Month: September 2019

The United States rejected a request by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to visit Iran’s United Nations ambassador in a New York hospital where he is being treated for cancer, the U.S. State Department and Iranian U.N. mission said on Friday.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said Zarif’s request would be granted if Iran released one of several American citizens it had detained.

In July the United States imposed tight travel restrictions on Zarif before a visit that month to the United Nations, as well as on Iranian diplomats and their families living in New York, which Zarif described as “basically inhuman.”

Unless they receive prior approval from Washington, they are only allowed to travel within a small area of Manhattan, Queens and to and from John F. Kennedy airport.

Iran’s U.N. mission spokesman Alireza Miryousefi said Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi was being treated for cancer in a hospital not far away in Manhattan’s Upper East Side neighborhood. Zarif is in New York for the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations.

“Iran has wrongfully detained several U.S. citizens for years, to the pain of their families and friends they cannot freely visit,” the State Department spokesperson said. “We have relayed to the Iranian mission that the travel request will be granted if Iran releases a U.S. citizen.”

The United States and Iran are at odds over a host of issues, including the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, U.S. accusations — denied by Tehran — that Iran attacked two Saudi oil facilities on Sept. 14 and Iran’s detention of U.S. citizens on what the United States regards as spurious grounds.

Brian Hook, the State Department’s special representative for Iran, on Monday said that if Iran wanted to show good faith, it should release the U.S. citizens it has detained, including Xiyue Wang, a U.S. citizen and Princeton University graduate student who was detained in Iran in 2016.

At a news conference in New York on Thursday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Tehran was open to talking about prisoner swaps but that the ball was in Washington’s court after Iran’s release of a Lebanese man with U.S. permanent residency in June.

The United States deported an Iranian woman who pleaded guilty to exporting restricted U.S. technology to Iran on Tuesday. During a visit to New York in April, Zarif specifically mentioned the woman’s case when talking about possible prisoner swaps.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday declined to discuss the possibility of a U.S.-Iranian prisoner swap after the woman’s deportation.   

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Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who set off a political firestorm by disputing U.S. intelligence used to justify the 2003 Iraq invasion, died Friday, according to his ex-wife. He was 69. 
 
Wilson’s died of organ failure in Santa Fe, said his former wife, Valerie Plame, whose identity as a CIA operative was exposed days after Wilson’s criticism of U.S. intelligence that Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase uranium. 
 
The leak of Plame’s covert identity was a scandal for the administration of President George W. Bush that led to the conviction of vice presidential aide Scooter B. Libby for lying to investigators and justice obstruction. 
 
President Donald Trump pardoned Libby in 2018. 
 
Plame, who is running as a Democrat for Congress — in part as a Trump adversary — called Wilson “a true American hero, a patriot, and had the heart of a lion.” Plame and Wilson moved to Santa Fe in 2007 to raise twin children and divorced in 2017. 
 
In 2002, Wilson traveled as a diplomat to the African country of Niger to investigate allegations that Hussein was attempting to purchase uranium, which could have been used to make nuclear weapons. 

Wife’s identity revealed

Plame’s identity with the CIA was revealed in a newspaper column days after Wilson alleged in an opinion piece in The New York Times that the Bush administration twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war. Wilson later accused administration officials and political operatives of putting his family at risk. 
 
A Connecticut native and graduate of the University of California-Santa Barbara, Wilson’s career with the Foreign Service included posts in a handful of African nations. 
 
He was the senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad during the first Gulf War and was the last American official to meet with Saddam before Desert Storm. 
 
Wilson drew intense criticism from Republican lawmakers over his statements regarding Iraq in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion. A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 pointed to inconsistences. 
 
Wilson dismissed those claims, later authoring the book “The Politics of Truth.” 
 
In a 2003 interview with PBS, he said that the post-9/11 security mission went astray with the full invasion of Iraq. 
 
“The national security objective for the United States was clear: It was disarmament of Saddam Hussein,” he said. “We should have pursued that objective. We did not need to engage in an invasion, conquest and occupation of Iraq in order to achieve that objective.” 

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Mourners gathered at the Elysee Palace in Paris on Friday to pay their respects to former President Jacques Chirac, whose death unleashed a flood of tributes to a charismatic but complex giant of French politics. 
 
Chirac, president from 1995 to 2007, died Thursday at age 86 after years of deteriorating health since suffering a stroke in 2005. 
 
Ahead of a national day of mourning announced for Monday, the French presidency threw open the doors of the Elysee Palace for people wanting to sign a book of condolences. 
 
“I express my admiration and tenderness for the last of the great presidents,” read one tribute. “Thank you for fighting, thank you for this freedom and good spirits.” 
 
In a televised address Thursday night, President Emmanuel Macron praised “a man whom we loved as much as he loved us.” 
 
Chirac is also to be given the honor of a public memorial ceremony on Sunday as well as a mass on Monday, which will be attended by Macron and foreign dignitaries including German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. 
 
A minute of silence will also be observed Monday at public institutions, schools and football matches. 
 
Schools have also been urged to dedicate class time on Monday “to evoke the former head of state’s memory,” with the education ministry saying it will propose potential discussion themes for teachers. 
 
And the Quai Branly museum of indigenous art founded by Chirac, who had a deep appreciation of Asian cultures, said it would offer free admission until Oct. 11. 
 
French newspapers splashed his portrait across their front pages and dedicated most of their editions to the former president’s life — Le Parisien had an exhaustive 35 pages plus a 12-page special insert. 

Everyman charm 

Even Chirac’s opponents hailed his charm and qualities as a political fighter, as well as how he stood up to Washington in 2003 by opposing the Iraq War. 
 
He was also lauded for acknowledging France’s responsibility for the wartime deportation of Jews, slashing road deaths with the introduction of speed cameras, and standing up to the increasingly popular far right under Jean-Marie Le Pen. 
 
But some questioned how much he had actually achieved during a long period in office — his career shadowed by a graft conviction while mayor of Paris, from 1977 to 1995. 
 
He contested the ruling but did not appeal it, saying the French people “know who I am: an honest man” who worked only for “the grandeur of France and for peace.” 
 
And it hardly dented the popularity of the beer- and saucisse-loving charmer, whose extramarital affairs were an open secret. 
 
He had barely been seen in public in recent years, after suffering a stroke in 2005 and undergoing kidney surgery in December 2013. 
 
He will be buried at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris next to his daughter Laurence, who died in 2016 after a lifelong battle with anorexia. 
 
He is survived by Bernadette, his wife of more than six decades; his daughter Claude, who served as his confidante and adviser; and a grandson, Martin. 

‘Embodied’ France 
 
The centre-right Chirac succeeded his longtime political rival,  Socialist Francois Mitterrand, in 1995 after two previously unsuccessful bids to secure the Elysee. 
 
“As a leader who was able to represent the nation in its diversity and complexity … President Chirac embodied a certain idea of France,” Macron said Thursday. 
 
His death garnered an outpouring of tributes from world leaders, the latest from Chinese President Xi Jinping, who lauded “an old friend of the Chinese people.” 
 
Lebanon has also declared a day of mourning Monday, noting the close ties between Chirac and the family of former Premier Rafiq Hariri — whose family provided Chirac and his wife with a sumptuous Paris apartment for several years after he left office. 

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The head of Zimbabwe’s Doctors Association has left the country for urgent medical treatment in South Africa after being held captivity, during which his medical team says he was poisoned.  Police tried to block his departure even though he had a court order allowing him to leave.  Columbus Mavhunga reports from Harare for VOA News.

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Losing a job is seldom a good thing.  Repeatedly losing that job on the same day sounds nightmarish. Get ready to feel sorry for a person who does not exist. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi plugs us in to an alternate reality created to help managers hone skills at performing an unpleasant but sometimes necessary task.

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Health experts warn we are due for a cataclysmic pandemic — they just don’t know when it will happen.

The warning was delivered this week to world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly by a special global health monitoring group that said the next pandemic could traverse the world in 36 hours, killing up to 80 million and causing devastating economic loss.

The group, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, operates independently of the World Health Organization and the World Bank, the entities that created it last year with a mandate to issue an annual assessment. The first report was grim.

Lack of medical care a threat

Despite remarkable gains in medicine, politics and social issues keep those in rich countries as well as poor ones from desperately needed medical care, and this threatens the entire world.

Medical achievements of the past several decades are remarkable. AIDS once meant enduring a horrible death, but now treatment has changed that and research on a vaccine is promising.

Moreover, there’s talk about ending malaria, a disease that kills half a million people each year, most of them children.

Scientists are also closing in on Ebola. A vaccine and two new drugs to treat those infected are saving lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ebola used to kill up to 90% of its victims. Now, it’s been reversed.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and a member of the board, says with a low viral load, someone infected with the Ebola virus now has a 90% chance of surviving.

This report warns that the world is woefully unprepared for the next pandemic. So unprepared that the next pandemic could kill up to 80 million people and cause enormous economic suffering.

The report is intended for political leaders. One of the board’s co-chairs is both a doctor and a politician. Gro Harlem Brundtland is a former prime minister of Norway and a former head of the World Health Organization. She likens health to a military threat in response to which an entire government comes together.

“This has to be the same in global health security,” Brundtland said.

Fauci just returned from a trip to East Africa to assess progress against an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“I was clearly impressed at the capabilities of the Congolese who are administering the care here, as well as the preparedness of the Rwandans and the Ugandans, in case cases spill over the border,” he said.

The board cited stigma as a problem that makes it more difficult to stop the spread of disease. Diseases like tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, Ebola and others carry such a stigma that those who are infected often don’t seek treatment. Political leaders can create policies to erase stigma, the board said.

The report cited poverty and lack of clean water and sanitation as incubators for infectious disease. Political leaders can fund cleaning up polluted water and improving hygiene.

“We need to have a stronger preparedness across the board to avoid unnecessary loss of life and large economic losses,” Brundtland warned.

The monitoring group also cited prolonged conflict and forced migration as risk factors for the spread of disease. It urged countries to establish emergency preparedness from the local level on up, to build trust and to work cooperatively to improve responses to serious threats and ensure health of the world’s 7.7 billion people.
 

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A shallow tremor Thursday sent terrified residents of northeastern Pakistan onto the streets, days after a powerful quake killed 38 people and caused widespread damage in the area.

The tremor stretched already-frayed nerves in Mirpur, in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, as fears of aftershocks from Tuesday’s quake sent hundreds into the streets and put local hospitals on alert.

The US Geological Survey put the quake at 4.7 magnitude and 10 kilometres (six miles) deep, adding that it had struck just four kilometres outside of Mirpur.

City residents huddled in streets following the quake, some still barefoot, while others recited verses from the Koran.

“It’s hell. I am running to save my life,” Mohammad Bilal told AFP moments after the tremor.

“I thought most of the building would have tumbled down,” said Sagheer Ahmad. “Allah is very kind to us.”

Dozens of patients were evacuated from the main government hospital in Mirpur, some in wheelchairs or on stretchers.

Dr Farooq Noor, the medical superintendent at the hospital, told AFP that 93 people were brought in after the tremor.

Most were swiftly discharged with minor wounds or shock, but some with head injuries and broken limbs were admitted, he added.

The city’s hospitals were already packed with hundreds injured by the quake earlier in the week.

‘Poor construction’

The tremor came as rescuers continued to pick through toppled buildings to reach victims from Tuesday’s earthquake.

“You can see we have no arrangements, we don’t have any place to live, have nothing to eat, we are pulling out rubble, and trying to restore electricity and water,” Muhammad Waqas Aslam, who lives in the village of Nakkah Kharak outside Mirpur, told AFP.

The village of Jatlan appeared to be one of the worst affected by Tuesday’s quake, while Mirpur was largely spared major damage.

In Jatlan, bridges, mobile-phone towers and electricity poles were badly damaged while its roads were ripped apart.

Pakistani geologists blamed the “poor construction of shanty houses in Jatlan” for some of the damage, as well as its location near a fault line and the shallowness of the quake.

Pakistan’s Kashmir information minister Mushtaq Minhas said at least 6,500 homes were destroyed by Tuesday’s quake, adding that officials had begun to distribute thousands of tents to affected residents.

Mirpur, a city known for its palatial houses, has strong ties to Britain and many of its population of 450,000 carry both British and Pakistani passports.

The city owes its prosperity to thousands of former residents who migrated to Britain in the 1960s, but retained their links to the area — repatriating money to buy land and build plush homes.

Tuesday’s quake also sent people in Lahore and Islamabad running into the streets, while tremors were felt as far as New Delhi.

Pakistan straddles the boundary where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates meet, making the country susceptible to earthquakes.

In October 2015, a 7.5-magnitude quake in Pakistan and Afghanistan killed almost 400 people across rugged terrain that impeded relief efforts.

The country was also hit by a 7.6-magnitude quake on October 8, 2005, that killed more than 73,000 people and left about 3.5 million homeless, mainly in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.

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A Jewish civil rights group has added dozens of new entries to its online database of hateful symbols, slogans and memes that white supremacists have adopted and spread.

The “OK” hand gesture is one of the images that the Anti-Defamation League has added to its hate symbols database. Online trolls have used the gesture to dupe viewers into perceiving it as a “white power” symbol, but the ADL says far-right extremists also are using it as a sincere expression of white supremacy.
 

California Synagogue Shooting Suspect Pleads Not Guilty to Hate Crimes

The man suspected of killing a woman in a shooting at a Southern California synagogue pleaded not guilty to federal hate crime charges Tuesday.

John T. Earnest spoke twice during the brief hearing — to acknowledge his name and to say he agreed with his court-appointed attorney’s decision against seeking bail.

Earnest, 19, is charged with bursting into the Chabad of Poway synagogue on April 27 and opening fire with an assault rifle, killing one and injuring three. 
 
Peter Ko, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the judge that the government had not decided whether to seek the death penalty.

The database additions also include “Happy Merchant,” an anti-Semitic meme that depicts a stereotypical image of a Jewish man rubbing his hands together.
 
ADL launched the database in 2000 to help law enforcement officers and others recognize signs of extremist activity. It has grown to nearly 200 entries.

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The fate of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency of France may lie in the fate of his planned overhaul of the retirement system, which has already prompted strikes and protests.

Knowing that it’s not going to be the easiest of sells following the yellow vest movement that brought France to a near-standstill last winter, Macron is embarking Thursday on a “Tour de France” of meetings to try to convince skeptical workers that reform is exactly what France’s stretched and hugely complicated pension system needs to survive into the long-term.  
 
Here’s a look at the planned changes, and why they are generating debate:
 
France old-age pension system

The country’s retirement system has its roots in 1673 and the reign King Louis XIV. Initially for royal marines, the system swelled to include civil servants in the wake of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. Military personnel were added in 1831, followed by others over the decades to come, before employees in the private sector were finally added in 1930.
 
Now, all French retirees receive a state pension. The average French pension this year stands at 1,400 euros per month ($1,500 per month) once taxes are deducted. But that average masks an array of different pension regimes. In total, there are 42 pension regimes.
 
So many special regimes
 
The easy bit: Employees from the private sector are affiliated to the overall system. The account for around 7 of 10 workers.
 
The more complicated bit: many professions have a special pension regime. Some workers like train workers and air crews allow early retirements, others, like lawyers and doctors, pay less tax.
 
Civil servants also have a separate pension scheme.
 
Over the last three decades, governments have made changes but each reform has been met with massive demonstrations. None of the changes managed to simplify the system.    
 
Macron’s grand plan
 
Macron wants to simplify the system and replace it with a unified scheme, so that all French workers have the same pension rights.
 
He promises that the overhaul will make the system fairer.
 
He also wants to make the French pension system, which is projected to be in deficit in the coming years, more sustainable.
 
However, unions argue that the new system will require people to work longer and reduce pensions. Strikes have already taken place and more are expected over the coming months.
 
The government has promised the legal retirement age of 62 won’t change, but new financial conditions may encourage people to work longer.
 
Macron’s government said some specific measures would be maintained to allow military and police officers to retire earlier. Very arduous jobs would also be taken into account to allow workers to retire earlier.

What’s next?
 
The government has opened three-month talks with unions, employer groups and professional organizations. Ordinary citizens are also being invited to give their opinion on a dedicated website and in public meetings — the first one taking place in the southern town of Rodez Thursday in the presence of Macron.
 
The government says that what finally emerges will take into account the outcomes of the current debate.
 
The bill is expected to be debated by lawmakers next summer. The government has said that the changes will only apply on people born after 1963 and will enter progressively into force between 2025 and 2040.

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