Parents of the British teen killed when his motorcycle collided with car allegedly driven by an American diplomat’s wife are on their way to the U.S. hoping to seek justice.

Harry Dunn, 19, died in August in near the Croughton Royal Air Force base in Northhamptonshire, which is used by the U.S. Air Force as a communications center.

Dunn’s mother, Charlotte Charles, told the BBC the family hopes to meet with the suspected driver, identified by British police and Prime Minister Boris Johnson as Anne Sacoolas, wife of an American intelligence officer based at Croughton.

Sacoolas claimed diplomatic immunity and returned to the United States while the case was still being investigated. She has since written a letter of apology to Dunn’s family.

But Charles said Sunday, “It’s nearly seven weeks now since we lost our boy, sorry just doesn’t cut it.

“That’s not really quite enough,” she told Sky News. “But I’m still really open to meeting her, as are the rest of us. I can’t promise what I would or wouldn’t say, but I certainly wouldn’t be aggressive.”

Charles also said the family was thankful to receive a letter Saturday from the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab that said since Sacoolas had left Britain, “immunity is no longer pertinent”.

The family is hoping Sacoolas will return to Britain.  They have even called on U.S. President Donald Trump to intervene on their behalf.

But Trump told a news conference Wednesday that Sacoolas would not return. Harry Dunn’s death was a “terrible accident,” the president said but he noted that driving on the worn side of the road “happens”.

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From: MeNeedIt

California has become the first U.S. state to ban all production and sale of animal fur products.

Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill that will make it illegal to make, sell and even donate any new item made using animal fur starting in 2023.

The bill excludes used items, taxidemy products, fur taken with a hunting license and fur used by Native American tribes for religious purposes.

Violators of the ban will face fines of up to $500, or even $1,000 for repeat offenses.

“The signing of AB44 underscores the point that today’s consumers simply don’t want wild animals to suffer extreme pain and fear for the sake of fashion,” Kitty Block, the head of the Humane Society of the United States said in a statement.

But the Fur Information Council of America condemned the ban as being part of a “radical vegan agenda” and has threatened a court challenge.

Along with the fur ban, Newsom also approved a ban on the use of most animals in circuses. Exceptions will be made for dogs and horses.

“California is a leader when it comes to animal welfare, and today that leadership includes banning the sale of fur,” Newsom said in a statement. “But we are doing more than that. We are making a statement to the world that beautiful wild animals like bears and tigers have no place on trapeze wires or jumping through flames.”

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From: MeNeedIt

Humanitarian groups on Sunday said they have rescued 74 migrants on a rubber boat in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya while Tunisian authorities reported blocking a smuggling boat carrying 110 migrants from setting off for Italy.

Doctors Without Borders and SOS Mediterranee said their Ocean Viking ship rescued the migrants Sunday morning about 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the Libyan coast near an oilfield. The groups said six children were among those rescued.

Tunisia’s Interior Ministry said three coast guard boats pursued the smuggling boat after it left Friday night from the city of Sfax. Officers shouted through loudspeakers at the boat and passengers threw projectiles that injured two officers and broke windows.

The coast guard eventually forced the boat back toward Tunisia and rescued 25 migrants who had jumped into the sea.

Meanwhile, three small boats carrying migrants reached Italian shores on Sunday. ANSA, the Italian news agency, said two boats – one carrying 15 people, the other 11 – landed on the island of Lampedusa. The agency says a third boat with 15 Tunisians aboard landed in southern Sicily.

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From: MeNeedIt

Indian police and intelligence agencies detained a freelancer for the Voice of America’s Tibetan service as he arrived in Chennai Friday (October 11) to cover the informal summit between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

A freelancer for Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan service was also detained.  Both VOA and RFA are part of the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

Cyaltsen Choedak for VOA and Pema Ngudup for RFA, were held for more than 40 hours, first at the Chennai railway station, then at a police station and finally at two guesthouses before they were released.

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From: MeNeedIt

One of Australia’s most senior government ministers has accused the Chinese Communist Party of behaving in ways that are “inconsistent” with his country’s values. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton warned Canberra would work to counter foreign interference in Australian universities, as well as cyber espionage.

Peter Dutton’s comments are some of the most uncompromising language yet from an Australian government minister on the perceived threat posed by China.

Tensions between Canberra and Beijing have risen in recent times because of allegations of cyber attacks by China, and that it has meddled in Australia’s domestic politics. There’s also been friction over the detention of a Chinese-Australian writer in Beijing, and differences over Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Australia also has concerns about Chinese interference in its universities, including allegations that students who have supported democracy protests in Hong Kong have been harassed or monitored by Chinese agents on campus.

Peter Dutton said Australia must be wary of China’s ambitions.

“My issue is with the Communist Party of China and their policies to the extent that they are inconsistent with our own values, and in a democracy like ours we encourage freedom of speech, freedom of the expression of thought, and if that is being impinged, if people are operating outside of the law then whether they are from China or from any other country we are right to call that out,” he said.

The comments prompted a stinging response from the Chinese government.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, told a press conference that he hoped “Australia will reject the Cold War mentality and bias, and work to advance bilateral relations and mutual trust.”

The Chinese Embassy in Canberra said it rejected “Mr Dutton’s irrational accusations … which are shocking and baseless.”

Australia is a liberal, middle-ranking world power. China is its biggest trading partner by some distance, and three of the main pillars of the Australian economy, mining, tourism and education, rely heavily on demand from China.

The challenge for Australia, which has a close military alliance with the United States, is to be able to criticize and challenge China while maintaining a key trade relationship that has underpinned its recent prosperity.

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From: MeNeedIt

The United States has hailed FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, for slapping a five-year ban on a former senior official of the Afghanistan Football Federation (AFF) for failing to act on sexual abuse allegations brought by the country’s female players.

“Survivors of sexual abuse deserve justice & we look to Afghan authorities to ensure accused officials are held accountable,” Alice Wells, acting U.S. assistant secretary for south and central Asia, tweeted Saturday.

We welcome @FIFAcom’s Ethics Committee’s suspension of an official who failed to act on allegations brought by the @AfghanistanWNT. Survivors of sexual abuse deserve justice & we look to Afghan authorities to ensure accused officials are held accountable. AGW

— State_SCA (@State_SCA) October 12, 2019

FIFA announced a day earlier its ongoing investigation into complaints, lodged by several female Afghan football players, has found Sayed Aghazada, the former AFF general secretary, guilty of breaching the world body’s code of ethics.

The complainants accused the former AFF president, Keramuudin Karim, of “repeated” sexual abuse between 2013 and 2018 when Aghazada was the general secretary. The players went public with the allegations last year, prompting FIFA to investigate and ban Karim for life in June. It also imposed a $1 million penalty on the former AFF president.

FIFA said Friday that Aghazada was aware of the abuse and had the duty to report and prevent it. Consequently, he has been banned from all football-related activity at both national and international level for five years. A financial penalty of about $10,000 was also imposed on him.

Aghazada was also serving as a member of the FIFA standing committee and as Asian Football Confederation (AFC) executive committee.

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From: MeNeedIt

Shepard Smith, whose newscast on Fox News Channel seemed increasingly an outlier on a network dominated by supporters of President Trump, abruptly quit after working at Fox since it started in 1996.

Smith said at the end of his daily newscast on Friday that he had asked the network to let him out of his contract and it had agreed.

Even in the current polarized environment, Smith said, “it’s my hope that the facts will win the day, that the facts will always matter and journalism and journalists will thrive.”

Neil Cavuto, who anchors the broadcast following Smith’s, looked shocked after the announcement.

“Whoa,” Cavuto said. “Like you, I’m a little stunned.”

Smith’s departure also comes one day after Attorney General William Barr met privately with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, founder of Fox News. President Trump has been increasingly critical of personalities on Fox News that he views as disloyal.

On his afternoon newscast, Smith had frequently given tough reports debunking statements made by Trump and his supporters — even the Fox News opinion hosts that rule the network’s prime-time lineup.

Two weeks ago, Smith clashed with Tucker Carlson when an analyst on Smith’s program, Andrew Napolitano, said that it was a crime for President Trump to solicit aid for his campaign from a foreign government, in this case the Ukraine. Later that night, Carlson asked his own analyst, Joseph diGenova, to comment and he called Napolitano a fool.

The next day, Smith said that “attacking our colleague who is here to offer legal assessments, on our air, in our work home, is repugnant.”
 

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From: MeNeedIt

The lights were back on Friday for many of the nearly 2 million Northern California residents who lost electricity when the state’s largest utility switched it off this week in an effort to prevent wildfires, as the first death linked to the outages was reported — a man who relied on oxygen.

The threat of widespread outages loomed in Southern California after the winds moved to the Los Angeles area, where a wildfire fueled by strong Santa Ana winds prompted officials to order the evacuation of 100,000 people from their homes in the foothills of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County.

In that fire, one man went into cardiac arrest and died at the scene.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. restored power in Northern California after workers inspected power lines to make sure it was safe to do so. The winds had increased the possibility of transmission lines toppling to the ground and starting wildfires.

The utility said 543,000 Northern California businesses and residences got their power back — but that nearly 195,000 customers were still in the dark. More than half of those who lost power in the San Francisco Bay Area had it again on Friday. The city itself was not subject to the preventive outages. Experts have said there are between two and three people for every electrical customer.

El Dorado County officials on Friday said a man dependent on oxygen died about 12 minutes after PG&E cut off power this week. Marie Aldea of Pollock Pines said her 67-year-old father Robert Mardis Sr. was asleep when the electricity went out around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday and likely couldn’t wake up in time to get his back up machine, which ran on battery.
 “We were all asleep, we heard my mom scream. She was crying,” she told KTXL-TV in Sacramento . “My dad went down in her arms, he was going for this oxygen machine.”

Aldea said her father’s health was poor, but she doesn’t understand why the utility turned off the power.
“No winds at all. And because of that, my father is gone,” she said.

PG&E spokesman Jeff Smith said the utility has not been able to confirm the report.
 
“It’s devastating beyond words,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom. “Losing a family member is horrific and to the extent this was the reason why I hope that is investigated and I hope those responsible are held to account.”
 
The death was first reported by the Mountain Democrat in Placerville.

Some people in the largely rural Butte, Plumas and Yuba counties and in Northern California’s wine country counties were in their third day without electricity.

Butte County is where a fire started by PG&E equipment last year decimated the town of Paradise and killed 85 people. In Napa and Sonoma counties north of San Francisco, the outages began on the two-year anniversary of deadly wildfires that killed 44 and destroyed thousands of homes.
 
PG&E said in a statement that employees located 11 spots where parts of its systems were damaged during the strong winds, but Smith said he could not provide damage details. That information will be in a state-mandated report the utility must give regulators within 10 business days after the outage ends.
 
PG&E faced hostility and second-guessing over the shut-offs, which prompted runs on supplies like coolers and generators and forced institutions to shut down.

Ryan Fisher, a partner in consumer goods and retail practice at global consultancy A.T. Kearney estimated $100 million in $200 million in fresh food was likely lost because of the outages along with $30 million a day in consumer spending.
 
PG&E cast the blackouts as a matter of public safety to prevent the kind of blazes that have killed scores of people over the past couple of years, destroyed thousands of homes, and ran up tens of billions of dollars in claims that drove the company into bankruptcy.

The utility suggested it was already seeing the wisdom of its decision borne out as gusts topping 77 mph (122 kph) raked some hilltops where wildfire risk was extremely high.

“We have found multiple cases of damage or hazards” caused by heavy winds, including fallen branches into overhead lines, said Sumeet Singh, a vice president for the utility.
 
Utility CEO Bill Johnson promised if future wind events require similar shut-offs, the utility will  “do better” at communicating with customers. It’s unacceptable that its website crashed, maps were inconsistent and call centers were overloaded, Johnson said.

“We were not adequately prepared,” he said.

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From: MeNeedIt

Two rockets struck an Iranian tanker traveling through the Red Sea off the coast of Saudi Arabia on Friday, Iranian officials said, the latest incident in the region amid months of heightened tensions between Tehran and the U.S. 

There was no word from Saudi Arabia on the reported attack, and Saudi officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

Iranian state television said the explosion damaged two storerooms aboard the unnamed oil tanker and caused an oil leak into the Red Sea near the Saudi port city of Jiddah.

The state-run IRNA news agency, quoting Iran’s National Iranian Tanker Co., identified the stricken vessel as the Sabity. That vessel last turned on its tracking devices in August near the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas.

US 5th Fleet ‘aware’

Lt. Pete Pagano, a spokesman for the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet overseeing the Mideast, said authorities there were “aware of reports of this incident,” but declined to comment further. 

The reported attack comes after the U.S. has alleged that in past months Iran attacked oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, something denied by Tehran. 

Friday’s incident could push tensions between Iran and the U.S. even higher, more than a year after President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the nuclear deal and imposed sanctions now crushing Iran’s economy. 

The mysterious attacks on oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz, Iran shooting down a U.S. military surveillance drone and other incidents across the wider Middle East followed Trump’s decision. 

The latest assault saw Saudi Arabia’s vital oil industry come under a drone-and-cruise-missile attack, halving the kingdom’s output. The U.S. has blamed Iran for the attack, something denied by Tehran. Yemen’s Houthi rebels, whom the kingdom is fighting in a yearslong war, claimed that assault, though analysts say the missiles used in the attack wouldn’t have the range to reach the sites from Yemen.

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From: MeNeedIt

U.S. President Donald Trump says the U.S. mission of defeating Islamic State in Syria is accomplished and that he plans to keep Turkey in line through economy and not military power. Trump told reporters Thursday that there are no U.S. combat forces in Syria and he does not think Americans would want to send thousands of troops to fight there. Turkey’s assault on Kurdish-held villages in northern Syria has sparked an exodus of civilians from their homes and is threatening to exacerbate a humanitarian crisis in the region. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.
 

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From: MeNeedIt

Antigovernment protests and unrest in Hong Kong continues after nearly four months. Among those affected by the turmoil are about 400,000 foreign domestic workers, mostly women from Indonesia and the Philippines. VOA’s Patsy Widakuswara brings this report from Hong Kong. 
 

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From: MeNeedIt

Evolutionary biologists know that humans have traces of DNA that go back millions of years, well before humans were human. But thanks to some amazing new high-resolution imagery, scientists can now see how that ancient DNA shows up, then disappears in early human embryos. VOA’s Igor Tsikhanenka reports.

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From: MeNeedIt