Protesters and police prepared Sunday for a likely showdown in central Hong Kong, one day after clashes led to 11 arrests and left at least two dozen injured in an outlying district toward the border with mainland China.

A midafternoon rally has been called at Chater Garden, an urban park in the financial district and about 500 meters (yards) west of the city’s government headquarters and legislature.

Police have denied a request from protest organizers to march about 2 kilometers (1.4 miles) west to Sun Yat-sen Memorial Park, but at least some of the demonstrators may still try to push forward.

Seven weeks of protests

Hong Kong has been wracked by protests for seven weeks, as opposition to an extradition bill has morphed into demands for the resignation of the city’s leader and an investigation into whether police have used excessive force in quelling the protests.

Underlying the movement is a broader push for full democracy in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory. The city’s leader is chosen by a committee dominated by a pro-Beijing establishment, rather than by direct elections.

In denying the march, police cited escalating violence in clashes with protesters that have broken out after past marches and rallies.

“The police must prevent aggressive protesters from exploiting a peaceful procession to cause troubles and violent clashes,” said Superintendent Louis Lau of the police public relations branch.

The police had denied permission for Saturday’s march in Yuen Long, where a mob apparently targeting demonstrators had beat people brutally in a train station the previous weekend.

Protests into the night

Protesters and police faced off in the streets well into the night, as they’ve done repeatedly during the summer’s pro-democracy protests.

Police said that protesters removed fences from roads to make their own roadblocks and charged police lines with metal poles. One group surrounded and vandalized a police vehicle, causing danger to officers on board, a police news release said.

Officers fired tear gas and rubber bullets as demonstrators threw bricks and other objects and ducked behind makeshift shields.v Later, police wearing helmets charged into the train station where a few hundred protesters had taken refuge from the tear gas. Some officers swung their batons at demonstrators, while others appeared to be urging their colleagues to hang back. For the second week in a row, blood was splattered on the station floor.

Police said in a statement they arrested 11 men, between the ages of 18 and 68, for offenses including unlawful assembly, possession of offensive weapon and assault. At least four officers were injured.

The Hospital Authority said 24 people were taken to five hospitals. As of Sunday morning, eight remained hospitalized, two in serious condition.

Police criticized

Amnesty International, the human rights group, called the police response heavy-handed and unacceptable.

“While police must be able to defend themselves, there were repeated instances today where police officers were the aggressors,” Man-kei Tam, the director of Amnesty International Hong Kong, said in a news release.

Police said they had to use what they termed “appropriate force” because of the bricks and other objects thrown at them, including glass bottles with a suspected corrosive fluid inside.

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From: MeNeedIt

When Ugnius Zilinskas came to Kenyon College in Ohio to play on the basketball team, he was welcomed with open arms.

“They kind of take you as a family member,” said the student from Kedainiai, Lithuania.

Zilinskas, a junior, is one of roughly 27,000 foreign students who play on U.S. college sports teams, out of more than 1 million foreign students who attend school in the U.S. Stars like basketball player Hakeem Olajuwon of Nigeria and soccer player Christine Sinclair of Canada began as international students at American colleges before competing professionally in the United States.

Zilinskas was welcomed by Kenyon College, a Division III National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) school in Gambier, Ohio. He has played basketball since he was a child in his home country and understood the ladder of college sports. But if a student comes to study in the U.S. with no knowledge of college sports, the system can seem complicated.

Here’s a breakdown.

The basics

The NCAA is one of three major associations that govern college and university athletics:

National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)
National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA)
National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA)

These nonprofit organizations determine student eligibility, establish sport guidelines, and oversee competition among schools across North America. For instance, the NCAA issues rules that define a foul in basketball, as well as prohibiting NCAA student athletes from endorsing commercial products.

The NCAA generates billions of dollars through media rights, ticket sales, merchandise and membership fees. The revenue goes to athletic scholarships, NCAA employee salaries, and to run competitions like March Madness, a wildly popular tournament broadcast across the country.

NCAA college athletes are banned from being paid to play while enrolled in schools to ensure amateur competition in college. Critics say the big sports associations use favors, trips, free meals and gear to compensate players in other ways. Not everyone considers these actions amateur, while others say the players deserve to be paid outright for their talent and skills.

Schools are sorted into divisions: Division I schools, such as the University of Virginia and University of Michigan, generally have large student populations and many teams. The University of Virginia, for example, has more than 16,000 undergraduate students. Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, a Division II school, has a little more than 6,000 undergraduate students. Kenyon College, a Division III school, has nearly 2,000 students.

Division I and Division II institutions are highly competitive with robust athletic programs and may have athletic budgets of millions of dollars to pay for athletic scholarships, coaches, sport facilities, athletes’ medical needs and transportation.

Division I provides the largest athletic scholarships. Athletes who receive athletic scholarships in soccer or basketball, for example, may get some or all tuition waved in addition to some room and board. Division III focuses on academics and offers merit scholarships or financial aid, not athletic scholarships.

Zilinskas said a benefit of competing in college sports was playing basketball while fully engaging in his studies.

The National Junior College Administration (NJCAA) operates differently and only at two-year colleges, organizing its member institutions into three divisions. Division I members, such Bismarck State College’s basketball team in North Dakota, offer larger athletic scholarships than Division II. Member institutions decide the division in which it wants to compete.

For similar reasons as the NCAA and NAIA, NJCAA Division III members do not provide athletic scholarships to their students.

Getting ready to compete

How do students get eligibility to play at U.S. schools?

Student athletes register through the NCAA Eligibility Center online. The $150 fee can be waived for students with financial needs. School transcripts, SAT or ACT scores and country-specific documents are required in English and according to the American grading system. (The NCAA offers country-specific information on its website.)

Students must also prove their amateur status.

Once eligibility is established and a U.S. college or university offers a student athlete a scholarship, they sign a National Letter of Intent to attend and compete for one academic year.

The application process to an NCAA Division III institution is less formal. A student does not need to register officially through the NCAA. Instead, grade and credit regulations are set by each school. Students should contact the team’s coach for school-specific requirements. Again, NCAA III does not offer student sports scholarships.

The process for international student athletes interested in competing on an NAIA or NJCAA Division I or Division II are similar.

While Zilinskas had hoped to play basketball at a Division I school, that dream seemed impossible after he suffered an injury.

“No one takes a player that cannot run and sits on the bench the whole year,” Zilinskas said. “So I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m packing my stuff, I’m going home.’ But then Kenyon gave me good financial aid. And I’m still here.”

“I would say that international students, if they’re really into athletics or doing some sports they should definitely try to do something with sports. … School is not everything, so there is a lot of different paths to go,” he said. “You can find a lot of different groups of people and academic sides and sports sides, music whatever. Meeting new people — that’s really big.”

More information about competing through the NCAA, NAIA or NJCAA can be found on the associations’ websites.
 

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From: MeNeedIt

Canned soup, canned tuna, and pasta, among other things — everything you’ll find in an average American pantry, yet these little pantries are not in someone’s home but in the streets, open and accessible to anyone who needs them. Free Little Pantry is behind this initiative, a grassroots organization that was founded Arkansas two years ago, but has spread across the country. For VOA, Nataliya Leonova visited a few of these little pantries in the Washington area. Anna Rice narrates her story. 
 

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From: MeNeedIt

Shelsea, whose husband was recently detained by ICE inside her family’s home, recounts the moments leading up to his arrest.

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From: MeNeedIt

Pakistan’s military says militant attacks in the country’s northwest and southwest have killed 10 soldiers.

The military says both attacks took place on Saturday. The first attack targeted a military patrol near a security post in the Gurbaz area of North Waziristan.

It says the shooting came from across the Afghan border and left six soldiers dead.

The second attack, during a search operation, killed four troops from the paramilitary Frontier Corps near Turbat in southwestern Baluchistan province.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the North Waziristan attack, a region that still sees attacks though the military says it’s cleared tribal areas of militants.

There was no claim for the Baluchistan attack. The province has been the scene of a low-level insurgency by Baluch separatists. Islamic militants also operate there.

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From: MeNeedIt

The head of a Sudanese investigative committee said on Saturday that 87 people were killed and 168 wounded on June 3 when a sit-in protest was violently broken up by security forces.

Fath al-Rahman Saeed, the head of the committee, said 17 of those killed were in the square occupied by protesters and 48 of the wounded were hit by bullets.

More Deaths Reported in Sudan Protests

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets Sunday in the capital Khartoum and other areas demanding a return to civilian rule

Saeed said some security forces fired at protesters and that three officers violated orders by moving forces into the sit-in.

He also said an order was issued to whip protesters.

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From: MeNeedIt

Georgia allowed its election system to grow “way too old and archaic” and now has a deep hole to dig out of to ensure that the constitutional right to vote is protected, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg said Friday.

Now Totenberg is in the difficult position of having to decide whether the state, which plans to implement a new voting system statewide next year, must immediately abandon its outdated voting machines in favor of an interim solution for special and municipal elections to be held this fall.

Election integrity advocates and individual voters sued Georgia in 2017 alleging that the touchscreen voting machines the state has used since 2002 are unsecure and vulnerable to hacking. They’ve asked Totenberg to order the state to immediately switch to hand-marked paper ballots.

But lawyers for Fulton County, the state’s most populous county that includes most of Atlanta, and for state election officials argued that the state is in the process of implementing a new system, and it would be too costly, burdensome and chaotic to use an interim system for elections this fall and then switch to the new permanent system next year.

A law passed this year and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp provides specifications for a new system in which voters make their selections on electronic machines that print out a paper record that is read and tallied by scanners. State officials have said it will be in place for the 2020 presidential election.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued Friday that the current system is so unsecure and vulnerable to manipulation that it cannot be relied upon, jeopardizing voters’ constitutional rights.

“We can’t sacrifice people’s right to vote just because Georgia has left this system in place for 20 years and it’s so far behind,” said lawyer Bruce Brown, who represents the Coalition for Good Governance and a group of voters.

Addressing concerns about an interim system being burdensome to implement, plaintiffs’ lawyers countered that the state put itself in this situation by neglecting the system for so long and ignoring warnings. Lawyer David Cross, who represents another group of voters, urged the judge to force the state to take responsibility.

“You are the last resort,” he said.

Georgia’s voting system drew national scrutiny during the closely watched contest for governor last November in which Kemp, a Republican who was the state’s top election official at the time, narrowly defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams.

The plaintiffs had asked Totenberg in August to force Georgia to use hand-marked paper ballots for that election. While Totenberg expressed grave concerns about vulnerabilities in the voting system and scolded state officials for being slow to respond to evidence of those problems, she said a switch to paper ballots so close to the midterm election would be too chaotic. She warned state officials that further delay would be unacceptable.

But she seemed conflicted Friday at the conclusion of a two-day hearing.

“These are very difficult issues,” she said. “I’m going to wrestle with them the best that I can, but these are not simple issues.”

She recognized that the state had taken concrete steps since her warning last year, with lawmakers providing specifications for a new system, appropriating funds and beginning the procurement process. But she also said she wished the state had not let the situation become so dire and wondered what would happen if the state can’t meet its aggressive schedule for implementing the new system.

The request for proposals specifies that vendors must be able to distribute all voting machine equipment before March 31, which is a week after the state’s presidential primary election is set to be held on March 24. Bryan Tyson, a lawyer representing state election officials, told the judge the state plans to announce the new system it’s selected in “a matter of days.”

Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science and engineering professor, testified Friday that the state election system’s vulnerabilities and that the safest, most secure system would be hand-marked paper ballots with optical scanners at each precinct.

Four county election officials, three of whom will oversee elections this fall, testified that it would be difficult to switch to hand-marked paper ballots in time for those elections. They cited difficulties getting enough new equipment, as well as challenges training poll workers and educating voters. They also said they’d have trouble paying for the switch unless the state helps.

The two groups of plaintiffs agree that the whole system is flawed and has to go. They also believe the ballot-marking devices the state plans to implement have many of the same problems, and they plan to challenge those once the state announces which vendor has won the contract. But they disagree about what the interim solution should be.

The plaintiffs represented by Brown are asking the state to use hand-marked paper ballots along with its existing election management system and to use the ballot scanners it currently uses for paper absentee and provisional ballots for all ballots.

The plaintiffs represented by Cross want the state to implement its new election management system in time for the fall elections and to use ballot scanners along with paper ballots.

Totenberg did not say when she would rule.

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From: MeNeedIt

Bahrain has executed two men convicted of terrorism offenses.

The executions were carried out despite objections from international human rights groups.

The French news agency AFP reports that the two men were killed by firing squad Saturday.

Rights groups have identified the men as Ahmad al-Malali and Ali al-Arab.

Human Rights Watch says both men were Bahraini citizens who were convicted on the terrorism charges last year “in a mass trial marred by allegations of torture and serious due process violations.”

A third man was also reported to have been killed by firing squad Saturday. His conviction, however, was not connected to the al-Malali and al-Arab cases.

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From: MeNeedIt

NEW YORK — Federal authorities arrested a New York City man Friday on charges accusing him of seeking to join the Taliban to fight American forces. 
 
The FBI intercepted Delowar Mohammed Hossain on Friday morning at Kennedy Airport before he could carry out a plan to travel to Afghanistan, prosecutors said. 
 
Hossain, 33, of the Bronx, was ordered held without bail after appearing in federal court in Manhattan. He is charged with one count of attempting to provide material support for terrorism. 
 
Defense attorney Amy Gallicchio declined to comment Friday. 
 
A criminal complaint says that starting in 2018, Hossain expressed interest in joining the Taliban and sought to recruit a government informant to do the same. It claims he told the informant: “I want to kill some kufars [non-believers] before I die.” 
 
Hossain’s preparations included buying equipment such as walkie-talkies and trekking gear, prosecutors said. He instructed the informant to save enough money “to buy some weapons” once they reached Afghanistan, they added. 
 
The case follows a series of arrests of self-radicalized terror suspects on charges they tried to join or support the Islamic State group by making contacts on social media. 
 
FBI official William Sweeney said in a statement: “The lure of radical ideologies comes from many sources, and just because the Taliban may seem like an old and out-of-vogue extremist group, it shouldn’t be underestimated.” 

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From: MeNeedIt

Two-month-old Lahya Kathembo became an orphan in a day. Her mother succumbed to Ebola on a Saturday morning. By sunset her father was dead, too. 
 
They had been sick for more than a week before health workers finally persuaded them to seek treatment, neighbors said. They believed their illness was the work of people jealous about their newborn daughter, a community organizer said, and sought the guidance of a traditional spiritual healer.

The Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo is ravaging Beni, a sprawling city of some 600,000, in large part because so many of the sick are choosing to stay at home. In doing so, they unknowingly infect caregivers and those who mourn them.

“People are waiting until the last minute to bring their family members and when they do it’s complicated for us,” says Mathieu Kanyama, head of health promotion at the Ebola treatment center in Beni run by the Alliance for International Medical Action, or ALIMA. “Here there are doctors, not magicians.”

Nearly one year into the outbreak which has killed more than 1,700 and was declared a global health emergency this month, a rise in community deaths is fueling a resurgence of Ebola in Beni. During a two-week period in July alone, 30 people died at home. 
 
Health teams are now going door-to-door with megaphones trying to get the message out.

“Behind every person who has died there is someone developing a fever,” Dr. Gaston Tshapenda, who heads the Ebola response in Beni for Congo’s health ministry, told his teams.

Fear of treatment centers

Many people still don’t believe Ebola is real, health experts say, which stymies efforts to control the disease’s spread.

Ebola symptoms are also similar to common killers like malaria and typhoid, so those afraid of going to a treatment center often try to self-medicate at home with paracetamol to reduce fever. 
 
But Ebola, unlike those other illnesses, requires the patient to be kept in isolation and away from the comfort of family.

Dr. Maurice Kakule, who became one of this outbreak’s first Ebola patients after he treated a sick woman at his clinic, is now trying to make it easier for those who are ill to get help in and around Beni, near the border with Uganda. 
 
He and other survivors, who are now immune to the disease, run a motorcycle taxi ambulance. After receiving a phone call for help they go to homes, reassure the sick and take them for medical care without infecting others.

People’s most common fear is that they will only leave an Ebola treatment center in a body bag, Kakule says.

“Some have heard of the problem of Ebola but there have been no survivors in their family,” he said. “Since they had relatives die at a treatment center, they think people are killed there and that’s why they categorically refuse to go.”

Humanizing care

They fear, too, that they will die alone, surrounded only by health care personnel covered in protective gear from head to toe.

To try to humanize the care of patients in isolation, ALIMA’s Ebola treatment center in Beni places some patients in their own transparent room called a “CUBE,” where they can see visitors from their beds. Others share a room with one other patient and a glass window where loved ones can gather. 
 
While there is no licensed treatment for Ebola, patients in eastern Congo are able to take part in clinical trials. That’s a welcome change from the 2014-2016 outbreak in West Africa when many patients entered Ebola centers never to come out alive again. More than 11,000 people died.

Still, the measures needed to keep Ebola from spreading remain difficult for many people to accept.

“We cannot be oblivious to the fact that when you’re sick with Ebola you’re put somewhere away from your family, with a 50% chance of dying alone from your loved ones,” said Dr. Joanne Liu, president of Doctors Without Borders, which is helping to fight the outbreak. “I don’t blame people for not finding this attractive, despite the fact that we have a clinical trial going on.”

The day after the deaths of baby Lahya’s parents, a morgue team in protective clothing carried their carefully encased bodies to a truck for a funeral procession to a Muslim cemetery on the edge of town. 
 
In the background was the sound of workers hammering away as they built more space at the nearby treatment center to accommodate the growing caseload.

Lahya developed a fever but has tested negative for Ebola. The infant with round cheeks and gold earrings is in an orphanage for now, while her 3-year-old sister is being cared for by neighbors who hope to raise them both.

But the sisters will have to wait a bit longer to be reunited — their adoptive father and former nanny both have tested positive for Ebola and are being treated.

‘I lost my entire family’

The fateful decision to avoid treatment centers haunts survivors like Asifiwe Kavira, 24, who fell ill with Ebola along with eight of her relatives.

Health teams came to the house in Butembo, trying to persuade them to seek treatment. Most of the family, though, said they wanted to treat their fevers at home. After three days of negotiations, Kavira finally agreed to seek help, believing she was on the brink of death.

She would be the only one to survive. 
 
Her mother, grandmother, brother and four other relatives all died at home. An older sister joined her at the treatment center, but medical care came too late.

“I tell people now that Ebola exists,” Kavira says, “because that is how I lost my entire family.”

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From: MeNeedIt

The U.S. Justice Department said on Friday it is approving T-Mobile US Inc’s $26 billion takeover of rival Sprint Corp, clearing a major hurdle to a deal that would merge the nation’s third and fourth largest wireless carriers.

The companies have agreed to divest Sprint’s prepaid businesses including Boost Mobile to Dish Network Corp in order to move ahead with the merger, which was announced in
April 2018.

But the deal still faces a significant challenge. A group of U.S. state attorneys general have filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York to block the merger on antitrust grounds,
arguing that the proposed deal would cost consumers more than $4.5 billion annually.

T-Mobile Chief Executive Officer John Legere, who will be the CEO of the combined company, said it would deliver a 5G network with lower prices, better quality and thousands of jobs, while unlocking $43 billion in synergies.

“We are pleased that our previously announced target synergies, profitability and long-term cash generation have not changed,” Legere said.

On Friday, the Justice Department and five state attorneys general said they were filing suit to enforce the settlement conditions that also include selling Virgin Mobile and Sprint prepaid and providing Dish with access to 20,000 cell sites and hundreds of retail locations.

Dish has agreed to acquire spectrum in a deal valued at $3.6 billion from the merged firm and pay $1.4 billion for Sprint’s prepaid business that serves about 9.3 million customers. Dish will get access to the combined firm’s network for seven years while it builds out its own 5G network.

Shares of T-Mobile, which is about 63 percent owned by Deutsche Telekom AG, were up 3.7% at $82.90. Shares of Sprint, which is about 84 percent owned by Softbank Group
Corp, were up 6.5% at $7.92.

Prepaid wireless phones are generally sought by lower-income people who cannot pass a credit check.

T-Mobile, the third largest U.S. wireless carrier with about 80 million customers, pursued the deal in order to seek scale to compete with bigger rivals Verizon Communications Inc and AT&T Inc. Sprint has about 55 million customers.

T-Mobile US on Thursday beat analysts’ estimates for second-quarter net new phone subscribers who pay a monthly bill, boosted by the U.S. mobile carrier’s wireless plans aimed at fending off its bigger rivals. The mobile carrier said it added a net 710,000 phone subscribers in the three months ended June 30.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has given his blessing to the merger in principle and said in a statement on Friday he would soon circulate a formal order.

The FCC is expected to give Dish more time to use spectrum it previously acquired but also impose strict penalties if it fails to create a consumer wireless network within a set
timeframe.

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From: MeNeedIt

A top Sudanese editor who heads the main journalists’ union has been detained, the union said Thursday, calling on Sudan’s military rulers to free him or put him on trial.

The detention of Sadiq al-Rizaigi came as the military said it had arrested a top general, several security officers and Islamist leaders over a failed coup attempt announced earlier this month.

The Sudanese Journalists’ Union called on the ruling Transitional Military Council to “immediately release” its head Rizaigi, a prominent Islamist and editor of Al-Sayha newspaper, or that he be put on trial.

A senior journalist with Rizaigi’s newspaper told AFP that security forces had taken him away from outside the newspaper’s premises.

“We do not know where he is being held or the reasons for his detention,” said Awad Jad Al-Sayid, news editor of Al-Sahya.

On Wednesday, the military announced several arrests in connection with a failed coup attempt.

It said it had arrested General Hashim Abdel Mottalib, the head of the joint chiefs of staff, and a number of officers from the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) along with leaders of the Islamic Movement and the National Congress Party.

On July 11, the military announced it had foiled a coup attempt without specifying when it took place.

Sudanese media also reported that among those arrested was General Bakri Hassan Saleh, a former first vice president and prime minister and a prominent figure in the 1989 coup that brought now ousted president Omar al-Bashir to power.

Also arrested was Ali Karty, a former foreign minister and Zubair Ahmed Hassan, an ex-finance minister, according to the reports.

During Bashir’s three-decade rule, the press was severely curtailed, according to media activists.

NISS agents cracked down regularly on journalists or confiscated entire print-runs of newspapers for publishing articles deemed critical of Bashir’s policies.

Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) recorded at least 100 cases of journalists being arrested during the months of protests that finally led to Bashir’s ouster in April.

RSF ranks Sudan 175th out of 180 countries in its 2019 World Press Freedom Index.

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From: MeNeedIt