North Korea’s call on the United Nations to cut its international staff involved in humanitarian work there could be a move to gain leverage over sanctions relief, a human rights expert said Thursday.

Pyongyang told the U.N. in an August 21 letter it wants the world body to slash the number of aid workers inside the country by the end of the year because U.N. programs have been ineffective, according to a Wednesday report  by Reuters.  The news service quoted Kim Chang Min, secretary general for North Korea’s National Coordinating Committee for the U.N., as writing that “U.N. supported programs failed to bring the results as desired due to the politicization of U.N. assistance by hostile forces” in the letter.

The letter comes at a time when talks between Pyongyang and Washington have been stalled since their Hanoi summit in February failed due to their difference over denuclearization and sanctions relief.  The United States rejected North Korea’s proposal for sanctions relief in exchange for partial denuclearization while asking it to carry out complete denuclearization.

Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, however, called the letter “an insidious way of blackmailing the international community.”  Scarlatoiu wrote in a Thursday email that North Korea is essentially saying unless sanctions are eased “we will punish you by restricting your access to those North Korean people who need assistance.”

Scarlatoiu said North Korea is “politicizing and weaponizing humanitarian aid” and “using its vulnerable people as hostage and leverage” to obtain sanctions relief.

“The North Korean regime focuses on the sanctions as the root cause of its precarious humanitarian situation,” Scarlatoiu said.  “This is a serious distortion of the truth.  It is the regime’s deliberate policy of human rights denial that results in severe human insecurity in North Korea.”

The U.N. Security Council began ratcheting up sanctions on North Korea in 2006 in response to its nuclear test in the same year, and in 2016, started imposing sanctions targeting North Korea’s key export commodities such as coal and seafood to cut off funds that flow into its nuclear and missile programs.   The United Nations has been granting sanctions exemptions to humanitarian groups to provide aids to North Korea.

Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said Tuesday that sanctions on North Korea are impeding humanitarian work there.

Scarlatoiu, though, said, “Humanitarian operators may be negatively affected by some unintended side effects of the sanctions regime,” but that the sanctions “do not target the people of North Korea.”

“The perennial human insecurity affecting the people of North Korea has persisted for three decades…[and is] are systematic,” he said, “What North Korea needs is comprehensive economic, political, and social reform.”

Daniel Jaspers, public education and advocacy coordinator for Asia at the American Friends Service Committee, said the North Korean letter “points to an issue that humanitarian groups have been raising for a number of years – namely that sanctions are impeding humanitarian operations and aid delivery” in an email to VOA on Thursday.  He continued, “These obstacles in aid delivery are despite U.N. regulations which clearly state that sanctions are not meant to interfere with humanitarian work.”  

U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters Thursday that the United Nations had received the letter, and said it is currently talking with North Korea.  He said the U.N. already has “a light footprint on ground” and that keeping the current number of humanitarian staff in North Korea is “vital” in mobilizing resources to support U.N.’s food, water, and nutrition programs in the country.
 

U.S. President Donald Trump heads to North Carolina late Monday, aiming to swing a congressional race in the 2020 election battleground state that could provide insight into his re-election chances.

Trump’s rally aims to persuade voters in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District to head to the polls Tuesday to vote for Republican candidate Dan Bishop. His opponent, Democrat Dan McCready, will be trying to flip a district that Trump won in 2016 with 54% of the vote.

The special election could provide an early test of whether highly educated women voters in suburban areas will throw their support to Democrats in marginally Republican districts as they did in a number of House races in the 2018 midterm elections.

North Carolina is one of a handful of states seen by analysts as a possible swing state in the 2020 presidential election. This early race, fueled by heavy spending on the national level by both political parties, will be a key early indicator on a number of levels.

Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College in North Carolina, said the election, “could serve in some ways as a canary in the coal mine if we’re looking at the national narrative of college-educated, white suburban women, and how they may view the Republican Party under President Trump, and whether they are supportive of him and the party, or they’ve been turned off by his rhetoric.”

‘Competitive election’

In this relatively safe Republican district, “bringing in the president and the vice president seems to indicate that Republicans are looking at this as a competitive election,” Bitzer said.

Vice President Mike Pence will also campaign for Bishop on Monday.

The 9th Congressional District has sent a Republican representative to Congress since 1963. Congressman Robert Pittenger, whose retirement from seat triggered this special election, won by 58% of the vote two years ago.

The effort to fill Pittenger’s seat has been anything but business as usual in this district.

Last November, McCready ran against Republican Mark Harris, whose election win was invalidated by the state board of elections after allegations of ballot tampering and election fraud. Support for Harris, who initially appeared to have won his election by 905 votes, eroded, leading him to decline to run in the new Republican primary held this February.

Bishop, the state senator who ultimately secured the nomination, appears to be lagging behind McCready in bipartisan polling. In a survey conducted Aug. 26-28, McCready leads Bishop by a margin of 46% to 42%. When voters leaning Democratic are included, McCready’s margin increases to 49 percentage points.

Primarily urban, suburban

According to Bitzer, non-Hispanic/Latino white women make up 30% of the district’s 501,000 registered voters. The district is primarily composed of urban and suburban areas that vote Republican, including outlying areas of Charlotte, the city selected for the 2020 Republican National Convention.

Democrats took back the House in 2018 by winning over traditionally Republican suburbs like the neighborhoods in the 9th District.

“It is a referendum on Trump and that’s because Trump and Dan Bishop have made it such,” said Susan Roberts, a political science professor at Davidson College in North Carolina. “That’s the theme the NRCC [National Republican Congressional Committee] and the surrogates for Trump have made it. [Donald Trump, Jr.] came and talked about the Hamas wing of the Democratic Party supporting Dan McCready.”

Bishop’s campaign ads have characterized McCready as a Washington insider with socialist views. The accusations imply McCready would fit in with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the so-called “Squad,” a high-profile group of female freshman House Democrats.

McCready is mounting a localized campaign, capitalizing on the fact that he has been running for this congressional seat for the past 2½ years.

“The feeling from the voters that I’ve talked to is that they’re sort of ignoring the noise,” said Sharon Toland, a door-to-door canvasser for the McCready campaign. “Dan’s been campaigning in the district for years now. I think they feel like they know and they have a pretty good idea of who he actually is, he’s a moderate candidate.”

‘Conservative district’

Recent mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, El Paso, Texas and Odessa, Texas, might not have much of an impact on the race.

“It’s such a conservative district in terms of guns,” said Sarah Taber, a member of the Cape Fear Indivisible, a Democratic activist group in the eastern part of the district.

Fort Bragg, the world’s largest military base, is nearby, and many military families live in the 9th Congressional District. Taber said many military voters are gun owners who support common sense measures but don’t engage with the issue as deeply as solutions for solving health care.

Political scientist Roberts said the district’s long-running saga of voter fraud and multiple elections in a relatively short amount of time may have a significant impact on voter turnout.

“Even a narrow win by Bishop is going to seem encouraging to the Democrats because it should be a red district,” Roberts said. “Anything you should win and don’t win is a big deal and anything you barely win is a big deal.”

People around the world are living longer according to the World Health Organization.  By 2020 there will be more people who are 60 or older than children younger than 5. Many adult children are painfully seeing their parents experience cognitive decline and symptoms of dementia.  What if virtual reality, or VR, can help prevent or delay the onset of cognitive decline?  VOA’s Elizabeth Lee visits one VR lab at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles with the details.
 

Satellite images appear to show the once-detained Iranian oil tanker Adrian Darya-1 near the Syrian port of Tartus, despite U.S. efforts to seize the vessel. 

Images obtained by The Associated Press early Saturday from Maxar Technologies showed the vessel there. 

Iranian officials haven’t acknowledged the ship went to Syria. The ship turned off its Automatic Identification System late Monday. 

The new images matched a black-and-white image earlier tweeted by John Bolton, the U.S. national security adviser.

Anyone who said the Adrian Darya-1 wasn’t headed to #Syria is in denial. Tehran thinks it’s more important to fund the murderous Assad regime than provide for its own people. We can talk, but #Iran’s not getting any sanctions relief until it stops lying and spreading terror! pic.twitter.com/saar05T8wt

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) September 6, 2019

Authorities in Gibraltar had seized the ship in July over concerns it would break European Union sanctions on Syria. They later released it after they say they received a promise from Iran that the vessel wouldn’t go there.

A tight U.S. labor market and booming demand in industries with an abundance of female workers is drawing more women back into the workforce, helping to shrink the longstanding gap in the labor participation rate between men and women to the narrowest on record.

Other parts of a report released by the Labor Department on Friday showed that the longest economic expansion on record is leading to improvements for workers who are often left on the sidelines. Not only did the unemployment rate for African Americans drop to a record low of 5.5% in August, it narrowed to being 1.62 times the white unemployment rate, the smallest gap ever.

The share of women aged 25 to 54 who either have jobs or are looking for work rose by a full percentage point in August to 76.3%, according to the report. The gain helped to lift the overall labor participation rate to 63.2%, one of the bright spots in a monthly jobs report otherwise riddled with signs of a softening U.S. economy.

“What we’re seeing is the benefits of a strong labor market,” said Nick Bunker, an economist at the Indeed Hire Lab.

“Workers who in the past have been shut out of the labor market, including women, workers of color and workers with disabilities have seen increasing gains.”

While the share of men who are working or looking for jobs is still higher at 89%, participation has been growing more strongly for women over the past several years.

Women are benefiting because they have a stronger presence in rapidly growing sectors such as health care and education, Bunker said. The education and health services sector, where women hold roughly three of every four jobs, added 32,000 jobs in August, topped only by the professional services and government sectors. However, many of those jobs are often low paying, contributing to the overall gender wage gap.

The labor participation rate for men, in contrast, has stalled since the recession because men tend to work disproportionately in sectors such as manufacturing, which suffered greatly during the downturn, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

The labor participation rate for men is now 12.7 percentage points higher than women, down from 13.4 percentage points a year earlier, and the lowest since 1950.

That gap could continue to shrink as women benefit from college degrees, which they are more likely to hold than men, Zandi said.

The labor participation rate for women increased steadily after the 1950s as more women entered the workforce, but the trend stopped in 2000 when the labor force participation rate for women peaked at 77%.

Progress stalled in the United States as some women were hindered by expensive child care and other long-standing challenges, including the gender pay gap, Zandi said.

After bottoming at 73% in 2015, the participation rate for women is rising again and finally approaching the highs seen almost two decades ago.

“This highlights why it’s so important to have a strong economy because it helps those that really have struggled for many decades,” Zandi said.

Typhoon winds toppled trees, grounded planes and left thousands of South Korean homes without electricity Saturday as a powerful storm system brushed up against the Korean Peninsula.

Strong winds and rain from Typhoon Lingling caused power outages in about 17,000 homes on the southern resort island of Jeju and in southern mainland regions, South Korea’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety said.

The typhoon was 184 kilometers (114 miles) southwest of the southern mainland city of Gunsan Saturday morning, moving north at 45 kilometers (28 miles) per hour with winds of up to 140 kilometers (87 miles) per hour, the Korea Meteorological Association said.

More damage expected

It is expected to affect a broader part of the country as it passes off South Korea’s west coast later Saturday before making landfall in North Korea in the evening.

The storm toppled trees and streetlamps and damaged traffic signs in Jeju overnight, caused airports to cancel 89 flights and forced 38 people to evacuate from their flooded homes in a city near Seoul. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

National parks were closed, as were southern ports on the mainland and major cross-sea bridges. South Korea’s weather agency has warned of flooding, landslides and structure damaged caused by strong rain and winds expected nationwide until early Sunday.

Kim berates North Korean officials

North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said leader Kim Jong Un “urgently convened” an emergency meeting Friday to discuss disaster prevention efforts and scolded government officials who he described as “helpless against the typhoon, unaware of its seriousness and seized with easygoing sentiment.”

Kim called for his military to drive national efforts to minimize damage from the typhoon, which he said would be an “enormous struggle” that would require the entire country to step up, KCNA said.

Police on Hawaii’s Big Island have arrested two people as crews demolished a small house built by demonstrators near the place where they are blocking construction of a giant telescope.

Hawaii County Managing Director Wil Okabe says officers arrived at Mauna Kea on Friday morning to clear the way for crews to take down the structure. He did not have details about why the arrests happened.

Officials say protesters who oppose the planned telescope near Mauna Kea’s summit constructed the wooden building in a lava field near their protest camp without a permit. Some Native Hawaiians consider the telescope site sacred.

The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands said this week that the building would be removed.

India’s space agency says it has lost communication with its unmanned spacecraft that was set to touch down Saturday on the moon’s south pole.

“Communications from lander to ground station was lost,” said K Sivan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization. “The data is being analyzed.”
 
It is not clear if the mission had failed.

A successful landing would make India just the fourth country to land a vessel on the lunar surface, and only the third nation to operate a robotic rover there.

The roughly $140 million mission, known as Chandrayaan-2, is intended to study permanently shadowed moon craters that are thought to contain water deposits that were confirmed by the Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008.

Dozens of people trapped on a scuba diving boat that caught fire off the Southern California coast appear to have died from smoke inhalation, not burns, authorities said Friday.

“The indicators are from the preliminary examination of the bodies that the victims died prior to being burned,” Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said. “The burn damage to the victims was post-mortem.”

More than half the 34 people killed as they slept in bunks below deck early Monday have been positively identified through DNA, and their family members around the world are being notified, Brown told reporters. Divers are searching for the one body that still has not been found.

Five crew members jumped overboard after trying to rescue the 33 scuba divers and one crew member whose escape routes were blocked by fire, federal authorities and the boat’s owner said. The crew, including the captain, said they were driven back by flames, smoke and heat.

Multiple investigations into the disaster are focused on determining what happened and have not become a criminal probe, though Brown said charges are possible.

Notifying families that their loved ones were aboard the Conception and gathering DNA to identify remains burned beyond recognition has taken an extraordinary worldwide effort.

A mother in Japan was told Thursday that her child was on the boat. The FBI also had to deliver the news to a family in Singapore and relatives from India who flew into California, Brown said.

The remains of 18 people have been positively identified, and the sheriff released the names of nine whose families have been notified.

A salvage crew working with the Coast Guard was trying to recover the ship that sank in 60 feet (18 meters) of water off the rugged Channel Islands, where the boat took a three-day excursion.

Speculation has grown about whether the captain and four other crew members who survived had tried to help the others before jumping from the flaming vessel. But they said that by the time they saw flames, it was too late.

The crew members told investigators a “harrowing story” about the moments after the blaze erupted before dawn Monday as it lay at anchor, Jennifer Homendy of the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.

They jumped from the bridge area to the main deck — one breaking a leg in the effort — and tried to get through the double doors of the galley, but they were on fire.

That cut off both escape routes from the sleeping quarters: a stairway and an escape hatch that exited in the galley area. The crew then tried, but failed, to get into windows at the front of the vessel.

“At that point, due to heat, flames and smoke, the crew had to jump from the boat,” Homendy said.

Captain Jerry Boylan stayed aboard trying to send radio distress calls and was last in the water, said Glen Fritzler, co-owner of Truth Aquatics Inc. of Santa Barbara, which operated Conception.

“The other crew at a certain point when the flames had engulfed the boat and they were in the water, they could see Jerry jump from the upper deck, a long jump. And there was a trail of smoke following him. They thought he was on fire,” Fritzler told KEYT-TV in Santa Barbara.

“Within minutes, they would’ve been consumed,” he said. “So they did their best. They did re-enter the vessel from the back of the boat after they swam around it. They could not get to firefighting equipment because everything was engulfed.”

The survivors used a skiff at Conception’s stern to reach a nearby boat, and two of them then returned to see if they could rescue any other survivors, Homendy said. They found no one.

Fritzler said the experience has traumatized the survivors.

“They’re breaking down,” he said. “They’re seeking counseling. It’s a very tough time for them.”

Meanwhile, Truth Aquatics filed a lawsuit Thursday in federal court that uses a pre-Civil War provision of maritime law to limit their liability from any victims’ claims. The lawsuit argues that the company and its owners made the boat seaworthy and it was properly manned and equipped.

Coast Guard records show the boat passed its two most recent inspections with no safety violations. And previous customers said Truth Aquatics and the captains of its three boats were very safety conscious.

The NTSB is just a few days into what will be a lengthy investigation that seeks to determine the fire’s cause and identify potential safety enhancements to avoid future disasters.

Investigators are examining potential ignition sources for the fire, including electronics, kitchen stoves and the vessel’s wiring systems. Investigators know photography equipment, batteries and other electronics were stored and plugged in on the Conception.

“We are not ruling anything out at this point,” Homendy said.

Hurricane Dorian has weakened to a Category 1 storm, after generating tornadoes and flooding roads in North and South Carolina.

Early Friday, Dorian made landfall over Cape Hatteras, North Carolina before moving out into the Atlantic ocean on its trek up the U.S. east coast with maximum sustained winds of 150 kilometers per hour.

In its most recent bulletin, the National Hurricane Center said, “The center of Dorian will move near or over the coast of North Carolina during the next few hours.”  NHC added, “The center should move to the southeast of extreme southeastern New England tonight and Saturday morning, and then across Nova Scotia late Saturday or Saturday night.”

The NHC expects Dorian to produce a life-threatening storm surge and dangerous winds along parts of the North Carolina and Virginia coasts. Flash flooding across eastern South and North Carolina and southeastern Virginia was expected to become more widespread Friday morning.

Bahamas recovery

Elsewhere, thousands of people in the Bahamas have begun the long and painful struggle to rebuild their lives following the onslaught of the hurricane, which was an extremely powerful Category 5 storm upon its arrival several days ago.

International search and rescue teams are spreading out across Abaco and Grand Bahama islands looking for survivors.

Late Thursday, the death toll in the Bahamas had risen to 30.

Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Minnis told CNN Thursday he believes the final number of people killed “will be staggering.”

The French news agency reported teams of people in masks and white protective suits were seen placing corpses enclosed in green body bags onto a flatbed truck.

Homes have been transformed into matchsticks.

“It’s hell everywhere,” said Brian Harvey, a Canadian who was on his sailboat when Dorian hit.

International assistance

The U.S. Coast Guard and British Royal Navy have ships docked off the islands and the United Nations is sending eight tons of ready-to-eat meals and satellite communications equipment.

The Royal Caribbean and Walt Disney cruise lines, which usually carry tourists to Bahamian resorts, are instead using ships to deliver food, water, flashlights and other vital aid.

Hampton University, a historically black college in Virginia, has offered free classes and room and board to students from the University of the Bahamas for the current fall semester.

After the fall semester, any students who remain will be charged the regular rates.

Mexico says the number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border has fallen by 56 percent since an agreement with U.S. officials three months ago to reduce the flow.
 
Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard declared the measures a success Friday. He also said the deployment of the National Guard has generated few complaints about human rights violations. The guardsmen operate highway checkpoints along major migratory routes through the country.
 
Ebrard is scheduled to meet with U.S. officials in Washington Tuesday to review the results of the effort, which followed U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to impose crippling tariffs on all Mexican imports.
 
Mexico has also been accepting a higher number of migrants who forced to wait in Mexico after requesting asylum in the U.S.

 

New York Attorney General Letitia James says a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general is investigating Facebook for alleged antitrust issues.

The Democrat said Friday the probe will look into whether Facebook’s actions endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices or increased the price of advertising.

Facebook had no immediate comment.

James said she is leading a coalition that includes the attorneys general of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and the District of Columbia.
 
The U.S. Justice Department announced in July that it was opening a sweeping antitrust investigation of Big Tech, though it did not name any specific companies. It said it was investigating whether online platforms have hurt competition, suppressed innovation or otherwise harmed consumers.
 
The House Judiciary Committee is also conducting an antitrust probe into Facebook, Amazon and Apple.

The near extinct masked dance of Lakhon Khol was on display recently, thousands of miles from its birthplace in Cambodia. A group of devoted amateurs brought the ancient dance to the Washington metropolitan. VOA’S Chetra Chap reports.

Ghana is famous for its cocoa, the main ingredient in chocolate. It supplies about 20 percent of the world’s market. This year, the government announced plans to raise cocoa incomes, but cocoa bean farms are being destroyed, with or without the farmers’ consent, as their landlords end their leases early, opting for other crops, development or mining. Stacey Knott reports for VOA from the Eastern Region of Ghana.
 

Hurricane Dorian left parts of the Bahamas underwater and in total ruin.  First-responders and disaster-relief organizations are mobilizing to deliver aid and assist in search and rescue operations in the Caribbean nation, where at least 30 deaths have been recorded. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi spoke with relief personnel and has this report.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media’s Chief Executive John Lansing said he will be leaving his post at the end of the month.

Lansing, a veteran government broadcast and cable television executive, was named four years ago by U.S. President Barack Obama to be the first chief executive of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees the Voice of America, Radio and Television Martí, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

Lansing made his mark at the agency early on by championing a free press.

“Despite some very dark moments, we have not been silenced. We will continue to report the truth. We will continue to find new ways to get independent reporting and programming to global audiences who rely on it,” he said this year on World Press Freedom Day.

USAGM board Chairman Kenneth Weinstein said in a statement, “John has put USAGM on solid footing to advance our mission to inform, engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy. … The Board is very grateful for, and deeply impressed by, the results achieved during his tenure.”

Lansing has boosted the networks’ global weekly audience by more than 100 million and expanded the agency’s use of platforms from encrypted live broadcasting to shortwave radio to push content into countries that jam or ban American programming.

Under his watch, the agency also created Current Time, a network broadcasting news, features and documentaries for Russian speakers in 2017. Polygraph and Faktograph are websites aimed at combating a stream of disinformation by Russia state-controlled media. A new Persian-language service, VOA365, also started broadcasting earlier this year.

In a statement released late Thursday, Lansing said he would be starting a new position at chief executive at National Public Radio, a publicly funded nonprofit membership media organization based in Washington.

Lansing acknowledged challenges ahead for the agency with countries such as Russia, China, North Korea and Iran trying to control information and spread their influence throughout the world.

“Please keep abiding by the highest standards of professional journalism. Please keep fighting for press freedom. Please keep telling the truth. The world needs you now more than ever,” he concluded in his statement to employees.

Weinstein said in his statement, “It is the Board’s top priority to find the best individual to run USAGM upon John’s departure.”

FLORENCE, Ala. — Jimmy Johnson, a founder of the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios and guitarist with the famed studio musicians “The Swampers,” has died.

He was 76. His family announced in a Facebook post that he died Thursday.

As a studio musician, recording engineer and record producer, Johnson played a role in iconic hits by Percy Sledge, The Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd and others.

Musician Jason Isbell posted on Twitter, writing “The mighty Jimmy Johnson has passed. A lot of my favorite music wouldn’t exist without him.”

‘Phenomenal music guy’

Bassist and business partner David Hood said Johnson was a “friend who became a brother” and an inspiration to him and countless others in the music business.

“Jimmy was just an all-around phenomenal music guy,” Hood said.

Johnson began work as a professional guitar player at an early age and became a studio musician with Fame Studio. He later helped found the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, which became a recording destination for well-known artists.

According to the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, Johnson’s “distinctive guitar fills” can be heard on the recordings of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, The Staple Singers and others. Johnson also was renowned as a recording engineer working the controls of Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” and the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” and other hits.

Hearing what others didn’t

Hood said in the studio that Johnson could hear things that others didn’t.

“When he first signed Lynyrd Skynyrd, nobody thought anybody would want to hear that,” Hood said of the long-haired group. “But he believed in them, fought for them and never gave up on them.” The group immortalized the Swampers with a reference on “Sweet Home Alabama.”

Johnson always remained humble, Hood said, recalling how Johnson’s mother would host home-cooked dinners for “all these rock ‘n’ roll people” in their small home in Sheffield.

Johnson’s son, Jay Johnson, wrote on Facebook: “He is gone. Playing music with the angels now.”

The owners of the dive boat where 34 people perished in a fire off Southern California filed a lawsuit Thursday to head off potentially costly litigation, a move condemned by some observers as disrespectful to the families of the dead. 
 
Truth Aquatics Inc., which owned the Conception, filed the action in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles under a pre-Civil War provision of maritime law that allows it to limit its liability. 
  
Investigators are still searching for what caused the blaze that wrecked the boat, which remains upside down at the bottom of the sea near the Channel Islands. 
  
The time-tested legal maneuver has been successfully employed by owners of the Titanic and countless other crafts — some as small as personal watercraft — and was widely anticipated by maritime law experts. Still, the fact it was filed just three days after the deadly inferno Monday surprised legal observers. 

Limited time to act
 
Families of the deceased, who are not named in the complaint, will be served with notice that they have a limited time to challenge the company’s effort to clear itself of negligence or limit its liability to the value of the remains of the boat, which is a total loss. 
  
“They’re forcing these people to bring their claims and bring them now,” said attorney Charles Naylor, who represents victims in maritime law cases. “They have six months to do this. They could let these people bury their kids. This is shocking.” 
 
Professor Martin J. Davies, the maritime law director at Tulane University, said the cases always follow accidents at sea and always look bad, but they are usually initiated by insurance companies to limit losses. 
  
“It seems like a pretty heartless thing to do, but that’s what always happens. They’re just protecting their position,” Davies said. “It produces very unpleasant results in dramatic cases like this one. … The optics are awful.” 
 
The U.S. law dates to 1851, but it has its origins in 18th-century England, Davies said. It was designed to encourage the shipping business. Every country with a shipping industry has something similar on its books. 
  
In order to prevail, the company and owners Glen and Dana Fritzler must show they were not at fault in the disaster. 
 
They asserted in the lawsuit that they “used reasonable care to make the Conception seaworthy, and she was, at all relevant times, tight, staunch and strong, fully and properly manned, equipped and supplied and in all respects seaworthy and fit for the service in which she was engaged.” 
 

Even if the captain or crew are found at fault, the Fritzlers and their insurance company could avoid paying a dime under the law, experts said. 
 
All of those who died were in a bunkroom below the main deck. Officials have said the 33 passengers and one crew member had no ability to escape the flames. 
  
Crew members told investigators they made several attempts to rescue the people who were trapped before abandoning ship, the National Transportation Safety Board said. None of the survivors has spoken publicly. 
 
The court filing not only seeks to protect the boat owners from legal exposure but also will require any lawsuits to be filed in the same federal court. 
  
A judge will hold a non-jury trial to see whether the company can successfully show it wasn’t at fault. If that’s the case, any claimants would be entitled only to the value of the remains of the ship, which the suit said is a total loss with zero value. 

Legal measure’s history
 
There’s a long history of ship owners successfully asserting this protection. The case involving the White Star Line, the owners of the Titanic, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that a foreign owner could assert protection of the Limitation Act, attorney James Mercante said. 
 
In that case, plaintiffs eventually withdrew their lawsuits and filed them in England, where the company was based. British law, even though it also limited damages, provided a bigger payout than the value of the remaining lifeboats. 
 
While the law can shield owners from damages, over 90% of cases where injury and death are involved are settled before trial, Mercante said. 
 
Attorney A. Barry Cappello, who is in discussions with another firm to represent family members of the Conception victims in court, said there’s a strong case to show negligence in the boat fire and that good lawyers can find a way around the admiralty law in federal court. 
  
“The law is so antiquated and so skewed in favor of the ship owners that damages for wrongful-death-type cases is very limited unless one can prove exceptions,” Cappello said. 
 
Cappello recently prevailed in a case in which a company that rented a paddleboard to a man who drowned in Santa Barbara Harbor had asserted the liability protection. A judge ruled the admiralty law didn’t extend to such crafts, though the company has appealed. 
 
Davies said from what he’s heard of the disaster, there’s a realistic prospect the owner might prevail if the boat was properly equipped and the cause of the fire remains mysterious. 
  
If the owner loses, there’s the potential of unlimited liability. 
  
“That’s why the fight is always about limitation, because if you’ve got unlimited liability, well … 30 dead people is a whole lot of money,” Davies said. 

Three children born to Nigerian Islamic State (IS) fighters in Syria were handed over to the Nigerian government, Syrian Kurdish officials said Thursday.

The orphaned children, aged 4, 6 and 8, were handed over to a Nigerian government representative in the city of Qamishli in northeast Syria.

“We have been in talks with Nigerian officials about these cases,” said Abdulkarim Omar, co-chair of foreign relations in the SDF-led administration in northeast Syria, who met with a Nigerian official on Thursday.

“They finally decided to come here and take these parentless children,” he told VOA.

This is the first time that an African country has taken back children of Africans who have traveled to Syria to join the terror group, the Kurdish official said.

Omar declined to give information about the number of Nigerians held in northeast Syria, but there are many Nigerians in custody who joined the IS terror group in recent years.

Children and women only

Musa Habib Marika, a representative of Nigeria’s government, said his country is also considering other cases.

“We have asked for a list of Nigerians who are held in camps and prisons to look into their cases,” Marika said during a press conference with Kurdish officials in Qamishli.

But Omar said that Nigeria and other countries can only repatriate children and women of IS fighters.  

U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) declared victory over IS in March 2019 after pushing out the group from its last stronghold in eastern Syria.

SDF officials say they are holding more than 1,200 IS militants from nearly 50 countries.

There are also about 20,000 women and 50,000 children of IS fighters who have been settled in an overcrowded camp in northeast Syria, the same sources said.

Kurdish officials say they couldn’t bear the responsibility of dealing with IS fighters alone and that a special international tribunal should be established for crimes they have committed in Syria.

“We can’t try these individuals on our own, so the international community needs to step up its efforts to help us address this international problem,” Kurdish official Omar said.

He added that some Western countries have expressed support for establishing such a court for IS foreign fighters.  

IS in Nigeria

On Thursday, IS claimed that its fighters killed 10 Nigerian soldiers and injured several others in an attack on a military base in Borno state. It is the third attack in the area over the last week.

IS said in a statement online that fighters from its West Africa Province (ISWAP) affiliate carried out the attack Wednesday, capturing six military vehicles, weapons and ammunition.

Nigerian officials have not yet commented on the attack.

ISWAP is a splinter of the Boko Haram terrorist group that pledged allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2015.

According the International Crisis Group, ISWAP has 3,500 to 5,000 fighters across Nigeria. The group has reportedly been engaged in deadly attacks against Nigerian military personnel and civilians.

While it is unclear how many Nigerian nationals have joined IS in Syria and Iraq, experts say their potential return could be a challenge for Nigeria since it “is in the midst of a major struggle with Boko Haran and ISWAP.”

“The return of hardened Nigerian fighters, even if they’re fairly small in number, is going to raise all kinds of important policy questions,” said John Campbell, a senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

He noted that ISWAP drives a degree of prestige among Islamist radicals in Nigeria for its association with IS.  

ISWAP “is expanding its influence and the territory it occupies, and even in some areas providing government services, so it’s a real threat to the Nigerian state,” Campbell, a former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, told VOA.

The stories are haunting: A young woman beaten by her partner before being set on fire in front of her 7-year-old daughter. A photo of a smiling scientist whose body is stuffed into a suitcase that is dumped into a river. 
 
These are just two examples in France of so-called femicides — women killed by their partners or family members. The country’s 101st case this year happened Sunday, when a 92-year-old woman was beaten to death by her husband. 
 
Now, the government is declaring war on domestic violence, announcing measures this week ranging from planned legislation to allow electronic tagging of suspected perpetrators to designation of millions of dollars to build more emergency shelters for victims. 
 
“For centuries, women have been buried under our indifference, our denial, our incapacity to face this horror,” Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said at a summit in Paris kicking off weeks of national consultations on the subject. 
 
With an average of one woman killed every three days, France has a femicide rate that is among Europe’s highest, according to available data from the Eurostat statistical agency. But domestic violence remains widespread across the region, activists say, and other governments have yet to sound the alarm.  

A European issue 
 
“One in three women over [age] 15 experiences physical or sexual violence in her life,” said Irene Rosales, policy and campaigns officer for the Brussels-based European Women’s Lobby, which represents more than 2,000 NGOs across the European Union. “This is a European issue, and it has to be addressed at a European level.” 
 
In a number of countries, data on femicides are spotty or nonexistent, she said, suggesting governments are not treating the phenomenon with the seriousness it deserves. The region also lacks comparable benchmarks to track progress, Rosales added. 
 
Moreover, roughly half a dozen EU countries have yet to ratify the Istanbul Convention, a key international treaty to combat violence against women. 
 
“They’re stuck in negotiations on ratifying it,” said Rosales, “which shows there’s no political will to implement and be serious about it.” 
 
European Commission spokesman Christian Wigand said some EU countries have been slow to ratify the treaty because of “misunderstandings and misconceptions” that need to be worked on. But he said Europe’s executive arm has prioritized raising awareness about domestic violence, earmarking millions of dollars for the cause in recent years. 
 
“There has been progress,” he said. 
 
Bright spots 
 
Activists also point to bright spots. Spain — which has recorded more than 1,000 femicides in two decades — is training hundreds of judges on gender violence. Other countries, including Belgium and Sweden, have embedded consent-based definitions of rape in their legal codes. Even so, Sweden and several other Nordic countries have legal loopholes making it difficult to report and punish sex crimes, according to an April Amnesty International report. 

In France, the government’s new campaign against domestic violence has drawn kudos from some quarters. Family members of victims praised Philippe this week for putting words to unspeakable crimes. But others are disappointed at the modest funding announced to date. 
 
“We came, we saw and we were super disappointed,” said feminist Caroline de Haas, who attended the government summit. “We expected unprecedented mobilization against women-based violence. Major overarching policies. And especially, we expected financing — and that’s not the case.” 
 
Activists like Rosales also hope for more action from Brussels. Incoming European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s onetime family minister, has proposed adding violence against women to a list of EU crimes. 
 
“That’s something we are really going to follow and try to make a reality,” Rosales said, “and hold her accountable.”