Month: May 2022

Biden to Visit Uvalde, Site of Mass Shooting at Elementary School

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U.S. President Joe Biden will be in Uvalde, in the southwestern U.S. state of Texas, Sunday, marking the second time this month he has been called to a town following a mass shooting.

Nineteen schoolchildren and two teachers were killed last week in Uvalde when a teenage gunman entered Robb Elementary School and opened fire. Earlier this month, Biden visited Buffalo, New York, where a white supremacist opened fire in a supermarket, killing 10 Black people.

Sunday in Uvalde, Biden, accompanied by first lady Jill Biden, will meet with families of the victims and survivors of the school shooting.  They will also visit a memorial site to the victims and attend Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church.

Saturday in Uvalde, dozens of people gathered to mourn and pay homage to the 21 people killed.

Twenty-one crosses have been placed around a fountain in the city’s courthouse square, one for each of the 19 fourth graders who died and their two teachers, Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles. A growing pile of flowers, stuffed animals and messages — “Love you,” “You will be missed” — surrounded the crosses. Dozens of candles burned like small eternal flames.

Pastor Humberto Renovato, 33, who lives in Uvalde, asked everyone to join hands and pray.

The investigation continued Saturday into the time it took for police to confront the gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos.

Some 90 minutes elapsed between the time he crashed a pickup into a ditch near the school and he was shot and killed by Border Patrol officers.

The gunman, carrying an AR-15-style rifle and a bag of ammunition, was in the school for 40 minutes to an hour before officers stormed in and killed him.

Samuel Salinas, 10, said Ramos barged into his fourth grade classroom and said, “You’re all going to die.”

Then “he just started shooting,” Salinas told ABC News.

Another student, Daniel, whose mother allowed him to speak to The Washington Post, was in a classroom down the hall. He said his teacher, who quickly locked the door and turned out the lights, saved their lives. She was shot twice when the gunman fired through the door’s glass window, Daniel said.

For an hour, he said, the students hid in the dark. The only sounds in the room were hushed sobs and his teacher urging the students to remain quiet.

“‘Stay calm. Stay where you are. Don’t move,'” Daniel recalled her saying.

Daniel told the newspaper that he and his classmates were rescued when police broke the room’s windows and they crawled to safety.

The city’s 911 call center received cries for help from at least two students in the adjoining classrooms where Ramos found his victims, Colonel Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said earlier this week.

“He’s in Room 112,” one girl whispered to a 911 operator at 12:03 p.m.

She called again at 12:43 p.m., begging the operator to “please send the police now,” and again four minutes later.

At 12:51 p.m., a Border Patrol-led tactical team stormed in and ended the siege.

Police have not yet found a motive for the shootings. Ramos, a high school dropout, had no criminal record or history of mental illness.

His mother has asked the schoolchildren’s parents for forgiveness. In an interview with Televisa, a CNN affiliate, a soft-spoken Adriana Martinez said in Spanish, “I don’t know what he was thinking. … Forgive me. Forgive my son.”

The head of the Texas Department of Public Safety said Friday that police responding to the shooting did not enter the classroom where the shooter was because the school district’s police chief believed that students were no longer at risk.

At a news conference outside the school Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said the police chief thought it had become a hostage situation with time to wait for a tactical team to arrive.

McGraw told reporters that with the benefit of hindsight, “it was the wrong decision” to wait to confront the shooter.

McGraw identified the incident commander as Pete Arredondo, chief of police of the Uvalde Consolidated School District.

Uvalde police have come under sharp criticism, and police officers from other cities, including Houston and Dallas, have come to Uvalde to support and in some cases protect the officers of the police department, the mayor and the owner of the gun shop where the gunman bought his rifles and ammunition.

Arredondo could not be reached for comment Friday, and Uvalde officers were stationed outside his home, but they would not say why.

New York City defense attorney Paul Martin and Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington, both told The Associated Press on Saturday that criminal charges are rarely filed against officers who fail to act in a mass shooting. It’s a “very high bar” because police officers are given wide latitude to make tactical decisions, Martin said, but they can be found civilly liable.

Biden said at a University of Delaware commencement Saturday that there has been “too much violence. Too much fear. Too much grief.”

“We have to stand stronger,” he told the graduates.

Vice President Kamala Harris echoed those thoughts Saturday as she attended the funeral of Ruth Whitfield, who was among the 10 killed in the supermarket in Buffalo on May 14.

“We will not let those people who are motivated by hate separate us or make us feel fear,” Harris said at the funeral for the 86-year-old.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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3 Deaths in Early US Heat Wave Raise Questions, Fears

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Temperatures barely climbed past 32 degrees Celsius and only for a couple of days. But the discovery of the bodies of three women inside a Chicago senior housing facility this month left the city looking for answers to questions that were supposed to be addressed after a longer and hotter heat wave killed more than 700 people nearly three decades ago.

Now, the city — and the country — is facing the reality that because of climate change, deadly heat waves can strike just about anywhere, don’t only fall in the height of summer and need not last long.

“Hotter and more dangerous heat waves are coming earlier, in May … and the other thing is we are getting older and more people are living alone,” said Eric Klinenberg, a New York University sociologist, who wrote Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. about the 1995 heat wave. “It’s a formula for disaster.”

The Cook County Medical Examiner’s office has yet to determine the causes of death for the three women whose bodies were found in the James Sneider Apartments on May 14. But the victims’ families have already filed or plan to file wrongful death lawsuits against the companies that own and manage the buildings.

The City Council member whose ward includes the neighborhood where the building is located said she experienced stifling temperatures in the complex when she visited, including in one unit where heat sensors hit 39 degrees Celsius.

“These are senior residents, residents with health conditions (and) they should not be in these conditions,” Alderman Maria Hadden said in a Facebook video shot outside the apartments.

Part of the problem, experts say, is that communities nationwide are still learning how deadly heat can be. It took the sight of refrigerated trucks being filled with dead bodies after Chicago’s 1995 heat wave to drive home the message that the city was woefully unprepared for a silent and invisible disaster that took more than twice as many lives as the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

That realization led to a system in which city workers call the elderly and frail and turn city buildings into 24-hour cooling centers when temperatures become oppressive.

What happened this month is a reminder that the safeguards in place to make sure people don’t freeze to death because they have not paid their heating bills often do not exist to prevent people from overheating in their homes.

“We have nothing for air conditioning,” Hadden said.

One expert isn’t surprised.

“We recognize people need heating in cold weather and set up programs, financial assistance, to enable that but we don’t do that for cooling,” said Gregory Wellenius, a Boston University professor of environmental health who has studied heat-related deaths. “But subsidies for cooling are really controversial (because) for many people cooling is seen as a luxury item.”

In Chicago, Hadden said the building’s management company believed it was not allowed to turn off the heat and turn on the air conditioning until June 1, because of the city’s heat ordinance. But while she said the ordinance has no such requirement, the explanation may at least be a signal that the ordinance should be amended to better protect vulnerable people from heat.

Wellenius said statistics show that while well over 80% of homes in cities such as Dallas and Phoenix have air conditioning, the percentage is far lower in cities like Boston and New York.

And in the Pacific Northwest, the percentage is even lower, something that came into stark relief in Oregon, Washington and western Canada last June, when temperatures climbed as high as 47 degrees Celsius, killing 600 people or more.

There is encouraging news.

“More people have air conditioning, and we are more aware of the health risks of heat waves,” Klinenberg said.

Still, there is evidence that people don’t appreciate or even know just how dangerous the heat can be.

In a study published in 2020, Wellenius and other researchers estimated that nationwide about 5,600 deaths a year could be attributed to high heat — eight times more than the 700 heat-related deaths that the study found were officially reported each year.

Wellenius said the reasons for what he called a “gross miscalculation” begin with the fact that official statistics only count death certificates that list heat as the sole cause of death. In some cases, heat is not listed as a cause even though it may have led to death in people with other conditions.

He said the same thing happened in the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic when people who died in nursing homes in Europe “were not tested for COVID so they were not counted as COVID deaths.”

In Cook County, which includes Chicago, the medical examiner’s office reported two heat-related deaths last year, and seven the year before.

Just how many deaths in the U.S. are heat related today is unclear. Wellenius’ study, published in 2020, is the result of research from 1997 to 2006. And Klinenberg said the issue has been complicated by the pandemic because the people at greatest risk of being killed by COVID-19 are also at the greatest risk of being killed by extreme heat.

“It’s hard to distinguish excess heat deaths from COVID deaths,” he said.

Still, Hadden knows something must be done to deal with heat that can hit earlier and later in the year than it once did.

“We have to plan for this,” she said.

Klinenberg wonders if cities will follow up on such talk.

“Heat never feels like the most important thing in cities and by the time it feels like the most important thing it is too late to do anything about it,” he said.
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Strawberry Farms Threaten Spanish Wetlands

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Standing in the middle of a stretch of land surrounded by dunes and pine forest, Juan Romero examines the cracked ground then stares at the dusty horizon.

“It’s dry… really dry,” the retired teacher said at the huge Donana National Park in southern Spain, home to one of Europe’s largest wetlands, which is threatened by intensive farming.

“At this time of the year this should be covered with water and full of flamingos,” added Romero, a member of Save Donana, a group that has been fighting for years to protect the park.

Water supplies to the park have declined dramatically due to climate change and the over-extraction of water by neighboring strawberry farms, often through illegal wells, scientists say.

The situation could soon get worse as the regional government of Andalusia, where Donana is located, has proposed expanding irrigation rights for strawberry farmers near the park.

It’s a battle pitting environmentalists against politicians and farmers, and the proposal to widen irrigation rights has drawn backlash from the EU, the UN and major European grocery store chains.

The proposal would regularize nearly 1,900 hectares (4,700 acres) of berry farmland currently irrigated by illegal wells, said Juanjo Carmona of the local branch of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF).

“For Donana it would be a disaster,” he added.

The park, whose diverse ecosystem of lagoons, marshes, forests and dunes stretch across 100,000 hectares, is on the migratory route of millions of birds each year and is home to many rare species such as the Iberian lynx.

“Donana is a paradise for migrating birds. But this ecosystem is threatened,” said Romero.

The driving force behind the plan to extend irrigation rights is the conservative Popular Party (PP), which governs the southern region of Andalusia with the support of far-right party Vox.

The plan’s fate will be decided after a snap poll in Andalusia on June 19 but with both parties riding high in the polls the controversial proposal looks set to go head.

‘Red gold’

Defenders of the proposal argue it will aid those who unfairly missed out during a previous regularization of farms in the area put in place in 2014 under a Socialist government.

About 9,000 hectares of farms were regularized but another 2,000 hectares that started being farmed after 2004 were deemed illegal.

“This plan was badly done. It should have used 2014 as the cut-off date,” said Rafael Segovia, a lawmaker with Vox in Andalusia’s outgoing regional parliament.

The proposed amnesty “does not present any danger for Donana”, Segovia said, adding people should take into account the “economic importance of the sector”.

Huelva, the drought-prone province where the park is located, produces 300,000 tonnes of strawberries a year, 90 percent of Spain’s output.

Known locally as “red gold”, strawberry farming employs some 100,000 people and accounts for nearly eight percent of Andalusia’s economic output.

UNESCO, the UN’s cultural agency, has designated the park one of its World Heritage sites and has called for illegal farms near Donana to be dismantled.

It has warned that the regional government’s plan would have an impact that would be “difficult to reverse”.

The European Commission has also weighed in.

It has threatened to impose “hefty fines” if any steps were taken to extract more water from Donana park after a European court ruling last year scolded Spain for not protecting its ecosystem.

And around 20 European supermarket chains, including Lidl, Aldi and Sainsbury’s, sent the regional government a letter urging it to abandon the plan.

‘Ruin us’

Consumers may get the impression that all strawberries in Huelva come from illegal farms, said Manuel Delgado, the spokesman of an association that represents some 300 local farms.

“This situation will likely cause a major reputational problem,” he said.

The group, the association of farmers Puerta de Donana, argues the plan to extend irrigation rights would “only serve the interests of a minority”.

“Water resources are limited,” said Delgado, who fears farms will be forced to drastically reduce the amount of land they cultivate due to a lack of water.

“That would ruin us,” he said.

Backers of the plan, including other larger farmers’ associations, reject these concerns.

“There is no water problem in Huelva, it’s a lie,” said Segovia, the Vox lawmaker.

He said water could be diverted to the province’s farms from the Guadiana River on the border with Portugal, a solution rejected as “not sustainable” by the WWF.

“When there is no rain, there is no rain everywhere,” said the WWF’s Carmona, adding Spain should instead rethink its agricultural model.

Passions are running high. Romero said ecologists who oppose the plan have received death threats.

“Without radical changes to curb the overexploitation of water resources, Donana will be a desert,” he said.
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‘Now I Am a Beggar’: Fleeing the Russian Advance in Ukraine

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As Russian forces press their offensive to take the eastern Ukrainian cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, civilians who have managed to flee say intensified shelling over the past week left them unable to even venture out from basement bomb shelters.

Despite the attacks, some managed to make it to the town of Pokrovsk, 130 kilometers to the south, and boarded an evacuation train Saturday heading west, away from the fighting.

Fighting has raged around Lysychansk and neighboring Sievierodonetsk, the last major cities under Ukrainian control in the Luhansk region. Luhansk and the Donetsk region to its south make up the Donbas, Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland which is the focus of Russia’s current offensive. Moscow-backed separatists have controlled parts of the Donbas for eight years and Russian forces are now trying to capture at least the whole Donbas.

Bouncing her 18-month-old son on her lap, Yana Skakova choked back tears as she described living in a basement under relentless bombing and having to leave her husband behind when she fled with her baby and 4-year-old son.

Initially after the war broke out, there were quiet times when they could come out of the basement to cook in the street and let the children play outdoors. But about a week ago, the bombing intensified. For the past five days, they hadn’t been able to venture out of the basement at all.

“Now the situation is bad, it’s scary to go out,” she said.

It was the police who came to evacuate them Friday from the basement where 18 people, including nine children, had been living for the past two and a half months.

“We were sitting there, then the traffic police came and they said: ‘You should evacuate as fast as possible, since it is dangerous to stay in Lysychansk now,’” Skakova said.

Despite the bombings and the lack of electricity, gas and water, nobody really wanted to go.

“None of us wanted to leave our native city,” she said. “But for the sake of these small children, we decided to leave.”

She broke down in tears as she described how her husband stayed behind to take care of their house and animals.

“Yehor is 1 1/2-years old, and now he’s without a father,” Skakova said.

Oksana, 74, who was too afraid to give her surname, said she was evacuated from Lysychansk on Friday by a team of foreign volunteers along with her 86-year-old husband. There were still other people left behind in the city, she said, including young children.

Sitting on the same evacuation train as Skakova, she broke down and cried. The tears came hard and fast as she described leaving her home for an uncertain future.

“I’m going somewhere, not knowing where,” she wept. “Now I am a beggar without happiness. Now I have to ask for charity. It would be better to kill me.”

She had worked for 36 years as an accountant, a civil servant, she said, and the thought of now having to rely on others was unbearable.

“God forbid anyone else suffers this. It’s a tragedy. It’s a horror,” she cried. “Who knew I would end up in such a hell?”
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Some UK Companies to Trial 4-Day Workweek

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Louis Bloomsfield inspects the kegs of beer at his brewery in north London, eagerly awaiting June, when he will get an extra day off every week.

The 36-year-old brewer plans to use the time to get involved in charity work, start a long-overdue course in particle physics and spend more time with family.

He and colleagues at the Pressure Drop brewery are taking part in a six-month trial of a four-day working week, with 3,000 others from 60 U.K. companies.

The pilot — touted as the world’s biggest so far — aims to help companies shorten their working hours without cutting salaries or sacrificing revenues.

Similar trials have also taken place in Spain, Iceland, the United States and Canada. Australia and New Zealand are scheduled to start theirs in August.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a program manager at 4 Day Week Global, the campaign group behind the trial, said it will give firms “more time” to work through challenges, experiment with new practices and gather data.

Smaller organizations should find it easier to adapt, as they can make big changes more readily, he told AFP.

Pressure Drop, based in Tottenham Hale, is hoping the experiment will not only improve their employees’ productivity but also their well-being.

At the same time, it will reduce their carbon footprint.

The Royal Society of Biology, another participant in the trial, says it wants to give employees “more autonomy over their time and working patterns.”

Both hope a shorter working week could help them retain employees, at a time when U.K. businesses are confronted with severe staff shortages, and job vacancies hitting a record 1.3 million.

Not all rosy

Pressure Drop brewery’s co-founder Sam Smith said the new way of working would be a learning process.

“It will be difficult for a company like us which needs to be kept running all the time, but that’s what we will experiment with in this trial,” he said.

Smith is mulling giving different days off in the week to his employees and deploying them into two teams to keep the brewery functioning throughout.

When Unilever trialed a shorter working week for its 81 employees in New Zealand, it was able to do so only because no manufacturing takes place in its Auckland office and all staff work in sales or marketing.

The service industry plays a huge role in the UK economy, contributing 80% to the country’s GDP.

A shorter working week is therefore easier to adopt, said Jonathan Boys, a labor economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

But for sectors such as retail, food and beverage, health care and education, it’s more problematic.

Boys said the biggest challenge will be how to measure productivity, especially in an economy where a lot of work is qualitative, as opposed to that in a factory.

Indeed, since salaries will stay the same in this trial, for a company to not lose out, employees will have to be as productive in four days as they are five.

Yet Aidan Harper, author of The Case for a Four Day Week, said countries working fewer hours tend to have higher productivity.

“Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands work fewer hours than the U.K., yet have higher levels of productivity,” he told AFP.

“Within Europe, Greece works more hours than anyone, and yet have the lowest levels of productivity.”

‘Hiring superpower’

Employees in the U.K. work roughly 36.5 hours every week, against counterparts in Greece who clock in upward of 40 hours, according to database company Statista.

Phil McParlane, founder of Glasgow-based recruitment company 4dayweek.io, says offering a shorter workweek is a win-win, and even calls it “a hiring superpower.”

His company only advertises four-day week and flexible jobs.

They have seen the number of companies looking to hire through the platform rise from 30 to 120 in the past two years, as many workers reconsidered their priorities and work-life balance in the pandemic.
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Hopes for Reset as Slovenia’s New Leader Pledges Media Protections

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As Slovenia transitions to a new prime minister, the country’s media look for signs of a reset after the hostile rhetoric and pressure that many say they experienced under the outgoing administration.

Former power company manager Robert Golob and his center-left Freedom Movement celebrated a victory in elections last month. They are expected to formally take power in early June.

Golob indicated that one of the first tasks will be legislation to limit political pressure on journalists and protect the independence of public media.

The pledge strikes a different tone from outgoing leader Janez Jansa, whom the European Parliament criticized for hostile rhetoric and pressure directed at media. During his time in office, Jansa was handed a suspended prison sentence for verbal assaults on two female journalists. A high court upheld that ruling on May 24.

Jansa’s administration introduced changes seen by many as an attempt to disrupt press agency STA and broadcaster RTV Slovenia.

The government at the time defended its actions, saying it was addressing bias at the networks. The Government Communications Office (GCO) echoed that view, publishing criticism of RTV on its website.

Golob secured 41 out of 90 seats in parliament: more than any other party since Slovenia declared independence in 1991. His party formed a coalition with the Social Democrats and the Left. Together they hold a comfortable majority in parliament, with 53 seats.

The new administration’s pledge to protect media is welcomed by media analysts.

“I am optimistic regarding the (media) plans of the incoming government particularly since I cannot imagine that conditions at RTV Slovenia could be any worse,” said Slavko Splichal, a professor of communication at the University of Ljubljana faculty of social sciences.

Splichal, who sits on RTV’s program council, added, “I have no reason to doubt that the new government will indeed reduce political interfering in the public media.”

Period of change

As well as accusations of bias, Jansa’s Cabinet stopped paying the national news agency STA for almost a year in 2021. Funding resumed after the head of STA resigned and the new head managed to reach a deal with the government.

At RTV Slovenia, a leadership change in 2021 led to the shortening or cancellation of several popular news programs.

Many media associations and trade unions expressed support for RTV journalists.

But the Association of Journalists and Publicists in a May 23 statement said that some changes “were necessary to increase pluralism and professionalism of the RTV.”

The association, described by some groups as supporting right-leaning media, added, “The incumbent leadership of the RTV has not done anything that would limit journalistic autonomy.”

Critics, however, saw the changes at RTV as a way to curb criticism of the government.

An agreement signed by the new coalition partners on May 24 now seeks to address those changes with action to “prevent constant political meddling” at public media.

“Our priority is to protect the independence of the STA and the RTV Slovenia and enable uninterrupted running of public service,” the agreement states.

The new administration did not detail how it plans to achieve those goals.

Splichal, who sits on the RTV’s program council as a representative of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, said any change needs to be fast to save the broadcaster.

The program council, which is legally obliged to act independently, runs RTV. Currently, parliament appoints the majority of its 29 members.

Analysts believe that one way to protect editorial independence could be to reduce the number of council members that parliament appoints.

International view

The European Parliament and rights groups have cited concerns about a decline in media freedom in Slovenia.

But, says Jamie Wiseman of the International Press Institute (IPI), there is “hope among the European media freedom community that this new government can unwind some of the more detrimental aspects of the previous government’s program regarding the media.”

The IPI will be watching for concrete actions from the incoming government.

“Vital here will be the implementation of reforms which strengthen the editorial independence of the public broadcaster RTV Slovenia,” said Wiseman, who is the IPI’s Europe advocacy officer.

Other areas that need attention, Wiseman said in an email to VOA, is “the normalization of the work of the Government Communications Office (GCO); and refraining from the attempts to attack and discredit critical journalism that was so damaging under the previous administration.”

The GCO in recent months has posted articles to its website titled Analysis of Reporting of RTV Slovenia.

The posts list content that the GCO believes shows bias against the government, including what it sees as hate speech or reports that fail to seek a government response.

Journalists and academics generally see the GCO posts as improper political commentaries.

The GCO has said previously that no one has dismissed the claims it makes, and that previous center-left governments have also tried to pressure the media.

For their part, journalists at RTV have been vocal in their protest at changes to their network and described political pressure in the past year as unbearable.

“We are here because we want to stop the aggression, we are here because we want freedom of speech,” Helena Milinkovic, head of the coordination of trade unions of journalists of RTV, said during a protest and one-hour strike on May 23.

“We fear for the existence of a public RTV,” she said, adding that the journalists demand “editorial autonomy, and the depoliticization of the public RTV.”

The broadcaster is one of the country’s most popular channels, with a monthly combined audience of about 700,000, according to station data.

But withstanding political pressure is not the only challenge for RTV, said Splichal. The academic believes that the broadcaster needs to increase its presence on the internet and social media to attract younger viewers and ensure its long-term future. 
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Timeline: Texas Elementary School Shooting, Minute by Minute

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In the hours and days following the fatal shooting of 19 children and their two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, authorities gave shifting and at times contradictory information of what happened and how they responded.

The investigation of the massacre is ongoing, but much is already known about the nearly two hours that passed between when authorities say Salvador Ramos shot his grandmother and when police radio traffic indicated that the 18-year-old gunman was dead and the siege was over.

Timeline

Sometime after 11 a.m. — Ramos shoots his grandmother in the face, according to Texas Public Safety Director Steve McCraw. Gilbert Gallegos, 82, who lives across the street from Ramos and his grandmother, hears a shot as he was in his yard. He runs to the front and sees Ramos speed away in a pickup truck and Ramos’ grandmother coming toward him pleading for help. Covered in blood, “She says, ‘Berto, this is what he did. He shot me,'” according to Gallegos, whose wife calls the police to report the shooting.

11:27 a.m. — Video shows a teacher, whom authorities haven’t publicly identified, propping open an exterior door of the school, McCraw said.

11:28 a.m. — The teacher exits to retrieve a phone and then returns through the exit door, which remains propped open, McCraw said. It’s not clear why the teacher was retrieving a phone. Department of Public Safety spokesperson Travis Considine said Thursday that investigators hadn’t determined why the door was propped open.

11:28 a.m. — Ramos crashes the pickup into a drainage ditch behind the school, McCraw said. Two men at a nearby funeral home hear the crash and run out to see what happened. They see Ramos jump out of the passenger side carrying an AR-15-style rifle and a bag full of ammunition. The men run and Ramos fires at them but doesn’t hit them. One of the men falls but both make it back to the funeral home. A panicked teacher then emerges from the school and calls 911.

11:30 a.m. — 911 receives a call saying there was a crash and a man with a gun at the school, McCraw said.

11:31 a.m. — Ramos begins shooting at the school from the school parking lot as police cars begin to arrive at the funeral home, McCraw said. Ramos then makes his way around the school building.

The school district police officer who was working that day wasn’t on campus around this time, contrary to previous reports, McCraw said Friday. The officer drives to the school “immediately” after getting the 911 call and approaches someone at the back of the school who he thought was the gunman. As the officer “sped” toward the man, who turned out to be a teacher, McCraw said the officer “drove right by the suspect who was hunkered down behind” a vehicle.

11:32 a.m. — Ramos fires multiple shots at the school and then makes his way toward the open door, McCraw said.

11:33 a.m. — Five minutes after crashing the pickup, Ramos enters the school and begins shooting into two adjoining classrooms, 111 and 112, McCraw said. He fires more than 100 rounds.

11:35 a.m. — Three city police officers enter the school through the same door that Ramos used and are later followed by four other officers, McCraw said, putting a total of seven inside the building. Two officers receive “grazing wounds” from Ramos, McCraw said.

11:37 a.m. — Gunfire continues, with 16 rounds being shot in total, McCraw said. It’s unclear who fired the shots.

11:51 a.m. — A police sergeant and other law enforcement begin to arrive, McCraw said.

12:03 p.m. — A female (age unknown) calls 911 and whispers that she’s in classroom 112, McCraw said. The call lasts 1 minute, 23 seconds.

12:03 p.m. — Officers continue to enter the school, with as many as 19 officers in the hallway near the room where Ramos is holed up, McCraw said.

12:06 p.m. — Anne Marie Espinoza, a spokesperson for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, posts on the district’s Facebook page: “All campuses are under a Lockdown Status.

“Uvalde CISD Parents: Please know at this time all campuses are under a Lockdown Status due to gunshots in the area. The students and staff are safe in the buildings. The buildings are secure in a Lockdown Status. Your cooperation is needed at this time by not visiting the campus. As soon as the Lockdown Status is lifted you will be notified.”

“Thank you for your cooperation!”

12:10 p.m. — The female (age unknown) who called 911 at 12:03 p.m. calls 911 again and says there are multiple dead, McCraw said. She calls again at 12:13 p.m. and then again at 12:16 p.m., when she says there are eight to nine students alive.

12:10 p.m. — The first group of deputy U.S. marshals from Del Rio arrive from nearly 113 kilometers away to assist the various other law enforcement officers already on scene, according to the Marshals Service.

12:15 p.m. — U.S. Border Patrol tactical team members arrive with shields, McCraw said.

12:19 p.m. — Another girl in room 111 calls 911 and ends the call when a fellow student tells her to hang up, McCraw said.

12:21 p.m. — Ramos fires his gun again and officers believe he’s at one of the door of one of the adjoining classrooms, McCraw said. Police move down the hallway.

12:21 p.m. — Three shots can be heard during a 911 call, McCraw said. Around this time, police are stuck in the hallway because both classroom doors are locked and they are seeking keys from a school employee.

12:36 p.m. — A child calls 911 for 21 seconds. Around this time, a girl calls 911 and is told to stay on the line and stay very quiet, McCraw said. The girl says, “He shot the door.”

12:43 p.m. —The girl urges the 911 dispatcher to “please send the police now.”

12:46 p.m. — The girl says she can “hear the police next door.”

12:47 p.m. — She again asks 911 to “please send the police now.”

12:50 p.m. — Officers open the doors with keys from a school employee, enter the classroom and kill Ramos, McCraw said. Shots can be heard over the 911 call.

12:51 p.m. — Officers can be heard moving children out of the room, McCraw said.

12:58 p.m. — Law enforcement radio chatter says Ramos has been killed and the siege is over, said Victor Escalon, regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety.
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War Surges Norway’s Oil, Gas Profit. Now, It’s Urged to Help

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Europe’s frantic search for alternatives to Russian energy has dramatically increased the demand — and price — for Norway’s oil and gas. 

As the money pours in, Europe’s second-biggest natural gas supplier is fending off accusations that it’s profiting from the war in Ukraine. 

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who is looking to the Scandinavian country to replace some of the gas Poland used to get from Russia, said Norway’s “gigantic” oil and gas profits are “indirectly preying on the war.”

He urged Norway to use that windfall to support the hardest-hit countries, mainly Ukraine.

The comments last week touched a nerve, even as some Norwegians wonder whether they’re doing enough to combat Russia’s war by increasing economic aid to Ukraine and helping neighboring countries end their dependence on Russian energy to power industry, generate electricity and fuel vehicles. 

Taxes on the windfall profits of oil and gas companies have been common in Europe to help people cope with soaring energy bills, now exacerbated by the war. Spain and Italy both approved them, while the United Kingdom’s government plans to introduce one. Morawiecki is asking Norway to go further by sending oil and profits to other nations. 

Norway, one of Europe’s richest countries, committed 1.09% of its national income to overseas development — one of the highest percentages worldwide — including more than $200 million in aid to Ukraine. With oil and gas coffers bulging, some would like to see even more money earmarked to ease the effects of the war — and not skimmed from the funding for agencies that support people elsewhere. 

“Norway has made dramatic cuts into most of the U.N. institutions and support for human rights projects in order to finance the cost of receiving Ukrainian refugees,” said Berit Lindeman, policy director of the human rights group, the Norwegian Helsinki Committee. 

She helped organize a protest Wednesday outside Parliament in Oslo, criticizing government priorities and saying the Polish remarks had “some merits.” 

“It looks really ugly when we know the incomes have skyrocketed this year,” Lindeman said. 

Oil and gas prices were already high amid an energy crunch and have spiked because of the war. Natural gas is trading at three to four times what it was at the same time last year. International benchmark Brent crude oil burst through $100 a barrel after the invasion three months ago and has rarely dipped below since. 

Norwegian energy giant Equinor, which is majority owned by the state, earned four times more in the first quarter compared with the same period last year. 

The bounty led the government to revise its forecast of income from petroleum activities to 933 billion Norwegian kroner ($97 billion) this year — more than three times what it earned in 2021. The vast bulk will be funneled into Norway’s massive sovereign wealth fund — the world’s largest — to support the nation when oil runs dry. The government isn’t considering diverting it elsewhere. 

Norway has “contributed substantial support to Ukraine since the first week of the war, and we are preparing to do more,” State Secretary Eivind Vad Petersson said by email. 

He said the country has sent financial support, weapons and over 2 billion kroner in humanitarian aid “independently of oil and gas prices.” 

European countries, meanwhile, have helped inflate Norwegian energy prices by scrambling to diversify their supply away from Russia. They have been accused of helping fund the war by continuing to pay for Russian fossil fuels. 

That energy reliance “provides Russia with a tool to intimidate and to use against us, and that has been clearly demonstrated now,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway, told the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. 

Russia has halted natural gas to Finland, Poland and Bulgaria for refusing a demand to pay in rubles. 

The 27-nation European Union is aiming to reduce reliance on Russian natural gas by two-thirds by year’s end through conservation, renewable development and alternative supplies. 

Europe is pleading with Norway, along with countries like Qatar and Algeria, for help with the shortfall. Norway delivers 20% to 25% of Europe’s natural gas, versus Russia’s 40% before the war. 

It is important for Norway to “be a stable, long-term provider of oil and gas to the European markets,” Deputy Energy Minister Amund Vik said. But companies are selling on volatile energy markets, and “with the high oil and gas prices seen since last fall, the companies have daily produced near maximum of what their fields can deliver,” he said. 

Even so, Oslo has responded to European calls for more gas by providing permits to operators to produce more this year. Tax incentives mean the companies are investing in new offshore projects, with a new pipeline to Poland opening this fall. 

“We are doing whatever we can to be a reliable supplier of gas and energy to Europe in difficult times. It was a tight market last fall and is even more pressing now,” said Ola Morten Aanestad, a Equinor spokesman. 

The situation is a far cry from June 2020, when prices crashed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and Norway’s previous government issued tax incentives for oil companies to spur investment and protect jobs. 

Combined with high energy prices, the incentives that run out at the end of the year have prompted companies in Norway to issue a slew of development plans for new oil and gas projects. 

Yet those projects will not produce oil and gas until later this decade or even further in the future, when the political situation may be different, and many European countries are hoping to have shifted most of their energy use to renewables. 

By then, Norway is likely to face the more familiar criticism — that it is contributing to climate change. 
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Critical Fire Condition Warnings Issued Across US Southwest 

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Warnings of critical fire conditions blanketed much of the U.S. Southwest on Saturday, as crews in northern New Mexico worked to stop the growth of the nation’s largest active wildfire. 

The 7-week-old fire, the largest in New Mexico history, has burned 1,272 square kilometers (491 square miles) of forest in rugged terrain east of Santa Fe since it was started in April by two planned burns. 

Crews were patrolling partially burned areas and clearing and cutting containment lines, including primary ones near the fire as bulldozers scraped backup lines farther away. 

The National Weather Service issued red flag warnings of critical fire conditions for parts of Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah. Those conditions are a combination of strong wind, low relative humidity and dry vegetation. 

Dry air, high winds

The return of drier and warmer weather with stronger winds posed a threat of increased fire activity over the Memorial Day weekend, prompting officials to urge the public to secure vehicle chains and to be careful with possible fire sources. 

“The last thing we need right now is another ignition,” said Jayson Coil, an operations section chief. 

Forecasts called for wind gusts up to 80 kph (50 mph), with critical fire conditions continuing into Monday, followed by more favorable weather later in the coming week, said Bruno Rodriguez, the fire management team’s meteorologist. 

The strong winds could fan flames and cause the fire to jump containment lines and race forward, said John Chester, a fire operations manager. 

“Imagine traveling in your car and the fire can outpace you. That’s the kind of extreme fire behavior that we’re talking about,” Chester said. 

3,000 firefighters

Nearly 3,000 firefighters and other personnel were assigned to the fire, which was contained around 48% of its perimeter. 

Initial estimates say the fire has destroyed at least 330 homes, but state officials expect the number of homes and other structures that have burned to rise to more than 1,000 as more assessments are done. 

Elsewhere, 150 firefighters battled a wind-driven fire that burned 24 square kilometers (9 square miles) of grass, brush and salt cedar on the California side of the Colorado River about 22.5 kilometers (14 miles) southwest of Parker, Arizona. 

The fire forced the evacuation of a recreational vehicle park after it started Thursday and was 44% contained Saturday, officials said. 

The cause of the fire was under investigation. 
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Uvalde Mourns as Texas Police Face Scrutiny for Delayed Shooting Response 

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Dozens of people gathered Saturday in Uvalde, in the southwestern U.S. state of Texas, to mourn and pay homage to the 21 people who were killed earlier this week at one of the town’s elementary schools. 

Twenty-one crosses have been placed around a fountain in the city’s courthouse square, one for each of the 19 fourth graders who died and their two teachers, Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles. A growing pile of flowers, stuffed animals and heartfelt messages — “Love you,” You will be missed” — surrounded the crosses. Candles burned like dozens of small eternal flames. 

Pastor Humberto Renovato, 33, who lives in Uvalde, asked everyone to join hands and pray. 

Investigators continued Saturday to determine what mistakes were made Tuesday from the time the gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, crashed into the fence surrounding the Robb Elementary School, entered the school through an unlocked door and killed 21 people. 

He was in the school for 40 minutes to an hour before officers stormed in and killed him. 

‘He just started shooting’

Samuel Salinas, 10, said Ramos barged into his classroom and said, “You’re all going to die.” 

Then “he just started shooting,” Salinas told ABC News. 

Another student, Daniel, whose mother allowed him to speak to The Washington Post so people would know what the students went through, was in a classroom down the hall. He said his teacher, who quickly locked the door and turned out the lights, saved their lives. She was shot twice when the gunman fired through the door’s glass window, Daniel said. 

For an hour, he said, the students hid in the dark. The only sounds in the room were hushed sobs and his teacher urging the students to remain quiet.  

“’Stay calm. Stay where you are. Don’t move,'” Daniel recalled her saying. 

Daniel told the Post that he and his classmates were rescued when police broke the room’s windows and they crawled to safety. 

The city’s 911 call center received cries for help from at least two students in the adjoining classrooms where Ramos found his victims, Colonel Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said earlier this week. 

“He’s in room 112,” one girl whispered to the 911 operator at 12:03 p.m. 

She called again at 12:43 p.m., begging the operator to “please send the police now,” and again four minutes later. 

At 12:51 p.m., a U.S. Border Patrol-led tactical team stormed in and ended the siege.  ​

Wrong decision

Police have not yet found a motive for the shootings. Ramos, a high school dropout, had no criminal record or history of mental illness. 

His mother has asked the schoolchildren’s parents for forgiveness. In an interview with Televisa, a CNN affiliate, a soft-spoken Adriana Martinez said in Spanish, “I don’t know what he was thinking. … Forgive me. Forgive my son.” 

The head of the Texas Department of Public Safety said Friday that police responding to the shooting made the decision not to enter a classroom where the shooter was because they believed students were no longer at risk.   

At a news conference outside the school Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said the incident commander that day judged there was no longer an active shooter and thought it had become a hostage situation with time to wait for a tactical team to arrive.   

McGraw told reporters that with the benefit of hindsight, “it was the wrong decision” to wait to confront the shooter.    

McGraw identified the incident commander as Pete Arredondo, chief of police of the Uvalde Consolidated School District.   

Uvalde police have come under sharp criticism and police officers from other cities, including Houston and Dallas, have come to Uvalde to support and in some cases protect the officers of the police department, the mayor and the owner of the gun shop where the gunman bought his AR-15 rifles and ammunition.  

Police cruisers were parked Saturday outside the home of Arredondo. 

Biden visits Sunday

President Joe Biden is scheduled to visit Uvalde on Sunday. At the commencement Saturday at the University of Delaware, he said there’s been “too much violence. Too much fear. Too much grief.” 

“We have to stand stronger,” he told the graduates. 

Vice President Kamala Harris echoed those thoughts Saturday as she attended the funeral of Ruth Whitfield, who was among the 10 killed when a white supremacist opened fire in a supermarket in Buffalo on May 14. 

“We will not let those people who are motivated by hate to separate us or make us feel fear,” Harris said at the funeral for the 86-year-old. 

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Air Travelers Face Cancellations Over Memorial Day Weekend

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Airline travelers are not only facing sticker shock this Memorial Day weekend, the kickoff to the summer travel season. They’re also dealing with a pileup of flight cancellations.

More than 1,200 flights were canceled as of 2 p.m. EST Saturday, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. That followed more than 2,300 cancellations Friday.

Delta Air Lines suffered the most among U.S. airlines, with more than 240 flights, or 9% of its operations, eliminated Saturday. Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, where Delta is based and has its largest hub, was heavily affected by the travel delays. On Saturday, 5% of the flights there were canceled, while 7% were delayed.

Delta noted in an email to The Associated Press that Saturday’s cancellations were due to bad weather and “air traffic control actions,” noting it’s trying to cancel flights at least 24 hours in advance this Memorial Day weekend.

Delta announced on its website Thursday that from July 1 to Aug. 7, it would reduce service by about 100 daily departures, primarily in parts of the U.S. and Latin America that Delta frequently serves.

“More than any time in our history, the various factors currently impacting our operation — weather and air traffic control, vendor staffing, increased COVID case rates contributing to higher-than-planned unscheduled absences in some work groups — are resulting in an operation that isn’t consistently up to the standards Delta has set for the industry in recent years,” said Delta’s Chief Customer Experience Officer Allison Ausband in a post.

Airlines and tourist destinations are anticipating monster crowds this summer as travel restrictions ease and pandemic fatigue overcomes lingering fear of contracting COVID-19 during travel.

Many forecasters believe the number of travelers will match or even surpass levels in the good-old, pre-pandemic days. However, airlines have thousands fewer employees than they did in 2019, and that has at times contributed to widespread flight cancellations.

People who are only now booking travel for the summer are experiencing the sticker shock.

Domestic airline fares for summer are averaging more than $400 for a round trip, 24% higher than this time in 2019, before the pandemic, and a robust 45% higher than a year ago, according to travel-data firm Hopper.
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More Than a Dozen Civilians Killed in DR Congo Massacre

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More than 12 civilians were killed by members of a notorious rebel group in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo Saturday, the army and Red Cross said.

“We heard bullets at dawn in the village of Beu Manyama. When we arrived, it was already too late because the enemy ADF had already killed more than a dozen of our fellow citizens with machetes,” army spokesman Anthony Mualushayi told AFP.

Described by the so-called Islamic State as its local affiliate, the rebel Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) have been accused of killing thousands of civilians in DRC’s troubled east.

After the attack early Saturday, in the Beni region in North Kivu province, soldiers pursued the attackers and “neutralized seven ADF” and captured another, Mualushayi said.

Local Red Cross head Philippe Bonane put the civilian death toll at 21-24 and was supervising the transfer of bodies to the morgue.

The massacre comes after almost a month of relative calm in Beni, where the Congolese and Ugandan armies have been conducting joint military operations against the ADF since late November.

On Friday another Red Cross representative said that soldiers in the neighboring Ituri province had found 17 decapitated bodies, also believed to be victims of the ADF.

More than 120 armed groups roam eastern DRC and civilian massacres are common.

Both the North Kivu and Ituri have been under a “state of siege” since May last year. The army and police have replaced senior administrators in a bid to stem attacks by armed groups.

Despite this, the authorities have been unable to stop the massacres regularly carried out on civilians
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Children Among 31 Killed in Church Fair Stampede in Nigeria

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A stampede Saturday at a church charity event in southern Nigeria left 31 people dead and seven injured, police told The Associated Press, a shocking development at a program that aimed to offer hope to the needy. One witness said the dead included a pregnant woman and many children.

The stampede at the event organized by the Kings Assembly Pentecostal Church in Rivers state involved people who came to the church’s annual “Shop for Free” charity program, according to Grace Iringe-Koko, a police spokeswoman.

Such events are common in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, where more than 80 million people live in poverty, according to government statistics.

Saturday’s charity program was supposed to begin at 9 a.m. but dozens arrived as early as 5 a.m. to secure their place in line, Iringe-Koko said. Somehow the locked gate was broken open, creating a stampede, she said.

Godwin Tepikor from Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency said first responders were able to bring the bodies of those trampled to death to the morgue. Security forces cordoned off the area.

Dozens of residents later thronged the scene, mourning the dead and offering any assistance they could to emergency workers. Doctors and emergency workers treated some of the injured as they lay in the open field. Videos from the scene showed the clothing, shoes and other items meant for the beneficiaries.

One witness who identified himself only as Daniel said many children were among the dead. Five children were from one mother, he told the AP, adding that a pregnant woman also died.

Some church members were attacked and injured by relatives of the victims after the stampede, according to witness Christopher Eze. The church declined to comment.

The police spokeswoman said the seven injured were “responding to treatment.”

The “Shop for Free” event was suspended while authorities investigated how the stampede occurred.

Nigeria has reported similar stampedes in the past.

Twenty-four people died at an overcrowded church gathering in the southeastern state of Anambra in 2013, while at least 16 people were killed in 2014 when a crowd got out of control during a screening for government jobs in the nation’s capital, Abuja.
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Tropical Storm Forms Off Mexico’s Pacific Coast

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Agatha, the first tropical storm of the 2022 hurricane season in the Pacific, formed Saturday off Mexico’s southern coast.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Agatha is expected to become a hurricane and head toward land.

On Saturday morning, the center of the tropical storm was located about 220 miles (355 kilometers) southwest of Puerto Angel, with winds of 45 mph (75 kph). The storm was moving west at 5 mph (7 kph) but was expected to take a turn northward.

A hurricane watch was issued for parts of the coast of the southern state of Oaxaca, where Agatha could make landfall by Tuesday.

While the storm could pack winds as high as 100 mph (160 kph) at landfall, the center cited the risk of “potentially life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides” as its rains pound the mountainous terrain of Oaxaca.

Because the storm’s current path would carry it over the narrow waist of Mexico’s Isthmus, the center said there was a chance the storm’s remnants could reemerge over the Gulf of Mexico.
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Algerian Dissidents: Victims of Crackdown or Outlaws?

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Mohamed Benhalima looks wary and frightened as he is led off a plane at Algiers airport, handcuffed with a security officer’s arm wrapped around him. A team from Algeria’s Rapid Intervention Force then puts him in their vehicle and whisks him to an unknown destination.

The video was posted online March 24. Three days later, Algerians watched on television as the 32-year-old confessed to involvement with an organization that authorities have listed as an Islamist terrorist group plotting against the Algerian government.

Once a faithful servant of his homeland as a noncommissioned army officer, Benhalima became a supporter of Algeria’s pro-democracy movement, then a deserter who fled to Europe. Spain expelled him after Algeria issued a warrant for his arrest.

The confession scene was made public by Algeria’s General Directorate of National Security, in what could be seen as a warning to other soldiers or citizens.

Hundreds of Algerian citizens have been jailed for trying to keep alive the Hirak movement that held weekly pro-democracy protests starting in 2019, leading to the downfall of longtime Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. The marches were banned last year by the nation’s army-backed government.

Authorities then expanded their sweep, linking some Hirak supporters to two groups added to Algeria’s terror list last year: Rachad, regarded as Islamist infiltrators whose leaders are in Europe, and MAK, a separatist movement in Kabylie, home of the Berbers.

“For the last two or three years, there have been thousands of legal cases against activists,” said well-known lawyer Mustapha Bouchachi. “Their only error is that they expressed their political opinions on social media … and are fighting for a state of law.”

For authorities of the gas-rich North African nation, guaranteeing the stability of the state is at the heart of their actions. For human rights groups, Benhalima and others are victims of an unjust, antiquated system of governance that views dissidents, or any critical voices, as criminals. They say that Algerian authorities use threats to national security to stifle free speech, including among journalists, and justify arrests.

A campaign on social media, with the hashtag #PasUnCrime (not a crime) was launched May 19 by dozens of non-governmental organizations against repression of human rights.

The U.S. State Department’s 2021 report on human rights in Algeria cited a long list of problems, including arbitrary arrests and detentions and restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly and association. In March, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, asked Algeria to “change direction” to “guarantee the right of its people to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly.”

“To be a human rights activist in Algeria has become very difficult,” said Zaki Hannache, a Hirak militant recently temporarily released from prison. “To be an activist who refuses the system is complicated. It even means sacrifices.”

Hannache, best known for keeping track of Hirak-related arrests, was arrested and jailed in February on a string of charges, including defending terrorist acts.

The alleged confession of Benhalima captures the combination of evils that Algeria claims it is up against. He said that he was under the spell of Rachad and in contact with its London-based leader and his two brothers. The official APS news agency said Benhalima confirmed “the implication of the terrorist organization Rachad in abject plans targeting the stability of Algeria and its institutions by exploiting misguided youth.”

Rachad’s website claimed the police video showed the forced confession of a “hostage” in a security services propaganda exercise.

Rachad’s true goals are unclear, but it is a key target of Algeria’s crackdown. In December, Rachad said it had submitted a complaint to a U.N. special rapporteur over Algeria’s “arbitrary” classification of the group as a terrorist organization and asked U.N. authorities to urge Algeria to cease its “illegal practices.”

Spain expelled Benhalima based on national security interests and activities “that may harm Spain’s relations with other countries,” according to Amnesty International. Spain expelled another deserter, Mohamed Abdellah, a dissident gendarme, to Algeria last August. Amnesty International described him as a whistleblower.

Spain has a special interest in remaining on good terms with Algeria, which provides much of its gas needs.

According to the National Committee for Freedom for the Detained, some 300 people are behind bars in Algeria for their political opinions. Up to 70 were given provisional freedom at the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, but others have since been arrested.

In a case emblematic for Algerian journalists, the man who heads the outspoken Radio M and the online news site Algerie Emergent, Ihsane El-Kadi, risks three years in prison with a five-year ban on working for allegedly attacking national unity, among other things. He had raised the ire of a former communications minister with a column pleading for the protest movement Hirak not to divide itself over Rachad. The verdict is set for next week.

President Abdelmadjid Tebboune recently launched an ill-defined initiative dubbed “outstretched hands,” described as an “internal front” to promote dialogue across all sectors of society. Army chief Said Chengriha suggested in several speeches that it is also to counter Algeria’s perceived enemies. The initiative precedes the July 5 celebrations of the 60th anniversary of Algerian independence from France, which was won after a brutal seven-year war.

“No one can refuse” to take part in this initiative, said Abou El Fadl Baadji, secretary-general of the National Liberation Front, once Algeria’s sole political party. He was among the officials that Tebboune has recently met with on the subject. People “await with suspense the contents of this initiative … but we’re for this idea, even before knowing the details.”

Benhalima awaits a verdict of his appeal of a 10-year prison sentence after being convicted in absentia for invasion of privacy and attacks on state interests, linked to his online posts on the Algerian military, including confidential information on senior officers.
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Congo Summons Rwandan Ambassador Over Alleged Support for M23 Rebels

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The Democratic Republic of Congo has summoned Rwanda’s ambassador and suspended Rwandair flights to Congo in response to what it says is Kigali’s support for M23 rebels carrying out a military offensive in eastern Congo.

Rwanda denies supporting the rebels, who advanced as close as 20 km this week to eastern Congo’s main city of Goma and briefly captured the army’s largest base in the area. 

Congo and U.N. investigators had also accused Kigali of supporting the M23 during a 2012-2013 insurrection that briefly captured Goma. Rwanda denied those charges.

Congo’s government spokesman, Patrick Muyaya, announced the suspension of flights by Rwanda’s national carrier and the summoning of the ambassador late Friday night, following a meeting of the national defense council.

He also said Congolese authorities had designated the M23 a terrorist group and would exclude it from on-and-off negotiations being held in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, between Congo’s government and militia groups active in the east.

“A warning was made to the Rwandans, whose attitude is likely to disrupt the peace process that is nearing its end with the discussions in Nairobi, where all the armed groups, except for the M23, are committed to the path to peace,” Muyaya said.

Rwanda’s government was not immediately available for comment on Saturday.

The fighting over the past week has forced more than 72,000 people from their homes, the United Nations said on Friday, compounding Africa’s worst displacement crisis.

Eastern Congo has experienced near constant conflict since 1996, when Rwanda and other neighboring states invaded in pursuit of Hutu militiamen who had participated in the 1994 Rwandan genocide
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Latest Developments in Ukraine: May 28

Posted on by SeeEU

For full coverage of the crisis in Ukraine, visit Flashpoint Ukraine.

The latest developments in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. All times EDT:

10:38 a.m.: Russian President Vladimir Putin says he’s willing to talk about resuming grain shipments from Ukraine. In a Saturday phone call, Putin told the leaders of France and Germany that shipments of grain might be able to leave Black Sea ports if sanctions against Russia are lifted, Reuters reported. Russia and Ukraine account for nearly a third of global wheat supplies. The war in Ukraine, as well as Western sanctions against Russia, have disrupted supplies of wheat, fertilizer and other commodities from both countries, triggering concerns about world hunger.

10:06 a.m.: Ukraine’s defense minister says his country has started receiving anti-ship missiles from Denmark and self-propelled howitzers from the United States. Oleksiy Reznikov said Saturday that the weapons will help Ukrainian forces fighting the Russian invasion, Reuters reported.

9:29 a.m.: Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Germany and France Saturday that continuing weapons supplies to Ukraine is “dangerous.” Putin told French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that sending arms to Ukraine could lead to the “further destabilization of the situation and aggravation of the humanitarian crisis,” the Kremlin said, according to Agence France-Presse.

8:37 a.m.: Russia said it has successfully tested hypersonic missiles in the Arctic, according to Agence France-Presse. The defense ministry said the Zircon hypersonic cruise missile traveled 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) and “successfully hit” a target in the Arctic.

7:50 a.m.: Russia says it has seized Lyman, a strategic town in eastern Ukraine.

“Following the joint actions of the units of the militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Russian armed forces, the town of Krasny Liman has been entirely liberated from Ukrainian nationalists,” the defense ministry said in a statement, Agence France-Presse reported. Lyman is a railway hub in the Donetsk region and its capture signals a potential momentum shift in the war, helping Russia prepare for the next phase of Moscow’s offensive in the eastern Donbas, Reuters reported.

5:29 a.m.: In early May, VOA Eastern Europe bureau chief Myroslava Gongadze spoke with Mark Brzezinski, the U.S. ambassador to Poland. He says Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has united Europe.

“What’s happened in Ukraine alarms everyone — with the genocide that is occurring there, the attacks on civilians, the mass destruction of villages, apartments, old people’s homes, hospitals — it defies any kind of human belief. And I think there is unity among all the allies in Europe about how bad this is and that something needs to be done. ​So, I don’t want to assess who’s taking it most seriously, because I don’t know anyone who’s not taking this seriously.”

4:15 a.m.: Reuters reports that Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian peace talks negotiator, said on Telegram that any agreement with Russia “isn’t worth a broken penny.”

“Is it possible to negotiate with a country that always lies cynically and propagandistically?” he wrote.

3:12 a.m.: The latest intelligence update from the U.K. defense ministry says most of the strategically important Ukrainian town of Lyman has likely fallen to the Russians. Lyman’s the site of a major rail junction and offers access to rail and road bridges over the Siverskyy Donets River.

That’ll be a key point as Russian troops aim to cross the river as part of the next stage of Russia’s Donbas offensive.

2:20 a.m.: Al Jazeera reports that the governor of Ukraine’s Luhansk region insists that Russian forces have not surrounded the city of Severodonetsk.

They have, he says, taken control of a hotel and a bus station. He said it was still possible that Ukrainian forces would have to retreat from the area.

1:13 a.m.: The Associated Press reports that a Communist Party leader in Russia’s Far East has called for an end to the war with Ukraine.

“We understand that if our country doesn’t stop the military operation, we’ll have more orphans in our country,” Legislative Deputy Leonid Vasyukevich said at a meeting of the Primorsk regional Legislative Assembly in the Pacific port of Vladivostok on Friday.

12:02 a.m.: Al Jazeera reports that Lithuanians have raised more than $3 million to buy a military drone for Ukraine. They’re aiming to raise a total of $5.4 million to purchase the Bayraktar TB2 armed drone.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Powerful Vatican Prelate, Dies at 94

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Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a once-powerful Italian prelate who long served as the Vatican’s No. 2 official but whose legacy was tarnished by his support for the pedophile found of an influential religious order, has died. He was 94.

The Vatican in its Saturday announcement of his death said the Sodano had died on Friday. Italian state radio said that Sodano recently had contracted COVID-19, complicating his already frail health. Corriere della Sera said he died in a Rome clinic where he had been admitted a few weeks ago.

Pope Francis in a condolence telegram Saturday to Maria Sodano, the retired prelate’s sister, noted that Sodano had held many roles in the Vatican’s diplomatic corps, culminating in his being named secretary of state on June 28, 1991, by the then-pontiff, John Paul II. A day later, John Paul, who later was made a saint, elevated Sodano to the rank of cardinal.

In the condolence message, Francis expressed “sentiments of gratitude to the Lord for the gift of this esteemed man of the church” and paid tribute to his long service as a Vatican diplomat in Ecuador, Uruguay and Chile in South America, Francis’ native continent.

But late in his Vatican career, Sodano’s church legacy was tarnished by his staunch championing of the Rev. Marcial Maciel, the deceased Mexican founder of the Legion of Christ, a religious order, who was later revealed to be a pedophile. Maciel’s clerical career was discredited by the cult-like practices he imposed on the order’s members. An internal investigation eventually identified 33 priests and 71 seminarians in the order who sexually abused minors over some eight decades.

Sodano for years, while secretary of state under John Paul, had prevented the Vatican from investigating sex abuse allegations against Maciel. The Holy See had evidence dating back decades that the founder of the religious order — an organization that was a favorite of John Paul’s for producing so many priests — was a drug addict and a pedophile.

The Vatican’s biography, issued after Sodano died, made no mention of the scandals. Instead, it noted Sodano’s accomplishment as a top Vatican diplomat, including his work for “the peaceful solution to the controversy of the sovereignty of 2 states,” a reference to the territorial dispute that erupted in the 1982 Falklands War between Argentina and Britain.

Speaking of Sodano’s career at the Vatican, which saw him serve until 2006 as the Holy See’s No. 2 official in the role of secretary of state, Francis said the prelate had carried out his mission with “exemplary dedication.”

In December 2019, Francis accepted Sodano’s resignation as Dean of the College of Cardinals, an influential role, especially in preparing for conclaves, the closed-door election of pontiffs. Sodano had held that position from 2005.

Sodano was born in Isola d’Asti, a town in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, on Nov. 23, 1927. He was ordained a priest in 1950 and obtained a doctorate in theology at the prestigious Pontifical Gregorian University and in canon law from the Pontifical Lateral University, both in Rome.

He joined the Vatican’s diplomatic corps in 1959, eventually representing the Holy See at foreign ministers’ meetings across Europe.

In 2000, Sodano played a role in ending an enduring mystery at the Vatican by disclosing the so-called third secret of Fatima.

In 1917, three Portuguese shepherd children said they saw the Virgin Mary appear above an olive tree and she told them three secrets. The first two were said to have foretold the end of World War I and the start of World War II and the rise and fall of Soviet communism. Some speculated that the third, unrevealed secret, was a doomsday prophecy.

While the pope was visiting the popular shrine in Fatima, Portugal, Sodano said that the “interpretations” of the children spoke of a “bishop clothed in white,” who “falls to the ground, apparently dead, under a burst of gunfire.” That description evoked the assassination attempt on John Paul in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, in which the pope was gravely wounded. 

Sodano’s funeral is to take place on Tuesday in St Peter’s Basilica. It will be celebrated by the dean of the College of Cardinals, Giovanni Battista Re, while Pope Francis will perform a traditional funeral rite at the end of the ceremony.
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Russia Announces Capture of Strategic Railway Town in Eastern Ukraine

Posted on by SeeUS

Russia’s military says it has taken the eastern Ukrainian town of Lyman, a key railway hub in the Donetsk region. The capture could signal a shift in momentum in the Ukraine war.  

“Following the joint actions of the units of the militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Russian armed forces, the town of Krasny Liman has been entirely liberated from Ukrainian nationalists,” the defense ministry said in a statement, using the Russian name for Lyman.

On Saturday, Russia also said it has successfully tested hypersonic missiles in the Arctic. The defense ministry said the Zircon hypersonic cruise missile traveled 1,000 kilometers and “successfully hit” a target in the Arctic.

Taking control of Lyman sets the stage for Russia to begin the next phase of its offensive in the Donbas region. The town is located 40 kilometers west of Sievierodonetsk, the largest Donbas city still held by Ukrainian forces.  

Sievierodonetsk, a main focus of Moscow’s offensive, is now under heavy assault. The governor of the Luhansk region, which along with Donetsk makes up the Donbas, said Friday that Russian troops have entered Sievierodonetsk.  

“If Russia did succeed in taking over these areas, it would highly likely be seen by the Kremlin as a substantive political achievement and be portrayed to the Russian people as justifying the invasion,” the British defense ministry said on Saturday.

The eastern Donbas region is Ukraine’s industrial heartland and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Moscow of carrying out a “genocide” there.

In his nightly video address Friday, Zelenskyy said that Ukraine will defend “as much as our current defense resources allow.”

He sounded a defiant note against Russia’s offensive in the Ukraine’s east: “If the occupiers think that Lyman or Sievierodonetsk will be theirs, they are wrong. Donbas will be Ukrainian.’’

Ukraine seeks advanced rockets

U.S. military officials acknowledge they have spoken to Ukrainian officials repeatedly about Kyiv’s requests for newer, more advanced weapons that could help stave off Russian gains in the Donbas but refuse to say publicly whether those systems will be delivered anytime soon.  

Ukraine has been pleading for weeks with the U.S. to get American-made Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, or MLRS, which are more powerful and more maneuverable than the howitzers and other artillery systems Washington and the West have provided to date.

Those pleas have only gotten louder as Russian forces have pushed ahead in eastern Ukraine, making what senior U.S. defense officials have described as “incremental gains” in a fight that has largely featured artillery and other so-called long-range fire.

“We’re mindful and aware of Ukrainian asks privately and publicly for what is known as a Multiple Launch Rocket System,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters. “But I won’t get ahead of a decision that hasn’t been made yet.”

“We’re in constant communication with them about their needs,” he added. “We’re working every single day to get weapons and systems into Ukraine, and every single day there are weapons and systems getting into Ukraine that are helping them, literally, in the fight.”

There are some indications, however, that U.S. officials may be ready to send Ukraine MLRS to help push back the latest Russian offensive.

Multiple U.S. officials, speaking to CNN on the condition of anonymity, said the Biden administration is leaning toward sending some MLRS to Ukraine, with an announcement possible in the next week.

Later Friday, two U.S. officials speaking to Politico confirmed that the U.S. is inclined to send MLRS to Ukraine but said a final decision has not yet been made.

The United States has two multiple launch rocket systems — the M270 and M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS. Both fire similar 227 mm rockets. The M270 can fire up to 12 rockets, while the more agile M142 can fire up to six.

Depending on the type of rocket, the M270 can hit targets as far away as 70 kilometers, which is twice the range of the U.S. howitzers currently in Ukraine’s arsenal. The HIMARS system can hit targets as far away as 300 kilometers.

Ukraine’s top military official, Lieutenant General Valery Zaluzhny, on Thursday took to Telegram, calling for “weapons that will allow us to hit the enemy at a big distance.”

 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded by warning that supplying Ukraine with weapons that could reach Russian territory would be a “a serious step towards unacceptable escalation.”

The debate over how best to supply Ukraine with weapons comes as Russian forces in eastern Ukraine appeared to be making more progress despite what U.S. military officials described as stiff resistance from Ukrainian troops.

Russian-backed separatists Friday claimed to have captured the center of Lyman, a key railway hub in the Donbas.

Other Russian forces managed to encircle most of Sievierodonetsk, the easternmost city under Ukrainian control, with some reports indicating Russian forces are also now in the city itself.

Ukrainian officials in Sievierodonetsk said 90% of the city has been destroyed by shelling but Luhansk regional governor Serhiy Gaidai remained defiant in a message Friday on social media.

“The Russians will not be able to capture Luhansk region in the coming days as analysts have predicted,” he said. “We will have enough strength and resources to defend ourselves.”

However, Gaidai also admitted “it is possible that in order not to be surrounded we will have to retreat.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday spoke by phone with Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer.

According to Nehammer, Putin offered to complete natural gas deliveries to Austria and to discuss a prisoner swap with Ukraine.

“The Russian president has given a commitment that there must be and should be access to the prisoners of war including to the International Red Cross,” the Austrian chancellor said. “On the other side, of course, he also demands access to Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine.”

However, Nehammer said he was doubtful Putin was interested in any negotiations to end the war.

“I have the impression that Putin wants to create facts now that I assume he will take into the negotiations [later],” he said.

VOA National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this report. Some information in this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. 
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Native Americans Confront Racism in South Dakota

Posted on by SeeUS

“No wonder those four great Americans seem so sad as they look down from Mount Rushmore,” Denver Post columnist Roscoe Fleming wrote in 1962. “For they see incongruous and continuing racism.”

In South Dakota at that time, it wasn’t unusual to see restaurant and shop signs reading, “No Indians Allowed.”

Today, the signs have come down, but VOA has heard from dozens of Native Americans in South Dakota who say that racism permeates their lives and is especially prevalent in the state’s second-largest city, Rapid City.

It was there, as VOA earlier reported, that Gateway Grand Hotel owner Connie Uhre in March announced she would no longer allow Native Americans on the property after a shooting took place there; later, she turned away two members of the Indian-led, nonprofit NDN Collective who tried to book a room at her hotel.

Sunny Red Bear, NDN Collective director of racial equity, is one of the two denied services. NDN Collective, the name a shortening of “Indian,” is an indigenous-led organization in Rapid City that works to empower Native peoples.

“Rapid City, like many places in the U.S., has a long history of racism that many white people are committed to upholding on both a systemic and interpersonal level, whether they know it or not,” she said. “People in positions of power here in Rapid City, by not stating that systemic racism exists in Rapid City, continue to minimize the lived experiences of Native people and people of color here in the community.”

Janet Davies, the daughter of a Lakota mother and a white father, described growing up in a city where she said she was constantly shamed.

“When I was in seventh grade, there was a school dance,” she said. “And this nice boy asked me to go with him. But then later on he said to me, ‘I can’t go with you because I found out you have Indian blood. You’re a sq—w.’”

She used an ethnic and sexual slur for Indigenous women.

In April, during a stay in a Rapid City hospital, Oglala Lakota rights advocate Hermus Bettelyoun posted on Facebook, “I now have a room to myself here. My [white] roommate found out my skin wasn’t the right color tint for him. He asked the doctor if they could move me because he didn’t want to ‘breath the same air’ as [me].”

Native American residents of the city complain of being tailed like thieves in local businesses, being turned down for jobs and enduring taunts to “go back to the reservation.”

“I’ve talked to multiple mothers and fathers whose children are experiencing racism in schools by getting their hair cut by other students, by being called “Prairie N-word,” Red Bear said.

Many expressed conviction that the state government is racist.

Critical race theory

In April, South Dakota Governor Kristie Noem signed an executive order banning the teaching of critical race theory in the state’s primary school system. CRT is an academic theory that states racism isn’t just the product of individual bias or prejudice but is embedded in the nation’s legal systems and policies.

“I think her message to us is that we don’t matter and that the Native experience in South Dakota doesn’t matter,” South Dakota Democratic State Sen. Troy Heinert, a Sicangu Lakota citizen from the Rosebud Reservation, told Native News Online in April.

Red Bear said she views the move as a continuation of historic assimilation policies.

“The lack of education and the lack of conversations around the history of what has happened to Indigenous people are perpetuating crazy, harmful … stereotypes,” Red Bear said.

“I’m fifth-generation Rapid City,” said J.B., who asked VOA to withhold his name out of fear of repercussion. “Up until the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, I was just another white guy. But when that killing happened, that triggered something in my head. I can tell you Rapid City is on the front lines of a lot of racism right now. It’s called Racist City for a reason.”

Rapid City Mayor Steve Allender admits there is a huge divide between “some of the Native American population here and non-native citizens.”

“If you look back in history and even currently, racism is in all of the continents,” he told VOA. “There’s nothing different or special about Rapid City when it comes to the flaws of humanity.”

“What I think must be pointed out,” he continued, “is that in Rapid City, this takes center stage in the news cycle, whereas there are other parts of the country where this type of stuff [goes on] and the reaction is nowhere near this.”

Historic roots

South Dakota has a history of “tumultuous race relations” dating back to early white settlement, according to a 2019 report by the South Dakota advisory committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty designated a large territory west of the Missouri River as the exclusive territory of the “Great Sioux” tribes – the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota.

After an 1874 expedition confirmed deposits of gold in the Black Hills, miners flocked to the region. When the Lakota refused to sell mining rights, the government ordered them to reservations and sent in troops when they resisted. The armed conflict that followed saw George Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn in 1876, the murder of Lakota leader Sitting Bull in 1879 and the massacre of several hundred Indian men, women and children at Wounded Knee.

And, as the South Dakota civil rights advisory committee noted, “overt racism and discrimination continued to impact the indigenous population in South Dakota significantly throughout the twentieth century, and some scholars argue that it manifests itself today in suppressed political participation and disparities in the criminal justice system.”

Native Americans were made citizens in 1924, but South Dakota didn’t allow them to vote or hold office until 1940. Between 1976, when the Voting Rights Act was passed, and 2002, South Dakota passed more than 600 statutes and regulations hindering Native voting in certain jurisdictions with large Native populations.

South Dakota today is home to nine Indian reservations; the 2010 census shows it leads the nation in the percentage of Native Americans living below the poverty line; more than 50% of the Native Americans in Rapid City live in poverty.

Natives invisible

The First Nations Development Institute conducted a two-year nationwide survey on public opinion about Natives. Among their findings:

Most Americans know Native Americans were oppressed and that their land was stolen but don’t know about the violence involved.
Non-Natives largely create and control narratives about Native Americans, focusing on deficits such as poverty, alcoholism and ill health.
Most policymakers and judges have little knowledge of Native issues and do not understand America’s treaty obligations to the tribes, who ceded land to the U.S. in exchange for education, health care, housing and other protections.
Non-Natives who live near reservations in areas of high unemployment or economic stress may be resentful of these entitlements.

Allender, the Rapid City mayor, said he believes eradicating racism is an unrealistic goal.

“We can certainly reduce it and we can certainly create an environment where these outward manifestations of it are not acceptable,” he added. “I want every citizen, whether a tourist or resident, a white-skinned person, a dark-skinned person … to receive equal treatment, have equal opportunities.”

He expressed frustration over the city’s homeless population.

The city’s annual “point in time” count of the homeless conducted in January showed 458 unhoused adults and children, 350 of whom were Native American. Thirty-nine reported substance abuse, and 28 had serious mental illness.

“Almost all of our homeless people in Rapid City are Native American,” Allender continued. “And a lot of them are intoxicated. And I’ll tell you, the homeless people are a violent group.”

Red Bear, of NDN Collective, is Lakota from the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.

“All the talk about our unhoused relatives and that Native people have a predisposition to alcoholism is accompanied by numerous other related misconceptions that feed into the idea that we are morally deficient because of our so-called inability to control ourselves, and that all that makes us a menace to society,” Red Bear said. “These stereotypes are extremely harmful and expose a lack of compassion and empathy for those who are struggling.”

In March, NDN Collective filed a lawsuit against hotel owner Connie Uhre and called for a citywide boycott of businesses with racist policies and practices. South Dakota tribal leaders have suggested they may relocate annual events like the Lakota Nation Invitational Basketball Tournament and Black Hills Powwow, which bring Rapid City millions of dollars in revenue.

The collective said it won’t back down until the city imposes “concrete consequences” on racist business owners.

This has triggered anger among some white citizens.

“Clearly, the Uhre family and their right to engage in commerce have been targeted …for the unpardonable sin of unpopular speech,” one resident wrote to the Rapid City Journal, likening the boycott to “racketeering.”

Mayor Allender also objects to the boycott.

“This hotel is still closed. They probably suffered well into the six figures of economic damage if not more, in the couple of months that they have been closed,” he said, pointing out its irony: “You’re offended because one family judged an entire group of people by the actions of one, and now your response is to judge an entire community because of the actions of one?”
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Fleeing the Russians: Evacuations are Slow, Arduous, Fraught

Posted on by SeeEU

To a threatening soundtrack of air raid sirens and booming artillery, civilians are fleeing towns and cities in eastern Ukraine as Russian forces advance.

Negotiating narrow apartment building staircases, volunteers carry the elderly and infirm in their arms, in stretchers or in wheelchairs to waiting minibuses, which then drive them to central staging areas and eventually to evacuation trains in other cities.

“The Russians are right over there, and they’re closing in on this location,” Mark Poppert, an American volunteer working with British charity RefugEase, said during an evacuation in the town of Bakhmut on Friday.

“Bakhmut is a high-risk area right now,” he said. “We’re trying to get as many people out as we can in case the Ukrainians have to fall back.”

He and other Ukrainian and foreign volunteers working with the Ukrainian charity Vostok SOS, which was coordinating the evacuation effort, were hoping to get about 100 people out of Bakhmut on Friday, Poppert said.

A few hours earlier, the thud of artillery sounded and black smoke rose from the northern fringes of the town, which is in the Donetsk region in Ukraine’s industrial east. Donetsk and the neighboring region of Luhansk makes up the Donbas, where Moscow-backed separatists have controlled some territory for eight years.

The evacuation process is painstaking, physically arduous and fraught with emotion.

Many of the evacuees are elderly, ill or have serious mobility problems, meaning volunteers have to bundle them into soft stretchers and slowly negotiate their way through narrow corridors and down flights of stairs in apartment buildings.

Most people have already fled Bakhmut: only around 30,000 remain from a pre-war population of 85,000. And more are leaving each day.

Fighting has raged north of Bakhmut as Russian forces intensify their efforts to seize the key eastern cities of Sieverodonetsk and Lysychansk, 50 kilometers to the northeast. The two cities are the last areas under Ukrainian control in the Luhansk region.

Northwest of Bakhmut in Donetsk, Russia-backed rebels said Friday they had taken over the town of Lyman, a large railway hub near the cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, both which are still under Ukrainian control. On Thursday, smoke rising from the direction of Lyman could be seen clearly from Slovyansk.

But even when faced with shelling, missiles and an advancing Russian army, leaving isn’t easy.

Svetlana Lvova, the 66-year-old manager for two apartment buildings in Bakhmut, huffed and rolled her eyes in exasperation upon hearing that yet another one of her residents was refusing to leave.

“I can’t convince them to go,” she said. “I told them several times if something lands here, I will be carrying them — injured — to the same buses” that have come to evacuate them now.

She’s tried to persuade the holdouts every way she can, she says, but nearly two dozen people just won’t budge. They’re more afraid to leave their homes and belongings for an uncertain future than to stay and face the bombs.

She herself will stay in Bakhmut with her husband, she said. But not because they fear leaving their property. They are waiting for their son, who is still in Sieverodonetsk, to come home.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “I have to know he is alive. That’s why I’m staying here.”

Lvova plays the last video her son sent her, where he tells his mother that he is fine, and that they still have electricity in the city but no longer running water.

“I baked him a big cake,” she said, wiping away tears.

Poppert, the American volunteer, said it was not unusual to receive a request to pick people up for evacuation, only for them to change their minds once the van arrives.

“It’s an incredibly difficult decision for these people to leave the only world that they know,” he said.

He described one man in his late 90s evacuated from the only home he had ever known.

“We were taking this man out of his world,” Poppert said. “He was terrified of the bombs and the missiles, and he was terrified to leave.”

In nearby Pokrovsk, ambulances pulled up to offload elderly women in stretchers and wheelchairs for the evacuation train heading west, away from the fighting. Families clustered around, dragging suitcases and carrying pets as they boarded the train.

The train slowly pulled out of the station, and a woman drew back the curtain in one of the train carriages. As the familiar landscape slipped away, her face crumpled in grief and the tears began to flow.
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Ukrainian Negotiator Says Any Agreement With Russia ‘Isn’t Worth a Broken Penny’

Posted on by SeeEU

Ukrainian presidential adviser and peace talks negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak said on Saturday that any agreement with Russia cannot be trusted and Moscow can only be stopped in its invasion by force.

“Any agreement with Russia isn’t worth a broken penny,” Podolyak wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “Is it possible to negotiate with a country that always lies cynically and propagandistically?”

Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other after peace talk stalled, with the last known face-to-face negotiations on March 29. The Kremlin said earlier this month Ukraine was showing no willingness to continue peace talks, while officials in Kyiv blamed Russia for the lack of progress.

On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that President Vladimir Putin was the only Russian official he was willing to meet with to discuss how to end the war.

Putin says Russian forces are on a special operation to demilitarize Ukraine and rid it of radical anti-Russian nationalists. Ukraine and its allies call that a false pretext to invade Ukraine on Feb. 24.

“Russia has proved that it is a barbarian country that threatens world security,” Podolyak said. “A barbarian can only be stopped by force.”
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NRA, After Uvalde School Massacre, Says No to New Gun Laws

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Separated from the massacre of 19 elementary school students and two of their teachers by just three days and 500 kilometers, the most powerful gun rights organization in the U.S. opened its annual meeting Friday in Houston.

With the nation still raw from the trauma inflicted by a teenage gunman who used a military-style semi-automatic rifle to bring horror to the small Texas town of Uvalde, the National Rifle Association filled the George R. Brown Convention Center with what it advertised as “14 acres of guns and gear.”

The organization also hosted some of its highest-profile leaders and supporters, including former President Donald Trump, NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre and, representing Texas, Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Greg Abbot. The governor, who had been scheduled to make a live appearance, announced after the massacre that he would, instead, deliver prerecorded remarks.

The overarching message of the day, hammered home by speaker after speaker, was that there is no need for more regulations governing the purchase of guns in the United States. Rather, they said, schools should be “hardened” with armed guards and other safeguards, and more measures should be taken to jail felons and identify the mentally ill.

Calls to reschedule ignored

The meeting went on despite calls from many critics to cancel it out of respect for Uvalde’s victims. While those demands went unmet, the proximity of the meeting to the killings, in both time and place, seemed to cause a number of scheduled speakers to rethink their plans.

Texas Senator John Cornyn and Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw, both scheduled to speak, announced scheduling conflicts. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a vocal gun rights supporter, also backed out of an appearance.

A number of musical guests who had been scheduled to entertain attendees, including country music stars Lee Greenwood and Larry Gatlin, also pulled out following the tragedy.

Setting the tone

LaPierre, in opening remarks, acknowledged that mass shootings, like the one in Uvalde, cause “gut wrenching, unimaginable pain” and “should never happen again.”

But LaPierre also set the tone for the rest of the meeting, arguing that there is no need for any additional restrictions on gun ownership. Instead, he called for increasing security around schools in the United States, fixing the country’s “broken” mental health system and putting more criminals in jail.

He also painted a dark picture of the United States, claiming that “hate-filled vile monsters walk among us,” and insisting that armed citizens are necessary to defend against an “evil criminal element that plagues our society.”

He said, “There can be no freedom, no security, no safety without the right of the law-abiding to bear arms for self-defense.”

Texas officials speak

In his remarks, Abbott argued that additional gun laws would not have made a difference in Uvalde.

“There are thousands of laws on the books across the country that limit the owning or using of a firearm,” Abbott said. “Laws that have not stopped madmen from carrying out evil acts on innocent people in peaceful communities.”

When Cruz took the stage, he acknowledged the “crushing darkness” he felt from the Uvalde massacre. He also listed the various shootings sites in Texas that he has visited since taking office, naming examples of mass killings in Dallas, Sutherland Springs, Santa Fe, El Paso and the cities of Midland and Odessa. Each, he said, was “the picture of horror.”

However, like LaPierre and others at the event, Cruz said that more restrictions on firearm ownership are not the answer to gun violence, noting that cities with strong gun laws, like Chicago, Baltimore and Washington suffer from high rates of firearm homicide.

Instead, to counter school shootings specifically, he called for every school to have a single point of entry staffed by “multiple armed police officers.”

Cruz also slammed the media, telling the crowd of NRA members, “The media blames you, the millions of members of the NRA, for these crimes.”

Trump calls for arming teachers

Former President Trump began his remarks by reading the name of each of the people killed in Uvalde, with the recorded toll of a bell following each name.

He then turned to attack political leaders who said that the massacre in Uvalde ought to spur action to restrict access to guns, saying, “sadly, before the sun had even set on the horrible day of tragedy we witnessed a now familiar parade of cynical politicians seeking to exploit the tears of sobbing families to increase their own power and take away our constitutional rights.”

In a speech that lasted about 50 minutes, Trump hit on many of the same ideas as the speakers who preceded him, and sometimes drifted away from gun-related topics into broader political commentary.

But, more than any of the other speakers on Friday, he advocated the arming of American teachers.

As part of broader security plans, he said, “It’s time to finally allow highly trained teachers to safely and discreetly” carry weapons in school. “Let them do that. It would be so much better and so much more effective, even from a cost standpoint.”

‘We will leave you behind’

Outside the venue, a large and vocal crowd gathered to protest the NRA’s presence.

Beto O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman who is challenging Abbott in the next election for governor, delivered a passionate address.

O’Rourke sought to make a distinction between the NRA’s leadership and its rank-and-file members, saying to the latter, “You are not our enemies; we are not yours.”

But toward the organization’s executives, his tone was different.

“To the leadership of the NRA and to those politicians that you have purchased, to those men and women in positions of power who care more about your power than using that power to save the lives of those you are supposed to serve, if you have done anything good it is the fact that you have brought us here together and that we are committing ourselves to act,” O’Rourke said. “We will defeat you and we will overcome you and we will leave you behind.”

Gun-free zone

It was not lost on the organization’s critics that when the speakers took the stage in Houston, it was in front of an audience that had been meticulously screened for firearms and any other weapons before entering the hall.

In an appearance on the Truth and Consequences podcast hours before the event, Shannon Watts, founder of the gun control activist group Moms Demand Action, said:

“Let’s keep in mind, it’s not just the annual meeting,” she said. “It’s a huge gun sale. So, in the wake of this horrific tragedy in Texas, they are selling guns in Houston. And when the leaders speak every single year, it’s in a gun-free zone because they’re afraid of being shot.” 
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Envoy Talks About Ukraine, the War and its Postwar Future

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In mid-May, VOA Eastern Europe bureau chief Myroslava Gongadze spoke with Alexandra Vasylenko, special envoy on coordination of humanitarian assistance to the minister for foreign affairs of Ukraine. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

VOA: The devastation of the war (in Ukraine) is affecting food security in the world. How can we estimate and assess what’s going on and how it would affect Ukrainian agricultural business and world business?

Vasylenko: Given that Ukraine is one of the main exporters of grain — of wheat, corn, buckwheat and sunflower oil — the implications of this war will be really hard, and we will feel it not only this year but also in coming years, three to five years at least. We already started sowing campaigns in almost all regions of Ukraine, but because of a huge mine decontamination mission there, it is very insecure for our farmers to perform sowing campaigns. But they already started doing this, even in the Zaporizhzhia region close to the front line. They’re performing their duty in helmets and vests.

The problem is not only with the sowing campaigns. We have an acute shortage of fuel, which is required for sowing campaigns, and it will be required for harvesting. Russian troops are trying to shell our railway stations, and they are focusing on the main railway complex. They destroyed a lot of grain storage as well, so we need to find out how we can store grain before we export it.

We also have very limited logistics capacity right now from the south and southeast because our Black Sea ports are blocked by Russian troops and mines. And to be figuring out alternative logistics routes can be really different from looking at the south in Romania. You’re looking at Poland, and you’re trying to figure out alternative routes with the European Union, using multimodal connections such as grain cargo lorries and, of course, seaports.

We get what we can see. If COVID-19 worsens world hunger, this war will have even more effects. According to the first quarterly report of FAO (U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization) for crops and production for harvest, already 44 countries in the world are experiencing hunger; almost plus seven countries have been added to this list.

Projections for the harvest season in Ukraine are still very high. But as I said before, this situation is really complex with logistics, and we do not know how it will unfold and how we can harvest. So, sowing campaigns have started, and we will try to do our best to provide the world with the grain and to keep the world food security on the same and stable level, but we need help — and need to see how we can solve our problems.

VOA: There is a lot of talk about Ukraine entering the European Union. Is Ukraine ready for it? Do you see this as an opportunity and possibility?

Vasylenko: Ukraine is already a part of the huge and complex logistic partnership of Europe, and we are already one of the biggest trading partners of the European Union. And I think this situation is an opportunity to simplify procedures for both partners. And this is an opportunity.

VOA: What do you mean, “this situation”?

Vasylenko: I mean, it’s a given situation. Because, you know, their integration into the European Union, and the trade agreement with the European Union, it took us years to proceed with it, and we were very, like, step by step integration with different types of quotas for different types of trade commodities, even in terms of food production. Yes, it’s for the grain, for oil, for poultry. For example, two years ago, we started this quarter to increase it for, for Ukrainian poultry.

VOA: That was a big issue, right?

Vasylenko: It was a big issue, but we made it. And I think that both partners benefited from it. If we take a look at Ukrainian production in terms of European legislation and in terms of European expectation, even in terms of the European Green Deal, our production is already much, much more sustainable than European because we are not using so many different types of plant protection for our crops.

Ukraine is a transit country. It’s always been a transit country. And this is the moment when we can really use all these transport corridors, and Europe can really see how Ukraine can add value to the trades and to different types of economies.

Food system production is very complex. It’s logistics. It’s production, produce and manufacturing, growing, harvesting, planting, everything. And it’s really important for communities, for the environment.

VOA: When we are talking about storing the grain and maybe helping to demine the fields and give more technical support, my understanding is that the Russians are stealing a lot of equipment from Ukraine. What are your expectations, and what is the relationship you have right now with the world’s biggest companies that provide equipment for agriculture? 

Vasylenko: Well, I would say in terms of demining, the problem is really huge. And we are working on the demining problem on different levels with our international organizations and with the government on a bilateral level. And EU and NATO countries, they are already providing help. They are sending teams for demining. And I think this process already started, and it will unfold very rapidly.

You’re absolutely right, a lot of our equipment was stolen, and things for information technology. We can identify where it is and, if we can, switch it off.

Private foundations — for example, Howard G. Buffett Foundation — really are focused on food security and resolving military conflict. They are working hard to provide us with different types of equipment for planting and harvesting — for combines, for tractors, for drilling machines. So we can use it, and we can help.

I’m not talking about the big companies in Ukraine; I’m talking about small and medium farmers who have around 150 to 300 hectares. They can really benefit from all the stuff that can be provided by private donors or by private companies.

VOA: One more issue you’re working on is humanitarian work for Ukraine, coordination. How is it going? What exactly does Ukraine need?

Vasylenko: We established a working mechanism of communication and coordination between the Ukrainian government and our partners on multilateral and bilateral levels, of course. We established effective logistics to the Ukrainian border and within Ukrainian borders. On a weekly basis, we are providing our partners with updates on what Ukraine needs in terms of general needs for civilians and specific needs.

Each government party provides us with a list of needs. We clarify it with them and then provide it as a request for our partner countries through different types of mechanisms — for example, the civil protection mechanism, which works within the EU’s borders and through EADRCC (Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre). It’s a NATO mechanism. They provide more specific help.

In terms of priorities and in terms of help, I would like to divide it into two groups. I mean, like goods, it can be medicine, equipment — generators, etc. — and services. In terms of goods, we, on a very constant and a systematic basis, are providing our needs. We provide an exact consignee who receives these needs, so we can definitely deliver tracking information for our partners when they request it. So we are working hard to make this process more transparent.

Already we have several logistic hubs in the cross-border countries — Slovakia, Romania and Poland, of course. Poland is the biggest one. Where they are, all the operations are performed by the government of the cross-border country, which is really effective, and we can easily make customs clearance, we can sort everything. For example, in Romania, we already established a mechanism, thanks to our Israeli and American partners, with QR codes, so you can track where a pallet is going. It’s good information for our partners so they can see that the assistance is really delivered to those in need. So we are working really hard to make the system effective.

Nobody expected war in the center of Europe in the 21st century, and this is a huge crisis for all institutions. Even for U.N. system institutions, this is a huge crisis. And we can see how they are struggling with the bureaucracy, but struggling to help us. Ukraine is absolutely different from where they have worked before.

Ukraine is a developed country. We have an operating government, we have established logistics within our borders so we can deliver goods by ourselves, and we can work as an equal partners. And I would say that on the 17th day of war, we already reached this point where they understood the situation, and they are willing and they are collaborating.

VOA: Are you getting what you need?

Vasylenko: Definitely, in different volumes, we’re receiving different types of goods. Yes, we have certain problems with the clearing of proposals of the donor countries, but we are trying hard with this communication process to deliver accurate information about our needs and to help them clear those proposals for help.

But we need more because the war, unfortunately, is continuing, and we still have a lot of problems with food for civilians, with medicine. As the summer is approaching, we also need to start working, and we already started to, again, for the water purification systems and water purification tools, because we need to provide fresh water, clean water to our citizens so we can avoid this communicable disease spread.

VOA: The United States government is sending additional money to help Ukraine. A lot of that money will go through USAID (United States Agency for International Development). How is your relationship with American humanitarian assistance and U.N. humanitarian assistance? Are you getting what you need?

Vasylenko: Well, we are in close collaboration with USAID. We have a constant conversation on what is needed and how it can be provided. They are providing us with different types of services.

I think that this support can be and could be and should be increased because the humanitarian catastrophe that we already experienced will be much bigger. Because this is not only about how they can help during the war. We also need to think how they can help postwar. And this is something that we need to start building like already.

In terms of U.N., yes, I see that they started the process of providing what is needed, and they started this communication and consultation with the Ukrainian government to be more precise about the help that they providing. For example, WFP (World Food Program).

VOA: Are you saying it’s on the developing level?

Vasylenko: I would say it’s on a development level because they were not prepared for the Ukrainian war. This is a huge difference from all of the conflicts that they were involved in before. And they really needed to adjust. And because it’s a huge system, very bureaucratic, it really took time, but they started coping with this problem.

And WFP also now started delivering bigger amounts of help for those people in need. They are focusing on the south and southeast regions, and they are trying to reach those regions, and they are succeeding. And this is a huge help because under the flag of the U.N., it’s much easier to provide humanitarian assistance for those in need in the occupied territories.

And this is something that we need. We need to show the people of Ukraine that the government of Ukraine is working hard to help them and support them, and that they cannot be victims to Russian propaganda and cannot be used by Russian troops as a living shield.

So for us this is the highest priority: that the people of Ukraine will understand that the government is caring and trying to find solutions to help and support and advocate.

I really appreciate the work of U.N. agencies on establishing humanitarian corridors. We can see the recent success, and hopefully it will be a very sustainable process. And we definitely hope that we can provide help, together with them, to our civilians who are stuck in occupied cities.

VOA: In terms of corridors and delivering goods, do you see enough workers on the ground? I heard a lot of concerns about the security situation, obviously, and maybe there is a way to hire Ukrainians to work for those agencies, maybe. What kind of cooperation are you looking for to better assist each other?

Vasylenko: I think that you are absolutely right. We need to increase the number of people on the ground, and international agencies need to work with local people because local people know better. This is something that we are thinking not only in terms of the people on the ground, for minor work, like sorting and delivering goods. But this is something that we’re thinking in terms of the greater scale. We’re thinking that we definitely need to use resources of U.N. to train Ukrainian people so they can run the process and build the processes because Ukrainians know their country better and they can adjust accordingly.

But using the high standards of training of U.N. personnel and NATO will be a great benefit for U.N. and for Ukraine, because if we have high-profile employees trained accordingly to those high standards, and they can deliver, I will say it will be a huge success. Not only for something specialized, like demining training and training for PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) helpers, but also something high-profile: managers that can really manage the situation.

VOA: This crisis will not be over soon, and the war is ongoing. The Russians have started bombarding delivery facilities and train railway stations and so on — logistics hubs. How long do you think the international community should be ready to help? And should they be ready for the long run?

Vasylenko: Well, definitely they should be prepared for the long run. So this is a marathon.

I would say it’s an ultramarathon for all of us. We cannot predict how the enemy will behave. We cannot predict what they will do. But what we definitely can predict is that Ukraine will win, and Ukraine is standing for all the democratic values of the world, and the world should be ready to run this marathon for Ukraine. And this is not only about humanitarian assistance. And this is not only about a humanitarian catastrophe. This is also — we are a huge economy.

We are an integrated part of the world economy. And if we are suffering, the world will also feel the implication of this suffering.

Yes, the world needs to think, as I said before, in terms of humanitarian assistance. This is not only about delivering the goods but also about helping the people of Ukraine regain what was lost. And this is something that we need to think not only in terms of mental health support, because all people are under a huge stress.

We need to think about how to help Ukrainians start small businesses and microbusinesses so they can support the economy, how to train them, how to encourage them. The small and micro entrepreneurs are a backbone of the big economy. Small entrepreneurs can provide help for their local communities, and we need to help them to source it and to establish their small and micro enterprises. And this is something that the world can help with.

A lot of countries that were working before with Ukraine — Sweden, U.K., Canada —were focusing on the support of small entrepreneurs.

A project of Canada, supported by SURGe Victory Gardens, is working with small local communities to provide them with vegetables and berries so they can eat something that they’ve grown on their land. And they can serve it and share it with the community and then hire people who lost their jobs.

And this is not only about the money. This is also about gaining dignity because you can provide for yourself. You’re feeling like an established person. Because a lot, a lot, a lot of people lost their homes. They lost everything. They lost families; they lost businesses. Some lost not only a family business, but they left their homes barefoot. And this is something that can help them regain dignity.

VOA: Thank you.
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