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Month: June 2024
NATO picks Netherlands’ Mark Rutte as next boss
LONDON — NATO allies on Wednesday selected Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte as NATO’s next boss, as the war in Ukraine rages on its doorstep and uncertainty hangs over the United States’ future attitude to the transatlantic alliance.
Rutte’s appointment became a formality after his only rival for the post, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, announced last week that he had quit the race, having failed to gain traction.
“The North Atlantic Council decided to appoint Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte as the next Secretary General of NATO, succeeding Jens Stoltenberg,” NATO said in a statement.
“Mr Rutte will assume his functions as Secretary General from 1 October 2024, when Mr Stoltenberg’s term expires after ten years at the helm of the Alliance,” it added.
After declaring his interest in the post last year, Rutte gained early support from key members of the alliance including the United States, Britain, France and Germany.
Others were more reticent, particularly Eastern European countries which argued the post should go to someone from their region for the first time.
But they ultimately rowed in behind Rutte, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a staunch ally of Ukraine.
Stoltenberg said he warmly welcomed the selection of Rutte as his successor.
“Mark is a true transatlanticist, a strong leader, and a consensus-builder,” he said. “I know I am leaving NATO in good hands.”
NATO takes decisions by consensus so Rutte, who is bowing out of Dutch politics after nearly 14 years as prime minister, could only be confirmed once all 32 alliance members gave him their backing.
Rutte will face the challenge of sustaining allies’ support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion while guarding against NATO’s being drawn directly into a war with Moscow.
He will also have to contend with the possibility that NATO-skeptic Donald Trump may return to the White House after November’s U.S. presidential election.
Trump’s possible return has unnerved NATO leaders as the Republican former president called into question U.S. willingness to support other members of the alliance if they were attacked.
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Several shot, protesters storm Kenya’s parliament after lawmakers approve tax hikes
Nairobi, Kenya — Several people were shot outside Kenya’s parliament on Tuesday as police clashed with protesters who stormed the complex after lawmakers passed highly controversial tax increases.
Police fired live ammunition after tear gas and rubber bullets failed to disperse the thousands who had gathered to protest the tax hikes.
Witnesses told VOA they saw a number of bodies on the ground outside the building, and news reports say that at least five people were killed.
Meanwhile, fires broke out in the parliament buildings after protesters made it past police barricades. At least two vehicles in the area were set on fire and burned.
Protesters had demonstrated peacefully near parliament in Nairobi most of the day to demand that lawmakers vote against the 2024 Finance Bill. However, the bill was approved on a 195 to 106 vote.
One protester told VOA he disagrees with what the government is trying to do and had to be there to make his voice heard.
“We are protesting against government impunity. You see the finance bill is not something that is going to make Kenyans live at peace,” he said. “And you’ve seen we’ve tried to talk to the government but they are forcing it down our throat. So I’ve decided as a youth to come here and protest and tell them that the government is made by the people, we are the people and we want the government to listen to us.”
Kelvin Moses works near where the protests were taking place. He told VOA the demonstrations have affected many businesses in the Central Business district.
“The businesses are really down, the traffic and flow of customers has really been affected,” Moses said. “You can see that in the CBD [Central Business District], very few shops are open. We hope this matter can be resolved as soon as possible because we business people are feeling the pinch.”
After the vote, some lawmakers fled the parliament complex as hundreds of protesters broke through police barricades and rushed inside.
Kenya has seen a growing youth-led movement in recent days against the tax increases, which the government says are necessary to continue to pay the interest on its high sovereign debt.
Lawmakers made some compromises on the tax bill, dropping proposed increases on bread, car ownership and financial transactions.
But that was not enough for protesters who said the cost of living is already too high.
The protests have been led largely by young people. However, Kenyan lawyer Javas Bigambo told VOA the opposition to the finance bill is not just limited to the youth.
“There has been the assumption that the protests are merely a creation of the Gen-Z or the youth in the country forgetting that these protests, organic as they are, have continued to receive overwhelming support from civil society organizations, from the farmers, manufacturers, the private sector and religious leaders,” Bigambo said.
The Finance Bill still needs President William Ruto’s signature to become law.
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21 Nigerien soldiers killed in ambush by ‘terrorist group,’ ruling junta says
NIAMEY, Niger — An ambush by a “terrorist group” killed 21 Nigerien soldiers near the country’s border with Burkina Faso on Tuesday, Niger’s ruling military junta said in a statement read on national television.
The statement Tuesday evening did not specify which group was behind the attack. Niger is struggling with a deadly security crisis involving several armed groups.
Last week, the rebel Patriotic Liberation Front attacked a China-backed pipeline and threatened more attacks if the $400 million deal with China isn’t canceled. The group, led by Salah Mahmoud, a former rebel leader, took up arms after the junta staged a coup last year ousting a democratically elected government.
Niger and neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso are also battling movements linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State extremist group in a decade-long conflict in the Sahel region that is worsening.
The violence killed thousands of people last year, and more than 2 million people have been displaced, according to the United Nations
Mali and Burkina Faso are also led by juntas and have experienced two coups each since 2020. Both juntas have expelled French forces and turned to Russian mercenaries as they struggle to quell the Islamist groups.
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In deal with US, WikiLeaks’ Assange pleads guilty, secures freedom, ends legal fight
SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has pleaded guilty to a single felony charge for publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that secures his freedom and concludes a drawn-out legal saga that raised divisive questions about press freedom and national security.
The plea was entered Wednesday morning in federal court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific. He arrived at court shortly before the hearing was to begin and did not take questions.
Though the deal with prosecutors required him to admit guilt to a single felony count, it would also permit him to return to his native Australia without spending any time in an American prison. He had been jailed in the United Kingdom for the last five years, fighting extradition to the United States on an Espionage Act indictment that could have carried a lengthy prison sentence in the event of a conviction.
The abrupt conclusion enables both sides to claim a degree of victory, with the Justice Department able to resolve without trial a case that raised thorny legal issues and that might never have reached a jury at all given the plodding pace of the extradition process.
WikiLeaks, the secret-spilling website that Assange founded in 2006, applauded the announcement of the deal, saying it was grateful for “all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.”
The deal, disclosed Monday night in a sparsely detailed Justice Department letter, represents the latest and presumably final chapter in a court fight involving the eccentric Australian computer expert who has been celebrated by supporters as a transparency crusader but lambasted by national security hawks who insist that his disdain for government secrecy put lives at risks, and strayed far beyond the bounds of traditional journalism duties.
The U.S. Justice Department agreed to hold the hearing on the remote island because Assange opposed coming to the continental U.S. and because it’s near Australia, where he will return.
The guilty plea resolves a criminal case brought by the Trump administration Justice Department in connection with the receipt and publication of war logs and diplomatic cables that detailed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prosecutors alleged that he conspired with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain the records and published them without regard to American national security, including by releasing the names of human sources who provided information to U.S. forces.
But his activities drew an outpouring of support from press freedom advocates who heralded his role in bringing to light military conduct that might otherwise have been concealed from view. Among the files published by WikiLeaks was a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.
The indictment was unsealed in 2019, but Assange’s legal woes long predated the criminal case and continued well past it.
Weeks after the release of the largest document cache in 2010, a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange based on one woman’s allegation of rape and another’s allegation of molestation. Assange has long maintained his innocence, and the investigation was later dropped.
He presented himself in 2012 to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he claimed asylum on the grounds of political persecution, and spent the following seven years in self-exile there, hosting a parade of celebrity visitors and making periodic appearances from the building’s balcony to address supporters.
In 2019, his hosts revoked his asylum, allowing British police to arrest him. He remained locked up for the last five years while the Justice Department sought to extradite him, in a process that encountered skepticism from British judges who worried about how Assange would be treated by the American criminal justice system.
Ultimately, though, the resolution sparing Assange prison time in the U.S. is a repudiation of sorts of years of ominous warnings by Assange and his supporters that the American criminal justice system would expose him to unduly harsh treatment, including potentially the death penalty — something prosecutors never sought.
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Russia bans distribution of dozens of EU news outlets in retaliatory step
moscow — Russia said on Tuesday it was banning access inside Russia to the broadcasts of 81 different media outlets from the European Union — including Agence France-Presse and Politico — in retaliation for a similar EU ban on several Russian media outlets.
The European Union said in May it was suspending the distribution of what it described as four “Kremlin-linked propaganda networks,” stripping them of their broadcasting rights in the bloc.
It said at the time that the ban applied to Voice of Europe, to the RIA news agency, and to the Izvestia and Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspapers.
The Russian Foreign Ministry hit back on Tuesday, releasing a list of 81 media outlets from 25 EU member states, as well as pan-European outlets, whose broadcasts it said would no longer be available on Russian territory.
It accused the outlets of “systematically distributing inaccurate information” about what Russia calls its special military operation in Ukraine.
France’s Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency, Austria’s ORF state TV company, Ireland’s RTE broadcaster, digital outlet Politico and Spain’s EFE news agency were among the outlets affected by the move, along with many other national broadcasters and newspapers.
“The Russian Federation has repeatedly warned at various levels that politically motivated harassment of domestic journalists and unjustified bans on Russian media in the EU will not go unanswered,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
“In spite of this, Brussels and the capitals of the bloc’s countries preferred to follow the path of escalation, forcing Moscow to adopt mirror and proportional countermeasures.”
It said it would review its ban if the EU lifted its restrictions on RIA, Izvestia and the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper, all of which it described as Russian media outlets.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the State Duma lower house of parliament, said in May that the EU move had shown that the West refused to accept any alternative point of view and was destroying freedom of speech.
‘Unjustified measure’
Italy’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday condemned the Russian decision to ban access to outlets including Italian broadcasters Rai and La7 and newspapers La Repubblica and La Stampa.
“We regret the unjustified measure taken against these Italian broadcasters and newspapers, which have always provided objective and unbiased information on the conflict in Ukraine,” the ministry said.
AFP declined to comment, and RTE did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the measures, announced a day before the Russian trial of U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich on espionage charges is due to begin.
Jamil Anderlini, Politico’s editor-in-chief for Europe, described the measures as “completely unacceptable” and said in a statement that it was “not the first time press freedoms have been restricted through politically motivated attacks.”
“We call for the immediate lifting of these restrictions and continue to call for Evan’s immediate release,” he wrote.
The first American journalist to be detained on spy charges in Russia since the Cold War more than three decades ago, Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, has denied he is a Central Intelligence Agency spy. The Journal says Gershkovich was doing his job and denies he is a spy.
Many Western news organizations pulled staff out of Russia after it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and passed laws soon afterwards that set long prison sentences for “discrediting” the armed forces.
Russian officials say large parts of the Western media spread false, unbalanced stories about Russia, and that Western media organizations are waging an information war.
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Ukraine begins talks to join European Union
Nigeria declares cholera crisis, launches emergency measures
German experts to investigate Malawi vice president’s plane crash
Blantyre, Malawi — Malawi has started investigations into the cause of a plane crash that killed Vice President Saulos Chilima and nine others June 10 in northern Malawi.
Government spokesperson Moses Kunkuyu said Sunday that German experts will look into several areas leading to the crash of the Dornier 228 aircraft, including the condition of the plane and circumstances.
The military plane went missing soon after it was advised not to land at an airport in northern Malawi because of bad weather.
The arrival of the German experts comes after Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera said last week he was puzzled with what caused the crash of the plane he has long used.
Chakwera said he asked foreign governments to help probe the accident, despite investigations being carried out by the Malawian Defense Force.
Michael Kaiyatsa, executive director for the Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation, one of several organizations in Malawi that asked for an independent investigation into the crash, welcomes the move.
“However, it is important that the government should not interfere in any way in the investigation,” Kaiyatsa said. “This should be a totally independent investigation so that whatever comes out of it should be credible.”
The sudden death of Chilima sparked conspiracy theories in Malawi and abroad, with some suggesting it was an assassination plot.
Last week, police in Malawi arrested lawmaker Kamlepo Kalua and rights activist Bon Kalindo for circulating messages on social media alleging the plane crash was planned.
The two were charged with cybercrimes and were expected to appear in court June 25.
But Kaiyatsa said arresting those expressing their views on the plane crash would prevent some people from giving information to investigators.
“That’s why we have issued a statement strongly condemning the arrests, because what these arrests would do is to create an atmosphere of fear at a time when we need people to freely open up and clearly come out and provide information about what they know about the cause of the accident,” Kaiyatsa said.
Malawian security expert Sheriff Kaisi said transparency is needed in such investigations to win the confidence of Malawians regarding the investigators.
“We need to know if they are from Germany, which company in Germany, and what is the track record that they have been doing similar jobs. For example, investigating such accidents, and for how long they have done that, and what are the reports they have,” Kaisi said.
Kunkuyu said two of the investigators are from the German Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation, and one is from General Atomics, a company that has taken over the manufacture of Dornier 228 aircraft.
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Kenyan police arrive in Haiti to combat gang violence
Georgians link past Russian atrocities with Ukraine invasion
Campaigners in Georgia are seeking to highlight past atrocities committed by invading Russian troops and allied militias during the early 1990s, which they say should have acted as a warning of the dangers posed by Russia, long before Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Henry Ridgwell reports from Tbilisi.
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China’s premier pushes back on EV, green industry concerns
Joy in Afghanistan as national team makes cricket World Cup semifinal debut
ISLAMABAD — Thousands of people in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan took to the streets Tuesday to celebrate their national team’s first-ever entry into the cricket World Cup semifinals by beating Bangladesh.
Video from several cities, many bordering Pakistan, showed joyous rallies in the streets early in the morning, with reports of celebratory gunfire by fans in some areas, including the capital, Kabul.
The celebrations erupted shortly after the Afghan team completed a dramatic eight-run victory over the Bangladeshi side in a rain-affected, low-scoring match in St. Vincent in the West Indies late Monday.
“It’s something of a dream for us as a team…it’s unbelievable. I don’t have the words to describe my feelings,” Rashid Khan, the Afghan team captain, said after the match. “I’m sure it’s going to be a massive celebration back home. It’s a massive achievement for us. The country will be very proud.”
Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in Kabul telephoned Khan and congratulated him on the landmark victory, his office said on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Authorities in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar officially ordered residents to celebrate the cricket team’s success inside their homes and avoid taking to the streets and roads for security reasons.
Hibatullah Akhundzada, the reclusive supreme leader of the Taliban, lives and governs the country from Kandahar, issuing edicts based on his strict interpretation of Islamic law, which includes restrictions on women’s and girls’ rights and freedom of movement.
Afghanistan scored 115 runs in their allotted 20 overs, but weather conditions led Bangladesh to chase a revised target of 114 runs in 19 overs under relevant cricketing rules.
Khan and Afghan pacer Naveen ul Haq displayed a brilliant bowling performance, bagging four wickets each and dismissing the Bangladeshi team for 105 in 17.5 overs.
Afghanistan will now face South Africa in the first semi-final in Tarouba, West Indies. Its historic semifinal appearance came two days after it surprised the world by scoring its first-ever victory over Australia, the cricketing superpower, in the Twenty20 World Cup jointly hosted by the United States and West Indies.
The Afghan victory has eliminated Australia from the tournament. After losing its crucial match to India earlier on Monday, Australia needed Bangladesh to defeat Afghanistan to advance to the semifinals.
Cricket began to gain popularity in Afghanistan following the ouster of the Taliban in 2001 by a U.S.-led military invasion of the country. Afghans, who had been living in refugee camps in Pakistan, are credited with bringing the game to their impoverished South Asian nation.
Afghanistan joined the International Cricket Council (ICC) in 2017. Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, the national team has mostly trained and played outside the country.
The international community has not formally recognized the Taliban government mainly for restricting Afghan women’s access to education, employment, sports, and public life at large. The curbs have prompted some countries to boycott bilateral cricket competitions with Afghanistan.
Australia has declined to play Afghanistan several times.
This past March, Australian cricketing officials canceled a three-match series due to take place in the United Arab Emirates in August. They referenced government advice that the situation for women and girls was deteriorating in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
The rare World Cup success of the national team and the resulting celebrations in Afghanistan contrast with the country’s deepening economic, humanitarian, and human rights crises caused by years of war and natural disasters.
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