The International Organization for Migration reports it has repatriated 127 African and Asian migrants stranded in Libya under difficult, brutal conditions.
Tripoli’s Mitiga International airport was shut down last Sunday after being hit by missiles. For safety reasons, IOM’s chartered plane with 127 migrants aboard took off earlier this week from Misrata, about a two-hour drive east of the Libyan capital.
From there, the passengers, which included women and children, flew to Istanbul and then onwards to their home countries. Missions from 15 countries in Africa and Asia, including Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Bangladesh and Egypt were involved in the complex, risky operation.
IOM spokeswoman, Safa Msehli told VOA stranded migrants is a reference to those those who either are held in Libyan detention centers or are living freely in urban areas across the country.
“In detention centers across Libya we have close to 5,000 migrants that are still detained. In Libya alone, according to IOM Libya’s DTM (Displacement Tracking Matrix), there are over 600,000 migrants, a lot of whom – not only due to the current context of war – but a lot of whom have arrived in Libya and remain without a solution,” Msehli said.
Libya’s detention centers are notorious as places where refugees and migrants are subject to horrific forms of abuse, including torture and rape, as well as the lack of sufficient food and medical care. Migrants and refugees in urban areas are vulnerable to exploitation, trafficking and kidnapping for ransom.
Despite all the difficulties, IOM has succeeded in returning more than 7,200 stranded migrants to their countries of origin this year.
Upon their return, Msehli said the migrants receive a reintegration package that helps them resume their lives, continue their education or start a small business.
Pakistan said Saturday four of its soldiers were killed and another was injured when “terrorists” from across the Afghanistan border opened fire at two locations.
The deadliest of the shootings occurred in the remote Dir district where Pakistani troops were building a border fence when they came under attack from the other side, killing three soldiers and injuring another.
The military’s media wing said another soldier was killed when “miscreants” from the Afghan side ambushed a routine border patrol party late Friday in North Waziristan district. It added that two of the assailants were also killed in an exchange of fire.
Cross-border militant attacks are not uncommon on Pakistani troops constructing a fence along the country’s nearly 2,600 kilometer border with Afghanistan.
Islamabad began the unilateral fencing of the largely porous frontier two years ago to plug hundreds of informal crossings that were encouraging terrorist infiltration in both directions.
Military officials expect the massive border project will be in place by end of next year, addressing to a large extent mutual concerns of illegal crossings of both militants and drug traffickers.
Pakistan has complained that anti-state militants linked to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, have taken refuge in “ungoverned” Afghan border areas after fleeing Pakistani security operations and orchestrate attacks from those sanctuaries.
Earlier this week, the United States designated TTP chief Qari Wali Noor Mehsud a global terrorist for directing deadly attacks against Pakistan.
Mehsud’s whereabouts are not known but his predecessor, Mullah Fazlullah, was killed in June of 2018 along with several key TTP commanders in an American drone strike in an eastern border region of Afghanistan.
For their part, officials in Kabul allege that leaders and fighters of the Afghan Taliban use sanctuaries on Pakistani soil to direct insurgent attacks against local and international forces.
The World Food Program has launched its biggest relief operation this year to aid thousands of Rohingya refugees whose possessions have been swept away in the torrential rains that hit Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh this week.
In the space of 24 hours, the WFP has delivered food to 16,000 Rohingya refugees who have lost everything in the heavy rains that have wreaked havoc in the camps. The agency reports it also has provided food aid to more than 800 people from the host community displaced by the flooding.
Bangladesh is a low-lying country prone to flooding during the monsoon season, which is set to last until October. However, the amount of rain that battered the region in just one day this week is by any measure extreme and devastating.
WFP spokesman Herve Verhoosel told VOA a colleague on the ground has described the depth of grief experienced by families who have lost the few belongings they have managed to acquire in the camps. More than 700,000 Rohingya refugees have fled violence and persecution in Myanmar since August 2017, many with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.
Citing one family as an example, Verhoosel described the refugees’ predicament as dire.
“The family lost everything because all that was in the house was basically washed away, what they used as a bed or what they used to cook. Everything was basically lost. They have nothing to cook [with]. They have nothing to sleep [on]. Most of their clothes have been lost. Basically, the little things that they have rebuilt since they arrived in the camp was lost in one night of rain,” he said.
Monsoons and downpours in Bangladesh have become more erratic and powerful due to climate change. Verhoosel says the WFP has been working with the refugees and host communities on disaster risk-reduction measures to mitigate the impact of climate-related events.
Fearing the worst, he said the WFP had pre-positioned food stocks at strategic locations around the camps before the monsoon season began. In doing so, he said, the agency was able to respond quickly to the current emergency.
Leaders of the United Auto Workers union have extended contracts with Ford and Fiat Chrysler indefinitely, but the pact with General Motors is still set to expire Saturday night.
The move puts added pressure on bargainers for both sides as they approach the contract deadline and the union starts to prepare for a strike.
The contract extension was confirmed Friday by UAW spokesman Brian Rothenberg, who declined further comment on the talks.
The union has picked GM as the target company, meaning it is the focus of bargaining and would be the first company to face a walkout. GM’s contract with the union is scheduled to expire at 11:59 p.m. Saturday.
Picket lines posted
It’s possible that the four-year GM contract also could be extended or a deal could be reached, but it’s more likely that 49,200 UAW members could walk out of GM plants as early as Sunday because union and company demands are so far apart.
FILE – An employee inspects a Cadillac Escalade as it nears the final process of assembly at the General Motors plant in Arlington, Texas, July 14, 2015.
Picket line schedules already have been posted near the entrance to one local UAW office in Detroit.
Art Wheaton, an auto industry expert at the Worker Institute at Cornell University, expects the GM contract to be extended for a time, but he says the gulf between the sides is wide.
“GM is looking through the windshield ahead, and it looks like nothing but land mines,” he said of a possible recession, trade disputes and the expense of developing electric and autonomous vehicles. “I think there’s really going to be a big problem down the road in matching the expectations of the union and the willingness of General Motors to be able to give the membership what it wants.”
Sunday meeting
Plant-level union leaders from all over the country will be in Detroit on Sunday to talk about the next steps, and after that, the union likely will make an announcement.
But leaders are likely to face questions about an expanding federal corruption probe that snared a top official on Thursday. Vance Pearson, head of a regional office based near St. Louis, was charged with corruption in an alleged scheme to embezzle union money and spend cash on premium booze, golf clubs, cigars and swanky stays in California. It’s the same region that UAW President Gary Jones led before taking the union’s top office last year.
Jones and other union executives met privately at a hotel at Detroit Metropolitan Airport on Friday. After the meeting broke up, Jones’ driver and others physically blocked an AP reporter from trying to approach him to ask questions.
In a 40-page criminal complaint, the government alleged that over $600,000 in UAW money was spent by union officials at businesses in the Palm Beach, California, area, including at restaurants, a golf resort, cigar shop and rental properties, between 2014 and 2017.
FILE – A General Motors employee holds an American flag as colleagues gather outside the plant, March 6, 2019, in Lordstown, Ohio. The plant was idled.
The union said the government has misconstrued facts and said the allegations are not proof of wrongdoing. “Regardless, we will not let this distract us from the critical negotiations under way with GM to gain better wages and benefits,” Rothenberg said.
At UAW Local 22 in Detroit, picket line schedules for three days were posted on the lobby windows. The local represents workers at a plant that straddles the border between Detroit and the hamlet of Hamtramck.
The 24-hour schedules don’t list any date to start but a separate schedule has a group reporting to the union hall at 6 a.m. on Sunday. The factory, which makes the Chevrolet Impala and Cadillac CT6, is one of four that GM plans to close.
Here are the main areas of disagreement:
— GM is making big money, $8 billion last year alone, and workers want a bigger slice. The union wants annual pay raises to guard against an economic downturn, but the company wants to pay lump sums tied to earnings. Automakers don’t want higher fixed costs.
— The union also wants new products for four factories GM wants to close. The factory plans have irked some workers, although most those who were laid off will get jobs at other GM factories. GM currently has too much U.S. factory capacity.
— The companies want to close the labor cost gap with workers at plants run by foreign automakers. GM’s gap is the largest at $13 per hour, followed by Ford at $11 and Fiat Chrysler at $5, according to figures from the Center for Automotive Research, an industry think tank. GM pays $63 per hour in wages and benefits compared with $50 at the foreign-owned factories.
— Union members have great health insurance plans but workers pay about 4% of the cost. Employees of large firms nationwide pay about 34%, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The companies would like to cut costs.
If there is a strike, it would be the union’s first since a short one against GM in 2007.
The union may have to strike at least for a while to show workers that it got as much from the company as it could, Wheaton said. Some workers, he said, mistrust union leaders because of the corruption scandal.
Negotiators are usually tight-lipped about the talks, but a week ago, Vice President Terry Dittes wrote in a letter to local union leaders that GM has been slow to respond to union proposals. GM answered in a letter sent to factories that said it is moving as quickly as it can.
“We are working hard to understand and respond to UAW proposals and we have offered to meet as often as needed,” the letter said.
Thousands of Nigerians have joined a lawsuit seeking to block members of the Senate from using public money to buy luxury cars. The suit was initiated by rights groups that became tired of government corruption.
More than 6,700 Nigerians have joined suit that aims to prevent parliament from releasing 5.5 billion naira — equal to about $15 million — that would enable leaders of the Senate to purchase luxury vehicles.
Three domestic rights groups originated the suit, which was filed with the Nigerian Federal High Court.
One of the NGOs leading the lawsuit is civic organization BudgIT. It tracks government spending in an effort to fight corruption. Shakir Akorede, the group’s communications associate, spoke on the class action suit.
“This is living the luxury life by the so-called representatives of the people. How in any way does this plan show the seriousness, the commitment on the part of the government to solve our socioeconomic crisis?” Akorede asked.
The activists are calling the luxury car allocation unjust, unfair and unconstitutional, a waste of taxpayers’ money. News of the allocation spread across social media, creating widespread anger.
The Nigerian Senate’s spokesman, Dayo Adeyeye, told local media that the news is a rumor and that he hadn’t heard about the allocation. He added, however, that government officials are entitled to purchase cars and that he cannot imagine himself in a car used by a former senator.
Senators have become accustomed to purchasing new cars with every new term. But political scientist Auwul Musa says this wouldn’t happen if former senators did what they were supposed to do and return the cars they purchased while in office.
“They’re supposed to return it. They claim that they bought these cars for them to facilitate and ease their work so after you’re done with your office, you’re supposed to return and retire these vehicles and other facilities including laptops, printers,” Musa said.
Musa, who is the director the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Center (CISLAC), headquartered in Abuja, said he does not think the lawsuit will effect any change and that Nigerian lawmakers have long abused public money.
CISLAC reported that the current administration of President Muhammadu Buhari has done little to curb government excesses, although Buhari campaigned on the pledge to do something about it.
Some analysts say the government should allocate such money to the police. The undermanned and underfunded police force is tasked with tackling the rise in armed banditry and kidnapping along roadways around the country.
Another factor behind the public outcry is rising poverty.
Data show the majority of Nigeria’s population lives on less than $2.00 a day.
Meanwhile, Nigerian lawmakers are among the highest paid in the world. Last year, a Nigerian senator revealed that the legislators receive a monthly package of 14.25 million naira. That’s more than $40,000 a month.
A federal appeals court in New York has restored a lawsuit by restaurant workers, a hotel event booker and a watchdog who say President Donald Trump has business conflicts that violate the Constitution.
The lawsuit tossed out in 2017 by a lower-court judge was restored Friday by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The lower court had concluded that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue. The appeals panel rejected that reasoning. Trump has called the lawsuit “totally without merit.”
The lawsuit alleged Trump’s “vast, complicated, and secret” business interests were creating conflicts of interest.
Justice Department lawyers had argued that the plaintiffs did not suffer in any way and thus had no standing to sue.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington first filed the lawsuit.
A Lebanese-American man was referred Friday to prosecutors after confessing he’d worked for Israel during its occupation of Lebanon for nearly two decades, a Lebanese security agency said.
Amer Fakhoury was detained after returning to his native Lebanon from the United States earlier this month. He had worked as a senior warden at the Khiam Prison in southern Lebanon that was run by an Israeli-backed militia, known as the South Lebanon Army, until Israel ended an 18-year occupation of the area in 2000.
Lebanon and Israel have been officially at war since Israel’s creation in 1948.
FILE – The courtyard of the infamous Khiam Prison in southern Lebanon, May 24, 2000.
Human rights groups have said in the past that Khiam prison was a site of torture and detention without trial before it was abandoned in 2000. Israel denies the allegations.
On Thursday, scores of people, including former Khiam prison detainees, held a sit-in in Beirut protesting against Fakhoury, referring to him as “the butcher of Khiam” and adding that he should be put on trial.
“We reject facilitating the return of agents to the nation,” former detainee Anwar Yaseen was quoted saying by state-run National News Agency.
The Lebanese General Security Directorate said Friday that Fakhoury used an Israeli passport before Israel’s withdrawal to travel from Israel to the U.S.
Hundreds of former Lebanese members of the militia had fled to Israel, fearing reprisals if they remained in Lebanon. Others stayed and faced trial, receiving lenient sentences.
Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil, an ally of the militant Hezbollah group, tweeted Friday that the Lebanese people “will not forgive” those who pained them.
Khalil said there are attempts to clear the names of “60 agents for Israel” and “we should take this very seriously” and follow the case.
Arrest of Hassan Jaber
Also on Friday, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry summoned Ethiopia’s charge d’affaires demanding information about Lebanese businessman Hassan Jaber, whom the ministry said was detained in Addis Ababa on Saturday.
The ministry informed the Ethiopian diplomat that Beirut wants “clear answers” by Monday, otherwise Lebanon would take countermeasures.
Some Lebanese media outlets have speculated that Israel or the United States might have been behind Jaber’s arrest.
In 2017, Lebanese businessman Kassim Tajeddine, was arrested in the Moroccan city of Casablanca while on his way from Guinea to Beirut. He later surfaced in the United States, where he was charged with laundering money for Hezbollah.
U.S. President Donald Trump has arrived in Baltimore, the eastern U.S., majority-black city he recently called a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.”
Trump was there Thursday to address Republican congressional leaders attending an annual retreat.
Before he left the White House, Trump ignored a reporter’s question about what he would say to the residents of the city, instead saying only that it was going to be “a very successful evening.”
Demonstrators gather near the U.S. House Republican Member Retreat where President Donald Trump is speaking, in Baltimore, Sept. 12, 2019.
Ahead of the president’s visit, activist groups planned to protest “racism, white supremacy, war, bigotry and climate change,” organizers told The Baltimore Sun.
On Thursday, several hundred protesters lined the route Trump’s motorcade took to the city’s Inner Harbor area, where Trump was to speak.
Trump has denied charges of racism on his attacks on the city and its congressman, Elijah Cummings.
“There is nothing racist in stating plainly what most people already know, that Elijah Cummings has done a terrible job for the people of his district, and of Baltimore itself,” he tweeted in July.
Jewish settlement construction in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem has spiked since President Donald Trump took office in 2017, according to official data obtained by The Associated Press.
The data also showed strong evidence of decades of systematic discrimination, illustrated by a huge gap in the number of construction permits granted to Jewish and Palestinian residents.
The expansion of the settlements in east Jerusalem, which Israel seized along with the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Mideast war, threatens to further complicate one of the thorniest issues in the conflict.
The refusal to grant permits to Palestinian residents has confined them to crowded, poorly served neighborhoods, with around half the population believed to be at risk of having their homes demolished.
Palestinian Jamil Masalmeh uses a power tool to destroy an apartment he had added to his home years earlier, in the Silwan neighborhood of east Jerusalem, Sept. 9, 2019.
Peace Now
The data was acquired and analyzed by the Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now, which says it only obtained the figures after a two-year battle with the municipality. It says the numbers show that while Palestinians make up more than 60% of the population in east Jerusalem, they have received only 30% of the building permits issued since 1991.
The fate of the city, which is home to holy sites sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians, is at the heart of the decades-old conflict. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state, while Israel views the entire city as its unified capital. Tensions have soared since Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017 and moved the U.S. Embassy there, breaking with a longstanding international consensus that the city’s fate should be decided in negotiations.
Trump has argued that his recognition does not preclude a final settlement. But the Palestinians and rights groups say his unbridled support for Israel’s nationalist government has given it a free pass to tighten its grip on war-won lands sought by the Palestinians.
Peace Now found that in the first two years of Trump’s presidency, authorities approved 1,861 housing units in east Jerusalem settlements, a 60% increase from the 1,162 approved in the previous two years. The figures show that 1,081 permits for settler housing were issued in 2017 alone, the highest annual number since 2000. A total of 1,233 housing units were approved for Palestinians in 2017 and 2018, according to Peace Now.
The data did not include the number of Jewish and Palestinian applications, or the rates of approval, though many Palestinians acknowledge not applying because they say it is nearly impossible to get a permit.
Spokesmen for the Israeli government and the municipality did not respond to requests for comment.
Arduous process
The figures are for construction permits issued by the municipality, the final step of a costly bureaucratic process that can take years to complete. The figures show that since 1991, the municipality has issued 21,834 permits for housing units in Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem and 9,536 for Palestinian neighborhoods.
Hagit Ofran, an expert on settlements who collected and analyzed the data, says the discrepancy in permits dates to 1967, when Israel expanded the city’s municipal boundaries to take in large areas of open land that were then earmarked for Jewish settlements. At the same time, city planners set the boundaries of Palestinian neighborhoods, preventing them from expanding.
“In the planning vision of Jerusalem, there was no planning for the expansion of Palestinian neighborhoods,” she said, adding that the government has initiated almost no construction in those neighborhoods, placing the burden of planning and permits entirely on the residents themselves.
Today, about 215,000 Jews live in east Jerusalem, mostly in built-up areas that Israel considers to be neighborhoods of its capital. Most of east Jerusalem’s 340,000 Palestinian residents are crammed into increasingly overcrowded neighborhoods where there is little room to build.
Palestinians say the expense and difficulty of obtaining permits forces them to build illegally. Peace Now estimates that of the 40,000 housing units in Palestinian neighborhoods of east Jerusalem, half have been built without permits.
“When you build illegally, without a permit, there’s always a chance your house will be demolished,” Ofran said.
B’Tselem, another Israeli rights group, says at least 112 housing units in east Jerusalem were demolished in the first seven months of 2019 — more than in any full year since at least 2004.
When Palestinian Jamil Masalmeh failed to secure a permit, Israeli municipal authorities gave him the option of destroying it himself or paying more than $20,000 for the city to demolish it.
‘I’ll die before I ever get a permit’
On a hot, sunny day earlier this week, Jamil Masalmeh, 59, used a crowbar and power tools to destroy an apartment he had added to his home in the Silwan neighborhood years earlier. When he failed to secure a permit, municipal authorities gave him the option of demolishing it himself or paying more than $20,000 for the city to do it.
He says he began trying to get a permit 20 years ago, when he built the extension, which consisted of two bedrooms and a kitchen, for his growing family. Eight years ago, the authorities forced him to dismantle it, but he built it again, hoping to eventually get a permit.
“Every time they tell me to get something different. Get this document or that document, get whatever we tell you to, and then in the end, they say you can’t build on this land. Why? There’s no answer,” he said. “I’ll die before I ever get a permit.”
Promoting Jewish settlement
Every Israeli government since 1967 has actively promoted settlement construction, including during the peace process with the Palestinians.
But settlement approvals have accelerated in east Jerusalem and the West Bank since Trump took office, as Israel has encountered little if any resistance from a friendly White House. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to annex the Jordan Valley, which makes up about a quarter of the West Bank, and other settlements there if his party wins next week’s elections.
The Palestinians cut off all ties with the Trump administration after the Jerusalem decision and have rejected a peace plan the president has promised to release, saying the administration is marching in lockstep with Israel’s right-wing government. The Palestinians and much of the international community have long seen settlements as illegal and a major obstacle to peace. Israel says the settlement issue should be resolved in negotiations and blames the lack of progress on Palestinian intransigence.
With peace efforts stalled and little hope for an independent state anytime soon, the Palestinians who remain in east Jerusalem are left to endure its crowded conditions and an uncertain future.
“If you want to travel, it’s a problem. If you want to stay home, it’s a problem. If you want to work, it’s a problem. If you want to build, it’s a problem,” Masalmeh said. “Everything’s a problem.”
Climate-change activists plan to disrupt Heathrow Airport with drones on Friday morning, despite the arrest of five of their members in a pre-emptive strike by London police.
The Heathrow Pause group aims to ground flights by illegally
flying drones within five kilometers (three miles) of an airport, to put pressure on the government to take tougher steps to reduce carbon emissions.
Police arrested three men and two women from the group on Thursday on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance in relation to operations at the airport.
But Heathrow Pause said it would go ahead anyway.
“The action will carry on exactly as planned, peacefully and nonviolently, regardless of today’s events — we have contingency measures in place,” it said in a statement on Thursday.
Earlier this week, police said they were confident the action would not lead to a repeat of the chaos seen at Gatwick last December, when drone sightings grounded planes in the run-up to Christmas.
But they warned that attempted disruption of the airport and flying drones without permission in the exclusion zone were serious crimes.
The activists say they are not looking to endanger life, and aim to conduct the action and alert authorities before the airport opens.
Heathrow has said the demonstration is counterproductive
and criminal, adding that despite talks between the two sides, the campaigners disagree with the airport’s belief that aviation can and should be decarbonized.
U.S. marine mammal biologists have declared an “unusual mortality event” in the deaths of nearly 300 ice seals off Alaska’s northwest coast.
The cause of the deaths is not known.
The fisheries arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the declaration covers ringed, bearded and spotted seals. All three types of seals use sea ice in varying ways.
NOAA Fisheries has received reports of 282 dead seals in the Bering and Chukchi seas since June 1, 2018.
That’s nearly five times the average number of reported seal strandings.
The deaths have mostly occurred from June to September in both years.
Declaration of an unusual mortality event allows the agency to use more resources to investigate the deaths.
Some Rwandans who used to be wildlife poachers have turned into conservationists. For VOA, reporter Eugene Uwimana has more from the Gorilla Guardians Village, located near Volcanoes National Park in Northern Rwanda
