Month: March 2022

Mali Mourns 27 Soldiers Killed in Attack Friday

Posted on by SeeAF

Three days of mourning have been declared in Mali after the deadliest attack on Malian soldiers in months. 

Mali’s transitional president, Assimi Goita, has declared the national mourning period, starting Saturday, after 27 Malian soldiers were killed and 33 wounded during an attack on a central Mali military camp in the town of Mondoro Friday, in Mali’s Mopti region. 

Seven soldiers are still missing, according to a press release published by Mali’s military government Friday. 

The release also says that 47 “terrorists” were “neutralized” the morning of the attack, and 23 later in the afternoon.

The attack comes after the military government, which seized power in a 2020 coup, asked the French military in February to leave Malian territory immediately, following an announcement from French President Emmanuel Macron that French troops would withdraw from Mali over a period of four to six months. 

The announcement of the withdrawal came after months of increasing tensions between the French and Malian governments.

The French military has been present in Mali since it intervened in 2013, in an operation to take back control of northern Mali from Islamists. But since then, both Malian and French forces have struggled to contain an insurgency that has moved from northern Mali into the center of the country.
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UN Appeals for Urgent Aid for Malawi Victims of Tropical Storm Ana

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The United Nations and other humanitarian organizations in Malawi have launched a flash appeal for $29.4 million to provide assistance for the next three months to those hit hardest by Tropical Storm Ana in Malawi. The U.N. team in Malawi said Friday the appeal focuses on the six hardest-hit districts where an estimated 680,000 people need humanitarian assistance and protection.

Tropical Storm Ana, which also hit Madagascar, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, moved through many districts in southern Malawi in late January, leaving thousands homeless.

Forty-four organizations are making the appeal, including the Malawi Red Cross, seven national NGOs, 26 international NGOs and 10 U.N. agencies.

Shigeki Komatsubara is U.N. resident coordinator in Malawi.

“U.N. country team in Malawi, we have worked really hard to ensure this appeal is prioritized and principled and we are confident that the activities planned are those that are most urgently needed to deliver immediate relief to people who need it most,” Komatsubara said.

Government figures show that over 990,000 people were affected in 17 of the country’s 28 districts. 

The U.N team says the flash appeal focuses on the six hardest-hit districts —Chikwawa, Nsanje, Phalombe, Mulanje, Chiradzulu and Balaka, where an estimated 680,000 people need humanitarian assistance and protection.

“While we are cautious that humanitarian support is not a long-term solution to the current climatic shocks that continue to increase in frequency and intensity in Malawi, we are faced with an urgent need to act swiftly to save lives and also the livelihoods of those whose homes and crops have been [affected] by the tropical storm Ana,” Komatsubara said.

Several U.N. agencies and organizations including UNICEF, U.N. Women, the U.N. Refugee Agency and the World Food Program already have been helping the affected, especially those in evacuation camps.

Isaac Falakeza is a camp coordinator at Bangula Evacuation Camp in Nsanje district. The camp houses 8,000 displaced Malawian households and 2,500 households from Mozambique. 

“Yes, we need further support because the major area of concern is water. It is wanted. Secondly, food is really wanted and some of the utensils. Some are even waiting until a friend cooks is when they borrow a utensil for cooking,” Falakeza said.

Flood victim, Jakina Lameck, agrees. She says they also need blankets, cooking materials, food, even money which they can use to buy what they cannot find in the camp. In the meantime, the U.N. team says it appreciates help the international community has already shown in response to Tropical Storm Ana.

This includes the $3 million the U.N. Central Emergency Response Fund recently allocated for humanitarian activities in Malawi.
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Iran Official: Russia’s Demand for US Guarantees May Harm Nuclear Talks

Posted on by SeeEU

Russia’s demand for written U.S. guarantees that sanctions on Moscow would not damage Russian cooperation with Iran is “not constructive” for talks between Tehran and global powers to revive a 2015 nuclear deal, a senior Iranian official told Reuters Saturday.

The announcement by Russia, which could torpedo months of intensive indirect talks between Tehran and Washington in Vienna, came shortly after Tehran said it had agreed a roadmap with the U.N. nuclear watchdog to resolve outstanding issues which could help secure the nuclear pact.

“Russians had put this demand on the table [at the Vienna talks] since two days ago. There is an understanding that by changing its position in Vienna talks Russia wants to secure its interests in other places. This move is not constructive for Vienna nuclear talks,” said the Iranian official in Tehran.

Demanding written U.S. guarantees that Western sanctions imposed on Russia over the conflict in Ukraine would not damage its cooperation with Iran, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the limitations had become a stumbling block for the Iran nuclear deal, warning the West that Russian national interests would have to be taken into account.

Lavrov said the sanctions on Russia over the conflict in Ukraine had created a “problem” from Moscow’s perspective. When asked whether Russia’s demand would harm 11 months of talks between Tehran and world powers, including Russia, Iran Project Director at International Crisis Group, Ali Vaez said: “Not yet. But it’s impossible to segregate the two crises for much longer.”

“The U.S. can issue waivers for the work related to the transfer of excess fissile material to Russia. But it’s a sign that the commingling of the two issues has started,” Vaez said.

All parties involved in Vienna talks said Friday they were close to reaching an agreement. “We have agreed to provide the IAEA by the end of [the Iranian month of] Khordad [June 21] with documents related to outstanding questions between Tehran and the agency,” Iran’s nuclear chief Mohammad Eslami told a joint news conference with International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi.

Grossi arrived in Tehran late Friday to discuss one of the last thorny issues blocking revival of the pact, which in return for a lifting of economic sanctions limited Iran’s enrichment of uranium, making it harder for Tehran to develop material for nuclear weapons.

“It is important to have this understanding … to work together, to work very intensively,” Grossi told the televised news conference. “Without resolving these [outstanding] issues, efforts to revive the JCPOA may not be possible.”

A major sticking point in the talks is that Tehran wants the question of uranium traces found at several old but undeclared sites in Iran to be closed. Western powers say that is a separate matter to the deal, which the IAEA is not a party to, several officials have told Reuters.

Grossi, who also held talks with Iran’s foreign minister before returning to Vienna on Saturday, said that “there are still matters that need to be addressed by Iran.”

The IAEA has been seeking answers from Iran on how the uranium traces got there – a topic often referred to as “outstanding safeguards issues.”

Grossi’s trip has raised hopes that an agreement with the IAEA will potentially clear the way for revival of the nuclear pact that was abandoned in 2018 by former U.S. President Donald Trump, who also reimposed far-reaching sanctions on Iran.  

Since 2019, Tehran has breached the deal’s nuclear limits and gone well beyond, rebuilding stockpiles of enriched uranium, refining it to higher fissile purity and installing advanced centrifuges to speed up output. Iran denies it has ever sought to acquire nuclear weapons.
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Humanitarian Crisis Deepens in Ukraine

Posted on by SeeEU

U.N. aid agencies are calling for unimpeded access to all areas of Ukraine in need of humanitarian assistance and protection. The call comes amid reported efforts to establish humanitarian corridors in Ukraine.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, welcomes a reported agreement between Ukraine and Russia to facilitate safe passage for civilians out of conflict areas. Delegates from the opposing sides proposed the agreement Monday in Belarus.

However, OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke says U.N. officials have not yet received anything in writing from the two sides on the establishment of humanitarian corridors.  He says people are terrified by the violence unfolding around them across Ukraine, and millions urgently need safe passage and life-saving aid.

“We look to both sides to ensure the passage is organized in a manner that allows for safety, dignity, and protection of those civilians. Humanitarian organizations stand ready to work with the parties to protect and care for the civilians, whether they choose to stay or to leave the concerned areas,” Laerke said.  

The U.N. children’s fund says escalating violence over the past week has forced half-a-million children to flee their homes. UNICEF spokesman James Elder, who is in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, some 60 kilometers from the Polish border, says the scale and speed of the forced displacement is unprecedented.  

“And if the violence, the explosive munitions do not stop, many, many more children will be forced to flee their country in a very short space of time. And we fear many more will be killed. We must also remember those who cannot escape the bombardment currently rocking Ukraine. Tens of thousands of children are in child-care institutions; many of these are disabled,”  Elder said.

U.N. refugee agency media chief Joung-ah Ghedini-Williams, who is in the Moldovan city of Palanca, describes the rate of the ongoing refugee exodus from Ukraine as without comparison.

“We have seen the numbers increase not only day on day, but hourly, and I think that …what we are seeing is the devastating toll that over a week of just unabated tragedy is having on people,” Ghedini-Williams said.  

The latest UNHCR figures show more than 1.3 million Ukrainians have fled to Poland, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, and other European countries. The agency is preparing to assist up to 4 million Ukrainian refugees, making this the biggest refugee crisis this century.
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Pulitzer Winner Walter Mears Dies, AP’s ‘Boy On The Bus’

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Walter R. Mears, who for 45 years fluidly and speedily wrote the news about presidential campaigns for The Associated Press and won a Pulitzer Prize doing it, has died. He was 87.

“I could produce a story as fast as I could type,” Mears once acknowledged — and he was a fast typist. He became the AP’s Washington bureau chief and the wire service’s executive editor and vice president, but he always returned to the keyboard, and to covering politics.

Mears died Thursday at his apartment in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eight days after being diagnosed with multiple forms of cancer, said his daughters Susan Mears of Boulder, Colorado, and Stephanie Mears of Austin, Texas, who were with him.

They said he was visited on his last night by a minister, with whom he discussed Alf Landon, the losing Republican presidential candidate in 1936, a year after his birth.

Mears’ ability to find the essence of a story while it was still going on and to get it to the wire — and to newspapers and broadcasters around the world — became legend among peers. In 1972, Timothy Crouse featured Mears in The Boys on the Bus, a book chronicling the efforts and antics of reporters covering that year’s presidential campaign.

Crouse recounted how, immediately after a political debate, a reporter from The Boston Globe called out to the man from AP: “Walter, what’s our lead? What’s the lead, Walter?” The question became a catchphrase among political reporters to describe the search for the most newsworthy aspect of an event — the lead. “Made me moderately famous,” Mears cracked in 2005.

It was a natural question. Mears had to bang out stories about campaign debates while they were still underway. Newspaper editors would see his lead on the wire before their own reporters filed their stories. So it was defensive for others on the press bus to wonder what Mears was leading with, and to ask him.

Early in his Washington career, he was assigned to write updates on the 1962 congressional elections. His bureau chief asked a senior colleague to size up how Mears worked under pressure and report back. “Mears writes faster than most people think,” the evaluator wrote, then, tongue in cheek, “and sometimes faster than he thinks.”

“Walter’s impact at the AP, and in the journalism industry as a whole, is hard to overstate,” said Julie Pace, AP executive editor and senior vice president. “He was a champion for a free and fair press, a dogged reporter, an elegant chronicler of history and an inspiration to countless journalists, including myself.”

Kathleen Carroll, a former AP executive editor, said he taught generations of journalists “how to watch and listen and ask and explain.”

“Walter was also a wonderful human being,” she said. “He loved his family — being a grandfather was one of the great joys of his life. He loved golf and the Red Sox, in that order. He loved politics and he loved the AP.”

Mears didn’t seem to mind being known as a pacesetter. “I came away with a slogan not of my making, but one that stuck for the rest of my career,” he recalled in his 2003 memoir, Deadlines Past. Over four decades, Mears covered 11 presidential campaigns, from Kennedy-Nixon in 1960 to Bush-Gore in 2000, as well as the political conventions, the campaigns, debates, the elections and, finally, the pomp and promise of the inaugurations.

In tribute, Jules Witcover, who covered politics for The Sun in Baltimore, said Mears combined speed and accuracy with an eye for the telling detail.

“His uncanny ability to cut to the heart of any story and relate it in spare, lively prose showed the way for a generation of wire service disciples, and he did so with a zest for the nomad’s life on the campaign trail,” Witcover said.

At other times in his career, Mears served AP as Washington bureau chief and as the wire service’s primary news executive, the executive editor in the New York headquarters. But he missed writing and went back to it.

He left once, to be Washington bureau chief for The Detroit News, but returned to AP nine months later. “I couldn’t take the pace,” he said. “It was too slow.”

In 1977 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his work covering the election in which Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated a sitting president, Gerald R. Ford, who had inherited his office through the resignation in disgrace of Richard M. Nixon.

It was the Pulitzer, not the Crouse catchphrase, for which Mears thought he would be remembered. Asked to address a later crop of Pulitzer winners, he told them they would never have to wonder what would be the first words of their obituaries: They would be, he said, “Pulitzer Prize-winning.”

Winning his Pulitzer, Mears said, was “the sweetest moment in a career that is like no other line of work.”

In his lead paragraphs, Mears captured the essence of events, not just the words but the music. 

When the 1968 Democrats, in a convention held in the midst of antiwar rioting on the streets of Chicago, finally chose their nominee, he wrote: “Hubert H. Humphrey, apostle of the politics of joy, won the Democratic presidential nomination tonight under armed guard.” 
When, earlier that year, a gunman killed John Kennedy’s brother: “Robert F. Kennedy died of gunshot wounds early today, prey like his president brother to the savagery of an assassin.” 
And, in 1976, when former peanut farmer Carter took the presidency from its accidental occupant: “In the end, the improbable Democrat beat the unelected Republican.”

Said Terry Hunt, former AP White House correspondent and deputy bureau chief in Washington: “You can’t talk about Walter without using the word legendary. He was a brilliant writer, astonishingly fast, colorful and compelling.”

David Espo, former special correspondent and assistant Washington bureau chief agreed. “No one ever wrote faster or with more clarity, nor worked harder and made it look easier than Walter did,” he said. “He took care to mentor those less talented than he, in other words, all of us.”

Mears was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, and grew up in Lexington, the son of an executive of a chemical company. He graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1956 and within a week joined the AP in Boston.

In those days, news was written on typewriters and transmitted on teletypes. “They were slow and they clattered,” Mears once wrote, “but the din was music to me.”

His first assignment was far from the din. He single-handedly covered the Vermont Legislature. “It was fun covering a citizen legislature with a representative from every hamlet in the state” — 276 of them, he recalled years later, including one elected by his townspeople to keep the fellow from being eligible for welfare.

Mears covered John F. Kennedy in 1960 whenever Kennedy campaigned in New England and covered Barry Goldwater’s hapless race against Lyndon Johnson four years later. He was back at it every presidential year, even after he retired in 2001.

On election night, 2008, he wrote an analysis of Barack Obama’s victory, and the challenge before him.

“Obama is the future,” he wrote, “and it begins now, in troubled times, for a president-elect with a costly agenda of promises that would be difficult to deliver in far better economic circumstances.”

No cheerleading from Mears there. He didn’t believe in reporters expressing political opinions and he kept his own to himself. Although he got to know the candidates he covered, sometimes shared after-hour drinks and played golf with them, he always addressed them by their titles.

He considered a distance between newsperson and newsmaker to be appropriate. He once explained: “I can’t really say I ever felt close to any of them, maybe because I always felt that there’s a line there, there’s sort of a reserve that I think needs to be maintained because you’re not covering a friend. You’re covering somebody who’s trying to convince the American people to give him the most important job they’ve got at their command.”

After retiring, Mears taught journalism for a time at the University of North Carolina and made his home there, in Chapel Hill.

His wife, Frances, died in January 2019. His first wife and their two children were killed in a house fire in 1962. Mears directed that a portion of his ashes be distributed with Frances’ remains and the rest in Massachusetts with those of his first wife and two children lost in the fire.
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From China to Turkey, Ukraine: 2 Men’s Search for Safety

Posted on by SeeEU

Two men originally from China are among the 1 million refugees fleeing Ukraine into neighboring countries this week after Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24.

VOA chronicled the journeys of Ibrahim Abliz, a Uyghur, and Ersin Erkinuly, a Kazakh.

Abliz and Erkinuly were among thousands of Uyghurs and Kazakhs who fled China because of its “anti-terrorism” policy in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where rights groups and some Western countries accuse China of crimes against humanity and arbitrarily detaining more than 1 million people in internment camps in recent years.

Beijing denies the mistreatment as lies and fabrication and says China’s policy in Xinjiang is about fighting extremism and that the facilities are vocational training centers.

Abliz and Erkinuly each found his way to Ukraine and had lived there for several years until everything changed on the day Russian troops entered Ukraine.

Ibrahim Abliz’s story

Abliz, a 31-year-old father, has lived with his toddler son in Ukraine since 2018, with the hope of reuniting with his wife, who has been living in Germany.

Abliz is no stranger to a nomadic life. He said he left China in 2013 and ever since had been looking for a safe place to live, away from China’s reach.

“I first spent almost one and half years in Pakistan and later safely arrived in Turkey where I studied and worked,” Abliz told VOA.

In 2016, he met and married a Uyghur woman living in Turkey who was also originally from China.

Two years later, Abliz lost hope of getting Turkish citizenship. He decided to leave Turkey for Europe in pursuit of a safer country where he could raise his family.

Many Uyghurs in Turkey live in constant fear of being sent back to China. In recent months, Turkey has rejected some Uyghur applications for citizenship citing “national security” and “public order.” Uyghurs see this as an attempt by China to persecute them outside its borders.

“In November 2018, my pregnant wife was able to fly to Germany from Ukraine and seek asylum,” Abliz said.

His 11-month-old son was not allowed to leave Ukraine because the boy had a Turkish ID. Abliz had no choice but to stay behind with his child.

“I had to be with my son in Ukraine and find a way to reunite with my wife,” Abliz said.

After Ukraine denied applications for refugee status for Abliz and his son, he tried to cross the border three times before the war broke out.

“I had to run away from Ukraine after my application was denied,” Abliz said. “But each time we were handed over to Ukraine from neighboring countries like Poland and Slovakia.”

Abliz said over the past three years he and his son have spent four months in detention in a Ukraine facility and two months in a refugee camp because of crossing borders to other countries without permits.

“In November 2021, my application for refugee status was approved thanks to Ukrainian authorities,” Abliz said.

On March 1, Abliz and his son were able to cross the border to Poland. They were reunited with his wife and other son, now 3 years old, who came from Germany to meet them.

“I am so happy that my son and I have met my wife and my second son I had never seen in person,” Abliz said.

Abliz said he is applying for entry into Germany because he is eligible to get a family reunification visa.

Ersin Erkinuly’s story

Erkinuly, a 25-year-old Kazakh refugee from China, arrived in Ukraine from Turkey in 2020.  He too applied for refugee status but did not get it.

“I fled China to Kazakhstan in late 2019 after I had witnessed some people around me disappeared into internment camps,” Erkinuly told VOA.

But in Kazakhstan, according to Erkinuly, he didn’t feel safe and worried about possible deportation to China.

“Kazakhstan has very close relation with China, and I felt insecure and decided to leave for Turkey,” Erkinuly said.

Erkinuly was still not able to secure refugee status in Turkey, so he decided to go to Europe.

“I came to Ukraine and lost my passport and faced deportation to China,” Erkinuly told VOA. “I pleaded on the social media, and after Ukraine got pressured by democratic countries like the U.S. government, the authorities didn’t (deport) me.”

When the fighting started, Erkinuly left Kyiv and traveled for days. He reached the Polish border and was able to cross on March 3.

“I now feel that I am free,” Erkinuly told VOA from Poland. “They gave me a document which states I am allowed to remain in Poland until May.”

What happens after May is still uncertain.  Erkinuly said he’s reached out to human rights group and the U.S. for help, as his search for a permanent safe haven continues.
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As Vaccine Demand Falls, US States Left With Huge Stockpile

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As demand for COVID-19 vaccines collapses in many areas of the U.S., states are scrambling to use stockpiles of doses before they expire and have to be added to the millions that have already gone to waste.

From some of the least vaccinated states, like Indiana and North Dakota, to some of the most vaccinated states, like New Jersey and Vermont, public health departments are shuffling doses around in the hopes of finding providers that can use them.

State health departments told The Associated Press they have tracked millions of doses that went to waste, including ones that expired, were in a multi-dose vial that couldn’t be used completely or had to be tossed for some other reason like temperature issues or broken vials.

Nearly 1.5 million doses in Michigan, 1.45 million in North Carolina, 1 million in Illinois and almost 725,000 doses in Washington couldn’t be used.

The percentage of wasted doses in California is only about 1.8%, but in a state that has received 84 million doses and administered more than 71 million of them, that equates to roughly 1.4 million doses. Providers there are asked to keep doses until they expire, then properly dispose of them, the California Department of Public Health said.

The national rate of wasted doses is about 9.5% of the more than 687 million doses that have been delivered as of late February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. That equates to about 65 million doses.

The problem is not unique to the U.S. More than a million doses of the Russian Sputnik vaccine expired this week in Guatemala, because nobody wanted to take the shot.

Vaccination program managers say that tossing out doses is inevitable in any inoculation campaign because of the difficulty in aligning supply and demand for a product with a limited shelf life.

But the coronavirus pandemic has killed nearly 6 million people and shattered economies across the globe, and every dose that goes to waste feels like a missed opportunity considering how successful the vaccines are in preventing death and serious disease.

It also comes only about a year after people desperate to get the vaccine attempted to jump in line to get ahead of those deemed higher priority. Hospital board members, their trustees and donors around the U.S. got early access or offers for vaccinations, raising complaints about favoritism and inequity at a time when the developing world had virtually no doses.

And many poorer nations still have low vaccine rates, including 13 countries in Africa with less than 5% of their population fully vaccinated. T hey are plagued by unpredictable deliveries, weak health care systems, vaccine hesitancy and some supply issues, although health officials say inventory is markedly stronger than earlier in the pandemic.

In fact, supplies are so strong that the CDC now advises doctors that it’s OK to discard doses if it means opening up the standard multi-dose vials to vaccinate a single person and the rest has to be tossed.

“Pivoting to what’s happening now, you have much more production and distribution to low-income countries,” said Dr. Joseph Bresee, who directs the COVID-19 Vaccine Implementation Program at the Task Force for Global Health in Decatur, Georgia. “The issue of some stockpiles in the U.S., Germany and Japan, that are not redistributed to sub-Saharan Africa, it’s less of an acute problem now because vaccine production and distribution is in high-gear right now serving those low-income countries.”

The Department of Health and Human Services also said that redistributing states’ excess doses to other nations is not feasible because of the difficulty in transporting the shots, which must remain cold, in addition to not being cost effective because of the relatively small number concentrated at sites.

Of the more than 687 million doses sent to states, 550 million to 600 million have been administered, HHS said Monday. The vaccines authorized in the U.S., made by Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, can last for up to about six months from the time of manufacture.

A senior HHS official familiar with vaccine distribution plans took issue with the word “wastage,” saying it implies mismanagement when states are effectively overseeing their inventories. The CDC, however, uses the term “wastage” on its website and asks states to report their numbers.

The CDC said Thursday that the federal government, jurisdictions and vaccine providers have a strong partnership to get as many people vaccinated as possible while reducing vaccine wastage, and that the likelihood of leaving unused doses in a vial may increase as demand slows, even when providers continue to follow best practices to use every dose possible.

The fading demand comes as the pandemic itself wanes in the U.S. On Thursday, the CDC said about 90% of the U.S. population lives in counties where the risk of coronavirus is posing a low or medium threat — meaning residents don’t need to wear masks in most indoor settings. That was up from 70% last week.

 

The average number of Americans getting their first shot is down to about 70,000 a day, the lowest point since the U.S. vaccination campaign began in December 2020. About 76% of the U.S. population has received at least one shot and roughly 65% of all Americans are fully vaccinated.

With demand so low, states will undoubtedly be confronted with more waste in the months ahead, although they will benefit from any booster expansions.

Idaho, for example, has 230,000 doses on hand but is only averaging fewer than 2,000 doses administered a week.

Oregon’s vaccination rate is slightly higher than the national average, but the health authority there said last week that they have “significant excess vaccine on hand” because of the recent drop in demand. The state is trying to use up as many of the 716,000 doses in its inventory as possible.

Rhode Island has the highest percentage of residents who are fully vaccinated in the nation, at slightly more than 80%, but the health department reported having 137,000 doses on hand last week. Health officials say they need them for a big push to increase the vaccination rate for booster doses.

Health officials in some states have developed “matchmaker” programs to connect vaccine providers with excess doses with providers seeking doses. Many said they’re attempting to redistribute doses with expiration dates that are quickly approaching. New Jersey has a task force that has transferred more than 600,000 doses around the state since June. West Virginia has offered to transfer Pfizer adult doses to nearby states.

Immunization managers have been asking for single-dose vials, especially for pediatricians, but it may not work for manufacturers to package it that way yet, said Claire Hannan, executive director at the Association of Immunization Managers. She said wasting vaccine “just can’t be an issue.”

“We tell this to providers, but the most important thing is getting people vaccinated. And that’s hard when the demand goes down. You don’t have constant flow,” she said. “But that’s just a necessary evil I guess.”

HHS said states are ordering prudently, paralleling the drop in demand. The minimum order for Pfizer used to be nearly 1,200 doses but now it’s 100, and Moderna reduced the number of doses per vial, the agency said.

“Given what we’ve seen in terms of the number of people still unvaccinated, I do think finding any way to get the shot in arms, even at the expense of potential wastage, is still important,” said Katie Greene, an assistant research director at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy.
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Republicans Make Headway in Texas’ Booming Latino Communities

Posted on by SeeUS

Democrats have long dreamed of flipping Texas from a bedrock Republican state to one that elects more Democrats to Congress and awards its mother lode of electoral votes to a Democratic presidential contender, something that hasn’t happened since 1976.

That dream has been buoyed by dramatic demographic changes in Texas, where the population has grown at more than twice the national average for the last 20 years, and people of Latin American descent account for 60% of that growth.

But Democrats have a problem. Latino voters, regarded as a key Democratic Party constituency, are showing a greater willingness to vote Republican, even in Texas’ southernmost counties along the border with Mexico.

In 2016, then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump received less than 28% of the vote in Hidalgo County, the most populous of Texas’ border counties, and one in which Latinos account for 93% of the population. In his 2020 reelection bid, Trump scored almost 41% of the vote.

Last year, Hidalgo County’s largest city, McAllen, elected its first Republican mayor in 24 years.

Such results may serve as a warning sign for Democrats ahead of November’s midterm elections that will determine control of Congress for President Joe Biden’s final two years of his current term.

Texas has long been critical territory for the Republican Party. The state sends the country’s largest Republican delegation to the House of Representatives and hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994.

‘Exciting time to be a Republican’

But Democrats have historically dominated at the ballot box in the land between San Antonio and the Mexican border — a vast, sunny scrubland where Spanish-speaking cowboys founded the first Texas cattle ranches a century before English-speaking settlers arrived.

Political observers predicted for years that Latino population growth in other parts of the state would boost support for Democrats in Texas. But for the most part, it hasn’t happened. In fact, while South Texas still leans toward the Democrats, Republicans are making inroads.

“It’s an exciting time to be a Republican,” said Adrienne Peña-Garza, the Republican Party chairperson for Hidalgo County. “The new generation is much more bold than I was.”

Peña-Garza is the first Latina to head the Republican Party in Hidalgo County. She told VOA she has critics who maintain that a woman — especially a Hispanic one —shouldn’t be a Republican. Yet, she says she has seen many Latina and Latino Republicans enter the political arena and is encouraged to see the party grow in her area.

Hildalgo County remains Democratic

Texas Democrats insist that they are not sitting idly by. Manuel Medina, state chairman for Tejano Democrats, the Latino wing of the Texas Democratic Party, said Democrats picked four Latina women to run for reliably Democratic seats in the Texas State House in Tuesday’s primary elections. He said he was glad to see more Hispanic involvement in the Republican Party, as well.

“That more doors are open for people to participate in the political system is a good thing. In general, it’s positive,” Medina said. “Hispanic women will lead.”

But he cautioned against reading too much into recent voting trends in Texas, pointing out that Democratic primary voters in Hidalgo County still outnumbered Republicans more than two-to-one on Tuesday. Despite Republican gains, the area remains largely Democratic.

Even so, Peña-Garza is optimistic about the Republican Party’s future in South Texas. She credited Trump for Republicans’ growing popularity in the region and noted that a stream of high-profile Republicans has visited Hidalgo County, including Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who drew 700 people to a local auditorium at 8 a.m. last year.

“It makes us feel included in state and national politics,” Peña-Garza said. “We have been voting Democrat for over 100 years. Has that helped us?”

Jason Villalba, chairman of the nonpartisan Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation, told VOA that a variety of issues have boosted Republicans’ fortunes in South Texas, including perceptions that Democrats are critical of law enforcement and want to restrict the fossil fuel industry — two major employment sectors in South Texas.

Villalba also contends that Trump’s “strongman” image played well among some Latino voters.

Villalba noted that until recently, turnout was often low among Hispanic voters.

“We were not able to be impactful,” he said.

Latino political clout growing

That is no longer true, as Latinos have grown in numbers and clout and are increasingly engaged in the political sphere. But they don’t vote as a bloc. Texas Hispanics include 2.5 million immigrants from Mexico, nearly 500,000 from Central America and 170,000 from South America — all of whom came with distinct viewpoints that influence the political leanings of their voting-eligible children.

According to Hector de Leon, a longtime political organizer and blogger in Houston, expectations for a wave of Democratic support amid the Texas population boom were based in part on incorrect assumptions from the national party that nonwhite voters would naturally vote Democrat.

“They just assume every person who is a person of color is going to behave the same electorally, and they got that completely wrong,” de Leon said. “That is continually driving their methods, and that’s why they may be losing more Hispanic voters.”

Those assumptions led to speculation as early as 2016 that perhaps Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee that year, could carry Texas. She lost the state to Trump by nine percentage points.

Looking ahead, a redrawing of Texas’ congressional districts based on the 2020 U.S. Census may give Democrats little to cheer in this year’s midterm elections.

“You don’t see progress being made by Democrats up and down the ballot,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Political Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “The idea that Texas is turning blue (Democratic) has been abandoned by most people, given the results.”  
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Ghana Evacuating Students From Ukraine

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Among African students evacuated from Ukraine when Russia attacked were hundreds of Ghanaians, some of them arriving back home this week. But just an hour from the border with Russia, a number of Ghanaian and other African students are sheltering underground while waiting for a safe escape. Senanu Tord reports from Accra, Ghana.
Camera: Senanu Tord
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US Embassy in Ukraine Calls Nuclear Power Plant Attack ‘War Crime’

Posted on by SeeEU

The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine said that attacking a nuclear power plant is a war crime, after Russia on Friday seized a Ukrainian nuclear facility that is the biggest in Europe.

The statement on the embassy’s Twitter account went further than any U.S. characterization of Russia’s actions in Ukraine since it launched its invasion Feb. 24.

“It is a war crime to attack a nuclear power plant. Putin’s shelling of Europe’s largest nuclear plant takes his reign of terror one step further,” U.S. Embassy Kyiv said in its post.

Russian invasion forces seized Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant in heavy fighting in southeastern Ukraine, triggering global alarm, but a blaze in a training building was extinguished and officials said the facility was now safe.

Russia’s defense ministry blamed a fire at the plant on a “monstrous attack” by Ukrainian saboteurs and said its forces were in control.

The State Department sent a message to all U.S. embassies in Europe telling them not to retweet the Kyiv Embassy’s tweet calling the attack a war crime, according to CNN, which said it reviewed the message.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters asking if the Kyiv Embassy’s tweet reflects the position of the entire U.S. government.

Rights groups have alleged violations of international war crimes law in Ukraine, including the targeting of civilians, as well as indiscriminate attacks on schools and hospitals.

On Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden stopped short of calling Russia’s actions war crimes, saying, “It’s too early to say that.”

Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby on Friday declined to answer the question, saying he would leave that determination to the International Criminal Court.

“This just underscores how reckless the Russian invasion has been and how indiscriminate their targeting seems to be. It just raises the level of potential catastrophe to a level that nobody wants to see,” Kirby said in an interview with CNN.

“It is certainly not the behavior of a responsible nuclear power.”

Britain has publicly accused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government of war crimes.

The ICC, the world’s top war crimes prosecutor, on the request of 39 member states, is investigating reports of cluster bombs and artillery strikes on Ukrainian cities.

Karim Khan, a British lawyer named as the chief prosecutor of the ICC last year, said the crisis in Ukraine is a chance to demonstrate that those committing war crimes would be held to account.

Intentionally targeting civilians and civilian objects is a war crime, a U.S. State Department spokesperson told Reuters, adding that it is backing the investigation, particularly Khan’s efforts to preserve evidence of possible atrocity crimes.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has strongly denied claims that Russian forces have struck civilian infrastructure targets or residential complexes.
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Ukraine Digital Army Brews Cyberattacks, Intel and Infowar

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Formed in a fury to counter Russia’s blitzkrieg attack, Ukraine’s hundreds-strong volunteer “hacker” corps is much more than a paramilitary cyberattack force in Europe’s first major war of the internet age. It is crucial to information combat and to crowdsourcing intelligence.

“We are really a swarm. A self-organizing swarm,” said Roman Zakharov, a 37-year-old IT executive at the center of Ukraine’s bootstrap digital army.

Inventions of the volunteer hackers range from software tools that let smartphone and computer owners anywhere participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks on official Russian websites to bots on the Telegram messaging platform that block disinformation, let people report Russian troop locations and offer instructions on assembling Molotov cocktails and basic first aid.

Zahkarov ran research at an automation startup before joining Ukraine’s digital self-defense corps. His group is StandForUkraine. Its ranks include software engineers, marketing managers, graphic designers and online ad buyers, he said.

The movement is global, drawing on IT professionals in the Ukrainian diaspora whose handiwork includes web defacements with antiwar messaging and graphic images of death and destruction in the hopes of mobilizing Russians against the invasion.

“Both our nations are scared of a single man — (Russian President Vladimir) Putin,” said Zakharov. “He’s just out of his mind.” Volunteers reach out person-to-person to Russians with phone calls, emails and text messages, he said, and send videos and pictures of dead soldiers from the invading force from virtual call centers.

Some build websites, such as a “site where Russian mothers can look through (photos of) captured Russian guys to find their sons,” Zakharov said by phone from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.

The cyber volunteers’ effectiveness is difficult to gauge. Russian government websites have been repeatedly knocked offline, if briefly, by the DDoS attacks, but generally weather them with countermeasures.

It’s impossible to say how much of the disruption — including more damaging hacks — is caused by freelancers working independently of but in solidarity with Ukrainian hackers.

A tool called “Liberator” lets anyone in the world with a digital device become part of a DDoS attack network, or botnet. The tool’s programmers code in new targets as priorities change.

But is it legal? Some analysts say it violates international cyber norms. Its Estonian developers say they acted “in coordination with the Ministry of Digital Transformation” of Ukraine.

A top Ukrainian cybersecurity official, Victor Zhora, insisted at his first online news conference of the war Friday that homegrown volunteers were attacking only what they deem military targets, in which he included the financial sector, Kremlin-controlled media and railways. He did not discuss specific targets.

Zakharov did. He said Russia’s banking sector was well fortified against attack but that some telecommunications networks and rail services were not. He said Ukrainian-organized cyberattacks had briefly interrupted rail ticket sales in western Russia around Rostov and Voronezh and knocked out telephone service for a time in the region of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014. The claims could not be independently confirmed.

A group of Belarusian hacktivists calling themselves the Cyber Partisans also apparently disrupted rail service in neighboring Belarus this week seeking to frustrate transiting Russian troops. A spokeswoman said Friday that electronic ticket sales were still down after their malware attack froze up railway IT servers.

Over the weekend, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, announced the creation of an volunteer cyber army. The IT Army of Ukraine now counts 290,000 followers on Telegram.

Zhora, deputy chair of the state special communications service, said one job of Ukrainian volunteers is to obtain intelligence that can be used to attack Russian military systems.

Some cybersecurity experts have expressed concern that soliciting help from freelancers who violate cyber norms could have dangerous escalatory consequences. One shadowy group claimed to have hacked Russian satellites; Dmitry Rogozin, the director general of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, called the claim false but was also quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying such a cyberattack would be considered an act of war.

Asked if he endorsed the kind of hostile hacking being done under the umbrella of the Anonymous hacktivist brand — which anyone can claim — Zhora said, “We do not welcome any illegal activity in cyberspace.”

“But the world order changed on the 24th of February,” he added, when Russia invaded.

The overall effort was spurred by the creation of a group called the Ukrainian Cyber Volunteers by a civilian cybersecurity executive, Yegor Aushev, in coordination with Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. Aushev said it numbers more than 1,000 volunteers.

On Friday, most of Ukraine’s telecommunications and internet were fully operational despite outages in areas captured by invading Russian forces, said Zhora. He reported about 10 hostile hijackings of local government websites in Ukraine to spread false propaganda saying Ukraine’s government had capitulated.

Zhora said presumed Russian hackers continued trying to spread destructive malware in targeted email attacks on Ukrainian officials and — in what he considers a new tactic — to infect the devices of individual citizens. Three instances of such malware were discovered in the runup to the invasion.

U.S. Cyber Command has been assisting Ukraine since well before the invasion. Ukraine does not have a dedicated military cyber unit. It was standing one up when Russia attacked.

Zhora anticipates an escalation in Russia’s cyber aggression — many experts believe far worse is yet to come.

Meantime, donations from the global IT community continue to pour in. A few examples: NameCheap has donated internet domains while Amazon has been generous with cloud services, said Zakharov.
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Ukraine’s Women and Children Flee as Men Must Stay to Fight

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As Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine’s cities intensifies, hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing the country. The United Nations has appealed to donor countries for help, as Henry Ridgwell reports from the Polish-Ukrainian border.
Camera: Henry Ridgwell
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NATO Rejects No-Fly Zone for Ukraine After Russian Attack on Nuclear Plant 

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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with NATO foreign ministers in Brussels just hours after Russia’s shelling of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine. VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports from Washington.
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White House Disavows Senator’s Call for Assassination of Putin 

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The Biden administration is not advocating for regime change in Russia, the White House said Friday, after a U.S. senator called for Russians to assassinate President Vladimir Putin.

“That is not the position of the U.S. government and certainly not a statement you’ll hear from — coming from the mouth of — anybody working for the administration,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in response to a question from Voice of America.

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, suggested in a televised interview Thursday evening that “somebody in Russia” should assassinate Putin. He repeated his statement Friday in another televised appearance on Fox News Channel.

“How does this end? Somebody in Russia has to step up to the plate … and take this guy out,” Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity.

Following the interview, Graham posted on Twitter, “The only people who can fix this are the Russian people.”

“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?” the senator wrote. Marcus Junius Brutus assassinated Roman ruler Julius Caesar, while German army officer Claus von Stauffenberg tried but failed to assassinate German leader Adolf Hitler in July 1944.

Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, called Graham’s comments “unacceptable and outrageous” and said they expressed “off the scale” hatred in the United States toward Russia.

He demanded “official explanations and a strong condemnation of the criminal statements.”

U.S. lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, also criticized Graham’s comments.

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz called Graham’s proposal “an exceptionally bad idea,” while Democratic Reprepresentative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted: “I really wish our members of Congress would cool it and regulate their remarks as the administration works to avoid WWIII.”

Graham introduced a resolution in Congress condemning Putin and his military commanders for committing “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.
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At Least 27 Soldiers Killed in Central Mali Attack

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A militant attack on an army base in central Mali on Friday killed at least 27 soldiers and wounded 33 more, the government said.

Seven soldiers are still missing following the attack in the rural commune of Mondoro, which involved car bombs, according to a government statement.

Seventy militants were killed in the military’s response, the statement said, without specifying which militant group was responsible. Affiliates of both al-Qaida and Islamic State are active in central Mali.

Mali has been facing an Islamist insurgency since al-Qaida-linked militants seized its desert north in 2012, forcing former colonial power France to intervene to drive them back the following year.

The militants have since regrouped and seized vast swaths of the Malian countryside, while also expanding into Niger, Burkina Faso and other neighboring countries.

France has maintained thousands of troops across the region since 2013 but announced last month that it would withdraw its forces from Mali as relations with the ruling military junta soured.
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Nigeria to Supply Equatorial Guinea With Natural Gas 

Posted on by SeeAF

Nigeria has agreed to supply natural gas to Equatorial Guinea at Nigeria’s International Energy Summit in Abuja. African energy experts are urging quick implementation of the gas deal amid high demand and supply disruptions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This week’s signing of a gas deal by Nigeria’s minister of state for petroleum, Timipre Sylva, and his Guinean counterpart, Gabriel Lima, is a testament to Africa’s untapped gas market.

The deal seeks to supply Nigerian gas to Guinea’s processing site in Punta Europa.

Sylva said the deal would allow much of Nigeria’s unused gas to access the global market within two years — a timely development, experts said.

Gbenga Komolafe, head of Nigeria’s Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, said, “The supply disruptions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in an upward surge of crude oil prices, surpassing $100 per barrel for the first time since 2014. This development offers market potential for Nigeria to key into maximizing its oil and gas assets.”

African energy experts at the signing urged officials of both countries to expedite the implementation of the deal.

Komolafe said African countries need to carry out increased exploration and adopt advanced technology to maximize production yields to increase oil and gas reserves.

Gas supply

Nigeria ranks among nine countries with the highest gas reserves in the world. In January, Nigeria’s gas reserves rose by 1.4% from the previous year. But the market remains largely untapped and previous attempts by authorities to initiate gas deals fell apart.

Nigerian authorities last week said they were willing to invest more and focus on natural gas exploration.

Simbi Wabote, executive secretary at the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board, said, “It is time for us to synergize as Africa in order to expand that opportunity beyond the shores of Nigeria.”

But officials said a lack of prior investments in the energy sector could limit this opportunity for African countries.

“There’s a clear demand and supply gap that we’re seeing today, and that’s why we’re seeing the $104 oil prices in the market today,” said Mele Kyari, managing director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Commission. “No one has invested significantly in the last 10 years, more so in the last five years, to an extent that we’re seeing the effect of what that truly means.”

For now, officials and experts will be eager to see how this gas deal changes the status quo.
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US Accuses Russia of ‘Increasingly Using Brutal Methods’ in Ukraine

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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that Russian forces “are increasingly using brutal methods in Ukraine, including going at civilian populations.”

His comments followed a Russian attack on a Ukrainian nuclear plant — the largest facility of its kind in Europe — that had sparked a fire in a building at the plant compound.

Speaking to reporters before a meeting with his European Union counterparts in Brussels, Blinken said, “We are faced together with what is [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin’s war of choice: unprovoked, unjustified, and a war that is having horrific, horrific consequences.”

“We’re committed to doing everything we can to make it stop,” he added, but ruled out imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, saying such an action could lead to a broader conflict.

“We have a responsibility to ensure the war does not spill over beyond Ukraine. … A no-fly zone could lead to a full-fledged war in Europe,” he said.

The meeting in Brussels came after Ukraine accused Russia of “nuclear terror” for shelling and starting a fire at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant before taking control of it. The plant is in the city of Enerhodar, in the country’s southeast.

Ukraine’s nuclear inspectorate said that no radiation had leaked at the plant and that personnel were continuing to operate the facility safely. Firefighters were able to get the blaze under control, Ukrainian officials said.

The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting Friday to discuss the attack at the request of the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Norway and Albania.

“The world narrowly averted a nuclear catastrophe last night,” U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said during the meeting. “We’ve just witnessed a dangerous new escalation that represents a dire threat to all of Europe and the world.”

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said a Russian “projectile” hit a training center at the plant.

“This just demonstrates the recklessness of this war,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said of the power plant attack before Friday’s meeting in Brussels with Blinken and EU foreign ministers.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov blamed the attack on a Ukranian “sabotage group” that he said had occupied the plant’s training building, attacked a Russian patrol and set the building on fire as it left. He offered no evidence, and no other country appeared to take the claim seriously.

The Zaporizhzhia facility produces about 25% of Ukraine’s power.

Nuclear safety experts have expressed concern that fighting so close to the power station could cut off the plant’s power supply, which would adversely affect its ability to keep nuclear fuel cool and would increase the possibility of a nuclear meltdown.

 

On the ground

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Friday that Russian ground forces were attacking a Ukrainian town near Odesa and that the United States was watching to see what it meant for the city.

A Russian convoy outside the capital, Kyiv, was still trying to reach the city, he said, but the “actions by the Ukrainians have in fact stalled that convoy … stopped it in some places.”

Ukraine’s use of its air and missile defenses has been “quite extraordinary,” Kirby said.

On Thursday, local Ukrainian government officials and the Russian military confirmed the seizure of the strategic port of Kherson, but a U.S. defense official said Washington was unable to confirm the development.

Russian troops were besieging the port city of Mariupol, east of Kherson, an attempt Mayor Vadym Boichenko said was aimed at isolating Ukraine.

A Russian diplomat said Friday that Russia had no intention of occupying Ukraine should its invasion be successful, and that its troops would withdraw once it had fulfilled its objective.

Speaking to reporters at U.N. headquarters in Geneva, Russian Ambassador Gennady Gatilov called the invasion a “military operation with limited objectives,” which he said were to “denazify the regime and demilitarize Ukraine.”

Ukraine is a country with a democratically elected Jewish president who lost relatives in the Holocaust. Historians and political observers view Russia’s invocation of World War II as disinformation.

Possibility of more sanctions

Blinken said Friday that the United States was considering additional sanctions against Russia and had not ruled out anything.

“Nothing is off the table. We are evaluating the sanctions every day,” he said.

On Thursday, Washington heaped another round of sanctions on Putin’s inner circle.

“Today I’m announcing that we’re adding dozens of names to the list, including one of Russia’s wealthiest billionaires, and I’m banning travel to America by more than 50 Russian oligarchs, their families and their close associates,” President Joe Biden said Thursday before a Cabinet meeting. “And we’re going to continue to support the Ukrainian people with direct assistance.”

VOA State Department Bureau Chief Nike Ching, National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin, Pentagon Correspondent Carla Babb, Istanbul Foreign Correspondent Heather Murdock, White House Correspondent Anita Powell and Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine contributed to this report. Some information came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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American Veterans Volunteer to Fight in Ukraine

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When one U.S. soldier heard that Russian forces had invaded Ukraine, he thought about a Ukrainian-American soldier who had served alongside him with U.S. forces in Iraq and decided he wanted to help the Ukrainians defend their homeland.

“I had a soldier in Iraq with me who was from Ukraine,” Mathew told VOA of his decision to join what he sees as a fight about justice and friendship. He is using only his first name for safety reasons. “He became an American citizen, joined the Army, and he told me about his home. He told me about his family and how proud they were. I remember him telling me about his little sister.

“Now … I’d like to think that by going to Ukraine, maybe I protect his mother, or his little sister or his home. Maybe in some small way, I say thank you to him for serving by doing something like this.”

Mathew, who spent 22 years in the U.S. Army and fought battles in Bosnia and Iraq, is not alone.

A representative of the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington told VOA that 3,000 U.S. volunteers have responded to the nation’s appeal for people to serve in an international battalion that will help resist Russia’s invading forces.

Many more have stepped forward from other countries, most from other post-Soviet states such as Georgia and Belarus.

Appeal from Zelenskyy

In an emotional video posted to his Telegram channel on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy referred to an “international legion” of 16,000 foreign volunteers who, he said, were being asked to “join the defense of Ukraine, Europe and the world.”

“We have nothing to lose but our own freedom,” the president said.

Zelenskyy’s appeal was echoed in a Facebook posting by Ukraine’s armed forces, which emphasized that they were looking for people with combat experience who “are standing with Ukraine against [the] Russian invasion.” The government has already temporarily lifted visa requirements for the volunteers.

For Mathew, a gray-haired father with four adult children, the decision to go and fight in Ukraine came even before Zelenskyy’s appeal.

Initially, he and 12 veterans, men he served with over the years, planned to board a plane to Poland, get to the Ukrainian border and register for territorial defense units along with other Ukrainian volunteers.

However, the path forward became much clearer after Zelenskyy called for the formation of the international legion and the Ukrainian government laid out a procedure for people who want to help.

“When we did not have the procedure, it would have been a process of showing up at the border. Maybe not knowing how to speak the language and trying to convince somebody. This way, they know our experience. They know our training. They can send us to places where they need us,” he said.

Instructor, fighter

Mathew, a native of the U.S. state of South Carolina, said in his years with the U.S. Army he has been an instructor as well as a combat leader.

“They can place me where they need me,” he said. “Or they can only leave me as an instructor with the legion to teach Ukrainians how to use different weapons systems. So now they have a choice — they can put me in combat or use me as an instructor, but we’re happy to help in whatever.”

For Mathew, the fight in Ukraine is about more than the defense of one central European country that has been subjected to an unprovoked attack by a larger neighbor. Like many of the volunteers, he feels that Americans’ own democratic rights will be threatened if Russia is able to prevail.

“What Ukrainians are fighting is a bully. They are facing someone who does not honor international law, who does not care about women and children, and we fought this type of people before,” Mathew said.

“We’re stopping a bully from hurting women and children.”

Objective: Stop Putin

Another of Mathew’s former combat friends was from Georgia, where Russia staged a similar war to break off two regions in 2008.

“They served next to me, soldiers from Georgia in Iraq. And I know how it felt being around them while their country was being attacked. Now we have another free country similar to Georgia that’s being attacked,” he said.

Mathew said he was leaving his security training business in South Carolina, his family and three dogs, and would be heading to Ukraine as soon as next week.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “has already taken the Crimea,” he said, “which should have never been allowed. That was a weakness by the international body. He can’t be allowed to take the rest of Ukraine.”
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IAEA Chief: Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant Safe After Russian Strike

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The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday that the reactors at Ukraine’s largest nuclear plant had not been affected during a Russian attack on the site in the early hours Friday that shocked the globe and raised fears of a possible nuclear accident.

“We confirm through our contacts at the regulator, but also directly from plant — we were able to confirm that no security or safety systems have been compromised, neither of the reactors themselves have been hit by this projectile,” IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi told an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

Unusually, the nuclear watchdog chief spoke by video connection from an airplane. He said he was on a flight to Iran to deal with outstanding nuclear issues there.

Grossi told council members that Ukraine has four large nuclear sites, 15 reactors and associated facilities, as well as the defunct Chernobyl site, which experienced a catastrophic meltdown in 1986.

He did not name Russia when describing the attack, saying only that “a projectile” hit a building adjacent to the block of reactors at Zaporizhzhia and sparked the fire, which was later extinguished.

“After this, the operation of and at the plant continued,” he said. “We consider from a technical point of view that operation continues normally, although as I have stressed to the board of governors of the IAEA, there is no, of course, ‘normalcy’ about this situation when there are military forces, of course, in charge of the site.”

Grossi said his agency was in contact with the Ukrainian government, its nuclear regulators, and the company and operators at the Zaporizhzhia site.

“At the same time, today, I indicated in the morning my readiness to travel, as soon as practicable, to Chernobyl in order to consult, of course, with our Ukrainian counterparts, but also if necessary and when necessary to the forces in charge, in order to establish a stable framework so the observance of the basic principles of safety and security, starting with the physical integrity of the facilities, can be observed,” Grossi said.

He emphasized that any such mission would be strictly to deal with the safety and security of the facilities, not the political or diplomatic dimensions.

Violation of international law

“Attacks on nuclear power facilities are contrary to international humanitarian law,” U.N. Undersecretary for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo told the council. “Specifically, Article 56 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions states that: ‘Works or installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dikes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population.'”

DiCarlo said it is critical that all parties work with the IAEA to establish a proper framework to ensure the safe, secure and reliable operation of the country’s nuclear power plants, as well as to grant swift and safe passage to IAEA personnel if they need to enter Ukraine.

Council members expressed concern that nuclear sites must not become part of the conflict.

“Russia’s attack last night put Europe’s largest nuclear power plant at grave risk,” U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said. “It was incredibly reckless and dangerous, and it threatened the safety of civilians across Russia, Ukraine and Europe.”

Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia denied that his country’s military had shelled Zaporizhzhia, saying such accusations were part of a “massive anti-Russian propaganda campaign.” He said, without offering evidence, that Ukrainian nationalist saboteurs orchestrated the attack and wanted Moscow to be blamed for it.

“The danger to the civilian population of Ukraine is not emanating from Russian troops. It is coming from Ukrainian nationalists who are holding the civilian populations of a number of large cities hostage and carrying out acts of sabotage and provocation, one of which is what we are now discussing,” Nebenzia said. “After that, they try to blame Russia for all of it.”

Possible war crimes

Ukraine’s envoy said Russia has retaliated against the people of Ukraine with war crimes and crimes against humanity that it no longer tries to hide.

“Indeed, every day provides us with newer and newer evidence that it is not only Ukraine under Russian attack, it is Europe. It is the entire world. It is humanity,” Sergiy Kyslytsya said. “And finally, it is the future of the next generations.”

Kyslytsya renewed his government’s appeal for a no-fly zone over Ukraine, saying he had sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council president regarding it.

“In this regard, we request you to consider the issue of protection of nuclear power plants and other critical infrastructure in Ukraine,” the envoy added. “Urgent discussion on establishing a ban on all flights in the airspace of Ukraine should be a top priority for the Security Council.”

Asked by reporters after the meeting if a no-fly zone was possibile, British Ambassador Barbara Woodward said that such zones require guarantees.

“And in order to guarantee it, NATO would have to put troops in the air, and that would or could bring them into direct conflict with Russian troops,” she said. “So, it would be a very high risk of escalating the conflict, and what we want to see is the de-escalation of the conflict and for Russian troops to go home and for Putin to end the war.”

There have been “thousands of casualties,” the U.N. said Friday, and more than 1.2 million people have fled Ukraine for safety as the Russian military continues to intensify its offensive.

Earlier Friday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke by phone with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. They discussed liaison mechanisms for the safe evacuation of civilians and coordination to deliver humanitarian aid to all those who need it through out Ukraine, Guterres’ spokesperson said.
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Top US Diplomat, EU Leaders Agree to Continue Pressure on Moscow

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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with leaders of the European Union on Friday, pledging with them to keep pressuring Russia with sanctions in response to its invasion of Ukraine, saying Russia’s aggression is a threat relevant to the entire world.

Following a similar meeting with NATO allies in Brussels, Blinken attended a special EU foreign ministers meeting. Speaking to reporters ahead of the meeting, the top U.S. diplomat said what is at risk with Russia’s invasion — along with the lives of Ukrainians — are fundamental principles of peace and security that the world established during two world wars, which Russian President Vladimir Putin “is egregiously violating every single day.”

Following the ministerial meeting, Blinken and European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen met with reporters.  

Von der Leyen ran through a series of sanctions on Russia’s financial system, which she said would cut off Russia’s central bank from a significant share of its reserves to bolster the plummeting ruble, the nation’s currency. As a result, the bank has had to raise interest rates by 20%, driving up inflation.

Action against commercial banks 

Meanwhile, the country’s commercial banks have been cut off from global markets and from SWIFT, the worldwide interbank communications system, curtailing their ability to finance the economy.  

Unfortunately and tragically, Blinken said, the war in Ukraine is not likely to be over soon, but the measures Von der Leyen announced must be sustained “until it stops, until the war is over, [and] the Russian forces leave.” He said both U.S. and EU officials were committed to doing that. 

Blinken said Russia’s actions could not go unanswered. 

“If we allow those principles to be violated with impunity, then we’re opening a Pandora’s box in every corner of the world for this to happen again and again and again,” he said.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.  
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UN: Human Rights Violations in Eritrea Continue Unabated 

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A report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council Friday finds a lack of progress in the human rights situation in Eritrea.

Investigators said that dissenting voices are being violently and systematically crushed by the government.

U.N. special rapporteur Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker said those most at risk include political opponents, activists, journalists, religious leaders, and draft evaders. He said they are subjected to prolonged arbitrary detention in inhuman and degrading conditions, in some instances amounting to torture.

Babiker said thousands of Eritreans have been arbitrarily detained and held in prison since 1991, stripped of their legal rights.

“Some have died over the years,” Babiker said. “The whereabouts of others remain unknown. I urge this Council to extend the maximum possible pressure on the Eritrean authorities to release all prisoners of conscience. A comprehensive reform of the justice sector is also urgently needed to re-establish the foundations of the rule of law.”

The U.N. investigator says the ongoing conflict in Ethiopia is worsening the already dire situation of forced conscription in Eritrea. Babiker said the government justifies its indefinite extension of the national service as necessary to defend the country against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

The rebel group from Ethiopia’s Tigray region, which borders Eritrea, has been at war with the Ethiopian government since November 2020.

Babiker said the national service program is akin to forced labor and is one of the key sources of human rights violations in the country.

“Conditions for conscripts are extremely harsh, and sexual harassment, severe punishments and inhuman or degrading treatment are common, Babiker said. “The program also has severe impacts on the rights to education and to the decent work of thousands of Eritreans, as well as on their families who cannot survive on the meager pay received by conscripts.”

Babiker said the conditions continue to push thousands of young Eritreans to flee their country every year. He calls on the government to engage in a constructive dialogue to improve human rights in the country.

Ambassador Gerahtu Tesfamicael in Eritrea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said his country has been the target of politically motivated resolutions and mandates of the U.N. Human Rights Council for years.

He said this latest report presents unsubstantiated allegations of violations and ignores the positive developments made in areas of social justice and human rights. While his government faces human rights challenges, the ambassador said there is no systematic human rights crisis in the country.
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Russian Space Agency Chief Threatens to End Cooperation Over Western Sanctions

Posted on by SeeEU

The head of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, is again threatening to end service to the International Space Station, saying Russia will stop supplying rocket engines to the United States and may curtail cooperation on the station in retaliation for Western sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. NASA says operations on the orbiting observatory are normal.  

In an interview with Russian state television Thursday, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said, considering the situation, “We can’t supply the United States with our world’s best rocket engines. Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don’t know what.”

Rogozin said Russia has delivered 122 RD-180 engines to the U.S. since the 1990s, of which 98 have been used to power Atlas launch vehicles. The Washington Post said the engines are also used by United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing to launch national security missions for the Pentagon. 

Russia said it would cut off the supply of the RD-181 engines used in Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket, which is used to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station. 

Projects with Germans scrapped

Rogozin tweeted Thursday that Russian cosmonauts would not cooperate with Germany on joint experiments on the Russian segment of the ISS. Roscosmos will conduct them independently. He went on to say the “Russian space program will be adjusted against the backdrop of sanctions; the priority will be the creation of satellites in the interests of defense.” 

Earlier in the week, in another interview with state television, Rogozin noted Russia is responsible for space station navigation, as well as fuel deliveries to the orbiting lab. He said Roscosmos “will closely monitor the actions of our American partners and, if they continue to be hostile, we will return to the question of the existence of the International Space Station.”

Russia had announced earlier that it was suspending cooperation with Europe on space launches from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana in response to Western sanctions.

Cooperation in space has traditionally avoided politics, and when asked about the situation Tuesday during a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said, “Despite the challenges here on Earth, and they are substantial …. NASA continues the working relationship with all our international partners to ensure their safety and the ongoing safe operations of the ISS.”

Some information for this report came from Reuters.
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Russia Blocks Facebook, Alleging ‘Discrimination’ Against Russian Media

Posted on by SeeEU

Russian internet regulator Roskomnadzor on Friday said it has blocked access to Facebook in the country.

It said it took the action following “26 cases of discrimination against Russian media and information resources by Facebook.”

It said Facebook “has restricted access to accounts: the Zvezda TV channel, the RIA Novosti news agency, Sputnik, Russia Today, the Lenta.ru and Gazeta.ru information resources.”

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week, social media companies have taken measures to restrict access to Russian state media.

On February 27, the European Union announced it was “banning Russia Today and Sputnik from broadcasting in the EU.” YouTube reportedly also blocked RT in the EU.

Twitter announced Monday that it will start labeling and making it harder for users to see tweets about the invasion of Ukraine that contain information from Russian state media like RT and Sputnik.

Facebook has taken similar measures.

Also on Friday, Russia’s legislature advanced a new law that would make publishing “fake news” about the army a crime punishable with jail time.

“If the fakes lead to serious consequences, (the legislation) threatens imprisonment of up to 15 years,” the lower house of parliament said in a statement, according to AFP.

The new law led the BBC to suspend activities in Russia.

Some information in this report came from Agence France-Presse.
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Hundreds of Nigerians Head Home Fleeing Russia’s Ukraine Invasion

Posted on by SeeAF

Some 2,000 Nigerians who fled Ukraine after the Russian invasion last week are on their way back to Nigeria. Nigerian authorities say 8,000 Nigerians were in Ukraine when Russia attacked, most of them students.

A flight from Romania carrying the first batch of 415 evacuees arrived at the private wing of the Abuja International Airport around 7 am Friday. 

The evacuees filed out of the aircraft into a waiting room, where they met with officials of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), foreign affairs ministry and the health ministry.

Orunor Otobrise, a final-year student of medicine who was studying in Ukraine, was just three months short of graduation.

“We didn’t expect the situation to escalate, it was a surprise, we went to sleep and we woke up with the sound of bombs and realized that certain cities had been missiled (hit with missiles),” Otobrise said.

At the airport, the evacuees were tested for COVID-19 and given $100 cash to pay for transportation to their homes.

Nigerian authorities say hundreds more were expected to arrive later in the day.

They say they are looking to evacuate around 8,000 Nigerians many of whom fled Ukraine for Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. The majority are young people who were studying at Ukrainian universities. 

Gabriel Tanimu Aduda, a permanent secretary at the ministry of foreign affairs, is optimistic about bringing them home.

“Everything is in place and we’re trusting God that this evacuation will continue safely. So we’re expecting that at the end of today, we’ll have brought in close to a thousand again,” Aduda said.

Olu Dominic, also a final year student who was in the group that arrived Friday morning, says he hopes to be able to continue his education.

“We’re hoping that things are a little bit settled in Ukraine so we can maybe complete our studies online.”

Aduda said he was worried about some 300 students trapped in Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine that was hit by severe Russian bombing.

“So many [foreign] nationals are help up in Sumy. Nigeria alone, we have 366 students in Sumy so the moment that [a] safe corridor is created, our mission… will be to receive them and being them back home,” Aduda said.

The United Nations says more than a million people have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion began. 

For now, many of the evacuees are happy to be back home but worry about the friends and lives they left behind.
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