Japan’s trade minister says the kimono belongs to Japan _ not to Kim Kardashian West’s shapewear brand.

West announced the line, Kimono Solutionwear, last week. But some Japanese critics on social media said the name, which the reality TV star, makeup mogul and budding lawyer trademarked, is an inappropriate take on centuries-old kimono clothing.

On Monday, West tweeted that she would launch her brand under a new name following careful thought and consideration.

Japan’s trade minister, Hiroshige Seko, said Tuesday that the kimono is globally known as belonging to Japan, and urged U.S. trademark officials to examine the case appropriately.
 
 “Kimono is Japan’s cultural pride that we boast to the world. Even in the United States, kimono is highly recognized as a Japanese thing,” Seko told reporters. “We hope the case is examined appropriately to reflect the purpose of the trademark system.”

Seko said he will dispatch senior officials to Washington next week for talks with U.S. trademark officials.  
 
The planned kimono brand also triggered a backlash in Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto, home to many kimono makers and a popular tourist destination.

Kyoto Mayor Daisaku Kadokawa, who wears a kimono at work, said in a June 28 letter to West that kimono are not only part of Japan’s cultural heritage but also the “fruit of craftsmanship and truly symbolize the sense of beauty, spirit and values of Japanese,” and that she should perhaps visit the city to “experience the essence of kimono culture.
 
“We think that the name for kimono is an asset shared with all humanity who love kimono and its culture, therefore it should not be monopolized,” said Kadokawa, who is campaigning to register kimono as a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage.
 

Ethiopia has begun restoring internet access 10 days after it was cut following the assassinations of six top government officials.

The internet shutdown affected the entire country but in recent days a few locations were able to function.  

No official explanation has been given for the internet cut but many Ethiopians suspect it was aimed at preventing government critics from communicating to wide audiences and to protect the country from fake news and disinformation. 

Ethio Telecom, the country’s state-owned monopoly of telecommunications services, also cut internet access two weeks ago during the national school exams. 

NetBlocks, an internet monitoring group, estimated Ethiopia was losing a minimum of $4.5 million a day during the internet cut.

Monsoon rains caused wall collapses that killed 27 people in India Tuesday, as a second day of bad weather disrupted rail and air traffic in the financial capital Mumbai, prompting officials to shut schools and offices, though markets were open.

During every monsoon season, which runs from June to September, India experiences fatal incidents of building and wall collapses as rainfall weakens the foundations of poorly built structures.

Heavy rain brought a wall crashing down on shanties built on a slope in Malad, a western suburb of Mumbai, a fire brigade official said, killing 18 people.

“Rescue work is still going on,” the official added. “So far we have rescued more than two dozen people.”

Three people died when a school wall collapsed in the city of Kalyan, 42 km (26 miles) north of Mumbai.

In the nearby western city of Pune, six people were killed in a wall collapse Tuesday, a fire brigade official said, after a similar incident Saturday killed 15.

India’s financial hub

Mumbai is looking to turn itself into a global financial hub, but large parts of the city struggle to cope with annual monsoon rains, as widespread construction and garbage-clogged drains and waterways make it increasingly vulnerable to chaos.

More than 300 mm (11.8 inches) of rain fell in 24 hours in some areas of Mumbai, flooding streets and railway tracks, forcing the suspension of some suburban train services, which millions of commuters ride to work each day.

About 1,000 people stranded in low-lying areas of the city were rescued after a swollen river began to overflow, municipal authorities said.

More rain

As weather officials forecast intermittent heavy showers and isolated extremely heavy rainfall, authorities called a holiday for government offices and educational institutions.

“Rain is expected to remain intense even today,” city authorities said on Twitter. “We request you to stay indoors unless there’s an emergency.”

Markets open, airport closed

Financial markets were open Tuesday, though trading volumes were expected to be lower than normal. Many firms asked employees to work from home. The main runway at Mumbai airport, India’s second biggest, was closed from midnight after a SpiceJet flight overshot the runway while landing, an airport spokeswoman said.

The secondary runway is operational, but 55 flights were diverted and another 52 were canceled because of bad weather, she said.

In 2005, floods killed more than 500 people in Mumbai, the majority in shantytown slums home to more than half the city’s population.

Asylum-seekers forced to wait in Mexico are increasingly facing violence and dire conditions, stranded in purgatory with no means to survive, according to an upcoming report from Human Rights Watch.

The international rights group called on the Trump administration to end the practice of preventing asylum-seekers from living in the United States while their cases are being considered.

As of last week, Mexico reported 15,079 people, mostly from Central America, had been sent back to Mexico after reaching the U.S. That number includes 4,780 children and at least 13 pregnant women, according to the report, which was obtained by The Associated Press and will be released Tuesday.

Attacked, kidnapped, assaulted

Several asylum-seekers interviewed by the group were attacked, kidnapped or sexually assaulted in Mexico while waiting for court hearings. When some go to the U.S. for their hearings, they lose their shelter in Mexico and have no place upon return.

Officials from the Department of Homeland Security had no immediate comment about the report.

The policy is one of the only border crackdown efforts by Trump that has not been shut down by courts. Homeland Security officials claim it is a necessary effort to stop the unmanageable flow of migrants streaming into the U.S. But there is growing outcry from humanitarian groups, lawyers and even asylum officers over the policy and what it means for safety and security, especially amid a rapid expansion following an allowance by Mexico to appease the Trump administration and avoid threatened tariffs.

Asylum-seekers have up to a year to file a claim. From October through March 31, there were 103,658 cases filed. There are tens of thousands of people crossing the border each month.

Belongings, papers taken by agents

The report also found that many asylum-seekers said their belongings, including their documents, were confiscated by Border Patrol agents. Homeland Security’s watchdog has also found that agents routinely dumped asylum-seekers’ backpacks, handbags and suitcases.

One 23-year-old asylum-seeker from Honduras, a mother, said agents took all her documents and now she has no proof that her daughter is even hers. In another case, a father said his government-issued ID was taken and he couldn’t get it back, despite needing to return to El Salvador to be with his gravely ill child. He ended up traveling to a Salvadoran consulate about 700 miles (1,120 kilometers) away and then leaving.

Another woman traveling with her 6-year-old and 3-year-old sons from Honduras said she is no longer permitted to stay in a shelter — it’s unclear why — and her court date is five months from now. She said she’s thinking of crossing illegally but is afraid the government will take her children.

The report was based on interviews and court monitoring done by the watchdog group in Mexico and the U.S. in May.

For almost two weeks, a 12-year-old migrant girl said she and her 6-year-old sister were held inside a Border Patrol station in Texas where they slept on the floor and some children were locked away when they cried for their parents.
 
She was one of hundreds of migrant children who have been held this year in holding cells at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection station near El Paso that has come under fire for holding children in squalid and unsanitary conditions.
 
In a video obtained by The Associated Press, the girl — speaking in Spanish — tells her Minnesota-based attorney Alison Griffith children were “treated badly” and were not allowed to play or bathe. The girl’s face is not visible on the video to protect her privacy and not jeopardize her immigration case.
 
El Paso, Texas, attorney Taylor Levy, who worked with the girl’s family, said she and her sister were separated from their aunt when they arrived in the U.S. on May 23. The children, from Central America, were put in the Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas, Levy said. Their aunt is still being detained.
 
Levy said the girls’ mother fled an abusive husband and arrived in the U.S. four years ago. She has applied for asylum. The girls stayed behind with their aunt, but the three headed north in May after the girls’ father threatened them, Levy said.
 
In the video, the girl says that inside the Clint station, she was given pudding, juice and a burrito she could not eat “because it tasted very bad.”
 
“There are some children, like the age of my sister, they cried for their mother or their father. They cried for their aunt. They missed them,” she said. “They cried and they were locked up.”
 
The attorneys discussed the case on the condition that the AP not release the girl’s name or her country of origin out of concern for her family’s safety.
 
Lawyers who visited the Clint facility last month after the girls had already been released said the conditions were perilous, with more than 250 children trying to take care of each other, passing toddlers between them, with inadequate food, water and sanitation.
 
Customs and Border Protection officials have repeatedly said the agency is “in a crisis mode” with too many immigrants and not enough resources.
 
Customs gave journalists a tour of the Clint Border Station on June 26, and a congressional delegation visited Monday.
 
In a facility designed to temporarily hold 100 adults, there were 117 children when AP visited, well below the 700 children Border Patrol said were detained there at one point earlier this year.
 
On Friday, a federal judge ordered that an independent monitor appointed last year move “post haste” to improve conditions at Border Patrol stations, where children are supposed to be held just 72 hours. In the Clint station, some had been held almost a month.
 
Levy said she helped reunite the 12-year-old girl and her sister with their mother. The mother flew to Texas from Minnesota to pick them up on June 3 after a Border Patrol official told her the girls had been repeatedly hospitalized with the flu.
 
“It was an incredibly difficult reunification. The kids were just highly, highly traumatized,” Levy said.

Costa Rica’s education minister Edgar Mora resigned Monday following protests against policies including his support for gender-neutral bathrooms, in a sign the cultural issues that dominated last year’s presidential election remain divisive.

Protesters included members of the Pentecostal Christian-aligned opposition party, as well as transportation and education groups. They criticized Mora on multiple fronts, including his proposal to allow transgender students to use the bathroom according to the gender with which they identify.

Catholic, Evangelical opposition

The 2018 election cycle was marked by clashes between Pentecostal Christian candidate Fabricio Alvarado Munoz over his criticism of same-sex marriage and what he called “gender ideology” that he said was promoted by the center-left ruling party.

Though the center-left candidate prevailed, with the election of President Carlos Alvarado Quesada, nearly 40% of the final vote went to its conservative opponent.

Costa Rica is famed for its laid-back way of life and progressive environmental policies. But it is also a bastion of traditional Catholic values, with a fast-growing evangelical community. Former minister Mora identifies as an atheist.

Port blockaded

The protest against Mora’s policies included blockades that cut off access to one of Costa Rica’s Caribbean ports, creating up to $10 million in daily losses, according to Laura Bonilla, spokeswoman for the Chamber of Exporters business group.

Protests began last week. At the time, Alvarado Quesada refused to push Mora out. The minister walked away from his role Monday after the news of the blockades.

“I hope that after my resignation, an avenue of dialogue will open,” Mora said in a press conference Monday afternoon.

But leaders who had taken to the streets said Mora’s departure would not be enough to end the protests.

The blockades were carried out by transport groups who joined with educators and students. Elected members of the opposition who took office in 2018 also supported the movement, which also opposed Mora’s policies to change the way students were evaluated.

A leader of the truck drivers, Quirico Alpizar, told the press that Mora’s ideology violated Christian doctrine.

Sri Lanka’s police chief and the nation’s former defense secretary should be charged with crimes against humanity as a result of their inability to prevent the Easter bombings that killed 258 people, the state’s prosecutor said Monday. 

According to Attorney General Dappula de Livera, the Inspector General of Police Pujith Jayasundara and Defense Secretary Hemasiri Fernando ignored intelligence information forecasting the attack. 

“The two officials should be brought before a magistrate for their criminal negligence to prevent the April 21 attacks,” wrote de Livera to the acting police chief.  

“Their negligence amounts to what is known under international law to be grave crimes against humanity.” 

Fernando has since resigned his position and Jayasundara was suspended. 

Indian Intelligence shared a report of targets for an attack with Sri Lankan officials on April 4, over two weeks in advance of the attacks on April 21. President Maithripala Sirisena alleged that the police chief and defense minister failed to act on the intelligence.  

Both Fernando and Jayasundara have denied the allegations that they were negligent in the weeks leading up to the attacks.  
  
Jayasundara told a parliamentary committee that the president offered him a diplomatic job if he were to take the blame for bombings. 

Fernando told parliament that the president had ordered him to keep a member off Sri Lanka’s security council. 

Both men also accused Sirisena of not doing enough to prevent the attacks. 

Following the testimonies by Fernando and Jayasundara, the president has said that he would not accept the committee’s conclusion.

When Viola Davis started her production company nearly a decade ago, she was determined to bring about change in Hollywood with a strategic mandate: Normalize people of color on screen.

“We’re not social statements. We’re not mythical creatures all the time … you can literally put pen to paper and write a great story that includes people of color, and it could actually sell,” the Oscar winner said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
 
Now, in the era of Time’s Up and #MeToo, the call for diversity on all levels has been amplified. Some actors and directors have publicly called for 50-50 inclusion riders, contractual stipulations for the diversity of a film’s cast and crew. But Davis says she doesn’t need a piece of paper to do the right thing, and her projects don’t try to replicate diversity simply based on statistics.

“Maybe that’s narcissistic of me, but I don’t want to tell my daughter that because she’s 12 percent of the population, she only deserves 12 percent of the pie,” Davis said.

She calls her JuVee Productions a “walking metaphor” of inclusion, noting that she has people of color and members of the LGBTQ community on staff at every level. 
 
“Women are at the forefront of just about every project,” she added.

She started JuVee Productions with her husband, Julius Tennon, in 2011 so she could have more of a voice in her own career, as well as provide more diversity on set. Before that, Davis says, she often felt left out of the conversation.  

Davis spoke to the AP while promoting a documentary on diabetes, “A Touch of Sugar.” The actress, who has an early form of the disease and has lost family members to it, wants to use her celebrity to help raise awareness.

“That’s what I can do. I’m not a politician. I’m not a senator. I’m not in the House of Representatives. I’m not in Congress. What I am is an artist. That’s how I provoke change,” Davis said.

Earlier this month, she signed on to Netflix’s adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” to be produced by Denzel Washington and co-starring Chadwick Boseman.

And JuVee has a slate of films on the horizon, including “Emanuel,” a documentary released this month that explores life in a Charleston, South Carolina, community after a self-avowed white supremacist killed nine African Americans at a church there in 2015. The story focuses on the victims’ family members, friends and community, and their efforts to heal through faith and forgiveness after the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Church. Dylann Roof was convicted of federal hate-crime and obstruction-of-religion charges and sentenced to death.

Davis also has a feature film in development, “The Personal History of Rachel Dupree,” in which she stars. It is based on the Ann Weisgarber novel about a pregnant woman struggling to survive with her homesteading family in the early 1900s.
 

The solid economy is doing little to bolster support for President Donald Trump.

Americans give Trump mixed reviews for his economic stewardship despite the growth achieved during this presidency, according to a new survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Nearly two-thirds describe as “good” an economy that appears to have set a record for the longest expansion in U.S. history, with decade-long growth that began under Barack Obama. More people consider the economy to be good today than did at the start of the year.

But significantly fewer approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, even as it remains a relative strength compared with other issues. The survey indicates that most Americans do not believe they’re personally benefiting from his trade policies. And only 17% said they received a tax cut, despite government and private sector figures showing that a clear majority of taxpayers owed less after the president’s tax overhaul passed in 2017.

These doubts create a possible vulnerability as Trump highlights the economy’s solid performance in his campaign for re-election in 2020. During two nights of debates last week, almost every Democratic presidential candidate found ways to criticize the president by decrying the wealth gap.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said it was evidence of “corruption.” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders railed against the concentration of wealth in the three richest Americans, while former Vice President Joe Biden said Trump thinks Wall Street, not the middle class, built America.

Christel Bastida, 39, a neuroscience researcher, was active in Democratic politics last year during the Senate race in Texas and plans to run for Houston City Council.

“I personally don’t feel more secure financially and I think that’s the case for a lot of people who are middle class,” she said. “A lot of working-class people are not comfortable now. I know there were tax breaks that were supposed to be helpful to people, but it turns out they’re helpful to billionaires and corporations and I’m neither.”

Nearly half of Americans, 47%, approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, but his overall approval rating – 38% – is low compared with what past presidents have enjoyed in strong economic conditions. Only about 4 in 10 Americans approve of his handling of taxes and trade negotiations.
The public skepticism has persisted even as the president routinely congratulates himself on the economy, including the 3.6% unemployment rate and stock market gains.

He tweeted last week: “The Stock Market went up massively from the day after I won the Election, all the way up to the day that I took office, because of the enthusiasm for the fact that I was going to be President. That big Stock Market increase must be credited to me.”

The 2017 tax overhaul was sold by the administration as a way to return more income to everyday Americans. But the poll shows nearly half say they think their taxes stayed the same or are unsure; 33% said they increased. This suggests the tax cuts may have been too modest to notice or were eaten up by daily expenses, or that people were disappointed with their refunds.

That feeling of being left behind has energized Democrats seeking to turn out the vote next year. The tax overhaul disproportionately favored corporations and the wealthy, allowing Democrats to say the tax cuts were fundamentally unfair.

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say the amount they paid in taxes increased in the last year, 42% versus 25%, while more Republicans say their taxes decreased, 25% versus 10%.

Nor are tariffs popular.

Trump has imposed a tax on roughly $250 billion worth of Chinese imports, part of an effort to force the world’s second-largest economy to trade on more favorable terms with the United States. China retaliated with their own tariffs that hit the U.S. agricultural sector, causing the Trump administration to provide aid to farmers with lost profits.

The president has also threatened tariffs on Mexico in order to get that country to reduce the border-crossings into the United States and has mused about hitting European autos with import taxes as well.

A mere 15% of Americans said the tariffs will help them and their family.

With regards to the national economy, just 26% said the tariffs will help, a sharp decline from 40% who said that last August. About half said the tariffs will be harmful.

Republicans, in particular, are less optimistic: Half think Trump’s tariffs will help the economy, down from 7 in 10 in August.

Ryan Brueggemann, 37, of New Berlin, Wisconsin, runs a dairy farm with his brother. He supports Trump but dislikes the tariffs, though he understands why the president has deployed them so frequently.

“I don’t believe it’s a great business practice to use them,” Brueggemann said. “But it came down to the point where our country is being taken advantage of unfairly and that the only way other nations were going to listen to what we wanted to renegotiate and even get them to the table to think about it was to get their attention by putting some tariffs on products.”

Paul Miller, 81, a retired shoe factory foreman from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, said he still intends to vote for Trump, since he hasn’t seen anyone better yet in the Democratic field.

Living off his pension and Social Security, Miller said the tax cuts were basically irrelevant for him.  And he doesn’t agree with the president’s claim that China is paying for the tariffs, rather than U.S. consumers and companies.

“I sort of have mixed feelings about the tariffs,” he said. “Of course, I don’t believe it when Trump says we won’t have to pay them. We will.”

The AP-NORC poll of 1,116 adults was conducted June 13-17 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4 percentage points. Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods and were interviewed later online or by phone.
 

Democrat Pete Buttigieg said Monday that he took in $24.8 million during the second fundraising quarter, more than triple what the South Bend, Indiana, mayor raised during the first three months of the year for his surprise hit presidential campaign.

Buttigieg was the first White House contender to announce his fundraising numbers for the quarter, which ended at midnight. His haul amounts to a show of force at a critical early juncture in the race where fundraising figures, and the number of people giving to a campaign, aren’t just indicators of viability but criteria for qualifying for the debate stage in September.

“Pete has proved why he is a top-tier candidate for the nomination,” campaign manager Mike Schmuhl wrote in an email to supporters. “From town halls on MSNBC, CNN, and FOX News to last week’s debate, he’s shown the country what I’ve known for a long time: Pete is the best person to bring a new generation of leadership to Washington.”

Buttigieg, 37, surprised many people with a first-quarter haul of roughly $7 million that topped many of his better-known rivals and helped place him in the upper echelon of a crowded 2020 field that has drawn more than 20 contenders. His latest numbers further cement him as a leading candidate and are sure to draw notice from rival campaigns, many of whom have struggled to raise money.

The $24.8 million sum tops the $18 million raised last quarter by Bernie Sanders, who led the Democratic field in fundraising during that period.   

More importantly, Buttigieg is doing well enough in public opinion polls and has received contributions from more than 400,000 people, which secured his spot in the September debates.

Democratic National Committee requires participants to hit 2% in multiple polls and 130,000 individual donors. Though many campaigns are worried, DNC Chairman Tom Perez has resisted pressure to relax the requirements.

Currently, the only other locks for the fall debates are former Vice President Joe Biden, Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and California Sen. Kamala Harris.

Buttigieg’s campaign says he has $22.6 million cash on hand and received money from donors from all 50 states, as well as U.S. territories, with an average contribution of about $47.

But his fundraising figures could come with caveats. For example, Buttigieg may be accepting donations that he could only spend during the general election. That would allow him to inflate his totals by allowing donors to give a $2,800 check for the primary, as well as an additional $2,800 for the general.

Buttigieg’s campaign has not said how much general election money is included in the total, though spokesman Chris Meagher said they do accept those donations when they are given.

So far, none of Buttigieg’s rivals have released their quarterly fundraising figures, which don’t have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission until July 15.

Last month, however, Biden hinted that he had raised a similar amount.

Biden said at a New York fundraiser that his campaign had amassed 360,000 donors, who gave an average of $55 apiece. The math suggests he collected about $19.8 million since entering the race in April, but his campaign declined to confirm the figure at the time.

Two more members of the Congressional Black Caucus are backing Kamala Harris’s bid for the presidency: Reps. Bobby Rush of Illinois and Frederica Wilson of Florida.

Endorsements from the caucus, which counts more than 50 members, could be influential in the Democratic presidential primary. With these two new supporters, Harris now has six endorsements from the CBC.

Rush has been sharply critical of former Vice President Joe Biden in the wake of comments in which he recalled working alongside two segregationist Southern senators. Rush told Politico that Biden, another Democratic presidential candidate, was “wholly out of touch and woefully ignorant of the nuances of the black American experience.” Rush will serve as Harris’ Illinois campaign chair.

Rush said Harris was “the only candidate prepared to fight for all Americans against a Trump Administration that has left them behind” and that she is a “once-in-a-lifetime leader” who “exemplifies what global leadership is all about.”

Harris and Biden clashed during the first Democratic primary debate after Harris, who is black, directly challenged Biden over his history of opposing school integration through federally ordered busing. Harris said Biden’s recollections of working with the two senators were hurtful.

Harris’s campaign announced on Saturday that she had raised $2 million in the first 24 hours following the start of Thursday’s debate. Aides to her campaign said she received donations from 63,277 people, and that 58 percent of those donors had not contributed to her campaign before.

The U.S. Institute of Peace is training and working with Kenyan women as they build trust within their communities to prevent violent extremism. The program comes as Kenya struggles to halt the recruitment efforts of Islamist militant group al-Shabab.

The organization Sisters Without Borders was formed in 2014. One of its missions is to bridge the mistrust between Kenyan security agencies and families of terrorism suspects.

The organization includes at least 20 women’s groups from Nairobi, Mombasa and Garissa, all of which have seen deadly terrorist attacks by the Islamist militant group al-Shabab.

Sureya Hirsi, a member of the sisters’ group from Mombasa, attended the conference in Nairobi. She says it is time for women to take an active role in the fight against terrorism.

“The reason I joined this sisters group, it’s because I have been affected, I have family members, people whom I know, I know youths who have been recruited, and this is happening because as a community we don’t speak up about these issues. As a woman who is lucky and also educated, I have decided to be on the frontline to help my community so that we can speak about these issues that affect our community.”

Nicoletta Barbera, a program officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace, says women can play a key role in preventing young people from going down the terrorist path.

“The women that we work with, the sisters without borders are integrated within their communities, they live, work, and serve. They are very aware of the threats that are in their homes, in their markets, in their communities. We enable them to identify those potential individuals who are prone in engaging in violent extremism and give them the skills to try to mitigate them at the very beginning when they see those initial signs of radicalization,” Barbera said.

Kenya National Counterterrorism Center Director Martin Kimani says that kind of ground-level activism is exactly what the country needs.

“We in the security services are hunting and looking for recruiters to put them behind bars where they belong. But radicalization continues to be a problem.  That problem is going to need for the county level actions to get radicalization, to where, for example, Kenya got HIV/AIDS where everybody could speak about it, everybody knows what it is and everybody know their role in how to stop it and protect it each other from getting into that kind of life,” Kimani said.

Kenya has been prime recruiting territory for al-Shabab since 2011, when the government sent troops into Somalia to fight militants.

Al-Shabab has been responsible for several major terrorist attacks, the worst coming in 2015, when al-Shabab fighters stormed Garissa University College, killing nearly 150 people.

Five Japanese whaling ships set off Monday to begin the first commercial whale hunt in more than 30 years.

Japan stopped commercial whaling in 1988 after the International Whaling Commission (IWC) imposed a moratorium on killing the giant mammals.

But despite the global ban, Japan continued to hunt whales for what it claimed was scientific research. Critics have long disputed that claim, calling it commercial whaling in disguise.

In the 2017-2018 whaling season, Japanese sailors killed 333 minke whales in Antarctic waters. More than 120 were pregnant females.

In December, Japan announced it was leaving the IWC June 30.

The whaling fleet sailed from the port of Kushiro, on the northern island of Hokkaido. They will hunt minke, sei and Bryde’s whales in Japanese waters.

Japan’s return to commercial whaling has created an international outcry.

“Japan leaving the IWC and defying international law to pursue its commercial whaling ambitions is renegade, retrograde and myopic,” said Kitty Block, president of Humane Society International. “It is undermining its international reputation for an industry whose days are so clearly numbered, to produce a product for which demand has plummeted.”

But some experts say Japan’s move might be a blessing in disguise for some whales, because it will mean that Japan will stop hunting whales in the Southern Ocean, the Atlantic and other sensitive locations.

Japan’s Fisheries Agency set a quota at 227 whales for this year.
 

Senior U.S. officials were on hand in Jerusalem Sunday for the opening of part of what is believed to be an ancient Roman-era road to the Jewish temple, angering Palestinians and some Israeli historians.

Ambassador David Friedman, Mideast peace negotiator Jason Greenblatt, and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham attended the unveiling.

The City of David Foundation, which organized Sunday’s ceremony, says visitors will now be able to “touch history” and walk the 300-meter-long portion of the road through a tunnel, uphill to where the Jewish temple stood more than 2,000 years ago in what is now east Jerusalem.

“Were there ever any doubts about the accuracy, the wisdom, the propriety of President Trump recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, I certainly think this lays all doubts to rest,” Friedman said.

Work on the project was carried out in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan. The Palestinian Authority condemned the project as another example of pushing the Palestinians out of Jerusalem. 

“The Israeli occupation is trying to legalize colonial practices in Jerusalem by using a religious cover. Friedman and Greenblatt are ready to fake history for this colonial purpose,” it said.

A group of Israelis who oppose what they call the politicization of archeology also said it resented the American officials being at Sunday’s event, calling it “a political act, which is the closest the U.S. will have come to recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem.”

Greenblatt dismissed the criticism, as “ludicrous,” tweeting: “We can’t “Judaize’ what history/archeology show. We can acknowledge it and you can stop pretending it isn’t true. Peace can only be built on truth.”

Israel regards all of Jerusalem as its capital. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.
 

Anti-government protesters in Hong Kong blocked main roads early Monday to limit access to a ceremony marking the anniversary of the city’s handover to China.

Senior officials from Hong Kong and mainland China are to attend the annual flag-raising on the 22nd anniversary of the handover on July 1, 1997.

Pro-democracy activists have called for a march as they have on every anniversary. This year the march is expected to be larger than usual because of widespread opposition to a government proposal that would allow suspects to be extradited to mainland China to face charges.

It will be the third protest in three weeks against the extradition bill.

The government has already postponed debate on the bill indefinitely, leaving it to die. But protest leaders want the legislation formally withdrawn. They are also calling for Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam to resign.

On Sunday, government supporters held a pro-police rally. Hong Kong police have come under criticism for using tear gas and rubber bullets during a crackdown on a protest that left dozens injured June 12.
 

New York staged a huge Gay Pride march Sunday, one of several in major U.S. cities marking the 50th anniversary of the clash between police and gay patrons at the city’s Stonewall Inn bar that sparked the modern gay rights movement.

The New York parade could attract three million rainbow flag-waving supporters. More than 650 contingents with 150,000 people, including community groups, corporations, politicians and celebrities, are planning to march through the city’s streets.

“I believe we are going to have the greatest Pride celebration in the history of the globe,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio, a vocal defender of gay rights and a Democratic presidential candidate.

In Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, the city’s first openly gay mayor, is one of seven grand marshals for its parade.

The annual celebration of gay rights has its origin in the June 1969 riots sparked by repeated police raids on Stonewall Inn, a prominent gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. The riots proved to be a pivotal touchpoint in the LGBTQ community’s struggle for civil rights.

The smaller Queer Liberation March started Sunday morning at the bar, with its organizers saying that the Pride march had become too commercialized and heavily policed.