Sabtu, 27 Juli 2019

Irish PM says hard Brexit would raise issue of Irish unification - Reuters

GLENTIES, Ireland (Reuters) - The question of the unification of Ireland and British-ruled Northern Ireland will inevitably arise if Britain leaves the European Union without a divorce deal on Oct. 31, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said.

FILE PHOTO: Ireland's Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Leo Varadkar arrives to take part in a European Union leaders summit, in Brussels, Belgium July 2, 2019. Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/Pool via REUTERS

He also warned that a so-called hard Brexit could undermine Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom.

His comments on Friday prompted a sharp rebuke from Northern Ireland’s largest pro-British party, the Democratic Unionist Party, whose member of parliament Ian Paisley said the Irish government’s language was “unhelpful and unnecessarily aggressive.”

Asked at a politics forum if the Irish government intended to begin to publicly plan for a united Ireland, Varadkar said it did not at present as it would be seen as provocative by pro-British unionists in Northern Ireland.

“But in the event of a hard Brexit, those questions do arise,” he said.

“If Britain takes Northern Ireland out of the European Union against the wishes of the majority of people in Northern Ireland – takes away their European citizenship and undermines the Good Friday Agreement - in doing so, those questions will arise, whether we like it or not,” Varadkar said at the MacGill Summer School conference in the northwest of Ireland.

“We are going to have to be ready for that.”

In the 2016 referendum, 56 percent in Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU.

Over 3,600 people died in three decades of violence between Irish nationalists seeking a united Ireland and the British security forces and pro-British “unionists”.

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended the violence, foresees the holding of referendums on both sides of the border on uniting the island if London and Dublin see public support for that. The British government says it does not believe there is sufficient support now.

Varadkar also suggested voters in Scotland, where 62 percent voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum, might make a new push for independence.

“Ironically one of the things that could really undermine the union - the United Kingdom union - is a hard Brexit, both for Northern Ireland and for Scotland. But that is a problem that they are going to have to face,” Varadkar said.

Reporting by Conor Humphries; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Janet Lawrence

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-ireland-nireland/irish-pm-says-hard-brexit-would-raise-issue-of-irish-unification-idUSKCN1UL288

2019-07-27 08:12:00Z
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South Korea balcony collapse kills 2, injures 16 -- including US water polo athletes - Fox News

At least two people were killed and 16 injured, including three American and other athletes at the world swimming championships, after an internal balcony at a South Korean nightclub collapsed Saturday.

USA Water Polo told the Associated Press that Kaleigh Gilchrist, a female water polo player, suffered a deep left leg laceration that required immediate surgery at a hospital. The other two injured Americans are also water polo players and suffered minor injuries.

Gilchrist, 27, is from Newport Beach, Calif.

“This is an awful tragedy,” said Christopher Ramsey, CEO of USA Water Polo. “Players from our men's and women's teams were celebrating the women's world championship victory when the collapse occurred at a public club. Our hearts go out to the victims of the crash and their families.”

“This is an awful tragedy. ... Our hearts go out to the victims of the crash and their families.”

— Christopher Ramsey, CEO of USA Water Polo
Kaleigh Gilchrist, 27, a water polo player for Team USA, suffered a severe leg injury when a balcony collapsed in a South Korean nightclub on Saturday, officials say. (Team USA photo)

Kaleigh Gilchrist, 27, a water polo player for Team USA, suffered a severe leg injury when a balcony collapsed in a South Korean nightclub on Saturday, officials say. (Team USA photo)

The collapse occurred next to the athletes' village in the southern South Korean city of Gwangju. Hundreds of people were at the club at the time.

CALIFORNIA CASINO ROOF COLLAPSE LEAVES MULTIPLE PEOPLE INJURED, AUTHORITIES SAY

Officials said two South Korean men died while 16 others were injured. Among the injured are 10 foreigners, including eight participating in the swimming championships in the city.

Rescue workers walk to inspect a collapsed internal balcony at a nightclub in Gwangju, South Korea, Saturday, July 27, 2019. Members of the U.S. national water polo team were in a South Korean nightclub on Saturday when an internal balcony collapsed, killing at least one person. (Associated Press)

Rescue workers walk to inspect a collapsed internal balcony at a nightclub in Gwangju, South Korea, Saturday, July 27, 2019. Members of the U.S. national water polo team were in a South Korean nightclub on Saturday when an internal balcony collapsed, killing at least one person. (Associated Press)

Among those athletes were the three Americans, plus two New Zealanders, one Dutch, one Italian and one Brazilian, authorities said. Most suffered minor injuries.

One of the nightclub's co-owners was detained by police. Three other club officials were summoned by the authorities to investigate whether the collapsed balcony was an unauthorized structure.

A collapsed internal balcony is seen at a nightclub in Gwangju, South Korea, Saturday, July 27, 2019. Members of the U.S. national water polo team were in a South Korean nightclub on Saturday when an internal balcony collapsed, killing at least two people. (Associated Press)

A collapsed internal balcony is seen at a nightclub in Gwangju, South Korea, Saturday, July 27, 2019. Members of the U.S. national water polo team were in a South Korean nightclub on Saturday when an internal balcony collapsed, killing at least two people. (Associated Press)

100-YEAR-OLD NORTH DAKOTA BRIDGE COLLAPSES UNDER OVERWEIGHT TRUCK CARRYING SEVERAL TONS OF BEANS, POLICE SAY

Members of the New Zealand men's and women's water polo teams were also at the nightclub. Matt Small, the men’s team captain, said the scene was chaotic and his team tried to help people.

“(It was) business as usual and then it literally collapsed beneath our feet,” Small told New Zealand Radio Sport. “None of the boys are hurt or injured though — so that's good. But everyone's a bit shaken up at the moment.”

Police stand at the door to a nightclub in Gwangju, South Korea, Saturday, July 27, 2019. (Associated Press)

Police stand at the door to a nightclub in Gwangju, South Korea, Saturday, July 27, 2019. (Associated Press)

“We did what we could but we couldn't really do too much. Some of them were pretty dire cases,” he said. “We were more so just concerned about everyone else, we were trying to do a number count and make sure all the boys were there.”

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The local organizing committee said that at least seven athletes have already returned to the athletes' village after minor treatments at hospitals.

The organizing committee said it won't disclose other personal information about the athletes at the request of their national teams.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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2019-07-27 07:51:03Z
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Jumat, 26 Juli 2019

'Please, Save My Life.' A Bomb Specialist Defuses Explosives Strapped to Children - The Wall Street Journal

Joseph Edu and Paul Barka of Nigeria’s bomb disposal squad.

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—A 14-year-old girl in a black veil walked onto the road, raised her hands and made a plea to the soldiers nearby. She had been strapped to a suicide bomb and didn’t want to die.

It was explosives specialist Randy Iljeseni’s turn to defuse the girl, one in an army of child bombers deployed across northeast Nigeria by jihadist group Boko Haram. He grabbed a pair of fabric scissors, mouthed a brief prayer and slowed his breathing. He began to slice into her bomb-strapped belt. Some of his closest friends had died this way.

“You must do it gently. Most of them you first cut with scissors,” said Mr. Iljeseni, a tall and wiry 35-year-old with an intense stare, recalling the episode. “If this thing explodes, you will be gone.”

On the sharpest edges of the global war on terror, behind the multibillion-dollar endowments of jet fighters, armored cars and drone feeds, lurks a U.S.-aided program that is low in technology but high in effectiveness: bomb squad training.

From the Sahara to East Asia, hundreds of small bomb-disposal units are taking on the hair-raising assignment of disabling improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The devices may be buried in roads, cars or public buildings. In a gruesome turn, they are often strapped to children—mostly girls—by jihadist terrorist groups.

Binta Umma and Maimuna Musa tell the story of their survival.

The bomb squads’ work is especially intense in northern Nigeria and the Lake Chad basin, where the Islamist group Boko Haram is leading the way in the use of child bombers. Its insurgency, which first flared exactly a decade ago, has left tens of thousands of people dead and forced millions from their homes.

A few years ago, there were only a few dozen men and women like Mr. Iljeseni trained to do this work in Nigeria. Now there are hundreds.

The bomb squads receive some of their training from a traveling boot camp of U.S. ordnance experts schooled on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. They aren’t imparting a skill as much as a state of mind: a mix of courage and composure that can be sparked in a classroom but only truly learned in the live-or-die moments before the puzzle of a live bomb.

This year, U.S. Army trainers will travel to 22 countries to conduct 52 courses. More than half will take place in the Lake Chad region.

“It’s low-cost, big return—it helps us save a lot of lives,” said Lt. Col. Armando Hernandez, who served with the Explosives Ordnance Division across the Middle East and Africa and now helps oversee training operations from a base in Italy. “We don’t just teach them to understand the bomb, but to go after them aggressively.”

Last year, 57 children died in northern Nigeria after being strapped with explosives by Boko Haram, according to data from the United Nations. About 67% of them were girls.

In Boko Haram’s evolving strategy, children as young as 10 are helping to construct the bombs as well. They stuff nails and ball bearings as shrapnel into vests for other children to wear, and then euphoric crowds cheer on the bomb carriers, say survivors of Boko Haram camps. Clerics frame the mission in religious terms.

“We must always achieve 100%” in defusing bombs to survive, said Ntul Silvanus, commander of the Explosives Ordnance Disposal unit in the state of Borno. He has personally defused five bombs in the last three months.

Ntul Sylvanus in his office in Maiduguri.

The practice of suicide bombing has turned daily shopping errands in the city of Maiduguri, the largest in Nigeria’s northeast, into hourslong expeditions, with airport-like security at the entrances to vegetable markets. Security guards in the commercial center struggle to remember how many times they’ve hit the floor after the clap of a suicide bomb.

Mr. Iljeseni has defused dozens of human-borne explosives. He compares his work to crossing a river.

“Or, or. It is these two simple words,” he says. “Or you come out alive, or you come out dead.”

The bomb doctor

Mr. Iljeseni was working as a beat cop when he joined Nigeria’s elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal team in the mid-2000s, a few weeks after his father’s funeral. He was looking for a sense of purpose.

The country was in a period of relative peace, and most of Mr. Iljeseni’s new job meant accompanying construction crews as they triggered controlled demolitions to pave roads through the countryside.

By 2010, Boko Haram, a reclusive group camped in the forest, was gathering force. It began to hit government buildings, churches and mosques with crude fertilizer bombs in its quest to carve out an Islamist state.

Within four years, Boko Haram’s insurgency had expanded from northeast Nigeria into three neighboring countries. Its members torched villages, sending hundreds of thousands fleeing.

Members of Nigeria’s bomb disposal squad.

Mr. Iljeseni’s team began to encounter far more female bombers than male. The women’s long veils could easily conceal explosive devices. They were less conspicuous than young men in the marketplaces and mosques where large groups of civilians gathered.

The terror group also held thousands of children it had kidnapped—more than 10,000 boys, by the estimation of Nigerian officials, and a similar abundance of girls. The kidnapping of 276 high-school students from the town of Chibok in April 2014 prompted global outrage.

The next year, a detachment of American trainers began rotating through Nigeria, passing on the hard lessons its soldiers had taken from Iraq. “With IEDs, there’s a million different ways they can be made, so we teach them the thinking,” said Katie van Dwy, a U.S. Army ordnance trainer who has made four trips to Lake Chad. “We learn a lot from [trainees]….They will come up with scenarios we would not have thought of.”

The Nigerians left with rudimentary tools, given to them by the U.S. military: ropes, carabiners, metal detectors and scissors. American officials worried that anything more high tech would eventually break down and not be repaired.

The more visceral training took place on the job. Mr. Iljeseni stood next to his superiors, sweating under the bright sun, as they destroyed live bombs. He unearthed IEDs buried next to highways or hidden in trash bins. He watched checkpoints for vehicle-borne bombs.

A poster outside Maiduguri’s bomb disposal squad base shows the most wanted Boko Haram members.

Often, his team showed up hours too late, meeting a scene of personal effects strewn around bodies lying under white sheets.

Once, Mr. Iljeseni caught a man acting nervously at the entrance to a crowded market in the city of Maiduguri. He yelled for civilians to flee. Then he told soldiers nearby: “If you see this man doing anything, shoot him to death or stone him to death.”

People ran from the marketplace. The bomb was on a timer, strapped to the jittery man pacing alone near the gate, surrounded from a distance. They waited. The bomb exploded, killing only the man wearing it.

Mr. Iljeseni cried for hours and for two weeks he couldn’t hear, he says: “I saw the masses of people they intended to kill. You can’t help but think about people losing their loved ones.”

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As Boko Haram ramped up suicide attacks, the bomb squad decided they needed more intelligence gathering, to better understand the bombers and their handlers. Mr. Iljeseni traveled to towns and villages classified by the military as “no-go areas,” posing as a trader in the markets and mosques.

Mr. Iljeseni’s EOD comrades began to share videos of defusing operations that went tragically wrong. The EOD team’s families—many of whom live hundreds of miles away from the war front—began weekly prayer sessions. His unit, a small crew of Christians and Muslims, prayed together.

Child-borne bombs

Boko Haram was soon using children to carry and make the bombs.

The most common devices needed to be detonated by the bomber with a trigger. Others were on a timer or even operated remotely—ensuring the bomb would still detonate if the carrier had a change of heart.

When Boko Haram strapped a vest packed with ball bearings and tied together with a rubber tube to 16-year-old Maimuna Musa, she was sure she would die. Ms. Musa had been kidnapped at 15 and forcibly married to a fighter. She was chosen after her husband was killed on the battlefield.

One thought preserved her: Maybe she could use her deployment to escape.

‘They told me I’d go to paradise,’ says Maimuna Musa.

After a week of daily lectures from clerics who said her mission would please God, Ms. Musa’s moment had arrived. A crowd gathered to watch and she knew what would come next. Weeks earlier, she had watched a group of men strap bombs to both a mother and the infant on her back. A voice commanded Ms. Musa to raise her hands and look up.

“They told me I’d go to paradise, but I thought I would go to hell,” she said, sketching an outline showing the way the bomb was swaddled across her waist. The front of the device had two wires, held in rubber tubes. When Ms. Musa reached the target, she was supposed to touch the wires together, detonating the bomb.

When she reached her target, she found men in uniform and surrendered. They called the bomb squad.

At 15, Binta Umma walked for two days to the town of Gwoza, her chest weighed down by an explosive vest, in a frantic search for an adult willing to remove the device. She stopped only to sleep under a tree, taking care not to breathe too deeply.

The next morning, a vigilante found her, pointed his shotgun at her, and called the bomb squad. A white Toyota pickup pulled up an hour later and Ms. Umma shouted: “It is a bomb. Please, save my life.”

Two officers approached, carrying metal tools. To examine the device, an officer asked her to carefully remove her veil; Ms. Umma pinched it between thumb and forefinger, slowly peeled it back, afraid the fabric would trigger the bomb.

“Don’t ever drop your hands,” one said.

Binta Umma walked for two days wearing a bomb and looking for help.

She raised her arms. Staring at the sky, Ms. Umma felt tugs and jerks on the belt. Minutes went past. Her arms were numb.

She felt the vest loosen. Her knees buckled. Her defuser lowered the bomb into a plastic bag and handed her a Coca-Cola .

“It was 50-50. I could live and I could die,” said Ms. Umma, who now works at a mosque in her hometown, checking female worshipers for weapons and suicide bombs.

Mr. Iljeseni’s unit views teenage boys as more of a risk than teenage girls. Boys have showed up at checkpoints in tears, asking for help removing the bombs strapped to them—then detonated their bombs once officers got close, Mr. Iljeseni said.

In 2017, his unit began using a new tool: a signal jammer. Boko Haram sometimes sent people to accompany young girls it didn’t trust to set off the bombs they were wearing. Those escorts then used a cellphone, or more often a rewired car key, to detonate the bomb at the right moment. The jammer prevents the signal from triggering the bomb.

“It is part of our life. We love the jammer,” Mr. Iljeseni says.

On one operation, he says, he was walking toward a young woman, maybe 16 years old, screaming, “They put a bomb on me.” Then he caught sight of an older woman nearby holding a car remote. Mr. Iljeseni hadn’t yet switched on his jammer.

He hit the ground, and the explosion passed over his head. When he got up he shot the older woman dead, as well as another young woman nearby, who also said she had a bomb.

A member of the bomb disposal squad wearing a protective suit.

This month, the United Nations said that Boko Haram and Islamic State in West Africa has recruited at least 8,000 children.

One 15-year-old, captured by Nigeria’s military, claimed to have made some 500 bombs since the age of 10. He said he was encouraged to innovate to make the bombs more difficult to defuse or remove. On some of them, he put padlocks.

Elsewhere, Islamic State’s “cubs” fighters have launched dozens of suicide attacks and been filmed executing prisoners in propaganda videos. The Islamic State franchise in Indonesia used children age 9 to 18 in May to carry out three bombings that left 25 dead. Somalia’s al Qaeda franchise al-Shabaab has ordered teachers in religious schools to provide hundreds of children as young as 8 for their ranks or face attack, according to rights group Human Rights Watch.

Mr. Iljeseni says the bombs carried by children in Nigeria are getting bigger, more powerful and tougher to detect. Boko Haram bomb makers are innovating new devices built into custom-made handbags. Detonators can be hidden inside books, making the bombers look like schoolchildren. Two months ago,another one of Mr. Iljeseni’s colleagues was killed.

“Ten years back, this insurgency was just starting. There’s no sleeping now,” says Mr. Iljeseni, as he flicked through pictures of his comrades and their operations on his phone.

Last month, two girls and a boy detonated explosive vests at a hall in the town of Konduga as locals gathered to watch a soccer match, killing 30 and injuring dozens more. An EOD specialist was able to remove a vest that failed to detonate from a fourth.

A member of the Nigeria’s bomb disposal squad screens civilians with a metal detector near the Maiduguri airport.

Write to Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com and Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com

Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/please-save-my-life-a-bomb-specialist-defuses-explosives-strapped-to-children-11564156722

2019-07-26 15:58:00Z
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Armed men disguised as cops take $40M in gold, precious metals and hostages in Brazilian airport heist - Fox News

Several armed gunman in federal police cars entered one of Brazil’s busiest airports Thursday and made off with $40 million worth of gold and precious metals, taking two hostages with them during the heist.

Four suspects were captured on surveillance tape entering the Sao Paulo International Airport in Guarulhos in a black pickup truck that appeared to have the markings of Brazil’s federal police, Reuters reported.

MMA LEGEND ANDERSON SILVA BECOMES US CITIZEN: ‘THIS IS MY COUNTRY NOW’ 

The four men exited the vehicle, at least one armed with a rifle, and confronted airport employees. Security footage then shows the workers loading cargo into the vehicle.

A fake police truck that was used in robbery is transported on a flat-bed truck in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Thursday, July 25, 2019. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

A fake police truck that was used in robbery is transported on a flat-bed truck in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Thursday, July 25, 2019. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

MAN CHARGED WITH BANK ROBBERY AFTER FIRST MAKING 911 REPORT

According to a police report, the thieves made off with about 1,650 pounds of gold and other precious metals worth $40 million. They also took with them two airport workers as hostages.

A spokeswoman for the airport confirmed the heist to Reuters but did not comment on a hostage situation. She said no one was hurt during the robbery.

Early reports suggested that there were as many as eight suspects and that they kidnapped a senior airport official Wednesday and held him for 12 hours to gain information about the valuable cargo which was set to ship to New York and Zurich, the Evening Standard reported.

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Four children related to the official were also said to be kidnapped in an attempt to gather information.

A local broadcaster said that the cars used during the heist were found abandoned in a neighborhood about 12 miles from the airport. The suspects remain at large.

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https://www.foxnews.com/world/armed-men-cops-40m-gold-precious-metals-hostages-in-brazilian-airport-heist

2019-07-26 13:06:41Z
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Record-breaking heat wave in Europe sparks demands to combat climate crisis - Salon

Following days of warnings from meteorologists, temperatures soared to historic highs throughout Western Europe Thursday, eliciting impassioned demands for governments to take more ambitious action to combat the climate crisis.

Heat records were shattered Thursday in regions of Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

That came after, as the New York Times reported, "officials sounded high-temperature health alarms on Wednesday, mindful that some previous heat waves have claimed thousands of lives across a region where people are not used to such weather, structures are not built for it and few homes have air conditioning."

Peter Stott of the U.K.'s national weather service, the Met Office, explained on BBC Radio 5 Live that the current heat wave is the result of "weather and climate acting in concert."

"What we have at the moment is this very warm stream of air, coming up from northern Africa, bringing with it unusually warm weather," he said. "But without climate change we wouldn't have hit the peaks that we're hitting right now."

Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist and meteorologist at the University of Oxford, tweeted: "This. Is. Climate. Change."

In a statement Thursday, Johannes Cullmann, director of the Climate and Water Department at the World Meteorological Organization, also connected the scorching temperatures that Europeans are enduring this week to the broader trend of anthropogenic global warming.

"Such intense and widespread heatwaves carry the signature of man-made climate change. This is consistent with the scientific finding showing evidence of more frequent, drawn out, and intense heat events as greenhouse gas concentrations lead to a rise in global temperatures," Cullmann said. "WMO expects that 2019 will be in the five top warmest years on record, and that 2015-2019 is to be the warmest of any equivalent five-year period on record."

Meteorologist Eric Holthaus took to Twitter to track various record-smashing measurements. In his tweets about Europe's life-threatening heat wave, Holthaus repeatedly declared, "We are in a climate emergency."

As the temperature in Paris continued to rise Thusrday, Holthaus continued to post updates. When it hit 108.7°F (42.6°C) in the late afternoon, he noted that "this breaks the previous all-time heat record by 4°F — a shocking amount for a city with such a long history."

Responding to the updates out of Paris, Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg wrote on Twitter, "The heat records are not just being broken all over the place... they are being smashed."

Tweeting with the hashtag #HottestDayOnRecord, Greenpeace U.K. called out global governments for their failure to adequately address the climate emergency.

The British arm of the advocacy group Friends of the Earth warned that "days like this will become the new normal unless governments unite to take real climate action."

"This is not normal," scientist and writer Andrew Steele tweeted about the new temperature records. "The climate is changing. Use your voice, wallet and votes to fight it."

This is the second heat wave to hit Europe this summer, following one last month — which, on a global scale, was the hottest June ever recorded, according to multiple analyses.

Looking ahead, Bob Henson wrote forWeather Underground Wednesday that "toward the weekend, the intense heat will translate northward and eastward into parts of Scandinavia, where monthly and all-time records may fall. By early next week, upper-level high pressure — perhaps stronger than anything ever recorded at these latitudes — will extend from northern Scandinavia to the North Pole. This pattern may cause Arctic sea ice, which was already at a record low extent for the date on Wednesday, to diminish at a rapid rate into early August."

The dangerous temperatures across the continent — as well as in parts of the United States and Asia — come as new research reveals that the planet is warming at a rate not seen in the past 2,000 years.

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https://www.salon.com/2019/07/26/record-breaking-heat-wave-in-europe-sparks-demands-to-combat-climate-crisis/

2019-07-26 09:00:00Z
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'Tragedy': Up to 150 people feared drowned in Mediterranean Sea - Aljazeera.com

Scores of refugees and migrants are feared drowned after the boats they were travelling in capsized off Libya's coast in the Mediterranean Sea, according to aid agencies and officials.

Ayoub Qasim, a spokesman for Libya's coastguard, told The Associated Press news agency that two boats carrying around 300 people sank around 120km east of the capital, Tripoli, before adding that 134 others were rescued.

However, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in a Twitter post on Thursday that more than 150 people were feared drowned while 145 were rescued and returned to Libya after the incident.

Charlie Yaxley, spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), said the survivors were picked up by local fishermen and then taken back to shore by the Libyan coastguard.

"We estimate that 150 migrants are potentially missing and died at sea," he said. "The dead include women and children."

"The worst Mediterranean tragedy of this year has just occurred," Filippo Grandi, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, said.

He called on European nations to resume rescue missions in the Mediterranean, halted after a European Union decision, and appealed for an end to migrant detentions in Libya. Safe pathways out of the North African country are needed "before it is too late for many more desperate people", Grandi said.

I don't want anything now except to go back to my country, Sudan, to die there

Sabah Youssef, survivor who lost her seven-year-old child

Qasim told AFP news agency that most of the rescued from the sea were from Ethiopia while others were Palestinians and Sudanese.

Sabah Youssef, from Sudan, lost her seven-year-old child after the boat sank. "I don't want anything now except to go back to my country, Sudan, to die there," Youssef, who was rescued, told Reuters news agency.

Some of the survivors shared their ordeal at the sea.

"In the afternoon, we started from Libya going to Italy, but when we went there, after one hour the ship started to sink and most of them (people) sank," an unnamed survivor from Eritrea told AP.

Another survivor from Eritrea added: "We rescued ourselves. No-one could help us and no one came to rescue us, and here we are in a big problem so we need your (International community) help."

Libya is one of the main departure points for migrants and refugees fleeing poverty and war in the Middle East and Africa and attempting to reach Europe by boat via the Mediterranean.

Those who make the journey often travel in overcrowded and unsafe vessels.

Nearly 700 deaths have been recorded in the Mediterranean so far this year, according to the IOM, almost half as many as the 1,425 registered in 2018.

"If current trends for this year continue, that will see us pass more than 1000 deaths in the Mediterranean for the sixth year in a row," Yaxley, the spokesman for UNHCR told Al Jazeera.

"That’s a really bleak milestone. It comes just weeks after more than 50 people lost their lives in a detention centre following an airstrike in Tajoura, and really once again stresses the [need] for a shift in approach to the situation in Libya and the Mediterranean."

An estimated 6,000 refugees and migrants are held in detention centres across Libya, while some 50,000 registered refugees and asylum seekers reside elsewhere in the country, according to the UNHCR.

'Preventable deaths'

The UN has repeatedly warned that the conflict-wracked sprawling North African country is not a safe place for migrants and refugees to be held in and called for those in detention centres to be released.

It has also urged the European Union to drop its policy of backing the Libyan coastguard to intercept and forcibly return people caught while trying to cross to Europe from the country. 

The EU ended its naval patrols in the Mediterranean in March due to disagreements on how to divide those rescued among EU member states.

Italy's far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has objected to the existing arrangement because most of the rescued migrants and refugees were brought to Italian ports.

Salvini, who is also Italy's deputy prime minister, has barred charity rescue vessels from docking at Italy's ports, and threatened to fine transgressors tens of thousands of euros and impound their vessels.

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in recent days slammed the EU's approach, saying the "suffering" of migrants and refugees in Libya and "deaths" of others in the Mediterranean were "preventable".

"Politicians would have you believe that the deaths of hundreds of people at sea, and the suffering of thousands of refugees and migrants trapped in Libya, are the acceptable price of attempts to control migration," Sam Turner, MSF's head of mission for search and rescue in Libya, said in a statement on Sunday.

"The cold reality is that while they herald the end of the so-called 'European migration crisis', they are knowingly turning a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis these policies perpetuate in Libya and at sea," he added.

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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/100-migrants-refugees-feared-drowned-mediterranean-sea-190725150839996.html

2019-07-26 07:19:00Z
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Chinese official urged Hong Kong villagers to drive off protesters before violence at train station - Reuters

HONG KONG (Reuters) - A week before suspected triad gang members attacked protesters and commuters at a rural Hong Kong train station last Sunday, an official from China’s representative office urged local residents to drive away any activists.

A front view of the village of Nam Pin Wai, where groups of suspected attackers at the Yuen Long train station were surrounded by police, in Hong Kong, China July 23, 2019. REUTERS/James Pomfret

Li Jiyi, the director of the Central Government Liaison’s local district office made the appeal at a community banquet for hundreds of villagers in Hong Kong’s rural New Territories.

In a previously unreported recording from the July 11 event obtained by Reuters, Li addresses the large crowd about the escalating protests that have plunged Hong Kong into its worst political crisis since it returned to Chinese from British rule in 1997.

Li chastises the protesters, appealing to the assembled residents to protect their towns in Yuen Long district and to chase anti-government activists away.

“We won’t allow them to come to Yuen Long to cause trouble,” he said, to a burst of applause.

“Even though there are a group of protesters trained to throw bricks and iron bars, we still have a group of Yuen Long residents with the persistence and courage to maintain social peace and protect our home.”

Repeatedly, Li spoke of the need for harmony and unity between the traditional villages and the government, “especially when there is wind and rain in Hong Kong”.

The banquet was attended by a Hong Kong government district officer, Enoch Yuen, and many of the city’s rural leaders. Yuen gave no immediate response to Reuters’ questions on Li’s speech and its impact on village representatives.

Last Sunday, after anti-government protesters marched in central Hong Kong and defaced China’s Liaison Office, over 100 men swarmed through Yuen Long train station, attacking black-clad protesters, passers-by, journalists and a lawmaker with pipes, clubs and lampstands.

When some protesters retaliated, the beatings escalated as men and women were hit repeatedly on their heads and bodies by the masked men, who wore white shirts.

Video footage showed victims fleeing the mayhem amid screams, and floors of the train station streaked with blood. Forty-five people were injured, one critically.

China’s Liaison Office did not immediately respond to Reuters questions about Li’s speech, and Li could not be reached for comment.

Johnny Mak, a veteran Democratic Alliance district councilor in Yuen Long who witnessed the train station bloodshed, said he believed Li’s remarks had been an explicit call to arms against protesters.

“If he didn’t say this, the violence wouldn’t have happened, and the triads wouldn’t have beaten people,” he told Reuters in his office close to the station.

Ching Chan-ming, the head of the Shap Pat Heung rural committee which hosted the banquet that night, said he thought Li’s speech was positive and held no malicious intent.

“How could he (Li) make such an appeal like that?,” Ching told Reuters. “I don’t think it was a mobilization call. His main message is that he hopes Hong Kong can remain stable and prosperous.”

TRIADS

The protesters are demanding Hong Kong’s leader scrap a controversial extradition law that many fear will extend China’s reach into the city.

The government’s refusal to do so - it has agreed only to suspend the bill so far - have led to two months of sometimes violent demonstrations across the city.

Beyond the extradition bill, many activists are demanding independent inquiries into the use of police force against them, and far-reaching democratic reforms - anathema to Beijing’s leaders.

China’s Foreign Ministry Office in Hong Kong said earlier this week that “the recent extreme and violent acts in Hong Kong have seriously undermined the foundation of the rule of law ... and trampled on the red line of “One Country, Two Systems” which underpins Beijing’s control of Hong Kong.

Two senior police sources told Reuters some of the men who attacked the protesters had triad backgrounds including from the powerful Wo Shing Wo, Hong Kong’s oldest triad society, and the 14K, another large, well-known triad.

Police spokespeople didn’t respond to Reuters questions about triad involvement or any aspect of their operation that night.

While Hong Kong’s triads - ancient secret societies that morphed into mafia-style underworld operations - no longer hold the high profile of previous decades they remain entrenched in some grittier districts and in rural areas, according to police.

Police told reporters in 2014 during the so-called “Occupy” democracy protests, that hundreds of triad members were suspected of mounting operations to infiltrate, beat and harass those in the movement. Several dozen people were arrested at the time.

NO POLICE IN SIGHT

Within hours of Sunday’s violence, police bosses battled criticism they had failed to protect the public given delays getting to the scene.

Police commissioner Stephen Lo said there had been a need to “redeploy manpower from other districts”.

Democratic Party district councilor Zachary Wong said Li’s message was having an impact in the days leading up to Sunday’s violence and he had received repeated calls from associates a day earlier saying something was brewing.

Wong said he called local police on Saturday, and then again on Sunday at 7pm when he heard of men gathering in a Yuen Long park.

“Some people called me and said, ‘We’re really scared, please do something,” Wong told Reuters.

Both Mak and Wong said they were told by police they were aware of the situation and were handling it.

During this time, pro-Beijing lawmaker Junius Ho was filmed laughing and shaking hands with some of the men in white shirts near the park. Giving them the ‘thumbs up’ sign, he said: “You are my heroes”. The men laughed and cheered in response.

Ho later told reporters he had no knowledge of or involvement in the violence, but was merely reaching out to his constituents.

Ho was not immediately available at his office and could not be reached on his mobile phone.

Several hours later, when the most violent assaults took place at the train station, there were still no police present to prevent the bloodshed.

“It doesn’t make sense that for many hours, there wasn’t a single police car in sight,” said Mak.

Two senior police officers involved in controlling demonstrations and a senior government security official told Reuters privately they were incensed at public perceptions the police somehow acted in concert with triads at Yuen Long.

After the attacks in Yuen Long train station, some of the assailants fled to the traditional walled village of Nam Pin Wai nearby.

There, riot police and other officers surrounded and questioned scores of men in white shirts for several hours, live media coverage showed.

Sometime after 4 a.m., the men in white began to leave. No arrests were made at the time, although a dozen men have since been arrested over the incident, according to a police statement.

A police commander told reporters at the scene that no arrests were made as the police couldn’t prove the men were the assailants, and no weapons were found.

Public anger over the incident has built in the days since, and tens of thousands of people are expected to march through Yuen Long on Saturday.

A rare open letter signed by a group of civil servants criticized authorities’ handling of the violence.

Slideshow (3 Images)

“The police’s lack of response on July 21 had made people suspect the government colluded with triads,” wrote a group of 235 civil servants from 44 government departments including the police force.

“This had not only caused citizens to lose confidence in the police, but also made civil servants suspect that the government departments are not aimed to serve citizens faithfully.”

At a press conference, Police Commissioner Lo denied any collusion between his force and triads but acknowledged the need to restore public confidence.

Additional reporting by Jessie Pang, Felix Tam and Vimvam Tong. Editing by Lincoln Feast.

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-extradition-gang-insight/chinese-official-urged-hong-kong-villagers-to-drive-off-protesters-before-violence-at-train-station-idUSKCN1UL0LK

2019-07-26 06:14:00Z
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