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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the United States has concluded that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in an attack in May.
Speaking in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday, Pompeo said U.S. officials had determined that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government had used chlorine in the attack on opposition forces in Idlib province on May 19.
He said the U.S. would provide an additional $4.5 million to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to fund investigations into other instances of suspected Syrian chemical weapons use.
Pompeo also called on the Assad government to release thousands of unjustly detained prisoners, including American journalist Austin Tice. Tice has been missing and presumed held by the government for seven years.
Arab leaders have reasserted their rejection of any attempt by Israel to annex Palestinian land in the aftermath of Israel’s election. Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi and President Barham Saleh of Iraq meeting at the United Nations this week say they refuse possible Israel’s annexation designs on the Jordan Valley and the area north of the Dead Sea. Saudi Arabia and the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council likewise have condemned any such potential move by Israel.
Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the only way to ensure peace in the region, the leaders of Jordan, Egypt and Iraq say after a mini summit they held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
In a statement they issued, they are also calling on the international community to put a stop to Israel’s building and expansion of illegal settlements, as well as all unilateral measures. These include changing the historical and legal status quo in Jerusalem and its Islamic and Christian holy sites.
What has really stoked the anger of Arab leaders, though, is the pledge made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the recent election to annex parts of the West Bank, specifically the Jordan Valley and an area north of the Dead Sea, effectively putting an end to hopes of a future Palestinian state set up there.
King Abdullah already warned Israel that annexing the Jordan Valley will “directly impact” the relationship between Israel and Jordan, and Israel and Egypt, and that “these types of statements are … a disaster to any attempt to move forward to the two-state solution” to achieve peace. This warning from Jordan and Egypt as the only two Arab countries to have signed peace treaties with the Jewish state is meant to be serious.
Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace explains to VOA the predicament Jordan could face should Israel try to annex this area bordering the kingdom.
When Israel is making moves that cut off the possibility of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, that is a security threat to Jordan and an existential threat to Jordan,” said Friedman. “And it’s not for nothing. A lot of people who support this Greater Israel vision of the future, if you push them, would probably say that Jordan is Palestine. They are already in the Palestinian state.
Friedman says that concerns by Israel and some of Arab Gulf states over Iran’s growing military presence in Middle East edged them closer to forming open ties with Israel in recent years, building something of a united front against Iran. However, Netanyahu’s annexation pledge drew harsh condemnation from regional leader Saudi Arabia and the rest of its Gulf allies, who called it a “very dangerous escalation.”
Declaring annexation really takes away the pretense. It rips away the fig (leaf) that there could be, or that people want there to be, a political solution on the West Bank and Gaza that resolves the claims of the Palestinians. For Arab neighbors, this has different levels of threat involved,” said Friedman. “For Gulf countries, this is an issue of the symbolism of Jerusalem, the symbolism of the Palestinian struggle which is certainly less of a hot issue than it has been in past years, but for the ‘street,’ based on polling, it appears not to have gone away.
But for Jordan, this is an immediate existential threat on its border. For Lebanon, which has a population of Palestinian refugees that, simply for Lebanese demographic reasons, cannot be accommodated, it is an existential problem. And for Egypt as well. It’s the argument: What do you do with Gaza? Do we make it Egypt’s problem? Egypt doesn’t want Gaza. At the point where Israel starts announcing annexation and ripping away even the pretense of a political process for those three countries in particular, this becomes an immediate and domestic existential issue.
Human rights lawyer Zaha Hassan, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says she wonders if Benny Gantz of Israel’s Blue and White party will pull Netanyahu back from his campaign promise to annex the Jordan Valley or if there may be pressure to move ahead with it. If the only Israeli governing coalition that can be formed is a hard-right one that includes the ultra-nationalist and religious parties, she says, then annexation is almost guaranteed.
Queen Maxima of the Netherlands urged financial regulators on Wednesday not to let fears over technology stall efforts to ensure everyone in the world has access to a bank account and credit to save money and build businesses.
Maxima said progress had been made since she was appointed the United Nations special advocate for financial inclusion 10 years ago, with about 70 percent of the world now having access to banking, insurance and credit compared with 51 percent in 2011.
But she said 1.7 billion adults globally still did not have an account at a financial institution or through a mobile money provider, with women in developing economies about 9 percentage points less likely than men to have a bank account.
“Financial inclusion is not the end but the means to increase family income, improve nutrition, increase access to health care … education, and empower — especially women,” Maxima told a side event at the United Nations General Assembly.
Ending poverty, inequality
The Dutch queen said it is critical if the world is to achieve the United Nations’ goals to end poverty and inequality by 2030 that people were included in financial systems.
She said mobile money and fintech had opened opportunities to connect people — particularly those sidelined like women in developing countries, farmers and the poor — and cautioned fears over cyberattacks and data privacy should not stop this.
“Technology today presents our best chance to reach these people,” Maxima told an event marking her 10 years as the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development (UNSGSA).
“The challenges are that this new technology brings risks … but get together the innovators with the regulators. If we are serious about this issue, we need to innovate and go beyond business as usual,” she said.
Argentine-born Maxima, 48, said she intended to continue in her role traveling around the world to encourage regulators and governments to treat financial inclusion as a priority.
Gates: Money is power
Melinda Gates, who co-founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with her husband Bill Gates, backed Maxima, saying digital financial services had to reach women, marginalized people and the poor to create an equitable world.
“Money is power. If we want to empower people you have to make sure that they have the means for saving … and bring them into the digital financial services,” Gates said.
The gilded coffin of a high-ranking ancient Egyptian priest, which had been buried, looted and illegally sold before going on public display at a New York museum, was returned Wednesday to Egyptian authorities.
The coffin of Nedjemankh, which dates to the first century B.C., came to New York two years ago by way of a global art underground network before being sold to an unwitting Metropolitan Museum of Art for $4 million, authorities said.
“Thus far our investigation has determined that this coffin is just one of hundreds of antiquities stolen by the same multinational trafficking ring,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said at a repatriation ceremony.
“So, you may well see a few more significant seizures,” he added.
Vance credited his office’s two-year-old Antiquities Trafficking Unit with untangling a web of forged documents to track down the coffin’s true origin.
Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. greet each other during a news conference to announce the return of the gold coffin of Nedjemankh to the people of Egypt, in New York City, Sept. 25, 2019.
The unit focuses on the high-powered New York art world, with its museums, galleries and auction houses, much the same as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Art Crime Team does on a national scale.
The highly ornamented coffin had been buried in Egypt for 2,000 years before it was stolen from the country’s Minya region after the political upheaval of October 2011, authorities said.
From there, it went on an underworld odyssey through the United Arab Emirates, Germany, France and New York, they said.
After it had been on display for six months, agents for the district attorney’s office presented the Metropolitan Museum of Art with evidence early this year that its ownership history documents, including one that suggested the coffin had been exported from Egypt in 1971, were forgeries.
The museum announced last February that it had been defrauded when it bought the coffin and was cooperating with the district attorney’s investigation.
The coffin, which is inscribed with the name Nedjemankh, a priest of the ram-headed god Heryshef of Herakleopolis, will now go back to Egypt, where it will be put on display next year, Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sameh Hassan Shoukry said.
“This is not only for Egyptians but this is for our common human heritage and our sense that we all share in the values and we all are one of the same international family,” Shoukry said at the repatriation ceremony.
British car production increased by an annual 3.3% in August, the first rise in 15 months, helped by several factories having moved their summertime shutdowns to April in preparation for the original Brexit date, an industry body said Thursday.
MW, Peugeot, Honda and Jaguar Land Rover all closed factories ranging from a few days to four weeks in April over concerns that Britain’s scheduled departure from the European Union in March could lead to disruption, including delays to the arrival of parts.
The move led to a 44.5% decline in output in April, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) and ended up being in vain as Brexit was eventually pushed back to the end of October.
August saw a small bounce back with output rising 3.3% to 92,158 cars, helped by a 15.2% increase in domestic demand, data showed.
“Today’s figures mask the underlying downward trend and strengthening global headwinds facing the sector, including international trade tensions, massive technological upheaval and, in the UK, political and economic uncertainty,” said SMMT Chief Executive Mike Hawes.
“We now need parliament and government to redouble efforts to get a deal that maintains free and frictionless trade.”
An Army veteran who was deported to Mexico in 2018 arrived back in Chicago Tuesday for a final chance at becoming a U.S. citizen and living in the city he has called home since boyhood.
Federal immigration authorities granted Miguel Perez Jr. a two-week parole into the U.S. for an immigration hearing, according to his attorney. The 41-year-old Perez has a green card as a permanent U.S. resident, but after serving time for a 2008 non-violent drug conviction was deported last year. Then last month, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued a pardon , erasing the conviction and reviving Perez’s chances to become a citizen.
“I’m speechless. I wish I could say a lot more but it’s just, I’m choked up,” a teary-eyed Perez said outside a church, hours after landing in Chicago. “I’m so blessed to be here.”
His immigration hearing was set for Wednesday, but it’s unknown when immigration officials will decide the case.
Perez’s attorney, Chris Bergin, hoped for a speedy decision so Perez wouldn’t have to return to Mexico after the 14 days are up.
Officials with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to comment, citing privacy laws.
Perez is among several deported military members who have been recently pardoned by Democratic governors. His case has received wide support, including from including from Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a veteran who said Tuesday that Perez should never been deported in the first place.
Miguel Perez Jr., center, is surrounded by family and supporters at a news conference in Chicago, Sept. 24, 2019.
Perez was born in Mexico, but his family immigrated when he was a young child. His parents are naturalized U.S. citizens and his two children were born in the U.S.
He joined the Army in 2002 and served in Afghanistan where he suffered a brain injury and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
It was the disorder, which caused crippling anxiety, that led him to the drug charge, according to Bergin. Perez wasn’t able to immediately get medical care through a federal Veterans Administration hospital, so he turned to drugs.
In 2008, he was accused of giving cocaine to an undercover police officer. He pleaded guilty and spent seven years in prison and was then turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who detained him for two years. Perez was deported last year after failing to persuade a federal appeals court to block his removal.
Perez said he faced “dangerous” conditions while living in Tijuana, Mexico, after his deportation, but he didn’t want to talk about it.
He also declined to discuss about how he was managing PTSD, saying it was too personal.
His doctor was among those who came to welcome him home at the church.
“Miguel was failed on multiple occasions by our immigration service, for sure, and our treatment service for veterans,” said Dr. David Ansell of Rush University Medical Center, who started treating Perez while he was in ICE custody. “People need treatment, not deportation.”
Family members and friends from the church stood by Perez’s side Tuesday, many of them offering warm hugs and prayers.
His father, Miguel Angel Perez, said the military was an important part of their family, with a grandfather and uncle who served during wars. He said having his son back with him Chicago was priceless.
“Now, I have a big heart,” he said in Spanish.
Perez said the decision for him to come to the U.S. happened so quickly that he was still dazed. He said he was most looking forward to seeing his children and eating some Chicago-style pizza and popcorn.
‘”We’ll see what happens,” he said. “But I have faith in God that I am going to be able to stay home.”
A recent wave of abductions in Nigeria is raising fear across the country. Unlike kidnappings involving oil militants in the south or Boko Haram in the north, which often take on political dimensions, this crime wave spans through every region, and is driven largely by economic hardship, experts say. The government is trying to address the problem by setting up an kidnapping response team. Timothy Obiezu has this report from Abuja
A strong earthquake rattled eastern Pakistan Tuesday afternoon forcing residents into the streets in several cities, with witnesses claiming a building collapsed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
The shallow 5.8-magnitude hit 22.3 kilometers (13.8 miles) north of the city of Jhelum along the boundary separating the agricultural heartland of Punjab province and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
“The quake was 10 kilometers deep and was felt in most of Punjab province, some parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The worst hit was Mirpur, Azad Kashmir,” Pakistan’s chief meteorologist Muhammad Riaz told AFP.
Witnesses, Sajjad Jarral and Qazi Tahir, told AFP at least 50 people were injured by the quake that caused a building to collapse in Pakistani Kashmir’s Mirpur and inflicted heavy damage at least one road.
Tremors were felt as far as New Delhi, while the Press Trust of India reported that people rushed out of their homes and offices in panic in several places, including in Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana.
Pakistan straddles part of the boundary where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates meet, making the country susceptible to earthquakes.
In October 2015, a 7.5-magnitude quake in Pakistan and Afghanistan killed almost 400 people, flattening buildings in rugged terrain that impeded relief efforts.
The country was also hit by a 7.6-magnitude quake on October 8, 2005, that killed more than 73,000 people and left about 3.5 million homeless, mainly in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.
Google won a major case in the European Union on Tuesday, when the bloc’s top court ruled that the U.S. internet giant doesn’t have to extend the EU’s “right to be forgotten” rules to its search engines outside the region.
The case stems from a 2014 ruling that said people have the right to control what appears when their name is searched online. They can ask Google, for example, to remove a link. The French privacy regulator then wanted that rule applied to all of Google’s domains, even outside the EU, and asked the EU’s top court for advice.
The European Court of Justice said Tuesday that there “is no obligation under EU law for a search engine operator” to extend the rule beyond the EU states.
It said, however, that a search engine operator must put measures in place to discourage internet users from going outside the EU to find that information.
The decision, which matches a preliminary opinion in January from the court’s adviser, highlights the need to balance data privacy and protection concerns against the public’s right to information. It also raises questions about how to enforce differing jurisdictions when it comes to the borderless internet.
In a reaction to the ruling, Google’s Senior Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer said “it’s good to see that the Court agreed with our arguments” and added that Google had worked hard “to strike a sensible balance between people’s rights of access to information and privacy.”
The European Commission noted that the court again confirmed that the “right to be forgotten” exists in the EU.
The 2014 ruling that people in the EU have the right to control what appears when their name is searched online forced Google to delete links to outdated or embarrassing personal information that popped up in searches within the 28-nation bloc.
One year later, the French privacy watchdog wanted Google to remove results on all its search engines on request, and not just European country sites like www.google.fr . Google refused and in the resulting court case, French legal authorities asked the EU’s highest court for advice.
On Tuesday, the EU court said it was illegal to apply an EU rule to business operations in countries outside the EU.
The ruling is final and becomes the benchmark on which courts in the 28-nation bloc must base their decisions relating to such cases.
Those who wanted to see such an extension argue that on the internet it is easy to switch from the national versions of the web site to ones outside the EU – by switching from google.fr to google.com for example – to find the information that must be removed within the EU.
Since Google started handling “right to be forgotten” requests in May 2014, the U.S. tech giant has removed about 1.3 million web links from its search results, or 45% of total requests processed, according to the company’s transparency report .
Online takedown requests filed by European residents are reviewed by Google staff based mainly in Ireland, who assess them on criteria including whether the webpage’s information is “inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant, or excessive.”
Google says it may reject a delisting request if the page contains information that’s “strongly in the public interest” with material that relates to the requester’s professional life, past crime, political office, position in public life, or whether the content consists of government documents or “journalistic in nature.”
Russia’s Interior Ministry says a former Kremlin official, whom media reports have called a CIA informant, has been officially declared missing.
The ministry said on Monday that it had added Oleg Smolenkov, born in 1969, to its list of missing people and that it has launched a search to locate him.
Earlier this month, U.S. media reports from Reuters, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post said a CIA informant in the Russian government had been extracted and brought to the United States in 2017.
Some of the reports said the unidentified Russian had provided intelligence from inside President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The CIA, the State Department, and the White House have said the reports were inaccurate.
Public records from the Russian government administration in 2008 and 2010 show a person named Oleg Smolenkov employed in the administration of Putin, who served as prime minister between 2008 and 2012. In 2010, Smolenkov was promoted to a relatively high civil-service ranking, under an order signed by then-President Dmitry Medvedev.
Smolenkov was listed earlier as working as a second secretary at the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., according to a personnel listing from the time. The ambassador at that time was Yury Ushakov, who later returned to Moscow and became a deputy chief of staff for Putin and then a foreign-policy adviser.
The Russian newspaper Vedomosti reported that Smolenkov was the chief adviser to Ushakov in the Kremlin, and a New York Times reporter on September 11 posted a photo on Twitter of a phone listing for Ushakov’s team indicating that Smolenkov indeed held that post.
The Russian government confirmed Smolenkov’s employment, but Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on September 10 that “he was fired several years ago.”
According to the Russian media reports, Smolenkov disappeared with his wife, Antonina, and three children while on holiday in the Adriatic country of Montenegro in June 2017.
Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg scolded world leaders Monday at a United Nations summit calling for climate action, saying people are suffering and dying from the effects of global warming and that all the leaders have are empty words.
“We are in [the] beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money,” said Thunberg, who ignited a youth movement with her Friday school strikes for climate action.
She said the science has been clear for 30 years, and still they are not doing enough.
“You are failing us! But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal,” Thunberg said in a voice filled with emotion. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you.”
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, far left, and young environmental activists look on as Greta Thunberg, of Sweden, in red, addresses the Climate Action Summit in the United Nations General Assembly, at U.N. headquarters, Sept. 23, 2019.
The 16-year-old warned the more than 60 presidents and prime ministers gathered in the General Assembly hall for the summit that the youth would not let them “get away with this.” She said they draw the line here and now and “change is coming,” whether they like it or not.
“My generation has failed in its responsibility to protect our planet,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said. “That must change.”
Guterres has called for the phasing out of fossil fuels and an end to construction of new coal power plants.
“Is it common sense to build ever more coal plants that are choking our future?” the secretary-general asked. “Is it common sense to reward pollution that kills millions with dirty air and makes it dangerous for people in cities around the world to sometimes even venture out of their homes?”
He said it is time to end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and shift taxes from salaries to carbon – taxing pollution, not people.
The U.N. chief has sought to highlight the importance of the summit and challenged leaders to “come with concrete plans” and not just “beautiful speeches,” which some outlined Monday.
India, which has one of the world’s highest levels of air pollution, said it would increase its renewable energy capacity to 175 gigawatts by 2022. Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted his country’s expansion into solar energy.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a rare U.N. appearance, pledged that her country would reduce its carbon emissions by 2030 by 55% compared to its 1990 emissions. She said Germany would be carbon neutral by 2050.
“In 2030 we want to get two-thirds of our energy from renewables,” Merkel said. “In 2022, we will phase out the last of our nuclear power plants, and at latest, in 2038, we will phase out coal.”
U.S. President Donald Trump, who announced his administration’s intention to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement soon after taking office, was not scheduled to attend or speak at Monday’s summit. Trump, however, made a brief appearance and was seen sitting at the U.S. delegation’s table before attending an event on religious persecution.
The U.N. released a report ahead of the summit compiled by the World Meteorological Organization showing there has been an acceleration in carbon pollution, sea-level rise, warming global temperatures, and shrinking ice sheets.
It warns that the average global temperature for the period of 2015 through the end of 2019 is on pace to be the “warmest of any equivalent period on record” at 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which has been ratified by 186 nations, calls for actions to prevent global temperatures from surpassing 2 degrees, and ideally remain within 1.5 degrees by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. One of the world’s biggest emitters – the United States – announced under President Trump that it would leave the pact. The U.S. decision has not stopped climate action at the state, local and private sector levels.
The report warns that in order to achieve the 2-degree target, “the level of ambition needs to be tripled.”
