Category: Мистецтво

An American Airlines mechanic was ordered temporarily detained Friday after he was charged with purposely damaging an aircraft in July amid a dispute between the airline and its mechanics union involving stalled contract negotiations.

Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani will remain in custody pending a hearing Wednesday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

Federal prosecutors are requesting he be detained pending trial.

Takeoff aborted

Pilots of a flight from Miami to Nassau, Bahamas, July 17 aborted takeoff plans after receiving an error message involving the flight computer, which reports speed, pitch and other data, according to a criminal complaint filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Miami.

It said after returning to the gate for maintenance, a mechanic discovered a loosely connected pitot tube, which measures airspeed and connects directly to the flight computer.

A later review of video surveillance footage before the flight captured “what appears to be the sabotage of the aircraft” by a man walking with a limp, the complaint said.

Union contract

When Alani was interviewed, he told law enforcement he was upset at the stalled contract between the union and American, which he said had affected him financially, according to the complaint. It said Alani claimed to have tampered with the aircraft to cause a delay or have the flight canceled in anticipation of obtaining overtime work.

Unions have complained that American is trying to outsource more maintenance jobs, a move American has indicated is necessary to cover increased wages.

In a statement Friday, American said it was scheduled to resume negotiations with its mechanics union at the National Mediation Board in Washington Sept. 16.

A U.S. federal court last month issued a permanent injunction against American’s mechanics union, which the airline had accused of illegal slowdowns it said had devastated its operations during the peak summer travel season.

Passengers continued safely

A spokesman for American said the airline had an “unwavering commitment” to safety and security and had placed passengers on the July 17 flight on another plane to get to their destination.

“At the time of the incident, the aircraft was taken out of service, maintenance was performed and after an inspection to ensure it was safe the aircraft was returned to service,” the spokesman said. “American immediately notified federal law enforcement, who took over the investigation with our full cooperation.”

Court records do not indicate whether Alani had an attorney.

The U.S. federal court order last month prohibits employees from “calling, permitting, instigating, authorizing, encouraging, participating in, approving, or continuing any form of disruption to or interference with American’s airline operations,” including a refusal to accept overtime or complete any maintenance repairs in the normal course of work.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida on Friday wrote on Twitter that on two days last week he had American flights canceled at the last minute because of mechanical issues and “now we learn an American mechanic was caught sabotaging planes due to labor dispute.” He added he wants mechanics to get a fair contract.

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The announcement of John Lansing’s resignation as CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media is renewing questions about the mission and direction of the broadcasters it oversees.

The USAGM directly manages five international news entities, including Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of America. Combined, the USAGM broadcasters transmit in 61 languages and have an unduplicated weekly audience of 345 million.

Lansing, 62, a veteran cable TV executive, was named CEO of USAGM in 2015 and has now served under two presidents. He will formally leave the agency at the end of September and start in mid-October as CEO of the domestic National Public Radio network.

“John Lansing is going to leave behind a really remarkable legacy,” said Amanda Bennett, director of the Voice of America. “He really focused USAGM on issues of a free and independent press. That’s going to be his legacy. That, and his sunny disposition.”

Trump nominee

President Donald Trump has nominated documentary filmmaker Michael Pack to replace Lansing. Pack, a senior fellow and former president at the Claremont Institute in California, has collaborated on film projects with former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon.

Pack’s name was sent to the Senate in January but has been stuck in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Efforts to reach committee Chairman Jim Risch, an Idaho Republican, and ranking member Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, were unsuccessful.

Pack could become the CEO in one of two ways: by Senate approval or appointment by the advisory Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a bipartisan panel that includes Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Pack’s nomination sparked debate about Trump’s intentions for the agency, as has the president’s own words and repeated criticism of the U.S. media.

On Twitter last November, Trump complained about unfair coverage by CNN and mused, “Something has to be done, including the possibility of the United States starting our own Worldwide Network to show the World the way we really are, GREAT!”

A few days later, Bennett published an op-ed in The Washington Post stating that such a network already existed: VOA.

Under VOA’s charter, its journalists are required to report “accurate, objective and comprehensive” news. Other legal provisions, collectively known as the “firewall,” protect VOA journalists from political interference in their work.

“Whoever the next CEO is, they need to look at the history of the agency,” said Danforth Austin, a former reporter and executive at The Wall Street Journal who served as VOA director from 2006 to 2011.

Changed focus

Austin said that during WWII, and then the Cold War, VOA and the other U.S.-funded news entities were largely a propaganda tool. But from the 1960s on, they transformed into solid journalistic organizations with a mandate to provide balanced and independent news.

“There are all kinds of different groups with different ideas of what we should or shouldn’t be broadcasting,” Austin said. “I recall getting calls from the State Department saying, ‘You can’t do that!’ I would always politely suggest they call the secretary of state and hang up the phone.”

“Propaganda or news, you have to decide, ‘What’s the most effective approach?’ ” he added.

Representative Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat, chairs the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Although he has no vote in the Senate, his committee wields influence on Capitol Hill over USAGM.

Engel praised Lansing on Friday for putting the USAGM’s networks “ … on a path toward becoming modern, effective news organizations providing unbiased information in some of the world’s most closed media spaces.”

But he said that if the Senate does not confirm Pack in a timely manner, the BBG should exercise its power and appoint someone.

“The existing Board of Governors retains the power to name a replacement. I urge the board to do so immediately, as we can’t predict when the Senate may act on the president’s nominee. This is too important a job to be left vacant for even a day,” he added.

The USAGM has its share of critics. Engel’s predecessor, former Representative Ed Royce, a California Republican, has called it a “broken agency.” Hillary Clinton, while secretary of state, said the agency was “practically defunct in terms of its capacity to tell a message around the world.”

Bennett and Austin attributed audience growth under Lansing to a focus on independent and unbiased news coverage. In 2018, USAGM’s audience expanded 24%, a record.

“Sixty percent of our audience around the world believes us and trusts us,” Bennett said. “John’s focus on editorial independence is what must carry on if we’re not to squander that trust built up over the years.”

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Eight-and-a-half-months pregnant and experiencing contractions, a Salvadoran woman who had crossed the Rio Grande and was apprehended by the Border Patrol was forced to go back to Mexico.

Agents took her to the hospital, where doctors gave her medication to stop the contractions. And then, according to the woman and her lawyer, she was almost immediately sent back to Mexico.

There, she joined the more than 38,000 people forced to wait across the border for immigration court hearings under a rapidly expanding Trump administration policy. And her plight highlights the health risks and perils presented by the “Remain in Mexico” program.

The woman was waiting Thursday with her 3-year-old daughter in a makeshift tent camp in Matamoros, Mexico, next to an international bridge, due to give birth any day, said her attorney, Jodi Goodwin.

“She’s concerned about having the baby in the street or having to have the baby in a shelter,” Goodwin said.

Pregnant women face special hazards in Mexico because places where migrants wait to enter the U.S. often don’t have access to regular meals, clean water and medical care.

Many shelters at the Mexico border are at or above capacity, and some families have been sleeping in tents or on blankets in the blistering summer heat. Reports have abounded of migrants being attacked or kidnapped in Mexican border cities, especially in Tamaulipas state across from South Texas, where the Salvadoran mother is waiting for a November court date.

The Associated Press is not identifying the woman from El Salvador because she fears for her safety.

The U.S. government does not automatically exempt pregnant women from the “Remain in Mexico” program. U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to comment on the woman’s case.

The program, officially called the Migrant Protection Protocols, was instituted by the U.S. and Mexico as a way of deterring migrants from crossing the border to seek asylum. Mexico has cooperated with the expansion of the program at the behest of President Donald Trump, who threatened crippling tariffs in June if Mexico did not do more to stop migrants.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has said people in “vulnerable populations” may be exempt from being sent to Mexico. But pregnant women are not necessarily considered vulnerable by CBP, a subsidiary of the department.

“In some cases, pregnancy may not be observable or disclosed, and may not in and of itself disqualify an individual from being amenable for the program,” CBP said in a statement. “Agents and officers would consider pregnancy, when other associated factors exist, to determine amenability for the program.”

Goodwin provided copies of the 28-year-old woman’s immigration paperwork and the bracelet from when she was admitted to Valley Regional Medical Center.

“In this particular case, this woman was actually taken to the hospital by CBP,” she said. “There’s no way that CBP could suggest that her pregnancy wasn’t known.”

The paperwork instructs her to return to Brownsville on Nov. 14 for a court hearing.

The U.S. government is establishing temporary tent courtrooms in Brownsville and Laredo, Texas, where immigration judges from around the U.S. will hear migrants’ cases by video. The hearings will start in those cities later this month.

The woman’s notice lists her address as a migrant shelter in Matamoros several miles from the primary international bridge near the camp where she is staying. Goodwin says she has never been to that shelter.

There are at least six cases of pregnant women border-wide who have been sent back to Mexico, according to U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who recently sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general demanding an investigation into the issue. Goodwin also represents a woman from Peru who was seven months pregnant when border agents allowed her to enter, only to send her back to Mexico the next day.

Mexico offers limited health coverage to people regardless of nationality that includes some of the screenings a pregnant woman needs, said Lina Villa, a Mexico-based health official for Doctors Without Borders. But many migrants don’t know that they can get that coverage, she said.

As their deliveries near, many migrant women aren’t sure whether they’ll have access to a hospital and if they will need surgery, Villa said. They are worried about their child being born in Mexico instead of the U.S. and what that might mean for their prospects of eventually entering the U.S., she said.

“It’s a very, very difficult group of people that needs a lot of help, and they don’t get enough,” she said.

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U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday the United States is ready to make a free trade agreement with Britain as soon as the country completes its exit from the European Union. In a keynote address at the International Trade Dinner in London’s Guildhall, Pence conveyed a message of strong support from President Donald Trump for the embattled British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose determination to take Britain out of the bloc at any cost has angered even some members of his own party.  VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.
 

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Robert  Mugabe, who ruled the southern African nation of Zimbabwe for 37 years following the end of white minority rule in 1980, has died.  He was 95 years old. Some hailed Mugabe as a liberation hero, but others say he destroyed the economy of what was once Africa’s breadbasket, rigged elections and terrorized his people for decades. VOA’s Anita Powell looks at his life and legacy.
 

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Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was feted as an African liberation hero and champion of racial reconciliation when he first came to power in a nation divided by nearly a century of white colonial rule.

Nearly four decades later, many at home and abroad denounced him as a power-obsessed autocrat willing to unleash death squads, rig elections and trash the economy in the relentless pursuit of control.

Former Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe Dies

Mugabe died in Singapore, where he has often received medical treatment in recent years

Mugabe, was ultimately ousted by his own armed forces in November 2017.

He demonstrated his tenacity — some might say stubbornness — to the last, refusing to accept his expulsion from his own ZANU-PF party and clinging on for a week until parliament started to impeach him after the de facto coup.

His resignation triggered wild celebrations across the country of 13 million. For Mugabe, it was an “unconstitutional and humiliating” act of betrayal by his party and people, and left him a broken man.

Confined for the remaining years of his life between Singapore where he was receiving medical treatment and his sprawling “Blue Roof” mansion in Harare, an ailing Mugabe could only observe from afar the political stage where he once strode tall. He was bitter to the end over the manner of his exit.

On the eve of the July 2018 election, the first without him, he told reporters he would vote for the opposition, something unthinkable only a few months before.

Took power in 1980

Educated and urbane, Mugabe took power in 1980 after seven years of a liberation bush war and — until the army’s takeover — was the only leader Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, knew since independence from Britain.

But as the economy imploded starting from 2000 and his mental and physical health waned, Mugabe found fewer people to trust as he seemingly smoothed a path to succession for his wife, Grace, four decades his junior and known to her critics as “Gucci Grace” for her reputed fondness for luxury shopping.

“It’s the end of a very painful and sad chapter in the history of a young nation, in which a dictator, as he became old, surrendered his court to a gang of thieves around his wife,” Chris Mutsvangwa, leader of Zimbabwe’s influential liberation war veterans, told Reuters after Mugabe’s removal.

‘A jewel’

Born on Feb. 21, 1924, on a Roman Catholic mission near Harare, Mugabe was educated by Jesuit priests and worked as a primary school teacher before going to South Africa’s University of Fort Hare, then a breeding ground for African nationalism.

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Founding Father Hailed as Hero and Villain, Dies at 95 video player.

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Returning to then-Rhodesia in 1960, he entered politics but was jailed for a decade four years later for opposing white rule.

When his infant son died of malaria in Ghana in 1966, Mugabe was denied parole to attend the funeral, a decision by the government of white-minority leader Ian Smith that historians say played a part in explaining Mugabe’s subsequent bitterness.

After his release, he rose to the top of the powerful Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, known as the “thinking man’s guerrilla” on account of his seven degrees, three of them earned behind bars.

Later, as he crushed his political enemies, he boasted of another qualification: “a degree in violence.”

After the war ended in 1980, Mugabe was elected the nation’s first black prime minister.

“You have inherited a jewel in Africa. Don’t tarnish it,” Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere told him during the independence celebrations in Harare.

At first, reconciliation

Initially, Mugabe offered forgiveness and reconciliation to old foreign and domestic adversaries, including Smith, who remained on his farm and continued to receive a government pension.

In his early years, he presided over a booming economy, spending money on roads and dams and expanding schooling for black Zimbabweans as part of a wholesale dismantling of the racial discrimination of colonial days.

With black and white tension easing, by the mid-1980s many whites who had fled to Britain or South Africa, then still under the yoke of apartheid, were trying to come home.

No challengers

But it was not long before Mugabe began to suppress challengers, including liberation war rival Joshua Nkomo.

Faced with a revolt in the mid-1980s in the western province of Matabeleland that he blamed on Nkomo, Mugabe sent in North Korean-trained army units, provoking an international outcry over alleged atrocities against civilians.

Human rights groups say 20,000 people died, most of them from the minority Ndebele tribe from which Nkomo’s partisans were largely drawn. The discovery of mass graves prompted accusations of genocide.

After two terms as prime minister, Mugabe tightened his grip on power by changing the constitution, and he became president in 1987. His first wife, Sally, who had been seen by many as the only person capable of restraining him, died in 1992.

A turning point came at the end of the decade when Mugabe, by now a leader unaccustomed to accommodating the will of the people, suffered his first major defeat at the hands of voters, in a referendum on another constitution. He blamed his loss on the white minority, chastising them as “enemies of Zimbabwe.”

Days later, a groundswell of black anger at the slow pace of land reform started boiling over and gangs of black Zimbabweans calling themselves war veterans started to overrun white-owned farms.

Mugabe’s response was uncompromising, labeling the invasions a correction of colonial injustices.

“Perhaps we made a mistake by not finishing the war in the trenches,” he said in 2000. “If the settlers had been defeated through the barrel of a gun, perhaps we would not be having the same problems.” 

The farm seizures helped ruin one of Africa’s most dynamic economies, with a collapse in agricultural foreign exchange earnings unleashing hyperinflation.

The economy shrank by more than a third from 2000 to 2008, sending unemployment above 80%. Several million Zimbabweans fled, mostly to South Africa.

Brushing aside criticism, Mugabe portrayed himself as a radical African nationalist competing against racist and imperialist forces in Washington and London.

Rock bottom

The country hit rock bottom in 2008, when 500 billion percent inflation drove people to support the challenge of Western-backed former union leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

Facing defeat in a presidential run-off, Mugabe resorted to violence, forcing Tsvangirai to withdraw after scores of his supporters were killed by ZANU-PF thugs.

South Africa, Zimbabwe’s neighbor to the south, squeezed the pair into a fractious unity coalition but the compromise belied Mugabe’s grip on power through his continued control of the army, police and secret service.

As old age crept in and rumors of cancer intensified, his animosity towards Tsvangirai eased and the two men enjoyed weekly meetings over tea and scones, in a nod to Mugabe’s affection for British traditions.

On the eve of the 2013 election, Mugabe dismissed cries of autocracy and likened dealing with Tsvangirai to sparring in the ring.

“Although we boxed each other, it’s not as hostile as before,” he told reporters.

Even as he spoke, Mugabe’s agents were busy finalizing plans to engineer an election victory through manipulation of the voters’ roll, according to the Tsvangirai camp.

It was typical of Mugabe’s ability to outthink — and if necessary outfight — his opponents, a trait that drew grudging respect from even his sternest critics.

Writing in a 2007 cable released by WikiLeaks, then-U.S. ambassador to Harare Christopher Dell reflected the views of many: “To give the devil his due, he is a brilliant tactician.”

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An American woman who attempted to carry a 6-day-old baby out of the Philippines hidden inside a sling bag has been arrested at Manila’s airport and charged with human trafficking, officials said Thursday.

They said Jennifer Erin Talbot was able to pass through the airport immigration counter on Wednesday without declaring the baby boy but was intercepted at the boarding gate by airline personnel.

Talbot, from Ohio, was unable to produce any passport, boarding pass or government permits for the baby, airport officials said.

Clad in an orange detainee shirt and in handcuffs, Talbot, 43, was presented to reporters in Manila on Thursday. She kept her head low and appeared at times to be on the verge of tears. She did not issue any statement.

Talbot had planned to board a Delta Air Lines flight to the United States with the baby, airport officials said.

“There was really an intention to hide the baby,” immigration official Grifton Medina said by telephone.

After discovering the baby, airline staff called immigration personnel, who arrested Talbot at the airport. She was later turned over to the National Bureau of Investigation and the baby was given to government welfare personnel.

The investigation bureau said Talbot presented an affidavit at the airport, allegedly from the baby’s mother, giving consent for the baby to travel to the U.S., but it had not been signed by the mother.

Officials said no government travel approval had been issued for the baby, prompting them to file human trafficking charges against her. The charges carry a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

U.S. Embassy officials have been notified of her arrest.

Officials are searching for the baby’s parents, who have been charged under a child protection law.

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Prominent Washington lawyer Greg Craig was found not guilty of lying to the Justice Department about work he did for the government of Ukraine in a case that arose from the special counsel’s Russia investigation and that centered on the lucrative world of foreign lobbying.

The jury deliberated for less than a day before clearing Craig, a White House counsel in the Obama administration, of a single count of making false statements to federal investigators.

The swift verdict on Wednesday was a setback to the Justice Department’s crackdown on lobbyists who do unregistered work for foreign governments and came as prosecutors have been ramping up enforcement of a decades-old law meant to police foreign influence and promote transparency. U.S. officials hoped a conviction would demonstrate an aggressive approach to lobbyists who fail to register their foreign work or who give false information to the Justice Department to avoid identifying themselves as a foreign agent, as Craig was alleged to have done.

But the jury rejected the theory of the case in a matter of hours. One juror told reporters that while some members found some of Craig’s actions unseemly, all agreed he hadn’t broken the law.

Craig hugged his attorneys after the verdict was read and, outside the courthouse, thanked the jury for “doing justice in this case.”

His attorney, William Taylor, said the jury reached the only possible verdict it could have reached and called the case a tragedy and a disgrace.

“The question that you need to ask isn’t why this jury acquitted Greg Craig, but why the Department of Justice brought this case against an innocent man in the first place,” Taylor said.

The prosecution was an offshoot of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which besides examining whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to sway the 2016 presidential election also looked into the international business dealings of multiple Trump associates. Among them was former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who years earlier did consulting work for the government of Ukraine and connected with Craig and his law firm on a multimillion-dollar project that prosecutors say was meant to improve Ukraine’s standing in the international community.

Craig and the law firm — Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom — were commissioned to produce a report on the trial of Ukrainian opposition figure Yulia Tymoshenko, a political opponent of then-President Viktor Yanukovych, a Manafort patron. Prosecutors contend that Ukraine, eager to bolster its global image, wanted the report to conclude that the trial was fair and not politically motivated.

But Craig, who testified in his own defense, said the actual report identified significant flaws in Tymoshenko’s trial and that he did not register as a foreign agent because he did not view himself as doing the bidding of the Ukrainian government.

The case against him centered on conversations he had with Western reporters in advance of the report’s release, and whether those interactions should have required him to register his work under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The 1938 law, enacted to unmask Nazi propaganda, requires people to disclose to the Justice Department when they advocate, lobby or perform public relations work in the U.S. on behalf of a foreign government or political entity. It is meant to allow Americans to know when foreign entities are trying to influence public opinion or policymakers.

Though violations of the law rarely result in prosecutions, Mueller used the statute in multiple criminal cases, including against Manafort.

Craig was not charged with failing to register under the law, known as FARA, but rather with lying to Justice Department lawyers who asked him and the firm about the work as they sought to determine whether it required registration. Prosecutors tried to prove that Craig was involved in shaping the media rollout of the report — an activity that may have required him to register — but Craig insisted on the witness stand that he was honest when he said his interactions with journalists were solely aimed at correcting the way the document was being mischaracterized and spun in Ukraine’s favor.

Craig, who is now retired, has represented many powerful political figures in his decades-long legal career. He worked on President Bill Clinton’s impeachment defense, and represented former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and James Cartwright, a retired general and former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Craig also served as an adviser to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

One juror, Michael Meyer, 60, said he was agitated that prosecutors, including Mueller, had devoted resources and attention to the case given the more serious allegations that he said were illuminated by the special counsel’s work.

“I just could not understand why so many resources of the government were put into this when, in fact, actually the republic itself is at risk,” Meyer said. “I was deeply offended personally … that this particular case was brought against this particular man.”

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Like whisperers in a tempest, conservative-minded officials across the breadth of Donald Trump’s government are letting it be known what they think of him, and some of it isn’t pretty.

But they are speaking oh so softly, in a kind of code, to a country that may only hear shouting.

Jim Mattis is just the latest in a string of leading lights from the conservative establishment to throw shade at Trump. As with others — the chief justice, a special counsel, various Republican lawmakers who hope to have a political future — the ex-Pentagon chief’s words are subtle, filtered through notions of duty, decorum, deference to history, the greater good.

Crack the code and you can sometimes see deep discomfort with Trump, the contours of a searing repudiation. In the view of many institutionalists of the right as well as the left, he is bulldozing values that America holds dear.

Yet the negativity is couched in words of moderation and caution. What effect does that have in Trump’s America?

These are sober, restrained players in a fracas produced, directed and dominated by an in-your-face president.

“The well-informed public understands what they’re saying and how deeply concerned they are,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor and historian at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “The rest of the public might not get it.”

Says Eric Dezenhall, a crisis-management specialist who has studied Trump’s rise in business and politics: “In a fight between crassness and discretion in the new millennium, crassness will win every time.”

Washington’s well-known partisan fever coexists with a more decorous tradition in some quarters — of raising eyebrows instead of raising hell, of saying things in so many words without actually using the words. People such as Mattis, former special counsel Robert Mueller and Chief Justice John Roberts are steeped in those ways.

When certain people let down their guard, history can happen. So it was when Joseph Nye Welch, a lawyer representing the buttoned-up U.S. Army, assailed Sen. Joseph McCarthy in a 1954 congressional hearing remembered for his putdown of the senator’s scorched-earth pursuit of men and women he deemed communist sympathizers in government and society:

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

In the McCarthy and Richard Nixon eras, “it took a long time for congressional leaders for the Republican Party to see the damage to their party and step in,” Jillson said, and no such tipping point has been reached in Republican ranks. If it comes, he said, “that’s when they’ll talk and then everybody will hear them.”

“Republicans will not do it while they think there are still gains to be made through the Trump presidency,” he said. But if the fear that was stirred by 2018 losses and Trump’s behavior since then “consolidates into wide-eyed terror,” that’s “when they cut their people loose,” loyalty fractures and more in the GOP abandon the president.

For now, censure comes in coded form from power players in the nonpartisan world — as well as frontally from a few Republican lawmakers as they exit their careers and from, predictably, Democrats.

“Mattis, Mueller and others have lived in a world of consequences which, combined with their natures, has made them discreet,” says Dezenhall, the crisis-management specialist. “They’re not about to blast Trump because they view it as dishonorable.” But they hint at what they think.

When The Associated Press asked the chief justice last fall to address Trump’s criticism of judges who had ruled against his wishes — like the “Obama judge” who had just rejected his migrant asylum policy — it did not really expect an answer. It got one.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” the Republican-nominated Roberts responded in a statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.” He added: “The independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

His words were both startling and circumspect, no more provocative on the surface than a civics lesson, yet a rare engagement by the high court in the fray.

Roberts had never addressed Trump’s past personal criticisms, whether as president or pundit (“Congratulations to John Roberts for making Americans hate the Supreme Court because of his BS,” Trump tweeted in 2012). But when Trump rhetorically charged through the firewall of the independent judiciary, the chief justice subtly called him out.

Among the elites, those without robes also maintain stoicism through slings and arrows, to a point.

Trump-nominated Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell bites his lip in silence when the president, upset that interest rates aren’t lower, takes on a target that past presidents only jousted with obliquely. “My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powel or Chairman Xi?” Trump demanded in a tweet misspelling the Fed chairman’s name and referring to China’s president.

Mueller’s mastery of restraint drove Trump’s opponents batty in hours of congressional testimony about his special counsel investigation of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election and its contacts with the Trump campaign. Democrats pressed him to say what they wanted to hear, but he talked the code.

“Problematic is an understatement,” is how the longtime Republican characterized his view of Trump’s 2016 encouragement of Russia to find missing emails of his political opponent, Hillary Clinton.

“I hope this is not the new normal, but I fear it is,” Mueller said of the idea of a U.S. campaign embracing help from a foreign government. “It is not a witch hunt,” he said of a probe that Trump repeatedly attacked as just that. He was no more animated than the stone statues of the Capitol.

Through the two years of his investigation, Mueller never responded to any of Trump’s attacks, never updated the public on his work and certainly never offered a glimpse of any personal view of the president. Yet his final report had damning detail, wrapped in legalese, about Trump’s efforts to get Mueller fired, to get aides to lie on his behalf, to get an attorney general he perceived as a loyalist to take control of the investigation — all while stopping short of accusing Trump of a crime.

Mueller’s fellow Marine, Mattis, quit as defense secretary before Trump assigned him an insulting nickname, though the president came close in branding Mattis “sort of a Democrat.” Mattis resigned over differences with Trump on Syria and the fight over the Islamic State and is known to have objected to Trump’s disparagement of traditional allies.

Months later, Mattis is promoting his new book, “Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead,” which is not a tell-all about Trump despite the title. And, for now, he’s speaking the code.

“He’s an unusual president, our president is,” he said blandly in an interview for “CBS Sunday Morning,” adding elliptically, “just the rabid nature of politics today, we’ve got to be careful.”

Then there was this exchange on “PBS NewsHour” this week when Mattis was asked whether he would say so if he thought Trump or any president wasn’t fit for office.

“Yes.”

So he thinks Trump is fit to be president?

“No, I’m not saying that. I don’t make political assessments one way or the other.  I come from the Defense Department.”

In interviews for an article in The Atlantic magazine, Mattis, a student of history, cited the French concept of “the duty of silence” to explain why he won’t say whether he thinks Trump is fit to be in charge.

“I may not like a commander in chief one fricking bit,” he said. But: “When you leave an administration over clear policy differences, you need to give the people who are still there as much opportunity as possible to defend the country.”

Yet it seems that the man with the Marine-flavored nickname Trump once loved — Mad Dog — will someday break his leash and growl.

“There is a period in which I owe my silence,” he told the magazine. “It’s not eternal. It’s not going to be forever.”

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Britain’s political turmoil is again making headlines across the English Channel, with a number of European commentators criticizing Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s handling of Brexit.

But others, like conservative French lawmaker Nicolas Bay, saluted Johnson for standing firm, and honoring Britain’s 2016 referendum to leave the European Union.

In Brussels, European Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva said the EU’s position toward Brexit has not changed.

“There may be twists and turns in political developments in London right now, but our position is stable,” she said. “We are willing to work constructively with Prime Minister Johnson and to look at any concrete proposals as long as they’re compatible with the withdrawal agreement.”

The commission is freeing up millions of dollars in disaster funds for farmers, workers and companies to cope with a potentially chaotic or hard Brexit — although governments and the EU parliament must sign off on the plan. It also published a checklist for European businesses trading with Britain to prepare for Brexit — and a citizens’ hotline.

Europeans have been preparing for months for a potentially chaotic Brexit. In France, where roughly 20,000 businesses export to Britain, the key port city of Calais is conducting simulations to prepare for both deal and no-deal scenarios. France, along with Belgium and the Netherlands, has hired hundreds more customs agents to cope with expected backlogs.

Experts predict Brexit will deal an economic blow to the EU as well as Britain — at a time when countries like Germany and Italy are braced for economic slowdowns. 

…

Illegal drug use is on the rise around the world according to a new UN report. How bad is it and what is being done to stop the spread of dangerous and increasingly deadly drugs? Former US “Drug Czar” Gil Kerlikowske and Ben Westhoff, author of “Fentanyl Inc.” weigh in with Greta Van Susteren. Recorded September 4, 2019 

…

The U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Burundi said Wednesday that the country, following years of political turmoil, was primed for a genocide.  
 
The commission’s warning, contained in its latest report on human rights in Burundi, was based on an analysis developed by the U.N. Office for the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect.   
 
The three-member panel found that eight common risk factors for criminal atrocities leading to a possible genocide were present in Burundi. 
 
Factors included an unstable political, economic and social environment; a climate of impunity for human rights violations; a weak judicial system; and the absence of an independent press and freedom of expression. 
 
Commission member Francoise Hampson said the criteria identified by the Genocide Prevention Committee indicated that in countries where these factors were present, there was a risk the situation could deteriorate.  
 
“On top of that, our own report shows the continuation of violations of human rights law based on human security,” she said. “So, things like arbitrary killings, torture, arbitrary detention.  And this year, a deterioration … freedom of expression, freedom of association.  Now that is actually already getting worse compared to last year.” 

Nkurunziza campaign
 
Burundi has been in turmoil since President Pierre Nkurunziza ran for a third term in 2015, defying critics who said he was violating constitutional term limits. Violence prompted more than 300,000 to flee the country. 
 
Hampson said the crisis in Burundi was essentially a political one.  She noted that targeting people because of their political affiliation does not come within the definition of genocide, according to the Genocide Conventions. 

However, she said, “There are elements on occasion where there is an ethnic dimension. There are sometimes taunts of people in detention.  And, there have in the past been the chants of the Imbonerakure [the youth wing of the ruling party] when they have been gathering, which have got hateful content.”    
 
The U.N. report documented widespread human rights violations by the Imbonerakure, including intimidation and harassment of political opponents, activists, journalists and human rights defenders. 
 
After the report’s release on Wednesday, Willy Nyamitwe, a senior adviser to Nkurunziza, tweeted a message that said, “Burundi is no longer interested in responding to lies and manipulation of opinion on the part of some Westerners whose aim is to destabilize Burundi.”

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Argentine economists sharply hiked 2019 inflation forecasts and cut their gross domestic product outlook for the year, according to a central bank poll released on Tuesday, following a wave of  political uncertainty that beat the local peso down 26% in August.

The survey came two days after the government announced capital controls in a bid to halt a run on the peso currency.

The controls, which followed an announcement that Argentina would extend the maturities of about $100 billion in debt, were a massive setback for the government’s free-markets reform effort.

Inflation was seen at 55% for the year, according to the survey of 39 analysts, up from 40% in the same central bank poll a month earlier. The new weakness in the peso, which fell 50.5% against the U.S. dollar last year, is expected to lead to rising consumer prices over the months ahead.

Gross domestic product was forecast to shrink 2.5% this year, the poll said, versus the previous month’s survey, which saw 2019 GDP shrinking by 1.4%.

The poll was conducted after the Aug. 11 primary election, which triggered a sharp fall in the value of the peso currency when business-friendly President Mauricio Macri was soundly trounced by his populist-leaning rival Alberto Fernandez.

Peronist Fernandez is now the front-runner ahead of the Oct. 27 general election. Macri is running for a second term, but his popularity has been beaten down by the poor economy.

“Capital controls imply a full reversal of Macri’s reforms,” said Alberto Bernal, chief emerging markets strategist at XP Investments in New York. “He did his best to try to change the course of the country, but the situation is dire now.”

On Sunday, the government authorized the central bank to restrict purchases of dollars as it burns through reserves to prop up the peso.

Fernandez’s vice presidential running mate is former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, a free-spending populist who applied heavy currency controls during her eight years in power through December 2015, when Macri took office.

Her presence on the ticket has caused concern about the return of the interventionist left to power, although the more moderate Fernandez has said he alone will set policy.

“The markets have ZERO confidence on the likely future government,” Bernal said in an email. “The hope of the markets is that Alberto Fernandez will prove a pragmatist.”

…

Hurricane Dorian will likely avoid landfall in Florida, but that does not mean residents of the Sunshine State or anywhere else along southeastern U.S. coast can relax.

Forecasters say Dorian is getting bigger and will move “dangerously close” to Florida and Georgia Tuesday through Wednesday night, then threaten North and South Carolina with massive rainfall and powerful winds.

As of late Tuesday, Dorian was a Category 2 storm, about 200 kilometers east of Cape Canaveral, Florida, with top sustained winds of 175 kilometers per hour.

Tropical storm warnings are in effect for an area from near the Savannah River along the Georgia-South Carolina border north to Surf City, North Carolina.

Even if it stays offshore, Dorian’s winds and rain extend 95 kilometers from the center and is expected to remain a powerhouse the rest of the week.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami cautions everyone along the Mid-Atlantic coast — from Maryland to New York City — to keep a close eye on Dorian.

Dorian finally drifted away from the Bahamas Tuesday, leaving behind devastation described as “apocalyptic,” “total,” and looking as if a bomb had gone off.

The lack of wind currents in the atmosphere kept Dorian parked on top of Abaco and Grand Bahama Island for two days as a Category 4. It was the strongest storm ever to strike the Bahamas.

Initial reports say more than 13,000 homes were destroyed.

The runways at the Grand Bahama international airport are under water, making rescue efforts complicated.

Five deaths have been reported. But Lia Head-Rigby, who runs a hurricane relief organization on Abaco said bodies are being gathered.

She said it is no longer a question of rebuilding on Abaco; it is time to start over.

…

Facebook said Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would be violating the company’s rules if agents create fake profiles to monitor the social media of foreigners seeking to enter the country.

“Law enforcement authorities, like everyone else, are required to use their real names on Facebook and we make this policy clear,” Facebook spokeswoman Sarah Pollack told The Associated Press in a statement Tuesday. “Operating fake accounts is not allowed, and we will act on any violating accounts.”

Pollack said the company has communicated its concerns and its policies on the use of fake accounts to DHS. She said the company will shut down fake accounts, including those belonging to undercover law enforcement, when they are reported.

The company’s statement followed the AP’s report Friday that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had authorized its officers to use fake social media accounts in a reversal of a previous ban on the practice.

Homeland Security explained the change to the AP in a statement Friday, stating that fake accounts would make it easier for agents reviewing visa, green card and citizenship applications to search for fraud or security threats. The department didn’t provide comment when asked Tuesday.

The plan would also be a violation of Twitter’s rules. Twitter said Friday that it’s still reviewing the new Homeland Security practice. It did not provide further comment.

The change in policy was preceded by other steps taken by the State Department, which began requiring applicants for U.S. visas to submit their social media usernames this past June, a vast expansion of the Trump administration’s enhanced screening of potential immigrants and visitors.

Such a review of social media would be conducted by officers in the agency’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate on cases flagged as requiring more investigation. The privacy assessment notes that officers can only review publicly available social media available to all users on the platform — they cannot “friend” or “follow” an individual — and must undergo annual training.

The officers are also not allowed to interact with users on the social media sites and can only passively review information, according to the DHS document.

While lots of social media activity can be viewed without an account, many platforms limit access without one.

Facebook said it has improved the ability to spot fake accounts through automation, blocking and removing millions of fake accounts daily.

Twitter and Facebook both recently shut down numerous accounts believed to be operated by the Chinese government using their platforms under false identities for information operations.

…

People in the Bahamas experienced another hellish night as the center of powerful Hurricane Dorian sat stationary on the northern edge of Grand Bahama Island and pounded the area with fierce winds and the flooding effects of heavy rains and storm surge.

Dorian made landfall on the island late Sunday night and barely moved throughout the day Monday. Forecasters expect the storm to finally move away during the day Tuesday and threaten the U.S. state of Florida.

“We are in the midst of a historic tragedy in parts of northern Bahamas,” said Prime Minister Hubert Minnis. “Our mission and focus now is search, rescue, and recovery. I ask for your prayers in those in affected areas and for our first responders.”

He told reporters at a Monday news conference there were five confirmed deaths on Abaco Island, where Dorian struck before moving to Grand Bahama. Minnis said initial reports from Abaco were of devastation that is “unprecedented and extensive.”

What the storm did to Grand Bahama will become more clear as it moves away and authorities are able to survey the island.

“We know that there are a number of people in Grand Bahama who are in serious distress and we will provide relief and assistance as soon as possible after the Met (Meteorology) Department has given the all clear. I strongly urge the residents of Grand Bahama to remain indoors and be as safe as possible until the all clear is given by the appropriate authorities,” Minnis said.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Dorian had weakened from its peak strength, but remained a extremely powerful storm with maximum sustained winds of 205 kilometers per hour early Tuesday.

Forecasters expect Dorian to drift “dangerously close” to the east coast of Florida by late Tuesday and the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina on Wednesday and Thursday.

Hurricane warnings are posted from just north of Miami to the Florida-Georgia border. Millions from Florida to South Carolina have been ordered to evacuate.

A National Guard spokesman says there has been almost no resistance from people being told they have to get out.

“People do understand that Dorian is nothing to mess around with,” he said.

Even if Dorian does not make landfall on the Atlantic Coast, the storm’s hurricane-force winds extend 56 kilometers to the west. Towns and cities can still expect up to 25 centimeters of rain, life-threatening flash floods, and some tornadoes.

Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management Jared Moskowitz says “Hurricane Dorian is the strongest storm to ever threaten the state of Florida on the East Coast. No matter what path this storm takes, our state will be impacted.”

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East Timor is marking the 20th anniversary of a referendum that ended 24 years of Indonesian occupation and delivered independence, but that also sparked a bloody rampage by pro-Jakarta militias who killed 1,500 people and pushed another half-a-million out of their homes.

The capital has been sprucing up with freshly painted structures, newly paved streets and manicured gardens for the arrival of foreign dignitaries for celebrations that will last until the end of the month.

But beneath the cheery facade is a lingering anger.

Joao Borras, now 37, was forced to flee as militias rampaged through the capital, Dili, shot dead his two best friends, and razed his home.

He said the killings were not just in the open but also behind closed doors by a government apparatus backed by militias that watched every move.

“It’s a horrible life actually,” Borras said. “There’s a lot of people killed, but you didn’t see because they took you in the night time. They said ‘let’s go for interviews’ – and you will not come back the next morning.”

The struggle since independence

United Nations peacekeepers landed three weeks after the August 30, 1999 referendum and restored order. Independence followed on May 20, 2002, with the election of resistance leader Xanana Gusmao as president.

But East Timor has struggled to develop its democracy and rebuild an economy shattered by conflict and ongoing internal fighting, which hampered its ability to attract much needed investment dollars.

In 2006, the United Nations sent in security forces to restore order after 155,000 people fled their homes to escape factional fighting. Then, in early 2008, President Jose Ramos-Horta was critically wounded in an assassination attempt.

The presence of peacekeeping forces helped buoy the economy but since that ended in 2012, East Timor’s Gross Domestic Product has crashed by half to less than $3 billion. Other financial figures are sketchy. An official unemployment rate of 3.5% is scoffed at even by the country’s leaders.

“Unemployment is a constant concern,” President Francisco Guterres said during a speech to commemorate the independence vote. “Our economy has been in recession since 2017, which has had an impact on the job market.”

He said 60% of East Timorese are of working age but only 19% of them are in the job market.

Of that, just 8% work in the private or public sectors while the rest work in the informal market, which Guterres said, “offers workers no security because it’s based on low wages, no contracts, irregular employment and poor working conditions.”

The bright side

Compounding these challenges is East Timor’s fickle foreign relations with much larger regional powers like Australia, China and Indonesia. Anticipated foreign aid, revenues from the sale of oil and gas and the construction of infrastructure projects have fallen far short of expectations.

However, East Timor is pushing for membership to the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its long running feud with Australia over sea boundaries and revenue from offshore oil and gas claims appears to be over.

A settlement over its shared maritime border with Australia will entitle East Timor to a bigger share of the Greater Sunrise oil and gas fields, which has reserves estimated at $50 billion.

Australia will also refurbish a naval base and bolster high-speed Internet traffic, widely seen as an effort by Canberra to further its influence in the region.

“This is a new chapter for Australia and Timor-Leste that is based on our shared respect, interests and values,” Morrison said in Dili.

Filmmaker Lyndal Barry, producer of Viva Timor Lorosae, has covered this country since the early 1990s and said Dili deserves recognition for rebuilding its security sector with an effective police force and military.

“There needs to be more done maybe in tourism, there needs to be more done in the countryside and to help people to rebuild there and be able to stand on their own two feet,” Barry said.

China is also investing heavily, financing a deep water port, an electricity grid, and a four lane highway. The China Railway Construction Corporation has signed a $943 million contract with state-owned Timor Gap to help run a liquid natural gas (LNG) plant.

Michael Maley worked for the Australian Electoral Commission as part of an international team that prepared the logistics for the referendum on self-determination. He said two big changes were taking place in East Timor.

“One is the effect of independence and they’re being a self-governing country, meeting their long term aspirations. But the other thing that has happened at the same time is they’ve been hit by globalization,” he said. “The young people from the time when they were almost totally isolated from the world are now incredibly connected. Everyone has a mobile phone, everybody is using Facebook and social media to communicate.”

His sentiments were backed by Borras who said life in East Timor 20 years after the slaughter had improved dramatically, despite the poverty, particularly in the countryside.

“Right now is clearly safe and secure, economic things are up and down but our life is great, better and I feel free and I’m enjoying my life, and my family and my friends – we are working and it’s nice.”

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Peru plans to beef up security at its border with Ecuador to prevent illegal immigration, after stricter entry requirements for Venezuelans led to a 90% drop in legal crossings, a government official said on Monday.

More than 850,000 Venezuelans have fled their homeland for Peru in recent years, part of a mass exodus from the Caribbean nation as it faces a crippling economic crisis.

But in June, Peru started requiring Venezuelans who arrive to already have visas, part of stricter policies for Venezuelans in some South American nations.

“The entry of Venezuelan migrants to our country has dropped dramatically and today it’s 90% less than what we saw in June,” Foreign Minister Nestor Popolizio told journalists.

Popolizio said his ministry was working with the interior ministry and police to make sure Venezuelan migrants were not evading the new requirements by crossing illegally.

“We’re engaged in a very direct coordination … to ensure more protection all along our border and to avoid illegal entries,” Popolizio said.

Popolizio said Peru was one of 11 countries in the region trying to coordinate their policies on handling immigration from Venezuela.

After Peru started requiring visas of Venezuelans, Chile and Ecuador implemented similar measures. All three countries also now require Venezuelans to have passports, a document that is hard to obtain for the growing ranks of poor Venezuelans.

…

Iran is for the first time acknowledging that a rocket explosion took place at its Imam Khomeini Space Center, with an official saying a technical malfunction caused the blast.
 
Government spokesman Ali Rabiei made the statement on Monday in comments broadcast by Iranian state television.
 
He said the explosion caused no fatalities and also that officials had found no sign that sabotage was involved in the explosion.
 
Satellite photos showed a rocket on a launch pad at the space center had exploded Thursday. The space center is located about 240 kilometers, or 150 miles, southeast of the capital, Tehran.
 
President Donald Trump on Friday tweeted a surveillance photo likely taken of the site by an American spy satellite. He wrote that the U.S. had nothing to do with the blast.

…

A senior U.S. naval officer has underlined Washington’s commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific as the United States launched its first joint naval exercise with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
…

The U.S. and Poland signed an agreement on Monday to cooperate on new 5G technology amid growing concerns about Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

Vice President Mike Pence and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki signed the deal in Warsaw, where Pence is filling in for President Donald Trump, who scrapped his trip at the last minute because of Hurricane Dorian.
 
The signing comes amid a global battle between the U.S. and Huawei, the world’s biggest maker of network infrastructure equipment, over network security.
 
The agreement endorses the principles developed by cybersecurity officials from dozens of countries at a summit in Prague earlier this year to counter threats and ensure the safety of next generation mobile networks.
 
 “Protecting these next generation communications networks from disruption or manipulation and ensuring the privacy and individual liberties of the citizens of the United States, Poland, and other countries is of vital importance,” the agreement says.
 
Pence said the agreement would “set a vital example for the rest of Europe.”
 
The U.S. has been lobbying allies to ban Huawei from 5G networks over concerns China’s government could force the company to give it access to data for cyberespionage. Huawei has denied the allegation.
 
The U.S. has called for an outright ban on Huawei, but European allies have balked.
 
A senior Trump administration official told reporters during a briefing ahead of the trip that the agreement would help ensure secure supply chains and networks and protect against unauthorized access or interference by telecommunications suppliers, some of which are controlled by “adversarial governments.”

…

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said the United States will continue to support Ukraine in the country’s conflict with Russia and its right to full territorial integrity.

Washington “stands with the people of Ukraine and most especially since 2014, we have stood strongly for the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Pence said after meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Warsaw on Sunday.

“And I can assure you that we will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine on your security, on territorial integrity, including Ukraine’s rightful claim to Crimea,” Pence said.

The United States is an important ally for Kyiv, having imposed sanctions on Russia for annexing the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and backing pro-Moscow separatists in Ukraine’s east.

Pence and Zelenskiy were in Warsaw for commemorations to mark the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II.

U.S. national-security adviser John Bolton said on a recent visit to Kyiv that President Donald Trump could meet Zelenskiy in Warsaw this weekend.

However, Trump cancelled his plans to attend the event in Poland, citing Hurricane Dorian, which is set to make landfall in Florida this weekend.

…

Hurricane Dorian, a dangerous Category 5 storm, made landfall in the northwestern Bahamas Sunday, slamming the island with 295 kilometer an hour winds.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Dorian is the strongest hurricane in modern history to hit the area and warned “catastrophic conditions” are occurring in the Abaco Islands.

The hurricane agency had said the storm’s advance is expected to slow over the next day or two, followed by a gradual turn to the northwest as it edges closer to southeastern U.S. state of Florida

Hurricane Dorian Lashes Northern Bahamas

US forecasters call storm’s 260-kilometer-an-hour winds ‘catastrophic’

“It’s going to stall out…and it hasn’t even touched Florida or the southeast (U.S.) coast,” Peter Gaynor, acting chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told Fox News Sunday. “You’ve got to take this storm seriously.”

He said emergency officials have been briefing President Donald Trump or his aides on an hourly basis on the storm’s advance. “He has his finger on the pulse,” Gaynor said.

Trump visited FEMA headquarters Sunday, where he urged everyone in “Hurricane Dorian’s path to heed all warnings and evacuation orders from local authorities.”

Dorian is expected to move near or over Grand Bahama Island on Sunday night and into Monday and “should move closer to the Florida east coast late Monday through Tuesday night.” The hurricane agency said the storm could dump as much as 76 centimeters of rain on the northwestern Bahamas, with life-threatening storm surges pushing tides as much as seven meters above normal.

The storm’s path toward the northwestern islands of Grand Bahama and Abaco puts 73,000 people and 21,000 homes at risk.

The hurricane agency, which has tracked the intensity of the storm with an Air Force Hurricane Hunter plane penetrating into the eye of the hurricane, said some fluctuations in the strength of the storm are expected, but that it will “remain a powerful hurricane during the next few days.”

Hurricane force winds are expected to extend outward up to 75 kilometers from Dorian’s center, with tropical-storm-force winds extending outward up to 220 kilometers.

But forecasters now say Florida could avoid a direct hit from Dorian, projecting its track could skirt much of the curving, southeastern U.S. coastline, possibly coming ashore further north in the states of Georgia, South Carolina or North Carolina.  

The storm’s high winds were felt in the northern Bahamas Saturday, forcing some evacuations and closing some hotels and airports, authorities said.

“Hurricane Dorian is a devastating, dangerous storm approaching our islands,” Bahamas Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said in a nationally televised news conference.

…

Marvelous Nyahuye contributed to this report from New York.

WASHINGTON –  Tererai Trent appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show in 2009 and inspired the world with her story of overcoming enormous odds to pursue her dreams of education. This week, she finds herself immortalized alongside Winfrey with a bronze statue in New York City. She is the only African woman to have received this honor.

The Zimbabwean educator and humanitarian is one of 10 “Statues For Equality” created by sculptors Gillie and Marc Schattner. Trent’s statue depicts her with her arms aloft, surrounded by the flame lily, the country’s national flower.

“It comes without saying that, by projecting these women into larger-than-life-size sculptures, it will help change our society — a change that will elevate the lives of women all around the world. A change that can trigger gender equality in careers, industries and the home,” Gillie Schattner said at the ceremony.

“I come from a very poor place, and I grew up very poor. I had four babies before I was even 18 years of age, and to think that because of the power of believing in a dream and today I am being celebrated,” Trent said. “And to think I have a statue in New York, the most celebrated city in the world? It’s just unbelievable. Even my own grandmother and my mother never dreamt of that.”

Trent grew up in a village and was denied an education because she was a girl, like her mother and grandmother before her. She secretly learned to read by using her brother’s books but was married to an abusive husband when she was 11.

But Trent did not let her dreams die. She moved to the U.S. and pursued a graduate degree, ultimately earning a Ph.D., after 20 years of effort. She taught global health at Drexel University and currently runs the Tererai Trent International Foundation, which focuses on providing education to children in rural Zimbabwe. She is a sought-after public speaker and author.

“When one woman is silenced, there is a part within all of us women that get silenced,” Trent said. “But when women are awakened and recognized in public places, all of us, we get the true joy of knowing that we are all equal with men.”

Anesu Munengwa, the program manager of the Tererai Trent Foundation in Zimbabwe, said Trent isn’t distracted by fame. “She does whatever she does quietly … we have to remind people of the work she is doing and how it is impacting the community she comes from.”

Trent’s story has inspired people around the world. Winfrey announced she would donate $1.5 million to assist Trent in building schools. To date, they have built 12 schools in rural Zimbabwe and helped 38,000 children get an education. Some of them are now going to universities.

Beatrice Nyamweda, Trent’s friend of more than 35 years, traveled from Zimbabwe to attend the unveiling of the statue. She said Trent’s impact is felt back home in communities where there is an opportunity gap.

“There are 10 children who went to her school and started studying at the university currently. She has changed the lives of these children who are bright but lack resources. I am proud of her for that,” Nyamweda said, speaking in her native Shona.  

During the unveiling of the statue, Trent said her greatest joy is passing along opportunities she received to others. She said she made a conscious decision to end a cycle of poverty and oppression that had stifled the women in her family for generations.

“My grandmother used to say that when you think about your great grandmother when she was born she was born holding this baton. I’m calling it the baton of poverty, the baton of early marriage,” Trent said. “So as women and as individuals, we have the choice to say do I want to carry on and pass on this ugly baton or do I want to pose in my own life to reflect and say what baton do I want to pass on? I’m deciding to pass on the baton of education.”

…

A list of some of the deadliest mass shootings in the United States in the last two years: 
 
— Aug. 31, 2019: Five people were killed in West Texas in shootings in the area of Midland and Odessa. 
 
— Aug. 4, 2019: A gunman wearing body armor shot and killed nine people at a popular nightlife area in Dayton, Ohio. Police were patrolling the area and killed the suspect.  
 
— Aug. 3, 2019: A gunman opened fire at a shopping center in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 people and injuring more than two dozen. A suspect was taken into custody. 
 
— May 31, 2019: Longtime city worker DeWayne Craddock opened fire in a building that houses Virginia Beach government offices. He killed 12 people and wounded several others before police shot him. 
 
— Feb. 15, 2019: Gary Martin killed five co-workers at a manufacturing plant in Aurora, Illinois, during a disciplinary meeting where he was fired. He wounded one other employee and five of the first police officers to arrive at the suburban Chicago plant before he was killed during a shootout with police. 
 
— Nov. 7, 2018: Ian David Long killed 12 people at a country music bar in Thousand Oaks, California, before taking his own life. Long was a Marine combat veteran of the war in Afghanistan.  

— Oct. 27, 2018: Robert Bowers is accused of opening fire at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during Shabbat morning services, killing 11 and injuring others. It’s the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history. 
 
— June 28, 2018: Jarrod Ramos shot through the windows of the Capital Gazette offices in Annapolis, Maryland, before turning the weapon on employees there, killing five at The Capital newspaper. Authorities say Ramos had sent threatening letters to the newspaper prior to the attack. 
 
— May 18, 2018: Dimitrios Pagourtzis began shooting during an art class at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas. The 17-year-old killed eight students and two teachers and 13 others were wounded. Explosives were found at the school and off campus. 
 
— Feb. 14, 2018: Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The incident surpassed Columbine High School as the deadliest shooting at a high school in U.S. history. 
 
— Nov. 5, 2017: Devin Patrick Kelley, who had been discharged from the Air Force after a conviction for domestic violence, used an AR-style firearm to shoot up a congregation at a small church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, killing more than two dozen. 
 
— Oct. 1, 2017: Stephen Paddock opened fire on an outdoor music festival on the Las Vegas Strip from the 32nd floor of a hotel-casino, killing 58 people and wounding more than 500. SWAT teams with explosives then stormed his room and found he had killed himself. 

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Read more at https://projects.voanews.com/election-2020/english/candidates/background.html

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