Lebanese security forces fired tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons Sunday to disperse hundreds of protesters for a second straight day, ending what started as a peaceful rally in defiance of the toughest crackdown on anti-government demonstrations in two months.
The violence comes on the eve of a meeting between the president and parliamentary blocs in which resigned Prime Minister Saad Hariri is widely expected to be renamed to the post. The tension also reflects deepening divisions in the country that is grappling with a severe liquidity and foreign currency crunch.

Hariri resigned Oct. 29 amid nationwide protests that have accused the entire political elite of corruption and mismanagement amid Lebanon’s worst economic crisis in decades. The protesters say they won’t accept Hariri as prime minister, demanding an independent head of government not affiliated with existing parties.

“Saad, Saad, Saad, don’t dream of it anymore,” protesters chanted Sunday.

After weeks of bickering, the political parties failed to put forward independent names, most of them insisting on keeping their political share in the government.

The protests Sunday were largely peaceful, but some demonstrators lobbed water bottles and firecrackers at security forces guarding parliament. After a couple of hours, security forces chased the the protesters away, using batons and tear gas. The protesters dispersed in central Beirut. At one point, someone set fire to two tents set up by protesters in Martyrs’ Square, the epicenter for the anti-government protests for 60 days.
After hours of clashes, the army deployed around central Beirut, putting an end to the pitched street battles. The Lebanese Civil Defense said it transferred 20 injured to hospitals while it treated over 70 protesters on site. A news photographer was among the injured.

The army first deployed to separate protesters and rival supporters of political groups, according to reports on al-Jadeed. The local TV station filmed soldiers forcing protesters to retreat from central Beirut’s squares.

Tension has surfaced between protesters and supporters of the Shiite groups Hezbollah and Amal, after the later rejected criticism of their leaders. Meanwhile, the protesters were angered by what they said was the security forces’ harsh crackdown on their rallies while treading lightly when dealing with supporters of the powerful political groups.

Divisions also surfaced among the protesters who rallied in central Beirut. Some promoted confrontation with security forces to express anger at the crackdown and the government’s “business as usual” approach. Many protesters came prepared with helmets and tear gas, and they used plant pots and bins to throw up a barricade in the street.

“We have reclaim our country from this occupation,” one angry protester told LBC TV, referring to what he called a corrupt government in place for decades. Another told Al-Jadeed that on Sunday the protesters started the friction “as a reaction to unjust crackdown” the day before.

Thousands had gathered peacefully earlier Sunday dispersed by evening.

Security forces chased protesters in central Beirut, firing tear gas and rubber bullets. Some protesters hid in the commercial area surrounding the parliament and others in masks pelted officers with stones.

Demonstrators had chanted against the security crackdown. One raised a poster saying the tear gas won’t keep them away. “We are crying already,” it added, in a jab at the deep economic crisis Lebanese are facing.

The streets leading to parliament were filled with men, women and even children. Some huddled in smaller groups while others were lifted on shoulders chanting in megaphones.

“I came back today to pressure the parliament to make the right choice tomorrow and choose a prime minister from outside the political parties. If they don’t choose someone acceptable, we will be back to the streets again and again,”said Chakib Abillamah, a businessman who was demonstrating Saturday when violence broke out.

Another protester, Huda Kerbagi, said she expected violent protests for some more days, warning that violence will beget violence, particularly in a diverse society like Lebanon. “In other revolutions you have one bloc against one bloc and in this country we have many blocs.”

One protester from southern Lebanon, who gave his name as Ali, said he came to the Beirut protest to change the rulers because “none of them feels their offenses or have any conscience. Not one of them offered an apology.”

Saturday night into Sunday saw one of the most violent crackdowns on protesters since nationwide anti-government demonstrations began two months ago. The overnight confrontations in Beirut left more than 130 people injured, according to the Red Cross and the Lebanese Civil Defense. The Red Cross said none of the injured were in serious condition and most of them were treated on the spot.

Attackers in northern Lebanon also set fire to the offices of two major political parties early Sunday, the state-run National News Agency said.

In one attack, assailants broke the windows and set fire to the local office of Hariri’s political party in the town of Kharibet al-Jundi in the northern Akkar district. Photos circulated on social media of shattered glass and the aftermath of the fire.

In a separate attack also in Akkar, assailants stormed the local office of the largest party in parliament, affiliated with President Michel Aoun and headed by Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil. The party said the contents of the office in the town of Jedidat al-Juma had been smashed and burned.

Interior Minister Raya al-Hassan on Sunday ordered an investigation into the Beirut overnight clashes, which she said injured both protesters and security forces. She said she watched the confrontations “with concern, sadness and shock.”

Al-Hassan blamed “infiltrators” for instigating violence and called on the demonstrators to be wary of those who want to exploit their protests for political reasons. She didn’t elaborate.

The head of the Internal Security Forces, Maj. Gen. Imad Osman, turned up at the protest rally Sunday. He told reporters on the scene that the right to protest was guaranteed by the law. “But calm down, no need for violence,” he said, appealing to protesters.

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Chinese state television pulled the scheduled live broadcast of a football (soccer) game following one of the players’ comments online criticizing the government’s treatment of its Muslim Uighur minority.

China’s CCTV was scheduled to broadcast the football game between Arsenal and Manchester United, but instead decided to show a taped game between Tottenham Hotspur and the Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Arsenal footballer Mesut Ozil posted on Twitter Friday comments condemning China’s crackdown on Muslim minorities in the Western region, while also criticizing other Muslim countries for not speaking up against abuses.

“Korans are being burnt… Mosques are being shut down… Muslim schools are being banned… Religious scholars are being killed one by one… Brothers are forcefully being sent to camps,” Ozil wrote in Turkish on his Twitter account Friday.

#HayırlıCumalarDoğuTürkistan 🙏🏼 pic.twitter.com/dJgeK4KSIk

— Mesut Özil (@MesutOzil1088) December 13, 2019

The U.S., the United Nations and various human rights groups have accused China of detaining an estimated one million ethnic Muslims in so-called “re-education camps” in the remote Western province of Xinjiang in an attempt to force them to renounce their religion and heritage.

Chia’s state-run Global Times said on its Twitter account Sunday that CCTV made the decision to pull the game after Ozil’s comments had “disappointed fans and football governing authorities”.

Arsenal posted on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, that the the content Ozil shared was “entirely Ozil’s personal opinion”. The team has not posted a response on Twitter or released and official statement.

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Hours before the official result was complete for Britain’s general election, U.S. Democrats on the other side of the Atlantic were taking to social-media sites to draw quick conclusions on what Labour’s catastrophic defeat might mean for them and the electoral challenge they face with the 2020 White House contest.

Forewarned by an exit poll, which suggested Britain’s storied Labour Party was heading for its worst election rebuff since 1935, one of the first Democrats to hit the send button was Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security advisor to Barack Obama.

He tweeted: “There are a lot of factors that went into this massive defeat, but progressives have to learn from them to do better on both sides of the Atlantic.”

But that begs the crucial question: what lessons?

On the British side of the Atlantic, Labour politicians can’t agree about what went wrong for them in what’s likely to be seen as the most consequential British election for a quarter-of-a-century, with some, including defeated party leader Jeremy Corbyn, insisting that the radical socialist policies he advocated, including the nationalization of a swathe of the British economy, were individually popular and that the blame should go on Brexit.

A key Corbyn ally, Len McCluskey, the leader of the powerful Unite trade union, said the policies in the party’s manifesto were “very popular,” but “we very evidently didn’t win the argument over Brexit” and the party’s policy of holding a second referendum on European Union membership. McCluskey said the party’s “biggest mistake” was “perhaps underestimating the desire for people who had voted Leave to leave the European Union.”

But many Labour moderates believe Brexit-favoring working-class voters who deserted the party in droves would have overlooked the issue of Europe, if Labour had had a more popular and centrist leader and a manifesto shorn of leftwing dogma. In a post-election opinion poll, only 17 percent of Labour defectors cited Brexit as the reason for their switch to the Conservatives.

“Jeremy Corbyn was destined to lead the Labour Party to a catastrophic defeat,” according to Jason Cowley, the editor of the New Statesman magazine, Britain’s leading leftwing weekly. “If he believed that the British would vote for the most radical socialist manifesto in our history, he was sadly deluded. The party has learned nothing from past defeats: the more it moves to the left, the more people are alienated,” he added in a post-mortem assessment for Britain’s The Times newspaper.

Cowley says Labour has lost touch with Britain’s working-class and the party’s defeat Thursday is a parable of what can go wrong when a party rejects pragmatism for “ideological purity.”

Some Democrats in the U.S.  worry that might be the case with their own party and say the British election should be seen as window on the 2020 presidential race.

Former U.S. vice president Joe Biden, the current front-runner to win the Democratic nomination to take on Trump, has said that the British election should be taken as a warning against Democrats moving too far to the radical left ahead of the 2020 White House race.

Speaking to supporters in San Francisco, Biden argued that the radicalism of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn ultimately contributed to Boris Johnson’s landslide victory last week.

Others on the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, too, fear that Labour’s defeat may foreshadow trouble for their bid to vanquish Trump, especially if the Democrats pick a progressive nominee like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren as their champion in the 2020 presidential election.

Political trends on one side of the Atlantic have often presaged trends on the other, although often with time lags because of misaligned elections. Both countries were moderately conservative in the 1950s and Republican and Conservative governments accepted the welfare systems established by their predecessors in office and ideological rivals, Franklin Roosevelt and Britain’s Clement Attlee.

In the 1960s both countries trended left, although were divided over the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, free-market conservatives — Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan — reshaped their nations’ politics.

And in the 1990s “Third Way” Democrats, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, marched almost in lockstep to refashion their parties as market-friendly, seeking to blend center-right economics with center-left social policies. The 2016 Brexit referendum was seen by many, including Donald Trump’s then strategist Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief of staff, as foreshadowing Trump’s upset a few months later of Hillary Clinton, who saw her candidacy rebuffed in the fading towns of the “rust belt” states much like Corbyn was rejected in the post-industrial north of England.

Nationalist conservatives rule the roost now in Washington and London, prioritizing the nation state over multilateralism and favoring tough immigration restrictions. The skirmishing by Democrats over the British election result is enmeshing with the fight over who should get the party’s presidential nomination.

Democrats favoring a progressive candidate maintain there are no real lessons to draw from Johnson’s election win, echoing Corbyn supporters on the other side of the Atlantic by arguing Labour lost the election because of Brexit. “This UK election was ultimately an election about Brexit, and Brexit won. There’s no clean analogue to that in the U.S,” says Kate Aronoff, a senior fellow at Data for Progress, a progressive U.S. think tank.

“The UK election was undeniably bad for Labour, but it doesn’t at all vindicate centrists saying the U.S. should make one of them the Democratic nominee. Left policies are popular,” she tweeted.

Aronoff, like other U.S. progressives maintain that the kind of centrist politics espoused by establishment Democrats also got rebuffed by British voters in an election that dashed the hopes of Britain’s centrist Liberal Democrats, who presented themselves as a respectable alternative between the Conservatives and Labour. Their leader Jo Swinson even failed to get reelected as a lawmaker.

Some commentators who’ve chronicled the rise of populist nationalism say neither moderates nor progressives have the grasped the full scale of the realignment of Western politics that’s underway. The UK vote wasn’t just any election, says Matthew Goodwin, an academic at Britain’s Kent University and co-author of the book “National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy.” “The old left versus right economic divide continues to make way for a new cultural divide.”

He says Brexit was just one factor prompting working-class voters to trade left for right, with other driving issues coming down to promises of immigration reform and prioritizing national independence. Conservative nationalists have hit on a winning formula by leaning left on economics, with promises of increased government spending, and right on culture when it comes to identity politics and pledges to get tough on crime.

Goodwin believes it is easier for the right to move left on economics than it is for the left to move right on questions of national identity which are worrying socially conservative working-class voters.

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Officials in Afghanistan confirmed Sunday the United States plans to withdraw thousands of troops from the country, insisting the move stemmed from a mutual understanding between the two allied nations.

Sources in Kabul went on to tell VOA the drawdown process is expected to start in three months, though no official confirmation was available immediately about the timeline.

On Saturday, U.S. media reported that President Donald Trump’s administration intends to announce as early as later this week plans to reduce the number of American forces in Afghanistan by around 4,000.

A spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani insisted the troop reduction plan is not tied to the ongoing peace negotiations between Washington and the Taliban insurgency aimed at ending the 18-year-old war.

“The matter regarding the withdrawal of 4,000 troops had already been agreed upon in principle between the governments of Afghanistan and the United States,” Dawa Khan Meenapal told VOA. He shared no further details.

Currently around 13,000 U.S. troops are deployed to Afghanistan who are conducting counterterrorism missions in addition to advising and training Afghan security forces battling the Taliban.

Trump had told an American broadcaster (Fox News Radio) in a recent interview he might reduce the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to around 8,600.

The withdrawal of foreign forces has been at the center of a peace deal the U.S. has been trying to negotiate with the Taliban for over a year to end America’s longest war.

Trump had suspended the dialogue process in September citing the killing of an American soldier in a series of Taliban attacks in Kabul.

The two adversaries returned to the negotiating table in Qatar a week ago but Washington paused the talks again on Thursday in retaliation to a Taliban raid on the largest U.S.-run military base of Bagram, north of Kabul. The attack killed two Afghan civilians and injured scores of others.

U.S. and Taliban negotiators after months of meetings had concluded a draft agreement that outlined Taliban’s counterterrorism guarantees in exchange for a phased withdrawal of American and allied forces. The document would also require the insurgent group to reduce violence and enter into intra-Afghan negotiations to seek a permanent end to decades of hostilities in Afghanistan.

Critics have cautioned against an abrupt withdrawal of foreign forces, fearing it will embolden the insurgents.

“The conditions for withdrawal should be achieved so that Afghan security and defense forces are able to fill the vacuum, otherwise it can have a negative impact on the (battlefield) situation,” sayid Nadir Khan Katawazai, a member of the Afghan parliament.

But former Afghan military general, Atiqullah Amarkhel, insisted as long as Afghan forces continued to receive financial assistance to sustain their operational costs, the reduction in foreign troops will not have any impact because neither U.S. nor NATO troops are taking part in battlefield activities.

Reports of the U.S. withdrawal come just days after the Washington Post released hundreds of documents showing U.S. officials and military commanders had been lying about the progress of the war. The revelation has encouraged the Taliban to intensify its propaganda against the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan and justify the violence.

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Protests against a divisive new citizenship law raged Saturday as Washington and London issued travel warnings for northeast India following days of violent clashes that have killed two people.

Many in the far-flung, resource-rich northeast fear the new legislation will grant citizenship to large numbers of immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh, whom they accuse of stealing jobs and diluting the region’s cultural identity.

Several thousand protesters rallied in New Delhi late Saturday to urge Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to revoke the law, some holding signs reading: “Stop Dividing India.”

“People are not gathered here as Hindus or Muslims; people are gathered here as citizens of India. We reject this bill that has been brought by the Modi government and we want that equal treatment as is enshrined in our constitution,” said protester Amit Baruah, 55, a journalist.

Protests turned violent in West Bengal state, a hotbed of political unrest, with at least 20 buses and parts of two railway stations set on fire as demonstrators blocked roads and set fire to tires. No injuries were reported.

Epicenter of unrest

Tensions also simmered in Guwahati in Assam state, the epicenter of the unrest, where medical staff said two people were shot dead and 26 hospitalized late Thursday after security forces fired live rounds.

Assam police chief Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta told the Press Trust of India late Saturday that 85 people had been arrested in connection with the protests, and that officials were working to identify violent demonstrators caught on video.

Friday’s funeral procession for Sam Stafford, 18, who was killed in the demonstration, was attended by hundreds of angry and distraught mourners who shouted, “Long live Assam.”

“We were watching news all day on TV about the protests when my nephew left home in the evening. We asked him not to go but he went with his friends,” the student’s aunt, Julie Stafford, told AFP.

Anticipating further unrest, authorities extended an internet ban across Assam until Monday. Most shops were shut and anxious residents stocked up on supplies Saturday when the curfew was relaxed during the day.

The Citizenship Amendment Act allows for the fast-tracking of applications from religious minorities, including Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, but not Muslims.

Samujjal Bhattacharya from the All Assam Students Union, which has been at the forefront of the protests, told AFP the group would continue its fight against the new law “in the streets and in the court.”

‘Exercise caution’

Modi and Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe postponed a summit that was reportedly due to be held in Guwahati beginning Sunday, and the United States and Britain warned their nationals to “exercise caution” if traveling to the wider northeast region.

Islamic groups, the opposition and rights organizations say the law is a part of Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda to marginalize India’s 200 million Muslims.

He denies this and says that Muslims from the three countries are not covered by the legislation because they have no need of India’s protection.

Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah, on Saturday sought to reassure the northeastern states, saying the government would protect their “culture, social identity, language and political rights.”

Nellie massacre

Assam has long been a hotbed of ethnic tensions. In 1983, 2,000 people, mainly Bengali Muslims, were butchered in what became known as the Nellie massacre.

This year a citizenship registry left off 1.9 million people — many of them Muslims — unable to prove that they or their forebears were in Assam before 1971, leaving them to face possible statelessness.

“There has been this agitation [against] illegal migration from Bangladesh over many years,” Sanjoy Hazarika, a professor at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University, told AFP. “They feel that their rights to land, to jobs, and the entire social fabric, education, existing social services and so on will be impacted by this.”

On Friday, university students in Delhi clashed with police, who used batons and tear gas shells to quell the protests.

The passage of the bill also sparked angry scenes in both houses of parliament this week, with one lawmaker likening it to anti-Jewish legislation by the Nazis in 1930s Germany.

…

Green activists dumped horse manure and staged a mock hanging outside the venue of a U.N. climate summit in Madrid on Saturday, airing their frustration at the failure of world leaders to take meaningful action against global warming.

Led by grass-roots group Extinction Rebellion, the actions were timed to coincide with the closing of the COP25 summit, where negotiators have been unable to agree on how to implement the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

“Just like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, this COP’s fiddling of carbon accounting and negotiating of Article 6 is not commensurate to the planetary emergency we face,” Extinction Rebellion said in a statement.

Twelve members of the group stood on melting blocks of ice, nooses drawn tight around their necks to symbolize the 12 months remaining until the next summit, when the Paris deal enters a make-or-break implementation phase.

Attached to the pile of manure was a short message to leaders saying, “The horses— stops here.”

In contrast to a protest held last weekend, in which hundreds of demonstrators blocked one of Madrid’s central shopping streets for a mass disco dance, the mood at the gathering was subdued.

‘Nothing has really changed’

“Even if they reach an agreement, it’s still not enough. This is the 25th COP they’ve had and nothing has really changed,” protester Emma Deane told Reuters from her perch atop an ice block, holding her young daughter in her arms. “She’s going to grow up in a world where there’s no food on the shelves, and that breaks my heart.”

Still, Extinction Rebellion spokesman Ronan McNern stressed the importance of humor in the face of the climate crisis.

“Out of s— comes the best roses. We hope that the international community comes together to create a beautiful future,” McNern said.

…

North Korea says it successfully performed another “crucial test” at its long-range rocket launch site that would further strengthen its “reliable strategic nuclear deterrent.”

The announcement on Saturday comes as North Korea continues to pressure the Trump administration over an end-of-year deadline set by leader Kim Jong Un to salvage faltering nuclear negotiations.

North Korea’s Academy of Defense Science did not specify what was tested on Friday. Just days earlier, the North said it conducted a “very important test” at the site, prompting speculation that it involved a new engine for either a space launch vehicle or an intercontinental ballistic missile.

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Pentagon Tests Long-Banned Ballistic Missile Over Pacific

The Pentagon says it’s conducted a flight test of a missile that had been banned under a treaty that the United States and Russia abandoned last summer

The North Korean announcement suggests that the country is preparing to do something to provoke the United States if Washington doesn’t back down and make concessions in deadlocked nuclear negotiations.

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The Xinjiang regional government in China’s far west is deleting data, destroying documents, tightening controls on information and has held high-level meetings in response to leaks of classified papers on its mass detention camps for Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities, according to four people in contact with government employees there.

Top officials deliberated how to respond to the leaks in meetings at the Chinese Communist Party’s regional headquarters in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, some of the people said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of fears of retribution against themselves, family members and the government workers.

The meetings began days after The New York Times published last month a cache of internal speeches on Xinjiang by top leaders including Chinese President Xi Jinping. They continued after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists worked with news organizations around the world including The Associated Press to publish secret guidelines for operating detention centers and instructions on how to use technology to target people.

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Families of Uighurs Abroad Increasingly Targeted by China

There are an estimated 13 million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities living in the Xinjiang region in northwest China

The Chinese government has long struggled with its 11-million-strong Uighur population, an ethnic Turkic minority native to Xinjiang, and in recent years has detained 1 million or more Uighurs and other minorities in the camps.

Xinjiang officials and the Chinese foreign ministry have not directly denied the authenticity of the documents, though Urumqi Communist Party chief Xu Hairong called reports on the leaks “malicious smears and distortions.”

The Xinjiang government did not respond to a fax for comment on the arrests, the tightened restrictions on information and other measures responding to the leaks. The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not have an immediate comment.

Xinjiang’s government had already mandated stricter controls on information in October, before the news reports, according to three of the people, all Uighurs outside Xinjiang.

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Egyptian Police Said to Detain Chinese Uighurs in Wide Sweep

Chinese students from the Uighur ethnic minority have been detained in Egypt in a broad police sweep that has shaken the country’s sizeable Uighur student and expatriate community, activists said Thursday.

Egyptian police have detained scores of Uighur students, including 20 from Cairo’s Al-Azhar University who were stopped in the city of Alexandria on their way out of the country late Wednesday and told they would be deported to China, said Abduweli Ayup, a Uighur activist in Turkey.

Ayup said he…

They include orders for community-level officials to burn paper forms containing sensitive personal details on residents in their area such as their detention status, and for various state offices to throw away computers, tighten management of classified information, and ensure all information related to the camps is now stored on databases disconnected from the internet in special, restricted-access rooms to bar hackers, the Uighurs said.

“They became much more serious about the transfer of information,” one said.

Publication of the classified documents prompted the central government in Beijing to put more pressure on Xinjiang officials, several of the Uighurs said.

Restrictions on information appear to be tightening further. Some university teachers and district-level workers in Urumqi have been ordered to clean out sensitive data on their computers, phones and cloud storage, and to delete work-related social media groups, according to one Uighur with direct knowledge of the situation.

In other cases, the state appears to be confiscating evidence of detentions. Another Uighur who had been detained in Xinjiang years before said his ex-wife called him two weeks ago and begged him to send his release papers to her, saying eight officers had come to her home to search for the papers, then threatened she’d be jailed for life if she couldn’t produce the papers.

“It’s an old matter, and they’ve know I’ve been abroad for a long time,” he said. “The fact that they suddenly want this now must mean the pressure on them is very high.”

Some government workers have been rounded up as the state investigates the source of the leaks. In one case an entire family in civil service was arrested. Abduweli Ayup, a Uighur linguist in exile, said his wife’s relatives in Xinjiang – including her parents, siblings, and in-laws – were detained shortly after the leaks were published, although Ayup said they had no relation to the leaks as far as he was aware. Some people in touch with relatives outside China were also investigated and seized, Ayup said.

It is unknown how many have been detained since the leaks.

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Stepped-up Surveillance of Uighurs Sends ‘Relatives’ into Homes

Authorities in Xinjiang launched what they call a new “relatives’ week” program this month, which requires local civil servants to spend a week with Uighur families in rural areas by the year’s end. While officially trumpeted as a way to promote ethnic harmony, the move is widely seen by observers as stepped-up surveillance of the Muslim minority that may instead fuel, rather than ease, inter-racial tensions.Beginning December 11, thousands of cadres from the northwestern province traveled to the…

Earlier this week, a Uighur woman in the Netherlands told a Dutch daily, de Volkskrant, that she was the source of the documents published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The woman, Asiye Abdulaheb, said that after she posted one page on social media in June, Chinese state agents sent her death threats and tried to recruit her ex-husband to spy on her.

The leaked documents lay out the Chinese government’s deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities even before they commit a crime, and to rewire their thoughts and the language they speak. They reveal that facilities Beijing calls “vocational training schools” are forced ideological and behavioral re-education centers run in secret.

The papers also show how Beijing is pioneering a new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence. Drawing on data collected by mass surveillance technology, computers issued the names of tens of thousands of people for interrogation or detention in just one week.

The leaks come at a delicate time in relations between Washington and Beijing, amid ongoing negotiations to end a trade war and U.S. concerns about the situation in Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous Chinese territory where police have clashed with pro-democracy protesters.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, aimed at pressuring China over the mass detentions in Xinjiang. Beijing swiftly denounced the bill as foreign meddling. State media reported that the Chinese government was considering retaliatory measures including visa bans on U.S. officials.

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U.S. House Democrats are one big step away from impeaching President Donald Trump. After 14 hours of contentious partisan debate, the House Judiciary Committee on Friday approved formal charges alleging Trump abused the power of his office and obstructed congressional efforts to investigate him. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson looks ahead to the final vote on impeachment on the House floor

…

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee reconvenes Friday morning to vote on articles of impeachment against U.S. President Donald Trump. The committee recessed late Thursday after 14 hours of debate.

The Democratic-controlled committee rebuffed Republican attempts Thursday to weaken or throw out the allegations and instead will vote on sending them to the full House of Representatives for a vote, likely to be held next week.
 
Democratic lawmakers, after hours of at-times rancorous partisan claims and counterclaims with Republicans, rejected the Republican effort to eliminate the impeachment allegation that Trump abused the presidency by pushing Ukraine to investigate one of his chief 2020 Democratic election rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden.
 
The committee is also expected to approve a second article of impeachment, that Trump obstructed Congress by refusing to turn over hundreds of documents to impeachment investigators and blocked key Trump administration officials from testifying. The unified Democratic majority has the votes to block Republican efforts aimed at slowing the push to impeach Trump.
 
Flawed case?

Republicans contended that the case against Trump is flawed, that the committee was rushing to judgment without hearing more witnesses. They noted that Trump in September released the $391 million in military aid to Ukraine that Trump had temporarily blocked without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy launching the politically tinged Biden investigation that the U.S. leader wanted.
 
Trump asked Zelenskiy in a late July phone call to “do us a favor” by opening the investigation of Biden, his son Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian natural gas company and a debunked theory that Ukraine worked to undermine Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
 
Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, a staunch Trump ally, contended that the “us” in Trump’s request was a reference to the United States, not to a Trump request to benefit himself politically.
 
But Democratic Congressman David Cicilline, supporting Trump’s impeachment, said that Trump in his call with Zelenskiy “never once uttered the word corruption” to investigate corruption generally in Ukraine. “It was about a smear on Vice President Biden,” Cicilline argued.
 
If the full House, as expected, votes to impeach Trump, he would become only the third American leader to be impeached in the country’s 243-year history, setting the stage for a trial in the Republican-majority Senate in January, where his conviction and removal from office remains unlikely.
 

Trump’s stance

Trump denies wrongdoing and has ridiculed the impeachment effort. He has repeatedly referred to his discussions with Zelenskiy as “perfect,” and pointed to statements by Zelenskiy and other Ukrainian officials that they did not feel pressured by Trump to open the investigations in order to get the military assistance it wanted to help fight pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
 
House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler said that by withholding the military assistance, Trump “weakens an ally who advances American security interests by fighting an American adversary” and “weakens America. And when the president demands that a foreign government investigate his domestic political rivals, he corrupts our elections.”   
 
The top Republican on the committee, Congressman Doug Collins, said Democrats have wanted to impeach Trump since the moment he took office in 2017, and that the facts of the case do not match the allegations they have presented.
 
“The president did not commit any crimes,” he said. “The president had a longstanding skepticism of foreign aid and a deeply held belief that Ukraine was corrupt, and not a good destination for American taxpayer dollars.”
 
 

Next steps

Once the committee approves the articles, the full House with its Democratic majority is expected to vote on them next week.
 
The final step in the process would be a trial in the Senate, which Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday would occur next month.
 
“Assuming that House Democrats send us articles of impeachment next week, a Senate trial will have to be our first item of business in January,” McConnell said.
 
A conviction in the Senate would lead to Trump’s removal from office, but that is highly unlikely because at least 20 Republicans would have to side with Democrats to meet the required threshold of 67 of the chamber’s 100 members.
 
Two other U.S. presidents — Andrew Johnson in the mid-19th century and Bill Clinton two decades ago — were impeached, but both were acquitted in the Senate and remained in office.

…

President Donald Trump is now expected to become only the third U.S. president impeached by the House of Representatives.

If the Democratic-controlled House votes next week to impeach Trump for allegedly abusing his power related to his dealings with Ukraine, the case would move to the Republican-controlled Senate for an impeachment trial where the political landscape is much more favorable to the president.

While Democrats dominate the House, Republicans hold 53 of the 100 seats in the Senate. Democrats hold 45, and also count on the votes of two independents —  Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

In order for Trump to be removed from office, the Senate, sitting as jurors, would need to convict him of one or more articles of impeachment by a two-thirds majority vote, or 67 of the 100 senators, according to the U.S. Constitution.

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A high bar

Democrats would need to find a way to get 20 Senate Republicans to support conviction. Given polls that show Republican voters are still firmly behind the president, experts see Trump’s removal as highly unlikely.

“I do not see how in the world you could ever get 20 Republican senators to vote to oust Donald Trump,” said University of Virginia analyst Larry Sabato via Skype. “They might as well vote to oust and then announce their resignations, because they won’t be serving for very long once they cast that vote.”

While House Republicans have stood with the president on impeachment, a few Senate Republicans such as Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine have been critical of the president at times.

Associated Press Washington bureau chief Julie Pace said those senators will be watched closely in a Senate trial.

“It does not mean that they will vote to convict him, but it does mean that we may see a scenario in which you have at least some members of Trump’s party expressing real concern about his interactions with Ukraine.”

What kind of trial?

There is also the issue of how a Senate impeachment trial will be conducted.  As laid out in the U.S. Constitution, Chief Justice John Roberts would preside. But the Senate approves the rules for consideration of evidence and witnesses.

Trump has said he would like to call a host of witnesses, including Democratic House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, and the whistleblower who filed the initial complaint over the president’s dealings with Ukraine.

House Democrats have accused Trump of abuse of power by demanding that Ukraine announce an investigation of the Bidens, and a discredited theory that Ukraine conspired with Democrats to interfere in the 2016 election in exchange for the release of $391 million in military aid that was temporarily held up by the White House.

White House officials expect the trial procedures will benefit the president. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Trump would be helped “where you get to introduce live witnesses and have them cross-examined, and introduce your own pieces of evidence, and challenge other people’s evidence.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans are said to favor a shorter, streamlined trial that would not include witnesses. They would prefer to dispense of the impeachment case against Trump fairly quickly, perhaps in a few weeks. By contrast, the Clinton impeachment trial in 1999 ran for five weeks.

“I’m not in the camp of calling a bunch of witnesses.  I think as an American, the best thing we can do is deep-six this thing,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told Axios.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has warned Republicans against a partisan trial.

“The best way to do something as important and almost as hallowed a procedure as this is in a bipartisan way,” the New York Democrat said.

That may not suit Trump, who reportedly wants to use impeachment as motivation to drive his supporters to the polls in next year’s presidential election.

Trump has denied the allegations and is counting on Senate Republicans to vote to acquit him in an impeachment trial.

“The radical left Democrats and the failed Washington establishment are trying to erase your votes, nullify the election and overthrow our democracy,” Trump told supporters this week at a campaign rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania. “It is not going to happen, don’t worry about it.”

A test for the Senate

The Senate has been down this road before.

In 1999, Clinton was acquitted of perjury and obstruction of justice related to his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

In 1868, President Andrew Johnson survived a Senate trial by a single vote after he was impeached for violating a congressional act protecting high government officials from removal.

In Trump’s case, House Democrats have accused him of abuse of power for pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, and obstruction of Congress for ordering administration officials to refuse to testify or provide documents as part of the impeachment inquiry.

“Our president holds the ultimate public trust,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, as he introduced the two articles of impeachment. “When he betrays that trust and puts himself before country, he endangers the Constitution, he endangers our democracy, and he endangers our national security.”

No matter the outcome, a Senate trial will be a demanding test for U.S. democracy.

“I would hope and pray that all of my Senate colleagues will take a deep breath no matter where we have been so far and step back and realize this is probably the most important constitutional responsibility we have,” Democratic Sen. Mark Warner told reporters at the Capitol.

Perhaps looking ahead to a January trial, Senate Chaplain Barry Black offered up an appeal this week for divine guidance as the Senate was gaveled to order.

“Lord, guide our senators to the right paths. Lead them beside still waters. Restore their souls.”

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As Kenya marks the anniversary of the end of British colonial rule more than five decades ago (Dec 12, 1963), two communities in the Great Rift Valley want the United Nations to investigate a colonial-era land grab.  The Kipsigis and Talai communities accuse the British of collective punishment by forcefully evicting them off their land, which was turned into profitable tea farms. Mohammed Yusuf reports from Kericho, Kenya.  

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Nearly a year and a half after India scrapped controversial legislation criminalizing homosexuality, the Indian capital has hosted its first ever queer literature festival. Turning the focus on stories and experiences of the community, the two day meet explored common ground between different identities of society. Anjana Pasricha reports from New Delhi.

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Fears mounted Wednesday that a deadly shooting at a Jewish market in Jersey City was an anti-Semitic attack as authorities recounted how a man and woman deliberately pulled up to the place in a rental van with at least one rifle and got out firing.

A day after the gun battle and standoff that left six people dead — the two killers, a police officer and three people who had been inside the store — state and federal law enforcement officials warned they have not established the motive for the attack.

“The why and the ideology and the motivation — that’s what we’re investigating,” New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said, adding that authorities are also trying to determine if anyone else was involved.

But Mayor Steve Fulop said surveillance video of the attackers made it clear they targeted the kosher market, and he pronounced the bloodshed a hate crime against Jews, as did New York’s mayor and governor.

Also, investigators believe the two dead attackers — who were believed to be a couple — identified themselves in the past as Black Hebrew Israelites, a movement whose members have been known to rail against whites and Jews, according to a law enforcement official who was briefed on the matter but was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

In addition, authorities have found social media postings from at least one of the killers that were anti-police and anti-Jewish, the official said. The FBI on Wednesday searched the Harlem headquarters of the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, which is the formal name of the Black Hebrew group, according to the official.

The killers were identified as David N. Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 50 — both of them also prime suspects in the slaying of a livery driver found dead in car trunk in nearby Bayonne over the weekend, Grewal said. Anderson served about four months in prison in New Jersey on weapons charges and was paroled in 2011, authorities said.

Two of the victims at the store were identified by members of the Orthodox Jewish community as Mindel Ferencz, 31, who with her husband owned the grocery, and 24-year-old Moshe Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn who was shopping there. The Ferencz family had moved to Jersey City from Brooklyn. Authorities identified the third victim as Miguel Douglas, 49.

“The report from the Jersey City mayor saying it was a targeted attack makes us incredibly concerned in the Jewish community,” said Evan Bernstein, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil rights organization. “They want answers. They demand answers. If this was truly a targeted killing of Jews, then we need to know that right away, and there needs to be the pushing back on this at the highest levels possible.”

The bloodshed in the city of 270,000 people across the Hudson River from New York City began at a graveyard, where Detective Joseph Seals, a 40-year-old member of a unit devoted to taking illegal weapons off the street, was gunned down by the assailants, authorities said. They then drove the van about a mile to the kosher market.

Grewal said that within seconds of pulling up to the market, Anderson got out with a rifle and immediately began shooting, and Graham followed him into the store. He would not say whether Graham had a weapon.

A pipe bomb was found in the van, FBI agent Gregory Ehrie said.

Jersey City’s mayor said it was clear that the killers deliberately made their way toward the kosher market, passing many other possible targets along the way, and calmly and promptly opened fire.

“We shouldn’t parse words on whether this is a hate crime at this point. This was a hate crime against Jewish ppl + hate has no place,” he tweeted, adding: “Some will say don’t call it anti-semitism or a hate crime till a longer review but being Jewish myself + the grandson of holocaust survivors I know enough to call it what this is.”

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio likewise said the attack was a “premeditated, violent, anti-Semitic hate crime,” while New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called it a “deliberate attack on the Jewish community.” They announced tighter police protection of synagogues and other Jewish establishments in New York as a precaution.

The drawn-out battle with police filled the streets with the sound of high-powered rifle fire and turned the city into what looked like a war zone, with SWAT officers in full tactical gear swarming the neighborhood. The attackers were killed in the shootout with police.

A fourth bystander was shot at the store when the attackers burst in, but escaped, Grewal said. His name was not released.

Rabbi Moshe Shapiro said he spoke with the survivor at a hospital. “He said the guy next to him fell to the ground,” Shapiro said. “He suffered two gunshot wounds but managed to run out of the store and climb over fences.”

In the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, 11 people were killed in an October 2018 shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Last April, a gunman opened fire at a synagogue north of San Diego, killing a woman and wounding a rabbi and two others.

The kosher grocery is a central fixture in a growing community of Orthodox Jews who have been moving to Jersey City in recent years and settling in what was a mostly black section of Jersey City, causing some resentment.

Mordechai Rubin, a member of the local Jewish emergency medical services, said the small Jewish community has grown over the past three or four years, made up mostly of people from Brooklyn seeking a “nicer, quieter” and more affordable place to live. Next to the store is a synagogue with a school and day care center where 40 students were present at the time of the shooting, he said.

“It’s unfortunate what happened, but we don’t even want to think about what would have happened if they made their way up to the day care or to the synagogue,” he said.

Authorities also warned that several fake Go Fund me pages have popped up purporting to be raising funds for the family of the slain officer, a father of five.

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George Laurer, who invented the universal product code, has died at his home in North Carolina. He was 94. 

The UPC or bar code is the unique marking — made up of black stripes of varying thicknesses and a 12-digit number — allotted to products sold worldwide. It allows retailers to identify each product and its price by using a scanner. 

Laurer, who died Dec. 5, was working as an electrical engineer at IBM when he was assigned to the project, an idea pioneered by colleague Norman Woodland, who died in 2012.

Laurer brought Woodland’s idea to fruition in the 1970s with the help of lasers and computers. 

Laurer said retailers spent millions in time and labor putting price tags on every item. The bar code allowed them to reduce pricing errors and keep an accurate count of inventory. 

The first product scanned, in June 1974, was a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum. It is now on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington. 
 

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More than 70% of the African forest elephant species has been wiped out, primarily by poachers slaughtering them for their ivory.  Park rangers are on the front lines defending them. But in the Central African country of Gabon these park rangers, also known as eco-guards, aren’t going it alone. Now the U.S military is joining the fight by helping to train the rangers who protect the elephants. VOA Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb gives us an exclusive look at the counter-poaching effort in central Gabon.

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Leading House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment against U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday, accusing him of abusing his office for personal political gain and obstructing the congressional impeachment inquiry.

It was only the fourth time in the 243-year history of the United States that impeachment charges have been brought against an American leader, although Trump’s removal from office remains unlikely.

House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler, head of the panel that will first consider the impeachment articles, contended that Trump “sees himself as above the law.” Nadler alleged that Trump threatened U.S. national security by withholding key military aid to Ukraine. He said the president threatened the integrity of the 2020 election, in which he is seeking a second term in office, and sought to block congressional review of his actions.

“He consistently puts himself above the country,” Nadler said.

Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, who led the weeks-long impeachment inquiry against Trump, called the allegations against the U.S. leader “overwhelming and uncontested.”

But Trump has said he did nothing wrong and none of his Republican supporters in Congress has called for his impeachment and removal from office.

“Today the House Democrats announce these two flimsy, pathetic, ridiculous articles of impeachment,” Trump told supporters at a Tuesday night rally. “They want to win an election and that’s the only way they can do it.”

The essence of the case against Trump stems from his months-long effort and that of his key aides to push Ukraine to investigate one of Trump’s chief 2020 Democratic rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden, at the same time the president was temporarily withholding $391 million in military assistance Kyiv wanted to help fight pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

“Nadler just said that I ‘pressured Ukraine to interfere in our 2020 Election,'” Trump tweeted. “Ridiculous, and he knows that is not true. Both the President & Foreign Minister of Ukraine said, many times, that there “WAS NO PRESSURE.” Nadler and the Dems know this, but refuse to acknowledge!”

Nadler just said that I “pressured Ukraine to interfere in our 2020 Election.” Ridiculous, and he knows that is not true. Both the President & Foreign Minister of Ukraine said, many times, that there “WAS NO PRESSURE.” Nadler and the Dems know this, but refuse to acknowledge!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2019

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham called the impeachment effort a “partisan, gratuitous and pathetic attempt to overthrow the Trump Administration and the results of the 2016 election.” She said Trump “expects to be fully exonerated” at a trial in the Senate next month.

Nadler said his panel will consider the allegations in the next few days, possibly voting on the articles of impeachment by the end of the week.

That would set the stage for a simple majority vote in the full Democratic-controlled House of Representatives next week, when Trump is likely to become the third U.S. president to be impeached, following Andrew Johnson in the mid-19th century and Bill Clinton two decades ago, although both were later acquitted in Senate trials and remained in office. In 1974, President Richard M. Nixon resigned in the face of certain impeachment.

If the House impeaches him, Trump would then stand trial in the Republican-majority Senate, although his conviction and removal from office remains unlikely because as yet no Republican has called for his ouster from the White House. While a small number of Republicans have voiced dismay at Trump’s request to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Biden, at least 20 Republican senators would have to turn against Trump to reach the 67-vote threshold for a conviction in the 100-member chamber.

Nadler’s Judiciary Committee wrapped up impeachment hearings Monday with Nadler saying Trump’s efforts to “cheat to win an election” represent a threat to national security.

Republican defenders of Trump say that ultimately Trump released the military aid to Ukraine without Zelenskiy announcing any investigation into Biden, his son Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian natural gas company or a debunked theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election against Trump, while the U.S. intelligence community concluded it was Russia that interfered to help Trump.

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The number of journalists imprisoned globally remains near a record high, according to an annual survey released Wednesday by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which identifies China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt as the world’s largest jailers of reporters.

“For the fourth consecutive year, hundreds of journalists are imprisoned globally as authoritarians like Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Mohammad bin Salman, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi show no signs of letting up on the critical media,” says CPJ’s 2019 Prison Census.

Although the number of journalists imprisoned worldwide slipped from 253 to 245 in 2019, the New York-based press freedom watchdog also says that journalists charged with reporting “false” or “fake news” continues to climb.

“The number charged with ‘false news’ rose to 30, compared with 28 last year,” says the report, explaining that the charge, most prolifically levied in Egypt, “has climbed steeply since 2012, when CPJ found only one journalist worldwide facing the allegation.”

“In the past year, repressive countries, including Russia and Singapore, have enacted laws criminalizing the publication of ‘fake news.’”

This year’s census marks the first time since 2015 that Turkey did not rank as the world’s largest jailer, in part because Ankara, “having stamped out virtually all independent reporting, released journalists awaiting trial or appeal.”

China — second only to Turkey as one of the world’s most repressive media environments for years — has 47 journalists in prison, the same number as it did in 2018, which largely resulted from reporters attempting to document large-scale persecution of the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority in Xinjiang.

“In one recent Chinese case, Sophia Huang Xueqin, a freelancer who formerly worked as an investigative reporter at Chinese outlets, was arrested in October shortly after describing on her blog what it was like to march with the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong,” the report states.

Saudi Arabia, “where the number of journalists jailed has risen steadily since 2011,” the report states, is currently holding 26 reporters behind bars amid allegations of torture.

The growing number of arrests and documented abuse, say CPJ researchers, reflect a brutal crackdown on dissent under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom U.S. and UN officials blame for the October 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Istanbul.

The crown prince told CBS News’s “60 Minutes” in September accepted responsibility for Kashoggi’s murder, but denied that it was done on his order. 

Most of the 26 reporters currently imprisoned in Egypt, CPJ reports, are prosecuted en masse, brought before a judge in groups, typically to face charges of terrorism and “fake news” reports.

Egyptian government officials, much like their counterparts in Turkey, China, Russian, and Iran, typically insist they target only reporters who aim to destabilize their respective countries.

CPJ’s 2019 census also says Iran saw an uptick of journalist incarcerations in 2019, as did Russia, which now has seven reporters in state custody.

“Of 38 journalists jailed in sub-Saharan Africa, the bulk remain in Eritrea, where most have not been heard from for nearly two decades,” the report says, adding that Cameroon has the second worst record of African nations, while evidence of free-speech safeguards are backsliding in Ethiopia and Nigeria.

Three journalists are jailed in the Americas, with incarcerations in Venezuela, Honduras, and Cuba.

“The highest number of journalists imprisoned in any year since CPJ began keeping track is 273 in 2016,” the report states. “After China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the worst jailers are Eritrea, Vietnam, and Iran.”

CPJ’s annual census does not account for disappeared journalists or those held by non-state actors. The survey accounts only for journalists in government custody as of 12:01 a.m. on Dec. 1, 2019.

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The Afghan government, claiming progress in the ongoing war against militants, is downplaying The Washington Post’s recent report that said U.S. officials made overly optimistic statements about the war that they knew to be false.

The Washington Post this week published a trove of government documents, revealing that U.S. officials made false statements and hid evidence about the years long conflict.

Fawad Aman, a spokesperson for the Afghan Ministry of Defense, downplayed the Post report, telling VOA Tuesday that the Afghan forces have made tremendous progress in fighting the militants.

“If we have a comparative glance at the war in Afghanistan, we have had tremendous progress in the past two years,” Aman told VOA.

“For instance, we destroyed IS-K (Islamic State-Khurasan) in eastern Afghanistan. In addition, due to our military operations, Taliban suffered many casualties this year. Taliban’s offensive capabilities have been taken away from them. We are progressing well and Afghan security forces are making progress and we are optimistic about the future,” he added.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has denied intentionally misleading the public about the war in Afghanistan.

“There has been no intent by DoD (Department of Defense) to mislead Congress or the public,” Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Col. Thomas Campbell wrote to VOA on Monday. “The information contained in the interviews was provided to SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) for the express purpose of inclusion in SIGAR’s public reports.”

Implications of the revelation

Analysts have had mixed reactions, however, about whether the recent report reveals anything major that has not been published over the years by the U.S. government’s watchdog, tasked with overseeing U.S. military expenditure in the country. The report has also renewed debate over U.S. engagement in Afghanistan,

Michael Semple, a longtime expert on Afghanistan, said he thinks that, except for some details, the new report does not reveal anything that was not already known.

“For anyone who has followed Afghanistan closely …, there is nothing new in the latest Washington Post report. A bit more detail, yes, and an updated commentary,” Semple said.

“The main themes in the interviews the WP (Washington Post) obtained were confusion, private pessimism, public optimism and corruption,” he added. “But these themes have been debated for the past 18 years. And to be fair to the Inspector General, who commissioned these interviews, his team has already published a useful series of reports based on the interviews.”

SIGAR was created by the U.S. Congress to provide independent and objective oversight of Afghanistan reconstruction efforts.

More debates?

Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert at the Washington-based Wilson Center, echoes Semple’s assessment. However, he said the revelations would likely lead to more debates on Afghanistan in the U.S. Congress.

“The Afghanistan papers don’t reveal much that wasn’t already known,” Kugelman said.

“I imagine these new documents will prompt members of Congress to convene hearings to ask what went wrong,” he added.

Some members of Congress are already talking about the details released in the newspaper’s report.

U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said Tuesday the U.S. should leave Afghanistan.

“…Our troops deserve so much better, and the public deserves honesty from the Pentagon. We need to declare victory and leave now! U.S. officials misled the public about the war in Afghanistan, confidential documents reveal,” Paul said on Twitter.

This is a MUST READ. Our troops deserve so much better, and the public deserves honesty from the Pentagon. We need to declare victory and leave now! U.S. officials misled the public about the war in Afghanistan, confidential documents reveal. https://t.co/CwfbIsPobP

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) December 10, 2019

Keeping the truth from Americans

Jason H. Campbell, a policy researcher at Washington-based Rand Corp., believes the report highlights U.S. limitations versus an effort to conceal the truth.

“My big takeaway from the Post story is that this is more indicative of the limitations of the U.S. bureaucracy than an indictment on some nefarious and coordinated effort to keep the truth from the American people,” Campbell said.

“Fundamentally, when engaging in a counterinsurgency effort that is a ‘war of choice’ (insofar that there is no immediate and monumental threat to the U.S. homeland), as a bureaucracy you’re constantly redefining what you’re willing to live with and inherently averse to the risks associated with a full withdrawal,” he added.

“Ultimately, however, the political risk of folding up the tents in Afghanistan was collectively seen as greater than sustaining some level of effort so long as there was some progress to point to,” Campbell said.

Matt Dearing, an assistant professor at the Washington-based National Defense University, agreed with Cambell’s assessment. He added, if anything, the papers reveal the frustrations among “stability practitioners” toward unclear policies.

“The Afghanistan papers are a raw display of the frustrations stability practitioners faced – a state-building strategy based on faulty assumptions, unclear vision and goals from policymakers, inconsistent partners, and the inability to forecast beyond one-year deployments,” Dearing said.

“These revelations might be a shock to the vast majority of Americans, but for those who served in Afghanistan, these frustrations are all too real,” he said.

Sanctuaries in Pakistan

Some experts charge that the issue of sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan, which has continued to fuel the Afghan war and played a key role in its perpetuation, has been largely ignored in the recent report.

“The report also doesn’t cover many other issues, such as complaints or concerns from many military and civilians experts on Taliban sanctuaries, their network of support, and other political matters such as in early times of the war when Talban were ready for talks with the Afghan government,” said Sher Jan Ahmadzai, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

“Those and many others were many opportunities gone in vain,” Ahmadzai added.

Peace talks

Since 2018, the U.S. has stepped up efforts to seek a negotiated settlement to the war and has since engaged in direct talks with the Taliban. Those talks fell apart in September 2019 after Trump canceled the negotiations, citing increased violence in Afghanistan perpetrated by the militants in an attempt to gain more leverage at the negotiating table.

Both sides restarted negotiations Saturday after a three-month delay. Some experts believe the recent revelations would not harm the talks.

“I do think there will be increased public support in the U.S. for peace talks, because Americans, now understanding how messy this war has become, will want their government to expedite plans to leave Afghanistan,” Kugelman, of the Wilson Center, said.

The Afghan war has claimed the lives of more than 2,400 U.S. service members and cost Washington nearly $1 trillion.

VOA’s Pentagon Correspondent Carla Babb contributed to this story.

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American billionaire and Democratic presidential contender Michael Bloomberg says that the next U.S. president should halt fossil fuel subsidies altogether.

Bloomberg, who launched his campaign less than three weeks ago, is attending a United Nations global climate conference in Madrid that is kicking into high gear.

Ministers from nearly 200 countries are arriving on Tuesday to tackle some of the tough issues that negotiations couldn’t resolve over the past week, including finalizing the rules for international carbon markets that economists say could help drive down emissions and help poor countries to cope with the effects of rising temperatures.     

Opening an event on sustainable finances organized by the summit host, Spain, Bloomberg said that “the next president of the United States should end all subsidies for fossil fuel companies and fossil fuel extraction, and that includes tax breaks and other special treatment.”

“He or she should reinvest that funding into clean energy, which will also create a lot of new jobs,” he added.

The 77-year-old businessman and former New York mayor is expected to share the results of his private push to organize thousands of U.S. cities and businesses to abide by the terms of a global climate treaty that the Trump administration is working to abandon.

 “Americans are willing to continue to work even with a climate change denier in the White House,” Bloomberg told a room packed of journalists and officials.

 “The White House matters, but sometimes not too much,” he added.

The Democrat has vowed to rejoin the Paris climate agreement if he’s elected as president. He recently stepped down as the U.N.’s special envoy for climate action.

Unlike at many past climate summits, few heads of government are joining the talks in Madrid. The U.S. has sent a career diplomat, Ambassador Marcia Bernicat, as head of its delegation.

John Kerry, the former Secretary of State under the last Democrat administration, is also attending events on the sidelines of the Madrid conference, and said the absence of any representative from the White House at the talks “speaks for itself.”

 “It’s an absence of leadership,” Kerry told The Associated Press. “It’s a tragedy.”

Most other countries are sending environment ministers or other senior officials instead of prime ministers or presidents, worrying some observers.

“It shows that there has not yet been an internalization of the emergency situation that we are in, that so few heads of state are coming to Madrid and ready to roll up their sleeves and do what it takes to actually respond to the science,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International.

She also accused some governments, such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia, of trying to weaken the agreements, and called on the European Union to work with vulnerable nations to counter those efforts.

Environmental campaigners are hoping the EU will present an ambitious plan this week for cutting emissions in the medium- and long-term that would send a message of hope to weary negotiators in Madrid.

The new head of the bloc’s executive Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has backed a call for the EU to stop all net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

Scientists say emissions worldwide need to start falling sharply from next year onward if there is to be any hope of achieving the Paris climate accord’s goal of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).

Negotiators in Madrid had worked until 3 a.m. to prepare the ground for ministers, said said Sigrid Kaag, the Dutch minister for foreign trade and development cooperation.
“Let’s hope to see that we can … really sort of give shape and meaning to the call ‘Time for action,'” said Kaag, referring to the motto of the U.N. talks. “It’s now or never.”

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Finland’s parliament chose Sanna Marin as the country’s new prime minister Tuesday, making the 34-year-old the world’s youngest sitting head of government.

Marin is heading a five-party, center-left coalition. The four other parties in the coalition are headed by women _ three of whom are in their early 30s.

The Nordic country’s Parliament, the 200-seat Eduskunta approved Marin in a 99-70 vote. The government has a comfortable majority of 117 seats.

President Sauli Niinisto will formally hand Marin her mandate later Tuesday, after which she will officially become prime minister.

The appointment of Marin and her new government on Tuesday allows Marin to represent Finland at the European Union summit in Brussels later this week . Finland currently holds the bloc’s rotating presidency until the end of the year.

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Thick reindeer fur boots and a fur hat covering most of his face shielded Niila Inga from freezing winds as he raced his snowmobile up to a mountain top overlooking his reindeer in the Swedish arctic.
                   
His community herds about 8,000 reindeer year-round, moving them between traditional grazing grounds in the high mountains bordering Norway in the summer and the forests farther east in the winter, just as his forebears in the Sami indigenous community have for generations.
                   
But Inga is troubled: His reindeer are hungry, and he can do little about it.  Climate change is altering weather patterns here and affecting the herd’s food supply.
                   
“If we don’t find better areas for them where they can graze and find food, then the reindeers will starve to death,” he said.
                   
Already pressured by the mining and forestry industry, and other development that encroach on grazing land, Sami herding communities fear climate change could mean the end of their traditional lifestyle.
                   
Slipping his hand from a massive reindeer skin mitten, Inga illustrated the problem, plunging his hand into the crusted snow and pulling out a hard piece of ice close to the soil.
                   
Unusually early snowfall in autumn was followed by rain that froze, trapping food under a thick layer of ice. Unable to eat, the hungry animals have scattered from their traditional migration routes in search of new grazing grounds.
                   
Half the herd carried on east as planned, while the rest retreated to the mountains where predators abound, and the risk of avalanches is great.
                   
Elder Sami herders recall that they once had bad winters every decade or so, but Inga said that “extreme and strange weather are getting more and more normal, it happens several times a year.”
                   
The arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. Measurements by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute show the country has warmed 1.64 degrees Celsius (2.95-degree Fahrenheit) compared with pre-industrial times. In Sweden’s alpine region, this increase is even greater, with average winter temperatures between 1991 and 2017 up more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4-degree Fahrenheit) compared with the 1961-1990 average.
                   
Snowfall is common in these areas, but as temperatures increase, occasional rainfall occurs, and `rain-on-snow’ events are having devastating effects. The food is still there, but the reindeer can’t reach it. The animals grow weaker and females sometimes abort their calves while the survivors struggle to make it through the winter.
                   
“We have winter here for eight months a year and when it starts in October with bad grazing conditions it won’t get any better,” Inga said.
                   
That is devastating to Sami herders, a once-nomadic people scattered across a region that spans the far north of Sweden, Norway, Finland and the northwestern corner of Russia. Until the 1960s, this indigenous minority were discouraged from reindeer herding and their language and culture were suppressed. Today, of the 70,000 Sami, only about 10% herd reindeer, making a limited income from meat, hides and antlers crafted into knife handles.
                    
“Everyone wants to take the reindeers’ area where they find food. But with climate change, we need more flexibility to move around,” said Sanna Vannar, a young herder from a community living in the mountains surrounding Jokkmokk, an important Sami town just north of the Arctic Circle. “Here you can’t find food, but maybe you can find food there, but there they want to clear-cut the forest and that’s the problem.”
                   
The 24-year-old is the president of the Swedish Sami Youth organization and, together with eight other families elsewhere in the world, they launched a legal action in 2018 to force the European Union to set more ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Earlier this year, the European General Court rejected their case on procedural grounds, but the plaintiffs have appealed.
                   
“We’ve said we don’t want money because we can’t buy better weather with money,” Vannar said. “We’ve said we need that the EU take action and they need to do it now.”
                   
The EU’s new executive Commission is expected to present a `European Green Deal’ on Wednesday, to coincide with a U.N. climate conference in Madrid.
                   
Herders have also started working with Stockholm University, hoping to advance research that will broaden understanding about changing weather patterns.
                   
As part of this rare collaboration between Sami and science, weather stations deep in the forests of the Laevas community are recording air and ground temperature, rainfall, wind speed and snowfall density. Sami ancestral knowledge of the land and the climate complements analysis of data gathered, offering a more detailed understanding of weather events.
                   
“With this data we can connect my traditional knowledge and I see what the effects of it are,” says Inga who has been working on the project since 2013 and has co-authored published scientific papers with Ninis Rosqvist, a professor of Natural Geography at Stockholm University.
                   
Rosqvist directs a field station operating since the 1940s in the Swedish alpine region measuring glaciers and changes in snow and ice. But through the collaboration with Inga, she realized that less “exciting” areas in the forests may be most crucial to understanding the impacts of changing climate.
                   
“As a scientist I can measure that something is happening, but I don’t know the impact of it on, in this case, the whole ecosystem. And that’s why you need their knowledge,” she said.
                   
Rosqvist hopes this research can help Sami communities argue their case with decision-makers legislating land use rights.
                   
Back in the forest, Inga is releasing onto the winter pastures a group of reindeer that had been separated from the herd when the animals scattered earlier in autumn.
                   
Several other herders have spent more than a week high in the mountains searching for the other half of the herd and trying to bring the animals down, to no avail.
                   
“As long as they are forced to stay there, they’ll get into worse and worse condition,” he warned.

…

During his recent visit to Washington, Sudan’s Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok said one goal looms above all others as he leads the country’s transitional government: bringing peace to the war-ravaged nation.
 
“Our number one top priority is to stop the war and build the foundation of sustainable peace,” he said. “Essentially to stop the sufferings of our people in the IDP camps and the refugee camps. We think the opportune time of stopping this war is now.”
 
Hamdok did not specify which war he meant; Sudan’s government has been fighting rebels in the Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile regions for years. The capital, Khartoum, saw deadly conflicts between protesters and the military earlier this year.
 
He did say he was heartened by the resiliency on display when he visited the Zam Zam camp for internally displaced people in Darfur, where a war that began in 2003 has never entirely stopped.
 
“It was a very moving moment but the climax of it was… a woman who took the floor and delivered the first speech. She articulated so well their interest, their expectations about the transitional government, how they see the peace process. After that, she was followed by six speakers… They all said our sister articulated our issues and were very satisfied with what she said.
 
“All the sufferings and the miseries they went through, it taught them, educated them and made them strong enough to be able to say from now onwards we know what is good for ourselves and nobody can dictate on us anything. This is very liberating,” Hamdok said.
 
Unlike the administration of his predecessor, Omar al-Bashir, Hamdok’s government has pledged to allow unfettered access for aid organizations to reach those in need.

Hamdok spoke at the Atlantic Council, a foreign policy think tank in Washington. He visited the American capital in an effort to repair Sudan’s relationship with the U.S., which was strained to nonexistent during the entire 30-year reign of former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who the military ousted in April after months of mass protests.
 
One of Hamdok’s goal’s is for the U.S. to remove Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.  Sudan was put on the list in 1993, at a time when al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden was living in Khartoum.

 Although Sudan is still on the list, the two countries agreed to resume diplomatic relations and exchange ambassadors.
 
U.S. officials have said the process of removing Sudan from the terrorism list will be a long one. Hamdok stressed that his country is prepared to meet the requirements which may include paying restitution to victims of terrorist attacks.
 
“We Sudanese as a people have never supported terrorism before. It was a former regime that supported this,” he said. “We are also as a nation, victims of terrorism that was inflicted on us by the regime. But we accepted this as a corporate responsibility. And we are negotiating.”
 
Hamdok, an economist and diplomat who has worked for the U.N., was named the country’s transitional prime minister in August. In deference to the leading role women played in the revolution, Hamdok made history by naming four women to his cabinet.

Walaa Esam AbdelRahman, Minister of Youth and Sport, was an activist who participated in sit-ins and street protests. She and other activists faced live fire and tear gas and were forced to go into hiding in between protests in fear of reprisals from security forces.
 
“It was very dangerous. But the more that they were aggressive, the more that we went to the street. That’s why we went so far,” she told VOA.
 
Now AbdelRahman and others are seeking to institute a series of changes, including legal and political reforms, paving the way for a democratic, free and fair election in 2022.
 
“The road is not easy but we went so far and we were very determined to reach to the final destination of this transitional period because I always say that these [upcoming] three years is part of the revolution. It’s another level,” she told VOA. “We will finish the level of protesting and marching. Now we need to build the new Sudan.”

…

House Democrats have reached a tentative agreement with labor leaders and the White House over a rewrite of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal that has been a top priority for President Donald Trump. That’s according to a Democratic aide not authorized to discuss the talks and granted anonymity.

Details still need to be finalized and the U.S. Trade Representative will need to submit the implementing legislation to Congress. No vote has been scheduled.

The new, long-sought trade agreement with Mexico and Canada would give both Trump and his top adversary, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a major accomplishment despite the turmoil of his likely impeachment.

An announcement could come as early as Monday. Pelosi, D-Calif., still has to officially sign off on the accord, aides said. The aides requested anonymity because the agreement is not official.

The new trade pact would replace the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement, which eliminated most tariffs and other trade barriers involving the United States, Mexico and Canada. Critics, including Trump, labor unions and many Democratic lawmakers, branded NAFTA a job killer for America because it encouraged factories to move south of the border, capitalize on low-wage Mexican workers and ship products back to the U.S. duty free.

Weeks of back-and-forth, closely monitored by Democratic labor allies such as the AFL-CIO, have brought the two sides together. Pelosi is a longtime free trade advocate and supported the original NAFTA in 1994. Trump has accused Pelosi of being incapable of passing the agreement because she is too wrapped up in impeachment.

Democrats from swing districts have agitated for finishing the accord, in part to demonstrate some accomplishments for their majority.

By ratifying the agreement, Congress could lift uncertainty over the future of U.S. commerce with its No. 2 (Canada) and No. 3 (Mexico) trading partners last year and perhaps give the U.S. economy a modest boost. U.S. farmers are especially eager to make sure their exports to Canada and Mexico continue uninterrupted.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer last year negotiated the replacement agreement with Canada and Mexico. But the new USMCA accord required congressional approval and input from top Democrats like Pelosi and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal of Massachusetts, who have been engaged in lengthy, detailed negotiations over enforcement provisions and other technical details.

The pact contains provisions designed to nudge manufacturing back to the United States. For example, it requires that 40% to 45% of cars eventually be made in countries that pay autoworkers at least $16 an hour — that is, in the United States and Canada and not in Mexico.

The trade pact picked up some momentum after Mexico in April passed a labor-law overhaul required by USMCA. The reforms are meant to make it easier for Mexican workers to form independent unions and bargain for better pay and working conditions, narrowing the gap with the United States.

Mexico ratified USMCA in June and has budgeted more money later this year to provide the resources needed for enforcing the agreement.

…