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Supporters cheered late Friday as once-powerful opposition leader and two-time Peruvian presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori left the prison where she had been held while being investigated for alleged corruption. Peru’s Constitutional Tribunal approved her release.
Smiling broadly, the daughter of jailed ex-President Alberto Fujimori walked out of the women’s prison in the Lima district of Chorrillos and was handed a bouquet of roses by her husband, Mark Villanella, who had been on a hunger strike demanding her release.
Keiko Fujimori called her 13-month prison stay the “most painful time of my life, so the first thing I want to do now that I am on the street is thank God for giving me the strength to resist.”
Odebrecht accusations
She was freed by the Constitutional Tribunal in 4-3 vote earlier this week. The magistrates noted the decision on a habeas corpus request does not constitute a judgment on her guilt or innocence with regards to accusations she accepted money from Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht. Fujimori could still be returned to a cell.
Dozens of riot police were present in case of protests by opponents who have called her release another blow for entrenched impunity for the corrupt in the South American country. But most of the people outside the prison were her supporters.
“The Constitutional Tribunal has corrected a great damage done to us in a process filled with abuses and arbitrariness,” Fujimori said.
Changed political landscape
The 44-year-old, who was jailed in October 2018, faces a radically different political landscape outside of prison.
Her Popular Force party held a majority in congress until September, when President Martin Vizcarra dissolved the legislature in a popular move he described as necessary to uproot corruption. The conservative Popular Force will participate in January legislative elections, but Fujimori is not expected to be a candidate and analysts predict that her party could fare poorly in the voting.
As party leader, Fujimori helped fuel the impeachment of former President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski for lying about his ties with Odebrecht. But now Fujimori herself has been ensnared by a corruption scandal that has toppled political and businesses leaders around Latin America.
Corruption allegations have hit all of Peru’s presidents between 2001 and 2016.
Prosecutors accuse Fujimori of laundering $1.2 million provided by Odebrecht for her 2011 and 2016 presidential campaigns. They opened an investigation into the campaigns after seeing a note written by Marcelo Odebrecht, head of the Brazilian mega-company, on his cellphone that said: “increase Keiko to 500 and pay a visit.”
Fujimori denies the accusations and says prosecutors and Peru’s election body have received Popular Force’s accounting books for inspection.
Striking downfall
Her jailing capped a striking downfall for a politician who went from presidential daughter, to powerful opposition leader, to within a hair’s breadth of the presidency.
Fujimori’s father, a strongman who governed Peru from 1990 to 2000, remains a polarizing figure. Some Peruvians praise him for defeating Maoist Shining Path guerrillas and resurrecting a devastated economy, while others detest him for human rights violations. He is serving a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses and corruption.
She tried to follow in her father’s presidential footsteps and forge a gentler, kinder version of the movement known as “Fujimorismo.”
She finished second in the 2011 election and five years later lost in a razor-thin vote, coming within less than half a percentage point of defeating Kuczynski.
Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi announced his resignation on Friday after the country’s top Shi’ite Muslim cleric called for lawmakers to reconsider their support for a government rocked by weeks of deadly anti-establishment unrest.
“In response to this call, and in order to facilitate it as quickly as possible, I will present to parliament a demand (to accept) my resignation from the leadership of the current government,” a statement signed by Abdul Mahdi said.
The statement did not say when he would resign. Parliament is to convene an emergency session on Sunday to discuss the crisis.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani earlier urged parliament to considering withdrawing its support for Abdul Mahdi’s government to stem spiraling violence.
Security forces meanwhile shot dead at least three people in the southern city of Nassiriya as clashes continued.
Iraqi forces have killed nearly 400 mostly young, unarmed demonstrators people since mass anti-government protests broke out on Oct. 1. More than a dozen members of the security forces have also died in clashes.
The burning of Iran’s consulate in the holy city of Najaf on Wednesday escalated violence and drew a brutal response from security forces who shot dead more than 60 people nationwide on Thursday.
The unrest is Iraq’s biggest crisis for years. It pits protesters from Shi’ite heartlands in Baghdad and the south against a corrupt Shi’ite-dominated ruling elite seen as pawns of Iran.
Demonstrators try to extinguish a protester who has caught on fire, during clashes between Iraqi security forces and anti-Government protesters, in Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2019. Iraqi officials said several protesters were killed as heavy…
‘Chaos and infighting’
Iraq’s current political class is drawn mainly from powerful Shi’ite politicians, clerics and paramilitary leaders including many who lived in exile before a U.S.-led invasion overthrew Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Sistani, who only weighs in on politics in times of crisis and wields huge influence over public opinion, on Friday warned against an explosion of civil strife and tyranny. He urged government forces to stop killing protests and protesters themselves to reject all violence.
The government “appears to have been unable to deal with the events of the past two months … parliament, from which the current government emerged, must reconsider its choices and do what’s in the interest of Iraq,” a representative of Sistani said in a televised sermon.
Protesters “must not allow peaceful demonstrations to be turned into attacks on property or people,” he said.
Wednesday’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Najaf set off a sharp escalation of violence.
On Thursday, security forces shot dead 46 people in another southern city, Nassiriya, 18 in Najaf and four in Baghdad bringing the death toll from weeks of unrest to at least 417, most of them unarmed protesters, according to a Reuters tally from medical and police sources.
Clashes between protesters and security forces broke out early on Friday in Nassiriya killing three people and wounding several others, hospital sources said.
Iraq’s “enemies and their apparatuses are trying to sow chaos and infighting to return the country to the age of dictatorship … everyone must work together to thwart that opportunity,” Sistani said, without elaborating.
As he prepared to announce his candidacy for president on Sunday, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took a page from an old political playbook.
Appearing in a black church in the city’s Brooklyn borough last week, the multibillionaire media mogul apologized for long pushing a now-defunct policing tactic that had disproportionately targeted African American and Hispanic residents.
Known as “stop and frisk,” the controversial policy, imposed between 2003 and 2013, allowed New York City police to stop, temporarily detain, and search anyone suspected of carrying weapons and other contraband.
“I was wrong,” Bloomberg declared to the congregation. To those who had been wronged by the policy, he said, “I apologize.”
Criminal justice policy records
Bloomberg is the latest Democratic candidate forced to reckon with a criminal justice policy record that critics view as too punitive to minorities.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has been criticized for backing a 1994 crime bill that helped trigger a federal prison population explosion, while South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has faced questions over policing tactics in his hometown.
Others, including Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, have had to justify their law enforcement policies as a former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and a California prosecutor, respectively.
That Democrats are under scrutiny over criminal justice issues is unusual. Historically, Democratic presidential candidates ran on platforms of civil rights and criminal justice reform while Republicans campaigned as tough law-and-order candidates, according to criminal justice experts.
But as the 2020 campaign enters the crucial primary phase, Democratic candidates are being forced to disavow criminal justice policies they once championed, while Republican President Donald Trump — who hardly discussed criminal justice in 2016 — is touting himself as a leading reform candidate.
Trump says he can make that claim because he signed into law a sweeping piece of legislation known as the First Step Act last December. The legislation, which has released or reduced the prison sentences of thousands of inmates convicted of drug offenses, has earned Trump praise from many African Americans.
“It’s sort of a switch in what people thought was the standard left-right divide,” said Noah Weinrich of Heritage Action for America, a conservative grassroots organization.
So what happened?
The short answer is the country has changed. The 1994 Crime Bill now under attack from liberals and African Americans was enacted during the Clinton administration, near the height of a violent crime epidemic in the country when heavy-handed policies enjoyed broad public support.
But as crime has steadily declined over the past two decades to historically low levels, support for those measures has eroded and politicians on both sides of the aisle have increasingly embraced overhaul proposals.
FILE – President Bill Clinton signs the $30 billion crime bill during a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington.
Behind the 1994 Crime Bill
Biden helped craft the legislation when he was a U.S. senator and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and now is taking heat for the legislation’s more onerous side effects.
“Today, crime and murder rates are at historic lows and American communities are safer than they have been in generations,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, acting director of the Justice Program at New York University’s Brennan Center. “That’s significant because that allows the bipartisan conversations about how to best reduce the number of people who have been incarcerated.”
To be sure, criminal justice reform is not among the most pressing concerns for voters who care more about issues such as health care, immigration and jobs, according to polling.
But public support for measures, such as eliminating mandatory minimum sentencing, has been on an upswing in recent years. That has prompted not only the large field of Democratic candidates but also the Republican president to campaign on criminal justice issues. Today, instead of incarceration, politicians increasingly talk about rehabilitation and redemption.
“Now we’re at a point in the country where we’re looking at our criminal justice system and saying maybe sentencing is what we need to think about and how do we best get our nonviolent criminals back into being productive members of society,” veteran Republican strategist David Avella said.
Last December, growing bipartisanship for criminal justice reform culminated in the enactment of the First Step Act.
FILE – President Donald Trump speaks at the 2019 Prison Reform Summit and First Step Act Celebration in the East Room of the White House in Washington, April 1, 2019.
Considered the most sweeping overhaul in a generation, the First Step Act allows for the early release of some nonviolent offenders, while providing inmates with in-prison job training to ease their reintegration into society and reduce recidivism rates. To date, more than 3,000 prisoners have been released and nearly 1,700 others have received sentence reductions under the program.
“Last year we brought the whole country together to achieve a truly momentous milestone,” Trump said last month at the historically black Benedict College in South Carolina, where he received an award for signing into law the First Step Act. “They said it couldn’t be done.”
Trump was an unlikely champion of the bill. When he first ran for president in 2016, he was seen as an obstacle to reform.
While his platform was notably silent on the issue, he consistently pushed for tough-on-crime policies over the decades, advocating lengthy sentences for violent offenders and effusing about New York City’s stop-and-frisk policies.
Then, after he was elected in 2016, Trump appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior White House adviser. Given a broad policy platform, Kushner zeroed in on an issue that he said was very close to his heart: prison reform.
FILE – Charles Kushner, left, walks to the U.S. District Courthouse with his lawyers Benjamin Brafman, right, and Alfred C. DeCotiis, center, in Newark, N.J., Aug. 18, 2004.
Kushner’s father imprisoned
His father, real estate developer Charles Kushner, spent 14 months in a federal prison in the 2000s for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering. Jared Kushner later called his father’s incarceration “obviously unjust.”
“When I had my personal experience, I wish that there was somebody who was in my office in the White House, who cared about this issue as much as I do, and if they’d been focused on it in making a difference, perhaps that would have made an impact on a lot of people who I came to meet and care about,” he told CNN’s Van Jones, a prominent African American advocate of the First Step Act, last year.
Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, an advocacy organization that lobbied for the legislation, said Kushner played an indispensable role in championing the bill and that Trump deserves credit for signing it into law.
“No one would have thought four years ago or three years ago that President Trump would have signed a law like that,” Ring said. “Everyone would have been skeptical that he would have supported any reform. So because he did it, I see no reason not to celebrate that.”
But Democratic candidates were in no mood to celebrate Trump’s action. They have denounced other Trump administration policy decisions that they say have set back years of progress on criminal justice. These include the Justice Department’s recent decision to resume federal executions.
“I find it hypocritical of him to tout whatever advances have been made in the First Step Act given his history,” Democratic candidate Harris said at the Bipartisan Justice Center event after Trump received the award.
Harris, who had initially opposed the First Step Act for not going far enough to address criminal justice reform before voting for it, has faced criticism for not embracing criminal justice reform when she was San Francisco’s top prosecutor and later California’s attorney general.
For medieval history buffs, the Czech town of Kutna Hora has two great attractions: St. Barbara’s Church, often called a cathedral because of its grandeur, and the Sedlec Ossuary, located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints outside the town. St. Barbara’s is one of the best examples of Gothic architecture in central Europe and is a UNESCO world heritage site. But visitors are more attracted to the ossuary, a chapel containing bones of more than 40,000 people, arranged in decorative patterns. Those decorations are now being dismantled so that the centuries-old bones can be cleaned while the church undergoes a renovation. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports how it is done.
The Taliban said Friday they were ready to restart peace talks with the United States, a day after President Donald Trump made a surprise visit to U.S. troops in Afghanistan and said he believed the radical group would agree to a cease-fire.
Trump’s Thanksgiving Day visit was his first to Afghanistan since becoming president and came a week after a prisoner swap between Washington and Kabul that has raised hopes for a long elusive peace deal to end the 18-year war.
“The Taliban wants to make a deal and we are meeting with them,” Trump told reporters after arriving in Afghanistan Thursday.
“We say it has to be a cease-fire and they didn’t want to do a cease-fire and now they want to do a cease-fire, I believe. It will probably work out that way,” he said.
Meetings with US officials
Taliban leaders have told Reuters that the group has been holding meetings with senior U.S. officials in Doha since last weekend, adding they could soon resume formal peace talks.
On Friday, Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the hardline Islamist insurgent group, said they were “ready to restart the talks” that collapsed after Trump had called them off earlier this year.
“Our stance is still the same. If peace talks start, it will be resumed from the stage where it had stopped,” Mujahid told Reuters.
Trump canceled peace negotiations in September after the militant group claimed responsibility for an attack in Kabul that killed 12 people, including an American soldier.
“We are hoping that Trump’s visit to Afghanistan will prove that he is serious to start talks again. We don’t think he has not much of a choice,” said a senior Taliban commander on conditions of anonymity.
US troops in Afghanistan
There are currently about 13,000 U.S. forces as well as thousands of other NATO troops in Afghanistan, 18 years after an invasion by a U.S.-led coalition following the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks on the United States.
About 2,400 U.S. service members have been killed in the course of the Afghan conflict.
A draft accord agreed in September would have thousands of American troops withdrawn in exchange for guarantees that Afghanistan would not be used as a base for militant attacks on the United States or its allies.
Still, many U.S. officials doubt the Taliban could be relied upon to prevent al-Qaida from again plotting attacks against the United States from Afghan soil.
President Donald Trump is making a surprise visit to Afghanistan to spend time with U.S. troops on Thanksgiving.
Trump says US and Taliban have been engaged in ongoing talks, says he believes Taliban open to ceasefire.
Trump arrived at Bagram Air Field shortly after 8:30 p.m. local time and spent more than two-and-a-half hours on the ground. Reporters were under strict instructions to keep the trip a secret to ensure his safety.
The visit comes more than two months after Trump abruptly broke off peace talks with the Taliban after a bombing in Kabul killed 12 people, including an American soldier.
And it comes at a pivotal moment in Trump’s presidency, with the impeachment inquiry moving quickly.
The president and first lady made a similar trip last year to Iraq on Christmas night -their first to an active conflict zone.
Vice President Mike Pence also visited troops in Iraq this week.
Dozens of French activists blocked an Amazon warehouse south of Paris in a Black Friday-inspired protest, amid increased opposition to the post-Thanksgiving sales phenomenon that has seen a group of French lawmakers push to ban it altogether.
Protesters from climate group Amis de la terre (Friends of the Earth) spread hay and old refrigerators and microwaves on the driveway leading to the warehouse in Bretigny-sur-Orge on Thursday. They held signs in front of the gates reading “Amazon: For the climate, for jobs, stop expansion, stop over-production!”
The activists were later dislodged by police.
More demonstrations are expected as Black Friday looms into view. French climate groups are planning “Block Friday” demonstrations Friday.
Their objections are garnering some support within France’s National Assembly. Some French lawmakers want to ban Black Friday, which has morphed into a global phenomenon even though it stems from a specifically U.S. holiday: Thanksgiving Thursday.
A French legislative committee passed an amendment Monday that proposes prohibiting Black Friday since it causes “resource waste” and “overconsumption.”
The amendment, which was put forward by France’s former environment minister, Delphine Batho, will be debated next month. France’s e-commerce union has condemned it.
On Europe 1 radio Thursday, France’s ecological transition minister, Elisabeth Borne, criticized Black Friday for creating “traffic jams, pollution, and gas emissions.”
She added that she would support Black Friday if it helped small French businesses, but said it mostly benefits large online retailers.
When AIDS was first identified, more than 40 years ago, it was considered a death sentence. Since then, it has become a chronic but treatable disease. The yearly World AIDS Day observance is a way to make people realize AIDS is still with us and, despite advances, the epidemic isn’t over. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports
Festive floats and giant balloons are on the move in New York City for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, an annual, nationally-televised spectacle. Blustery weather had threatened to ground the balloons, a crowd favorite not permitted to fly in strong winds.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio drew cheers from the crowd when he declared the balloons “are going to fly” even if a “little lower.” Handlers are keeping the massive inflatables only a couple meters above them.
In the past, strong winds have caused some helium-inflated characters to detach from tethers, leading to injuries.
This year’s parade, the 93rd sponsored by American retail department store Macy’s, includes a canine cartoon character, Snoopy, as an astronaut.
The event features about 8,000 marchers, two dozen floats and many marching bands — ending with an appearance by Santa Claus.
Among the performers scheduled for this year are singers Celine Dion, Ciara, Kelly Rowland and Idina Menzel.
For many Americans, the holiday to give thanks also marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.
Albanian Defense Minister Olta Xhacka becomes emotional while reading names of victims of the strongest earthquake to hit Albania in more than three decades.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed into law congressional legislation backing protesters in Hong Kong despite angry objections from Beijing, with which he is seeking a deal to end a damaging trade war.
The new legislation, approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate and by all but one lawmaker in the House of Representatives last week, requires the State Department to certify, at least annually, that Hong Kong retains enough autonomy to justify favorable U.S. trading terms that have helped it maintain its position as a world financial center. It also threatens sanctions for human rights violations.
Congress passed a second bill — which Trump also signed — banning the export to the Hong Kong police of crowd-control munitions, such as teargas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and stun guns.
“I signed these bills out of respect for President Xi, China, and the people of Hong Kong. They are being enacted in the hope that Leaders and Representatives of China and Hong Kong will be able to amicably settle their differences leading to long term peace and prosperity for all,” Trump said in a statement.
Trump had been vague about whether he would sign or veto the legislation, while trying strike a deal with China on trade that he has made a top priority ahead of his 2020 re-election bid.
China has denounced the legislation as gross interference in its affairs and a violation of international law.
