A Sudanese judge formally indicted former president Omar al-Bashir on charges of possessing illicit foreign currency and corruption on Saturday.

Questioned in court for the first time, Bashir said that he had received $25 million from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as well as funds from other sources, but that he had not received or used the money for his own benefit.

A lawyer for Bashir said that his client denied the charges against him and that witnesses for the defense would be presented at the next hearing.

The judge denied a request for bail and said a decision on the duration of Bashir’s detention would be taken at a hearing on Sept. 7.

Sudan’s military ousted and arrested Bashir in April after months of protests across the country. His prosecution is seen as a test of how far military and civilian authorities now sharing power will go to counter the legacy of his 30-year rule.

Bashir was also charged in May with incitement and involvement in the killing of protesters. He has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague on charges of masterminding genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region.

A police detective told the court earlier this month that Bashir had acknowledged receiving millions from Saudi Arabia.

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From: MeNeedIt

The Taliban have staged a “large-scale” predawn attack on an important city in northern Afghanistan, even as leaders of the insurgent group are engaged in marathon peace talks with the United States on ending the deadly war.

Residents and officials said Saturday insurgents assaulted Kunduz, the capital of the province with the same name, from several different directions, triggering intense gun battles with Afghan government forces.

Both sides reportedly have suffered casualties and civilians also have been harmed, though exact details of the battlefield losses could not be ascertained from independent sources. The fighting disrupted power supplies and cell phone services to Kunduz, cutting off all communications.

Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Roohullah Amadzai told reporters the Taliban managed to enter central parts of Kunduz and took positions in civilian population, including the main hospital.

Ahmadzai said security forces, backed by airpower, were responding to the insurgent attack to force them out of the city while making sure civilians and patients were not harmed in the process. He confirmed both Afghan and foreign forces carried out airstrikes against Taliban positions in the city, killing at least 25 insurgents.

The Afghan city, located on a key highway providing easy access to much of northern border provinces, repeatedly has come under Taliban attack since 2015 and was briefly held twice by the insurgents. The Taliban has since taken control of much of the province.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed in his latest statement that insurgents remained in control of areas they overran at the start of the assault, and they have inflicted heavy casualties on pro-government forces during ongoing clashes.

The Taliban advances prompted top Afghan security officials to arrive in Kunduz later in the day along with the U.S. commander of international forces, General Scott Miller. A Kabul government spokesman, Feroz Bashari, said the officials will “lead clearance operations” against the insurgents. He also tweeted a picture of Miller with other officials from a meeting in the embattled city.

The latest battlefield insurgent attack came on a day when Taliban leaders resumed talks with U.S. interlocutors in the Gulf state of Qatar after taking a one-day break for internal consultations.

The crucial ninth round in the yearlong dialogue between the two adversaries in the 18-year-old Afghan war started on August 22 amid exceptions it would lead to a peace agreement. But it was not clear whether a deal was imminent.

The Taliban is pressing the United States and its NATO allies to pull out their troops from Afghanistan, while Washington wants counterterrorism guarantees from the insurgents, a nationwide cease-fire and the Taliban’s participation in intra-Afghan talks to permanently end hostilities in the country.

President Donald Trump said this week he plans to reduce U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 8,600 from the current level of roughly 14,000. He would not discuss the fate of the residual force.

The Taliban has not responded to Trump’s latest statement, which runs counter to repeated insurgent assertions that in ongoing peace talks with the U.S., an understanding has been reached on a complete withdrawal of foreign troops.

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From: MeNeedIt

About two million people living in India’s northeastern state of Assam face the unnerving prospect of becoming stateless as authorities wind down a mammoth process to identify illegal immigrants.
 
Their names did not appear on an updated citizens’ register published Saturday. Human right activists say they would potentially add up to the largest number of people effectively stripped of their citizenship.
 
The state government has said they will be given the opportunity to prove that they are Indian citizens before foreigners’ tribunals, but many will find it difficult to navigate the legal process as they are poor and marginalized.
 
In an unprecedented exercise that began four years ago, the state’s 33 million people were called on to show documentary evidence that they or their ancestors had resided in India before 1971. Mandated by the Supreme Court, it aimed to weed out migrants from neighboring Bangladesh – an emotive issue that had triggered communal strife in the past in a border state where local communities complained of losing jobs and land to migrants.
 
The controversial exercise was backed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party which has vowed to end “illegal infiltration.” It left millions in one of the country’s poorest states scrambling to produce documents dating back five decades to prove their Indian heritage. Critics slammed the process as one that targeted Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh.  

It is unclear what happens next to the two million who now do not figure in the state’s citizens list. The number is half of the four million who were excluded from a draft list published last year, but is still massive.
 
Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal in a video message on Friday said that no one excluded from the final list of the National Register of Citizens would be treated as a foreigner until their appeal was heard by a foreigners tribunal. They have been given 120 days to make an appeal and promised legal aid. The government says it will expand the number of tribunals from 200 to 1000 and will not send people to detention centers.

 That is likely to do little to reassure the hundreds of thousands who have to produce papers to prove their citizenship in a country where many poor people did not attend schools, do not own property or have bank accounts and voting cards.
 
 “It is not about who is a foreigner or who is a national, it is all about whether you have a document or not,” says Suhas Chakma, a writer and Assam-based human rights activist. He points out that in 1971, two thirds of Assamese people were illiterate and did not have any documentation. “People have already been economically ruined and they shall further be ruined. It is unimaginable tragedies cast upon them simply because they don’t have a document.”
 
Critics have also slammed the list for being riddled with errors — sometimes excluding one branch of the family while including the other. Lawyers say it is the first time the burden of proving citizenship is falling on people who have lived in a country for decades.
 
Muslims, who make up about one third of the state’s population, have complained of bias against them and opposition parties have expressed concern that the appeals process could discriminate against minority communities. The BJP has countered by saying that the two million also includes many Hindus.

Critics also point to a proposed citizenship law introduced by the BJP that would grant refugee status to non-Muslim immigrants. That has raised fears that while the majority Hindu community that figures among those left off the citizens roll can eventually hope to get citizenship if the law is adopted, Muslims would be excluded.

Some BJP leaders in the state appeared to step back from the controversial process undertaken in Assam saying it had left off many genuine Indians but said they remain committed to root out illegal immigrants.

Assam is a multi-ethnic state that includes Hindus, Muslims and a medley of indigenous tribes. With a 4,000 kilometer-long border with Bangladesh, it has long complained of illegal immigration.

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From: MeNeedIt

A worsening drought is pushing parts of eastern Australia towards a “Fish Armageddon,” according to senior politicians.

With not much rain on the horizon, as well as record low river levels, there are fears eastern Australia will witness more fish dying at a higher rate than last summer.

A million fish died in January at Menindee, 1,000 kilometers west of Sydney, when a sudden drop in temperature caused algae to die. As the algae decomposed, oxygen was sucked out of the river, suffocating marine life.

Farmers and conservationists accused the state government of allowing cotton growers to drain too much water from the Murray-Darling River Basin, one of Australia’s key waterways. Officials, though, blamed a worsening drought. They have announced a multimillion dollar fish rescue plan to help avert an “ecological disaster.”

Modern Noah’s Ark

The New South Wales Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall says vulnerable native fish will be relocated from the river to hatcheries for safety.

“I cannot sugar-coat it, it will be the equivalent of a ‘Fish Armageddon’ in New South Wales this summer, and I say that based on all the evidence. We will use hatcheries like this to create a modern-day Noah’s Ark for native fish species in New South Wales,” Marshall said.

The fish will be kept in captivity until river conditions improve.

Environmental groups, however, say changes are needed to water policy and management to improve flows to ensure “living, functioning” rivers.

Playing God?

Paul Humphries, an ecologist at Charles Sturt University, believes the Noah’s Ark plan probably will not work.

“It is a terrible choice because it was actually floods that caused the problem that Noah was trying to solve and here we are talking about droughts. It is also, I think, a problem because Noah was essentially being instructed by God and in some ways we are playing God with this sort of stuff,” Humphries said.

Australia is the world’s driest inhabited continent. Scientists are warning that climate change not only threatens national treasures such as the Great Barrier Reef, but also critical river systems that sustain the nation’s agriculture.

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From: MeNeedIt

Gavi, the global vaccine alliance that targets developing countries, said Friday that it was appealing for $7.4 billion to immunize 300 million children in 2021-25. 

Gavi’s latest fundraising drive is its most ambitious to date. Officials said they expected huge returns from what would be the agency’s most comprehensive and cost-effective preventive health package ever. 
 
Gavi said the vaccines would protect against 18 diseases, saving up to 8 million lives. Spokeswoman Frederique Tissandier said sustainable investment was needed for the project because there still are 1.5 million people dying every year from vaccine-preventable diseases. 

“The situation is increasingly fragile because of climate change, because of wars, because of the rise of the population in the urban slums,” she said. “So you have more and more epidemics that are spreading around.” 

Tissandier said Gavi planned to introduce new vaccines to prevent deadly diseases. For instance, she said, Gavi is ready to invest up to $150 million in a new Ebola vaccine stockpile once it is prequalified by the World Health Organization. 
 
She told VOA that Gavi also would help the Democratic Republic of the Congo obtain the lifesaving vaccines it needs to immunize children against other killer diseases.  
 
“We are going to fund, for instance, starting in September, measles campaigns in DRC to cover — I think the number is close to 18 million kids — to strengthen routine immunization, because we really focus on routine immunization,” Tissandier said. “We fund the stockpile against cholera, yellow fever or meningitis to respond to outbreaks.” 
 
She said support for the global polio eradication program remained a priority. Tissandier said Gavi would invest up to $800 million to accelerate the rollout of inactivated poliovirus vaccine. This would protect against a re-emergence of the disease in areas such as Africa, which is on the cusp of becoming polio-free, and other regions that already have achieved that status. 

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From: MeNeedIt

This Monday is Labor Day in the United States — a holiday linked to workers’ rights and wearing white.

That may sound strange, but it is true. Many Americans put away their white clothes on Labor Day and do not wear them again until the following May, after Memorial Day.

One reason for the clothing custom relates to the season. In the United States, the months between June and September are summer.

The weather is usually hot, including in Northeast cities like Boston, Massachusetts and New York, New York. Many people there historically wore light-colored clothing in the summertime to keep cool.

Judith Martin is an expert on manners – in other words, on how to behave politely. She spoke to Time Magazine about the history of wearing white in the summer.

She said that Americans in the 1800s and early 1900s wore formal clothes all year long. Wearing white clothes in the summertime may have felt more comfortable because “white is of a lighter weight,” Martin said.

Then, in about the 1930s, wearing white clothes in the summertime became fashionable, too. That is because some wealthy Americans in Northeast cities went on vacation for weeks or months in the summer. They stayed in costly hotels or summer houses. The white clothes they wore there became linked to ease, beauty and money.

But at the end of summer, around Labor Day, they put those white clothes away and returned to their lives in the city – as well as to their darker, heavier clothes. In time, not wearing white after Labor Day became a bit of a fashion rule. Following it showed that you were wealthy — or at least that you knew how to act like you were.

Today’s fashion magazines, however, advise readers to ignore the rule. They point to Coco Chanel, Kim Kardashian and Michelle Obama, who have appeared in white in all seasons.

But you may want to be careful about wearing white to an American-style Labor Day barbecue. 

The trouble is not fashion – it is ketchup. If it spills, the popular red tomato sauce can ruin a nice set of clothes.

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From: MeNeedIt

British lawmakers will next week pull the trigger on their plans to stop Prime Minister Boris Johnson leading the country out of the European Union without an exit deal. Johnson says he still wants to convince Brussels to give him an improved exit agreement, but will leave without one on Oct. 31 if he has to.

A narrow majority of lawmakers in parliament has previously voted to try to stop this outcome, known as a “no-deal” Brexit. But, with only a few weeks left before the deadline and limited time in parliament to play with, what options do they have to block the prime minister?

Change the law

British law says that the country will end its membership of the EU on Oct. 31. That date can only be changed by the government of the day. This means members of parliament need to find a way to pass a law that requires Johnson to ask the EU to delay Brexit and then, if the EU agrees to the request, make the required changes to domestic legislation.

In extremis, a law change could even be used to force Johnson to revoke the government’s intention to quite the EU. However, passing a law against the government’s wishes is not easy because ministers have almost complete control over the parliamentary agenda. To do it requires lawmakers to clear three main hurdles: find a procedural opportunity to hijack the agenda in parliament; win several votes to pass a bill through the lower chamber; and then win a series of votes in the upper chamber.

Each stage is fraught with risk. To gain control of the parliamentary agenda will likely require a helping hand from the Speaker John Bercow, who has in the past been supportive of efforts to hinder a no-deal exit. The opposition Labour Party is hoping to use an emergency debate next week to do this, but the method is untested.

To win votes in the 650-seat House of Commons will require members of Johnson’s ruling Conservative Party to rebel against their leader. They have proven willing to do this in the past, but some recent decisions have come down to a single vote.

The House of Lords, which is largely pro-EU, could also prove a stumbling block if eurosceptic Conservative lawmakers there try to filibuster. Above all, each of these steps take parliamentary time, which is in short supply after Johnson announced on Wednesday that he would suspend parliament for more than a month between mid-September and mid-October.

Nevertheless, the approach has been successful once before, earlier this year when parliament passed a law demanding then-Prime Minister Theresa May delay Brexit. In the end, she decided to do so anyway, so the effectiveness of that legislation was not fully tested.

Change the government

Parliament can collapse Johnson’s government using a no-confidence vote, creating two opportunities for lawmakers to try to stop a no-deal Brexit.
Firstly, if the government were to lose a no-confidence vote, this could lead to an election that brings in a new government with a strategy to either delay Brexit or revoke the decision to leave the EU.

But it is within Johnson’s power to delay any election until after Oct. 31, and his aides have indicated he is willing to take this step to ensure Britain’s exit. The second method is untested and harder to predict. Losing a confidence vote triggers a 14-day period in which a new administration can be formed.

If the majority who voted against Johnson were able to prove, by holding a vote in parliament, that they could form a stable alternative government they could try to extend Britain’s EU membership beyond Oct. 31. However, so far rival parties have been reluctant to rally around a single candidate who could lead an alternative
government.

In addition, the electoral legislation allowing for this was introduced in 2011 and has never been tested in this way. It has been criticized for not defining exactly how the 14-day period would work and who has the power to do what during it.
Johnson could argue that he is not obliged to resign, decide to hold out until an election is triggered, and then hold that election after Oct. 31.

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From: MeNeedIt

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed nearly 900 cases of mumps among people at adult migration detention facilities across the United States in the last year. 
 
The virus swept across 57 detention centers in 19 states, sickening 898 migrants between Sept. 1, 2018, and Aug. 22, the CDC said Thursday.  
 
Thirty-three staff members were also infected.  
 
The CDC said the virus continues to spread as more migrants are arrested or transferred between facilities.  
 
Mumps is a contagious virus that causes swollen glands, puffy cheeks, fever, headaches and, in severe cases, hearing loss and meningitis. 
 
Mumps outbreaks are rare in the U.S. because of vaccinations, but the disease is easily transmittable in spaces where people have close, prolonged contact. 
 
The CDC said most of those infected were men who caught the virus while in detention.  
 
Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Bryan Cox said all detainees go through a medical screening within 24 hours of arriving at the facilities. 

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From: MeNeedIt

As fires continue burning through the Amazon jungle, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has begun accepting aid from the world governments. Voice of America spoke with Nestor Forster, Brazil’s interim Ambassador in Washington.

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From: MeNeedIt

 Top US military officer said Wednesday it was too early to talk about the future of US counterterrorism forces in Afghanistan, where insurgent violence continues  

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From: MeNeedIt

An oppressive political climate marked by a lack of rights and freedoms is now a key factor driving emigration from Russia, with more than 1.5 million Russians leaving the country since Vladimir Putin became president, according to the Atlantic Council. 

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From: MeNeedIt

New York City garbage man Nelson Molina has been seeing value in other people’s garbage for the past three decades. For years he has been saving unique items that their owners threw away. Vladimir Lenski met with the unusual collector.
 

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From: MeNeedIt