A senior minister of Britain’s ruling Conservative party has resigned because she does not think the prime minister is serious about creating a Brexit divorce deal. 

Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd said late Saturday that Boris Johnson is not working to secure a Brexit withdrawal agreement. 

“There is no evidence of a deal,” Rudd said.  “There are no formal negotiations taking place.” 

Rudd said in her resignation letter: “I joined your cabinet in good faith: Accepting that ‘no deal’ had to be on the table, because it was the means by which we would have the best chance of achieving a new deal to leave on 31 October.” 

Rudd added: “The government is expending a lot of energy to prepare for ‘no deal’ but I have not seen the same level of intensity go into our talks with the European Union.” 

Home Secretary Sajid Javid said Sunday the government is “straining every sinew to get a deal.” 
 

…

Dorian, now a post-tropical cyclone, is expected to move over or near the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador Sunday and then enter the North Atlantic.

The storm hit Canada’s Atlantic coast Saturday with heavy wind and rains that toppled a construction crane into the side of an apartment building under construction in Halifax, the provincial capital of Nova Scotia.

Nova Scotia Power told the Associated Press that 300,000 customers of Halifax, which has a population of 400,000, were without power late Saturday.

Before reaching Canada, Dorian moved over extreme southeastern Massachusetts and Maine in the U.S.

On Friday, Dorian made landfall over Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, after weakening into a Category 1 storm. It generated tornadoes, severe storm surges and flooding in coastal areas in North and South Carolina.

Steve Harris, a resident of North Carolina’s Ocracoke Island said, “We went from almost no water to 4 to 6 feet in a matter of minutes.”

Dorian was a Category 5 storm when it hit the Bahamas, creating a path of death and destruction, leaving an estimated 70,000 people in need of immediate humanitarian relief.

The official Bahamian death toll is 43, but officials say that will rise, because hundreds, perhaps thousands are missing.

The death toll will be “catastrophic and devastating,” Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said, while Health Minister Duane Sands said the final toll “will be staggering.”

The U.N. World Food Program warned Saturday that thousands of displaced people are living in “rapidly deteriorating” conditions in the worst-hit parts of the Bahamas in Dorian’s aftermath.

“The needs remain enormous,” WFP spokesman Herve Verhoosel said in an email Saturday.

“People have no food. People have no water, and it’s not right. They should have been gone,” Chamika Durosier told the French news agency AFP Saturday as she waited for a flight out of Abaco, one of the most badly damaged areas in the Bahamas. “The home that we were in fell on us,” she said. “We had to crawl — get out crawling. By the grace of God, we are still alive.”

“Our relief operation is growing, but we are also facing serious challenges in terms of delivering aid,” Red Cross spokeswoman Jennifer Eli told Reuters. “Even search-and-rescue choppers haven’t been able to reach some people because there’s no place to land. These challenges are affecting everyone.”
 

…

Bidi Bidi refugee camp is home to nearly a quarter-million South Sudanese who fled the violence of civil war in their home country. Its progressive policies allow refugees to live, farm and work together while they wait to return to their home country. But, as conditions are slow to improve in South Sudan, many refugees are opting to stay.

U.S. Democratic Senators Chris Coons and Chris Van Hollen visited the camp recently. The two lawmakers were touring several refugee settlements throughout Uganda last month, including Bidi Bidi — one of the world’s largest.

Speaking by phone, Senator Van Hollen called the settlements an “important model” that other countries should consider when housing the displaced.

 
“Obviously a key ingredient to the success of that model has been significant international support,” he said.

When Bidi Bidi was opened in 2016, it was a rural piece of land in northern Uganda, where South Sudanese refugees, mostly women and children, fled to avoid violence during their country’s civil war.
 
As is often the case, tensions are common between refugees and the local population, who feel that the refugees are taking resources that might have been available for them.

But, Uganda decided to do something different, earmarking a percentage of the country’s international funding to go toward local amenities. Refugee families were given plots of land to build family-style clusters of homes with room to grow their own fruits and vegetables. As a result, a small-scale economy began to flourish in the camp, with some refugees starting their own businesses.

Last year, following a peace deal between warring South Sudan leaders, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said he hoped the refugees would begin returning home.
 
But, that’s not the case.
 
According to a new report published this week by several humanitarian agencies, including Oxfam, refugees — especially women — are hesitant to return home. They fear the peace won’t last.

 As a result, settlement official Michael Joelle says Bidi Bidi has reached capacity, and refugees are being turned away and settlements are feeling the strain.
 
“Before the 2016 emergency, we were offering a plot of 50 by 100, so the number has been decreasing as the number of refugees increase,” said Joelle.
 
The situation has become more dire after international donors suspended their funding earlier this year after it was reported that funds for refugees in Uganda had been mismanaged.

Grace, a refugee at Bidi Bidi, fled her home country with her children four years ago. Her husband finally joined the family last year.

The former teacher said she doesn’t see herself moving back to South Sudan anytime soon.   
 
“Even we’re receiving bad news, so and so has been killed, so and so has been raped, so many things are happening.”

…

Winston Churchill’s grandson, who was expelled midweek from the Conservative party for voting to delay Brexit, launched Saturday a scathing attack on Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who wrote a biography of his grandfather, saying he should stop comparing himself to Britain’s iconic wartime leader as he’s “nothing like” him.

“Winston Churchill was like Winston Churchill because of his experiences in life. Boris Johnson’s experience in life is telling a lot of porkies [lies] about the EU in Brussels and then becoming prime minister,” Nicholas Soames told Britain’s The Times newspaper.

Soames was among 21 Conservative rebels who were expelled from the party for voting to stop Johnson taking Britain out of the EU by October 31, something Johnson has pledged to do “no ifs or buts.”

In the interview, Soames, a former defense minister, said he could see no “helpful analogy” between his grandfather and Johnson. “I don’t think anyone has called Boris a diplomat or statesman. We all know the pluses and minuses, everyone he has worked for says the same thing: he writes beautifully [but he’s] deeply unreliable.”

Johnson’s Brexit options are shrinking fast. He has lost every single vote he’s brought as prime minister before the House of Commons in the face of a Conservative party split and the united efforts of the country’s opposition parties to thwart him.

On Monday party rebels again will join with opposition parties to block him from calling an election before they’ve ensured he can’t take Britain out of the European Union without a deal agreed upon with Brussels.

Limited options

In effect, his opponents are trapping him in Downing Street as his hardline Brexit strategy appeared to be in tatters. Johnson now has no majority in the House of Commons, thanks to defections and the mass expulsion of party rebels.

Last week, his election bid was rebuffed when he failed to secure the backing of two-thirds of the Home of Commons. His second bid will get a similar dismissal, according to lawmakers and analysts. With his options limited, Johnson is now saying he will ignore legislation passed midweek requiring him to ask Brussels for a Brexit delay to allow further negotiations to take place between Britain and EU leaders.

The Conservative rebels and opposition parties argue that the economic impact of a so-called no-deal Brexit would be devastating for livelihoods and jobs.

Johnson also wrote to Conservative lawmakers on Friday, telling them: “They just passed a law that would force me to beg Brussels for an extension to the Brexit deadline. This is something I will never do.” He told reporters earlier he won’t comply and seek yet another deadline extension from Brussels, as the incoming law, which will receive the Queen’s assent on Monday, compels him to do, if no agreement with Brussels is in place by October 19.

Asked if he would obey the new law requiring him to write to EU leaders, Johnson responded: “I will not. I don’t want a delay.”

His defiance is prompting growing alarm that Britain’s political crisis is deepening and risks a tumultuous clash between the government and the courts, along with a rebellion by top civil servants and an even bigger split in Conservative ranks.  

David Lidington, the de facto deputy prime minister under Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, warned Saturday it would set a “dangerous precedent,” if Johnson chose to break the law. “It is such a fundamental principle that we are governed by the rule of law that I hope no party would question it,” he told the BBC.

A former senior legal official went further, warning Johnson he risked being jailed, if he refuses to obey the law. Kenneth MacDonald, who was the country’s top prosecutor between 2003 and 2008, said if the courts were asked to issue an injunction ordering that “the law should be followed,” a refusal to obey “could find that person in prison.” He added that would not be “an extreme outcome” as it is “convention” that individuals who refuse to “purge their contempt” are sent to prison.

Warning shots

The warning was echoed by a former attorney general, Dominic Grieve, another Conservative rebel. If he refuses to obey the law he will be “sent to prison for contempt,” he said, while accusing Johnson of acting like a “spoiled child having a tantrum.” A former Supreme Court judge, Lord Sumption, told Sky News he doubted it would get as far as that because civil servants likely would rebel and refuse to co-operate with a prime minister who was willfully breaking the law.

Johnson broke off early on Saturday from a social visit with his partner, Carrie Symonds, to the Queen at the monarch’s Scottish residence, Balmoral, to plot his next moves. On his visit to Scotland, Johnson ramped up the pressure on opposition parties to agree to an early election, goading them by accusing them of cowardice. “I have never known an opposition in the history of democracy that has refused to have an election,” he said. “I think that obviously they don’t trust the people, they don’t think that the people will vote for them, so they are refusing to have an election.”

But Downing Street aides admit the unity of the opposition parties — as well as the size of the Conservative rebellion — had surprised Johnson and his chief strategist, Dominic Cummings, who miscalculated the reaction of the leader of the main opposition party, Labor’s Jeremy Corbyn.

“The plan was to use the threat of suspending parliament to force the rebels out into the open early,” an aide said. “We always knew they would try and force a Brexit delay on us. But the expectation was that Corbyn could be goaded into welcoming an election. That was a serious miscalculation on our part,“ he added.

The turbulence of the last week — which saw the British parliament break convention and initiate legislation — is unnerving the cabinet, too.

Will Boris Johnson’s Election Gamble Pay Off?

With British politics being turned upside down by Brexit , few pollsters are ready to hazard a firm prediction of an election win for Johnson — consensus suggests a hung parliament

Collision course

On Friday, some current cabinet ministers expressed major reservations about Johnson’s bellicose approach with much of the blame for the government’s lose of control being focused on the 47-year-old Dominic Cummings, a controversial figure who’s been compared to the former adviser to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, for his ‘slash-and-burn tactics.”

Cummings, the chief strategist for the Brexit campaign during the 2016 referendum on EU membership, told government advisers Friday they should hold their nerve, saying if they thought last week was chaos, it was “only just the beginning.” Cummings has made no secret of his wish to rip up the map of British politics and re-draw it, starting with a populist remake of the Conservative party.

A former cabinet minister, David Gauke, one of the expelled Conservative rebels, said Johnson and Cummings want “to rebadge the Conservative party as the Brexit Party.”

“I can see nothing incompatible about being a Conservative MP and not wanting to crash the country into a brick wall, but it appears that it is no longer the case,” he said in a newspaper interview. The risk is that Johnson will end up alienating millions of pragmatically-inclined, traditional Conservative voters, he says.

…

Cambodia has launched a campaign to end child labor in the brick industry by 2020, a move industry observers cautiously welcome while expressing doubts the goal will be achieved, and calling for more structural changes.

The industry drew international attention last year when a report, Blood Bricks: Untold Stories of Modern Slavery and Climate Change from Cambodia, asserted poverty, often caused by climate change, forced tens of thousands of Cambodians into debt bondage at brick kilns, and again in March when a 9-year-old girl lost her arm working in one of the factories.

The government fined the factory and issued a directive barring children from brick kiln production line compounds. Children often live with their families in accommodation provided for by the brick factory, which often is in the direct vicinity of the kilns.

The government said Aug. 31 that the director of the Labor Ministry’s Child Labor Department, Veng Heang, had started the campaign August 26 in cooperation with local authorities.

 “According to the department director, any brick factory found having child labor will be severely penalised without any excuse,” the state news agency Agence Kampuchea Presse reported.

One of the authors of the Blood Bricks report, Laurie Parsons, welcomed the initiative, saying child labor was still prevalent in the industry and estimating that the number of children working in brick factories ranged “in the thousands.”

Parsons said the government had denied the issue for years and as late as last year, despite multiple reports by nongovernmental organizations, but now had started to acknowledge the issue because of increased international media attention.

“Although the issue has been known, it hasn’t been internationally known,” Parsons said.

He welcomed the initiative but called just focusing on child labor a “symptom-led approach” not likely to address the root causes of the problem. He said that poverty pushes people into debt-bondage at the brick kilns, poor working conditions, and brick kiln contracts barring workers from employment elsewhere.

“It’s a focus which won’t necessarily produce any long-term tangible change, [which] is very much a kind of symptom-led focus with what we see as being an undue focus on the issue of child labor, which is obviously a very evocative topic,” he said. “It’s something that gets a lot of attention. But to us, the child labor is essentially part of the wider structural problem.”

“The reason that these conditions exist is essentially because people are desperate enough to keep bonding themselves into work in the brick industry,” he said.

The ministry remained evasive, however, about what concrete measures would be taken to combat child labor. Asked what the government would do once the inspection was done, ministry spokesman Heng Sour said: “I would like to inform you that our labor inspectors are still on their mission to inspect all brick factories across the country, which will conclude in late October. We will publish the report in this November.”

Sour did not answer questions about further details of the campaign and what steps the government would take.

Parsons said the success of the campaign depends on the concrete measures that have been taken, and whether the brick kiln owners’ claims they don’t directly employ children but only buy bricks will be tolerated. “It has to have a really sweeping overhaul of the entire industry,” he said.

Sou Chhlonh, vice director of the Building and Wood Workers Trade Union Federation of Cambodia, agreed.

Chhlonh said it would be easy for brick factories to avoid being fined if inspections were conducted on a one-off basis. Factories could easily have no children on site for one week, for example, and revert to children working there after the inspection was done, he said.

To make matters more complicated, he said, children were largely not employed by the factory owners directly, but rather helped – voluntarily or involuntarily – their parents instead of going to school to lighten their parents’ debts. Sometimes, brick kiln owners tell parents to get their children to work to pay their debts, he said, but this was not always the case.

Sour told VOA the government would show “zero tolerance” on the issue.

“The main mission is zero tolerance to child labor, and debt bondage in the brick factory,” he said. “So, the labor inspector is doing such inspection, education, and raising awareness among the workers who work in the brick factory.”

Chhlonh said training those inspectors is crucial for the success of the campaign, and raised doubts that child labor could be erased by the government’s deadline.

 “It’s so fast,” he said. “We should train more inspectors [first].”

Pointing to the comparatively small size of the industry – Parsons estimated that about 10,000 people were involved in about 450 kilns in the country – the researcher said significant improvements could be made quickly.

However, “in practice, of course, it’s not going to happen by 2020,” he said, “because resources won’t be put in place, and the kind of structural attitude won’t be there.” 
 

…

India’s top national security adviser said Saturday that a large number of suspected militants are trying to infiltrate Kashmir and accused Pakistan of trying to foment trouble in the region.
 
“About 230 terrorists are ready to infiltrate into different parts of Kashmir,” Ajit Doval, national security adviser to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, told reporters. “A large number of weapons are being smuggled and people in Kashmir are being told to create trouble.”
 
Military officials said the information was based on radio intercepts and ground intelligence.  
 
India has long accused Pakistan of supporting and training militants to foment a separatist insurgency in Kashmir, charges Islamabad denies.

A month after India brought its only Muslim-majority territory under its direct control, scrapped its semi-autonomous status and deployed thousands of troops to prevent violent protests, residents in Kashmir continue to face curbs on travel and communications restrictions.  Although most landlines are functioning, the internet and mobile phone services have still not been restored.

“We would like to see all restrictions go, but it depends on how Pakistan behaves,” Doval said. “If Pakistan starts behaving, terrorists don’t intimidate and infiltrate, Pakistan stops sending signals through its towers to operatives, then we can lift restrictions.”

He cited an attack that injured three persons including an apple merchant and a two-year-old girl when unidentified persons opened fire in the apple-growing region of Sopore on Saturday. Police called it “a merciless act of terrorism.”  

Officials say that 90 percent of the Kashmir valley is free of restrictions during the daytime and hundreds of schools and government offices have re-opened.

But attendance by students in schools has been thin, commercial areas in the capital, Srinagar, still remain largely shuttered and the city’s streets continue to be deserted, defying efforts by Indian officials to return the region to normalcy.
 
The spokesman of the Jammu and Kashmir government, Rohit Kansal, has blamed “anti-national” forces for preventing shops from opening.
 
The region has also witnessed sporadic demonstrations by stone-throwing protesters, most of them in Srinagar. According to unconfirmed reports, scores of civilians and security persons have been wounded in the protests.    
 
Rights group Amnesty International this week launched a campaign urging New Delhi to lift the communications blockade. “It has grossly impacted the daily lives of Kashmiri people, their emotional and mental well-being, medical care, as well as their access to basic necessities and emergency services,” according to Aakar Patel, head of Amnesty India.
 

…

Eight-and-a-half-months pregnant and experiencing contractions, a Salvadoran woman who had crossed the Rio Grande and was apprehended by the Border Patrol was forced to go back to Mexico.

Agents took her to the hospital, where doctors gave her medication to stop the contractions. And then, according to the woman and her lawyer, she was almost immediately sent back to Mexico.

There, she joined the more than 38,000 people forced to wait across the border for immigration court hearings under a rapidly expanding Trump administration policy. And her plight highlights the health risks and perils presented by the “Remain in Mexico” program.

The woman was waiting Thursday with her 3-year-old daughter in a makeshift tent camp in Matamoros, Mexico, next to an international bridge, due to give birth any day, said her attorney, Jodi Goodwin.

“She’s concerned about having the baby in the street or having to have the baby in a shelter,” Goodwin said.

Pregnant women face special hazards in Mexico because places where migrants wait to enter the U.S. often don’t have access to regular meals, clean water and medical care.

Many shelters at the Mexico border are at or above capacity, and some families have been sleeping in tents or on blankets in the blistering summer heat. Reports have abounded of migrants being attacked or kidnapped in Mexican border cities, especially in Tamaulipas state across from South Texas, where the Salvadoran mother is waiting for a November court date.

The Associated Press is not identifying the woman from El Salvador because she fears for her safety.

The U.S. government does not automatically exempt pregnant women from the “Remain in Mexico” program. U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to comment on the woman’s case.

The program, officially called the Migrant Protection Protocols, was instituted by the U.S. and Mexico as a way of deterring migrants from crossing the border to seek asylum. Mexico has cooperated with the expansion of the program at the behest of President Donald Trump, who threatened crippling tariffs in June if Mexico did not do more to stop migrants.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has said people in “vulnerable populations” may be exempt from being sent to Mexico. But pregnant women are not necessarily considered vulnerable by CBP, a subsidiary of the department.

“In some cases, pregnancy may not be observable or disclosed, and may not in and of itself disqualify an individual from being amenable for the program,” CBP said in a statement. “Agents and officers would consider pregnancy, when other associated factors exist, to determine amenability for the program.”

Goodwin provided copies of the 28-year-old woman’s immigration paperwork and the bracelet from when she was admitted to Valley Regional Medical Center.

“In this particular case, this woman was actually taken to the hospital by CBP,” she said. “There’s no way that CBP could suggest that her pregnancy wasn’t known.”

The paperwork instructs her to return to Brownsville on Nov. 14 for a court hearing.

The U.S. government is establishing temporary tent courtrooms in Brownsville and Laredo, Texas, where immigration judges from around the U.S. will hear migrants’ cases by video. The hearings will start in those cities later this month.

The woman’s notice lists her address as a migrant shelter in Matamoros several miles from the primary international bridge near the camp where she is staying. Goodwin says she has never been to that shelter.

There are at least six cases of pregnant women border-wide who have been sent back to Mexico, according to U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who recently sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general demanding an investigation into the issue. Goodwin also represents a woman from Peru who was seven months pregnant when border agents allowed her to enter, only to send her back to Mexico the next day.

Mexico offers limited health coverage to people regardless of nationality that includes some of the screenings a pregnant woman needs, said Lina Villa, a Mexico-based health official for Doctors Without Borders. But many migrants don’t know that they can get that coverage, she said.

As their deliveries near, many migrant women aren’t sure whether they’ll have access to a hospital and if they will need surgery, Villa said. They are worried about their child being born in Mexico instead of the U.S. and what that might mean for their prospects of eventually entering the U.S., she said.

“It’s a very, very difficult group of people that needs a lot of help, and they don’t get enough,” she said.

…

Britain’s bedeviling Brexit dilemma intensified Friday, as opposition parties refused to support Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s call for an election until he secures a delay to Britain’s exit from the European Union — something he vows he’ll never do.

Johnson insists Britain must leave the EU in 55 days, and says an election is the only way to break the deadlock that has seen lawmakers repeatedly reject the divorce deal on offer, but also block attempts to leave the EU without one.

He wants to go to the public on Oct. 15, two weeks before the scheduled Brexit day of Oct. 31, but needs the support of two-thirds of lawmakers to trigger a snap election.

Johnson lost a vote on the same question this week, but he plans to try again Monday.

Standoff

After discussions Friday, lawmakers from several opposition parties said they would not back an election unless the government asked the EU to postpone Brexit, removing the risk the U.K. could crash out without a deal. Johnson says he would “rather be dead in a ditch” than delay Brexit.

Parliament is trying to force his hand, passing an opposition-backed law that would compel Johnson’s Conservative government to seek a three-month Brexit postponement if no divorce deal is agreed by Oct. 19.

The legislation was approved Friday by the unelected House of Lords, after gaining backing from the elected House of Commons earlier this week. It will become law within days once it gets the formality of royal assent.

But pro-EU lawmakers want to hold off on triggering an election until the Brexit delay has actually been secured, fearing Johnson will try to wriggle out of the commitment.

“I do not trust the prime minister to do his duty,” said Liz Saville Roberts, leader in Parliament of the Welsh party Plaid Cymru.

She said lawmakers needed to be sitting in Parliament in late October, rather than on the election campaign trail, to ensure Britain does not crash out of the EU. That makes an election before November unlikely.

“We need to make sure that we get past the 31st of October,” she said.

Risky plan

Blocking an election is a risky strategy for the opposition, which could be accused of denying the public its say.

The Conservative Party on Friday tweeted a mocked-up image of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in a chicken suit, and Johnson said he had “never known an opposition in the history of democracy that’s refused to have an election.”

“I think obviously they don’t trust the people, they don’t think that the people will vote for them, so they’re refusing to have an election,” he said.

Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon tweeted: “An early general election is now a question of `when’ not `if’ — but Johnson mustn’t be allowed to dictate the timing as a device to avoid scrutiny and force through a ‘no deal’ Brexit.”

Johnson’s options are unclear if he loses Monday’s vote. He could call a no-confidence vote in his own government, which would only need a simple majority to pass. He could try to change the law that governs how elections can be triggered. He could even resign.

In short, it’s a complicated mess.

Johnson became prime minister in July after promising Conservatives that he would complete Brexit and break the impasse that has paralyzed Britain’s politics since voters decided in June 2016 to leave the bloc and which brought down his predecessor, Theresa May.

After only six weeks in office, however, his plans are in crisis. The EU refuses to renegotiate the deal it struck with May, which has been rejected three times by Britain’s Parliament.

Opposition in courts

Johnson’s push to leave the EU at the end of next month, come what may, is facing opposition in the courts as well as in Parliament. Most economists say a no-deal Brexit would cause severe economic disruption and plunge the U.K. into recession.

Johnson enraged his opponents by announcing he would suspend Parliament at some point next week until Oct. 14, leaving just over two weeks to the deadline. Critics accused him of subverting democracy and carrying out a “coup.”

Transparency campaigner Gina Miller took the government to court, arguing the suspension was an “unlawful abuse of power.”

On Friday, a panel of three High Court judges ruled against her, but said the case can be appealed to the Supreme Court, which has set a hearing for Sept. 17.

Outside court, Miller said she was disappointed with the ruling but would not give up.

“We need to protect our institutions,” she said.” It is not right that they should be shut down or bullied, especially at this momentous time in our history.”

‘Quite a mess’

Johnson insists he wants to secure a divorce deal, and his chief Brexit negotiator, David Frost, was in Brussels Friday for talks with EU officials. But the bloc says Britain has made no concrete proposals for changes to May’s rejected deal.

EU officials say it seems increasingly likely Britain will depart without an agreement.

“The situation in Britain is quite a mess now and we don’t know what is happening there,” said Finnish Prime Minister Antti Rinne, whose country currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency.

“It seems very obvious that we are not getting Brexit with an agreement,” he said.

…

After more than five years of neglect because of control of the region by the Islamic State, residents of Raqqa can finally enjoy their favorite sport — Arabian horse racing — in the northern Syrian city once considered to be the capital of the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate.  

Hundreds of men and children could be seen dancing and celebrating as 50 Arabian horses raced each other in a festival held late last week on the city’s outskirts.

Spectators said the distinctive breed and the riders’ equestrian skills offered a respite from the conflict that has been wreaking havoc in Syria since 2011.

Symbolic importance

Husam al-Din Hamad, one of the organizers of the event and the head of the Raqqa Arabian Horse Group, said staging the race has a great symbolic importance for the residents as they try to bring normalcy back to their city, which was nearly destroyed by the war against IS.

Kurdish_Raqqa_HORSERACE video player.

Embed

Copy

“Raqqa’s horses are among the most elegant in the world. But unfortunately, in the past five to seven years, this sport was abandoned,” Hamad told VOA.

Praising the pedigree of horses in the area, Hamad said he was heartbroken at the toll that had been taken on the horses. He said local officials needed to increase efforts to help the horses recover from the physical and psychological trauma of the war.

According to World Arabian Horse Organization, of nearly 8,500 horses that were registered by the group in 2011, as many as 3,000 were killed or stolen in the war. It reported that 72 stolen horses were recovered between 2017 and 2018.

In eastern Syria’s regions, such as Raqqa, the organization found 2,200 horses in 2016-18. Of that number, 1,022 horses were freeze branded for visual registration in 2018.

“This is a heritage of our ancestors,” Hamad said. “Raqqa governorate and its countryside is rich with this treasure. I hope this sport of our fathers and grandfathers, this wealth of pure Arabian horse, is maintained and well-supported.”

Long history

Horse racing in Syria’s northeastern desert has a long history, offering the Bedouin tribes a way to connect to each other through annual festivals where competitions are held. The tribes in the region are famous for maintaining purebred Arabian horse lines. The animals are celebrated for their beauty, stamina and speed.

Raqqa’s Old City, which contains a complex of palaces built by the famed caliph Harun al-Rashid about 1,300 years ago, contains a hippodrome that was used by the caliph to hold horse races. The area remains mostly damaged now by the war to remove IS.

During the horse racing festival late last week, Hussain al-Mustafa, a spokesperson for the Culture and Antiquities Committee of the Raqqa Civil Council, said he was thrilled to see hundreds of residents attend the festival.

The event, he added, showed IS was unable to stop the closely held traditions of the city.  

“This festival confirms that we have preserved our heritage and we will work to preserve it no matter how big the challenges. Many malevolent people have repeatedly tried to obliterate the civilization of our ancestors, but they failed, as will anyone who will try to do so in the future,” al-Mustafa said.

Syria’s equine population was not left untouched by years of the multisided civil war that has killed between 350,000 and 500,000 million people and displaced millions of others.

…

Residents in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa have revived Arabian horse racing after the defeat of the Islamic State group. VOA’s Reber Kalo reports.

…

Robert  Mugabe, who ruled the southern African nation of Zimbabwe for 37 years following the end of white minority rule in 1980, has died.  He was 95 years old. Some hailed Mugabe as a liberation hero, but others say he destroyed the economy of what was once Africa’s breadbasket, rigged elections and terrorized his people for decades. VOA’s Anita Powell looks at his life and legacy.
 

…

Robert Mugabe, the guerrilla leader who led Zimbabwe to independence in 1980 and ruled with an iron fist until his own army ended his almost four decade rule, has died. He was 95.

Mugabe died in Singapore, where he has often received medical treatment in recent years, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

His death was confirmed by Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

It is with the utmost sadness that I announce the passing on of Zimbabwe’s founding father and former President, Cde Robert Mugabe (1/2)

— President of Zimbabwe (@edmnangagwa) September 6, 2019

On leading Zimbabwe to independence from Britain in 1980, Mugabe was feted as an African liberation hero and champion of racial reconciliation.

But later, many at home and abroad denounced him as a power-obsessed autocrat willing to unleash death squads, rig elections and trash the economy in the relentless pursuit of control.

Mugabe was forced to resign in November 2017 after an army coup.

His resignation triggered wild celebrations across the country of 13 million. Mugabe denounced his removal as an “unconstitutional and humiliating” act of betrayal by his party and people, and it left him a broken man.

In November, Mnangagwa said Mugabe was no longer able to walk when he had been admitted to a hospital in Singapore, without saying what treatment Mugabe had been undergoing.

Officials often said he was being treated for a cataract, denying frequent private media reports that he had prostate cancer.

…