ReportWire

Tag: misc organizations

  • Judge in Proud Boys case denies mistrial motion after jurors report being followed | CNN Politics

    Judge in Proud Boys case denies mistrial motion after jurors report being followed | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The federal judge overseeing the trial of five Proud Boys members who are accused of plotting to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, denied a mistrial motion on Thursday after jurors reported being followed and confronted in public.

    In late March, several jurors reported two incidents in which they were approached outside the courthouse by members of the public, District Judge Timothy Kelly said in a sealed proceeding Thursday that was inadvertently streamed to a media room in the Washington, DC, federal courthouse. CNN reported last week that one juror believed she was being followed.

    Kelly denied a mistrial motion from all five defendants, saying that every member of the jury was questioned about the interactions and confirmed they could still judge the case fairly. Kelly also denied motions from the defendants to strike the jurors who said they had been confronted, adding that “none of the jurors expressed a concern that any of this would affect their jury service.”

    Kelly said that he instructed the jury to disregard those interactions, and that “when I read this instruction to the jury, I watched many of them nod as if to say, ‘Okay, let’s get on with the case.’”

    The ruling ends a dayslong argument over how to handle the alleged incidents involving a total of four jurors who were approached in public, the latest in a series of mishaps that have plagued the trial.

    Kelly described the interactions in detail during the under-seal proceeding, bringing to light additional information about the incidents. A coalition of media outlets, including CNN, previously fought for access to the sealed arguments, but Kelly denied that request.

    In one instance, three jurors were walking away from the courthouse when they were approached by a man on a bike, Kelly said. The man began discussing a trial he was watching at the courthouse, and while it is not clear if he mentioned the Proud Boys defendants by name, the man said that the case was interesting and called a recent defense witness “crazy.”

    “The individual did not say that he knew they were jurors,” Kelly said.

    The three jurors told Kelly that they thought the incident was “odd” and “weird,” but didn’t become concerned until they saw the same man sitting in the courtroom the next day, looking at them and whispering to someone else in the gallery. One juror told Kelly that seeing the man gave her a “weird feeling.”

    In another instance, Kelly said that a juror reported seeing the same man at a metro stop on four separate occasions. The first time she saw the man, the juror said that he asked her if she was serving on a jury but did not mention any case specifically.

    Kelly said the issue was referred to the US Marshals, who went to the metro station to find him and watched the man walk into a nearby homeless shelter. Kelly also saw two pictures of the man and said that “from my view of the photos, it was certainly plausible he was homeless.”

    The juror who was approached at the metro stop told Kelly that she “did not feel intimidated by this,” he added.

    After issuing his ruling Thursday, Kelly was informed by a courtroom staff member that video of the proceeding was being streamed elsewhere in the courthouse. Kelly then had the video stream cut, saying that “there is nothing we can do at this point. Let’s have them shut it off now.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • UN tells Afghan staff to stay home after Taliban bans women from working with the organization | CNN

    UN tells Afghan staff to stay home after Taliban bans women from working with the organization | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The United Nations has instructed all of its personnel in Afghanistan to stay away from its offices in the country, after the Taliban banned Afghan women from working with the organization.

    “UN national personnel – women and men – have been instructed not to report to UN offices, with only limited and calibrated exceptions made for critical tasks,” the organization said in a statement.

    It comes after Afghan men working for the UN in Kabul stayed home last week in solidarity with their female colleagues.

    The UN said the Taliban’s move was an extension of a previous ban, enforced last December, that prohibited Afghan women from working for national and international non-governmental organizations.

    The organization said the ban is “the latest in a series of discriminatory measures implemented by the Taliban de facto authorities with the goal of severely restricting women and girls’ participation in most areas of public and daily life in Afghanistan.”

    It will continue to “assess the scope, parameters and consequences of the ban, and pause activities where impeded,” the statement said, adding that the “matter will be under constant review.”

    Several female UN staff in the country had already experienced restrictions on their movements since the Taliban seized power in 2021, including harassment and detention.

    Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN Deputy Special Representative, Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan, called the Taliban’s decision an “unparalleled violation of human rights” last week.

    “The lives of Afghanistan women are at stake,” he said, adding, “It is not possible to reach women without women.”

    The UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, is engaging with the Taliban at the highest level to “seek an immediate reversal of the order,” the UN said last week.

    “In the history of the United Nations, no other regime has ever tried to ban women from working for the Organization just because they are women. This decision represents an assault against women, the fundamental principles of the UN, and on international law,” Otunbayeva said.

    Other figures within the organization also condemned the move, with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights calling it “utterly despicable.”

    After the Taliban banned female aid workers in December, at least half a dozen major foreign aid groups temporarily suspended their operations in Afghanistan – diminishing the already scarce resources available to a country in dire need of them.

    The Taliban’s return to power preceded a deepening humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, worsening issues that had long plagued the country. After the takeover, the US and its allies froze about $7 billion of the country’s foreign reserves and cut off international funding – crippling an economy heavily dependent on overseas aid.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Dozens of rockets fired from Lebanon into Israel after raids on al-Aqsa mosque | CNN

    Dozens of rockets fired from Lebanon into Israel after raids on al-Aqsa mosque | CNN

    [ad_1]


    Jerusalem
    CNN
     — 

    Dozens of rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel on Thursday, the Israeli military said, in a major escalation that comes amid regional tensions over Israeli police raids at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

    Some 34 rockets were launched from Lebanese territory into Israeli territory, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said, with the majority intercepted but six landing in Israel.

    It was the largest such attack since a 2006 war between the two countries left around 1,200 Lebanese people and 165 Israelis dead.

    Videos posted on social media showed rockets streaking through the skies over northern Israel, and the sounds of explosions in the distance.

    The country closed its northern airspace in the wake of the barrage. No deaths were reported, and it is not yet known which group in Lebanon launched the rockets.

    Israel said it would “decide on the place and time” of its response, an IDF defense official who asked not to be named told CNN. An Israeli military spokesman said they believed a Palestinian militant group was behind the attack, not the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

    The Lebanese army confirmed a number of a rockets were launched from the country’s south, but did not detail who had fired them. It said on Twitter that a unit had found “missile launchers and a number of rockets intended for launch” in the vicinity of the Lebanese towns of Zibqin and Qlaileh, and was “currently working to dismantle them.”

    Hezbollah has not yet commented on the incident. It comes a day after Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, arrived in Beirut for meetings with Hezbollah officials.

    Tensions are sky-high in the region after Israeli police stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on two separate occasions Wednesday, as Palestinian worshipers offered prayers during the holy month of Ramadan.

    Footage from inside the mosque showed Israeli officers beating people with their batons and rifle-butts, then arresting hundreds of Palestinians. Israeli police said they entered the mosque after “hundreds of rioters” tried to barricade themselves inside.

    The incident, which was met with widespread condemnation from the Arab and Muslim world, sparked retaliatory rocket fire from Gaza into Israel.

    Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told CNN “we are at a very dangerous moment.”

    “What we see unfolding on the Lebanese border is obviously a consequence, a reaction to what we saw happening in al-Aqsa [mosque].” Safadi said.

    Trails from rockets can be seen over the skies of northern Israel in this video screengrab, as authorities raised concerns over increased tensions between Israel and Lebanon.

    Lebanon and Israel are considered enemy states, but a truce between them has largely held since the 2006 war.

    There have been several small-scale rocket attacks from Lebanon in recent years that have prompted retaliatory strikes from Israel. Few casualties were reported in those incidents, with the largest death toll in an exchange of fire in 2015 that left two Israeli soldiers and a Spanish peacekeeper dead. Palestinian factions in Lebanon were believed to be behind those rocket attacks.

    The 2006 conflict was the biggest flare-up between Lebanon and Israel since 1982. Around 1,200 Lebanese people and 165 Israelis died in an exchange of fire that involved a nationwide Israeli aerial assault, and a naval and aerial blockade. Hezbollah fired many rounds of rockets reaching deep into Israeli territory during the conflict.

    The Israeli military pinned the blame for the rockets on either Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, with international spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht saying the IDF assumed that “Hezbollah knew about it, and Lebanon also has responsibility.”

    But he emphasized several times that the IDF viewed the attack as having come from a Palestinian source, and that it did not represent a widening of the conflict to actors outside of the direct Israeli-Palestinian conflict, raising hopes that tensions could be ratcheted down after the incident.

    The Lebanese foreign ministry also said it was ready to cooperate with the United Nations and take steps to “restore calm and stability” in the south, while calling on “the international community to put pressure on Israel to stop escalation,” the state-owned National News Agency reported.

    The IDF has been concerned for some time about an escalation on the Lebanese border, and hosted a high-level seminar in the spring of 2022 to brief journalists and policy makers about it.

    The UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said Thursday’s escalation of violence between Lebanon and Israel was “extremely serious.”

    UNIFIL also said it has directed its personnel stationed at the border between the two countries to move to air raid shelters, as a “common practice.”

    The White House said it was “extremely concerned by the continuing violence and we urge all sides to avoid further escalation.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Erdogan’s political fate may be determined by Turkey’s Kurds | CNN

    Erdogan’s political fate may be determined by Turkey’s Kurds | CNN

    [ad_1]

    Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.


    Abu Dhabi, UAE
    CNN
     — 

    Turkey’s persecuted pro-Kurdish party has emerged as a kingmaker in the country’s upcoming election, playing a decisive role that may just tip the balance enough to unseat two-decade ruler Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

    In a key setback to the Turkish president and leader of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) last month announced that it would not put forward its own presidential candidate, a move analysts say allows its supporters to vote for Erdogan’s main rival.

    “We are facing a turning point that will shape the future of Turkey and (its) society,” said the HDP in a statement on March 23. “To fulfill our historical responsibility against the one-man rule, we will not field a presidential candidate in (the) May 14 elections.”

    It is a twist of irony for the Turkish strongman, who spent the better half of the past decade cracking down on the party after it began chipping away at his voter base. Its former leader Selahattin Demirtas has been in prison for nearly seven years and the party faces possible closure by a court for suspected collusion with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and affiliated groups. But its influence may nonetheless determine the course of Turkey’s politics.

    The HDP’s decision not to field a candidate came just three days after head of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) Kemal Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan’s main rival, visited the party’s co-chairs. He told reporters that the solution to Turkey’s problems, “including the Kurdish problem” lies in parliament,” according to Turkish media.

    Kilicdaroglu, who represents the six-party Nation Alliance opposition bloc, is the strongest contender to run against Erdogan in years. And while the HDP hasn’t yet announced whether it will put its weight behind him, analysts say it is the kingmaker in the elections.

    “It was a carefully crafted political discourse,” Hisyar Ozsoy, deputy co-chair of the HDP and a member of parliament from the predominantly Kurdish province of Diyarbakir, told CNN. “We are not going to have our own candidate, and we will leave it to the international community to interpret it the way they wish.”

    Experts say the crackdown on the HDP is rooted in the threat it poses to Erdogan politically, as well as its position as one of the main parties representing Turkey’s Kurds, an ethnic minority from which a separatist militant movement has emerged.

    The party and the Kurdish people have had a complicated relationship with Erdogan. The leader courted the Kurds in earlier years by granting them more rights and reversing restrictions on the use of their language. Relations with the HDP were also cordial once, as Erdogan worked with the party on a brief peace process with the PKK.

    But ties between Erdogan and the HDP later turned sour, and the HDP fell under a sweeping crackdown aimed at the PKK and their affiliates.

    Kurds are the biggest minority in Turkey, making up between 15% and 20% of the population, according to Minority Rights Group International.

    It is unclear if the HDP will endorse Kilicdaroglu, but analysts say that the deliberate distance may be beneficial for the opposition candidate.

    The accusations against the HDP place it in a precarious position during the elections. It currently faces a case in Turkey’s Constitutional Court over suspected ties to the PKK, which is designated as a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. Knowing it may be banned at any moment, its candidates are running under the Green Left Party in parliament.

    If the opposition is seen as allying with the HDP, Erdogan’s AK Party may use its influence in the media to discredit it as being pro-PKK, said Murat Somer, a political science professor at Koc University in Istanbul and author of Return to Point Zero, a book on the Turkish-Kurdish question in Turkey.

    The HDP’s threat to Erdogan’s hold on power became apparent after the June 2015 election, the first general election it participated in. It won 13% of the seats, denying the ruling AK Party its majority for the first time since 2002. Erdogan, however, called a snap election five months later, which led to a drop in the HDP’s support to 10.7%, as well as the restoration of the AK Party’s overall majority.

    “They are a kingmaker in these elections because the HDP gets about half of the votes of the Kurdish population in Turkey,” said Somer, adding that the other, more conservative Kurdish voters have traditionally voted for Erdogan’s AK Party. And last month, the Free Cause Party (HUDA-PAR), a tiny Kurdish-Islamist party announced support for Erdogan in the elections. The party has never won seats in parliament.

    The HDP knows that its position is key to the outcome of next month’s vote, but that it’s also in a delicate situation.

    “We want to play the game wisely, and we need to be very careful,” said Ozsoy, adding that the party wants to avoid a “contaminated political climate” where the elections are polarized “between a very ugly ultra-nationalist discourse against Kilicdaroglu and others.”

    The party was founded in 2012 with a number of aims, said Ozsoy, one of which was “peaceful and democratic resolution of the Kurdish conflict.”

    Somer said that the party was seen to be “an initiative” of the PKK, which later led to a heavy government crackdown on it in the name of counterterrorism.

    Its former leader Demirtas remains an influential figure.

    The Turkish government has been trying to link the HDP to the PKK but has so far failed to prove “a real connection,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

    A post-Erdogan Turkey may give some breathing space to the Kurds and Kurdish-dominated parties in Turkey, Aydintasbas told CNN, noting that many Kurdish voters have recently left Erdogan’s camp. “For HDP, this is more than just an ideological choice,” she said. “It’s a matter of survival.”

    Ozsoy says his party understands what’s at stake, not only for Turkey’s Kurds but for all its minorities.

    “We are aware of our responsibility here. We are aware of our role. We know we are in a kingmaker position,” the HDP lawmaker said.

    Two women arrested for not wearing hijab following ‘yogurt attack’

    Two women were arrested in Iran for failing to wear the hijab in public, after a man threw a tub of yogurt at them at a store in the city of Shandiz on Thursday, according to Mizan News Agency, the state-run outlet for Iran’s judiciary.

    • Background: A video and report published by the Mizan News Agency showed footage of the man approaching one of the unveiled women and speaking to her before he grabs a tub of yogurt and throws it, hitting both women on the head. The video appears to show a male staff member removing the man from the store. The two women were arrested, as well as the man who threw the yogurt, according to local media.
    • Why it matters: Iranians have taken to the streets in protest for several months against Iran’s mandatory hijab law, as well as other political and social issues across the country. The Iranian government has continued to crack down on the protests, and on Saturday, Iran’s Ministry of Interior said that the “hijab is an unquestionable religious necessity.”

    Oil prices surge after OPEC+ producers announce surprise cuts

    Oil prices spiked Monday after OPEC+ producers unexpectedly announced that they would cut output. Brent crude, the global benchmark, jumped 5.31% to $84.13 a barrel, while WTI, the US benchmark, rose 5.48% to $79.83. Both were the sharpest price rises in almost a year. The collective output cut by the nine members of OPEC+ totals 1.66 million barrels per day.

    • Background: The reductions are on top of the 2 million barrels per day (bpd) cuts announced by OPEC+ in October and bring the total volume of cuts by OPEC+ to 3.66 million bpd, equal to 3.7% of global demand. In a note Sunday, Goldman Sachs analysts said the move was unexpected but “consistent with the new OPEC+ doctrine to act pre-emptively because they can, without significant losses in market share.”
    • Why it matters: The White House pushed back on the cuts by OPEC+. “We don’t think cuts are advisable at this moment given market uncertainty – and we’ve made that clear,” a spokesperson for the National Security Council said. “We’re focused on prices for American consumers, not barrels.” In October, OPEC+’s decision to cut production had already rankled the White House. US President Joe Biden pledged at the time that Saudi Arabia would suffer “consequences.” But so far, his administration appears to have backed off on its vows to punish the kingdom.

    Iran blames Israel for the killing of second IRGC officer, vows to respond

    A second Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officer died following an attack in Syria on Friday, according to Iranian state media on Sunday. Iranian state media said the Iranian military adviser died after an Israeli attack near the Syrian capital Damascus left him wounded. The attack also killed another IRGC officer. In a tweet on Sunday, Iranian government spokesman Ali Bahadori Jahromi said the alleged Israeli attack wouldn’t go unanswered. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said on Sunday that Iran has the right to respond to “state terrorism.”

    • Background: The Friday airstrike hit a “site in the Damascus countryside,” Syrian state news agency SANA said. Israel declined CNN’s request for comment on reports of airstrikes near Damascus on Friday, saying its military doesn’t comment on reports in the foreign media. Iranian influence has grown in Syria since a civil war broke out in the country more than a decade ago, with the IRGC building a substantial presence as “advisers” to the Syrian armed forces.
    • Why it matters: The Israeli military declined to comment, but it has previously claimed responsibility for attacks it has described as Iranian-linked targets in Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a cabinet meeting Sunday: “We are exacting a high price from the regimes that support terrorism, beyond Israel’s borders. I suggest that our enemies not err. Israel’s internal debate will not detract one iota from our determination, strength and ability to act against our enemies on all fronts, wherever and whenever necessary.”

    Iranian-American comedian Maz Jobrani, who has been touring the Middle East, spoke to CNN’s Becky Anderson about his support for the protests in his homeland, saying that he used his standup comedy platform to highlight the “brutality against the Iranian people.”

    “It was an opportunity for me to say, ‘let’s keep fighting,’” he said.

    Watch the interview here.

    An Iranian state news outlet is gloating at what it sees as the demise of the US dollar.

    IRNA recreated a popular meme to mark China and Brazil’s decision to reportedly ditch the US dollar as an intermediary in trade, citing the Chinese state news outlet, China Daily. It shows two men representing China and Brazil posing in front of a grave labelled “USD.”

    The meme was pinned to the top of IRNA’s Twitter page, and was met with laughter and ridicule. “Dream on,” said another user, pointing to the dollar’s use as the main reserve currency around the world.

    China Daily said that the agreement was part of “the rising global use of the Chinese renminbi.” It would reportedly enable China and Brazil to conduct trade and financial transactions using local currencies instead of the dollar.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Police investigating reports of Liverpool bus attack after Manchester City match | CNN

    Police investigating reports of Liverpool bus attack after Manchester City match | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Greater Manchester Police (GMP) is investigating reports that Liverpool’s team bus was damaged after the club’s English Premier League match against Manchester City, the police force said in a statement.

    The incident is reported to have taken place close to the Etihad Stadium, where the match was held, on Saturday afternoon, GMP said.

    “There were no reports of any injuries and the Liverpool Club coaches were able to continue with their journey. An investigation has now been launched by Greater Manchester Police to identify and locate the offenders,” read the statement sent to CNN.

    Manchester City, who won the tie 4-1 to keep alive its hopes of winning a third successive league title, described the incident as “totally unacceptable” and said it would “fully support” the investigation.

    “We understand an object was thrown towards the coach in a residential area,” the statement said.

    “Incidents of this kind are totally unacceptable, and we strongly condemn the actions of the individual(s) responsible.”

    Manchester City also addressed the chanting aimed at Liverpool fans during the game. Some British media outlets reported that the chanting made reference to the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster which caused 97 Liverpool fans to lose their lives.

    “We regret any offence these chants may have caused and will continue to work with supporter groups and officials from both clubs to eradicate hateful chanting from this fixture,” City said.

    Liverpool has not responded to CNN’s request for comment.

    In a statement to CNN, the Premier League said: “The Premier League condemns the chanting heard during today’s match between Manchester City and Liverpool. The League is treating the issue of tragedy chanting as a priority and as a matter of urgency.”

    The rivalry between the two English teams has increased in recent seasons as both have vied for the league title. Last season, City finished one point ahead of Liverpool in the title race.

    In 2018, UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, fined Liverpool after fans threw objects at City’s team bus ahead of a Champions League quarterfinal at Anfield.

    Last October, City manager Pep Guardiola said coins were thrown towards him during a league game between the two teams, and after the same match Liverpool condemned the “vile chants relating to football stadium tragedies” heard in the away end of the stadium, adding that offensive graffiti was also found in the away section.

    Fans singing songs about stadium disasters or fatal accidents, which has been described as ‘tragedy chanting,’ has been put in the spotlight in England this season.

    Ahead of Manchester United’s league match against Liverpool last month, the respective managers of both clubs called for an end to such chanting in a joint statement.

    The Football Association, English football’s governing body, said it strongly condemned such chants.

    In a statement to CNN, a FA spokesperson said: “We are very concerned about the rise of abhorrent chants in stadiums that are related to the Hillsborough disaster and other football related tragedies.

    “These chants are highly offensive and are deeply upsetting for the families, friends and communities who have been impacted by these devastating events, and we strongly condemn this behaviour.

    “We support clubs and fans who try to stamp out this behaviour from our game. We also support the excellent work of the survivor groups who engage with stakeholders across football to help educate people about the damaging and lasting effects that these terrible chants can have.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Convicted ISIS supporter sentenced to additional year in prison over meeting with ‘American Taliban’ John Lindh | CNN Politics

    Convicted ISIS supporter sentenced to additional year in prison over meeting with ‘American Taliban’ John Lindh | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    A Virginia man convicted of providing support to ISIS in 2015 was sentenced Thursday to serve an additional year in prison for breaking his release conditions after meeting multiple times with John Walker Lindh, the so-called “American Taliban” and sharing ISIS propaganda online in encrypted chats.

    In 2015, Ali Shukri Amin pleaded guilty to providing support to ISIS – posting articles on how ISIS members could avoid detection in online communications and sharing instructions on how the terrorist group could use cryptocurrency for fundraising efforts, according to the plea agreement.

    Amin, who was 17 years old when he pleaded guilty, served several years in prison before being released on supervision.

    According to the government, Amin broke his release conditions when he met Lindh, a convicted felon, in person several times, communicated with him and others on an unmonitored device and shared and translated ISIS propaganda online.

    One file stored on his device, which Amin attempted to share with others, according to the government, contained an ISIS propaganda video showing mass beheadings and attack instructions, prosecutors said.

    “Now he has a network of like-minded convicted terrorists,” prosecutors said, adding, “Mr. Amin continues to support ISIS” and “remains a danger to society.”

    Amin’s attorney, Jessica Carmichael, told the court that Amin also had anti-ISIS material on his computer and said that his conversations with Lindh online were largely about job searches.

    “We’re talking about having dinner with John Walker Lindh three times,” Carmichael said, noting that Lindh was also on supervision at the time of the meetings in 2021 and was being supervised by the same probation officer as Amin.

    Lindh, who was released in 2019, was also on supervised release and subject to the same condition as Amin at the time of the alleged meetings, but has not been accused of violating those terms.

    Amin told the court the government had used “selective quotes” that were out of context but said he regretted “my poor decisions.”

    “I will do better,” he told District Judge Claude M. Hilton.

    Hilton also sentenced Amin to a lifetime of supervised release.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Proud Boy testifies that talk of ‘stacking bodies’ was locker-room banter | CNN Politics

    Proud Boy testifies that talk of ‘stacking bodies’ was locker-room banter | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Proud Boys member Fernando Alonso, who was with members of the group in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, testified on Monday that text messages about “stacking bodies” on the White House lawn were akin to locker-room banter and that members of the group were simply “knuckleheads.”

    During his testimony in the trial against five members of the Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy for their alleged actions around the US Capitol attack, Alonso testified that the idea Proud Boys wanted to take over the government was “offensive.”

    But then prosecutors pressed him about text messages he sent weeks earlier.

    In one message, an individual named Al messaged Alonso on December 24, 2020, asking: “When do we start stacking bodies on the White House Lawn?”

    “Jan 7th,” Alonso wrote back, according to evidence presented at the trial.

    Al responded: “The RINOs first, make the Democrats watch…”

    Alonso answered: “yes.”

    When asked about the message, Alonso testified it was all “‘locker room talk,’ if you will.”

    The Proud Boy also testified that defendant Enrique Tarrio – chairman of the group – never wanted violence. Alonso said the idea that they wanted to overtake the government “is insulting” and “ridiculous.”

    The five defendants – Tarrio, Zachary Rehl, Ethan Nordean, Dominic Pezzola and Joseph Biggs – have pleaded not guilty.

    Alonso said that, around the time of January 6, Proud Boys were irritated by police who, in his view, didn’t do enough to stop violence perpetrated by the left-wing group Antifa, calling them “coptifa.”

    “Antifa did a lot of things, and I don’t see any trials for them,” he said.

    Alonso testified that on January 6, he followed Proud Boys leaders around the Capitol but said he never went inside. Alonso has not been charged in connection with his actions on January 6.

    “I wasn’t going to go in when there’s armed police pointing guns at us,” Alonso said, adding that it “was pretty extreme” to go inside.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Blast kills Taliban governor in his office in Afghanistan | CNN

    Blast kills Taliban governor in his office in Afghanistan | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    A Taliban governor in northern Afghanistan has been killed by an explosion in his office, police officials have told CNN.

    Mohammad Dawood Muzammil, the governor of Balkh province, died along with two others in the blast on Thursday, said the provincial police force’s spokesman Asif Waziri.

    The cause of the explosion remains unclear, but Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said the men had been killed “by the enemies of Islam.”

    However, he did not identify the suspects and no group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

    “An investigation into the incident is underway,” Mujahid said.

    The governor is one of the most senior officials to have been killed since the radical Islamist group retook control of the country in August 2021 following the withdrawal of US forces.

    Since then, the Islamic State militant group and its affiliates have claimed a series of deadly attacks in Afghanistan both on civilians and members of the Taliban.

    These have included an attack at a Sikh temple that killed at least two people, a string of incidents in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, and a suicide bomb blast at Kabul airport.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Marine injured in Kabul airport bombing recounts ‘catastrophic’ US withdrawal from Afghanistan at House hearing | CNN Politics

    Marine injured in Kabul airport bombing recounts ‘catastrophic’ US withdrawal from Afghanistan at House hearing | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    US Marine Corps Sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews can remember in specific detail the moment that a suicide bomber attacked Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate in August 2021 amid the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

    “A flash and a massive wave of pressure. I’m thrown 4 feet onto the ground but instantly knew what had happened. I opened my eyes to Marines dead or unconscious lying around me. A crowd of hundreds immediately vanished in front of me. And my body was catastrophically wounded with 100 to 150 ball bearings now in it,” he recalled.

    Vargas-Andrews, 25, offered emotional and detailed testimony of the days leading up to the bombing, which took the lives of 13 US service members and more than 100 Afghans, as part of a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the evacuation from Afghanistan.

    The Biden administration’s frenzied withdrawal after two decades of US involvement in the war has come under immense scrutiny by Republican lawmakers, including the new chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, who has vowed to investigate the matter.

    However, those accusations in Congress about who is responsible for the chaotic final weeks of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan have fallen largely along party lines, with Republican lawmakers pointing fingers at the Biden administration and Democratic lawmakers casting blame on the Trump administration for the deal that set the US withdrawal into motion.

    In a statement to CNN Wednesday, White House spokesperson for oversight Ian Sams also pointed to the deal President Joe Biden “inherited” from Trump and said the last administration “failed to establish an evacuation plan and slowed down processing of special visas for our Afghan allies.”

    “Instead of returning the U.S. to active combat with the Taliban and putting even more of our troops’ lives at risk, President Biden made the tough decision to finally end the 20-year war in Afghanistan, bring our troops home, and safely evacuate tens upon tens of thousands of Americans and Afghan allies,” Sams said. He added that the withdrawal put “the U.S. in a stronger position to lead the world and address the challenges of the future, while continuing to welcome our Afghan allies and maintaining our ability to deal with terrorist threats in the region.”

    Wednesday’s hearing featured the testimonies of two service members who were on the ground in Afghanistan during those final weeks: Vargas-Andrews and US Army Specialist Aidan Gunderson. In addition, three people involved with groups who worked to evacuate Afghans – Francis Hoang from Allied Airlift 21, retired Lt. Col. David Scott Mann from Task Force Pineapple and Peter Lucier from Team America Relief – and immigration lawyer Camille Mackler, who worked to try to get the administration to begin relocating vulnerable Afghans well before the fall of Kabul, all served as witnesses.

    Vargas-Andrews described the withdrawal as a “catastrophe,” telling lawmakers that “there was an inexcusable lack of accountability and negligence.” He painted a picture of days of chaos and violence toward Afghans who were trying to flee the Taliban, described the US State Department as “not prepared to be at” the Kabul airport, claimed that threat warnings were disregarded by higher command on the day of the attack.

    Vargas-Andrews described the horrific scenes he witnessed from his post at Abbey Gate at Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA), telling lawmakers that “Afghans were brutalized and tortured by the Taliban.”

    “Some Afghans turned away from HKIA tried to kill themselves on the razor wire in front of us that we used as a deterrent,” he said. “Countless Afghans were murdered by the Taliban 155 yards in front of our position day and night.”

    “We communicated the atrocities to our chain of command and intel assets but nothing came of it,” he said.

    Vargas-Andrews said on the day of the August 26 suicide attack, he spotted a man in the crowd who fit the description of “a suicide bomber in the vicinity of and nearing Abbey Gate.”

    “Over the communication network we passed that there was a potential threat and an IED attack imminent. This was as serious as it could get,” he said, noting that he asked for permission to shoot, but “our battalion commander said, and I quote, ‘I don’t know,’ end quote.”

    “Myself and my team leader asked very harshly, ‘Well, who does? Because this is your responsibility, sir.’ He again replied he did not know but would find out. We received no update and never got our answer. Eventually the individual disappeared. To this day, we believe he was a suicide bomber,” he said.

    “Plain and simple, we were ignored. Our expertise was disregarded. No one was held accountable for our safety,” he said.

    Beyond the suicide attack, witnesses spoke about the mental health toll that the botched evacuation has had on US veterans of the war in Afghanistan.

    Mann, the retired lieutenant colonel, said he had a friend who took his own life, whose wife said “that the Afghan abandonment reactivated all the demons that he had managed to put behind him from hard time and Afghanistan together.”

    “And he just couldn’t find his way out of the darkness of that moral injury,” he said.

    They also spoke broadly about their work to try to aid the Afghans who worked alongside US troops during the war, the “majority” of whom were left behind in the evacuation, and the need to continue to work to help them.

    “I and thousands of others received frantic pleas for help from our Afghan allies whose lives were in peril,” said Hoang from Allied Airlift 21. “Thousands of us guided tired and scared Afghan families through crowds and Taliban checkpoints. The weight of this work was crushing. We left jobs, drained savings, reopened old wounds.”

    “We looked in horror as our screens filled with images of violence and desperation outside the gates of Kabul airport. We wept as we listened to messages left by children pleading for our help. Nine times out of 10 our efforts failed. But every success was a family saved, a promise kept,” he said.

    “It is our turn to summon the courage to fill our commitment to the Afghan allies still left behind,” Hoang said.

    Mackler, the immigration lawyer, told lawmakers that “what happened in August of 2021 was the product of decades long of inaction and systemic failures that we can no longer ignore.”

    “To ensure that the actions we heard today were not in vain, we must use this moment to create and implement better solutions,” she said, and called on Congress to take steps like passing the Afghan Adjustment Act.

    “After all, as we’ve been told, those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. We saw that in Afghanistan. We tried to learn the lessons from Vietnam and we were ignored, and we cannot allow a future generation to go through this as well,” Mackler said.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Fact check: Trump delivers wildly dishonest speech at CPAC | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Trump delivers wildly dishonest speech at CPAC | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    As president, Donald Trump made some of his most thoroughly dishonest speeches at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

    As he embarks on another campaign for the presidency, Trump delivered another CPAC doozy Saturday night.

    Trump’s lengthy address to the right-wing gathering in Maryland was filled with wildly inaccurate claims about his own presidency, Joe Biden’s presidency, foreign affairs, crime, elections and other subjects.

    Here is a fact check of 23 of the false claims Trump made. (And that’s far from the total.)

    Crime in Manhattan

    While Trump criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been investigating Trump’s company, he claimed that “killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.”

    Facts First: It isn’t even close to true that Manhattan is experiencing a number of killings that nobody has ever seen. The region classified by the New York Police Department as Manhattan North had 43 reported murders in 2022; that region had 379 reported murders in 1990 and 306 murders in 1993. The Manhattan South region had 35 reported murders in 2022 versus 124 reported murders in 1990 and 86 murders in 1993. New York City as a whole is also nowhere near record homicide levels; the city had 438 reported murders in 2022 versus 2,262 in 1990 and 1,927 in 1993.

    Manhattan North had just eight reported murders this year through February 19, while Manhattan South had one. The city as a whole had 49 reported murders.

    The National Guard and Minnesota

    Talking about rioting amid racial justice protests after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Trump claimed he had been ready to send in the National Guard in Seattle, then added, “We saved Minneapolis. The thing is, we’re not supposed to do that. Because it’s up to the governor, the Democrat governor. They never want any help. They don’t mind – it’s almost like they don’t mind to have their cities and states destroyed. There’s something wrong with these people.”

    Facts First: This is a reversal of reality. Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 unrest; Walz first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself. Walz’s office told CNN in 2020 that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.

    Trump has repeatedly made the false claim that he was the one who sent the Guard to Minneapolis. You can read a longer fact check, from 2020, here.

    Trump’s executive order on monuments

    Trump boasted that he had taken effective action as president to stop the destruction of statues and memorials. He claimed: “I passed and signed an executive order. Anybody that does that gets 10 years in jail, with no negotiation – it’s not ’10’ but it turns into three months.” He added: “But we passed it. It was a very old law, and we found it – one of my very good legal people along with [adviser] Stephen Miller, they found it. They said, ‘Sir, I don’t know if you want to try and bring this back.’ I said. ‘I do.’”

    Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. He did not create a mandatory 10-year sentence for people who damage monuments. In fact, his 2020 executive order did not mandate any increase in sentences.

    Rather, the executive order simply directed the attorney general to “prioritize” investigations and prosecutions of monument-destruction cases and declared that it is federal policy to prosecute such cases to the fullest extent permitted under existing law, including an existing law that allowed a sentence of up to 10 years in prison for willfully damaging federal property. The executive order did nothing to force judges to impose a 10-year sentence.

    Vandalism in Portland

    Trump claimed, “How’s Portland doing? They don’t even have storefronts anymore. Everything’s two-by-four’s because they get burned down every week.”

    Facts First: This is a major exaggeration. Portland obviously still has hundreds of active storefronts, though it has struggled with downtown commercial vacancies for various reasons, and some businesses are sometimes vandalized by protesters. Trump has for years exaggerated the extent of property damage from protest vandalism in Portland.

    Russian expansionism

    Boasting of his foreign policy record, Trump claimed, “I was also the only president where Russia didn’t take over a country during my term.”

    Facts First: While it’s true that Russia didn’t take over a country during Trump’s term, it’s not true that he was the only US president under whom Russia didn’t take over a country. “Totally false,” Michael Khodarkovsky, a Loyola University Chicago history professor who is an expert on Russian imperialism, said in an email. “If by Russia he means the current Russian Federation that existed since 1991, then the best example is Clinton, 1992-98. During this time Russia fought a war in Chechnya, but Chechnya was not a country but one of Russia’s regions.”

    Khodarkovsky added, “If by Russia he means the USSR, as people often do, then from 1945, when the USSR occupied much of Eastern Europe until 1979, when USSR invaded Afghanistan, Moscow did not take over any new country. It only sent forces into countries it had taken over in 1945 (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968).”

    NATO funding

    Trump said while talking about NATO funding: “And I told delinquent foreign nations – they were delinquent, they weren’t paying their bills – that if they wanted our protection, they had to pay up, and they had to pay up now.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that NATO countries weren’t paying “bills” until Trump came along or that they were “delinquent” in the sense of failing to pay bills – as numerous fact-checkers pointed out when Trump repeatedly used such language during his presidency. NATO members haven’t been failing to pay their share of the organization’s common budget to run the organization. And while it’s true that most NATO countries were not (and still are not) meeting NATO’s target of each country spending a minimum of 2% of gross domestic product on defense, that 2% figure is what NATO calls a “guideline”; it is not some sort of binding contract, and it does not create liabilities. An official NATO recommitment to the 2% guideline in 2014 merely said that members not currently at that level would “aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade.”

    NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg did credit Trump for securing increases in European NATO members’ defense spending, but it’s worth noting that those countries’ spending had also increased in the last two years of the Obama administration following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the recommitment that year to the 2% guideline. NATO notes on its website that 2022 was “the eighth consecutive year of rising defence spending across European Allies and Canada.”

    NATO’s existence

    Boasting of how he had secured additional funding for NATO from countries, Trump claimed, “Actually, NATO wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t get them to pay up.”

    Facts First: This is nonsense.

    There was never any indication that NATO, created in 1949, would have ceased to exist in the early 2020s without additional funding from some members. The alliance was stable even with many members not meeting the alliance’s guideline of having members spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.

    We don’t often fact-check claims about what might have happened in an alternative scenario, but this Trump claim has no basis in reality. “The quote doesn’t make sense, obviously,” said Erwan Lagadec, research professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and an expert on NATO.

    Lagadec noted that NATO has had no trouble getting allies to cover the roughly $3 billion in annual “direct” funding for the organization, which is “peanuts” to this group of countries. And he said that the only NATO member that had given “any sign” in recent years that it was thinking about leaving the alliance “was … the US, under Trump.” Lagadec added that the US leaving the alliance is one scenario that could realistically kill it, but that clearly wasn’t what Trump was talking about in his remarks on spending levels.

    James Goldgeier, an American University professor of international relations and Brookings Institution visiting fellow, said in an email: “NATO was founded in 1949, so it seems very clear that Donald Trump had nothing to do with its existence. In fact, the worry was that he would pull the US out of NATO, as his national security adviser warned he would do if he had been reelected.”

    The cost of NATO’s headquarters

    Trump mocked NATO’s headquarters, saying, “They spent – an office building that cost $3 billion. It’s like a skyscraper in Manhattan laid on its side. It’s one of the longest buildings I’ve ever seen. And I said, ‘You should have – instead of spending $3 billion, you should have spent $500 million building the greatest bunker you’ve ever seen. Because Russia didn’t – wouldn’t even need an airplane attack. One tank one shot through that beautiful glass building and it’s gone.’”

    Facts First: NATO did spend a lot of money on its headquarters in Belgium, but Trump’s “$3 billion” figure is a major exaggeration. When Trump used the same inaccurate figure in early 2020, NATO told CNN that the headquarters was actually constructed for a sum under the approved budget of about $1.18 billion euro, which is about $1.3 billion at exchange rates as of Sunday morning.

    The Pulitzer Prize

    Trump made his usual argument that The Washington Post and The New York Times should not have won a prestigious journalism award, a 2018 Pulitzer Prize, for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election and its connections to Trump’s team. He then said, “And they were exactly wrong. And now they’ve even admitted that it was a hoax. It was a total hoax, and they got the prize.”

    Facts First: The Times and Post have not made any sort of “hoax” admission. “The claim is completely false,” Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said in an email on Sunday.

    Stadtlander continued: “When our Pulitzer Prize shared with The Washington Post was challenged by the former President, the award was upheld by the Pulitzer Prize Board after an independent review. The board stated that ‘no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.’ The Times’s reporting was also substantiated by the Mueller investigation and Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the matter.”

    The Post referred CNN to that same July statement from the Pulitzer Prize Board.

    Awareness of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline

    Trump claimed of his opposition to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany: “Nord Stream 2 – Nobody ever heard of it … right? Nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along. I started talking about Nord Stream 2. I had to go call it ‘the pipeline’ because nobody knew what I was talking about.”

    Facts First: This is standard Trump hyperbole; it’s just not true that “nobody” had heard of Nord Stream 2 before he began discussing it. Nord Stream 2 was a regular subject of media, government and diplomatic discussion before Trump took office. In fact, Biden publicly criticized it as vice president in 2016. Trump may well have generated increased US awareness to the controversial project, but “nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along” isn’t true.

    Trump and Nord Stream 2

    Trump claimed, “I got along very well with Putin even though I’m the one that ended his pipeline. Remember they said, ‘Trump is giving a lot to Russia.’ Really? Putin actually said to me, ‘If you’re my friend, I’d hate like hell to see you as my enemy.’ Because I ended the pipeline, right? Do you remember? Nord Stream 2.” He continued, “I ended it. It was dead.”

    Facts First: Trump did not kill Nord Stream 2. While he did approve sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around an estimated 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself. The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.

    The pipeline never began operations; Germany ended up halting the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine early last year. The pipeline was damaged later in the year in what has been described as an act of sabotage.

    The Obama administration and Ukraine

    Trump claimed that while he provided lethal assistance to Ukraine, the Obama administration “didn’t want to get involved” and merely “supplied the bedsheets.” He said, “Do you remember? They supplied the bedsheets. And maybe even some pillows from [pillow businessman] Mike [Lindell], who’s sitting right over here. … But they supplied the bedsheets.”

    Facts First: This is inaccurate. While it’s true that the Obama administration declined to provide weapons to Ukraine, it provided more than $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine between 2014 and 2016 that involved far more than bedsheets. The aid included counter-artillery and counter-mortar radars, armored Humvees, tactical drones, night vision devices and medical supplies.

    Biden and a Ukrainian prosecutor

    Trump claimed that Biden, as vice president, held back a billion dollars from Ukraine until the country fired a prosecutor who was “after Hunter” and a company that was paying him. Trump was referring to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, who sat on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.

    Facts First: This is baseless. There has never been any evidence that Hunter Biden was under investigation by the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who had been widely faulted by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists and European countries for failing to investigate corruption. A former Ukrainian deputy prosecutor and a top anti-corruption activist have both said the Burisma-related investigation was dormant at the time Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin.

    Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, told The Washington Post in 2019: “Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma. And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.” In addition, Shokin’s successor as prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, told Bloomberg in 2019: “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws – at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing.”

    Biden, as vice president, was carrying out the policy of the US and its allies, not pursuing his own agenda, in threatening to withhold a billion-dollar US loan guarantee if the Ukrainian government did not sack Shokin. CNN fact-checked Trump’s claims on this subject at length in 2019.

    Trump and job creation

    Promising to save Americans’ jobs if he is elected again, Trump claimed, “We had the greatest job history of any president ever.”

    Facts First: This is false. The US lost about 2.7 million jobs during Trump’s presidency, the worst overall jobs record for any president. The net loss was largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but even Trump’s pre-pandemic jobs record – about 6.7 million jobs added – was far from the greatest of any president ever. The economy added more than 11.5 million jobs in the first term of Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

    Tariffs on China

    Trump repeated a trade claim he made frequently during his presidency. Speaking of China, he said he “charged them” with tariffs that had the effect of “bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into our Treasury from China. Thank you very much, China.” He claimed that he did this even though “no other president had gotten even 10 cents – not one president got anything from them.”

    Facts First: As we have written repeatedly, it’s not true that no president before Trump had generated any revenue through tariffs on goods from China. In reality, the US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries, and FactCheck.org reported in 2019 that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.” Also, American importers, not Chinese exporters, make the actual tariff payments – and study after study during Trump’s presidency found that Americans were bearing most of the cost of the tariffs.

    The trade deficit with China

    Trump went on to repeat a false claim he made more than 100 times as president – that the US used to have a trade deficit with China of more than $500 billion. He claimed it was “five-, six-, seven-hundred billion dollars a year.”

    Facts First: The US has never had a $500 billion, $600 billion or $700 billion trade deficit with China even if you only count trade in goods and ignore the services trade in which the US runs a surplus with China. The pre-Trump record for a goods deficit with China was about $367 billion in 2015. The goods deficit hit a new record of about $418 billion under Trump in 2018 before falling back under $400 billion in subsequent years.

    Trump and the 2020 election

    Trump said people claim they want to run against him even though, he claimed, he won the 2020 election. He said, “I won the second election, OK, won it by a lot. You know, when they say, when they say Biden won, the smart people know that didn’t [happen].”

    Facts First: This is Trump’s regular lie. He lost the 2020 election to Biden fair and square, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. Biden earned more than 7 million more votes than Trump did.

    Democrats and elections

    Trump said Democrats are only good at “disinformation” and “cheating on elections.”

    Facts First: This is nonsense. There is just no basis for a broad claim that Democrats are election cheaters. Election fraud and voter fraud are exceedingly rare in US elections, though such crimes are occasionally committed by officials and supporters of both parties. (We’ll ignore Trump’s subjective claim about “disinformation.”)

    The liberation of the ISIS caliphate

    Trump repeated his familiar story about how he had supposedly liberated the “caliphate” of terror group ISIS in “three weeks.” This time, he said, “In fact, with the ISIS caliphate, a certain general said it could only be done in three years, ‘and probably it can’t be done at all, sir.’ And I did it in three weeks. I went over to Iraq, met a great general. ‘Sir, I can do it in three weeks.’ You’ve heard that story. ‘I can do it in three weeks, sir.’ ‘How are you going to do that?’ They explained it. I did it in three weeks. I was told it couldn’t be done at all, that it would take at least three years. Did it in three weeks. Knocked out 100% of the ISIS caliphate.”

    Facts First: Trump’s claim of eliminating the ISIS caliphate in “three weeks” isn’t true; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019. Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq, in late December 2018, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has in the past, when he said “I did it”: Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.

    IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

    Military equipment left in Afghanistan

    Trump claimed, as he has before, that the US left behind $85 billion worth of military equipment when it withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. He said of the leader of the Taliban: “Now he’s got $85 billion worth of our equipment that I bought – $85 billion.” He added later: “The thing that nobody ever talks about, we lost 13 [soldiers], we lost $85 billion worth of the greatest military equipment in the world.”

    Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of about $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.

    As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress has appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.

    The Afghanistan withdrawal and the F-16

    Trump claimed that the Taliban acquired F-16 fighter planes because of the US withdrawal, saying: “They feared the F-16s. And now they own them. Think of it.”

    Facts First: This is false. F-16s were not among the equipment abandoned upon the US withdrawal and the collapse of the Afghan armed forces, since the Afghan armed forces did not fly F-16s.

    The border wall

    Trump claimed that he had kept his promise to complete a wall on the border with Mexico: “As you know, I built hundreds of miles of wall and completed that task as promised. And then I began to add even more in areas that seemed to be allowing a lot of people to come in.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that Trump “completed” the border wall. According to an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not been completed.

    The report, provided to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said that, of those 280 miles left to go, about 74 miles were “in the pre-construction phase and have not yet been awarded, in locations where no barriers currently exist,” and that 206 miles were “currently under contract, in place of dilapidated and outdated designs and in locations where no barriers previously existed.”

    Latin America and deportations

    Trump told his familiar story about how, until he was president, the US was unable to deport MS-13 gang members to other countries, “especially” Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras because those countries “didn’t want them.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that, as a rule, Guatemala and Honduras wouldn’t take back migrants being deported from the US during Obama’s administration, though there were some individual exceptions.

    In 2016, just prior to Trump’s presidency, neither Guatemala nor Honduras was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant,” or uncooperative, in accepting the return of their nationals.

    For the 2016 fiscal year, Obama’s last full fiscal year in office, ICE reported that Guatemala and Honduras ranked second and third, behind only Mexico, in terms of the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US. You can read a longer fact check, from 2019, here.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Proud Boy testifies in sedition trial about far-right group being the ‘tip of the spear’ on January 6 | CNN Politics

    Proud Boy testifies in sedition trial about far-right group being the ‘tip of the spear’ on January 6 | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The sole Proud Boy to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy in connection to the US Capitol riot testified on Wednesday that members of the far-right organization believed the country was barreling toward revolution and that they were the “tip of the spear.”

    Jeremy Bertino, a top lieutenant to Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio, testified as part of a cooperation deal that he struck with prosecutors against Tarrio and four other members of the Proud Boys charged with conspiring to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

    “We had a big fight on our hands. It was going to be an uphill battle, and everyone had turned against us,” Bertino testified. “My belief was that we had to take the reins and pretty much be the leaders that we had been building ourselves up to be.”

    His testimony allowed prosecutors to show jurors how the events of January 6, 2021, unfolded in the mind of a top member of the organization as he watched it online from his North Carolina home, sending messages to his “brothers” about targeting then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and assuring them that members of the far-left group Antifa weren’t there to stop them.

    Some of the messages featured in court were from defendants in the case, whom Bertino said he would “take a bullet for.” But Bertino and the five defendants – Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, Joseph Biggs and Dominic Pezzola – rarely made eye contact during the testimony.

    There was not a premeditated or specific plan to storm the Capitol, Bertino testified, adding that getting the Proud Boys to communicate and work together was like “herding cats.” The Proud Boys had several group messages from the days before the riot where members mentioned descending on the Capitol building, according to exhibits shown by prosecutors.

    As court challenges to the 2020 election failed, members of the Proud Boys – who saw themselves as the “foot soldiers of the right” – began to believe the country was headed toward an “all-out revolution,” Bertino testified.

    “I felt it coming,” he said.

    The Proud Boys believed that the government was controlled by “commies,” he testified, and they began to turn against the police, whom the group increasingly saw as their enemy. Everybody in the organization felt “desperate,” including Tarrio, Bertino told the jury.

    “His tones were calculated,” Bertino said of Tarrio. “Cold, but very determined. He felt the exact same way that I did.”

    Members also were inspired by then-President Donald Trump’s reference to their organization in a 2020 presidential debate, where he told the group to “stand back and stand by.” Bertino testified that there were “nonstop requests for membership” after the debate, specifically from people who wanted to attend rallies, and that the group did less vetting of new members to keep up with applications.

    During cross examination, Bertino said that he thought the Proud Boys had a goal to stop the 2020 election but had no knowledge of how that goal would be achieved.

    “I didn’t have a direct idea of where they were going, how they were going to get there.”

    Bertino was not in Washington, DC, on the day of the riot because he was at home recovering from a stab wound he suffered during a previous pro-Trump rally, but he testified that he watched on a livestream video. He saw the mob as starting the “next American revolution,” and told others Proud Boys he was brought to tears during the attack.

    “I was happy, excited, in awe and disbelief that people were doing what they said they would do,” Bertino told the jury. When the crowd descended on the Capitol building, “it meant that we influenced people, the normies, enough to make them stand for themselves and take back their country and take back their freedom,” he said.

    In chats to other Proud Boys, Bertino encouraged members to move forward, telling them that he could see the Capitol building on a livestream and that no members of Antifa would be at the building to stop the pro-Trump mob.

    Bertino also messaged: “They need to get peloton” – which he testified was a misspelled reference to Pelosi. “She was the talking head of the opposition and they needed to remove her from power,” he said.

    By the evening of January 6, Bertino grew angry at Trump supporters for leaving the Capitol building, he told the jury.

    “The way I felt at the moment, if we give that building up, we were giving up our country,” Bertino testified. He sent encrypted messages to other Proud Boys members, saying that “we failed,” and “Half measures mean nothing,” and, referring to lawmakers inside the Capitol, “Fuck fear: They need to be hung.”

    “Once they took that step, there was no coming back from it,” Bertino testified Wednesday. “And they decided basically to balk and walk away after creating all that chaos down there.”

    “The revolution had failed,” he continued, “because the House was still going to go on and certify the election.”

    Bertino told the jury that after January 6, he tried to delete what he saw as incriminating messages on his phone and he wasn’t fully truthful with FBI agents when they asked him about the Capitol attack.

    “I guess it’s a natural instinct to protect yourself and protect those you love,” Bertino testified.

    “I love them,” he said of the five defendants. “I didn’t want to see anything bad happen to them. Still don’t.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • British woman who joined ISIS as a teen loses UK citizenship appeal | CNN

    British woman who joined ISIS as a teen loses UK citizenship appeal | CNN

    [ad_1]


    London
    CNN
     — 

    Shamima Begum, who left the United Kingdom to join ISIS at the age of 15, has lost her appeal against the decision to revoke her British citizenship.

    Judge Robert Jay gave the decision on Wednesday following a five-day hearing in November, during which her lawyers argued the UK Home Office had a duty to investigate whether she was a victim of trafficking before removing her citizenship.

    The ruling does not determine if Begum can return to Britain, but whether the removal of her citizenship was lawful.

    Begum, now 23 and living in a camp in northern Syria, flew to the country in 2015 with two school friends to join the ISIS terror group. In February 2019, she re-emerged and made international headlines as an “ISIS bride” after pleading with the UK government to be allowed to return to her home country for the birth of her son.

    Family of ISIS victim says YouTube algorithm is liable. What will the Supreme Court say?


    02:30

    – Source:
    CNN Business

    Then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid removed her British citizenship on February 19, 2019, and Begum’s newborn son died in a Syrian refugee camp the following month. She told UK media she had two other children prior to that baby, who also died in Syria during infancy.

    Begum’s lawyers criticized Wednesday’s ruling as a “lost opportunity to put into reverse a profound mistake and a continuing injustice.”

    “The outcome is that there is now no protection for a British child trafficked out of the UK if the home secretary invokes national security,” Gareth Pierce and Daniel Furner, of Birnberg Pierce Solicitors, said in a statement seen by UK news agency PA Media.

    “Begum remains in unlawful, arbitrary and indefinite detention without trial in a Syrian camp. Every possible avenue to challenge this decision will be urgently pursued,” it continued.

    Rights group Amnesty International described the ruling as a “very disappointing decision.”

    “The power to banish a citizen like this simply shouldn’t exist in the modern world, not least when we’re talking about a person who was seriously exploited as a child,” Steve Valdez-Symonds, the group’s UK refugee and migrant rights director, said in a statement.

    “Along with thousands of others, including large numbers of women and children, this young British woman is now trapped in a dangerous refugee camp in a war-torn country and left largely at the mercy of gangs and armed groups.”

    “The home secretary shouldn’t be in the business of exiling British citizens by stripping them of their citizenship,” Valdez-Symonds said.

    Javid, the home secretary who removed Begum’s British citizenship, welcomed Wednesday’s ruling, tweeted that it “upheld my decision to remove an individual’s citizenship on national security grounds.”

    “This is a complex case but home secretaries should have the power to prevent anyone entering our country who is assessed to pose a threat to it.” Javid added.

    Begum has made several public appeals as she fought against the government’s decision, most recently appearing in BBC documentary The Shamima Begum Story and a 10-part BBC podcast series.

    In the podcast series she insisted that she is “not a bad person.” While accepting that the British public viewed her as a “danger” and a “risk,” Begum blamed this on her media portrayal.

    She challenged the UK government’s decision to revoke her citizenship but, in June 2019, the government refused her application to be allowed to enter the country to pursue her appeal.

    In 2020, the UK Court of Appeal ruled Begum should be granted leave to enter the country because otherwise, it would not be “a fair and effective hearing.”

    The following year, the Supreme Court reversed that decision, arguing that the Court of Appeal made four errors when it ruled that Begum should be allowed to return to the UK to carry out her appeal.

    UK police appealed for help Friday, Feb. 20, 2015, to find three teenage girls who are missing from their homes in London and are believed to be making their way to Syria. The girls, two of them 15 and one 16, have not been seen since Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2015, when, police say, they took a flight to Istanbul. One has been named as Shamima Begum, 15, who may be traveling under the name of 17-year-old Aklima Begum, and a second as Kadiza Sultana, 16. The third girl is identified as Amira Abase, 15.

    Shamima Begum loses legal bid to return home to appeal citizenship revocation (February 2021)

    Begum was 15 when she flew out of Gatwick Airport with two classmates and traveled to Syria.

    The teenagers, all from the Bethnal Green Academy in east London, were to join another classmate who had made the same journey months earlier.

    While in Syria, Begum married an ISIS fighter and spent several years living in Raqqa. Begum then reappeared in al-Hawl, a Syrian refugee camp of 39,000 people, in 2019.

    shamima begum sky feb 2019

    With ISIS fall, Europe faces returnees dilemma (February 2019)

    Speaking from the camp before giving birth, Begum told UK newspaper The Times that she wanted to come home to have her child. She said she had already had two other children who died in infancy from malnutrition and illness.

    She gave birth to her son, Jarrah, in al-Hawl in February of that year. The baby’s health quickly deteriorated, and he passed away after being transferred from the camp to the main hospital in al-Hasakah City.

    In response to that news, a British government spokesperson told CNN at the time that “the death of any child is tragic and deeply distressing for the family.”

    But the spokesperson added the UK Foreign Office “has consistently advised against travel to Syria” since 2011.

    Begum pictured at a refugee camp in northern Syria in March 2021.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Lawyers for Proud Boys member take steps to subpoena former President Trump in seditious conspiracy trial | CNN Politics

    Lawyers for Proud Boys member take steps to subpoena former President Trump in seditious conspiracy trial | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Lawyers for a Proud Boys member on trial for seditious conspiracy related to his alleged role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol are taking steps to subpoena former President Donald Trump to testify as a witness for the defense.

    It’s a longshot bid as judges have previously rejected subpoenas for Trump and arguments that rioters were obeying his orders in other trials of January 6 defendants. Trump’s lawyers also wouldn’t accept service of any subpoena for him unless they had extensive discussions about it first, according to a source familiar with the matter, and they have not decided on a Proud Boys trial subpoena.

    The Justice Department has not indicated in court, or in the email to defense attorneys, whether it plans to try to quash this subpoena.

    But DOJ has informed defense lawyers they can contact Trump’s attorney Evan Corcoran, according to an email reviewed by CNN. If he refuses to accept service, the Justice Department said they can reach out to the Secret Service’s Miami field office to facilitate the process, or ask the court to order the US Marshals Service to serve the subpoena.

    The subpoena asks for Trump to come to the federal courthouse in Washington, DC, on March 1, but bringing Trump into court is likely an uphill battle. Trump’s attorneys also could move to quash the subpoena, and federal prosecutors still have the ability to argue that his testimony isn’t relevant to the ongoing trial.

    A federal prosecutor on the case declined to comment.

    Norman Pattis, a lawyer who represents defendant Joseph Biggs, announced the subpoena in court last week and asked for the government’s assistance in serving the subpoena. Pattis told CNN on Wednesday that he had reached out to Corcoran about the subpoena and has not received a response. Pattis added that he also has reached out to the Secret Service in Miami.

    CNN has reached out to Corcoran for comment.

    Biggs and his four co-defendants are on trial for their alleged participation in the January 6 US Capitol insurrection, and all five have pleaded not guilty.

    Attorneys for the five defendants in this case, including Biggs, previously asked a federal judge to allow them to argue to a jury that Trump ordered their clients to storm the Capitol on January 6. District Judge Timothy Kelly rejected the argument, saying that Trump did not have the authority to order a mob to storm the Capitol.

    Pattis told CNN that serving Trump with the subpoena is “the first of many steps” in the process of getting the former president to testify in the high-profile sedition trial. Pattis also said he anticipates lawyers for Trump will move to stop the subpoena.

    “I presented to the United States government a signed subpoena requiring the presence of Donald J. Trump at the Proud Boy trial sometime in March,” Pattis said on his podcast “Law and Legitimacy” last week. “We’re hoping that Mr. Trump – ambitious as he is – recognizes that this is an opportunity for him to begin to explain to the public his position on ‘Stopping the Steal.’”

    “We have drawn the line,” Pattis continued. “We have asked Mr. Trump to join us, and our position is, Mr. President, you urged patriots to stop the steal in 2020 and early 2021. We have a simpler request: Take the stand.”

    Pattis added that they want to question Trump on the period between November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021.

    Pattis has not said publicly what he would hope to elicit from Trump’s testimony, but several defense lawyers representing Proud Boys members have argued during this trial that their clients were called to action by the former president when he told the far-right group to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 presidential debate, and that the Proud Boys believed they were acting at his behest on January 6.

    “You see Trump, President Trump, told them the election was stolen. It was Trump that told them to go [to the Capitol]. And it was Trump that unleashed them on January 6,” Sabino Jauregui, the attorney for former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, told jurors during his opening statement last month.

    “It’s too hard to blame Trump,” Jauregui said. “It’s too hard to bring him in here with his army of lawyers. … Instead, they go for the easy target. They go for Enrique Tarrio.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s hearing on Twitter’s liability for terrorist use of its platform | CNN Business

    Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s hearing on Twitter’s liability for terrorist use of its platform | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    After back-to-back oral arguments this week, the Supreme Court appears reluctant to hand down the kind of sweeping ruling about liability for terrorist content on social media that some feared would upend the internet.

    On Wednesday, the justices struggled with claims that Twitter contributed to a 2017 ISIS attack in Istanbul by hosting content unrelated to the specific incident. Arguments in that case, Twitter v. Taamneh, came a day after the court considered whether YouTube can be sued for recommending videos created by ISIS to its users.

    The closely watched cases carry significant stakes for the wider internet. An expansion of apps and websites’ legal risk for hosting or promoting content could lead to major changes at sites including Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube, to name a few.

    For nearly three hours of oral argument, the justices asked attorneys for Twitter, the US government and the family of Nawras Alassaf – a Jordanian citizen killed in the 2017 attack – how to weigh several factors that might determine Twitter’s level of legal responsibility, if any. But while the justices quickly identified what the relevant factors were, they seemed divided on how to analyze them.

    The court’s conservatives appeared more open to Twitter’s arguments that it is not liable under the Anti-Terrorism Act, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett at one point theorizing point-by-point how such an opinion could be written and Justice Neil Gorsuch repeatedly offering Twitter what he believed to be a winning argument about how to read the statute.

    The panel’s liberals, by contrast, seemed uncomfortable with finding that Twitter should face no liability for hosting ISIS content. They pushed back on Twitter’s claims that the underlying law should only lead to liability if the help it gave to ISIS can be linked to the specific terrorist attack that ultimately harmed the plaintiffs.

    Here are the takeaways from Wednesday:

    The justices spent much of the time picking through the text of the Anti-Terrorism Act, the law that Twitter is accused of violating – especially the meaning of the words “knowingly” and “substantial.”

    The law says liability can be established for “any person who aids and abets, by knowingly providing substantial assistance, or who conspires with the person who committed such an act of international terrorism.”

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed unpersuaded by Twitter attorney Seth Waxman’s arguments that Twitter could have been liable if the company were warned that specific accounts were planning a specific attack, but that those were not the facts of the case and Twitter was therefore not liable in the absence of such activity and such warnings.

    Chief Justice John Roberts grappled with the meaning of “substantial” assistance: Hypothetically, he asked, would donating $100 to ISIS suffice, or $10,000?

    “Substantial assistance” would hinge on the degree to which a terror group actually uses a platform such as Twitter to plan, coordinate and carry out a terrorist attack, Waxman said at one point. The existence of some tweets that generally benefited ISIS, he argued, should not be considered substantial assistance.

    The justices alluded to the gravity of the dilemma as they drew analogies to other industries that have grappled with related claims.

    “We’re used to thinking about banks as providing very important services to terrorists,” said Justice Elena Kagan. “Maybe we’re not so used to, but it seems to be true, that various kinds of social media services also provide very important services to terrorists,” the liberal justice said. “If you know you’re providing a very important service to terrorists, why aren’t you [said to be] providing substantial assistance and doing it knowingly?”

    Eric Schnapper, an attorney representing the Alassaf family – who had also argued on behalf of the plaintiffs in Tuesday’s Supreme Court arguments in Gonzalez v. Google – again struggled to answer justices’ questions as they sought to find some limiting principle to constrain the scope of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

    Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Schnapper to respond to concerns that a ruling finding Twitter liable for the ISIS attack — even when the tweets it hosted had nothing to do with it — would negatively affect charities and humanitarian organizations that might incidentally assist terrorist organizations through their work.

    Schnapper suggested those groups might be insulated from liability due to the law’s “knowledge” requirement, but did not offer the justices a way to draw a bright-line distinction.

    Justice Clarence Thomas hinted at the potential expansiveness of what Schnapper was proposing in calling for Twitter to be held liable for the ISIS tweets.

    “If we’re not pinpointing cause-and-effect or proximate cause for specific things, and you’re focused on infrastructure or just the availability of these platforms, then it would seem that every terrorist attack that uses this platform would also mean that Twitter is an aider and abettor in those instances,” Thomas said.

    “I think in the way that you phrased it, that would probably be, yes,” Schnapper replied, going on to suggest a test involving “remoteness and time, weighed together with volume of activity.”

    Several justices asked the parties to respond to hypotheticals about what liability a business would have for dealing with Osama bin Laden. Their reliance of the terrorist in their examples seemed to get at the “knowing” requirement of the law.

    However, the court is being asked to issue an opinion that will guide lower courts in cases that likely will not involve such high-profile figures.

    Kagan invoked bin Laden’s name when she put forward a hypothetical for US Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler about a bank that offered services to a known terrorist that were the same services it provided its non-terrorist clients. Kneedler, arguing that Twitter should not be found liable under the anti-terrorist law in this case, said that in that scenario, the bank could be sued under the law.

    Other exchanges during the hearing revolved around the liability for a business that sold bin Laden a cell phone, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asking if the business could be sued even if bin Laden did not use the cell phone for the terrorist attack that injured the plaintiff. Schnapper said that bin Laden would not need to use the cell phone in an attack for the seller to be found liable.

    Gorsuch put forward a theory for why Twitter should prevail in the case but neither Twitter nor the US Justice Department took him up on it.

    Gorsuch gave Waxman a chance to reframe his arguments for why Twitter shouldn’t be liable, based on language in the law suggesting a defendant is liable for assistance provided to a person who commits an act of international terrorism. Gorsuch noted the lawsuit against Twitter doesn’t link Twitter to the three people involved in the 2017 attack on the Istanbul nightclub.

    Waxman declined to fully adopt that view, arguing instead that the “aid and abet” language in the statute should be tied to the terrorist activity that gives rise to a suit.

    When Kneedler was up to podium, Gorsuch offered up the theory again, implying it would be a way for Twitter to avoid liability in this case.

    “It seems to me that that’s a pretty important limitation on aiding and abetting liability and conspiracy liability … that you have to aid an actual person,” Gorsuch said. “It’s not just a pedantic point. It has to do with the idea that you’re singling somebody out, and that is different than just doing your business normally, and that does help limit the scope of the act.”

    Jackson later hypothesized why Twitter and the US government were reluctant to endorse Gorsuch’s interpretation of the law, suggesting it was not the limitation Gorsuch thought it was.

    “I’m wondering whether the concern about that is, if you’re focusing on the person [who committed a terrorist act]… that it seems to take the focus away from the act itself,” she told Kneedler. “You could ‘aid and abet’ a person who committed the act, even if it’s not with respect to that act.”

    Justice Kagan voices concern on whether Supreme Court should step in. Listen why

    The Taamneh case is viewed as a turning point for the future of the internet, because a ruling against Twitter could expose the platform – and numerous other websites – to new lawsuits based on their hosting of terrorist content in spite of their efforts to remove such material.

    While it’s too early to tell how the justices may decide the case, the questioning on Wednesday suggested some members of the court believe Twitter should bear some responsibility for indirectly supporting ISIS in general, even if the company may not have been responsible for the specific attack in 2017 that led to the current case.

    But a key question facing the court is whether the Anti-Terrorism Act is the law that can reach that issue – or alternatively, whether the justices can craft a ruling in such a way that it does.

    Rulings in the cases heard this week are expected by late June.

    This story has been updated with Wednesday’s developments.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • WADA appeals case of Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva to Court of Arbitration for Sport | CNN

    WADA appeals case of Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva to Court of Arbitration for Sport | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The protracted doping saga involving Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva entered another phase on Tuesday as the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) appealed the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

    Last month, the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) effectively cleared Valieva of wrongdoing, saying that the 16-year-old had violated anti-doping rules but bore no “fault or negligence” for the transgression.

    But WADA believes such a conclusion is “wrong” and has now exercised its right to appeal the ruling.

    Valieva was suspended by RUSADA the day after she guided the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) to victory in the figure skating team event at last year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing, where she also became the first woman in history to land a quadruple jump at the Games.

    However, it came to light during the course of the Olympics that Valieva had tested positive for the heart medication trimetazidine – which can enhance endurance – in December 2021.

    Valieva has not publicly explained the positive test results.

    The ROC placed first in the team event in Beijing ahead of the USA in second, Japan in third and Canada in fourth, but no medal ceremony was held as a result of the doping controversy.

    In a statement on Tuesday, WADA said it is seeking a four-year period of ineligibility for Valieva and disqualification of her results from the date of the sample collection on December 25, 2021.

    “As it has sought to do throughout this process, WADA will continue to push for this matter to proceed without further undue delay,” the statement added.

    “Given the case is now pending before CAS, WADA can make no further comment at this time.”

    CNN has contacted RUSADA and the International Olympic Committee for comment.

    Valieva was cleared to compete in the women’s singles event at the Winter Olympics but ultimately placed fourth after falling and stumbling several times during the competition.

    Travis Tygart, the CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), said on Tuesday that the decision to appeal Valieva’s case to CAS “had to be done in order to restore some confidence in the global anti-doping system.”

    He added: “Let’s hope the hearing is expedited and open to the public so that the athletes whose dreams are hanging in the balance can believe in the final outcome, whatever it may be, and that some justice can be salvaged soon.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • James O’Keefe ousted from right-wing activist group Project Veritas | CNN Business

    James O’Keefe ousted from right-wing activist group Project Veritas | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    James O’Keefe, the founder and chairman of Project Veritas — the right-wing activist group known for its selectively edited undercover sting videos targeting journalists and progressive groups — has been ousted from the organization, he told staff in a videotaped speech posted online Monday.

    “I’ve been stripped of my authority as CEO and removed from the board of directors,” O’Keefe said in a prepared statement to the group’s staff. “I’m indefinitely suspended from this organization,” he added.

    R.C. Maxwell, a Project Veritas spokesperson, said on Twitter that O’Keefe “was removed from his position as CEO by the Project Veritas board.”

    The right-wing group, which was founded in 2010 and quickly rose to notoriety, has used its undercover sting videos to target news organizations, including CNN and The New York Times. The group’s highly edited videos, which have often promoted disinformation and conspiracy theories, have been featured prominently on Fox News and in the right-wing media universe to fundraise and generate publicity for the group.

    Federal authorities have been investigating Project Veritas for its involvement in the 2020 theft of a diary kept by President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley. Two people who sold Ashley Biden’s journal and other items to Project Veritas for $40,000 pleaded guilty last year to stealing her belongings.

    The removal of O’Keefe from the nonprofit organization that he founded more than a decade ago came after an internal memo reportedly signed by members of the staff earlier this month and presented to the group’s board alleged that O’Keefe was “outright cruel” to his employees.

    Daniel Strack, executive director of Project Veritas, acknowledged in a statement last week that there had been “real management concerns regarding the treatment of people” and internal processes at the group. Strack denied that O’Keefe had been removed from Project Veritas, calling him the “hardest working person I have ever met,” but said that O’Keefe had been forced to take time off from the organization.

    Earlier that day, the 38-year-old O’Keefe was pictured on a hiking trail in the Santa Monica Mountains with anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

    O’Keefe said in the video posted Monday that he had apologized to the group’s board for his “tone” in the office, but that his apology was not accepted or considered sincere.

    In a statement Monday, Project Veritas said that while its leadership “has not concluded looking into the full scale of financial issues over the years, a preliminary review at this time indicates that James has spent an excessive amount of donor funds in the last three years on personal luxuries. More is still being uncovered during the ongoing review at this time.”

    The organization said those expenses include “$14,000 on a charter flight to meet someone to fix his boat under the guise of meeting with a donor” and “over $150,000 in Black Cars in the last 18 months.”

    “Even with all of this public fallout, the Board still wants to speak with James,” the statement said. “We did not fire him, nor do we want him to resign. We would like to continue conversations with James to resolve internal matters rather than litigate them publicly.”

    O’Keefe pledged to continue his activism and hinted he would form a new organization in his 44-minute speech to the group’s staff Monday.

    “I’m not done,” he said. “The mission will perhaps take on a new name.”

    – CNN’s Oliver Darcy contributed

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Two Supreme Court cases this week could upend the entire internet | CNN Business

    Two Supreme Court cases this week could upend the entire internet | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court is set to hear back-to-back oral arguments this week in two cases that could significantly reshape online speech and content moderation.

    The outcome of the oral arguments, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, could determine whether tech platforms and social media companies can be sued for recommending content to their users or for supporting acts of international terrorism by hosting terrorist content. It marks the Court’s first-ever review of a hot-button federal law that largely protects websites from lawsuits over user-generated content.

    The closely watched cases, known as Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh, carry significant stakes for the wider internet. An expansion of apps and websites’ legal risk for hosting or promoting content could lead to major changes at sites, including Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube, to name a few.

    The litigation has produced some of the most intense rhetoric in years from the tech sector about the potential impact on the internet’s future. US lawmakers, civil society groups and more than two dozen states have also jumped into the debate with filings at the Court.

    At the heart of the legal battle is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a nearly 30-year-old federal law that courts have repeatedly said provide broad protections to tech platforms but that has since come under scrutiny alongside growing criticism of Big Tech’s content moderation decisions.

    The law has critics on both sides of the aisle. Many Republican officials allege that Section 230 gives social media platforms a license to censor conservative viewpoints. Prominent Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have argued Section 230 prevents tech giants from being held accountable for spreading misinformation and hate speech.

    In recent years, some in Congress have pushed for changes to Section 230 that might expose tech platforms to more liability, along with proposals to amend US antitrust rules and other bills aimed at reining in dominant tech platforms. But those efforts have largely stalled, leaving the Supreme Court as the likeliest source of change in the coming months to how the United States regulates digital services.

    Rulings in the cases are expected by the end of June.

    The case involving Google zeroes in on whether it can be sued because of its subsidiary YouTube’s algorithmic promotion of terrorist videos on its platform.

    According to the plaintiffs in the case — the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris — YouTube’s targeted recommendations violated a US antiterrorism law by helping to radicalize viewers and promote ISIS’s worldview.

    The allegation seeks to carve out content recommendations so that they do not receive protections under Section 230, potentially exposing tech platforms to more liability for how they run their services.

    Google and other tech companies have said that that interpretation of Section 230 would increase the legal risks associated with ranking, sorting and curating online content, a basic feature of the modern internet. Google has claimed that in such a scenario, websites would seek to play it safe by either removing far more content than is necessary, or by giving up on content moderation altogether and allowing even more harmful material on their platforms.

    Friend-of-the-court filings by Craigslist, Microsoft, Yelp and others have suggested that the stakes are not limited to algorithms and could also end up affecting virtually anything on the web that might be construed as making a recommendation. That might mean even average internet users who volunteer as moderators on various sites could face legal risks, according to a filing by Reddit and several volunteer Reddit moderators. Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and former California Republican Rep. Chris Cox, the original co-authors of Section 230, argued to the Court that Congress’ intent in passing the law was to give websites broad discretion to moderate content as they saw fit.

    The Biden administration has also weighed in on the case. In a brief filed in December, it argued that Section 230 does protect Google and YouTube from lawsuits “for failing to remove third-party content, including the content it has recommended.” But, the government’s brief argued, those protections do not extend to Google’s algorithms because they represent the company’s own speech, not that of others.

    The second case, Twitter v. Taamneh, will decide whether social media companies can be sued for aiding and abetting a specific act of international terrorism when the platforms have hosted user content that expresses general support for the group behind the violence without referring to the specific terrorist act in question.

    The plaintiffs in the case — the family of Nawras Alassaf, who was killed in an ISIS attack in Istanbul in 2017 — have alleged that social media companies including Twitter had knowingly aided ISIS in violation of a US antiterrorism law by allowing some of the group’s content to persist on their platforms despite policies intended to limit that type of content.

    Twitter has said that just because ISIS happened to use the company’s platform to promote itself does not constitute Twitter’s “knowing” assistance to the terrorist group, and that in any case the company cannot be held liable under the antiterror law because the content at issue in the case was not specific to the attack that killed Alassaf. The Biden administration, in its brief, has agreed with that view.

    Twitter had also previously argued that it was immune from the suit thanks to Section 230.

    Other tech platforms such as Meta and Google have argued in the case that if the Court finds the tech companies cannot be sued under US antiterrorism law, at least under these circumstances, it would avoid a debate over Section 230 altogether in both cases, because the claims at issue would be tossed out.

    In recent years, however, several Supreme Court justices have shown an active interest in Section 230, and have appeared to invite opportunities to hear cases related to the law. Last year, Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch wrote that new state laws, such as Texas’s that would force social media platforms to host content they would rather remove, raise questions of “great importance” about “the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.”

    A number of petitions are currently pending asking the Court to review the Texas law and a similar law passed by Florida. The Court last month delayed a decision on whether to hear those cases, asking instead for the Biden administration to submit its views.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • US conducts helicopter raid in Syria capturing ISIS official | CNN Politics

    US conducts helicopter raid in Syria capturing ISIS official | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The US military and Syrian Democratic Forces conducted a helicopter raid in eastern Syria early Saturday, capturing an ISIS official, according to a statement from US Central Command.

    Batar, “an ISIS Syria Province Official involved in planning attacks on SDF-guarded detention centers and manufacturing improvised explosive devices,” was captured in the raid, CENTCOM said in the statement.

    The US did not provide any additional information or evidence regarding its claims about Batar.

    No civilians, SDF or US forces were killed or injured in the raid, according to CENTCOM.

    The development comes on the heels of an earlier helicopter raid in Syria on Thursday night that the US military said killed Hamza al-Homsi, a senior ISIS leader, as well as wounded four US troops and a working dog.

    Officials told CNN that US forces were “close to” al-Homsi when an explosion occurred, killing al-Homsi and wounding the US service members. It is unclear at this point if the explosion was the result of a suicide vest, a booby trap or something else, two officials said.

    Separately, US Central Command said in a statement Saturday evening that two rockets had landed near a coalition base in northeast Syria.

    No US or coalition troops were injured and no damage to equipment or infrastructure occurred during the rocket attack that targeted Green Village, a coalition base in northeast Syria.

    US forces are investigating the incident.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • At least two killed as militants storm Karachi police headquarters | CNN

    At least two killed as militants storm Karachi police headquarters | CNN

    [ad_1]


    Islamabad, Pakistan
    CNN
     — 

    Two people were killed after militants stormed the police headquarters in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, according to ambulance officials.

    A police officer and a janitor died in the attack while four police rangers were also injured, Edhi Ambulance Service said.

    Up to 10 militants attacked the police station with hand grenades and shots were fired, an eyewitness told CNN. The Sindh provincial minister for labor, Saeed Ghani, confirmed the attack to CNN, adding the incident was ongoing.

    Multiple shots could be heard ringing through the area where the headquarters is located, according to footage from the scene, and eyewitnesses described hearing multiple explosions.

    The attack prompted the Sindh provincial government to declare a state of emergency in Karachi, according to its spokesperson, Sharjeel Memon.

    Pakistan’s Taliban, known as Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the attack, according to spokesman Mohammad Khorasani.

    Pakistan’s Taliban have been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department since September 2010.

    Pakistani authorities have yet to confirm any group’s involvement.

    Rescue teams have reached the site of the attack, according to video released by Chhipa Ambulance Service, in which gunfire could be heard.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Isolated Iran finds ally China reluctant to extend it a lifeline | CNN

    Isolated Iran finds ally China reluctant to extend it a lifeline | CNN

    [ad_1]

    Editor’s Note: A version of this story appears in today’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, CNN’s three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.


    Abu Dhabi, UAE
    CNN
     — 

    Shortly before leaving for his first state visit to China on Tuesday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi issued a thinly veiled criticism of his powerful ally, saying the two countries’ relationship has not lived up to expectations.

    The first Iranian president to arrive in China on a state visit in two decades, Raisi was keen to tell Beijing that it has not given enough support to Tehran, especially economically.

    “Unfortunately, I must say that we have seriously fallen behind in these relations,” he said, referring to trade and economic ties. Part of his mission, he said, was to implement the China-Iran Strategic Partnership Plan (CISPP), a pact that would see Beijing invest up to $400 billion in Iran’s economy over a 25-year period in exchange for a steady supply of Iranian oil.

    Raisi said that economic ties had regressed, and that the two nations needed to compensate for that.

    The public criticism on the eve of the landmark trip demonstrated the heavily-sanctioned Islamic Republic’s disappointment with an ally that has in many ways become one of its few economic lifelines.

    The speech was likely “a reflection of Tehran’s frustration with China’s hesitancies about deepening its economic ties with Iran,” Henry Rome, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told CNN. “The same issues that have constrained China-Iran relations for years appear to remain.”

    Analysts said Raisi’s speech was a clear call for China to live up to its end of the relationship, seeking economic guarantees from the Asian power so he can have something to show at home amid a wave of anti-government protests and increasing global isolation.

    “The mileage Raisi will get for having a visit is going to be very limited if that visit doesn’t produce anything,” said Trita Parsi, vice-president of the Quincy Institute in Washington, DC. “The Iranians are not in a position right now in which a visit in and of itself is sufficiently good for them…They need more.”

    Whether Iran is satisfied with what China offered it, however, is yet to be seen.

    “Though more substance may be achieved following the visit, the reality is that Raisi needs both the substance and the announcement of concrete agreements,” said Parsi. He added that China, on the other hand, appears to be inclined to “play matters down” as it balances the partnership with its ties with Gulf Arab states at odds with Iran, as well as its own fraught relations with the US.

    In a joint statement, both China and Iran said they are “willing to work together to implement” the CISPP and “continue to deepen cooperation in trade, agriculture, industry, renewable energy, infrastructure and other fields.”

    On Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, who accompanied Raisi to China, said that the two countries agreed to remove obstacles in the way of implementing the CISPP, adding that Iran was “optimistic at the results of the negotiations,” according to state news agency IRNA.

    Chinese President Xi Jinping also accepted an invitation to visit Iran on a future date.

    Raisi’s trip comes as Beijing strengthens its ties with Iran’s foe Saudi Arabia, and as cheap Russian oil potentially threatens Iran’s crude exports to China.

    Less than two years after he took power, Raisi’s term has witnessed growing isolation from the West – especially after Iran supplied Russia with drones to use in its war on Ukraine – and failed efforts to revive a 2015 nuclear deal that removed some barriers to international trade with the Islamic Republic.

    As Western sanctions cripple its economy, Beijing has helped keep Tehran afloat economically. China is Iran’s biggest oil customer, buying sanctioned but cheap barrels that other nations would not touch.

    Tehran’s other ally, Russia, has however been biting into its Asian oil market as China buys more Russian barrels – also sanctioned by the West – for cheap, threatening one of Iran’s last economic lifelines.

    The visit is therefore a strategic one, analysts say, and an attempt by Iran pull itself back up from domestic instability and worsened isolation from the West.

    “(It) is an opportunity for Raisi to try to draw a line under the past five months of domestic unrest and project a sense of normalcy at home and abroad,” said Rome.

    But Jacopo Scita, a policy fellow at the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation in London, said he did not expect the visit to result in much more than a recognition of China’s partnership with Iran.

    “Raisi will hardly get much from the economic perspective, except for a new series of memoranda of understanding and some minor deals,” he told CNN.

    Iran has also been reminding its people that looking eastward is the right path toward economic revival as prospects of returning to nuclear agreement fade, said Parsi. The government has been keen to show that it has “an eastern option” that is supportive and lucrative, he said.

    Scita said that China is unlikely to live up to Iran’s expectations, however.

    “I don’t believe that Beijing can offer guarantees to Tehran except a pledge to continue importing a minimum amount of crude regardless of the global market situation and China’s domestic demand,” he told CNN.

    How Raisi’s visit will be received back at home remains unclear. If the trip yields no concrete results in the coming days, then Iran’s move eastward could prove to be “a huge strategic mistake that the Raisi government has really rushed into,” said Parsi.

    Additional reporting by Adam Pourahmadi and Simone McCarthy

    Turkey’s earthquake left 84,000 buildings either destroyed or in need of demolition after sustaining heavy damage, Turkish Urban Affairs and Environment Minister Murat Kurum said Friday, according to state media.

    The deadly earthquake – which sent shockwaves across the region – has so far killed more than 43,000 across both Turkey and Syria.

    At least 38,000 people died in Turkey, according to Turkey’s governmental disaster management agency, AFAD. The death toll in Syria remains at least 5,841, according to the latest numbers reported Tuesday by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

    Here’s the latest:

    • Since the February 6 earthquake, a total of 143 trucks loaded with aid provided by six UN agencies have crossed from Turkey to northwest Syria through two border crossings, a OCHA statement said Friday.
    • Two men were rescued in Hatay ten days after the earthquake struck, said Turkey’s Health Minister Fahrettin Friday. And late on Thursday, a 12-year-old boy was rescued from rubble in southern Hatay 260 hours after the earthquake hit, according to CNN Turk, which reported live from the scene.
    • World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said upon returning from Syria on Tuesday that more than a decade of war in the region has left towns destroyed, with the health system unable to cope with this scale of emergency. “Survivors are now facing freezing conditions without adequate shelter, heating, food, clean water or medical care,” he said.
    • Turkey added Elazig as the 11th province in the list of those impacted by the quake, the ruling party spokesman said.
    • A Turkish family was reunited with the ‘miracle baby’ that was found in the rubble of the quake after they had given up hope.
    • A confused woman asked her rescuers “What day is it?” when pulled alive from the rubble of last week’s earthquake after 228 hours.
    • After attending the Munich Security Conference in Germany, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel on to Turkey and Greece on Sunday to see US efforts to assist with the earthquake and to meet with Turkish and Greek officials, the State Department said Wednesday.

    Palestinian activist beaten by Israeli soldier says he is scared for his life

    Palestinian activist Issa Amro, who was filmed being assaulted by an Israeli soldier on Monday, told CNN Thursday that he is physically and psychologically affected by the attack and fears for his life.

    • Background: Lawrence Wright, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, posted video of the assault on Twitter. It showed two IDF soldiers manhandling well-known activist Amro, throwing him onto the ground, and one soldier kicking him, before that soldier is pushed away by other troops. The Israeli soldier who was filmed assaulting Amro in Hebron was sentenced to 10 days in military jail. In response to CNN’s interview with Amro, Israel Defense Forces international spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said there was “no justification” for the soldier’s behavior, but suggested Amro had provoked the incident.
    • Why it matters: Amro said he is afraid for his life and for the lives of the people in the area, but added that, “unfortunately what happened to me is happening almost every day.” He said he filed many complaints to the Israeli police about soldier and settler violence, but had gotten no accountability. Amro also said he wants the Biden administration to reopen the Palestinian consulate in East Jerusalem.

    Protesters set fire to ATMs as Lebanese lira hits 80,000 against the dollar in new record low

    Lebanon’s national currency has hit a new record low of 80,000 Lebanese lira against the US dollar, according to values sold on the black market on Thursday. On Thursday, protesters blocked roads across Beirut and set fires to ATMs and bank branches, according to videos posted on social media by the organizers, United for Lebanon and the Depositors Outcry Association, who are both advocating for the release of depositor savings.

    • Background: The lira has been on an exponential fall since January 20 when the Lebanese central bank (BDL) adjusted the official exchange rate for the first time in decades, from LL1,500 to LL15,000. Lebanese banks have been closed since Tuesday due to a strike announced by the Association of Banks in Lebanon. Prime Minister Najib Mikati said in a statement Thursday that “efforts are continuing to address the financial situation.”
    • Why it matters: Lebanon has been in a deepening financial crisis since 2019. The country moved toward securing an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout in April 2022, but the deal is yet to be finalized.

    Iran denies links to new al-Qaeda leader, calls US claim ‘Iranophobia’

    Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian on Thursday denied claims by the US that al-Qaeda’s new leader, Seif al-Adel, is living in his country. “I advise White House to stop the failed Iranophobia game,” wrote Abdollahian on Twitter. “Linking Al-Qaeda to Iran is patently absurd and baseless,” he said.

    • Background: US State Department spokesman Ned Price on Wednesday told reporters that the US backs a UN report linking al-Adel to Iran. “Our assessment aligns with that of the UN, the assessment that you (a reporter) referenced that Saif al-Adel is based in Iran,” said Price during a press briefing, adding that “offering safe haven to al-Qaeda is just another example of Iran’s wide-ranging support for terrorism, its destabilizing activities in the Middle East and beyond.”
    • Why it matters: Tensions between Iran and the US have only worsened in recent months, as the Islamic Republic supplies drones to Russia for use in its war on Ukraine and negotiations to revive a 2015 deal remain frozen. The US said it killed al-Qaeda’s former leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a drone strike on Kabul, Afghanistan last year.

    A Roman-era lead sarcophagus was uncovered on Tuesday at the site of a 2000-year-old Roman necropolis in the Gaza Strip. The necropolis is along the Northern Gaza coast and 500 meters (0.3 miles) from the sea.

    The sarcophagus may have belonged to a prominent individual based on where it was found, the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities’ director of excavation and museums, Jehad Yasin, told CNN on Thursday.

    Yasin said the ancient Roman cemetery was discovered in 2022 “as excavations were carried out at the site in cooperation with Premiere Urgence Internationale and funded by the British Council.”

    Premiere Urgence Internationale, a French humanitarian organization, has collaborated on “Palestinian cultural heritage preservation” projects in Gaza under a program called INTIQAL.

    The coffin was exhumed from the site to perform archaeological analysis for bone identification, which will take around two months, according to Yasin.

    A team of experts in ancient funerary will unseal the coffin in the coming weeks.

    While Gaza is a site of frequent aerial bombardment and a land, air, and sea blockade imposed by Israeli and Egyptian officials, the sarcophagus remains intact.

    “The state of preservation of the sarcophagus is exceptional, as it remained sealed and closed,” read a press release from the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

    French and Palestinian archaeologists have uncovered eighty-five individual and collective tombs in the 3,500-square-meter Roman acropolis since its discovery last year, while ten of them have been opened for excavation.

    Beyond the rubble of the coastal enclave lay dozens of artifacts and burial sites from the Roman, Byzantine and Canaanite eras.

    Last year a Palestinian farmer discovered the head of a 4,500-year-old statue of Canaanite goddess Anat while another Palestinian farmer discovered a Byzantine-era mosaic in his orchard.

    In 2022 the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities released their first Arabic archaeological guide titled “Gaza, the Gateway to the Levant.” The guide charts 39 archaeological sites in Gaza, including churches, mosques and ancient houses that date back to 6,000 years.

    The ministry expects more archaeological findings at the necropolis.

    Further sarcophagi are likely to be uncovered in the following months, said Director Yasin.

    By Dalya Al Masri

    A man and woman walk along a damaged street at night in earthquake- stricken Hatay, Turkey on Thursday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link