Ecuador Amazon tribe win first victory against oil companies
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Category: International Affairs,
U.K. Construction Finds Neolithic Skeletons in Oxfordshire
Why do people go straight for explanations like human sacrifice? With, as far as the peanut gallery can tell, literally nothing to back that fantasy up? It’s just stupid.
Alan Garcia, former Peru president, dies from self-inflicted gunshot wound – CNN
Former Peruvian president Alan Garcia died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head as police were preparing to arrest him on Wednesday morning.
…Garcia, who served as president from 1985 to 1990 and from 2006 to 2011, was under investigation for money laundering and taking bribes in connection with a massive corruption scandal that has engulfed a number of former Latin American leaders.
….Garcia was accused of receiving kickbacks from one of Latin America’s largest construction firms — the Brazil-based company Odebrecht — during the building of an electric train for the Lima metro while he was president during his second term. He has denied the claims.
Alan Garcia, former Peru president, dies from self-inflicted gunshot wound – CNN
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Nusrat Jahan Rafi video: Woman in Bangladesh burned to death after refusing to drop sexual harassment charges against principal
Nusrat Jahan Rafi told her family she was lured to the roof of her rural school in the town of Feni on April 6 and asked to withdraw the charges by five people clad in burqas.
When she refused, she said her hands were tied and she was doused in kerosene and set alight. Rafi told the story to her brother in an ambulance on the way to the hospital and he recorded her testimony on his mobile phone.
“The teacher touched me, I will fight this crime till my last breath,” Rafi said in the video, according to BBC News. She also identified some of her attackers as students at the school.
Rafi died four days later in a Dhaka hospital with burns covering 80 percent of her body.
… A video taken on March 27 while Rafi reported the assault shows the local police chief registering her complaint but telling her that the incident was “not a big deal.”
The chief was later removed from the police station for negligence in dealing with the case.
…At least 17 people, including students, have been arrested in connection with the case, said Banaj Kumar Majumder, the head of the Police Bureau of Investigation.
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Father and son separated at the border reunite after 326 days
An officer approached him, gave him five pages and was told to sign the paperwork. But he said he didn’t know what it was since he couldn’t speak or read English.
It was his own deportation order, sending him back to Guatemala, while keeping his son in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.
Father and son separated at the border reunite after 326 days – CBS News
sigh…
Julian Assange Arrested in London as U.S. Unseals Hacking Conspiracy Indictment
Julian Assange was arrested on Thursday in London to face a charge in the United States of conspiring to hack into a Pentagon computer network in 2010.
…The indictment …revealed that prosecutors in Northern Virginia had not charged Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act for publishing government secrets. Instead, they charged him with conspiring to commit unlawful computer intrusion based on his alleged agreement to try to help Ms. Manning break an encoded portion of passcode that would have permitted her to log on to a classified military network under another user’s identity.
…His organization began publishing Ms. Manning’s leaks in 2010, bringing to light many secrets — like revealing that more civilians had died in Iraq than official estimates showed, detailing the accusations against Guantánamo detainees and airing American diplomats’ unvarnished takes on what was happening around the world.
…During the 2016 presidential campaign [Wikileaks released] thousands of Democratic emails stolen by Russian hackers. (Russian intelligence officers apparently adopted the guise of a hacker calling itself Guccifer 2.0 when providing the files to WikiLeaks.)
…The Ecuadorean government said last year that it had cut off Mr. Assange’s internet access, saying that he had violated an agreement to stop commenting on, or trying to influence, the politics of other countries. The government also imposed other restrictions, like limiting his visitors.
…Ecuador’s president …[said] that his country had decided to stop sheltering Mr. Assange after “his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols.”
Julian Assange Arrested in London as U.S. Unseals Hacking Conspiracy Indictment – The New York Times
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Shana Grice: Sussex police to face discipline after stalking case
Shana Grice, 19, was killed in August 2016 by an ex-boyfriend, Michael Lane, who was convicted of murder a year later and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Grice went to Sussex Police five times in six months to report Lane but, in most incidents, little to no action was taken against the man, an independent review found.
In one instance, Grice was “fined for wasting police time” after officers learned she and Lane had previously been in a relationship, the review by England and Wales’ Independent Office for Police Conduct found.
Shana Grice: Sussex police to face discipline after stalking case
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Explainer: What Is the Significance of the Golan Heights
The Golan Heights were part of Syria until 1967, when Israel captured most of the area in the Six Day War, occupying it and annexing it in 1981. That unilateral annexation was not recognized internationally, and Syria demands the return of the territory.
Syria tried to regain the Heights in the 1973 Middle East war, but was thwarted. Israel and Syria signed an armistice in 1974 and the Golan had been relatively quiet since.
…Both sides covet the Golan’s water resources and naturally fertile soil.
…More than 40,000 people live on the Israeli-occupied Golan, more than half of them Druze residents.
The Druze are an Arab minority who practice an offshoot of Islam and many of its adherents in Syria have long been loyal to the Assad regime.
After annexing the Golan, Israel gave the Druze the option of citizenship, but most rejected it and still identify as Syrian. About another 20,000 Israeli settlers also live there, many of them working in farming and tourism.
Explainer: What Is the Significance of the Golan Heights | World News | US News
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Golan Annexation by Israel Shouldn’t Get U.S. Recognition – Bloomberg
…Israel doesn’t regard its annexation as irreversible, and not long ago treated the territory as a bargaining chip. As recently as the late 1990s, Israel almost returned most of the territory to Syria.
Negotiations failed because Israel was unwilling to withdraw to exactly the 1949 armistice lines, which would have restored Syrian access to the waters of Lake Tiberias. Israel insisted on keeping a strip of land that would deny Syria access to the lake, also known as the Sea of Galilee.
…A State Department human rights report this month described the Golan as “Israeli controlled” instead of the traditional U.S. designation, “Israeli occupied.”
…Confirming Israel’s seizure of this territory would render any territory in the world subject to conquest and annexation. There’d be no legal basis to insist, for example, that Russia must return Crimea to Ukraine. Indeed, Russia would be virtually invited to start gobbling up any parts of the former Soviet Union it regrets having let go of at the end of the Cold War. And that’s just Russia.
……Given the chaos in Syria, no one would ask Israel to make a territorial concession on the Golan Heights now. But that’s hardly a justification for a decades-old land grab. Like recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, confirming Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights is a solution in search of a problem. It would come at a steep cost and achieve nothing.
Golan Annexation by Israel Shouldn’t Get U.S. Recognition – Bloomberg
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