Tens of thousands of people are marching in Barcelona to protest the separatist movement in the northeastern Catalonia region that has produced Spain’s worst political crisis in decades.

Barcelona’s police say 80,000 people have rallied Sunday on one of the city’s main streets, with many carrying Spanish and Catalan flags.

One poster read in English: “We are Catalonians too, stop this madness!!”

The rally in favor of Spanish unity comes after several days of protests – some of which have spiraled into violent clashes with police – by Catalan separatists. They are angered by a Supreme Court ruling that sentenced nine of separatist leaders to prison for a failed 2017 secession attempt.

Polls say the 7.5 million residents of the wealthy Catalonia region are roughly evenly divided on the secession question.

 

An Afghan politician confirms that U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad is in Afghanistan’s capital for his first visit since talks between the U.S. and Taliban collapsed last month. 
 
Sayed Hamid Gailani, leader of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, posted on his Twitter account late Saturday that he met with Khalilzad and his team in Kabul to discuss the country’s recent presidential elections and peace efforts.
 
Speaking on condition of anonymity, an Afghan official also confirmed Sunday that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had met with Khalilzad.
 
He said that the meeting took place at the presidential palace on Saturday.
 
Khalilzad’s visit to Kabul follows a meeting in Moscow he held with representatives of China, Russia and Pakistan, over restarting peace talks to end Afghanistan’s 18-year-old war.

 

Two British opposition parties want to hold elections even earlier than Prime Minister Boris Johnson has proposed as they try to ensure the country doesn’t leave the European Union without an agreement.

The Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats say they will push for a Dec. 9 election, three days earlier than Johnson has proposed and years earlier than the next scheduled vote in 2022.

They also plan to ask EU leaders to extend the Brexit deadline to at least Jan. 31 to provide more time to debate Johnson’s withdrawal agreement.

Johnson says if lawmakers approve a Dec. 12 election he will attempt to push his Brexit deal through Parliament quickly. He is seeking to delay Britain’s Oct. 31 Brexit deadline by only a few weeks to keep pressure on lawmakers.

 

Clashes between police and militant elements in a thousands-strong crowd of demonstrators transformed part of central Barcelona into a battleground late on Saturday as another day of pro-independence protests turned violent. 

Projectiles were fired, at least six people were hospitalized with injuries, and barricades were set alight after officers charged ranks of demonstrators — many young and masking their faces — who had amassed outside Spanish police headquarters. 

The violent standoff in the city’s tourist heartland offered stark evidence of the fault lines developing between hardline and conciliatory elements within the region’s independence movement. 

It lasted several hours before protesters dispersed through the city’s streets. 

Barcelona has witnessed daily pro-secession protests since Oct. 14. That was when Spain’s Supreme Court sentenced nine politicians and activists to up to 13 years in jail for their role in a failed independence bid in 2017, prompting widespread anger in the region and sending shockwaves through Spain’s political landscape. 

Saturday’s protest was not the first marred by violence, with unrest notably on Oct. 18 having been more widespread. But it contrasted starkly with events earlier in the day, when 350,000 Catalans had marched peacefully through the city in support of calls from civil rights groups for the jailed separatist leaders to be freed. 
 
Bottles, balls, bullets

The later protest was organized by CDR, a pro-independence pressure group that favors direct action and has cut off rail tracks and roads, as well as trying to storm the regional parliament. 

It began around 7:30 p.m. (1730 GMT) and as the crowd grew to around 10,000, according to police estimates, demonstrators threw a hail of bottles, balls and rubber bullets at officers, TV footage showed. 

Police carrying shields and weapons and backed by some 20 riot vans then charged the demonstrators in an attempt to disperse them, splitting the crowd in two along Via Laietana near the police headquarters. 

Reuters TV footage showed police armed with batons forcing their way through the crowd while demonstrators threw stones and flares. News channel 24h showed police grappling one-on-one with demonstrators, who fell back before reforming their lines. 

Some projectiles were fired, with a Reuters photographer among those hospitalized after being hit in the stomach by a rubber or foam bullet. Catalan emergency services said that, in all, six people were hospitalized. 

The organizers of the earlier protest, grass-roots groups Assemblea Nacional Catalana (ANC) and Omnium Cultural, had hoped that, with pro-secessionist parties split over what strategy to adopt, it would refocus attention in the secessionist camp by 
drawing the largest crowd since the court verdicts were passed. 

“From the street we will keep defending all the [people’s] rights, but from the institutions we need political answers,” ANC leader Elisenda Paluzie told the gathering, pledging to organize more protests. 

Local police said around 350,000 attended, compared with a daily peak of 500,000 at the Oct. 18 protest and 600,000 at a march that took place on Catalonia’s national day last month. 

All those figures, however, represent only a small percentage of the region’s 7.5 million population, and its electorate is almost evenly split over the issue of independence. 

Mainstream Spanish parties, including the minority Socialist government, have consistently rejected moves toward Catalan independence and all except for the left-wing Podemos are opposed to any form of referendum. 

They are now gearing up for a national election on Nov. 10. 
 
‘Prison is not the answer’

Both ANC and Omnium Cultural eschew violence and their then-leaders were among the nine jailed on Oct 14. 

Many who joined their march carried Catalan pro-independence flags and banners bearing slogans that included: “Prison is not the answer,” “Sit and talk” and “Freedom for political prisoners.” 

In the front row was regional government head Quim Torra, who earlier presided over a ceremony at which hundreds of Catalan mayors endorsed a document demanding self-determination. 

“We have to be capable of creating a republic of free men and women … and overcoming the confrontational dynamic with a constructive one,” he told them. 

While not currently affiliated with any party, Torra belongs to the separatist political movement Junts per Catalunya. It has been in favor of maintaining confrontation with authorities in Madrid, while its leftist coalition partner Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya favors dialogue. 

One marcher, Maria Llopart, 63, criticized the lack of unity between the two parties. “Everything looks very bad. We are not advancing,” she said. 

Francesc Dot, 65, said the nine leaders had been jailed in defense of “Spain’s unity.” 

His wife, Maria Dolors Rustarazo, 63, said she should also be in prison because she voted in the 2017 referendum, which Spanish courts outlawed. “If [all separatist votes] … have to go to jail, we will go, but I don’t think we would all fit,” she said. 

She condemned the violence but had understanding for young protesters being “angry at the lack of democracy.” 

On Saturday they included Manel, a 20-year-old student with his face obscured by a cloth, who said he was among those who lit barricades during last week’s unrest. 

“We need a consistent protest — more streets and less parliamentary talk, because that doesn’t seem to work,” he said before the CDR protest turned violent. 

“If we halt the economy, the Spanish government would be obliged to talk.” 

Democratic presidential candidates in South Carolina Saturday accused U.S. President Donald Trump of stoking racism as they vied for the state’s black vote in its strategically important early primary.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and five other Democrats participated in a forum at historically black Benedict College a day after Trump was presented an award there for his work on criminal justice, sparking outrage among candidates and temporarily prompting Senator Kamala Harris to pull out.

Harris, a former district attorney and state attorney general in California, spoke at the event Saturday after the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center, which gave Trump the award, was removed as a sponsor, according to her campaign.

A spokeswoman for that nonprofit group, which continued to be involved in organizing the event throughout the day, did not respond to a request for comment.

“I said I would not come because I just couldn’t believe that Donald Trump would be given an award as it relates to criminal justice reform,” Harris told the audience.

“Let’s be clear: This is somebody who has disrespected the voices that have been present for decades about the need for reform,” she said, criticizing the president for describing an impeachment inquiry against him as a “lynching,” a form of vigilante killing historically associated with white supremacists.

Showcase for Democrats

The event is an important showcase for Democrats ahead of South Carolina’s Feb. 29 primary, the party’s fourth state-nominating contest. Six in 10 Democratic voters in the state are black and Biden has a strong early lead in local political polls.

In receiving the award Friday, Trump extolled his record on race and criminal justice before a largely handpicked and appreciative audience. The award recognized Trump last year signing bipartisan legislation including easing harsh minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.

Biden told the crowd on Saturday that “I don’t quite understand” why Trump would get the award. “It’s not just his words that have given rise to hate,” he said. “His actions — his actions have failed the African American community, and all communities.”

Trump hopes his support for a sweeping criminal justice reform law will help him pick up votes among African Americans next year after only winning 8% of the black vote in 2016. The president easily won South Carolina, where Republican voters outnumber Democrats 2-to-1, in 2016.

On Twitter, the president shot back at Harris, calling her a “badly failing presidential candidate” and said low unemployment and new criminal justice reforms achieved during his administration are “more than Kamala will EVER be able to do for African Americans!”

A spokeswoman for Trump’s presidential campaign, Sarah Matthews, added that “only people with desperately failing campaigns try to make this kind of racist nonsense against the President and Republicans work.”

Biden and Warren

Ten Democrats seeking the presidential nomination are speaking at events in South Carolina this weekend and presenting plans on legalizing marijuana, ending the death penalty and eliminating sentencing disparities for offenses involving crack cocaine and powder cocaine, which have disproportionately affected black people.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is scheduled to speak on the final day of the criminal justice event Sunday along with two other Democrats.

In South Carolina, Democrats are working to chip away at a Biden’s early advantage. Bolstered by the eight years he served as vice president to Barack Obama, the first black U.S. president, Biden has deep connections with black politicians and clergy.

Biden leads his closest rival in South Carolina, Warren, by nearly 20 percentage points, according to a RealClearPolitics average of recent polls. The state may end up being crucial for the former vice president as a last line of defense if he continues to lose ground to rivals in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The U.S. military conducted an operation against elusive Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Saturday, a U.S. official said, as U.S. President Donald Trump prepared to make a “major statement” at the White House Sunday morning.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, was unable to say whether the operation against Baghdadi was successful.

Newsweek said the operation took place in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province and was carried out by special operations forces after receiving actionable intelligence.

From @ABC: https://t.co/RaE2cRAPov#ISIS

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) October 27, 2019

The official did not disclose details of the operation and other U.S. officials contacted by Reuters declined to comment.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley announced late Saturday that Trump would make a “major statement” at 9 a.m. EST (1300 GMT) Sunday.

Gidley gave no further details.

The president gave an indication that something was afoot earlier on Saturday night when he tweeted without explanation:

Something very big has just happened!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2019

Trump has been frustrated by the U.S. news media’s heavy focus on the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry, which he calls an illegitimate witch hunt.

He has also faced withering criticism from both Republicans and Democrats alike for his U.S. troop withdrawal from northeastern Syria, which permitted Turkey to attack America’s Kurdish allies.

Trump was expected to make the statement in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, which he has used to make a number of major announcements.

Just last week he used the same room to announce that a ceasefire between Turkey and the Kurds had taken hold.

California is bracing for “extreme” and “potentially historic” winds, the National Weather Service warned Saturday. State officials in the wine region ordered evacuation of at least 50,000 more people as a nearby wildfire continued to burn. 
 
In addition, millions more California residents will face power outages as utility company Pacific Gas & Electric decided Saturday afternoon to begin mass power shutoffs. The shutoffs will affect nearly 1 million customers, affecting nearly 3 million people, and will include San Francisco, California’s wine country and the Sierra foothills. 
 
In the past month, PG&E has shut down power to thousands of consumers to try to contain the spread of the fires. PG&E is in bankruptcy because of liability from recent major wildfires, including one last year that killed 85 people in the northern California town of Paradise. 
  
Forecasters said hot, dry winds, some as strong as 112 kph (70 mph), were expected to start late Saturday and last into Monday in the San Francisco Bay Area. The National Weather Service warned the winds, often called Santa Ana or Diablo winds, might be a record event. 

Lengthy period
 
“This is definitely an event that we’re calling historic and extreme,” David King, meteorologist for the U.S. National Weather Service, told the Los Angeles Times. “What’s making this event really substantial … is the amount of time that these winds are going to remain.” 
 
“The weather event could be the most powerful in California in decades,” PG&E said Saturday, adding, “PG&E will need to turn off power for safety several hours before the potentially damaging winds arrive.” 
 
“Winds of this magnitude pose a higher risk of damage and sparks on the electric system and rapid wildfire spread,” the utility said. 
 
Cal Fire Division Chief Jonathan Cox warned the high winds could also lead to the grounding of water-dropping aircraft, as well as the driving of hot embers far ahead of the flames, setting new blazes, the Associated Press reported. 
 
California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in both Sonoma and Los Angeles counties Friday. No injuries have been reported from either fire. 

2 towns in evacuation order
 
On Saturday, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office issued the latest evacuation order, which they said would be the largest in the county in more than 25 years and include the entire towns of Healdsburg and Windsor. 
  
In a visit to the communities affected by the Kincade Fire on Friday, Newsom expressed frustration with PG&E, saying the company “simply did not do their job.” 
 
The company has said its electrical equipment may have caused the Kincade Fire, despite pre-emptive power outages to try to avoid a fire. 
 
PG&E sent an “electric safety incident” report Thursday to the California Public Utilities Commission, saying that one of its power lines malfunctioned at about the time and location as the origin of the Kincade Fire. 
 
The company said that while it shut off power to much of the region, it did not de-energize the transmission line that malfunctioned. 
 
Firefighters are battling wildfires in Northern and Southern California, from Sonoma County to Los Angeles. 

Severe damage
 
The California Department of Forestry and Protection said about 2,000 firefighters were battling the Kincade Fire, located near Geyserville, about 120 kilometers (77 miles) north of San Francisco. The fire was only 10 percent contained by Saturday. Officials said the fire had destroyed 49 buildings, including 21 homes, and scorched nearly 104 square kilometers (25,700 acres) of the state’s wine-growing region.  

In Southern California, the Tick Fire threatened Santa Clarita, just north of Los Angeles. Residents who had been ordered to evacuate were allowed back to their homes on Saturday. The fire scorched about 16 square kilometers (40 acres) and forced the closure of schools and a major freeway on Friday. 
 
No injuries were reported caused by the Tick Fire. 
 
Across the border, in Mexico’s Baja California state, officials said wildfires killed three people and destroyed 150 homes. 
 
Antonio Rosquillas, the state’s director of civil protection, told the French news agency AFP on Saturday that Tecate, on the U.S.-Mexico border, was hardest hit by the wildfires. 

Russia’s defense ministry on Saturday attacked U.S. plans to maintain and boost the American military presence in eastern Syria as “international state banditry” motivated by a desire to protect oil smugglers and not by real security concerns.

U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Friday Washington would send armored vehicles and troops to the Syrian oil fields in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of Islamic State militants.

His comments came after President Donald Trump earlier this month pulled some 1,000 U.S. military personnel out of northeast Syria, a move that prompted Turkey to launch a cross-border incursion targeting the Kurdish YPG militia, a former U.S. ally against Islamic State.

Trump’s decision drew an angry backlash from Congress, including key Republicans who saw the pullout as a betrayal of the Kurds and a move that could bolster Islamic State.

In a statement, Russia’s defense ministry said Washington had no mandate under international or U.S. law to increase its military presence in Syria and said its plan was not motivated by genuine security concerns in the region.

“Therefore Washington’s current actions – capturing and maintaining military control over oil fields in eastern Syria – is, simply put, international state banditry,” it said.

U.S. troops and private security companies in eastern Syria are protecting oil smugglers who make more than $30 million a month, the statement said.

Russia, which backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and has helped him turn the tide of a bloody civil war, has long insisted that the U.S. military presence in Syria is illegal.

Moscow has further bolstered its position in Syria following the U.S. withdrawal from the northeast of the country, negotiating a deal this week with Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan to help remove the Kurdish YPG militia from within a 30 km (19 mile) strip along the Syrian-Turkish border.

Ankara views the YPG as terrorists linked to Kurdish insurgents operating in southeast Turkey.

 

California officials warned on Saturday that “historic and extreme” wind conditions were set to fan raging wildfires in the north of the state as millions of residents face power cuts.

Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency as the so-called Kincade Fire spread to 23,700 acres (9,591 hectares) after breaking out on Wednesday in the Sonoma wine region.

The blaze, which is burning in remote steep terrain, has destroyed about 50 structures and forced the evacuation of the small community of Geyserville and of nearby vineyard operations.

“This is definitely an event that we’re calling historic and extreme,” David King, meteorologist for the U.S. National Weather Service, told Saturday’s Los Angeles Times.

“What’s making this event really substantial… is the amount of time that these winds are going to remain.”

Hot, intense winds are expected to pick up on Saturday and last into Monday.

The state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., said it expected to cut off power to 850,000 customers — a precautionary shutdown that local media say would affect about two million people.

“The weather event could be the most powerful in California in decades,” PG&E said, with dry northeast winds forecast to gust up to 70 miles per hour (112 kilometers per hour).

“PG&E will need to turn off power for safety several hours before the potentially damaging winds arrive,” it added.

“Winds of this magnitude pose a higher risk of damage and sparks on the electric system and rapid wildfire spread.”

About 1,300 firefighters battled the Kincade Fire, which is only five percent contained, according to the California Department of Forestry and Protection.

‘Don’t know what to do’

“I can’t explain it,” 70-year-old Tina Tavares, who was evacuated from her Geyserville home, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

“It’s like you’re in a bad earthquake, the ground is opening up… and you’re seeing it and don’t know what to do.”

PG&E has come under fierce scrutiny after it reported that even though power had already been shut down to nearly 28,000 customers in Sonoma County this week, some high-voltage transmission lines were still operating when the fire broke out.

The same type of lines was responsible for California’s deadliest wildfire ever — last year’s Camp Fire, which killed 86 people.

PG&E, which filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year, has been blamed for several other fires in the state in recent years.

Governor Newsom hit out at the company on Friday, saying it had put “profits over the people of California for too long.”

He said it was “infuriating beyond words” that a state such as California had to endure blackouts.

“It’s about dog-eat-dog capitalism meeting climate change,” he said, referring to PG&E. “It’s a story about greed, and they need to be held accountable.”

Further south in California, tens of thousands of residents near Santa Clarita, just north of Los Angeles, evacuated their homes this week as the so-called Tick Fire scorched over 4,000 acres.

The blaze forced the shutdown of all schools in the area as well as a major freeway, creating traffic chaos for commuters.

Some 1,325 firefighters backed by air tankers and helicopters battled the flames close to densely packed communities, with 10,000 structures at threat, officials said.

Six homes were destroyed, though the number was expected to rise.

Wildfires also erupted over the border in Mexico’s Baja California state, where local civil protection authorities said on Friday that three people had been killed and over 150 homes destroyed.

The state’s director of civil protection, Antonio Rosquillas, said that the municipality of Tecate, bordering the United States, was worst hit.

 

House Republicans have intensified their dissent against an impeachment inquiry of U.S. President Donald Trump, protesting that the House Intelligence Committee is questioning witnesses in hearings closed to the public and other lawmakers. The protest is part of Republicans’ strategy of attacking the process by which House Democrats probe allegations Trump sought foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election. VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson reports from Capitol Hill.
 

The Pentagon awarded Microsoft a $10 billion cloud computing contract , snubbing early front-runner Amazon, whose competitive bid drew criticism from President Donald Trump and its business rivals.

Bidding for the huge project, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, pitted leading tech titans Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and IBM against one another.

The giant contract has attracted more attention than most, sparked by speculation early in the process that Amazon would be the sole winner of the deal. Tech giants Oracle and IBM pushed back with their own bids and also formally protested the bidding process last year.

Oracle later challenged the process in federal court, but lost .

Trump waded into the fray in July, saying that the administration would “take a very long look” at the process, saying he had heard complaints. Trump has frequently expressed his ire for Amazon and founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post. At the time, he said other companies told him that the contract “wasn’t competitively bid.”

Defense Secretary Mark Esper recused himself from the controversial bidding process earlier this week, citing a conflict of interest because his son works for one of the companies that originally bid.

The JEDI system will store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the U.S. military to use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities.

A cloud strategy document unveiled by the Defense Department last year called for replacing the military’s “disjointed and stove-piped information systems” with a commercial cloud service “that will empower the warfighter with data and is critical to maintaining our military’s technological advantage.”

The Pentagon emphasized in an announcement that the process was fair and followed procurement guidelines. It noted that over the past two years, it has awarded more than $11 billion in 10 separate cloud-computing contracts, and said the JEDI award “continues our strategy of a multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment.”

The latter statement appeared designed to address previous criticism about awarding such a large deal to one company.

The deal is a major win for Microsoft’s cloud business Azure, which has long been playing catch-up to Amazon’s market leading Amazon Web Services. Microsoft said it was preparing a statement.

Amazon said Friday it was surprised by the decision.

“AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly lead to a different conclusion,” Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said in a statement. “We remain deeply committed to continuing to innovate for the new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure.”

According to a July report from the research firm Gartner, Amazon holds almost 48% of the market for public cloud computing, followed by Microsoft in second place with close to 16%.

Over the last year, Microsoft has positioned itself as a friend to the U.S. military. President Brad Smith wrote last fall that Microsoft has long supplied technology to the military and would continue to do so, despite pushback from employees.

Oracle and IBM were eliminated earlier in the process, leaving Microsoft and Amazon to battle it out at the end.

Google decided last year not to compete for the contract, saying it would conflict with its AI ethics principles. Google employees have been especially vocal in protesting the company’s involvement with government contracts.

“It’s a paradigm changer for Microsoft to win JEDI,” said Dan Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities. “And it’s a huge black eye for Amazon and Bezos.”

Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other tech giants have faced criticism from their own employees about doing business with the government, especially on military and immigration related projects.

 

 

Police in southern China detained feminist activist and journalist Huang Xueqin after she returned to the mainland from Hong Kong and Taiwan, her friends said Friday.

Authorities in Guangdong province’s Guangzhou city arrested Huang last Thursday on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” her friends said. The vague charge is commonly used against activists viewed as threatening by the ruling Communist Party.

The friends spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared government retribution for being publicly associated with Huang. Calls on Friday to Huang’s lawyer and Guangzhou’s Baiyun District Detention Center, where friends say she is detained, rang unanswered.

The friends said police harassed Huang’s family after she published an essay describing her experience at a protest in Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous Chinese city that has been roiled by months of anti-government demonstrations.

“Perhaps, under the powerful machine of the party state, ignorance and fear can be cultivated,” Huang wrote in her essay. “But if you have personally experienced it, witnessed it, you cannot pretend to be ignorant.”

In August, Guangzhou police confiscated Huang’s passport and other travel documents, preventing her from pursuing a postgraduate law program at the University of Hong Kong.
 
Huang has been an outspoken voice in China’s #MeToo movement, helping sexual assault victims highlight cases against university professors. She has worked as an independent reporter covering issues surrounding gender, equality and disadvantaged groups.

Detained, harassed 

“It is unclear exactly the reasons for Huang’s detention, but in recent weeks, more and more activists, writers and regular citizens in the mainland have been detained or harassed by authorities for their peacefully voicing support for the Hong Kong protests,” said Yaqiu Wang, China researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“Huang’s detention shows that the Chinese government has intensified the crackdown on mainland Chinese who peacefully showed solidarity with Hong Kong protesters, and that authorities are fearful that the protests in Hong Kong could inspire challenges to the government in the mainland, and any expression of ideas of freedom and democracy is a threat to their grip on power,” Wang said.

The protests in Hong Kong began over the summer in response to a now-withdrawn extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kong residents to stand trial in mainland China, where critics say their legal rights would be threatened. The sometimes-violent demonstrations have since ballooned to encompass broader calls for democratic reform and an inquiry into alleged police abuse.
 

The body of former Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco was exhumed from its grandiose mausoleum outside Madrid Thursday and moved to a cemetery near the capital. Critics have long campaigned for the move, arguing that the site in the “Valley of the Fallen” – which was built by prison laborers under Franco – glorified his dictatorship. The exhumation comes as Spain faces an imminent election and risks inflaming already intense political passions, as Henry Ridgwell reports.   

Firefighters in California are simultaneously fighting blazes in both the north and south of the state, as a new wildfire broke out Friday.

Firefighters responded to the blaze near the town of Ramona, about 48 kilometers northeast of downtown San Diego.

A separate fire north of Los Angeles has caused the evacuation of more than 40,000 residents. 

The so-called Tick Fire, which began Thursday afternoon just outside the city of Santa Clarita, had consumed about 17 square kilometers. Firefighters say more than 15,000 structures are threatened by the fire.

Officials said Friday the Los Angeles Unified School District has closed all of its schools in the San Fernando Valley.

Another fire is burning in northern Sonoma County, affecting the state’s wine country. That fire, known as the Kincade Fire, has burned at least 49 buildings and 65 square kilometers.

California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in both Sonoma and Los Angeles counties Friday.

Also Friday, the stock price for California’s biggest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), fell sharply after the company said its electrical equipment may have caused the Kincade Fire, despite pre-emptive power outages to try to avoid a fire.

PG&E sent an “electric safety incident” report Thursday to the California Public Utilities Commission saying that one of its power lines malfunctioned at about the time and location as the origin of the Kincade Fire.

The company said that while it shut off power to much of the region, it did not de-energize the transmission line that malfunctioned.

PG&E is in bankruptcy because of liability from recent major wildfires, including one last year that killed 85 people in the northern California town of Paradise.

The company has shut down power to thousands of consumers in an effort to contain the spread of the fires.

The utility says power was restored to most people by Thursday evening, however it is warning of another round of power outages starting Saturday when winds are forecast to pick up strength again. It says that power shutdown could affect 2 million people.

Winds at speeds up to about 80 kilometers per hour are fanning the wildfires in California.
 

As U.S. forces withdraw, Russian military police are arriving in northern Syria to drive out Kurdish fighters under the terms of an agreement forged by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Most foreign policy experts say Russia and Turkey are the clear winners of the agreement, and some fear the U.S. retreat leaves Russia as the new power broker in the Middle East. VOA’s diplomatic correspondent Cindy Saine reports from the State Department.

The Justice Department’s probe into its investigation of whether Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has shifted from an administrative review into a criminal investigation.

The New York Times was the first to report the development Thursday, citing two sources.

The new move gives the lead prosecutor the ability to issue subpoenas and empanel a grand jury.  

It was not immediately clear if a grand jury has already been assembled.

John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, is the lead prosecutor in the criminal investigation.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded earlier this year in his report on possible Russian interference that there was not enough evidence to determine that President Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia.

Mueller wrote, however, that he could not exonerate Trump of allegations of obstruction of justice, turning the matter over to Attorney General William Barr.

Barr said he could find no evidence of obstruction.

Trump has repeatedly characterized the Justice Department’s initial Russia investigation as a “witch hunt.”

 

 

 

Indonesia has recommended closer scrutiny of automated control systems, better design of flight deck alerts and accounting for a more diverse pilot population in the wake of a Boeing 737 MAX crash, according to a copy of a final report seen by Reuters.

The report into the crash of the Lion Air jet, Oct. 29, 2018, that killed all 189 people on board is to be released publicly later Friday.

Less than five months after the Lion Air accident, an Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crashed, leading to a global grounding of the model and sparking a corporate crisis at Boeing, the world’s biggest plane manufacturer.

Indonesian investigators Wednesday told families of the victims that a mix of factors contributed to the crash, including mechanical and design issues and a lack of documentation about how systems would behave.

“Deficiencies” in the flight crew’s communication and manual control of the aircraft contributed to the crash, as did alerts and distractions in the cockpit, according to slides presented to the families.

The final report said the first officer was unfamiliar with procedures and had shown issues handling the aircraft during training.

The report also found that a critical sensor providing data to an anti-stall system had been miscalibrated by a repair shop in Florida and that there were strong indications that it was not tested during installation by Lion Air maintenance staff.

Lion Air should have grounded the jet following faults on earlier flights, the report said and added that 31 pages were missing from the airline’s October maintenance logs.

Lion Air did not respond to a request for comment.

Fighting MCAS

In the report, Indonesian regulators recommended a redesign of the anti-stall system known as MCAS that automatically pushed the plane’s nose down, leaving pilots fighting for control.

Boeing has said it would remake the system and provide more information about it in pilot manuals.

According to the report, Boeing’s safety assessment assumed pilots would respond within three seconds of a system malfunction but on the accident flight and one that experienced the same problem the prior evening, it took both crews about eight seconds to respond.

Boeing has said it cannot comment before the release of the report.

A panel of international air safety regulators this month also faulted Boeing for assumptions it made in designing the 737 MAX and found areas where Boeing could improve processes.

Brazil’s Supreme Court on Thursday delayed until next month a ruling on whether defendants should go to prison after losing their first appeal, a decision that could release ex-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva who was jailed last year for taking bribes.

The 11-member tribunal is expected to vote 6-5 in favor of overturning a rule that convicts start serving their sentences after losing their first appeal and instead allow them to exhaust the lengthy appeals process before serving prison time.

Voting stood at 4-3 in favor of keeping the rule when the court suspended the hearing on Thursday until Nov. 6.

Ending the three-year rule could lead to the freeing of Lula and dozens of other politicians and businessmen convicted in Brazil’s biggest-ever corruption investigation, the so-called Car Wash operation, until they have exhausted the appeals process.

In a swing vote on Thursday that could make that possible, Justice Rosa Weber voted to end the mandatory imprisonment rule that she had supported in the past.

Such a revision would come at a time when politicians are pushing back against the Car Wash investigation. Its team of prosecutors have come under increasing criticism for excessive use of temporary arrests and plea bargaining to obtain evidence.

The prospect of serving immediate prison time after losing a first appeal encouraged suspects to negotiate plea deals with prosecutors, providing them with information that helped unravel the biggest graft scheme in Brazil’s history centered on engineering contracts with state companies, in particular state-run oil giant Petroleo Brasileiro.

Former judge Sergio Moro, who handled most of the Car Wash trials and is now justice minister in the government of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, said scrapping the rule would be a major setback for Brazil’s fight against corruption.

“The legal process in Brazil is extremely slow, there are endless appeals after appeals after appeals,” Moro said at an event in Sao Paulo.

The Trump administration has invited the foreign ministers of Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan to Washington to discuss a giant hydropower dam project on Ethiopia’s Blue Nile, the focus of an escalating feud between Addis Ababa and Cairo over water resources. 

The invitation letter obtained by VOA was extended by U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin Oct. 21 to the three countries and to David Malpass, president of the World Bank Group.

Egypt, which has long sought outside help to mediate the talks, has accepted the meeting, scheduled to be held at Mnuchin’s office Nov. 6. 

A senior administration official confirmed that during the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi asked President Donald Trump to mediate the conflict caused by the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. 

Cairo considers the issue a national security matter. Without a settlement with Ethiopia, the construction of the massive upstream Nile dam could threaten Egypt’s source of fresh water.  

Offer to el-Sissi 

The administration official said that Trump had offered el-Sissi “the good offices of Mnuchin.” 

This would indicate that the Treasury Department would be the point of contact in the matter, instead of the State Department, which has its own Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, an agency tasked with engaging foreign governments on transboundary water management through its Office of Conservation and Water. 

The State Department bureau has been engaging with parties to the dam project since 2011. It has repeatedly urged tripartite negotiations to resolve the matter and stated to Egypt as recently as last month that any consideration of technical assistance would be conditioned upon agreements resulting from the tripartite process. 

The bureau was not involved in the invitation by Mnuchin to begin talks.

Trump’s appointment of Mnuchin to mediate is a shift from the administration’s

When Cherokee actor Wes Studi was thinking about moving to Los Angeles to take a shot at being an actor in the 1980s, he asked a friend if it was a good idea. The friend said “why not? There aren’t many Native American actors.”

Instead of a deterrent, Studi took that as a plus.  

“I thought, ‘OK, so not a whole lot of competition then,’” Studi, 71, said laughing. “I thought why not take a leap and I did. And things turned out well.”

Although there was no way he could have known it at the time, the Tulsa, Oklahoma native came at the perfect time too. Hollywood had started to move beyond its deplorable past of casting white actors for indigenous roles and looking for more authenticity in casting. Some of his first films included “Dances With Wolves,” “The Last of the Mohicans” and “Geronimo: An American Legend” that would lead to a fruitful 30-year career that’s still very active.

This Sunday, Studi will make history as the first ever Native American Oscar recipient at the 11th annual Governors Awards, alongside fellow honorary Oscar honorees David Lynch and Lina Wertmuller.

“I feel very honored about it,” he said on a recent phone call from Santa Fe, New Mexico, which he has called home for the past 26 years. He just feels more comfortable living outside of Los Angeles, he said.  

Studi came to acting somewhat late in life. He went to agriculture school, served in the Oklahoma National Guard and even went to Vietnam before he stated dabbling in theater and local educational television.

“I had a life before getting into this business. A non-acting life,” Studi said. “And it turns out that life has served me well. I can connect with characters I play simply by referencing real life. It’s been very helpful over the years to have experienced life outside of entertainment.”

When he arrived in Los Angeles, a now defunct organization called the American Indian Registry helped him get his start. The group promoted Native American actors and made opportunities for them to meet agents. It led to Studi securing representation and booking Kevin Costner’s Oscar-winning “Dances With Wolves,” which then put him on Michael Mann’s radar for what would be his most memorable role to date: Magua in “The Last of the Mohicans.”

“I thank Michael Mann for having an open mind in terms of expanding the character of Magua to the point that he was sort of an antihero, but he had his qualities. He had his reasons for doing what he was doing,” Studi said. “He and the writer were open to that were creating more of a three-dimensional character.”

Mann would then go on to cast Studi again in “Heat” as an Los Angeles police detective — a somewhat rare opportunity for Studi to play a character who wasn’t primarily defined by his ethnicity.

“It can be frustrating,” Studi said. “I can understand the idea of wanting to get away from leathers and feathers. But it’s a double-edged sword in its own way. Westerns and or period pieces in which Native Americans are portrayed have been the starting point and the bread and butter of Native American actors. Fortunately I’ve been able to cross over in a few roles over the years. Sometimes it’s a matter of two steps forward and one step back.”

With a slew of projects just wrapped or in the works, Studi doesn’t appear ready to slow down or retire anytime soon.

“I retire every time we wrap a film,” he said. “So I’ve had a taste of retirement and I’m not sure I enjoy it all that much.”