Tensions are growing outside the Hong Kong government headquarters, known as the Legislative Council (LegCo), where protesters have smashed multiple windows and torn down barriers, so far without any reaction from police.
Several thousand protesters are packed into the demonstration zone outside LegCo’s public entrances, wearing helmets and masks. Their arms are wrapped in cling film to protect them from pepper spray.
There is little to no leadership and only spontaneous coordination. That's led to confusion about how and when protesters should break in to LegCo ... and what they’ll do even if they can get inside.
The protesters are all very young and very aware of the risks they are taking, hiding their faces and blocking reporters from taking photos. Some have even demand that images be deleted if they fear someone has been compromised.
As the sun starts to go down here, the feeling is that we’re headed for an ugly, violent night.
Police patience cannot last forever and official statements suggests it’s almost run out. Protesters, meanwhile, are determined to stay on, even if that means fighting.
Tensions are growing outside the Hong Kong government headquarters, known as the Legislative Council (LegCo), where protesters have smashed multiple windows and torn down barriers, so far without any reaction from police.
Several thousand protesters are packed into the demonstration zone outside LegCo’s public entrances, wearing helmets and masks. Their arms are wrapped in cling film to protect them from pepper spray.
There is little to no leadership and only spontaneous coordination. That's led to confusion about how and when protesters should break in to LegCo ... and what they’ll do even if they can get inside.
The protesters are all very young and very aware of the risks they are taking, hiding their faces and blocking reporters from taking photos. Some have even demand that images be deleted if they fear someone has been compromised.
As the sun starts to go down here, the feeling is that we’re headed for an ugly, violent night.
Police patience cannot last forever and official statements suggests it’s almost run out. Protesters, meanwhile, are determined to stay on, even if that means fighting.
Protesters attempt to smash a glass door at the government headquarters in Hong Kong on July 1. Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images
Angry protesters are trying their hardest to tear into the city's Legislative Council (LegCo) building ... and so far the nearby riot police are letting them.
Windows have been smashed. Metal fences torn apart. Demonstrators have even used long metal poles to try to prise open the metal shutters that stand between them and entering the main building.
There appears to be some division among the protesters as to whether to move further into the government building or not, but the destruction is continuing regardless.
Video from inside the building shows dozens of Hong Kong police in full riot gear and additional police support is waiting nearby.
But so far no action has been taken by the authorities despite the issuing of a red alert at LegCo.
Iran has exceeded the amount of enriched uranium that it was allowed to have under a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, sources say.
Under the accord, Iran agreed to limit its sensitive nuclear activities and allow in international inspectors in return for the lifting of crippling economic sanctions.
What is enriched uranium?
Enriched uranium is widely used for peaceful purposes, such as medical research and producing electricity. But if it is highly purified it can also be used to make a nuclear bomb.
Under the nuclear deal, Iran is only permitted (until 2031) to produce low-enriched uranium, which has a 3-4% concentration of the most fissile isotope, U-235, and can fuel a power plant. "Weapons-grade" uranium is 90% enriched or more.
Iran can also stockpile no more than 300kg (660lbs) of the low-enriched uranium and operate no more than 5,060 of the centrifuges used to separate out U-235 isotopes from uranium hexafluoride gas.
Another part of the deal instructs Iran not to accumulate more than 130 tonnes of heavy water, which contains more hydrogen than ordinary water, and to redesign its heavy-water nuclear facility at Arak. Spent fuel from a heavy-water reactor contains plutonium, which can be used in a nuclear bomb.
Why did Iran break the limit?
The Iranian economy has slumped since President Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in May 2018 and began reinstating sanctions. He said the deal was flawed and that he wanted to force Iran's government to renegotiate the terms - something it refused to do.
The other parties to the deal - the UK, France, Germany, China and Russia - criticised Mr Trump's decision and said they remained committed to the deal.
In May 2019, the White House stepped up pressure on Iran by ending exemptions from secondary sanctions for countries still buying Iranian oil.
It also ended exemptions for countries participating in deals under which Iran exchanged its surplus low-enriched uranium for un-enriched ore concentrate known as "yellowcake" and sold its surplus heavy water. Such transfers allowed Iran to continue production of both materials without exceeding the stockpile limits.
Iran's President, Hassan Rouhani, subsequently said it would retaliate against the US sanctions by suspending its commitment to comply with the stockpile caps. Officials noted that Iran stated in the nuclear deal that it would cease performing its commitments "in whole or in part" if sanctions were reimposed.
Mr Rouhani also gave the five remaining parties to the deal until 7 July to shield Iran from the sanctions' effects. If they failed, he said, Iran might start enriching uranium beyond 3.67% concentration and halt the redesign of the Arak reactor.
The European countries have set up a bartering mechanism that would essentially allow foreign companies to trade with Iran in a way that would avoid sanctions, but it is not yet operational.
Why does this matter?
First and foremost, it could be considered a violation of the nuclear deal.
If that is formally confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose inspectors monitor compliance, the deal allows for a so-called "snap back" of UN and multilateral sanctions on Iran. No permanent member of the UN Security Council would be able to veto the move.
Iran has also said it will speed up production of low-enriched uranium once it has breached the stockpile limit, but its concentration would still be well below anything that could be used possibly for a weapon.
Experts say they would be more concerned if Iran decided after 7 July to violate another commitment and started to enrich uranium beyond 3.67%.
The Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran said earlier this month that it might begin to enrich uranium up to 5% so that it could provide fuel for its nuclear power plant at Bushehr, or even up to the 20% required for Tehran's research reactor.
The production of 20% enriched uranium is a major concern because it is most of the way to weapons-grade uranium. Going from uranium's natural state of 0.7% concentration to 20% takes approximately 90% of the total effort required to reach weapons-grade.
Before the nuclear deal was implemented, Iran had a sufficient amount of 20% enriched uranium and number of centrifuges that its so-called "break-out time" - the time it would theoretically take to acquire enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon, if it chose to do so - was estimated to be about two to three months.
The deal slowed the break-out time to at least a year. But any reversal of Iran's commitments on uranium enrichment would see that start to shorten.
Does Iran want a nuclear bomb?
Iran insists it has never sought to develop such a weapon.
The international community does not believe that, pointing to evidence collected by the IAEA suggesting that until 2003 Iran conducted "a range of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device". Some of those activities continued until 2009, according to the IAEA.
KABUL, Afghanistan — A complex attack including a car-bombing and militant assault killed at least 40 people in Kabul on Monday, badly damaging a private war museum and adjoining television station, officials said.
The attack came as American and Taliban negotiators were to meet for a second day in Qatar amid hopes for a deal on an American troop withdrawal. But the pace of violence in the 18-year Afghan war has only picked up, with each side increasing attacks.
A senior Kabul defense official put the death toll at six security force members, with another 20 of them wounded, and 34 civilians, with at least 63 civilians wounded. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. There were reports that children were among the victims, but it was unclear whether they had been visiting the museum, or were hurt in a nearby school that collapsed from the force of the explosion, which was heard throughout Kabul.
Officials said that attackers were still holed up in a nearby ministry of defense building that they had run to after the bomb explosions.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a Twitter message on the account of the Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, and said that a logistics and engineering unit of the ministry of defense was the intended target.
“According to some reports, some civilians slightly have been wounded,” the spokesman said. “But civilians were not the target.”
Image
An injured man being brought to a hospital.CreditMohammad Ismail/Reuters
Nasrat Rahimi, the spokesman for the interior ministry, said that a car bomb detonated near the museum and television complex, after which attackers entered a defense ministry building, where they were fighting with security forces who had surrounded them.
There were unconfirmed reports that journalists were among the victims, as well as reports that the actual target was a government facility nearby. The Taliban have recently threatened Afghan journalists; in a statement a week ago that drew widespread condemnation, the insurgents said journalists who did not stop publishing what they considered anti-Taliban propaganda would be considered legitimate targets.
But the centerpiece of its displays are the many anti-personnel and other mines planted through the country, which has more mines than anywhere else in the world, and which has lost 30,000 civilians to mines since 1989. Schoolchildren tour the museum, which in the past has received funding from the United States government, to educate them about the dangers of handling mines and explosive projectiles.
Fazel Rahim, the director of the museum, said Monday’s bombing had damaged the television station, which was also attacked by Islamic State gunmen in 2017.
“The poor Shamshad TV was destroyed again,” he said. “Some colleagues are wounded. I got out. The situation is bad.”
Image
Students visiting the Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation museum in Kabul last month.CreditJim Huylebroek for The New York Times
But Abid Ihsas, the news manager for Shamshad TV, said the station had been forced off the air by the blast but resumed broadcasting within 13 minutes.
At the museum, the largely outdoor exhibit houses British rifles, American cluster bomblets, Italian and Egyptian land mines, rusted artillery pieces, and dilapidated Soviet jet fighters in a cement-walled compound ringed by sandbags, barbed wire and a machine gun-mounted guard tower.
Almost all of the exhibits inside are painted with three letters “FFE,” or Free From Explosives.
The museum, opened in 2004 after the Taliban were run out of the capital three years earlier, gets around 1,000 visitors a year, but its contents hark back to an earlier period in Afghanistan’s long history of war. They include artifacts from the Soviet-led invasion and the brutal civil war that followed.
Glaringly absent from the displays are weapons and equipment from the American-led occupation since 2001 except for a few remnants of clusters bombs that were dropped in the early months of the war. (This is largely because the State Department has subsidized OMAR, spending $400 million since 2001 helping rebuild the museum and funding other demining programs across the country).
The United States military dropped roughly 1,228 cluster bombs in Afghanistan between October 2001 and March 2002, according to a Human Rights Watch report from December 2002. At least 60 civilians have been killed, along with the two de-miners, by the unexploded ordnance left behind.
A small glass case filled with the American munitions is what evidence remains, wedged near an Italian plastic anti-tank mine and some Russian rocket-propelled grenades.
Image
An empty FIM-92 Stinger case alongside mortars, a pressure-cooker explosive and suicide vest materials at the museum.CreditJim Huylebroek for The New York Times
What isn’t in the museum is spread out across roughly 1,000 square miles of the country: anti-personnel mines, anti-tank mines, explosive remnants of war and booby traps, according to a recent quarterly report by the Mine Action Program of Afghanistan.
Since 1989, more than 30,000 civilians have been wounded or killed by the explosive remains and de-miners have cleared nearly 1,800 miles of the country. That means Afghanistan won’t be cleared of buried explosives for decades.
“We are deminers. We are not talking about political issues, we’re showing what’s happening in Afghanistan,” Mr. Rahim said about the museum in an interview in late May.
And that’s also to stop more people from dying.
That’s why there is an aging YAK-40 Soviet airliner affixed to the museum’s roof. It serves as an ad hoc classroom, with airline seats plastered with the OMAR logo and a flat-screen TV.
Around 100 students, mostly children, sit in those seats a month, where they’re taught the dangers of unexploded munitions. What they look like. Not to touch them. Not to play with them. And what happens if you do. According to the mine action report, 161 boys and girls were wounded or killed by such devices between January and March 2019.
Menro, a 13-year-old in the sixth grade at Qahraman High School in Kabul, along with 34 other students, sat in the fuselage of the defunct jet on a recent simmering day in June. She had seen buried explosives in her village, read about them in books, but now she saw them, harmless, through a glass case.
“Now I have a clear picture of mines in my head,” she said. “I will talk about mines to my friends. I want them to know how dangerous mines are.”
KABUL, Afghanistan — A complex attack including a car-bombing and militant assault killed at least 40 people in Kabul on Monday, badly damaging a private war museum and adjoining television station, officials said.
The attack came as American and Taliban negotiators were meeting in Qatar amid hopes for a deal on an American troop withdrawal. But the pace of violence in the 18-year Afghan war has only picked up, with each side increasing attacks.
A senior Kabul defense official put the death toll at six security force members, with another 20 of them wounded, and 34 civilians, with at least 63 civilians wounded. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. There were reports that children were among the victims, but it was unclear whether they had been visiting the museum, or were hurt in a nearby school that collapsed from the force of the explosion, which was heard throughout Kabul.
Officials said that attackers were still holed up in a nearby ministry of defense building that they had run to after the bomb explosions.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a Twitter message on the account of the Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, and said that a logistics and engineering unit of the ministry of defense was the intended target.
“According to some reports, some civilians slightly have been wounded,” the spokesman said. “But civilians were not the target.”
Image
An injured man being brought to a hospital.CreditMohammad Ismail/Reuters
Nasrat Rahimi, the spokesman for the interior ministry, said that a car bomb detonated near the museum and television complex, after which attackers entered a defense ministry building, where they were fighting with security forces who had surrounded them.
There were unconfirmed reports that journalists were among the victims, as well as reports that the actual target was a government facility nearby. The Taliban have recently threatened Afghan journalists; in a statement a week ago that drew widespread condemnation, the insurgents said journalists who did not stop publishing what they considered anti-Taliban propaganda would be considered legitimate targets.
But the centerpiece of its displays are the many anti-personnel and other mines planted through the country, which has more mines than anywhere else in the world, and which has lost 30,000 civilians to mines since 1989. Schoolchildren tour the museum, which in the past has received funding from the United States government, to educate them about the dangers of handling mines and explosive projectiles.
Fazel Rahim, the director of the museum, said Monday’s bombing had damaged the television station, which was also attacked by Islamic State gunmen in 2017.
“The poor Shamshad TV was destroyed again,” he said. “Some colleagues are wounded. I got out. The situation is bad.”
Image
Students visiting the Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation museum in Kabul last month.CreditJim Huylebroek for The New York Times
But Abid Ihsas, the news manager for Shamshad TV, said the station had been forced off the air by the blast but resumed broadcasting within 13 minutes.
At the museum, the largely outdoor exhibit houses British rifles, American cluster bomblets, Italian and Egyptian land mines, rusted artillery pieces, and dilapidated Soviet jet fighters in a cement-walled compound ringed by sandbags, barbed wire and a machine gun-mounted guard tower.
Almost all of the exhibits inside are painted with three letters “FFE,” or Free From Explosives.
The museum, opened in 2004 after the Taliban were run out of the capital three years earlier, gets around 1,000 visitors a year, but its contents hark back to an earlier period in Afghanistan’s long history of war. They include artifacts from the Soviet-led invasion and the brutal civil war that followed.
Glaringly absent from the displays are weapons and equipment from the American-led occupation since 2001 except for a few remnants of clusters bombs that were dropped in the early months of the war. (This is largely because the State Department has subsidized OMAR, spending $400 million since 2001 helping rebuild the museum and funding other demining programs across the country).
The United States military dropped roughly 1,228 cluster bombs in Afghanistan between October 2001 and March 2002, according to a Human Rights Watch report from December 2002. At least 60 civilians have been killed, along with the two de-miners, by the unexploded ordnance left behind.
A small glass case filled with the American munitions is what evidence remains, wedged near an Italian plastic anti-tank mine and some Russian rocket-propelled grenades.
Image
An empty FIM-92 Stinger case alongside mortars, a pressure-cooker explosive and suicide vest materials at the museum.CreditJim Huylebroek for The New York Times
What isn’t in the museum is spread out across roughly 1,000 square miles of the country: anti-personnel mines, anti-tank mines, explosive remnants of war and booby traps, according to a recent quarterly report by the Mine Action Program of Afghanistan.
Since 1989, more than 30,000 civilians have been wounded or killed by the explosive remains and de-miners have cleared nearly 1,800 miles of the country. That means Afghanistan won’t be cleared of buried explosives for decades.
“We are deminers. We are not talking about political issues, we’re showing what’s happening in Afghanistan,” Mr. Rahim said about the museum in an interview in late May.
And that’s also to stop more people from dying.
That’s why there is an aging YAK-40 Soviet airliner affixed to the museum’s roof. It serves as an ad hoc classroom, with airline seats plastered with the OMAR logo and a flat-screen TV.
Around 100 students, mostly children, sit in those seats a month, where they’re taught the dangers of unexploded munitions. What they look like. Not to touch them. Not to play with them. And what happens if you do. According to the mine action report, 161 boys and girls were wounded or killed by such devices between January and March 2019.
Menro, a 13-year-old in the sixth grade at Qahraman High School in Kabul, along with 34 other students, sat in the fuselage of the defunct jet on a recent simmering day in June. She had seen buried explosives in her village, read about them in books, but now she saw them, harmless, through a glass case.
“Now I have a clear picture of mines in my head,” she said. “I will talk about mines to my friends. I want them to know how dangerous mines are.”
South Korea's military say it has detected an "unidentified object" flying near the border with North Korea.
The South's Joint Chiefs of Staff says its radar found "the traces of flight by an unidentified object" on Monday over the central portion of the Demilitarized Zone that bisects the two Koreas. It gave no further details.
The DMZ is the world's most heavily fortified border. The two Koreas have occasionally traded exchanges of gunfire before North Korea entered talks on its nuclear program.
The development came a day after President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong met at the DMZ and agreed to resume working-level talks on the North's nuclear program.
