The $6 billion loan package for Pakistan approved by the International Monetary Fund last week will require “very ambitious” fiscal measures and sustained commitment for the bailout to succeed, IMF officials said on Monday.

The three-year agreement approved by the IMF board last week, Pakistan’s 13th bailout since the late 1980s, has seen a sharp drop in the value of the rupee currency after the central bank agreed to a “flexible, market-determined exchange rate.”

It also foresees structural economic reforms and a widening of the tax base to boost tax revenues that are currently estimated to account for less than 13% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 4-5 percentage points.

With slowing growth, a budget deficit which has climbed to more than 7% of GDP and currency reserves of less than $8 billion, or enough to cover 1.7 months of imports, Pakistan has teetered on the edge of a debt and balance of payments crisis.

Ernesto Ramirez Rigo, the Fund’s mission chief for Pakistan said the program targets were tough but Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government, which came to power last year vowing not to turn to the IMF, was committed.

“We certainly think that debt sustainability under the program will be assured,” he told a conference call with reporters, adding that it would require “very ambitious” fiscal consolidation, mainly through improved revenue collection.

Pakistan has a notoriously narrow tax base, with less than 1% of its 208 million population filing income tax returns, a vast informal economy and several key sectors of the official economy largely exempt from tax.

The IMF loan and the associated package of reforms that goes with it will unlock another $38 billion in loans from other international partners but commitment by Pakistani authorities in pushing through reform was essential, Ramirez Rigo said.

“Consistency and sustained implementation is key,” he said.

The 2020 budget, passed last month, approved tax measures worth some 1.7% of GDP to help cut the deficit and Pakistan has promised a multiyear effort to overhaul its tax and budget system to put its public finances on a firmer footing.

A central part of the program will involve cleaning up accumulated debts in the power and gas sectors and in loss-making state enterprises including Pakistan International Airlines, Pakistan Steel Mills, and Pakistan Railways.

Losses built up in the power sector now amount to the equivalent of 4% of GDP, posing a serious fiscal risk, while losses in the big three state enterprises amount to 2% of GDP, the IMF said in a report on the package.

The tough conditions of the package, which has already seen interest rates hiked by 150 basis points and which will see a raft of tax loopholes closed, has already drawn resentment among households facing inflation running at around 9%.

Ramirez Rigo said there was a risk that the difficulties of implementing some of the policies in the package were “more complicated than we have assumed” and that there would be problems in building consensus behind the reforms.

He also said any sharp rise in oil prices could unbalance the reform drive given Pakistan’s heavy dependence on imported energy.

Mexico’s newly created National Guard has detained U.S.-bound migrants and the government should make public the rules governing their power to curb immigration, the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) said on Monday.

The National Guard is a security force created by Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to bring down record homicide rates. But now it has been tasked with patrolling the border to placate U.S. President Donald Trump, who threatened to slap tariffs on Mexican goods unless the country did more to stem the flow of Central American migrants heading to the United States.

“Publishing the protocols and coordination rules under which the National Guard operates in support of immigration authorities, particularly regarding the procedures for detaining persons with an illegal immigration status, is desirable,” CNDH President Luis Raul Gonzalez said in a speech. “If such protocols and rules don’t exist, establishing and publishing them is an urgent matter.”

The Mexican government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the speech.

While some 21,000 National Guard troops, nearly a third of their total ranks, have been deployed to Mexico’s northern and southern borders on immigration duties, their rules of engagement are still unclear.

Facing accusations the troops had been heavy-handed in their efforts to deter migrants from crossing the northern border, Lopez Obrador said on June 25 that the National Guard does not have orders to detain migrants.

The guardsmen themselves say they do not detain migrants but are there to advise them not to enter the United States.

Still, Reuters witnessed at least three adults and four children being detained as they tried to cross into the United States after Obrador made his statement.

Last week, Brigadier-General Vicente Antonio Hernandez, who heads the National Guard’s operations in Mexico’s southern states, said 20,000 migrants had been rescued since May 17.

Human rights groups say the migrants have been detained and some have been deported.

“There is a huge distance between what you hear from Lopez Obrador every morning and what is happening on the ground with respect to this issue. He’s not being very truthful, not being very honest with Mexican people regarding the reality of the deployment of these soldiers,” Fernando Garcia, founding director of the Border Network for Human Rights, told Reuters.

Democrats in the U.S. Congress on Monday said they were using a court case to demand documents from President Donald Trump’s businesses in hopes of proving that they violated anti-corruption provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

A group of more than 200 Democratic Party lawmakers said in a statement that as part of lawsuit in federal court they had issued 37 subpoenas the Trump Organization and other entities, seeking information about foreign government payments accepted by properties in his real estate empire.

The subpoenas also seek information about trademarks granted to Trump businesses by foreign governments.

“Our goal is simple and straightforward – stopping President Trump from putting a ‘For Sale’ sign in Russian on the door to the Oval Office,” said Richard Blumenthal, a senator from Connecticut and the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Blumenthal added that the politicians were seeking “a targeted set of documents” to ensure Trump “can no longer shirk his constitutional responsibility.”

The U.S. Department of Justice, which is representing Trump in the court case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move had been expected in light of recent rulings by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington in favor of the Democratic Party lawmakers.

Trump, a wealthy real estate developer, maintains ownership of his businesses but has ceded day-to-day control to his sons.

Critics have said that is not a sufficient safeguard.

In 2017, Democrats filed a lawsuit alleging Trump was illegally profiting from his businesses in various ways, including by collecting payments from foreign government officials who stay at his properties and accepting trademark registrations around the world for his company’s products.

A similar case brought the Maryland and the District of Columbia attorneys general is also making its way through the courts. 

The litigation represents the first time in U.S. history courts have interpreted the so-called “Emoluments Clauses” of the Constitution, which bans U.S. officials from accepting gifts or payments from foreign and state governments without congressional consent.

On June 25 Sullivan rejected a request by Trump administration lawyers to halt the case and let them file an expedited appeal of key preliminary rulings he issued against the president.

On Monday the Justice Department urged an appeals court to put the litigation on hold, saying it was based on “novel and flawed constitutional premises” and allows “intrusive discovery into the President’s personal financial affairs.”

The radical and painful restructuring of Germany’s Deutsche Bank, which is cutting 18,000 jobs, is the end of a long, failed attempt to compete with the global investment banking giants that left it overextended.

The bank plan unveiled Sunday aims to go “back to our roots” by refocusing on traditional strengths like serving corporate customers and wealthy individuals and cutting down on its stock-trading business and fixed-income investments.

Investors gave a wary response Monday, however, pushing shares down 5% at 6.82 euros ($7.68) in Frankfurt.

CEO Christian Sewing said the job cuts have already begun and will last until 2022, though he wouldn’t give a geographical breakdown.

Deutsche Bank had nearly 91,500 employees at the end of March, about 41,600 of them in Germany. Many of its investment banking activities are carried out in New York and London.

“This is a rebuilding which, in a way, also takes us back to our roots,” Sewing said in a message to staff.

Failed expansion

Analysts say the overhaul is the bank’s long-needed reckoning with the failure of its expansion plan.

Deutsche Bank’s move into investment banking dates back to 1989, when it took over Morgan Grenfell, and the 1999 takeover of Bankers Trust. The division helped drive strong profits in the 2000s and was part of an ambition to become one of the global banking giants, like JPMorgan or HSBC.

But the expansion, and the global financial crisis around 2008, also helped generate its subsequent problems.

Deutsche Bank wrestled for years with high costs, weak profits, and a low share price. It also paid billions in fines and settlements related to behavior before and after the global financial crisis. 
 
Analysts expect Deutsche Bank’s departure to be a net benefit for the U.S.-based investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase. Competition between the big Wall Street firms for business has been intense for years, and has only gotten worse in recent years as fewer companies are using traditional financial services to go public or issue debt. 
 
The end of Deutsche Bank’s commodity and bond trading operations will also be a boon for the banks, as trading will likely move to the banks which already specialize in it, like Citigroup, Goldman and JPMorgan.

‘Spread too thin’

The bad headlines continued this year when two U.S. congressional committees subpoenaed Deutsche Bank documents as part their investigations into President Donald Trump and his company. Deutsche Bank was one of the few banks willing to lend to Trump after a series of corporate bankruptcies and defaults starting in the early 1990s.

The Frankfurt-based bank went three straight years without an annual profit before earning 341 million euros for 2018. Sewing took over last year, promising faster restructuring after predecessor John Cryan was perceived to have moved too slowly.

“We tried to compete in nearly every area of the banking market at the same time,” Sewing told investors Monday. “We simply spread ourselves too thin.” 
 
Earlier this year, the bank entered talks to merge with German rival Commerzbank, which had also been ailing since the global financial crisis. But the talks failed in April amid concerns that a merger would be too complicated and costly.

That left open the question of what strategy Deutsche Bank could pursue to make its business leaner and more profitable.

Previous shake-up attempts have been “too little, too late,” said Neil Wilson, an analyst for Markets.com in London.

‘Right medicine’

“Now it’s the right medicine, it just should have been taken a few years ago,” Wilson said. He added that some questions remain about how the bank aims to grow revenues once it has restructured, and that seems reflected in the investors’ sell-off of the shares Monday.

Philip Augar, a British-based banking expert and former equities broker, told the BBC that Deutsche Bank was embarking on a spectacular reversal of the strategy that began with the 1999 Bankers Trust acquisition.

“Their ambition was to challenge the Wall Street giants. And for about decade, it looked as though they’d pulled it off,” he said, with the bank “a serious player on Wall Street and in the City” in the 2000s.

But things went wrong in the financial crisis as Deutsche Bank cut slowly and modestly while others “retreated radically and drastically, and more or less, instantly,” he added.

“They’ve been limping along for the last few years and I suppose this day had to come,” he said.

Police investigators summoned former Kyrgyz president Almazbek Atambayev for questioning on Monday, setting the stage for a stand-off between him and his successor, incumbent Sooronbai Jeenbekov, in the volatile Central Asian nation.

Jeenbekov, who came to power in 2017 with Atambayev’s support and used to be his close ally, sidelined his predecessor last year by reshuffling senior security officials and wresting control over the ruling party out of Atambayev’s hands.

An escalation of the conflict between the two could be of concern to Russia which has a military air base in the former Soviet republic and counts it among its closest political allies. Atambayev dismissed the summons as illegal.

Kyrgyzstan’s parliament voted last month to strip Atambayev of immunity normally enjoyed by former heads of state.

On Monday, the investigative unit of the interior ministry summoned Atambayev to its headquarters for questioning on Tuesday morning as a witness, without saying what the summons was linked to.

He has not yet been charged with any crimes, but some of his allies have been charged with corruption and abuse of office and parliament, and state prosecutors have said they could investigate similar allegations against Atambayev.

Atambayev, 62, who has taken part in two violent revolts which overthrew his predecessors in 2005 and 2010, said he would ignore the summons.

“I am not even going to touch and read these papers, the government must first start following the law,” he said in a video posted online.

“I am not going to play along in this circus.”

Since the parliament moved to strip him of immunity, Atambayev has mostly stayed in his home village just outside the capital, Bishkek, surrounded by up to a few hundred supporters some of whom carried firearms in front of reporters.

The U.N. says over 460,000 suspected cholera cases have been recorded in war-battered Yemen so far this year — a sharp rise from the 380,000 cases for all of 2018.

U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq says 705 suspected cholera deaths have been recorded since January — a dramatic increase from the 75 deaths in the same period last year.

Haq says the spread of cholera has been accelerated by recent flash flooding, poor maintenance of waste management systems and lack of access to clean water.

The U.N. and its partners are operating nearly 1,200 cholera treatment facilities across Yemen, but Haq says “funding remains an urgent issue.”

The U.N.’s $4.2 billion humanitarian appeal to help over 20 million Yemenis this year is only 32 percent funded.

Eleven years after letting Jeffrey Epstein off lightly with a once-secret deal, federal prosecutors took another run at putting the billionaire financier behind bars on sex charges, accusing him Monday of abusing dozens of underage girls as young as 14.

Epstein, arrested over the weekend, was expected to make his first court appearance on the charges in the afternoon in New York City. Prosecutors were likely to argue he is a flight risk and should remain in jail instead of being released on bail to await trial.

Epstein, a 66-year-old hedge fund manager who once hobnobbed with some of the world’s most powerful people, was charged in an indictment unsealed Monday with sex trafficking and conspiracy. The charges carry up to life in prison.

He was accused of paying underage girls hundreds of dollars in cash for massages and then molesting them at his homes in Florida and New York.

Epstein “intentionally sought out minors and knew that many of his victims were in fact under the age of 18,” prosecutors said. He also paid some of his victims to “recruit additional girls to be similarly abused by Epstein.”

“In this way, Epstein created a vast network of underage victims for him to sexually exploit in locations including New York and Palm Beach,” prosecutors said.

Epstein’s lawyer did not respond to repeated messages seeking comment.

Epstein, whose friends have included President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton and Britain’s Prince Andrew, was arrested Saturday at an airport in New Jersey, just outside New York City, after his private jet touched down from France. He was being held at the federal lockup in Manhattan.

Former federal prosecutor David Weinstein said there was almost no chance Epstein would be allowed out on bail.

“The guy is a millionaire or a billionaire. He has unrestrained assets,” he said. “If they let him out on a bond, he may take off, go to a jurisdiction where they don’t have extradition, and they may never get him back.”

Epstein’s arrest came amid increased (hash)MeToo-era scrutiny of the 2008 non-prosecution deal that allowed Epstein to plead guilty to lesser state charges while maintaining a jet-set lifestyle that includes homes in Paris and the U.S. Virgin Islands and a Bentley.

Under the deal _ overseen by Alexander Acosta, who was the U.S. attorney in Miami at the time and is now Trump’s labor secretary _ Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges of soliciting and procuring a person under age 18 for prostitution. He avoided a possible life sentence and served 13 months in jail.

The deal also required that he reach financial settlements with dozens of his victims and register as a sex offender.

Acosta has defended the agreement as appropriate, though the White House said in February that it was looking into his handling of the case.

The deal, examined in detail in a series of stories in The Miami Herald, is being challenged in federal court in Florida. A federal judge ruled earlier this year that Epstein’s victims should have been consulted under the law about the agreement, and he is now weighing whether to invalidate it.

Federal prosecutors recently filed court papers in the Florida case contending Epstein’s deal, known as an NPA, must stand.

“The past cannot be undone; the government committed itself to the NPA, and the parties have not disputed that Epstein complied with its provisions,” prosecutors wrote in the filing.

It was not immediately clear whether that case and the new charges involved the same victims, since nearly all have remained anonymous.

Epstein’s guilty plea involved only state crimes, while the current case involves federal law. As a result, his constitutional protection against double jeopardy does not apply.

According to court records in Florida, authorities say at least 40 underage girls were brought into Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion for what turned into sexual encounters after female fixers looked for suitable girls locally and in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world.

 

Before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin knew they would be the first to walk on the moon, they took crash courses in geology at the Grand Canyon and a nearby impact crater that is the most well-preserved on Earth.

Northern Arizona has had deep ties to the Apollo missions: Every moon-walking astronaut trained here, and a crater on the moon was even named in honor of the city of Flagstaff.

“It’s a really interesting and unique part of our history, and it’s really cool to think that this relatively small town in northern Arizona played such a big role in the Apollo missions,” said Benjamin Carver, a public lands historian at Northern Arizona University.

Today, astronaut candidates still train in and around Flagstaff, which is among many cities celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing on July 20, 1969.  

They walk in the same volcanic cinder fields where the U.S. Geological Survey intentionally blasted hundreds of craters from the ground to replicate the lunar surface, testing rovers and geology tools.

Scientists used early photos of the moon taken from orbit and re-created the Sea of Tranquility with “remarkable accuracy” before Apollo 11 landed there in 1969, the Geological Survey said.

Astronauts studied moon mapping at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff where Pluto was discovered and peered at their eventual destination through telescopes at various northern Arizona sites.

The region’s role in moon missions is credited to former Geological Survey scientist Gene Shoemaker, who moved the agency’s astrogeology branch to Flagstaff in 1963. It wasn’t long before Shoemaker guided Armstrong and Aldrin on hikes at Meteor Crater as he pushed to ensure NASA would include geology in lunar exploration.

A story passed down by geologists at the crater says Aldrin ripped his spacesuit on jagged limestone rocks that are part of the aptly named “tear-pants formation,” forcing a redesign, head tour guide Jeff Beal said.

Armstrong and Aldrin also hiked the Grand Canyon. A historical photo shows Armstrong carrying a rock hammer, a hand lens and a backpack for rock samples.

Harrison “Jack” Schmitt was the only Apollo astronaut who didn’t train at the national park. The geologist left Flagstaff to become an astronaut, and while his comrades were learning geology, he was learning to be a pilot.

In another historical photo, Apollo astronauts Jim Irwin and David Scott ride around in Grover, a prototype of the lunar rover made in Flagstaff from spare parts and now on display at the Astrogeology Science Center.

The eventual lunar rover used in three Apollo missions famously got a broken fender on a 1972 mission to the moon. Astronauts cobbled together a quick fix that included a map produced by geologists in Flagstaff.

In yet another historical photo, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean stand in the volcanic cinder field bordered by ponderosa pine trees holding a tool carrier. Bean would later say: “I now love geology, thanks to these early experiences in Flagstaff,” local historian Kevin Schindler co-wrote in a book on space training in northern Arizona.

Lauren Edgar, a research geologist at the Astrogeology Science Center, is working with the 2017 class of astronaut candidates who will be in Flagstaff later this year for field training.

“It will be pretty inspiring for them. It’s inspiring for us being involved in this, but knowing you’re walking in the boot steps of these previous astronauts here in Flagstaff and, hopefully, some day on another body,” she said.

Flagstaff is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing with tours, exhibits, talks and moon-themed food and art.

Charlie Duke, the youngest astronaut on the moon, is returning to Flagstaff in September as the keynote speaker at an annual science festival. He and Jason Young, who were on Apollo 17, named a moon crater “Flag Crater.”

Retired Flagstaff geologist Gerald Schaber plans to celebrate the lunar legacy wearing the same turquoise bolo tie that distinguished Shoemaker’s Arizona crew from others who worked on moon missions. Schaber was at Mission Control in Houston in 1969, monitoring black-and-white images while bent over a map trying to gauge the distance between Armstrong and Aldrin using cutouts of the men.  

“I was just trying to do the best I could with the primitive tracking ability we had in those days,” he said from his home in Flagstaff where he has a signed photograph of a hill on the moon that Apollo 15 astronauts referred to “Schaber Hill.”

Of the three crater fields created in northern Arizona for astronaut training in the late 1960s, only one has a sign acknowledging its importance in the moon missions. Visitors can walk through gaps in a barbed-wire fence and feel their feet sink into the volcanic cinders, although not as deep as the astronauts’ feet on the moon.

The craters don’t come into view without being close up, some as darkened, shallow depressions and others as giant welts in the ground partially lost to the weather.

Arizona has approved a nomination to list several of the training sites on the National Register of Historic Places to better preserve them, but federal approval is still needed.

Mexico will extend a reforestation program to Honduras and increase funding to $100 million to create jobs in Central America and stem migration.

Mexico had already announced a $30 million tree-planting program for El Salvador.

Mexico’s foreign relations secretary says Honduras’ president is expected to finalize details in a visit to Mexico next month.

Marcelo Ebrard says creating jobs does more to stop the flow of migrants than any enforcement measures.

It is unclear whether Guatemala will also benefit from the program. A similar plan to plant fruit and lumber trees is already being implemented in southern Mexico.

Ebrard said Monday that 327 Central American migrants awaiting US asylum hearings have found jobs in northern Mexico, and that companies had offered a total of 3,700 positions.

 

 

The International Criminal Court found former Congolese rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda guilty Monday of all 18 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

Ntaganda had denied being a killer and a war criminal when he spoke at his trial in The Hague Thursday. 

In a speech to judges of the ICC, Ntaganda acknowledged being described as “The Terminator” but said, “That is not me.”

Ntaganda insisted he was a soldier, not a criminal  He said, “I have never attacked civilians…I have always protected them.”  

The comments pose a sharp contrast to the image painted by ICC prosecutors, who say Ntaganda commanded a rebel group, the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), that killed, raped and exploited people in Congo’s eastern Ituri province in 2002 and 2003.

A lawyer for victims told the court that girls as young as 12 were forced to serve as so-called wives to senior rebel commanders.

The 18 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, included charges of murder, sexual slavery, enlistment of child soldiers and forcible transfer of population.  

The attacks by the UPC allegedly targeted specific ethnic groups such as the Lendu, Bira, and Nande. One alleged co-conspirator was Thomas Lubanga, who was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2012 after the ICC convicted him of conscripting child soldiers.

Ntaganda remained at large for seven years after his indictment was issued in 2006, irritating judicial officials with occasional appearances in public.  

He co-founded the Congolese rebel group M23 in early 2012.  In a surprise move, however, he surrendered at the U.S. embassy in Kigali, Rwanda, in March of 2013.  Experts say he may have turned himself in because fighting within M23 caused him to fear for his life.

Prosecutors called dozens of witnesses to testify against him, including a number of former child soldiers.

Conservative Greek opposition leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis rode to a landslide victory over leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in Sunday’s parliamentary elections and is set to take office in Athens Monday.

With more than 90 percent of votes counted, Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party had  39.8% of the vote, while Tsipras’s Syriza party had 31.6%.  

Tsipras, 44, rejected as the Greek leader after four years, conceded defeat and called Mitsotakis, 51, to congratulate him on his victory.

“I asked for a strong mandate to change Greece. You offered it generously,” Mitsotakis said in his victory speech. “From today, a difficult but beautiful fight begins…. Greeks deserve better and the time has come for us to prove it,” he said.

Mitsotakis, a graduate of Harvard in the U.S., will have a 158-seat majority in the 300-member Greek parliament.

He is the son of a former prime minister, Konstantinos Mitsotakis, brother of a former foreign minister, Theodora “Dora” Bakoyanni, and uncle to a newly elected mayor of Athens. 

Mitsotakis has pledged to create “better” jobs through foreign investment, tax cuts and removing obstacles for businesses.

Tsipras had called the election three months earlier than scheduled after his Syriza party suffered a severe defeat in European Union and local elections in May and early June.  

Greece is just beginning to recover from a massive financial crisis that included soaring unemployment and steep poverty levels. The country was forced to accept billions of dollars in financial bailouts from the International Monetary Fund, other eurozone countries and the European Central Bank that required deep spending cuts and other reforms.

More than one million Syrian refugees call Lebanon home, but the Lebanese government says it is time for them to leave. Officials deployed the army to accompany bulldozers as they began demolishing homes in refugee camps.  Arash Arabasadi has more.

“We don’t need to eat,” said a young man held in a Libyan detention center five days after the compound was bombed killing more than 50 people and injuring at least 130.  “We didn’t touch the food. We need to be out of Libya.”  
 
The hunger strike in the detention center was on its third day Sunday, according to the protester communicating with VOA via phone and social media. He sent pictures of detainees holding signs like “We are in the grave” and “Save us from the next bomb. We are survivors, but still we are targeted.”

News and additional photographs of the protest came from other detainees communicating with hidden mobile phones.
 
The airstrikes hit the detention center late Tuesday, after international organizations warned both sides of Libya’s ongoing war that civilians were held at that location, which has been targeted before. Amnesty International says there is evidence the detention center is located near weapons’ storage, but Tripoli authorities say there is no legitimate military target in the area.

Officials say about 600 people were inside the detention center when the airstrikes hit a nearby garage, and then the center itself. Some survivors reported breaking open the doors of the detention center to escape, others escaped the bombing after guards let them out. Still others reported shots fired in the chaos.  
 
Five days later, migrants were still sleeping outside in the yard on Sunday, according to detainees, with part of the center destroyed and other parts appearing to be about to collapse.

The United Nations announced it would start evacuations over the weekend, but some protesters said moving to another detention center would only prolong the danger.

“If they are taking us to another detention center, we won’t go,” the protester told VOA on the phone. “We want to get out of this country or stay here.”

Escalating war
 
To wind up in a Libyan detention center, migrants travel from across sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Asia in hopes of crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.  
 
Many people die on the trip to Libya alone and nearly 700 people have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in 2019 trying to cross to Europe, according to the International Organization for Migration.
 
Thousands of survivors remain detained in Libya, hoping to try to cross to Europe and unwilling to return to the wars, violence and dire poverty they fled.  But as the war for Tripoli intensifies, some say Libya is as dangerous as the countries they fled.
 
“Sudan, Libya… they are the same,” said one woman outside the detention center only hours after last week’s bombing.  She had fled war and genocide in Sudan, only to find herself detained, impoverished and terrified in Libya, she said.

Libyan forces have been battling for the capital since early April, when Khalifa Haftar, the de-facto leader of eastern Libya declared he would reunite the divided country by force and marched on Tripoli in the west. Forces loyal to the Government of National Accord, which runs western Libya, have been defending the city since. Neither side appears to be backing down.
 
Nearly 1,000 people have been killed and 5,000 wounded, according to the World Health Organization, and more than 100,000 have fled their homes.
 
Protesters outside the detention center on Sunday secretly sent out pictures and videos, calling on the international community to rescue them and allow them to apply for asylum in safer countries.
 
“Doctors Without Borders came with medicine, but we don’t want medicine,” said the protester communicating with VOA via phone and social media. “The UNHCR evacuated some people but we don’t want to evacuate to another detention center.  
 
“We want to go to a safe country, or we will stay here.”

 

Two remote California desert communities assessed damage after two major earthquakes hit the area at the end of last week, followed by thousands of smaller aftershocks.

Ridgecrest and neighboring Trona were hit hard by the magnitude 7.1 quake that rocked the Mojave Desert towns Friday. A day earlier, a magnitude 6.4 temblor hit the same patch of the desert.

The area, about 240 kilometers northeast of Los Angeles, is in recovery mode after the quakes crumbled buildings, ignited fires and cut power to thousands of homes and businesses.

The U.S. Geological Survey said Sunday there was just a 1% chance of another magnitude 7 or higher earthquake in the next week, and a rising possibility of no magnitude 6 quakes.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency for the area and warned local governments to strengthen alert systems and building codes. “It is a wake-up call for the rest of the state and other parts of the nation,” Newsom told reporters.

The damage wasn’t worse largely because of how remote the area is, but Newsom cautioned after touring Ridgecrest that “it’s deceiving, earthquake damage. You don’t notice it at first.”
 
The Democratic governor estimated the damage at more than $100 million and said U.S. President Donald Trump called him to offer federal support for rebuilding.

 

A 50-member delegation of Afghan elites is in Qatar for peace talks with Taliban leaders, with the hopes of ending the 18-year-long conflict in Afghanistan.

The two-day summit, facilitated by Germany and Qatar, is an “historic opportunity for all of them to bridge trust deficit, which will help pave the way for direct peace negotiations between Afghan government and the Taliban,” said Asadullah Zaeri, a spokesman of the country’s High Peace Council.

The delegation includes politicians, top members of the council, representatives of women’s groups and senior journalists, he said.

Although both sides have emphasized that members of Afghan government are attending in their personal capacity, not representing Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s government, their presence makes this conference different from the intra-Afghan conference in Moscow in April. At that gathering, the Taliban refused to sit at the table with anyone from the administration of President Ghani – an administration they insist is a “puppet” of the United States.

Ghani termed that conference a failure.

However, the United States seems to have succeeded in its efforts to get the Taliban to show flexibility.

“The Intra-Afghan Conference for Peace in #Doha has been a long time coming. It’s great to see senior government, civil society, women, and Taliban representatives at one table together,” tweeted U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The conference organizers are hoping this first step would pave way for a bigger breakthrough in future.

“A partial success is for people to continue to talk. A great success would be for them to come up with a framework that could lead into direct negotiations, Afghan-Afghan, and hopefully catch up with the speed in which the talks between the Taliban and the United States are progressing,” said Sultan Barakat, the director of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies at Doha Institute, who has been closely involved in organizing the event.
 
The Afghan meeting comes as the U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who’s already holding talks with the Taliban, is nearing an agreement over a timeframe for the U.S. and NATO troop withdrawal from the country.

 Both sides claim the talks are progressing well.

“The last 6 days of talks have been the most productive session to date,” tweeted Khalilzad on Saturday. The two sides will resume on the 9th after this intra-Afghan interaction which Khalilzad called “a critical milestone.”

A Taliban spokesman said in a future conference, the insurgent group may be willing to talk to top level Ghani administration officials.

“If someone is coming in his or her personal capacity and expressing his or her views on how to bring about peace in Afghanistan, we have not put any restriction on that,” said Suhail Shaheen when asked whether the Taliban could sit with government ministers or top-level officials.  

Afghan High Peace Council member Jamaluddin Badar said government representatives may be in Doha in their personal capacity but they “seemed to be giving the government’s point of view.”

He felt positive about the discussions held till late Sunday afternoon. The Taliban, he said, seemed to be willing to address some critical concerns of most Afghans, such as how to protect the gains made since the ouster of the insurgent group in 2001, particularly in terms of institution building and human rights.

“We might have disagreements with the Taliban on how to interpret those rights, but I don’t think they will be strong enough to lead to fighting,” he said. The Taliban, he added, have even been talking about the need to reduce violence against women.

He was not the only one who expressed optimism about the discussions with the Taliban.

“I think their attitude has changed tremendously. Last night they sat with women and we chatted. They tried to show that they are willing to talk to women,” said Asila Wardak, a women’s rights activist attending the conference.

 

Malawi President Peter Mutharika has warned of unspecified action against the leaders of violent protests following his narrow recent election victory. 

Mutharika, whose legitimacy is being challenged by key opposition leaders, said during the country’s 55th Independence Day celebration in Blantyre on Saturday that he has learned the protests have nothing to do with election results, but are aimed at toppling his government. The protests organizers dispute this and say they cannot be intimidated.

The celebrations started with a morning of prayer, with religious leaders appealing for the return of peace and unity to a country now torn by political violence.
 
Malawi has faced street protests, which in many cases turned violent, since the Malawi Elections Commission announced on May 27 that President Mutharika had been re-elected.
 
The MEC declared Mutharika the winner with 39 percent of the vote, and said opposition Malawi Congress Party leader Lazarus Chakwera was a close second with 35 percent.
 
Vice President Saulos Chilima’s opposition United Transformation Movement Party came in third with 20 percent.
 
Chakwera and Chilima are challenging the election results in court, alleging ballot-stuffing and the use of a popular correction fluid to alter ballots.
 
Both opposition leaders shunned Mutharika’s Independence Day speech, in which he called for peace.

“This is the day we must raise our flags of patriotism,” said Mutharika. “This is a day everyone must show how we love this country. Malawi is the only country that we have. If we destroy this country, as we are currently doing, we have destroyed ourselves.”
 

However Mutharika had harsh words for the organizers of the protests. He said he knows that opposition leaders want to use the protests to unseat him because they lost the election “big time.”   

“Let me assure them that they will take over this government over my dead body. They will never, never take over this country. Let me warn them,” he said.
 
Mutharika said his government will soon hold accountable those who are leading the violent protests.
 
Gift Trapence is the deputy chairperson of the Human Rights Defenders Forum, a civil society group organizing the protests.

“We are not targeting unseating the government.  But our issue is with Dr. Jane Ansah, who failed to manage the election,” said Trapence.
 
Trapence said the protests will continue until Ansah resigns.
 
“You cannot be intimidated because for us to do demonstration is in our [Malawi] constitution. So, for us to be intimidated because people were exercising their rights, that’s something regrettable,” he said. 
 
Political commentator Vincent Kondowe said Mutharika could have used the occasion to call for peace talks with the opposition leaders.

“I think the president coult have gone further and reach out to the opposition and probably call for dialogue and then thereafter, moving forward peacefully. Because what it means now, where the tempers are already very high, it sparks more violent protests, on the side of opposition,” said Kondowe.

The protesters said Friday that they would hold another protest in Blantyre on Monday should Ansah fail to resign by before then.
 

 

 

 

 

Nearly one in every four Americans say they never plan to retire.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey released Sunday found 23% of Americans have no plans to stop working.

Another 23% say they expect to have to work well beyond their 65th birthday.  

Financial instability is the major reason for Americans to delay retirement, the poll found.

“The average retirement age that we see in the data has gone up a little bit, but it hasn’t gone up that much,” says Anqi Chen, assistant director of savings research at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. “So people have to live in retirement much longer, and they may not have enough assets to support themselves in retirement.”

When asked how comfortable they feel about retirement, just 14% of those under age 50 and 29% of those over age 50 felt “extremely or very prepared,” for retirement. About another 4 in 10 older adults say they do feel somewhat prepared, while just about one-third feel unprepared. By comparison, 56% of younger adults say they don’t feel prepared for retirement.

About 25% of those who had already retired said they didn’t feel prepared to stop working, according to the poll. Just 38% of fully retired individuals said they “felt very or extremely prepared.”

U.S. government data shows about 1 in 5 people age 65 and older were working or searching for a job in June, the AP reports.

 

Conservative Greek opposition leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis rode to a landslide victory over leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in Sunday’s parliamentary elections and is set to become the country’s new head of government Monday.

Tsipras, rejected as the Greek leader after four years, said he called Mitsotakis, the son of a former prime minister, to congratulate him on his victory.

A combined survey of Greece’s main TV stations showed Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party leading Tsipras’ Syriza party by an average of 39.8% to 31.6%. If the trends hold, the 51-year-old Mitsotakis, a graduate of Harvard in the U.S., would have a 158-seat majority in the 300-member parliament.

The 44-year-old Tsipras, Greece’s youngest premier in more than a century, had trailed for months in pre-election surveys, with voters voicing widespread dissatisfaction over high taxes.

Greece is just beginning to recover from a massive financial crisis that included soaring unemployment and steep poverty levels. The country was forced to accept billions of dollars in financial bailouts from the International Monetary Fund, other eurozone countries and the European Central Bank that required deep spending cuts and other reforms.  

Mitsotakis has pledged to create “better” jobs through foreign investment, tax cuts and removing obstacles for businesses.

 

Iraq’s security and paramilitary forces began Sunday a military operation along the border with Syria aimed at clearing the area of Islamic State group militants, the military said in a statement.

Although Iraq declared victory against IS in July 2017, the extremists have turned into an insurgency and have carried out deadly attacks in the country.

The military said the operation that began at sunrise was being carried out by Iraqi troops and members of the Popular Mobilization Forces that largely consist of Iran-backed militias.

It said the operation will last several days and was the first phase of the Will of Victory Operation securing the western province of Anbar and the central and northern regions of Salahuddin and Nineveh.

“We press on the hands of our heroic forces that will achieve victory with the will of its heroes against the gangs of Daesh,” said Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi using an Arabic acronym to refer to IS. “May God protect you and make you victorious.”

IS once held large parts of Syria and Iraq where it declared a caliphate in 2014. The extremists lost in March the last territory they controlled in Syria.

 

Pope Francis on Sunday invited the crowd gathered in Saint Peter’s Square to join him in prayer for the “poor, unarmed people” who were killed or injured by an air strike on a detention center for migrants in Libya.
 
A United Nations assessment of the attack this week in the Tripoli suburb of Tajoura reported that more than 50 people were killed, including six children, and 130 others were injured. It said there were reports that “following the first impact, some refugees and migrants were fired upon by guards as they tried to escape.”

Pope Francis told the faithful that the “international community cannot tolerate such serious incidents.” He expressed the hope that “humanitarian corridors may be opened in an organized and concerted manner for the migrants who are most in need.”
 
Since his election, the pope has often spoken out in favor of migrants and on the need to provide assistance to people fleeing wars and famine. His first trip outside of the Vatican after being named pope in March 2013 was to the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, which for decades has borne the brunt of many of the arrivals of these desperate people.

Tomorrow on the sixth anniversary of that visit, the pope will celebrate a special Mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica. Some 250 people including migrants, refugees and people involved in assisting migrants will be taking part in the Monday morning service.
 
On Sunday the pope also told the faithful he wished to remember “all the victims of the recent massacres in Afghanistan, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.”

Meanwhile many migrants continue to attempt to reach European shores in every possible way. The Alan Kurdi, a German rescue ship, with 65 migrants on board, was heading toward Malta on Sunday after Italy refused to allow it to enter its territorial waters. The migrants will be transferred onto a vessel of the Maltese armed forces and then relocated from Malta to other European Union member states.

The Alan Kurdi is the latest of several vessels to be turned back in the last 10 days as Italy maintains its “closed ports” policy and imposes stiff fines on NGOs that break that rule in their efforts to bring migrants to safety.