The U.S.-South Korean alliance is strained by their differences over military pacts, and if the allies fail to reach agreements, Seoul’s national security could be at risk, experts said.

The pressure stems from two military agreements nearing expiration: Seoul’s intelligence sharing pact with Tokyo, set to expire Nov. 23, and Seoul’s defense cost sharing deal with Washington, expiring Dec. 31.

“There’s a lot of pressure on the alliance right now,” said Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the Rand Corp. research center. “Because of that pressure, the alliance is not quite as strong as it’s been at some points in the past.”

Seoul has been refusing Washington’s demands to reverse its decision to terminate an intelligence-sharing pact with Tokyo.

Withdrawal from GSOMIA

In August, Seoul announced it would withdraw from General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) with Tokyo. That came during a trade row that broke out in the summer, a disagreement rooted in South Korea’s historical grievances over forced labor during the Japanese colonial period from 1910 to 1940.

Washington sees GSOMIA as a crucial vehicle for its two allies to share sensitive military information, such as threats from North Korea or to communicate during a crisis.

“The U.S. government has ratcheted up considerable public pressure on South Korea not to go through with its GSOMIA nonrenewal decision,” said Scott Snyder, director of the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The U.S. sees GSOMIA less as a Japan issue than a regional security issue, while South Korea seems to be approaching GSOMIA solely in the context of bilateral relations with Japan,” he said.

Defense cost sharing

Adding to the pressure is Washington’s push for Seoul to pay $5 billion next year to share the costs of maintaining 28,500 American troops in South Korea.

The U.S. made the request during the last round of negotiations for the Special Measures Agreement (SMA) in Honolulu in October, and the increase is more than five times the $924 million that South Korea agreed to shoulder this year.

“Seoul and Washington will have to eventually compromise on defense cost sharing,” Snyder said, adding, “But how the issue is managed will have an impact on the quality of the relationship. Both sides need to bear that in mind.”

In considering how to reconcile the differences, Bennett said the allies have to bear in mind Pyongyang’s objective, which is to break the alliance so North Korea can have military superiority over South Korea, which it sees as a threat.

North Korea’s objective “has been to break the alliance totally, have U.S. forces completely withdrawn from Korea, no plan to bring them back to Korea, end the nuclear umbrella,” Bennett said. “If it’s got military superiority, the question is how does it decide to use that superiority? Does it invade the South? Perhaps, but maybe it only coerces the South and tells the South, ‘Look, we’re prepared to live peacefully. Just give us a hundred trillion won (about $85 billion) a year to help us build up our economy.’”

David Stilwell, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, met with South Korean officials in Seoul this week to discuss GSOMIA.

James DeHart, U.S. negotiator in the defense cost-sharing talks with South Korea, is in Seoul to gauge public sentiment ahead of another round of negotiations to take place in Seoul later this month.

According to a survey published by the government-funded Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), 96% of South Koreans do not want Seoul to pay an increased share of its defense cost, although 91% think the U.S. military presence is necessary in South Korea.

Annual defense talks

The Pentagon on Thursday said Secretary of Defense Mark Esper will be in Seoul Nov. 15 to attend annual defense talks, the Security Consultative Meeting. He will meet with South Korean Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo and discuss security issues surrounding the alliance and “bilateral defense cooperation.”

Experts think Seoul should renew GSOMIA but that the U.S. has overburdened Seoul with a steep increase in SMA.

David Maxwell, a former U.S. Special Forces colonel and current fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the relationship of the allies could be further strained if Seoul does not renew GSOMIA.

“The best way out of this is for [South Korean] President Moon [Jae-in] to seize the moral high ground, and he needs to stand up and say he is not going to withdraw from GSOMIA because he is going to put the national security of Korea and the alliance with the United States and trilateral coordination with the United States and Japan first,” Maxwell said.

He continued, “If he doesn’t, I think there will be further strain in the ROK-U.S. alliance … because I think the United States is going to remain very disappointed.”

Gary Samore, White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction during the Obama administration, expects the GSOMIA issue to be resolved but said, “SMA is more difficult to resolve because [President Donald] Trump is asking for an unreasonable increase.”

Bennett thinks Seoul would not be able to meet the increased cost demand in SMA because of constraints in its defense budget.

“That’s a major hit and a major disruption of the alliance for South Korea to have to give up that much money,” he said. “I just don’t see that as being feasible. If you look at the defense budget, you can’t cut salaries. You can’t do much to cut operations and maintenance. Acquisition [for weapons] is what you’d have to cut to provide even one trillion won [$850 million], and there’s just no slack there.”

If Seoul does not renew GSOMIA with Tokyo against the U.S., and if Washington and Seoul do not come to a compromise on SMA by the deadline, experts believe South Korean national security could be at risk.

Far-reaching effect

Consequences of Seoul’s permanent decision to terminate GSOMIA could have a far-reaching effect in a wartime crisis, Bennett said, because Japan plays a critical role in the U.S. military support for South Korea. He added GSOMIA is more than just for sharing intelligence during peacetime.

“If a war suddenly broke out, it gives us a vehicle through which other sensitive information about military operations and so forth could be shared. This is really about can the U.S. support Korea as well as it would like to given that it needs Japan’s assistance to do that?” Bennett said.

GSOMIA is particularly crucial, he said, when South Korea is expected to slash its military manpower by 2020 and American troops would need to be brought from the U.S. through Japanese military bases to reinforce military forces on the Korean Peninsula in wartime, which requires Seoul to share information with Tokyo.

“The question is: Does South Korea really want to delay the deployment of U.S. forces to South Korea when it’s also reducing its own ability to repel a North Korean invasion?” Bennett said.

The South Korean government said it will reduce the number of its troops to 500,000 by 2020. In 2018, it had 599,000 troops, and the number is expected to fall to 225,000 in 2025 because of the country’s declining fertility rate.

As a tradeoff, South Korea is looking into reforming its military to rely more on technologies such as unmanned aircrafts and weaponized drones.

However, this clashes with Washington’s demand that Seoul pay more for its share of defense costs, which Bennett said most likely needs to come out of Seoul’s defense budget marked for the research and development and acquisition of weapons. In that case, Seoul’s ability to devote funds to develop and purchase military technologies could be curtailed.

“Everything South Korea is trying to acquire are critical systems,” Bennett said. “It would be interesting to ask the Americans to propose what exactly [South] Korea should cut from its defense budget in order to provide the money that President Trump is asking because that puts it into more realistic terms.”

If the allies do not come to a comprise on SMA, Seoul faces a potential risk of U.S. troops being withdrawn from South Korea, Maxwell said.

If the SMA expires Dec. 31, U.S. forces in Korea will be not be able to function normally because military personnel will need to be diverted from their regular duties, such as performing military operations and trainings, to support logistics and administrative work provided by South Korean workers who will be furloughed, Maxwell said.

“If there is not an agreement, then we are in a real difficult situation because we cannot leave the U.S. military forces on the peninsula and not be able to train and maintain readiness,” he said. “The question is going to be how long will the U.S. government, the U.S. military in the U.S. government allow that to go on before they make a decision [to withdraw], which of course, is the most damaging thing to the alliance.”

Thousands of people marched in Paris and other French cities against Islamophobia targeting Western Europe’s largest Muslim population.

Muslims joining the march through the rainy streets of the capital say they have had enough.

Mohamed, here with his sister Khadija, says the two feel completely integrated in French society. But he says he’s faced discrimination — including being asked to change his name during a job interview to something more traditionally French.

A recent IFOP poll finds four in 10 French Muslims also believe they are discriminated against because of their religion. Another survey finds more than 60 percent of respondents considered Islam incompatible with French values.

While anti-Islamic attacks are not new, several recent events helped catalyze this protest. Last month, two Muslims were shot and seriously wounded outside a mosque in southwestern France.

France’s conservative Senate also approved an amendment banning veiled women from accompanying their children on school outings. The lower house is unlikely to pass it. But it followed an incident where a far-right lawmaker demanded a woman visiting a regional council to remove her headscarf — leaving her son in tears.

Wafa, a mother of three, says she’s had a similar experience. She’s a trained computer technician, but she says she can’t find a job because of her veil.

Sixty-eight-year-old Julia Fernandez was among the many non-Muslims who joined the march.

She likened the current climate to the anti-Semitism of the 1930s, before the Holocaust.

Still the march was controversial, with some of the organizers accused of ties to fundamentalist Islam. A number of leftist politicians opted not to join the protest.

A frontrunner in Afghanistan’s recently held presidential election called Sunday for immediately halting a recount of the vote, casting aspersions on the integrity and legitimacy of the already delayed electoral process.

Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah made the demand a day after unilaterally withdrawing his team’s election observers from the recounting process ahead of Thursday’s scheduled announcement of the preliminary results from the September 28 polls.

The country’s Independent Election Commission (IEC) was due to release first results on October 19 but failed to meet the deadline, citing capacity issues and efforts aimed at ensuring transparency of the process.  

Incumbent President Ashraf Ghani, Abdullah’s lead challenger and ruling partner in the Afghan unity government, has so far not withdrawn from the process.

The fourth Afghan presidential election has been marred by record-low turnout and allegations of fraud, prompting continued bickering between Abdullah and Ghani.

Other presidential candidates also have accused Ghani of misusing state resources to run his campaign and try to manipulate the outcome in his favor, charges the president’s campaign leaders reject.

The initial turnout from a total of 9.6 million registered Afghan voters in an estimated 37 million population of the country stood at around 25%, the lowest turnout of any Afghan election.

The IEC has already discarded nearly a million votes for irregularities, leaving about 1.8 million ballots officials say have been retrieved from biometric machines used on the polling day to deter fraud.

Abdullah accused IEC of attempting to “legitimize fraud” and include votes into account that do not fulfil biometric verification standards or were cast outside the official ballot timeframe on the polling day.

“The election commission must stop the partial recount process until it has addressed our concerns about the newly 300,000 controversial votes,” he stressed.

In its reaction to Abdullah’s warning, a spokesman for the IEC explained to VOA presidential candidates will have the right to approach the Independent Election Complaints Commission and submit their concerns once the counting process is concluded.

All previous elections held in Afghanistan since the ouster of the Taliban government in 2001 were marred by allegations of widespread fraud and rigging, prompting the IEC to use biometric devices for the first time in the just concluded presidential polls.

Ghani and Abdullah have each already claimed victory, raising fears of a repeat of what happened in the 2014 fraud-marred presidential election. The United States at the time had to intervene to help the two men negotiate a power-sharing deal, ending months of nationwide chaos.

The Israeli Cabinet has approved hard-line politician Naftali Bennett as defense minister in the country’s caretaker government.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Bennet, with whom he has a rocky relationship, last week.

Netanyahu appears to be trying to shore up support among his right-wing base. He’s hoping to block attempts by his chief rival, Benny Gantz, to form Israel’s next government.

The Cabinet voted Sunday for Bennett to become defense minister until a permanent government takes hold.

Gantz is in the process of trying to cobble together a majority coalition after inconclusive elections in September.

Netanyahu had the first try at forming a government, but failed.

Bennett, who leads the New Right party, has demanded tougher military action against militants in Gaza.

Police and organizers say more than 100,000 people took part in an open-air party celebrating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
 
Despite the cold and damp, crowds flocked to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate late Saturday for music and fireworks.
 
The boulevard leading up to the Brandenburg Gate was covered with a giant rainbow-colored net made of 100,000 streamers, many with messages of love and peace, created by American artist Patrick Shearn.
 
Elsewhere in the city, images and video of the events around the Nov. 9, 1989 fall of the wall were projected onto buildings.
 
In the once-divided town of Moedlareuth, auto enthusiasts re-enacted the moment when East Germans first cross the border in their modest `Trabi’ cars to the cheers of welcoming West Germans.
   

Iran has discovered a new oil field in the country’s south with over 50 billion barrels of crude oil, its president said Sunday, a find that could boost the country’s proven reserves by a third as it struggles to sell energy abroad over U.S. sanctions.

The announcement by Hassan Rouhani comes as Iran faces crushing American sanctions after the U.S. pulled out of its nuclear deal with world powers last year. 

Rouhani made the announcement Sunday in a speech in the desert city of Yazd. He said the field was located in Iran’s southern Khuzestan province, home to its crucial oil industry. 

Some 53 billion barrels would be added to Iran’s proven reserves of some 150 billion, he said. 

“I am telling the White House that in the days when you sanctioned the sale of Iranian oil, the country’s workers and engineers were able to discover 53 billion barrels of oil,” Rouhani said, according to the semi-official Fars news agency. 

Oil reserves refer to crude that’s economically feasible to extract. Figures can vary wildly by country due to differing standards, though it remains a yardstick of comparison among oil-producing nations. 

Iran currently has the world’s fourth-largest proven deposits of crude oil and the world’s second-largest deposits of natural gas. It shares a massive offshore field in the Persian Gulf with Qatar. 

The new oil field could become Iran’s second-largest field after one containing 65 billion barrels in Ahvaz. The field is 2,400 square kilometers (925 square miles), with the deposit some 80 meters (260 feet) deep, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency. 

Since the U.S. withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal, the other countries involved — Germany, France, Britain, Russia and China — have been struggling to save it. However, they’ve offered no means by which Iran can sell its oil abroad. Iran since has gone beyond the deal’s stockpile and enrichment limits, as well as started using advanced centrifuges barred by the deal. It just began injecting uranium gas into centrifuges at an underground facility as well. 

The collapse of the nuclear deal coincided with a tense summer of mysterious attacks on oil tankers and Saudi oil facilities that the U.S. blamed on Iran. Tehran denied the allegation, though it did seize oil tankers and shoot down a U.S. military surveillance drone. 

Australian firefighters raced Sunday to contain widespread bushfires that have left three people dead, and warned of “catastrophic” fire conditions ahead, including around the country’s biggest city of Sydney.

Authorities upgraded the forecast for the greater Sydney region to catastrophic fire danger on Tuesday, the first time the city has been rated at that level since new fire danger ratings were introduced in 2009.

“High temperatures, strong winds and low humidity are forecast, making conditions dangerous,” the New South Wales state Rural Fire Service said in a statement.

Conditions on Tuesday in the greater Hunter region north of Sydney were also rated as catastrophic, the highest level of bushfire danger, while extreme or severe conditions were predicted for other parts of the state.

“If a fire starts and takes hold during catastrophic fire danger conditions, lives and homes will be at risk,” the statement said.

Australia is suffering one of its worst bushfire seasons, which is occurring even before the start of the Southern Hemisphere summer, with parts of the country crippled by severe drought.

Three people have died in New South Wales since Friday, when a record number of emergency-level fires were declared in the state, and at least 150 homes have been destroyed.

Five people were listed by authorities as missing on Saturday afternoon, but local media said Sunday they had now been accounted for.

By Sunday afternoon, about half of the more than 70 fires burning in New South Wales were still not under control, with two burning at an emergency level.

Education authorities said more than 40 schools in New South Wales would be shut on Monday due to the fires.

Further north in Queensland, more than 50 fires were burning on Sunday, with emergency warnings in place for two fires.

Thousands of residents in Queensland have been evacuated and authorities warned severe fire danger was expected on Wednesday, with little reprieve this year.

“There is really no rainfall, no significant rainfall, until at least the end of the year and possibly into the new year,” Queensland Fire and Emergency Services acting commissioner Mike Wassing told a news conference on Sunday.

Cambodia Sunday released opposition leader Kem Sokha from house arrest. He was arrested two years ago and charged with treason.  

A court said Sunday that Sokha is now banned from politics and cannot leave the country. 

Sokha’s release came a day after self-exiled Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy arrived in Malaysia in his attempt to return to Cambodia. 

Rainsy had promised to return to his homeland from Paris by Saturday, Cambodia’s 66th Independence Day. He said he was coming back to restore democracy in Cambodia. 

It is not immediately clear if Rainsy will be allowed to enter Cambodia. 

Sokha and Rainsy are the co-founders of the now-outlawed Cambodia National Rescue Party.  

A strong cyclone made landfall early Sunday in Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of people have moved to shelters across the low-lying delta nation’s vast coastal region.

Packing winds of up to 120 kilometers (75 miles) per hour and gusts of up to 130 kph (80 mph), Cyclone Bulbul weakened when it started crossing Bangladesh’s southwestern coastal region, dumping incessant rains across the country. No casualties were reported immediately.

The weather office said the cyclone slammed ashore at Sagar Island in the southern part of India’s West Bengal state. Its path included the southwestern Khulna region, which has the world’s largest mangrove forest, the Sundarbans, which straddles the Bangladesh-India border.

Up to 1.8 million people were expected to be evacuated by Saturday evening, said Enamur Rahman, Bangladesh’s junior disaster management minister. More than 5,000 shelters had been prepared.

The weather office said coastal districts were likely to be inundated by storm surges of 1{-2 meters (5-7 feet) above normal tide because of the impact of the cyclone.

Several ships from Bangladesh’s navy and coast guard were kept ready in parts of the region for an emergency response, the TV station Independent reported.

The storm is also expected to impact parts of northeastern India, where precautions were being taken.

Rahman said the government suspended weekend leave for government officials in 13 coastal districts.

On Saturday, volunteers used loudspeakers to ask people to move to shelters in Chittagong and other regions, according to the Disaster Management Ministry. In the Cox’s Bazar coastal district, tourists were alerted to stay in their hotels, while a few hundred visitors were stuck on Saint Martins Island.

Authorities suspended all activities in the country’s main seaports, including in Chittagong, which handles almost 80% of Bangladesh’s exports and imports. All vessels and fishing boats were told to stop operating.

Local authorities ordered school buildings and mosques to be used as shelters in addition to dedicated cyclone shelters — raised concrete buildings that have been built over the past decades.

Bangladesh, a nation of 160 million people, has a history of violent cyclones. But disaster preparedness programs in recent decades have upgraded the country’s capacity to deal with natural disasters, resulting in fewer casualties.

Hong Kong protesters suggested they could hold rallies at a several major shopping malls on Sunday, a week after similar gatherings resulted in violent clashes with police.

Last weekend, anti-government protesters crowded into a shopping mall when a man slashed people with a knife and bit off part of the ear of a politician.

Several other gatherings are planned for elsewhere in the city, to protest against police behaviour and perceived meddling by Beijing in the politics of the Asian financial hub.

China denies interfering in Hong Kong, but the protests have become the worst political crisis in the former British colony since it returned to Chinese rule in 1997.

Thousands of people gathered on Saturday night at a vigil for “martyrs”, after a student died in hospital this week following a high fall.
Though the vigil ended peacefully, many attendees called for revenge after the student’s death from injuries sustained during a protest.
Protesters have also called for a general strike on Monday and for people to block public transport, although when such calls have been made in the past they have come to nothing.

As they departed Saturday’s vigil, a number of people shouted “strike on Monday” and “see you on Monday.”

Scattered vigils on Friday night descended into chaos as some protesters vandalised metro stations and blocked streets.

Riot police responded with tear gas, pepper spray, and at least one round of live ammunition fired as a warning shot to protesters who had barricaded a street. 

When a coal company contractor working under federal oversight used a backhoe to dig up one of the largest known Native American bison killing grounds and make way for mining, investigators concluded the damage on the Crow Indian Reservation broke federal law and would cost $10 million to repair, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Eight years later, Colorado-based Westmoreland Coal has not made the repairs and is still mining in the area, under an agreement with former Crow leaders that some tribal members said has caused more damage to a site considered hallowed ground.

The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs issued a civil violation notice in the case last year, according to agency spokeswoman Genevieve Giaccardo. A Westmoreland executive said no penalty was involved. No charges were filed by federal prosecutors who investigated potential criminal violations.

Burton Pretty On Top, a 73-year-old tribal adviser and spiritual leader, and other Crow members said they were frustrated no one had been held accountable for “desecrating” the 2,000-year-old southeastern Montana site. It held countless bison bones and more than 3,300 stone tools and projectile points in an area known as Sarpy Creek.

“It was a shrine or temple to us,” Pretty On Top said. “We wanted to preserve the whole area … No amount of money in the world is enough to replace what has been lost here. The spirituality of our people has been broken.”

The mining company plans to repair the damage but has not reached agreement with the tribe and government on how that should be done, said Westmoreland executive Joe Micheletti.

Crow Chairman Alvin “A.J.” Not Afraid said the tribe, too, bears responsibility, for signing off when Westmoreland first proposed excavating the site a decade ago. The mine generates about $13 million to $15 million annually in revenue for the Crow, which makes up the bulk of the tribe’s budget, Not Afraid said.

“How can we hold them accountable when we approved them to do something?” he asked.

The large number of artifacts found suggest various tribes killed bison there for centuries before the Crow arrived — butchering animals for meat and turning the hides into clothing, according to experts who examined the site. The number of bison bones found makes it the largest kill site of its time ever discovered, said Lawrence Todd, an archaeologist from Colorado State University who participated in the investigation.

“The magnitude of the destruction done there, from the perspective of the archaeology of the northwest Plains, is probably unprecedented,” Todd said.

Since the investigation, Westmoreland has mined around the killing ground while avoiding the massive “bonebed” of more than 2,000 bison.

Tribal officials and archaeologists said the company compounded the original damage by destroying nearby artifacts including teepee rings and the remnants of a sweat lodge. Pretty On Top said some of the bones excavated in 2011 were piled in a heap, with grass growing over it, when he recently visited.

The excavation was part of a cultural resources survey required under federal law before the mine could expand onto the reservation. The use of a backhoe instead of hand shovels saved the company money but largely destroyed the site, documents and interviews show.

A Crow cultural official later convicted in a corruption case oversaw the work. At least two Interior Department officials, took part in the decision to use the backhoe, according to the documents obtained by AP and interviews with investigators.

The agency, which must protect the tribe’s interests under federal law, declined to answer questions about its involvement.
Giaccardo said the matter was under litigation but would not provide details. Micheletti and tribal officials said they were unaware of any litigation.

Neither the company nor government would release the violation notice or the company’s repair plan.

“I’m not going to look in the rear-view mirror. We’re trying to go forward,” Micheletti said. “From our point of view, it’s pretty much all said and done and agreed to on what needs to happen there. The ruling basically concluded that there was no penalty…We did nothing wrong.”

Many bones and other artifacts that were excavated were put into off-site storage until a decision is made about what to do with them, he added. There are no plans to pay the tribe compensation.

Former Crow Chairman Darrin Old Coyote said the company originally planned to mine the entire area and warned the tribe that it would lose revenue if it avoided the killing ground. Old Coyote said that after the 2011 excavation work, his administration insisted on a buffer zone to protect the site from further damage.

Archaeological investigators brought in by federal prosecutors said the bison kill site’s potential scientific value was obvious long before the backhoe was used.

A preliminary survey in 2004 and 2005 revealed artifacts at the site and suggested more might lie beneath the ground. It was enough for it to be considered eligible for a historic designation and meant further damage had to be avoided, minimized or mitigated.

“The real culprits in this in my mind are the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Office of Surface mining. They should have said, `This site has to be avoided, period,”‘ said Martin McAllister with Archaeological Damage Investigation and Assessment, an archaeology firm that led the investigation.

In June 2010, after Westmoreland obtained approval from state and federal regulators to mine in the area, representatives of the company, tribe, BIA and Interior’s Office of Surface Mining gathered at the bison killing ground to decide what to do about the site.
To save on the high cost of excavating by hand — the accepted practice among archaeologists when working on high-value finds — they agreed to use “mass excavation with mechanical equipment,” according to records of the meeting.

The Crow tribal official at that meeting was Dale Old Horn, at the time director of the tribe’s Historic Preservation Office. He was later convicted in a corruption scheme in which preservation office staff who were supposed to be monitoring sites — including the bison killing grounds — took money from both the tribe and the companies they oversaw.

By the time the backhoe work was finished, enough soil, bones, artifacts and other material had been removed to fill more than 300 dump trucks, investigators determined.

Although the preliminary survey work was done under a permit, that permit expired in 2010 and was not renewed. That meant the backhoe excavation violated the federal Archaeological Resource Protection Act, investigators concluded.

In their 2013 damage assessment, they called the loss of archaeological information “incalculable” and said repairing it would cost $10.4 million.

“The damage that was present when we did the assessment has been amplified by having it just sit there since then — uncovered, unprotected and unanalyzed,” said Todd, the bison bonebed expert.

A U.N. agency is urging the Iraqi government to address the grievances of its people or risk that the ongoing deadly protests across the country could spiral even further out of control.

Since anti-government protests began Oct. 1, the U.N. Human Rights Office has documented 269 deaths and at least 8,000 injuries, including among members of the Iraqi security forces.  The agency blames the majority of these casualties on the use of live ammunition by security forces and private armed militia groups.

U.N. human rights spokesman Rupert Colville says his agency also is following up on reports of multiple arrests of demonstrators and activists.  He says protesters and volunteers providing assistance during the demonstrations reportedly have been abducted by unknown perpetrators.  

“We are also disturbed by the statement by the High Judicial Council in Iraq that the Federal Anti-terrorism Law would be applicable against those resorting to violence, sabotaging public property and using firearms against security forces.  Our concern is centered on the fact that these are acts of terrorism, which may be punishable by death,” Colville said.

The agency is calling on the government to investigate the whereabouts of the people who have gone missing, to promptly investigate the killings and to prosecute all those responsible for these crimes.

Colville says tensions are running very high. He says the relatives and friends of people who have been killed, abducted and otherwise abused are angry.  Unless their grievances are resolved, he told VOA. He said the protests and violence in the country could spiral out of control.

“The way the security forces are reacting because they are not abiding by the kind of guidelines set down internationally, which are very much designed not only to save life and stop injuries, but exactly this—to stop tension [from] getting extreme because of deaths.  It is a sort of vicious circle of people getting killed and injured.  That’s leading to more anger and more demonstrations, more deaths, more injuries and so on.  And we are in that cycle in Iraq,” Colville said.  

To get out of this deteriorating cycle, Colville said the Iraqi authorities must control the security forces and engage in a meaningful dialogue with the public.  He said the government must listen and take stock of its many grievances and work with civil society to reach a sustainable resolution.
 

The prime minister of Pakistan greeted the first group of Sikh pilgrims from India to take advantage of a visa-free corridor, allowing them to visit one of their holiest shrines.

Imran Khan opened the border site Saturday as thousands of Sikhs anticipated visiting the Kartarpur shrine, the second holiest site in the Sikh faith.

Kartatpur is the final resting place of Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of Sikhism.

India Prime Minister Narendra Modi thanked Khan for “understanding Indian sentiments and acting accordingly on Kartatpur corridor.”

The rare spark of cooperation between the two archrivals comes amid their strained ties over the contested region of Kashmir which both countries partially control, but claim in full.

Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives have submitted a list of witnesses they want to testify in the Democrat-led House impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, and it includes former Vice President Joe Biden’s son and the anonymous whistleblower whose allegations triggered the inquiry. 

The ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes of California, sent the list Saturday to committee Chairman Adam Schiff of California, who is unlikely to approve all of the witnesses on it. 
 
Investigators enter a new phase next week when they begin publicly questioning witnesses after weeks of closed-door testimony.   
 
Schiff said three State Department witnesses are scheduled to appear in two hearings next week. U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor and career department official George Kent are to testify Wednesday, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch is to appear Friday.  

The Republican request to have Biden’s son Hunter, the whistleblower and six other people testify intensifies the political battle between Republicans and Democrats to shape the narrative of the probe. 
 
In the past week alone, a dozen Trump administration figures, including acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton, declined to appear before congressional investigators. 
 
Democrats want to know if Trump withheld nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine to get President Volodomyr Zelenskiy to publicly commit himself to investigating Joe Biden, a potential Trump rival in the 2020 presidential election, for corruption. Trump also has repeated an unfounded claim that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Democrats and their candidate, Hillary Clinton. 
 
The whistleblower complaint alleges Trump pressured Zelenskiy, during a July 25 phone call, to investigate Biden and his son.  

Second call

Trump said Saturday that he would likely release a transcript of a second call with Zelenskiy on Tuesday. 
 
“We have another transcript coming out which is very important,” Trump said. “I will give you a second transcript, because I had two calls with the president of Ukraine.” 
 
Trump said Friday that he was “not concerned about anything” when asked about the impeachment inquiry. 
 
Trump’s comments came hours after House Democrats released new transcripts from two national security officials who testified last month behind closed doors about the president, offering new details beyond what had previously been disclosed. 
 
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a Ukraine expert on the National Security Council who listened to Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelenskiy, said “there was no doubt” that Trump wanted Ukraine to launch investigations into political rivals, according to a transcript of his deposition.  

House investigators also released a transcript of the deposition of former National Security Council official Fiona Hill, who also voiced concerns about the Republican president’s efforts to prod Ukraine to investigate Democrats. 
 
Hill described Bolton as being angry about the administration’s political maneuvers, and she told of his efforts to distance himself from them. 
 
On Thursday, House investigators released the transcript of the deposition of Kent. In his closed-door testimony, the deputy assistant secretary of state said Trump wanted Zelenskiy to stand at a microphone and say three words: investigations, Biden and Clinton. 
 
Kent said the words Trump wanted to hear from Zelenskiy were relayed to Kent by others in the administration who dealt directly with Trump. 
 
“That was the message — Zelenskiy needed to go to a microphone, and basically there needed to be three words in the message, and that was the shorthand,” Kent was quoted as saying. 

‘Perfect’ call
  
Trump has described his telephone call with Zelenskiy as “perfect,” and has accused Democrats of conducting a witch hunt, calling the impeachment inquiry a hoax. 
 
The president fiercely denies seeking any quid pro quo with Ukraine. 
 
While some of Trump’s Republican supporters are finding it hard to defend his actions, they say they do not believe his request for an investigation into the Bidens is an impeachable offense that could lead to his removal from office. 

The U.N. children’s fund warns essential humanitarian programs for hundreds of thousands of children in Syria will have to be cut because it has run out of cash.

With just eight weeks left until the end of the year, the U.N. children’s fund reports only 53 percent has been met of its $295 million appeal for 2019.  Unless this major funding shortfall is urgently closed, it reports many children will be denied the lifesaving assistance they need.  

UNICEF spokeswoman Marixie Mercado says these forced cuts come at a particularly difficult time of the year.

“With temperatures dropping quickly, UNICEF’s aim is to provide 578,000 children zero to 14 years old in camps, collective shelters, host communities and areas of acute need with crucial winter clothing.  At this point, we have funds for 356,000 children.  Without additional funding, 220,000 children will go without,” Mercado said.  

UNICEF reports 5.5 million children across the country require assistance.  The agency is unable to help them all.  But Mercado noted it provides hundreds of thousands of Syria’s most vulnerable children with essential services that can make the difference between life and death for many.  

“In northeast Syria, home to some of the most vulnerable children in the country, UNICEF’s work in 2019 has included vaccinating over half a million children, providing nearly 150,000 children with psychosocial support, and enabling over 100,000 children to enroll in formal education,” Mercado said.  

Providing aid to children in this area has become more difficult since Turkish military forces invaded this Kurdish-controlled region last month. Despite the increased security risks, which limit freedom of movement, UNICEF says the most serious obstacle to reaching children in urgent need is the lack of money.

Mercado said some of the programs threatened by the shortfall include emergency water, sanitation and hygiene support, routine immunization, and specialized health and nutritional feeding for malnourished children.  

She said mine-risk education for 170,000 people at particular risk also will go by the wayside. She noted one in two Syrians is at risk of stepping on an unexploded ordnance. Children are particularly vulnerable.
 

He was once called a Lost Boy but today, his official title is Councilor-Elect.

Chol Majok won the 3rd District Common Council seat in Syracuse, New York, this week, becoming the first former refugee in city history to do so, according to Onondaga County’s Board of Elections.

“One of the things that I am certain about is when you are not at the table where policy and decisions are being made, you are not counted, you are not part of that narrative,” said Majok.

Majok arrived in Syracuse 18 years ago with other Lost Boys of Sudan — a group of 20,000 boys who were displaced or orphaned during the second Sudanese civil war in which about 2 million were killed. He was 16 years old and anxious to begin building his life.

He lived in foster homes until he turned 18, and although he was there for just two years, he says the conditions he experienced in the system changed his life.

“They are conditions that people in a first world country should not be in. So coupled with where I came from and what I saw, I just wanted something different,” he said.

Syracuse’s poverty rate is among the highest in the United States. About 32.6% of the population lives below the poverty line, according the latest figures by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Crime, gun violence and high poverty rates once again became part of his reality in his newly adopted country.

 “As somebody that came from that conditions you ask yourself, what is going on here. It seems like everywhere I go there is this poverty that never separates from me and its only right to say you know what I can’t just stand by and watch, let me try to be part of the solution,” said Majok.

Majok’s mother died when he was 2 years old. His father, who died during the war, fought for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army which was originally founded as a guerrilla movement against the government of Sudan in 1983 and was a key participant in the war.  

Now a husband and father of five, Majok earned a Master’s degree in Political Science and is now pursuing a doctorate in Executive Leadership.

A seat on the council is considered a part time job, so Majok says he will continue with his other work with Alliance for Economic Inclusion, an employment program that helps people find and keep their jobs by offering services like transportation, child care or interpersonal skills.

Onondaga County Elections Commissioner Dustin Czarny said Majok’s win is “going to be a boon for the growing refugee community here in central New York and specifically the city of Syracuse.”

“They see this as a victory for them and they now have a voice on the city council that will cater to their specific needs,” said Czarny.

Majok plans to focus on service delivery in Syracuse, particularly with snow plowing. But he says he also wants to be a bridge between law enforcement and the community, who he says doesn’t have trust with police officers.

He says he also hopes his win will inspire other immigrants.

“I didn’t realize that when I got into the race until toward the end of it when so many of my brother and sisters start calling everywhere and just encouraged me to keep going. Then I realized it was bigger than me,” he said.

A South Korean facility that kidnapped and abused children and the disabled for a generation was also shipping children overseas for adoption, part of a massive profit-seeking enterprise that thrived by exploiting those trapped within its walls, The Associated Press has found.

The AP, which previously exposed a government cover-up at Brothers Home and a level of abuse greater than earlier known, has now found that the facility was part of an orphanage pipeline feeding private adoption agencies.

Relying on documents obtained from officials and freedom of information requests, the AP uncovered direct evidence that 19 children were adopted out of Brothers and sent abroad, as well as indirect evidence showing at least 51 more adoptions. The adoptions AP found took place between 1979 and 1986.

There were probably many more adoptions over the three decades Brothers operated, but the extent will likely never be known. Most documents have been lost, destroyed or withheld by the government and adoption agencies.

The AP found one of the adoptees.

J. Hwang, who asked to be quoted by the name on her adoption papers because of privacy concerns, was 4 in 1982 when documents say police officers found her on the street and took her to Brothers, a compound in Busan. After her initial adoption fell through, she was sent weeks later to another orphanage and then to her new home in North America.

“One of my main questions is wondering if I was supposed to be (at Brothers), or if my parents, my biological parents, are still out there looking for me,” said Hwang, who didn’t know she had been at Brothers. “Why me?”

The previous AP investigation uncovered details about Brothers, where from the 1960s to the late 1980s thousands of children and adults that authorities deemed “vagrants” were rounded up and kept. Many were enslaved, raped and even beaten to death.

But Brothers was also separating young children for adoption, the AP found. Brothers sent these children to adoption agencies, which placed them with families in the West.

During that period, South Korea’s ruling military dictatorships aggressively institutionalized and exported poor children for profit and to clear the streets of those considered socially unacceptable.

Adoptive parents were unaware of the horrors happening where their children once lived or that their payments likely helped fund an abusive facility. Biological parents may not have known that their children were at Brothers, let alone sent overseas.

Lee Chae-sik, now 50, worked at the Brothers nursery as a boy. Once a month, for two years in the early 1980s, Lee said he penned letters bound for North America. Each letter was attached to a photo of a foreign couple and another of a Brothers child.

Hundreds of times, Lee wrote: “We have received the money and gifts you sent us. Thank you.” The letters addressed the couples as “yangbumo,” which typically means adoptive parents.

He said the photos were filed in a folder marked “Holt,” which is also the name of an adoption agency. Dozens of times, he said, the children in the photos would disappear just days after the letters were sent.

Lee said he has “no doubt” that Brothers was selling babies.

Kim Sang-ha, who spent 12 years at Brothers until 1987, remembers writing similar letters.

Park Gyeong-bo, who was at Brothers from 1975 to 1980, said guards would occasionally dress up children for photos that inmates thought were for adoption papers because the children would later disappear.

Former inmate Lee Hye-yul said she was 7 when she was told by a Brothers official that she would be sent to a family in Britain. Lee begged and cried for days to have the adoption called off. She was later told that the adoption was canceled but not why.

Several former adoption workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of privacy restrictions, agreed that what Lee Chae-sik described likely indicated an international adoption process.

Because of the loss of records, there’s no direct evidence to back the claims that adoptions were part of Brothers owner Park In-keun’s money-making operations. But experts say Park wouldn’t have sent children away unless he was getting more money than from keeping them at the compound, where he received government subsidies for each inmate and used inmates for slave labor.

Records will never show the real number of adoptions from Brothers, which came as adoption agencies competed for children and falsified the origins of many of them, said Lee Kyung-eun, a legal expert on transnational adoptions.

Park died in 2016. The former No. 2 at Brothers, Lim Young Soon, acknowledged that there had been some adoptions, without providing specifics.

“The adoptions happened a long time ago, and there’s a limit to what you can find with just the records that remain,” said Seong Chang-hyeon, a Ministry of Health and Welfare official. “We do recognize that the children (at Brothers) were exposed to various kinds of human rights violations.”

Holt International spokeswoman Susan Soonkeum Cox told AP that David Kim, a former president of the Oregon-based agency, couldn’t recall specifics but remembers that Holt Korea worked with Brothers. The two agencies separated in the 1970s but maintained a partnership.

The AP confirmed five other U.S. agencies took children from Brothers: Children’s Home Society of Minnesota, Dillon International, Children’s Home Society of California, Catholic Social Services and Spence-Chapin. None verified adoptions from Brothers when approached by the AP.

Hwang said she never cared about the details of her adoption. But now she’s filled with questions, including, perhaps most importantly, whether her birth family willingly gave her up.

“I’m very curious about what the real story is for my first six year’” she said. “I have thought all my life that it was one thing, and now it’s changed.”
 

There’s a new statue of Ronald Reagan, the 40th U.S. president, on a terrace of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, a stone’s throw from the iconic Brandenburg Gate.

It is a long time coming, for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and other supporters of the project. They had been pressing Berlin city officials for years to erect a statue in a public place, but Berlin officials demurred, noting that many factors and people contributed to the fall of the Wall on Nov. 9, 1989.

The Reagan supporters finally settled for a statue on the grounds of the embassy — American soil in the heart of Berlin.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attended the unveiling Friday, calling it a “monumental moment” as the artwork appeared. The statue memorializes Reagan’s 1987 speech in which he exhorted then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

Two years later, the Wall began to come down on live television. After a surprise announcement by an East German official that Easterners would be allowed to travel to the West, effective immediately, Berliners took hammers to the concrete barrier and started dismantling it themselves.

WATCH: The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 30 Years On

Dissension appeared to be spreading in police forces across Bolivia Friday as opposing sides in the country’s political divide held fast to their positions after 17 days of violent protests over the legitimacy of President Evo Morales’ claimed reelection.

Defense Minister Javier Zabaleta said a “police mutiny occurred in a few regions,” but he rejected the idea of a military intervention “at this time.”

The disputed results of the Oct. 20 election have triggered a wave of protests across Bolivia, which have resulted in three deaths and more than 300 injuries.

Earlier in the day, opposition leader Luis Fernando Camacho vowed not to leave the capital of La Paz until Morales personally accepts a resignation letter drafted for him. At a separate public event, Morales repeated that he is not resigning.

In the evening, a small group of police officers staged a rebellion in the central city of Cochabamba, apparently demanding the resignation of their commander, who has been accused of siding with Morales’ supporters during clashes this week that left one person dead and more than 100 injured. The 18 officers stood on the roof of the special operations tactical unit, waving flags and singing the national anthem as a large crowd of people in the street cheered.

Hundreds of residents in other cities then clamored outside local police stations urging officers to “follow their example.” Police in Santa Cruz, an opposition stronghold, affixed a sign on their station saying they were in revolt. Police officers in other cities left the streets and returned to their stations, without explaining why.

Morales convened an emergency meeting with his ministers and military high command to analyze the situation.

“There is no order. There will be no military operation at this time. It’s discarded,” Zabaleta said after the meeting.

Gen. Yuri Calderon, head of the national police, had previously denied that a police rebellion was under way and called the Cochabamba incident isolated.

“There is normalcy in the rest of the country and we hope that services will resume,” he said.

Later, Morales went on Twitter to warn that “our democracy is at risk from the coup d’etat put in place by violent groups that are attacking the constitutional order.” His government issued a statement claiming that an opposition plot to oust the president was being led by Camacho and former President Carlos Mesa, who finished second in the Oct. 20 election.

There was no immediate comment from either Camacho or Mesa.

Morales declared himself the outright winner even before official results indicated he obtained just enough support to avoid a runoff with Mesa. But a 24-hour lapse in releasing vote results fueled allegations of fraud by the opposition.

The Organization of American States is conducting an audit of the election count and their findings are expected Monday or Tuesday. The opposition says it will not accept the results because they were not consulted on how the process would unfold.

Morales’ bid for re-election was controversial before it began. The former union leader, and Bolivia’s first indigenous president, has shepherded significant economic growth and an overhaul of the constitution. But he refused to accept the results of a referendum upholding term limits. The country’s constitutional court later ruled that term limits violated his human right to run for office, and the electoral court ultimately accepted his candidacy for a fourth term.

The U.S. Supreme Court will take on a case Nov. 12 that could impact the future of hundreds of thousands of people brought to the United States as children illegally. In particular, one doctor who is on track to finish his residency training in the state of California could have his fate determined by the outcome. VOA’s Warangkana Chomchuen reports from San Francisco.