2020.Besides Pack, other invited speakers include former executives who resigned or who were fired soon after Pack took charge of the agency in June. These executives include former VOA Director Amanda Bennett; Jamie Fly, former Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty president; and Karen Kornbluh, chair of the board of directors of the Open Technology Fund.Republican and Democratic lawmakers have expressed concerns over the firings of the agency’s top media organization leaders, the agency’s denial of visa extensions for its foreign journalists, and other issues that critics say are eroding the editorial independence of the U.S.-funded news networks that broadcast to foreign audiences.Pack, a former independent film and television producer, and head of a conservative foundation, has defended his actions in interviews and in communications with USAGM staff, saying he wants to protect the agency’s editorial independence and make it more effective in achieving its mission.Pack has also said that government audits revealed serious, years-long security problems that were left unaddressed by the agency’s previous leaders.
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2 Officers Shot During Protests Over Charges in Louisville Police Shooting of Black Woman
A grand jury in the U.S. city of Louisville, Kentucky, Wednesday charged a former police officer with wanton endangerment for shooting into the apartment of the neighbors of a Black woman, Breonna Taylor, who was killed during a bungled drug raid in March. The grand jury decided that two other officers were justified in firing their weapons and cleared them of wrongdoing. No officers were charged directly with Taylor’s death. All three officers involved are white. Taylor family attorney Ben Crump said, “While not fully what we wanted, this brings us closer” to justice for Taylor. But in a second tweet, Crump said the fact that no one was charged directly with Taylor’s death was “outrageous and offensive.” Initially, thousands of people peacefully protested the decision in the city of 600,000. But the protests turned violent Wednesday night, with police and protesters clashing, and protesters setting fires in downtown Louisville, according to local media. Late Wednesday, two Louisville police officers were shot and suffered non-life-threatening wounds, a Louisville Metro Police Department spokesman said. The spokesman added that police had “one suspect in custody.” Around 5 p.m. local time, Louisville police had declared the protest a riot and ordered protesters to “immediately disperse.” Officers employed flash bang devices to clear protesters from a downtown area later Wednesday. Mayor Greg Fischer ordered a 72-hour curfew, beginning at 9 p.m. Wednesday. Much of the city’s downtown area had been closed to traffic. The Louisville Courier Journal reported that nearly 30 protesters had been arrested late Wednesday. Brett Hankison, who is white, and the lone officer charged in the case, had already been fired from the city police department after an investigation showed he fired 10 shots into Taylor’s apartment through a sliding glass door covered with blinds, violating police rules that officers should have a clear line of sight before firing their weapons.Police survey an area after a police officer was shot, Sept. 23, 2020, in Louisville, Ky. A grand jury has indicted one officer on criminal charges six months after Breonna Taylor was fatally shot by police in Kentucky.The grand jury charged Hankison with three counts of wanton endangerment, concluding the shots he fired went through a wall into a neighboring apartment and endangered three people living there. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison on each count. According to Kentucky’s statute, “A person is guilty of wanton endangerment in the first degree when, under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life, he wantonly engages in conduct which creates a substantial danger of death or serious physical injury to another person.” Hankison was booked and released from the Shelby County Detention Center Wednesday afternoon after posting $15,000 bail, according to media reports. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is Black and oversaw the grand jury’s consideration of the case, said the other two officers involved in the raid — Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove — “were justified in their use of force” after Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired at them first when they entered the apartment, thinking they were intruders. The officers had authorization for a “no-knock” raid, but Cameron said a resident in Taylor’s apartment building heard the police officers announce their presence before entering Taylor’s apartment, even though Walker told police he did not hear it. Cameron said Walker acknowledged firing the first shot, hitting Mattingly in the leg. Mattingly and Cosgrove fired numerous shots in return. Cameron said ballistics tests showed one of the shots fired by Cosgrove killed 26-year-old Taylor, a medical technician.
“The decision before my office is not to decide if the loss of Breonna Taylor’s life was a tragedy — the answer to that question is unequivocally yes,” Cameron said during a news conference Wednesday in Frankfurt, the state capital. “I understand that as a Black man, how painful this is … which is why it was so incredibly important to make sure that we did everything we possibly could to uncover every fact.” He later added, “I know that not everyone will be satisfied. Our job is to present the facts to the grand jury, and the grand jury then applies the facts. If we simply act on outrage, there is no justice. Mob justice is not justice. Justice sought by violence is not justice. It just becomes revenge.” Later, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear asked Cameron to post online all the evidence and facts that can be released without affecting the three felony counts brought against the fired Louisville police officer. “Everyone can and should be informed,” Beshear, a former attorney general, said during a press conference Wednesday. “And those that are currently feeling frustration, feeling hurt, they deserve to know more. I trust Kentuckians. They deserve to see the facts for themselves. And I believe that the ability to process those facts helps everybody.” Taylor’s killing became part of this summer’s national reckoning on race relations in the United States and police use of disproportionate force in minority communities. Street demonstrations broke out in dozens of cities in May after George Floyd, a Black man, died in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Taylor case became as prominent as Floyd’s, with celebrities and protesters alike calling for charges to be filed against all three police officers linked to her death. Protests over the charges in Taylor’s case took place around the country Wednesday night, including in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. Protesters said the charges against a single officer were not sufficient. Pastor Tim Findley, a regular at the protests held in Louisville seeking justice for Taylor, told the Courier Journal Wednesday, “It’s a tragedy. This is an embarrassment, and it’s exactly why there have been protests for the last (119) days. This is a disappointing, hurtful, painful day in our city.” Louisville recently agreed to pay $12 million to Taylor’s family to settle a lawsuit it brought against the city for the manner in which the raid was carried out.
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Trump Hedges on Committing to Peaceful Transfer of Power
U.S. President Donald Trump has declined to confirm he is willing to agree to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses his November 3 bid for re-election to Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden. “We’re going to have to see what happens,” said the president in response to a reporter’s question during a White House news conference on Wednesday evening. “I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster.” Trump, without evidence, has repeatedly predicted massive fraud with tens of millions of mail-in ballots, which Democrats have encouraged amid the coronavirus pandemic. “We want to have — get rid of the ballots,” continued the president, explaining if that happens “there won’t be a transfer, frankly; there’ll be a continuation.”
Biden, after his campaign plane landed in Delaware on Wednesday evening, was asked to respond to Trump’s remarks. “What country are we in? I’m being facetious,” said the former vice president. “I said what country are we in? Look, he says the most irrational things. I don’t know what to say.”At least one of Trump’s fellow Republicans in the U.S. Senate, expressed alarm about the president’s remark. “Fundamental to democracy is the peaceful transition of power; without that, there is Belarus,” said Senator Mitt Romney of Utah on Twitter. “Any suggestion that a president might not respect this Constitutional guarantee is both unthinkable and unacceptable.”Fundamental to democracy is the peaceful transition of power; without that, there is Belarus. Any suggestion that a president might not respect this Constitutional guarantee is both unthinkable and unacceptable.— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) September 24, 2020Romney was his party’s nominee for president in 2012 and has been one of the few Republicans in the Senate to occasionally take issue with Trump’s rhetoric and actions. “There is no question that he means exactly what he said,” Congressman Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on MSNBC about the president’s comment, adding that it was time for those serving in the Trump administration “to resign” in protest. One of the country’s oldest constitutional rights groups also weighed in. “The peaceful transfer of power is essential to a functioning democracy. This statement from the president of the United States should trouble every American,” said David Cole, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Earlier Wednesday, Trump said he thinks the November election “will end up in the Supreme Court and I think it’s very important that we have nine justices.” The president plans to announce his Supreme Court nominee on Saturday to fill the seat of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who died this past Friday. If the Senate confirms the president’s nominee before the election that would give the conservative wing a 6-3 majority on the court. “This scam that the Democrats are pulling, it’s a scam, the scam will be before the United States Supreme Court, and I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation,” said Trump. The president has repeatedly expressed concern about plans by a number of states, including California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington, to automatically dispatch mail-in ballots to all state residents for the election. Benjamin Ginsberg, a top election lawyer who has represented four Republican presidential candidates, has been quoted this month saying Trump’s prediction of fraud with such ballots lacks evidence. “The president’s words make his and the Republican Party’s rhetoric look less like sincere concern — and more like transactional hypocrisy designed to provide an electoral advantage,” Ginsberg wrote in a Washington Post opinion article. “And they come as Republicans trying to make their cases in courts must deal with the basic truth that four decades of dedicated investigation have produced only isolated incidents of election fraud.”
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World Becoming Less Accepting of Migrants, Poll Finds
As the European Union introduces a new migration and asylum plan after a blaze at an overcrowded camp in Greece left thousands without shelter, a FILE – Venezuelan migrants on their way to Peru sleep along the Pan-American Highway between Tulcan and Ibarra in Ecuador, after entering the country from Colombia, Aug. 22, 2018.”Many of the countries leading the global downturn have been on the receiving end of the mass exodus of Venezuelans fleeing the humanitarian crisis in their country,” the report shows. Biggest shiftThe most significant change came from Ecuador, Peru and Colombia, which have absorbed millions of Venezuelans since 2015. “Initially, many of the migrants and refugees were welcomed in these countries, but public sentiment started to turn against them as their economies, and their health, education and social assistance programs buckled under the strain,” according to the report.FILE – Volunteers carry donated items towards a group of undocumented migrants looking for work as day laborers alongside a hardware store in San Diego, California, Feb. 4, 2017.Ray added that despite the Trump administration’s efforts to curb immigration, the U.S., which ranked sixth overall in the index, has generally positive attitudes toward newcomers. “Despite the fact that immigration is such a hot topic in the U.S., Americans are mostly very accepting of migrants,” she said. Experts note that, around the world, greater acceptance is often displayed by younger generations and people with advanced levels of education.
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Economists Urge New Economic System for South Sudan
JUBA/GENEVA — While some South Sudanese experts recommend the government adopt a new economic system used by developing states to cut off black market currency exchange and stabilize skyrocketing prices, a new U.N. panel report says the real problem in South Sudan is deeply entrenched government corruption.
South Sudan should switch to a developmental state economic system under which the government could control prices, the black-market foreign exchange rate, and the flow of currency in and out of the country, according to Abraham Matoch, economics professor and vice chancellor at the Doctor John Garang Memorial University of Science and Technology in Bor.
“There’s no rule in a new country wishing to reconstruct, rehabilitate, and reconstruct to move immediately into a free market economic level which is more or less a catalyst, and therefore, I encourage having a developmental state economic system because we cannot apply a capitalist economic system in a developing country,” Matoch told South Sudan in Focus.
The developmental state economic system embodies strong state intervention, as well as extensive regulation and planning.
In South Sudan, speculators are able to manipulate foreign exchange rates to their advantage, said Matoch.
“If the commercial banks or the forex [bureaus] go and abuse the exchange rate to keep the bulk of the money or dollars with them for black marketing, this will affect the economy. And this is exactly what has actually happened,” Matoch told South Sudan in Focus.FILE – Children play with hula hoops at the Children Friendly Space, run by UNICEF at the United Nations Missions in South Sudan (UNMISS) Protection of Civillians (PoC) site, in Juba, South Sudan, Jan. 15, 2016.A new report by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan blasts South Sudanese officials and their cronies, however, for destroying the nation’s economy, saying the country is mired in crooked schemes aimed at enriching the political elite at the expense of millions of impoverished people who have endured years of conflict and abuse.
Looting and pillaging are not just offshoots of war, they are the main drivers of the conflict, according to commission chair Yasmin Sooka.
“At one end of the spectrum, South Sudan’s political elites are fighting for control of the country’s oil and mineral resources, in the process stealing their people’s future. At the other, the soldiers in this conflict over resources are offered the chance to abduct and rape women in lieu of their salaries,” said Sooka.
She said the commission has uncovered brazen embezzlement by senior politicians and other government representatives, adding that they have misappropriated a staggering $36 million since 2016. Sooka noted a number of international corporations and multinational banks have aided and abetted in these crimes.
University of Juba economics lecturer Ahmed Morjan agreed that South Sudan’s problems are political, not economic.
“An economy that produces goods and services needs to have proper peace and security whereby people will begin to produce import substitution goods and will lessen dependents on imports. If this is done, we expect the country to have enough reserves from the oil money that comes in, the reserves of foreign currency, but this has never happened, and people are not able to produce either for themselves or surpluses for export,” Morjan told South Sudan in Focus.
He said the new finance minister, Athian Diing Athian, and the administration must find a way to end rampant government corruption.
“If they can work to lessen corruption, there should be some improvement internally, especially now that the government sometimes is not able to pay its workers, wages and salaries of employees. What the new minister could do is to fight, reduce corruption,” Morjan told VOA.
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TikTok Asks Judge to Block US From Barring App for Download
TikTok asked a U.S. judge on Wednesday to block a Trump administration order that would require Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google to remove the short video-sharing app for new downloads starting Sunday. A federal judge in San Francisco on Saturday issued a preliminary injunction blocking a similar Commerce Department order from taking effect Sunday on Tencent Holdings’ WeChat app. U.S. officials have expressed serious concerns that the personal data of as many as 100 million Americans that use the app was being passed on to China’s Communist Party government. FILE – People walk past a WeChat Pay sign at the Tencent company headquarters, in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China, Aug. 7, 2020.On Saturday, the Commerce Department announced a one-week delay in the TikTok order, citing “recent positive developments” in talks over the fate of its U.S. operations. TikTok said the restrictions “were not motivated by a genuine national security concern, but rather by political considerations relating to the upcoming general election.” TikTok said if the order is not blocked, “hundreds of millions of Americans who have not yet downloaded TikTok will be shut out of this large and diverse online community — six weeks before a national election.” TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, said on Monday it will own 80% of TikTok Global, a newly created U.S. company that will own most of the app’s operations worldwide. ByteDance added that TikTok Global will become its subsidiary. Oracle Corp and Walmart Inc have agreed to take stakes in TikTok Global of 12.5% and 7.5%, respectively. On Monday, Oracle said ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok would be distributed to ByteDance’s investors, and that the Beijing-based firm would have no stake in TikTok Global. On Saturday, ByteDance, Walmart and Oracle said they reached an agreement that would to allow TikTok to continue to operate in the United States after President Donald Trump said he had blessed the deal. Trump signed an executive order on Aug. 14 giving ByteDance 90 days to relinquish ownership of TikTok.
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