At least 50 people have died in Bangladesh as cold weather continues to sweep across the country, health officials said.

The country’s lowest temperature this year was recorded at 4.5 degrees Celsius (40.1 degrees Fahrenheit) early on Sunday in Tetulia, a border town in Bangladesh’s north, the weather office said.

At least 17 people died of acute respiratory infection and 33 from diarrhea and other diseases across Bangladesh from Nov. 1 to Dec. 28, said Ayesha Akhter, a senior official of the government’s health directorate.

Hospitals have been crowded with people suffering from cold-related illnesses, such as influenza, dehydration and pneumonia, said Ayesha Akhter, she said.

Those on low incomes, particularly laborers, are the worst affected by the cold weather because they lack clothes while many others, especially children and the elderly people, are prone to diseases such as pneumonia, Akhter said.

The weather office said the cold snap, accompanied by chilly winds and dense fog, week was likely to continue for few more days.

Thick fog forced authorities to divert several flights and delay others, aviation officials said.

A fresh Taliban attack in Afghanistan has killed 17 pro-government forces, even as the insurgent group is reported to be mulling over a brief cease-fire to try to seal a foreign troop withdrawal deal with the United States.

The overnight deadly insurgent attack targeted a security outpost in Bahauddin district in northeastern Takhar province, a provincial government spokesman told VOA Sunday. 

Jawad Hejiri said the post was being manned by a local pro-government anti-Taliban militia when it came under attack. He said at least four security personnel were wounded in the ensuing clashes. 

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed in a statement the raid killed 21 government militia forces and insurgents did not suffer any casualties. Taliban claims are often exaggerated.

Despite harsh winter conditions, insurgent attacks have seen an unusual spike within the past week, particularly in northern Afghan provinces, killing more than 50 Afghan forces. 

For their part, government officials say retaliatory military actions and counterinsurgency operations have inflicted heavy casualties on the Taliban.

The violence comes as the Taliban’s leadership reportedly has agreed to observe a weeklong cease-fire with U.S.-led foreign troops in the country, starting early next month. 

The temporary truce could pave the ground for concluding a long-anticipated U.S.-Taliban agreement on the drawdown of foreign troops in Afghanistan to end the 18-year-old war, America’s longest. The move could also jumpstart Taliban-Afghan negotiations on a permanent end to decades of Afghan hostilities. 

Taliban spokesman Mujahid confirmed Sunday the group’s leadership council is currently engaged in intense internal deliberations on declaring a cease-fire, among other issues.

“But those consultations are still continuing and there has been no final decision as yet,” Mujahid told VOA. He said the Taliban will make a formal announcement about the outcome of the consultative process as and when it is completed. Mujahid did not offer more details. 

Insurgent sources believed the temporary truce, if announced, would lead to immediate resumption of U.S.-Taliban talks so the two adversaries could finalize the accord on the removal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan. 

Washington paused the dialogue earlier this month, demanding the Taliban leadership agree to a temporary cease-fire to further the peace process.

Under the proposed deal, Taliban officials say, the insurgent group would be bound to prevent Taliban-controlled Afghan areas from being used by international terrorists for attacks against America and other countries. In return, U.S. and allied forces would commit to a complete drawdown of their forces. 

But the Trump administration has said the withdrawal process would be “conditions-based”, meaning progress in Taliban-Afghan peace talks would determine the pace of the drawdown. 

Washington has hinted at reducing its troop levels to around 8,600 from the current more than 12,000 troops stationed in Afghanistan. NATO allies have about 8,000 forces. 

Some of the U.S. forces are conducting counterterrorism missions while the rest, together with coalition troops are tasked with training, advising and assisting Afghan forces battling the Taliban.

Turkey will not withdraw from its observation posts in Syrian rebel bastion province of Idlib which has seen an increase in violence carried out by regime forces supported by Russian airstrikes, the defense minister said. 

The posts were established under a September 2018 deal between Syrian regime ally Moscow and Ankara, which backs the rebels, to avert an all-out Syrian government onslaught in Idlib.

Government forces surrounded one of 12 Turkish observation post in Idlib province on Monday after overrunning nearby areas in a push to take the last opposition holdout, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. 

“We respect the agreement reached with Russia and we expect Russia to abide by this agreement,” Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said in comments published on Sunday on the defense ministry’s Twitter account.

“We will by no means empty those 12 observation posts, we will not leave there,” Akar said.

His comments came during a visit together with top army commanders to the southern province of Hatay on the Syrian border to inspect Turkish troops on Saturday.

Turkey, worried over a new wave of refugees from the Idlib region, is pressing for a fresh ceasefire deal, as it sent a delegation to Moscow on Monday.

Akar’s visit to soldiers on the border region comes as Turkey is also readying to send troops to support the UN-recognized government in Tripoli against strongman Khalifa Haftar’s self-styled Libyan National Army. 

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday said Ankara would respond to an invitation from the Libyan national unity government and Turkish parliament would vote on a motion to send troops as soon as it returns from recess as early as next month.

Ankara signed in November a security and military cooperation deal with the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) but in order to send troops, parliament needs to vote a motion like it does for Iraq and Syria.

The official Anadolu news agency, citing sources in Erdogan’s ruling party, reported that the timetable could be brought forward and the motion could be presented to parliament speaker’s office on Monday.

The General Assembly could vote the measure in an extraordinary session on Thursday, it said.

The first one occurred 19 days into the new year when a man used an ax to kill four family members, including his infant daughter. Five months later, 12 people were killed in a workplace shooting in Virginia. Twenty-two more died at a Walmart in El Paso in August. 
 
A database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University shows that there were more mass killings in 2019 than in any other year dating to at least the 1970s, punctuated by a chilling succession of deadly rampages during the summer. 
 
In all, there were 41 mass killings, defined as when four or more people are killed, excluding the perpetrator. Of those, 33 were mass shootings. More than 210 people were killed. 
 
Most of the mass killings barely became national news, failing to resonate among the general public because they didn’t spill into public places like massacres in El Paso and Odessa, Texas; Dayton, Ohio; Virginia Beach, Virginia; and Jersey City, New Jersey. 
 
Most of the killings involved people who knew each other — family disputes, drug or gang violence, or people with beefs who directed their anger at co-workers or relatives. 

In many cases, what set off the perpetrator remains a mystery. 
 
That’s the case with the very first mass killing of 2019, when a 42-year-old man took an ax and stabbed to death his mother, stepfather, girlfriend and 9-month-old daughter in Clackamas County, Oregon. Two others, a roommate and an 8-year-old girl, escaped; the rampage ended when responding police fatally shot the killer. 
 
The perpetrator had had occasional run-ins with police over the years, but what drove him to attack his family remains unknown. He had just gotten a job training mechanics at an auto dealership, and despite occasional arguments with his relatives, most said there was nothing out of the ordinary that raised significant red flags. 
 
The incident in Oregon was one of 18 mass killings in which family members were slain, and one of six that didn’t involve a gun. Among other trends in 2019: 
 
— The 41 mass killings were the most in a single year since the AP/USA Today and Northeastern database began tracking such events back to 2006, but other research going back to the 1970s shows no other year with as many mass slayings. The second-most killings in a year prior to 2019 was 38 in 2006. 
 
— The total of 211 people killed in this year’s cases is still eclipsed by the 224 victims in 2017, when the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history took place in Las Vegas. 
 
— California, with some of the most strict gun laws in the country, had the most mass slayings, with eight. But nearly half of U.S. states experienced a mass slaying, from big cities like New York to tiny towns like Elkmont, Alabama, with a population of just under 475 people. 
 
— Firearms were the weapons used in all but eight of the mass killings. Other weapons included knives and axes, and at least twice, the perpetrator set a mobile home on fire, killing those inside. 
 
— Nine mass shootings occurred in public places. Other mass killings occurred in homes, workplaces or bars. 

James Densley, a criminologist and professor at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota, said the AP/USA Today/Northeastern database confirms and mirrors what his own research into exclusively mass shootings has shown. 

“What makes this even more exceptional is that mass killings are going up at a time when general homicides, overall homicides, are going down,” Densley said. “As a percentage of homicides, these mass killings are also accounting for more deaths.” 
 
He believes it’s partially a byproduct of an “angry and frustrated time” that we are living in. Densley also said crime tends to go in waves, with the 1970s and 1980s seeing a number of serial killers, the 1990s marked by school shootings and child abductions, and the early 2000s dominated by concerns over terrorism. 
 
“This seems to be the age of mass shootings,” Densley said. 
 
He and James Alan Fox, a criminologist and professor at Northeastern University, also expressed worries about the “contagion effect,” the focus on mass killings fueling other mass killings. 
 
“These are still rare events. Clearly the risk is low but the fear is high,” Fox said. “What fuels contagion is fear.” 
 
The mass shootings this year include the three in August in Texas and Dayton that stirred fresh urgency, especially among Democratic presidential candidates, to restrict access to firearms. 
 
While the large death tolls attracted much of the attention, the killings inflicted a mental and physical toll on dozens of others. The database does not have a complete count of victims who were wounded, but among the three mass shootings in August alone, more than 65 people were injured. 
 
Daniel Munoz, 28, of Odessa was caught in the crossfire of the shooting that took place over a 10-mile (16-kilometer) stretch in West Texas. He was on his way to meet a friend at a bar when he saw a gunman and the barrel of a firearm. Instinctively, he got down just as his car was sprayed with bullets. 

Munoz, who moved to Texas about a year ago to work in the oil industry, said he had actually been on edge since the Walmart shooting, which took place just 28 days earlier and about 300 miles (480 kilometers) away, worried that a shooting could happen anywhere at any time. 
 
He remembers calling his mother after the El Paso shooting to encourage her to have a firearm at home or with her in case she needed to defend herself. He would say the same to friends, telling them before they went to a Walmart to take a firearm in case they needed to protect themselves or others during an attack. 
 
“You can’t just always assume you’re safe. In that moment, as soon as the El Paso shooting happened, I was on edge,” Munoz said. 
 
Adding to his anxiety is that, as a convicted felon, he’s prohibited from possessing a firearm. 
 
A few weeks later, as he sat behind the wheel of his car, he spotted the driver of an approaching car wielding a firearm. 
 
“My worst nightmare became a reality,” he said. “I’m the middle of a gunfight and I have no way to defend myself.” 
 
In the months since, the self-described social butterfly steers clear of crowds and can only tolerate so much socializing. He still drives the same car, still riddled with bullet holes on the side panels, a bullet hole in the headrest of the passenger seat and the words “evidence” scrawled on the doors. His shoulder remains pocked with bullet fragments. 

President Donald Trump retweeted, then deleted, a post that included the alleged name of the anonymous whistleblower whose complaint ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment by the House. 
 
Just before midnight Friday, Trump retweeted a message from Twitter user @Surfermom77, an account that claims to be a woman named Sophia who lives in California. The account shows some indications of automation, including an unusually high amount of activity and profile pictures featuring stock images from the internet. 
 
By Saturday morning, the post had been removed from Trump’s feed, though it could still be found in other ways, including on a website that logs every presidential tweet. 
 
While Trump has repeatedly backed efforts to unmask the whistleblower, his retweet marks the first time he has directly sent the alleged name into the Twitter feed of his 68 million followers. 
 
Unmasking the whistleblower, who works in the intelligence field, could violate federal protection laws that have historically been supported by both parties. 

Phone conversation
 
The whistleblower filed a complaint in August about one of Trump’s telephone conversations with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other dealings with the Eastern European nation. The complaint prompted House Democrats to launch a probe that ended with Trump’s impeachment earlier this month. The matter now heads to the Senate, where the Republican majority is expected to acquit the president. 

The central points from the whistleblower’s complaint were confirmed during the House impeachment hearings by a string of diplomats and other career officials, many of whom testified in public. The White House also released an account of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelenskiy, in which he asks for help investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee. 
 
Speculation about the whistleblower’s identity has been circulating in conservative media and on social media for months. 
 
U.S. whistleblower laws exist to protect the identity and careers of people who bring forward accusations of wrongdoing by government officials. The Associated Press typically does not reveal the identity of whistleblowers. 
 
The White House had no comment Saturday on the president’s retweet or why it was removed. 

President’s position
 
Trump insists he did nothing wrong in his dealings with Ukraine and has asserted that the whistleblower made up the complaint, despite its corroboration by other officials. Trump also argues that he has a right to face his accuser and has called on the whistleblower to step forward. 
 
For months, an array of right-wing personalities, amateur pro-Trump internet sleuths and some conservative news outlets have published what they claim to be details about the whistleblower, including name and career history. The president himself has also been inching closer to outing the individual; earlier this week, Trump shared a tweet linking to a Washington Examiner article that included the alleged name. 
 
Still, his retweet Friday night went a step further — directly sending the name into the feeds of his 68 million followers. 
 
@Surfermom77, the Twitter handle on the post Trump retweeted, describes herself as a “100%Trump Supporter” and California resident. The account had nearly 79,000 followers as of Saturday afternoon. Some of its previous posts have denounced Islam and sharply criticized former President Barack Obama and other Democrats. 

@Surfermom77 has displayed some hallmarks of a Twitter bot, an automated account. A recent profile picture on the account, for instance, is a stock photo of a woman in business attire that is available for use online. 
 
That photo was removed Saturday and replaced with an image of Trump. 
 
A deeper look at @Surfermom77’s account shows the user previously used two other stock photos as profile pictures, including one of a model wearing an orange hat used by a hat retailer. 
 
@Surfermom77 has also tweeted far more than typical users, more than 170,000 times since the account was activated in 2013. @Surfermom77 has posted, on average, 72 tweets a day, according to Nir Hauser, chief technology officer at VineSight, a technology firm that tracks online misinformation. 
 
“That’s not something most humans are doing,” Hauser said. 
 
While many bots only repost benign information like cat photos, others have been used to spread disinformation or polarizing claims, as Russian bots did in the leadup to the 2016 election. 
 
Many jobs

In past years, @Surfermom77 has described herself as a teacher, historian, documentary author and model. Attempts to reach the person behind the account by telephone on Saturday were unsuccessful. An email address could not be found. 
 
Facebook has a policy banning posts that name the alleged whistleblower. But Twitter, which doesn’t have such a rule, has not removed the tweet from @Supermom77 or tweets from others who have named the alleged whistleblower. 
 
“The tweet you referenced is not a violation of the Twitter rules,” the company wrote in a statement emailed to The Associated Press. 
 
Some details about the whistleblower that have been published online by Trump’s supporters have been inaccurate or misrepresented. 
 
For example, a photo shared widely on social media last month was circulated by Facebook, Reddit and Twitter users who wrongly claimed it showed the whistleblower with Obama’s staffers outside the White House as Trump moved in. 
 
The individual in the photo actually was R. David Edelman, a former special assistant to Obama on economic and tech policy. Edelman debunked the claim on his Twitter account and told the AP he received threats online as a result of the false claims. 

‘Completely inappropriate’
 
Michael German, an FBI whistleblower who left the agency after reporting allegations of mismanagement in counterterrorism cases, said outing government whistleblowers not only puts them at personal risk but also discourages other government officials from stepping forward to expose possible wrongdoing. 
 
German, now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, said the ease with which the alleged whistleblower’s identity has been spread online shows the need for greater legal protections for whistleblowers. 
 
He added that it’s “completely inappropriate for the president of the United States to be engaged in any type of behavior that could harm a whistleblower.” 

North Korea began a closely watched ruling party meeting led by Kim Jong Un, state media reported Sunday, amid signs Pyongyang is set to announce a firmer stance toward the United States. 
 
Kim is widely expected in the next week to announce the details of his “new way” for North Korea, following the expiration of its self-imposed end-of-year deadline for the U.S. to offer a better proposal in stalled nuclear talks. 
 
State media coverage of the Workers’ Party of Korea meeting offered few hints about the country’s direction. 
 
The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) mentioned an “anti-imperialist” stance and the building up of national defense but gave no other details. 
 
“The plenary meeting goes on,” KCNA said, apparently indicating a multiday meeting. 
 
Talks boycotted

North Korea has boycotted nuclear talks for months and recently threatened to resume long-range missile and nuclear tests. An official said earlier this month that denuclearization was off the negotiating table. 
 
Those threats — mostly made by lower-level officials — were widely seen as an attempt to increase pressure on the U.S. ahead of North Korea’s deadline. 

Kim’s annual New Year’s speech is expected to offer much firmer evidence of the country’s direction in 2020. In his speech last year, he warned of a “new way” if the talks didn’t progress. 
 
North Korea also threatened to deliver a “Christmas gift” to the U.S., leading many analysts to predict a North Korean holiday missile test. But Christmas passed with no signs of what that “gift” might be. 
 
There are multiple possible explanations for why North Korea has refrained from a major provocation, including last-minute progress between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump or a warning from China, which typically frowns on North Korean missile and nuclear tests. 

No ‘cold feet’
 
“But Kim, nevertheless, probably did not get cold feet,” said Duyeon Kim, a senior adviser for Northeast Asia and nuclear policy at the International Crisis Group. 
 
“North Korea’s course of action after the year-end deadline will be far more significant than a gift timed to coincide with what it sees as an American holiday. After all, anything can happen in the remaining six days of 2019 after Christmas. And presents can be delivered any time the giver feels so compelled,” Kim said. 

Even without a North Korean launch or other provocation, tensions have been high, especially after Japan’s public broadcaster NHK erroneously reported Friday that North Korea had launched a missile that landed in the waters east of Japan. The broadcaster later apologized for the false report, saying it was a media training alert. 

A tense moment also occurred late Thursday when Camp Casey, a U.S. Army base in South Korea, accidentally blasted an emergency siren instead of taps, a bugle call typically played at military bases at the end of the day. 
 
The false alarms are even more notable considering the relative silence from North Korea during the last couple of weeks, after having ramped up threats in early December. 

‘Deafening’ silence
 
“It has been the uneasy calm before the storm,” said Robert Carlin, a former U.S. intelligence official with decades of experience researching North Korea. 
 
“The air was certainly heavy with Pyongyang’s warnings earlier. But then, beginning on December 15, these abruptly stopped and the North became extremely quiet, preternaturally quiet,” Carlin said in a post on 38 North, a website specializing in North Korea.

“The silence, in fact, has been deafening,” he said. 

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has slammed Iran for using “violence” and internet disruption to prevent memorials for those killed during a November crackdown on anti-establishment protests.  

“The Iranian people have the right to mourn 1,500 victims slaughtered by @khamenei_ir during #IranProtests,” Pompeo tweeted Friday, directly accusing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on religious and political issues in the Islamic republic. 
 
According to the semiofficial ILNA news agency, internet access was effectively cut off Wednesday in several Iranian provinces ahead of memorials planned Thursday. 
 
Several people were reportedly detained at a mourning in Karaj marking 40 days since the death of a slain protester. 
 
“The regime fears its own citizens and has once again resorted to violence and shutting down the internet,” Pompeo tweeted Friday. 
 
The protests in Iran were touched off by a significant increase in the price of gasoline. The United States said earlier this month that Iranian authorities might have killed more than 1,000 people in the crackdown in mid-November. 
 
Reuters quoted anonymous government officials as saying about 1,500 people had died during the protests, though that figure could not be confirmed. 
 
Amnesty International has said that at least 304 were killed and thousands injured in the unrest. 
 
Tehran has dismissed the figures by rights groups and others while failing to publish an official death toll. 
 
Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report.  

Protesters in Iraq on Saturday shut down a southern oil field and forced a cutoff of electricity at the facility amid unrest that has racked the capital and much of southern Iraq since public anger first boiled over nearly three months ago, news media reported. 
 
Reuters reported that the demonstrators chanted, “No homeland, no oil!” as they forced the closure at the Nassiriya oil field, which produces 90,000 barrels a day. 
 
The news agency cited “a security source and two oil sources” as saying the facility had been shut down. 
 
Iraq has been shaken by mostly leaderless anti-government and anti-Iranian protests that have led to hundreds of deaths amid a violent crackdown by authorities. 
 
The protesters have decried rampant corruption, a lack of jobs and perceived official incompetence. 
 
Many have also condemned foreign influence and demanded an end to the system imposed since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the ouster of the country’s ruling elite and placement of an independent in the prime minister’s seat. 
 
Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi was forced out by the public pressure, although he has said he will remain on in a caretaker capacity. 
 
The constitutional deadline to name his replacement was late last week. 

Friday protest

Thousands of Iraqis took to the streets Friday in support of a decision by President Barham Salih to reject an Iran-backed bloc’s candidate for prime minister, while some groups with purported ties to Iran criticized Salih’s move. 
 
Iraq’s parliament Tuesday approved a new electoral law aimed at giving political independents a better chance of winning seats, a key demand of the protesters to make elections fairer. 
 
The new law changes each of the country’s 18 provinces into several electoral districts and prevents so-called unified party lists. 
 
The semiofficial Human Rights Commission in Iraq said Saturday that at least 490 people had died since the anti-government rallies began in early October, according to AP. 
 
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

Living through years of Yemen’s devastating war has been a constant struggle for Afaf Mohammed al-Adwar, who uses a wheelchair because of congenital spinal damage. 

But she is now determined to demonstrate her ability to cope by participating in a women’s wheelchair basketball championship. 
 
The 16-year-old sportswoman joined dozens of other girls and women with mobility impairment in a wheelchair basketball tournament that was held in Sanaa this month. 
 
She told VOA that her participation was “the first step” toward showing the plight of Yemen’s women and girls with disabilities during four years of civil war between the government and Iran-backed Houthi rebels.    
 
“We are trying to show people that we are not just disabled, but we are able to do whatever we aspire to,” al-Adwar said. 
 
She said that women and girls with disabilities in Yemen are on the margins of society, excluded from basic humanitarian assistance, while at the same time facing gender-based discrimination. 
 
“The society frowns upon letting girls leave their houses, let alone allowing them to play sports. It was hard for my family at first to let me play, but when they saw me in the games, they started encouraging and supporting me,” she told VOA, adding that she was grateful to be a part of an attempt to change the common mentality of a rather conservative society going through conflict.

Five-team competition   
 
Five teams competed in a weeklong championship that started on December 7 and was sponsored by the Red Cross and other organizations in Yemen working to benefit people with disabilities.  

The winners will compete in a regional championship next year in Beirut. 
 
Al-Adwar’s team, al-Tahadi Organization for Supporting Women with Disabilities, came in fourth place and received a special award for their “sport spirit.” 
 
Jihad Hammoud Ahmed Jaber, a spokesperson for the al-Tahadi Organization, told VOA such activities will empower girls and women with disabilities to become active members of their communities. At the same time, they will help change societal perceptions by creating a more inclusive atmosphere for everyone. 
 
“The goal of having a women’s basketball championship was to make the women get out from their isolation, especially amid the ongoing war in the country,” Jaber said. “Those who didn’t allow their daughters to play a sport, we wanted to show them how this can help their daughters physically and mentally and how it can give their daughters strength and empowerment.” 

The conflict in Yemen escalated after Iran-backed Houthis overran Sanaa in September 2014. In 2015, the conflict turned into a proxy war when an international coalition led by Saudi Arabia launched a military and economic campaign against the Houthis. 
 
The United Nations calls the situation in Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. It has warned that people with disabilities are the country’s most vulnerable, facing immense hardship to get much medical aid or to move from battlefield zones to safer refuges. 
 
Most excluded 
 
Rights group Amnesty International estimates that the devastating conflict has left 4.5 million Yemenis, or 15% of the country’s population, with some form of disability.  In a 50-page report published this month, the organization concluded that the conflict has limited health services for Yemenis with disabilities and taken away their rights to education and employment opportunities, while adding risks from violence and living in displacement. 
 
It said some people with disabilities were separated from their families and left behind as people fled war “because the trip was too difficult for the person with a disability to undertake.” 
 
“Yemen’s war has been characterized by unlawful bombings, displacement and a dearth of basic services, leaving many struggling to survive. The humanitarian response is overstretched, but people with disabilities — who are already among those most at risk in armed conflict — should not face even greater challenges in accessing essential aid,” said Rawya Rageh, the group’s crisis adviser. 

Ukrainian authorities and pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country have agreed to swap dozens of prisoners on Sunday, the self-declared rebel republic of Donetsk said.

Both sides had said earlier this month they would carry out a prisoner exchange by the end of the year, following high-profile peace talks in Paris aimed at de-escalating Europe’s only active war.

“Kiev and the Donbass (a term used to refer to rebel-held eastern Ukraine) have reached an accord on an exchange of prisoners… this Sunday December 29,” Donetsk government spokeswoman Daria Morozova said in a statement.

She said two separatist territories Donetsk and Lugansk will get 87 prisoners, while 55 others will be handed over to Kiev, without giving details on the identity of those involved.

The prisoner exchange is expected to take place near the town of Gorlivka in the separatist-held Donetsk region.

Russian media reported that the operation will take place on the front line.

Ukrainian authorities refused to confirm or deny the exchange.

“We are not commenting on this,” Olena Guitlianska, spokesman for the SBU, the Ukrainian security services, told AFP.

Officials at the Ukrainian presidency could not immediately be reached for comment.

The swap would come three months after Ukraine carried out a long-awaited exchange with Russia of 35 prisoners each.

More than 13,000 people have been killed since pro-Russia militias in eastern Ukraine launched a bid for independence in 2014 – kicking off a conflict that deepened Russia’s estrangement from the West.

International pressure

Details of Sunday’s exchange were scarce, with officials saying that lists of prisoners were still being agreed.

OSCE Special Representative Martin Sajdik confirmed that preparations for the swap were under way.

At the Paris summit this month, the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine agreed to implement a full ceasefire and proceed with a new withdrawal of forces from conflict zones by March 2020.

The latest swap also comes after Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky held their first face-to-face talks and agreed measures to de-escalate the conflict.

The December 9 summit was the first of its kind in three years.

Since coming to power in May, comedian-turned-president Zelensky, 41, has sought to revive a peace process to end the separatist conflict.

The Kremlin has sent signals that it is ready to work with Zelensky, whom Putin has described as “likeable” and “sincere”.

Ahead of the summit, Kiev and separatists completed a partial troop pullback.

French President Emmanuel Macron said at the time of the Paris meeting a new summit would be held in four months to take stock of progress on ending the conflict.

Countries have sought to revive accords signed in Minsk in 2015 that call for the withdrawal of heavy weapons, the restoration of Kiev’s control over its borders, wider autonomy for Donetsk and Lugansk, and the holding of local elections.

But there was no sign of warmth between the Ukraine and Russian leaders in Paris and many doubt whether Putin genuinely wants to settle the conflict.

Speaking in Moscow this month, Putin said that if Kiev gets back control of the border in the east pro-Russian residents of separatist-held territories could be targeted.

Zelensky’s peace plan has also been strongly criticised by war veterans and nationalists.

Various nationalist organisations even deployed their own troops to the frontline in an effort to prevent a troop pullback in line with peace agreements.

Critics say the proposals favour Russia but Zelensky has pledged not to betray Ukraine’s interests.

Ties between Ukraine and Russia were shredded after a bloody uprising ousted a Kremlin-backed regime in 2014. Moscow went on to annex Crimea and support insurgents in eastern Ukraine.

 

 

Kazakhstan observed a national day of mourning on Saturday a day after 12 people died when an airliner crashed shortly after takeoff and slammed into a house.

The jet carrying nearly 100 passengers operated by budget carrier Bek Air was torn apart and its nose crushed on impact with a building in the country’s biggest city Almaty, but many on board managed to walk away without serious injury.

In the capital Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan’s largest flag was at half-mast while officials made urgent appeals for blood donations to help injured survivors.

Neighboring Russia and China were among the countries to join the Vatican and the European Union in expressing condolences to the former Soviet Central Asian republic.

Officials say the Fokker 100 plane’s tail hit the tarmac twice on Friday during take-off before it came down and crashed into the concrete building, splitting into two.

According to Kazakh emergency authorities, the 12 dead included the pilot. Another 47 passengers out of the 98 people onboard were still in hospital on Saturday. Nine of them were children, officials said.

An investigation has been opened into “violation of security regulations and air transport operating rules”. But the interior ministry is still examining possible causes for the accident.

According to the authorities, an inquiry should announce its first conclusions next month. But a dozen other Bek Air aircraft will be grounded in the meantime.

According to the industry ministry, the low-cost airline operates nine Fokker-100 type aircraft, a medium-haul model built by the Dutch aircraft manufacturer Fokker.

In March 2016, a Bek Air Fokker 100 with 116 passengers on board had to make an emergency landing at Nur-Sultan International Airport due to a landing gear problem, without causing injuries.

Algeria’s President Abdelmadjid Tebboune on Saturday named a university professor and former diplomat as prime minister as he builds a new government to handle political unrest and a looming economic challenge.

Abdelaziz Djerad, 65, served in the administration of a previous president in the 1990s, but was sidelined by president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was ousted in April after two decades as head of state.

The massive street protest movement that prompted Bouteflika to step down regarded Tebboune’s election this month as illegitimate and it seems unlikely to accept any government he appoints.

The protesters rejected any election that took place while the military stayed involved in politics and Bouteflika-era figures retained powerful positions.

Algeria’s authorities publicly welcomed the street protests, casting them as a patriotic movement aimed at refreshing Algerian politics and ending corruption.

Djerad spoke several times on radio after the protests began, backing them and demanding that Bouteflika and his allies quit power.

Tebboune, himself a former prime minister, was one of five former senior officials approved as candidates for the presidential race, and won 58% of votes on Dec. 12 amid protests and an electoral boycott that reduced turnout to 40%.

The opposition say that despite Tebboune’s election, ultimate power remains with the army, whose own chief, Ahmed Gaed Salah, died suddenly of a heart attack on Monday.

It leaves Algeria with a new president, prime minister and army chief during its most acute political crisis in decades. Meanwhile the country faces a longer-term slide in its trade and fiscal balances after years of lower energy prices.

With state coffers relying on energy exports for most annual revenue, the new government may be forced to make tough cuts in spending. The parliament and outgoing interim government have already agreed a 9% cut in public spending for 2020.

Other members of the new government are expected to be named in the coming days.

A Vietnamese court Saturday sentenced an ex-minister to life in prison in a multimillion-dollar corruption case that also saw another minister and a dozen executives receive lengthy prison terms, state media reported.

Nguyen Bac Son was accused of taking a bribe of $3 million to orchestrate the 2016 acquisition of a digital television service on behalf of state-owned Mobifone, one of major mobile network operators in Vietnam, when he was minister of information and communication.

Son, a former military officer, ordered the transaction that involved the purchase of 95% of shares of the indebted Audio Visual Global (AVG) company for an equivalent of $383.83 million, a price that had been inflated almost 10 times, national television VTV reported.

Son was sentenced to life for taking bribes plus 16 years on a charge of violating public investment management regulations. His combined punishment is life imprisonment, VTV quoted the presiding judge as saying after the two-week trial concluded in Hanoi.

Truong Minh Tuan, Son’s former deputy who succeeded him as minister at his retirement, was sentenced to 14 years in prison on the same charge. Tuan was accused of taking $500,000 in bribes to ink the acquisition deal.

Le Nam Tra, the former chairman of Mobifone, and Cao Duy Hai, the company’s former executive director, were handed 23 years and 14 years in prison, respectively, on bribery and mismanagement charges. Tra was accused of taking a $2.5 million bribe while Hai pocketed $500,000.

AVG CEO Pham Nhat Vu was sentenced to three years in prison on a charge of giving bribes.

Nine others, including officials and executives, got between two and six years in prison in the same case.

Lee Mendelson, the producer who changed the face of the holidays when he brought “A Charlie Brown Christmas” to television in 1965 and wrote the lyrics to its signature song, “Christmas Time Is Here,” died Christmas day, his son said.

Mendelson, who won a dozen Emmys in his long career, died at his home in Hillsborough, California, of congestive heart failure at age 86 after a long struggle with lung cancer, Jason Mendelson told The Associated Press.

Lee Mendelson headed a team that included “Peanuts” author Charles Schulz, director Bill Melendez, and pianist and composer Vince Guaraldi, whose music for the show, including the opening “Christmas Time Is Here,” has become as much a Christmas staple as the show itself.

Mendelson told The Cincinnati Enquirer in 2000 that he was short on time in finding a lyricist for the song, so he sketched out the six verses himself in “about 15 minutes on the backside of an envelope.”

He found a choir from a church in his native Northern California to sing the song that sets the show’s unforgettable tone, beginning with Mendelson’s words: “Christmas time is here, happiness and cheer, fun for all that children call, their favorite time of year.”

The show won an Emmy and a Peabody Award and has aired on TV annually ever since. The team that made it would go on to create more than 50 network specials, four feature films and many other “Peanuts” projects.

Mendelson also took other comic strips from newspapers to animated TV, including “Garfield,” for which he produced a dozen television specials.

His death was first reported by The Daily Post of Palo Alto.

Northern Californian

Born in San Francisco in 1933, Mendelson’s family moved to nearby San Mateo when he was a boy, and later to nearby Hillsborough, where he went to high school.

He graduated from Stanford in 1954, served in the Air Force and worked for his father’s fruit-and-vegetable company before going into TV for the Bay Area’s KPIX-TV.

In 1963 he started his own production company and made a documentary on San Francisco Giants legend Willie Mays, “A Man Named Mays,” that became a hit television special on NBC.

Show that nearly wasn’t

He and Schulz originally worked on a “Peanuts” documentary that proved a hard sell for TV, but midway through 1965 a sponsor asked them if they could create the first comic strip’s first animated special in time for Christmas.

Schulz wrote the now-familiar story of a depressed Charlie Brown seeking the meaning of Christmas, a school Christmas play with intractable actors including his dog Snoopy, a limp and unappreciated Christmas tree, and a recitation of the nativity story from his best friend Linus.

Mendelson said the team showed the special to executives at CBS a week before it was slated to air, and they hated it, with its simplicity, dour tone, biblical themes, lack of laugh track and actual children’s voices instead of adults mimicking them, as was common.

“I really believed, if it hadn’t been scheduled for the following week, there’s no way they were gonna broadcast that show,” Mendelson said on a 2004 documentary for the DVD of the special.

Holiday classic

Instead, it went on to become perhaps the biggest holiday classic in television.

“It became part of everybody’s Christmas holidays,” Mendelson told The Los Angeles Times in 2015. “It was just passed on from generation to generation. … We got this huge initial audience and never lost them.”

Mendelson is survived by his wife, Ploenta, his children Lynda, Glenn, Jason and Sean, his stepson Ken and eight grandchildren.
 

Somali officials say at least 30 people were killed and dozens wounded when a huge car bomb exploded at a busy junction on the southwestern side of Mogadishu.

Witnesses say the blast occurred at a security checkpoint at an intersection used by vehicles leaving and entering Mogadishu from Afgoye town. An officer said it was a truck bomb.

Early reports indicated the vehicle filled with explosives was targeting a busy taxation office at the junction where vehicles stop to pay their road taxes.

A witness who went to the scene told VOA Somali that he saw blood and pieces of bodies scattered throughout the scene.

“It’s hard to quantify, but many people died,” he said. Mogadishu’s Aamin Ambulance Service told VOA Somali they have collected 61 dead bodies and 50 wounded people.

The first pictures from the scene show at least 15 dead bodies lying on the ground.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast. However, the al-Qaida-linked terror group al-Shabab has carried out similar attacks in the past.

An Illinois man who made more than 27,000 crosses to commemorate victims of mass shootings across the country is retiring.

Greg Zanis came to realize, after 23 years, his Crosses for Losses ministry was beginning to take a personal and financial toll on him, according to The Beacon-News.

“I had a breaking point in El Paso,” he said, referring to the mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. “I hadn’t slept for two days, it was 106 degrees and I collapsed from the pressure when I heard there were two more victims of the mass shooting.”

Beginning with Columbine

Zanis has set up crosses after the school shootings at Columbine, Sandy Hook and Parkland. He also placed crosses after the Las Vegas music festival shooting and the Orlando nightclub shooting.

“I leave a piece of my heart behind each time I go,” he said.

In 2016 he made more than 700 crosses that were carried along Michigan Avenue in Chicago to honor each person who had been killed that year.

Earlier this year, Zanis found himself making crosses for his very own hometown of Aurora, Illinois, after a Henry Pratt Co. employee opened fire on his co-workers.

“After Orlando, it never stopped,” Zanis said of the mass shootings. “The country had me on the road for a while every week. I have driven 850,000 miles to put up crosses. I slept in my truck and never had the money to cover what I was doing.”

Deep in debt

With donations from time to time, Zanis mainly relied on his own resources to build the crosses.

“At one point last year I was $10,000 in debt and somebody covered that for me,” he said. “Now I am $14,000 in debt.”

Zanis hopes to pass on his ministry to the nonprofit Lutheran Church Charities of Northbrook.

“I feel it is not the end of the ministry. It is the end of me doing it,” he said.

The U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution Friday strongly condemning human rights abuses against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims and other minorities, including arbitrary arrests, torture, rape and deaths in detention. 
 
The 193-member world body voted 134-9 with 28 abstentions in favor of the resolution, which also calls on Myanmar’s government to take urgent measures to combat incitement of hatred against the Rohingya and other minorities in Rakhine, Kachin and Shan states. 
 
General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding but they do reflect world opinion. 
 
Buddhist-majority Myanmar has long considered the Rohingya to be “Bengalis“ from Bangladesh, even though their families have lived in the country for generations. Nearly all have been denied citizenship since 1982, effectively rendering them stateless, and they are also denied freedom of movement and other basic rights. 

The long-simmering Rohingya crisis exploded on August 25, 2017, when Myanmar’s military launched what it called a clearance campaign in Rakhine in response to an attack by a Rohingya insurgent group. The campaign led to the mass Rohingya exodus to Bangladesh and to accusations that security forces committed mass rapes and killings and burned thousands of homes. 

Myanmar response

Myanmar’s U.N. ambassador, Hau Do Suan, called the resolution “another classic example of double-standards [and] selective and discriminatory application of human rights norms,“ designed “to exert unwanted political pressure on Myanmar.” 
 
He said the resolution did not attempt to find a solution to the complex situation in Rakhine state and did not recognize government efforts to address the challenges. 
 
The resolution, the ambassador said, “will sow seeds of distrust and will create further polarization of different communities in the region.” 

The resolution expresses alarm at the influx of Rohingya Muslims into neighboring Bangladesh over the last four decades — the total is now 1.1 million, which includes 744,000 who arrived since August 2017 — “in the aftermath of atrocities committed by the security and armed forces of Myanmar.” 
 
The assembly also expressed alarm at an independent international fact-finding mission’s findings “of gross human rights violations and abuses suffered by Rohingya Muslims and other minorities” by the security forces, which the mission said “undoubtedly amount to the gravest crimes under international law.” 

‘Deep distress’
 
The resolution called for an immediate cessation of fighting and hostilities. 
 
It reiterated “deep distress at reports that unarmed individuals in Rakhine state have been and continue to be subjected to the excessive use of forces and violations of international human rights law, international humanitarian law by the military and security and armed forces.” 
 
And it called for Myanmar’s forces to protect all people, and for urgent steps to ensure justice for all rights violations. 
 
The resolution also urged the government “to expedite efforts to eliminate statelessness and the systematic and institutionalized discrimination” against the Rohingya and other minorities, to dismantle camps for Rohingyas and others displaced in Rakhine, and “to create the conditions necessary for the safe, voluntary, dignified and sustainable return of all refugees, including Rohingya Muslim refugees.” 
 
It noted that the Rohingya have twice refused to return to Myanmar from Bangladesh because of the absence of these conditions. 

Jocelyn Burdick, who became the first woman to represent North Dakota in the U.S. Senate when she briefly filled the seat vacated by her late husband, has died. She was 97.

Burdick died Thursday night at a care facility in Fargo, her son, Cass County State’s Attorney Birch Burdick, told The Associated Press.

The Democrat was appointed to the Senate in September 1992, following the death of her husband, Quentin, a cornerstone of the North Dakota Democratic Party. She served until a special election that November.

Burdick was a founding member of Democratic Women Plus and a strong supporter of women’s rights.

Supporter of women’s rights

She was private person and avoided the media while her husband was in office. But as a senator in 1992, she signed on to the Equal Rights Amendment and a proposal to guarantee abortion rights.

In her only Senate speech, she said she was proud of making history and of voting to override President George H.W. Bush’s vetoes of bills requiring family leave and of overturning a ban on abortion counseling in federally funded clinics.

“I’ve always had the courage of my convictions,” she said in a 1993 interview with The Associated Press. “From the time I was a young woman, I’ve taken positions I thought were right. And I stuck with them.”

Burdick was appointed to the Senate by then-Gov. George A. Sinner on Sept. 12, 1992, several days after the death of her husband. He served 34 years in Congress after being first elected to the U.S. House in 1958.

After her husband’s death, Jocelyn Burdick pledged to “serve the people of North Dakota and to finish Quentin’s unfinished agenda.” She served until a special election that November, when Kent Conrad was chosen to fill out the rest of Burdick’s term. Conrad, also a North Dakota senator, agreed to run at the urging of fellow Democrats and Burdick.

Family roots in women’s suffrage

Jocelyn Birch was born Feb. 6, 1922, in Fargo. Her great-grandmother, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was a leader in the women’s rights movement and worked closely with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

She attended Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, and then transferred to Northwestern University outside Chicago where she earned a degree in speech. She worked at radio station KVOX in Moorhead, Minnesota, as one of the area’s first woman announcers.

In 1946, she married Kenneth Peterson of Grand Forks, who died 10 years later. They had two children, Birch and Leslie.

She married Quentin Burdick July 7, 1960, just a week after he won a special election to the U.S. Senate. Quentin Burdick also was a widower, with four children, when he married Jocelyn. They had one son, Gage, who died in 1978.

Jocelyn Burdick’s parents were Republicans, but she was a founding member of Democratic Women Plus, a group based in Fargo.

Married a lawmaker

She met Quentin Burdick in 1952, in a League of Women voters’ debate. He also was a strong supporter of women’s rights.

“We would never have gotten together had he not been,” she once said.

While Quentin Burdick went to Washington to serve in Congress, she stayed behind in Fargo with their children and gave few interviews with reporters, preferring to keep her life private. But when she was appointed to the Senate, Jocelyn Burdick added her name to legislation on pay equity and women’s health, the Equal Rights Amendment and a proposal to guarantee abortion rights.

Civilians on Friday packed a road leading out of a flashpoint town in northwest Syria, where two weeks of heightened regime and Russian bombardment has displaced 235,000 people.

Pick-up trucks carrying mattresses, clothes and household appliances ferried entire families out of southern Idlib province, most heading toward safer areas farther north, said an AFP correspondent on the ground.

Since mid-December, regime forces and their Russian allies have heightened bombardment on the southern edge of the final major opposition-held pocket of Syria, eight years into the country’s devastating war.

The latest violence in the jihadist-dominated Idlib region has killed scores of civilians, despite an August cease-fire deal and international calls for a de-escalation.

More than 235,000 people fled the area between Dec. 12 and 25, mostly from the beleaguered city of Maaret al-Numan which has been left “almost empty,” according to the United Nations’ humanitarian coordination agency OCHA.

OCHA spokesman David Swanson said Friday that more than 80 percent of those who have fled southern Idlib this month are women and children.

“I can’t live in the camps,” said Umm Abdo, a mother of five who recently arrived in a displacement camp in the town of Dana, north of Idlib’s provincial capital.

“The rain is very strong, and we need heating … clothes, and food,” she said, her tired eyes showing through her veil.

The Idlib region hosts some three million people, including many displaced by years of violence in other parts of Syria.

It is dominated by the country’s former al-Qaida affiliate, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whose chief this week urged jihadists and allied rebels to head to the frontlines and battle “the Russian occupiers” and the regime.

Since Dec. 19, HTS jihadists and their rebel allies have been locked in fierce battles with regime forces around Maaret al-Numan.

Damascus loyalists have seized dozens of towns and villages from jihadists in clashes that have killed hundreds of fighters on both sides.

The advances have brought them to within four kilometers (two-and-a-half miles) of Maaret al-Numan, one of Idlib’s largest urban centers.

Winter weather

According to OCHA, ongoing battles have further amplified displacement from the area and the nearby town of Saraqeb.

“People from Saraqab and its eastern countryside are now fleeing in anticipation of fighting directly affecting their communities next,” it said.

The mass displacement could not come at a worse time, with heavy rainfall flooding squalid camps for the displaced.

“Being forced to move in winter months exacerbates existing vulnerabilities, particularly of the women, children, elderly, people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups,” OCHA said.

Since mid-December, the fighting has killed nearly 80 civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.

U.S. President Donald Trump reacted to the violence in a tweet on Thursday, saying that “Russia, Syria, and Iran are killing, or on their way to killing, thousands of innocent civilians in Idlib Province.”

He added that Turkey was “working hard to stop this carnage.”

Humanitarian aid

The escalation has forced aid groups to suspend operations in the area, exasperating already dire humanitarian conditions, OCHA said.

Idlib’s residents mainly depend on critical cross-border aid, which came under threat last week after Russia and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have extended such deliveries for a year.

The move raised fears that vital U.N.-funded aid could stop entering Idlib from January unless an alternative agreement is reached.

The Syrian regime pulled out of its last outposts in Idlib province in 2015, following fierce battles with rebels and al-Qaida-affiliated jihadists.

The Damascus regime, which now controls 70 percent of Syria, has repeatedly vowed to take back the region.

Backed by Moscow, Damascus launched a blistering offensive against Idlib in April, killing around 1,000 civilians and displacing more than 400,000 people.

Despite a cease-fire announced in August, the bombardment has continued, prompting Turkey this week to press for a fresh cease-fire deal during talks in Moscow.

France on Tuesday called for an “immediate de-escalation,” warning of deteriorating humanitarian conditions.

The war in Syria has killed more than 370,000 people and displaced millions since it began with anti-government demonstrations brutally crushed by security forces.
 

Republican attempts to require photo identification to vote in North Carolina are being thwarted again by judges hearing arguments that the mandate is tainted by bias that would deter black and Latino residents.

A federal court announced that next week U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs will formally block a photo ID requirement scheduled to begin in 2020. Unless the upcoming preliminary injunction is successfully appealed, the requirement will be halted until a lawsuit filed by the state NAACP and others is resolved.

Thursday’s short written notice from the federal court in Winston-Salem previewed Biggs’ order because state election officials were planning to expand efforts to educate voters about the ID law within days. Although the mandate would be carried out beginning with the March 3 primary, the requirement would actually start in just a few weeks with mail-in absentee ballot filers, who also would have to provide an ID copy.

The mandate identified several types of qualifying photo IDs and allowed people lacking one to get a free ID card or to fill out a form while voting explaining their “reasonable impediment” to obtaining one.

GOP leaders in charge of the legislature have been trying for most of the decade to advance voter ID, saying that more than 30 states require it and it builds confidence in elections. Data show voter impersonation is rare, however. 

The voting pool — currently 6.8 million registered voters — is critical in a closely divided presidential battleground state where statewide races are often competitive between the major parties.

Voter ID part of 2016 elections

Voter ID was actually carried out in North Carolina’s 2016 primary elections as the result of a 2013 law. But a federal appeals court struck down several portions of the law in July 2016, saying photo ID and other voting restrictions were approved with intentional racial discrimination in mind.

Republicans strongly disagreed with that decision and put a constitutional amendment on the November 2018 ballot — a strategy designed to give the idea more legal and popular standing. The amendment passed with 55% of the vote. The legislature approved a separate law in December 2018 detailing how to implement that amendment. Lawsuits challenging that new law were filed immediately.

Lawyers for the state and local NAACP chapters told Biggs in a court brief that the latest version of voter ID is a “barely disguised duplicate” of the 2013 voter ID law and “carries the same discriminatory intent as its predecessor,” likely violating the U.S. Constitution.

The new rules allow additional government IDs to meet the mandate, including public and private university cards. But they still prevent government IDs for public assistance programs from being used, disproportionately affecting African Americans, the NAACP said.

Waiting on formal order

The actual reasons for Biggs issuing the injunction — and whether the legislature could pass a law altering the rules to resolve her concerns — won’t be known until the formal order is released.

State NAACP President the Rev. Anthony Spearman praised Biggs’ decision, calling the 2018 measure “the latest bad-faith attempt in a string of failed efforts by the (North Carolina) General Assembly to impede the right to vote of African Americans and Latinos in this state, and to blunt the force of the true will of the people.”

Republican House Speaker Tim Moore of Cleveland County criticized the notice Friday as a “last-minute attempt by an activist federal judge to overturn the will of North Carolina voters.” He said the ruling should be ”immediately appealed” by the State Board of Elections, which is a defendant in the case. 

The board is composed of three Democrats and two Republicans, all appointed by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. Although a voter ID opponent, Cooper is also named a lawsuit defendant because of his position as governor.

Appeal plans on hold

Lawyers from the state Department of Justice represented the board in court to attempt to uphold the 2018 voter ID law. They argued that the mandate was improved to address previous concerns of bias and the plaintiffs failed to show it was enacted with discriminatory intent. Cooper vetoed the December 2018 law, but two Democratic legislators joined all Repubilcans voting to override the veto.

The department declined to comment Friday about a possible appeal as it awaits Biggs’ full order, said Laura Brewer, a spokeswoman for Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein. Biggs prevented Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger from officially entering the case, saying the board was making an adequate defense.

Two other lawsuits challenging the voter ID mandate or the constitutional amendment are pending in state courts.