A land mine explosion in Afghanistan claimed the lives of 9 children Saturday as they walked to school, according to police.
Spokesman Khalil Asir said the mine detonated in the northeastern province of Takhar, killing the children, who were nine to 12 years old.
Asir said the Taliban planted anti-personnel mines to clear the area but, “Unfortunately, today, one of those mines exploded and killed nine primary school students.”
The Taliban, which controls the area and is fighting to oust U.S.-backed foreign troops, was not immediately available for comment.
Saturday’s deaths are the latest in a growing number of civilian casualties this year, despite U.S.-Taliban talks to reach a peace agreement.
The U.N. said last month a record 4,313 civilians were killed or injured between July and September, a more than 40 percent increase from the same period last year.
Of that number, more than 1,000 were fatalities — making the period the most deadly since the U.N. began compiling figures in 2009.
Hong Kong police Saturday fired tear gas in an effort to disperse protesters whose rallies in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory show no signs of subsiding.
Saturday marked the 22nd consecutive weekend of pro-democracy protests in the territory’s streets.
Friday, Shen Chunyaok, the director of the Hong Kong, Macao and Basic Law Commission warned that China “absolutely will not permit any behavior encouraging separatism or endangering national security and will resolutely guard against and contain the interference of foreign powers in the affairs of Hong Kong and Macao and their carrying out acts of separatism, subversion, infiltration and sabotage.”
Eighteen-year-old protester Gordon Tsoi told the French news agency AFP: “The government and the police have been ignoring and suppressing the people’s demands so we need to continue the movement to show them we still want what we are asking for.”
The Asian financial hub has been mired in massive and oftentimes violent protests since June, sparked by a proposed bill that would have allowed criminal suspects to be extradited to mainland China. The protests have evolved into demands for full democracy for Hong Kong, an independent inquiry into the possible use of excessive force by police and complete amnesty for all activists arrested during the demonstrations. Masked activists have vandalized businesses and the city subway system, and attacked police with bricks and homemade gasoline bombs.
Hong Kong enjoys a high degree of autonomy under the “one government, two systems” arrangement established when China regained control of Hong Kong from Britain in 1997. But political activists and observers say Beijing is slowly tightening its grip on the territory and eroding its basic freedoms.
Vietnam Friday announced its first arrests in a suspected cross-border trafficking case in Essex, England, where authorities found the bodies of 39 Vietnamese they believe suffocated to death in a refrigerated truck.
Police in Ha Tinh province said they arrested and charged two suspects after 10 local families reported fearing their family members were among the 39 victims. The case has reached the highest levels of government, with both the British and Vietnamese prime ministers ordering investigations. The probes have expanded to include transit countries China, Ireland, and Belgium, where officials say the driver of the truck said he’d been transporting cookies and biscuits.
“The Ha Tinh Police have gathered the forces and means to clearly investigate the legal violations of individuals and organizations involved,” a post on the police website said Saturday. They did not name the suspects but said they detained others for questioning too.
Hoang Thi Ai holds up her phone showing a photo of her son, Hoang Van Tiep, who she fears is one of the possible victims in the truck deaths in England, at her home in Dien Chau district, Nghe An province, Vietnam, Oct. 28, 2019.
The suspects were charged with “organizing and brokering for other people to flee abroad or stay abroad illegally.” British police have also arrested or charged at least five people on suspicion of manslaughter and conspiracy to traffic people.
Journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai, the author of the book “Chinese Whispers: The Story Behind Britain’s Hidden Army of Labour,” wrote in the Guardian Wednesday that it is not constructive to merely focus on crime or “evil human traffickers.” She argued the 39 found last month were not hapless victims lured into trafficking, but workers “fighting for a future for their families.”
“In reality, the Vietnamese young men and women who choose to travel on these dangerous routes only do so when they cannot come to Britain in formal ways,” she wrote.
Pai said there “will be more deaths in lorries unless Britain changes” its anti-migrant policies.
“Let our fellow human beings have the opportunity to live and work in the open,” she wrote.
Many migrants are recruited to go abroad from Vietnam’s Mekong Delta region. (Ha Nguyen/VOA)
Separately, police in another Vietnamese province, Nghe An, said last week they arrested four people suspected of involvement in a trafficking ring, local media reported. It is unclear if that network was at all involved with the Vietnamese migrants found in Essex, but the truck deaths have increased the attention and urgency around existing investigations.
For the Essex Police, the truck deaths reportedly mark the biggest investigation they have conducted into mass casualties.
Although Vietnam has greatly decreased poverty since the end of the U.S.-Vietnam war, some still find they can earn more money to support their families by going overseas.
Among Asian migrants, Vietnamese pay the highest costs to brokers, and the number of migrants is rising, according to the International Labor Organization in Vietnam. It recommends that governments collaborate to ensure safe channels for migration, so people don’t have to resort to brokers. Migrants are still going through irregular channels because globalization has created more jobs in more places; however, while globalization has fostered the flow of companies and capital across borders, it has not done so for workers, pushing them toward trafficking.
“With collaboration and cooperation, labor migration can be a positive development force, and risks to the safety of migrant workers can be reduced,” Chang-Hee Lee, the ILO country director in Hanoi, said Tuesday.
A breast cancer diagnosis is terrifying enough at any time. But for 49-year-old Grecia Solis, the arduous choices faced by all cancer patients were complicated by the crippling decline of Venezuela’s public health facilities.
After her diagnosis two years ago, doctors recommended surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Before the oil-producing nation’s steep economic decline of recent years, those services would have been available free of charge or for a nominal fee at a state-run public hospital.
Grecia Solis is 49 years old; she raised money among family and friends to undergo her breast cancer operation in a private clinic, due to the lack of supplies in the public hospital.
But trained staff, medicines and equipment are in such short supply at those facilities today that a public hospital was no longer an option. Instead, Solis was forced to borrow money from family and friends to pay for her operation at a privately run, for-profit clinic.
Her operation, performed in May 2018, cost her $500, a modest amount by U.S. standards, but a huge sum in Venezuela where hyperinflation has ravaged most people’s savings. With additional financial help from a sister in Ecuador, Solis was able to pay for the recommended eight sessions of chemotherapy, which were completed in December.
Solis’ story is a common one among cancer patients in Venezuela. Patients are not just afraid of the disease itself, but they also fear dying because they cannot find or afford the necessary treatment.
Last year, about 4,700 women in Venezuela became ill with breast cancer, according to the Anticancer Society of Venezuela, although the nation’s health ministry has not produced official figures since 2012. The society reported 2,300 women died last year from the disease, one of the leading causes of cancer deaths among Venezuelan women.
Melania Carpio is 65 years old; she uses social media and nonprofits to ask for help and funds for her cancer treatment.
Senos Ayuda, an NGO that supports breast cancer patients, estimates the number of patients are even higher, at almost 7,000 a year. And it stresses that treatment, medicine and doctors are becoming ever less accessible with the deepening of the nation’s humanitarian emergency.
The problem is part of a wider crisis in public health facilities. According to several Venezuelan doctors’ organizations, 73% of the country’s operating rooms are out of service or lack supplies and have unsanitary conditions.
A survey conducted by the organization Doctors for Health indicated that 90% of radiotherapy facilities are inoperative, 94% of health centers cannot take an X-ray, and 88% of hospitals have insufficient supplies and medicines. The Anticancer Society of Venezuela has reported that 80% of public radiotherapy equipment has been inoperative in the last year.
Solis says she is frustrated the government of President Nicolas Maduro does not accept that Venezuela is in a humanitarian crisis and has done little to address the problem, leading to avoidable cancer deaths.
Algeria Diaz is 58 years old, she prays every day to overcome the disease she has, despite the lack of food and the medicines she needs to be healthy.
Another patient, 58-year-old Algeria Dias, was diagnosed with a breast tumor in August 2017. She was able to afford treatment with the help of family, donations, some government help and the sale of the family car, but she says she now she spends every day “going from clinic to clinic, public and private, and see if they have the space or equipment I need to monitor my disease.”
For her part, Solis says she is running out time. She has until December to raise $5,000 to pay for more than 30 additional radiotherapy sessions to prevent the likely return of her cancer.
“Cancer does not wait. Cancer does not warn and when you have it, it overtakes you. It hurts having the uncertainty of not knowing if you can say, “I am a cancer survivor,” she said.
The Washington Nationals will not have to travel far, or wait all that long, to visit the White House, as the World Series champions have a get-together planned with President Donald Trump on Monday.
Typically, teams wait until the following season when they are in Baltimore or Washington to visit the White House, but the logistics were not all that difficult for a team that plays a mere three miles away. A ceremony on the South Lawn is scheduled for 1:15 p.m. EST.
The White House visit will come after a parade to honor the champions on Saturday. The Nationals completed the seven-game World Series with a victory Wednesday at Houston.
The road team won every game, the first time that has happened in World Series history.
Trump attended Game 5 of the series on Sunday at Nationals Park, with boos filling the ballpark when he was shown on the video board.
Trump has also met with the 2017 champion Houston Astros and the 2018 champion Boston Red Sox, although a number of Red Sox players skipped that visit, including manager Alex Cora.
Spaniards are voicing outrage after five men were acquitted of rape on the grounds that their 14-year-old victim had been unconscious at the time.
The Barcelona-based court ruled Thursday that the men were guilty of the lesser crime of sexual abuse and sentenced them to 10-12 years and fined them 12,000 euros ($13,300).
It ruled that their act could not be considered sexual assault since the girl was unconscious after consuming alcohol and drugs and so they did not need to use violence or intimidation, a requirement for a rape conviction in Spain.
Spain’s deputy prime minister, Carmen Calvo, said that while her government does not comment on court decisions it has set as a priority a modification in the law to make clear consent necessary for sexual relations to occur legally.
The attack occurred in the town of Manresa, near Barcelona, in 2016 when the girl and the men went into an abandoned factory to drink.
The court said that since the victim was unconscious during the attack, she “could not accept or reject the sexual relations” and that the men “could carry out those sexual relations without the use of violence or intimidation.”
FILE – Barcelona mayor Ada Colau speaks at a mayors meeting in Paris, Oct. 23, 2017.
Barcelona mayor Ada Colau and other left-wing politicians and feminist groups have condemned the ruling, as well as clamoring for the law to be strengthened in the victim’s favor.
“Another senseless verdict by the patriarchal Justice that doesn’t want to understand that only a Yes means Yes,” Colau wrote on Twitter. “An unconscious 14-year-old girl was gang raped. I am not a judge and I don’t know how many years of prison they deserve, (but) what I do know is that this is not abuse, it is rape!”
Marisa Soleto, of the feminist group Fundacion Mujeres, said that “this is just one more piece of proof for the necessity to change the penal code.”
A similar 2017 ruling sparked widespread protests when five men were found guilty of sexual abusing a woman but acquitted of rape for an attack in Pamplona. Spain’s Supreme Court later overruled the lower court and convicted them of rape.
“Full House” actress Lori Loughlin and her fashion designer husband are contesting the latest charges against them in the college admissions scandal.
Lawyers for Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli filed court documents Friday saying the couple plans to plead not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit federal program bribery. The couple also waived their right to appear at a Nov. 20 arraignment.
Prosecutors recently added the bribery charge for 11 parents who previously pleaded not guilty in the case. Another 19 parents have pleaded guilty or agreed to plead guilty.
Loughlin and Giannulli are accused of paying $500,000 to get their two daughters into the University of Southern California as fake athletic recruits. Their daughters no longer attend USC.
The couple previously pleaded not guilty to fraud and money laundering.
VOA Connect Episode 94 – We get a rare, behind-the-scenes look at a Native Ute tribal tradition, the Bear Dance. We also visit a butterfly sanctuary and a high tech aquarium.
On Aug. 25, 1989, an 8-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis wrote in her journal that it was “the most best day” because scientists had “found a Jean for Cistik fibrosis.”
On Thursday, the current head of the National Institutes of Health — who was a member of one of the teams that found the gene — wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine that a triple-drug therapy has been found to be highly effective in treating the life-threatening disorder.
“We hoped that the gene discovery would someday lead to effective treatments for children and adults with cystic fibrosis,” Francis Collins wrote. “Now, 30 years later, that time has come.”
The drug, called Trikafta, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration last week.
Some 30,000 Americans have been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, which causes thick mucus buildup in the patient’s organs, affecting respiration and digestion. While other drugs have helped lengthen patients’ lives, those born with the disease are expected to live only into their 40s.
Past treatments helped only a small percentage of patients, but Trikafta targets Phe508del, the most common mutation of the cystic fibrosis gene. Collins said this means 90% of those suffering from cystic fibrosis — including Jenny, the 8-year-old journal writer — will be helped by the therapy.
Now 38, Jenny McGlincy told The Washington Post that she cried when she read the drug had been approved.
“To think of my lung function improving or my digestion increasing, or even adding a few years to my life that I could spend with my daughter. … Now that it’s available, I’m a little like, ‘Is this really happening?’ ” she told the Post.
Model of collaboration
Cystic fibrosis research has set a standard of how the collaboration between nonprofits and pharmaceutical firms can help develop treatments. Collins points out that the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, frustrated that gene treatments were slow to be found, decided to invest directly in a small company called Aurora Biosciences, which is now Vertex Pharmaceuticals, the developer of Trikafta.
That collaboration, “now spanning more than two decades, can be seen as an important model for other rare genetic diseases,” Collins wrote.
After the discovery of the gene, Collins wrote a song, “Dare to Dream.”
“The lyrics expressed hope that the gene discovery would lead to effective treatments for cystic fibrosis — that someday we would see ‘all our brothers and sisters breathing free.’ It is profoundly gratifying to see that this dream is coming true,” he said.
The Nationals’ World Series victory Wednesday night has brought together fans in a city deeply divided by the impeachment inquiry against U.S. President Donald Trump.
The Washington Nationals defeated the Houston Astros 6-2 on Wednesday in the seventh game of Major League Baseball’s World Series, earning the team’s first championship win in franchise history.
Politics have previously divided fans at D.C.’s Nationals Park, where the team plays its home games. Last Sunday, Trump, first lady Melania Trump and other prominent Republicans attended the fifth game of the series. The president’s group was loudly booed by members of the audience, many jeering “lock him up.”
But sporting events also provide an opportunity to bring people together, as famously happened during the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Nagoya, Japan, when a public encounter between two pingpong players from China and the U.S. was seen as signaling the thawing of U.S.-Chinese relations during the Cold War.
For D.C. residents, the Nationals’ World Series victory became a moment of unity for the city.
“The impeachment is definitely divisive,” said resident Ore Fashola. “The Nationals’ win in the World Series … is a very big cohesive moment.”
Despite the win, D.C. residents said the good news was only temporary.
“On Saturday, everybody will be together for the parade and for one day only, and then it will go back to business as normal,” said resident Daniel Dowhan. While Wednesday’s win was big, it was too small for people to overcome their differences and be “friends,” he added.
Fashola said she thought the win would be a “short-term” unifier. “I think that [impeachment is] more a long-term focus.”
Some Washingtonians, however, had trouble taking even a short break from the impeachment inquiry on the day of the World Series win.
“I’m following and looking forward to seeing a better change,” said one resident, Penelope, when asked about the inquiry.
The House voted Thursday to authorize a public impeachment inquiry targeting Trump for allegedly pushing Ukraine to investigate his political opponents.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s attended two fundraisers this week, raking in millions of dollars for the Trump 2020 and House Republican campaigns. The events, both held at Trump’s own properties in Washington and Chicago are drawing continued scrutiny and charges of ethics violations that the president brushes aside. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
Chile canceled the hosting of two important international meetings in the capital, Santiago, because of ongoing protests across the South American country. Chile’s President Sebastián Piñera said Wednesday his country will not host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in November or the COP25 environmental summit in December, as his government has to deal with the unprecedented unrest that has left about 20 people dead and led to the resignation of eight cabinet ministers. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.
