A Philadelphia jury on Tuesday awarded $8 billion in punitive damages against Johnson & Johnson and one if its subsidiaries over a drug the companies made that the plaintiff’s attorneys say is linked to the abnormal growth of female breast tissue in boys.
Johnson and Johnson immediately denounced the award after the jury’s decision in the Court of Common pleas, saying it’s “excessive and unfounded” and vowing immediate action to overturn it.
The antipsychotic drug Risperdal is at the center of the lawsuit, with the plaintiff’s attorneys arguing it’s linked to abnormal growth of female breast tissue in boys, an incurable condition known as gynecomastia.
Johnson & Johnson used an organized scheme to make billions of dollars while illegally marketing and promoting the drug, attorneys Tom Kline and Jason Itkin said in a statement.
Kline and Itkin said that Johnson & Johnson was “a corporation that valued profits over safety and profits over patients.” Thousands of lawsuits have been filed over the drug, but the attorneys said this was the first in which a jury decided whether to award punitive damages and came up with an amount.
Johnson & Johnson said in a statement on its website it was confident that the award would be overturned, calling it “grossly disproportionate” with the initial compensatory damage award and “a clear violation of due process.”
Johnson & Johnson said the court’s exclusion of key evidence left it unable to present a meaningful defense, including what they said was a drug label that “clearly and appropriately outlined the risks associated with the medicine” or Risperdal’s benefits for patients with serious mental illness. They also said the plaintiff’s attorneys failed to present any evidence of actual harm.
“This decision is inconsistent with multiple determinations outside of Philadelphia regarding the adequacy of the Risperdal labeling, the medicine’s efficacy, and findings in support of the company,” Johnson & Johnson said. “We will be immediately moving to set aside this excessive and unfounded verdict.”
Officials are working urgently to retrieve the bodies of 11 elephants that died after trying to save each other from a waterfall in a national park in central Thailand.
Park rangers had initially thought six adult elephants had died Saturday while trying to save a three-year-old calf that had slipped down the falls.
But Monday, a drone found the bodies of five more elephants in the waters below the fall in Khao Yai National Park.
Authorities have strung a net downstream to catch the bodies as they float down the fast-moving waters. There is concern that the rotting bodies will contaminate the water.
Officers expect the bodies to reach the net in a few days. The elephants will be buried and the area sealed with hydrated lime to prevent contamination, the Bangkok Post reported.
This is not the first such incident at the waterfall, known as Haew Narok (Hell’s Fall). In 1998, eight elephants died at the same site.
Park officials put up fencing to keep the wild animals away from the area, but that has not worked.
The park is home to about 300 of Thailand’s approximately 3,000 wild animals.
The furor over a tweet by the Houston Rockets general manager in support of Hong Kong protesters is highlighting the fine line that U.S. companies must walk when doing business with China.
The NBA is trying to manage that delicate relationship after Daryl Morey posted a now-deleted tweet of an image that read “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong,” referring to the 4-month-old protests in the semiautonomous Chinese territory. That set off an immediate backlash, with China’s state broadcaster canceling plans to show a pair of preseason games in that country later this week.
With a population of 1.4 billion people, a rapidly growing middle class and easing economic restrictions, China is highly appealing to U.S. companies looking for growth overseas. But companies must balance the potential for growth with the potential for pitfalls in dealing with a country that aggressively goes after its detractors.
Companies need to use caution
Paul Argenti, professor of corporate communication at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, cautions that companies should know what they’re getting themselves into when they enter a relationship with a country that’s heading into 70 years of communist rule.
“It has a regime that doesn’t look like the United States,” Argenti said. “We can pretend it is a democracy, but it’s not.”
Western governments dislike China’s attacks on companies but are unlikely to get involved, said David Zweig, a politics specialist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. So it’s up to companies to navigate situations themselves.
Most of the time that means companies that face trouble quickly acquiesce to Beijing, apologize and try to “build bridges” instead of standing up to China, said Jonathan Sullivan, director of China programs at the University of Nottingham’s Asia Research Institute.
In 2018, Gap pulled a shirt with a map of China that did not include Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing regards as Chinese territory, and apologized. Delta Air Lines, hotel operator Marriott and fashion brand Zara have all apologized to China for referring to Taiwan, Hong Kong or Tibet as countries on websites or promotional material. And Mercedes-Benz apologized for quoting the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in a social media post.
‘Tread on eggshells’
“Everyone — states and companies — seem to accept that they have to tread on eggshells when it comes to China for fear of offending them and being punished,” Sullivan said in an email. “And they have to contort themselves to do that.”
A rare exception of a company standing up to China is Google Inc., but even the internet giant had its limits. Google shut down its mainland Chinese search engine in 2010, no longer willing to enforce Chinese censorship by not displaying foreign websites in search results if they were blocked by government filters. Years later, however, reports surfaced that Google was working on a search engine that complies with China’s censorship laws, dubbed “Dragonfly,” leading to an outcry and a protest by hundreds of its own employees.
Peter Petri, a professor of international finance at the Brandeis International Business School, said despite the risks of dealing with China, the country is hard for U.S. businesses to avoid.
“Both countries have huge economies and are the world’s greatest innovators — they have too much to sell and license to each other to stay isolated in the long run,” he said. “Especially in high-tech products, China will soon be the largest market in the world, and America’s best companies can’t stay global leaders without a strong presence there.”
Reaction to tweet has chilling effect
China is well-aware of its power and influence. And while a tweet may seem inconsequential, the Chinese government’s subsequent outrage has a chilling effect on anyone thinking of doing the same, said Alexander Dukalskis, a professor at University College Dublin specializing in Asian politics and human rights.
“In these episodes, the Chinese government is sending a clear signal to other companies that if you or one of your executives criticize certain policies, your company risks losing large sums of money,” he said.
Over time, companies that want to do business with China learn to censor themselves — and maybe even their own employees.
Ultimately, some companies may find it’s not worth the possibility of alienating U.S. customers or risking Chinese ire by doing business in China, no matter how lucrative the deals may be. Dartmouth’s Argenti says they must consider how their business in China measures up to their own values and sense of responsibility and then decide, “Are you willing to go to the mat for that, or is it just lip service?”
“For most companies,” Argenti concedes, “it’s just lip service.”
Dogs can perform many tricks for their owners, but the best one might be extending their life.
“Our analysis found having a dog is actually protective against dying of any cause,” said Dr. Caroline Kramer, lead author of a study published Tuesday in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association.
Kramer’s team studied data on 3.8 million patients taken from 10 other studies conducted worldwide over more than 70 years. They found a 24% reduction in the risk of death from all causes, and a 31% reduction of death due to cardiovascular problems.
“Having a dog was associated with increased physical exercise, lower blood pressure levels and better a cholesterol profile in previous reports,”she said.
Another study also published Tuesday in the same journal found that dog owners living alone had a 33% better chance of surviving a heart attack than patients living alone without a dog. In stroke patients living alone, the chance of survival increased 27%.
That study was conducted in Sweden between 2001 and 2012 using the country’s National Patient Register.
“We know that loneliness and social isolation are strong risk factors for premature death, and our hypothesis was that the company of a pet can alleviate that,” said the study’s author Tove Fall, an associate professor of epidemiology at Uppsala University in Sweden.
A state-run Rwandan newspaper reports that the country has deported an American pastor who was arrested and accused of disturbing the public order.
The New Times Tuesday cited immigration authorities as saying conservative missionary Gregg Schoof had overstayed his work permit. Police had arrested him for what they called an illegal meeting with journalists to criticize the government’s shutdown of his local radio station.
Gregg Schoof, US pastor, arrested in Rwanda for ‘illegal’ meeting https://t.co/yybmZcjONxpic.twitter.com/JVSrcmoapl
— BBC News Africa (@BBCAfrica) October 7, 2019
That Amazing Grace radio station was banned last year after authorities said it broadcast a sermon that described women as “evil.”
The New Times report said Schoof in a statement on Monday criticized Rwanda authorities for loosening restrictions on abortion and teaching about reproductive health in schools.
“Is this government trying to send people to hell?” the statement asked.
The United States has imposed visa restrictions on Chinese government and Communist Party officials it believes responsible for the detention or abuse of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang province, the U.S. State Department said on Tuesday.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited the decision of the Commerce Department on Monday to add 28 Chinese public security bureaus and companies — including video surveillance company Hikvision — to a U.S. trade blacklist over Beijing’s treatment of Uighur Muslims and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities. The visa restrictions “complement” the Commerce Department actions, he said.
U.S. officials previously said the Trump administration was considering sanctions against officials linked to China’s crackdown on Muslims, including Xinjiang Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, who, as a member of the powerful politburo, is in the upper echelons of China’s leadership.
The State Department announcement did not name the officials subject to the visa restrictions, but news of the action sent U.S. stocks down. Many analysts believe U.S. government actions make it much less likely that China and the United States will reach a deal this week to resolve a trade war.
“The United States calls on the People’s Republic of China to immediately end its campaign of repression in Xinjiang, release all those arbitrarily detained, and cease efforts to coerce members of Chinese Muslim minority groups residing abroad to return to China to face an uncertain fate,” Pompeo said.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately comment. China has consistently denied any mistreatment of Uighurs.
Republican U.S. Senator Tom Cotton praised the State Department announcement and urged U.S. allies to follow suit. Chinese “officials who place Uighurs and other minority groups in concentration camps shouldn’t be allowed to visit the United States and enjoy our freedoms.”
Those added by the Commerce Department to the “Entity List” include the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region People’s Government Public Security Bureau, 19 subordinate government agencies and eight commercial firms, according to a Commerce Department filing.
(Carla Babb at the Pentagon and Nike Ching contributed to this article.)
WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump insisted Tuesday that he is not abandoning Kurdish forces in Syria, despite his orders to withdraw U.S. special forces from the Syrian-Turkish border region to make way for a Turkish incursion.
“We may be in the process of leaving Syria, but in no way have we Abandoned the Kurds, who are special people and wonderful fighters,” Trump tweeted.
“Any unforced or unnecessary fighting by Turkey will be devastating to their economy and to their very fragile currency,’ he added. “We are helping the Kurds financially/weapons!”
We may be in the process of leaving Syria, but in no way have we Abandoned the Kurds, who are special people and wonderful fighters. Likewise our relationship with Turkey, a NATO and Trading partner, has been very good. Turkey already has a large Kurdish population and fully….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
Backlash from lawmakers
The decision prompted an immediate backlash from U.S. lawmakers, including many who have been staunch defenders of the president.
Some slammed the decision as a betrayal of the Syrian Kurds, viewed by many in Washington as the most dependable ally in the fight to destroy the IS caliphate. Other lawmakers warned the decision would only benefit Russia, Iran and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as well as allow IS to regain momentum.
U.S. military and diplomatic officials have expressed unease with Turkey’s intentions.
“We think this operation is a very bad idea. We do not think this operation will provide more security in the fight against Daesh (Islamic State) for Turkey or for the people of the northeast,” a senior State Department official said late Monday.
Much of the concern has focused on the more than 11,000 IS fighters being held under SDF guard at more than 30 make-shift prisons across northeastern Syria.
FILE – A fighter of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) stands next to the wife of an Islamic State militant in al-Hol displacement camp in Syria, April 1, 2019.
SDF officials said some of the guards have already been pulled to reinforce positions along the border to defend against the expected Turkish operation.
A senior administration official told reporters late Monday it would be Turkey’s responsibility to both maintain the captivity of Islamic State fighters and to deal with “any sort of reconstitution of ISIS” that may occur.
But Kurdish officials tell VOA there have been no talks about transferring custody of the IS prisoners to Turkey or anyone else.
SDF officials have previously warned they may have no choice but to release the IS fighters, if forced to fend off a Turkish incursion.
Saitoti Petro scans a dirt road in northern Tanzania for recent signs of the top predator on the African savannah. “If you see a lion,” he warns, “stop and look it straight in the eyes — you must never run.”
Petro points to a fresh track in the dirt, a paw print measuring nearly the length of a ballpoint pen. He walks along a few more yards reading tracks the way an archaeologist might decipher hieroglyphics, gleaning meaning from the smudges in the dust. A large male passed here within the past two hours, he says. “Here he’s walking slowly, then you see his claws come out in the tracks. Perhaps he’s running after prey, or from something else.”
The tall, slender 29-year-old is marching with four other young men who belong to a pastoralist people called the Maasai. Beneath the folds of his thick cloak, he carries a sharpened machete. Only a few years ago, men of Petro’s age would most likely have been stalking lions to hunt them — often, to avenge cattle that the big cats had eaten.
But as Petro explains, the problem now is that there are too few lions, not too many.
“It will be shameful if we kill them all,” he says. “It will be a big loss if our future children never see lions.”
And so he’s joined an effort to protect lions, by safeguarding domestic animals on which they might prey.
Petro is one of more than 50 lion monitors from communities on the Maasai steppe who walk daily patrol routes to help shepherds shield their cattle in pasture, with support and training from a small, Tanzanian nonprofit called African People & Wildlife. Over the past decade, this group has also helped more than a thousand extended households to build secure modern corrals made of living acacia trees and chain-link fence to protect their livestock at night.
This kind of intervention is, in a way, a grand experiment. The survival of lions — and many other threatened savannah species, from cheetahs to giraffes to elephants — likely depends on finding a way for people, livestock and wild beasts to continue to use these lands together, on the plains where the earliest humans walked upright through tall grass.
“Vulnerable’ Species
Across Africa, the number of lions has dropped by more than 40 percent in two decades, according to data released in 2015 by the
FILE – A 5-year-old lioness named Nyala walks in the grassland after Kenya Wildlife Services veterinarians set up a radio collar on her neck to track her pride’s movements at the Nairobi National Park near Nairobi, Kenya Jan. 23, 2017.
Lions are respected as worthy adversaries in Maasai culture. Anyone who harms more than nine is said to be cursed. But avenging the death of a prize cow wins respect, like dueling to avenge a lost family member.
These retaliatory killings have become more deadly in recent years, as many herdsmen have switched from spearing individual lions to leaving out poisoned carcasses, which can decimate a pride of lions, along with other animals that might feed on tainted meat.
But what if the triggering conflicts could be prevented?
“Our elders killed and almost finished off the lions,” Petro says. “Unless we have new education, they will be extinct.”
And so he hikes the steppe, looking to teach people how to live more peaceably alongside large predators.
On a July morning, he stops suddenly and points toward a tree-lined ravine. The tracks he’s been following have veered off the road, so he thinks the lion moved toward a stream in the gorge. The footprints must be recent because there are not yet bits of grass strewn on top.
As his team walks toward the gulley, they hear cow bells jingling. “We should go and check if anyone is coming this way,” says Petro. “We need to warn them.” They soon find two young shepherds — pre-teen boys — sitting under an acacia tree, playing with small yellow fruit like balls in the dirt. Their two dozen cattle are meandering toward the ravine.
Petro kneels to greet the boys, then advises them about the lion. The men help the boys to turn their herd around, with a high whistle the cows recognize, sending them grazing in a safer direction. Petro knows most of the families near here; later, he will make a home visit.
Co-existence
In most corners of the planet, humans and big predators don’t easily co-exist. When forests and savannahs are converted to farms and cities, the land ceases to be suitable habitat for most large animals. And predators lingering on the edge of cultivated lands are often demonized, or exterminated — witness the heated debates about allowing gray wolves on the margins of Yellowstone and the French Pyrenees.
But on the elevated plains of northern Tanzania, pastoralists have long lived alongside wildlife: grazing their cows, goats and sheep on the same broad savannahs where zebras, buffalo and giraffe munch grass and leaves — and where lions, leopards and hyenas stalk these wild beasts.
It’s one of the few places left on Earth where coexistence may still be possible, but it’s a precarious balance. And what happens here in Tanzania will help determine the fate of the species; the country is home to a more than a third of the roughly 22,500 remaining African lions, according to data from researchers at the University of Oxford.
There’s some evidence that recent steps taken to mitigate conflict are working.
In 2005, the village of Loibor Siret (population 3,000) on the Maasai steppe saw about three predator attacks on livestock each month. In 2017, the number had declined to about one a month. The biggest change in that interval was that about 90 village households built reinforced corrals, which are much more effective than the older barriers of tangled thorn bushes at keeping predators away from livestock.
Although protecting animals in pasture is a trickier challenge, the lion monitors helped to defuse 14 situations in 2017 that might have led to lion hunts, according to records collected by African People & Wildlife.
While the number of lion hunts in the region is dropping, they do still sometimes happen. In July, one of the field patrols submitted a report about a recent revenge killing, including a photograph of a dead lion with its four paws and tail removed — an old ritual for collecting talismans.
FILE – A lion stand near two lionesses in the grassland of the Nairobi National Park near Nairobi, Kenya, May 12, 2017.
Despite such setbacks, the local lion population is beginning to bounce back.
Within a study area monitored by the nonprofit Tarangire Lion Project, the monthly count of lions hit a low of around 120 lions in fall 2011 — down from about 220 lions in 2004. But the population started to recover in 2012, reaching more than 160 lions by 2015.
“Once you make lions safe, their numbers can recover quickly,” because lions reproduce rapidly, says Laly Lichtenfeld, an ecologist and co-founder of African People & Wildlife.
Says Craig Packer, a biologist and founder of the Lion Center at the University of Minnesota, who is not involved in the project: “These conflict-mitigation efforts clearly help lions, although there’s always the question of whether they’re going to last 20 or 50 years with a growing human population.”
No Fences
Wildlife refuges are sometimes not a sufficient answer — at least for species that require large ranges.
Within the boundaries of Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park, lions sleep on open river banks and dangle from tree branches — they are, after all, cats — often ignoring the squadrons of open-top safari tour vehicles passing by. Here, they are mostly safe. But the protected area of the park is only a portion of the land that these lions and their prey depend upon. Large migratory animals range widely, and on the parched savannahs of eastern Africa, they mostly follow the rains.
The zebras and wildebeests that spend the dry months inside Tarangire National Park move outside the park during the wet winter months, where they munch on more nutritious grass and give birth to most of their calves. And lions, leopards and cheetah trail behind them, roaming widely on the Maasai steppe.
“The animals in Tarangire spend so much of the year outside the park, you could never put a fence around it — a fence that blocked migration in and out of the park would kill it,” says Packer.
A lion drinks a water in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, March 18, 2017.
Increasingly scientists are realizing that lands outside national parks must also be considered in conservation strategies. In a study published in March in the journal Science, researchers linked the access and condition of lands surrounding Tanzania’s famous Serengeti-Mara ecosystem to the health of wildlife inside the park. Overgrazing and fire suppression on the edge of the park, for instance, “squeezed” the animals into a smaller area within it, they found.
“The current way of just thinking about the borders of protected areas isn’t working,” says Michiel Veldhuis, an ecologist at University of Leiden in the Netherlands and a study co-author. When devising conservation strategies, he says, “we need to think about how to include people living next to protected areas.”
Those people can be skeptical. Some people in nearby villages say they aren’t happy about Petro’s efforts.
“We don’t want to hear lions roar at night,” says Neema Loshiro, a 60-year-old woman selling handmade jewelry spread out on a cloth on the street of Loibor Siret. The only wildlife she wants nearby are giraffes and impalas because “they’re pretty and don’t attack people or eat crops.”
Evolving Attitudes
Still, attitudes are evolving. Petro Lengima Lorkuta, Saitoti Petro’s 69-year-old father, killed his first lion when he was 25, hurling a spear after the cat attacked his largest bull. In those days, he says, “If you killed a lion it showed that you were a strong warrior.”
Since his extended family moved into a new ranch home and erected a reinforced corral four years ago, he says they have not lost any livestock to predators. “The modern fence is very helpful,” he says.
“Now I love to see lions,” just not too near his home — and he supports his son’s efforts to educate neighbors about avoiding predator conflicts.
Petro still rises each day at dawn to take the cattle to pasture, as his ancestors have done for generations. But the culture is changing in many ways: Rather than allowing his father to arrange his marriages, as most young Maasai men do, Petro wooed his two brides.
“We expect the growing generation to get more education than us,” he says, “and therefore to know the importance of wild animals.”
This Associated Press series was produced in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Al-Qaida’s South Asia region chief, Asim Omar, was killed along with many others in southern Afghanistan last month, according to a statement released by Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security.
The Tuesday statement said a joint operation — a term usually used to describe an operation that involves NATO forces — led to the killing of Omar in the Musa Qala district of Helmand province, along with the capture of several others, including some Pakistani citizens.
Omar was an Indian national, born in Uttar Pradesh between 1974 and 1976, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, which added him to a list of designated terrorists in 2016, along with al-Qaida’s branch for the region called al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS).
The Sept. 23 raid was followed by allegations of large-scale civilian casualties and conflicting reports from U.S. officials, the Afghan government, and local officials.
A provincial council member from Helmand alleged that 40 members of a wedding party, including women and children, were killed in an airstrike.
Haji Abdul Majed Akhund told VOA at the time that the residents of Musa Qala district, the site of the attack, had informed provincial authorities of the wedding ceremony in advance.
“We brought 13 members of our family to the emergency hospital in Lashkargah city last night,” a man named Abdullah told VOA after the raid, which was followed by an airstrike. Local health officials confirmed that 13 wounded people were shifted to the hospital.
“[T]he operation was aimed at al-Qaida targets in the Musa Qala district in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, a U.S. official in Kabul told The Washington Post at the time, on the condition of anonymity. The official acknowledged the possibility of civilian casualties.
A separate statement from the office of the governor of neighboring Kandahar province at the time said the target was al-Qaida.
“Last night, Afghan special forces conducted an air and ground operation in Takht Put village in Musa Qala district of Helmand province, killing five key members of the al-Qaida network and arresting three key female members,” the statement read, adding that all the members were from Karachi, Pakistan.
A teenager has traced her medical journey through several neurosurgeries by making art from her brain scans. Mike O’Sullivan reports from Los Angeles that 16-year-old Tessa Carlisle is exploring the healing potential of art as she travels her own road to recovery.
21-year-old Marilyn Zakarya is one of the players in the new Sudanese women’s football (soccer) league that launched last week (Sept 30). Zakarya came from South Sudan to follow her dream in Khartoum. But she is worried about whether Sudan’s conservative society will accept women’s football after decades of restrictions. Naba Mohiedeen reports from Khartoum.
The NBA’s (National Basketball Association) Houston Rockets gained popularity in China in the early 2000s when the club signed Chinese star, Yao Ming. That history threatened to unravel this weekend after the team’s general manager tweeted support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. The league and team both distanced themselves from his comments. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi examines the controversy.
Published reports say a Chinese state energy company that appears to have pulled out of a natural gas project in Iran had been under pressure to do so because of U.S. sanctions against Tehran.
Iranian oil minister Bijan Zanganeh announced the departure of China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) from the joint venture to develop Iran’s South Pars offshore gas field in comments Sunday reported by his ministry’s website.
Zanganeh said Iranian company Petropars, which originally had partnered with CNPC and France’s Total on the project, will develop the gas field on its own.
Total initially held a 50.1% stake in the joint venture announced in 2017, while CNPC had 30% and Petropars had 19.9%. Total withdrew from the project in August 2018 as the U.S. began reimposing sanctions on Iran to pressure it to negotiate a new deal to end its nuclear and other perceived malign activities.
Neither CNPC nor the Chinese government made any comment about the South Pars project on Monday, a public holiday in China.
But a Wall Street Journal report said CNPC executives previously had acknowledged that the company was struggling to find banks to transfer funds to Iran due to U.S. pressure. The article said CNPC’s own bank, Bank of Kunlun, had told customers that it was no longer processing trades with Iran while publicly asserting that it intended to keep its business with Tehran going.
The South China Morning Post reported that CNPC also “could have cause for concern when it comes to (U.S.) sanctions” because the company’s website says it has a four-year-old U.S.-based subsidiary that has made a “significant financial investment” in the United States.
The Trump administration has been unilaterally toughening sanctions on Iran since last year, calling on other nations not to do business with its energy and financial sectors and imposing secondary sanctions on foreign companies and individuals who defy those warnings.
U.S. officials sanctioned several Chinese shipping companies and executives last month for importing Iranian oil in defiance of a total ban on Iranian oil exports imposed by the U.S. in May.
A Bloomberg report said CNPC’s role in the South Pars project had been uncertain for several months. It said Zanganeh had complained in February that CNPC had not carried out any of its share of the work. The report said CNPC was in negotiations to remain a partner in the project as recently as August, according to the head of Iran’s Pars Oil and Gas Co.
The leading candidate to replace Justin Trudeau as Canada’s prime minister attacked him Wednesday during the second debate of the campaign, calling him a phony and fraud who can’t even recall how often he’s worn blackface.
Conservative party leader Andrew Scheer said Trudeau doesn’t deserve to govern Canada. Trudeau is seeking a second term in the Oct. 21 elections.
“Justin Trudeau only pretends to stand up for Canada,” Scheer said. “You know, he’s very good at pretending things. He can’t even remember how many times he put blackface on, because the fact of the matter is he’s always wearing a mask.”
Green Party leader Elizabeth May, left, responds to a question as Justin Trudeau, Andrew Scheer, Maxime Bernier, Yves-Francois Blanchet and Jagmeet Singh look on during the Federal leaders debate in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada, Oct. 7, 2019.
The blackface controversy surfaced last month when Time magazine published a photo showing the then-29-year-old Trudeau at an Arabian Nights party in 2001 wearing a turban and robe with dark makeup on his hands, face and neck. Trudeau was dressed as a character from “Aladdin.”
Trudeau said he also once darkened his face for a performance in high school. A brief video surfaced of Trudeau in blackface as well when he was in his early 20s. Trudeau has said he can’t give a number for how many times he wore blackface because he didn’t remember the third incident.
The controversy made global headlines but hasn’t led to a drop in the polls for Trudeau, who has been admired by liberals around the world for his progressive policies in the Trump era.
Trudeau has long championed multiculturalism and immigration. Half of Trudeau’s Cabinet is made up of women, four are Sikhs, and his immigration minister is a Somali-born refugee.
Trudeau accused Scheer of hiding his campaign platform, which he hasn’t released yet. And he accused the Conservative leader of wanting to impose cuts like the unpopular Conservative premier of Ontario has done.
Scheer took every opportunity to attack Trudeau after a rough week for the Conservative leader that led to a dip in the polls. The Globe and Mail reported last week that Sheer holds dual Canadian-U.S. citizenship. Scheer said he only renounced his American citizenship in August. The process could take up to 10 months so Scheer could be the first American to become Canada’s prime minister.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday his administration’s proposal to boost the biofuels market next year would bring the amount of corn-based ethanol mixed into the nation’s fuel to about 16 billion gallons (60.6 billion liters).
“We’ve come to an agreement and its going to be, I guess, about, getting close to 16 billion … that’s a lot of gallons. So they should like me out in Iowa,” he told a news conference.
The U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program currently requires refiners to blend 15 billion gallons of ethanol per year, but the corn lobby has said the Environmental Protection Agency’s use of waivers means the actual volumes blended are lower than that.
Trump’s EPA unveiled the plan here last week to boost U.S. biofuels consumption to help struggling farmers, but did not provide an exact figure. The plan cheered the agriculture industry but triggered a backlash from Big Oil, which views biofuels as competition.
The deal is widely seen as an attempt by Trump, who faces a re-election fight next year, to mend fences with the powerful corn lobby, which was outraged by the EPA’s decision in August to exempt 31 oil refineries from their obligations under the RFS. That freed the refineries from the requirement to blend biofuels or buy credits from those who do.
Biofuel companies, farmers and Midwest lawmakers complain such waivers undercut demand for corn, which is already slumping because of the U.S. trade war with China. Oil refiners say the waivers protect blue-collar jobs and have no real impact on ethanol use.
The RFS was intended to help farmers and cut U.S. reliance on foreign energy imports, but has become a constant source of conflict between the oil and corn industries – two crucial constituencies heading into next year’s election.
Russian President Vladimir Putin spent his pre-birthday weekend hiking the mountains of southern Siberia with his defense minister.
Putin, who turned 67 on Monday, can be seen walking up steep hills and picking wild mushrooms in photos and video released by the Kremlin.
Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu traversed the vast Taiga forest, at one point stopping to take in the views high on a mountain.
“We are high above the clouds,” the Russian leader exclaimed.
Putin has visited the area in the Tuva region near the Mongolian border several times over the past few years. In 2009, he was photographed riding shirtless on a horse. Two years ago, he and Shoigu fished bare-chested in the pristine lakes.
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani walks toward the podium before addressing the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Sept. 25, 2019.
Speaking on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York last month, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani criticized the U.S. entry ban but also appeared to dismiss it as irrelevant, saying Iranian officials have no desire to travel to the U.S. except to participate in meetings of international bodies.
Hook said the entry ban is as much about the immediate family members as it is about the senior Iranian officials. “We are aware of stories of children of regime elites who are enjoying U.S. educational, cultural and entertainment advantages that are denied to the Iranian people,” he said.
In an October 2018 op-ed published by The Washington Times, Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior Iran analyst Tzvi Kahn identified several children of senior Iranian officials as being enrolled in U.S. universities. The State Department has said there are “thousands” of Iranian students studying in the U.S. each year.
Trump’s proclamation said the entry ban would not apply to Iranians in three categories: lawful U.S. permanent residents; people already granted asylum and refugee status by the U.S. or deemed to be at risk of torture if deported; and people whose entry could benefit U.S. interests and law enforcement objectives. The document did not say anything about Iranians already in the U.S. on student visas or those seeking to enter the country on student visas.
When asked if the entry ban will lead to the deportation of senior Iranian officials or family members who already had legally entered the U.S., Hook said the measure is not “retroactive.” “It will be effective from the date the president signed the proclamation and will deal with everything going forward,” he added.
In a VOA Persian interview one day after the entry ban was declared, FDD research director David Adesnik said children of senior Iranian officials studying in the U.S. on short-term student visas could face challenges in completing their U.S.-based studies.
“It’s possible that the U.S. would renew their visas. But there is a constant stream of young Iranians who want to come to the U.S. to get the best education, and they definitely are going to be affected,” Adesnik said.
Hook said the Trump administration will continue to honor its obligations to allow the entry of Iranian officials for gatherings of multilateral organizations hosted by the U.S., such as the U.N. and World Bank. “But outside of those cases, this [entry ban] is something which we will rigorously enforce,” he said.
Climate protesters around the world started two weeks of demonstrations on Monday, engaging in acts of civil disobedience to demand action on cutting carbon emissions.
In London, police arrested 276 people who blocked bridges and roads, while in Berlin, around 1,000 protesters blocked the Grosser Stern, a traffic circle at the Victory Column.
The protests, organized by the Extinction Rebellion group, drew crowds of around several hundred people in cities across the world, including Austria, Australia, France, Spain and New Zealand.
In this freeze frame made from a video, fake blood covers the iconic Charging Bull statue near Wall Street in New York, Oct. 7, 2019.
In New York City, protesters threw fake blood on the Wall Street bull to display fears of a global economic meltdown caused by an environmental catastrophe. Police say they arrested around a dozen people who staged a sit-in at the bull.
Dutch police say they arrested 90 people who occupied a bridge outside the popular Rijksmuseum art gallery.
Extinction Rebellion says it expects protests to be carried out in 60 cities over the next two weeks. The group, which rose to prominence in April when it blocked traffic in central London for 11 days, says it is calling for governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.
The protests follow last month’s demonstrations carried out by millions of young people across the world inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.
US Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Monday dismissed a media report that he was planning to resign in November, saying he had no plans to leave the job.
“Answer is no. I’m here. I am serving,” Perry told reporters in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, when asked about a Politico report that he would resign next month.
“They’ve been writing the story that I was leaving the Department of Energy for at least nine months now. One of these days they’ll probably get it right. But it’s not today, it’s not tomorrow, it’s not next month.”
Perry also confirmed that he encouraged President Donald Trump to talk to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky about energy issues.
“Absolutely, I asked the president multiple times: Mr. President, we think it is in the United States’ and in Ukraine’s best interest that you and the president of Ukraine have conversations, that you discuss the options that are there,” Perry said.
A July phone call between Trump and Zelensky has triggered an impeachment inquiry into the US leader.
Trump is accused of having abused his powers by withholding US military aid in an attempt to pressure Zelensky into seeking damaging information on political rival Joe Biden.
Perry did not mention Biden at the conference Monday.
The U.S. military says it’s preparing a massive exercise early next year in Europe involving 20,000 soldiers from the U.S., the largest deployment across the Atlantic in more than 25 years for training.
U.S. European Command said Monday the “Defender Europe 20” exercise from April to May 2020 will support NATO objectives “to build readiness within the alliance and deter potential adversaries.” Eighteen countries are expected to take part in exercises across 10 countries, including Germany, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Georgia.
It will also involve 9,000 more Americans already stationed in Europe and 8,000 European troops.
The military says the exercise “confirms that the U.S. commitment to NATO and the defense of Europe remains ironclad.”
President Donald Trump has worried many NATO members with comments that the trans-Atlantic alliance is “obsolete.”
