(HONG KONG) — Police and protesters engaged in a standoff in Hong Kong’s nightlife district on Thursday after pro-democracy demonstrators urged people to celebrate Halloween by wearing masks in defiance of a government ban on face coverings.
Riot police pushed people back slowly from the Lan Kwai Fong area of bars, clubs and restaurants that is usually abuzz with revelers on the holiday.
Police fired tear gas but it wasn’t immediately clear whether there had been violence between protesters and officers or if anyone had been arrested.
Organizers had called on supporters of the protest movement to take part in a “masquerade” on Thursday to put to the test a recent government ban on masks at public gatherings aimed at quelling the increasingly violent protests now in their fifth month.
Digital fliers circulated online called on people to wear masks depicting Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior officials.
They also said people could wear a mask and dress in red for the march, which was set to begin at a large park and proceed to the Lan Kwai Fong bar and nightclub district.
Face masks have become a hallmark of protesters in Hong Kong, even at peaceful marches, amid fears their identities will be uncovered and spread online, resulting in retribution.
China’s authoritarian Communist government also collects such data to blacklist people from traveling to the mainland or qualifying for government jobs.
Lam introduced a measure to ban masks and face coverings at the start of October, but protesters have largely ignored it and police have not been enforcing it on a large scale.
Police said they didn’t rule out the possibility of violent incidents on Halloween.
The police force said in an online video that anyone refusing to comply with a request to remove their mask can be fined and jailed for six months, though they also said wearing Halloween masks is allowed as long as there is no violence.
Hong Kong’s High Court granted a temporary order banning anyone from spreading online messages inciting or encouraging violence, according to local broadcaster RTHK. The ban, in effect until Nov. 15, specifically targets the LIHKG online forum and encrypted messaging app Telegram, both popular with protesters.
In a separate event, police fired tear gas at protesters gathered at a subway station across the harbor. The demonstrators were marking two months since riot police stormed a subway car and beat passengers with batons and pepper spray in scenes that inflamed tensions.
In Beijing, the ruling Communist Party said it planned to strengthen laws regarding Hong Kong in the name of national security.
The party reaffirms the “one country, two systems” framework under which Hong Kong was handed over from British to Chinese control in 1997, it said in a statement issued at the end of a major meeting of the 202 members of the party’s Central Committee led by Xi, who is also the party chief.
However, it added that in an effort to maintain the territory’s “prosperity and stability,” it would embark on a project to “establish and strengthen a legal system and enforcement mechanism for safeguarding national security” in Hong Kong.
The document gave no further details and it wasn’t clear whether that indicated an intention to pass new laws in mainland China or in Hong Kong, which has a separate legal system under its own constitution.
(MULTAN, Pakistan) — A raging fire swept through a train in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab Province on Thursday killing 74 people and survivors said afterward it took nearly 20 minutes for the train to stop amid contradictory reports about the condition of the train’s brakes.
Three carriages were consumed by flames from a fire caused by a cooking gas stove and dozens of people jumped in panic from the speeding train.
Conductor Sadiue Ahmed Khan told The Associated Press the train’s emergency breaking system was in perfect working order and the train stopped within three minutes after the first signs of fire.
“This is the worst tragedy in my life as a driver,” he said.
Investigators said they will be looking at the train’s braking system to determine its condition at the time of the fire. Survivors recounted pulling at emergency cords that weave through the train to notify the conductor, but they said the train continued to speed down the tracks.
Ghulam Abbas, a passenger who had gotten on the train in the town of Nawabshah in neighboring Sindh Province with his wife and two children, echoed other passengers who said it took nearly 20 minutes for the train to stop. He recousnted watching panicked passengers jumping off the speeding locomotive.
“We learned afterward that most of them had died,” he said.
Abbas’ wife, Sulai Khan Bibi, said she was horrified what would happen to their two small children. “We were so close to death, but Allah saved us,” she said, clutching the children.
The train, which was traveling from the southern Arabian Sea port city of Karachi to Rawalpindi, just 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the federal capital, was carrying 857 passengers. Most of the dead were members of Tableeqi-e-Jamaat, an organization of Islamic missionaries. The fire was believed to have started in their compartment.
Mufti Wahab, a district chief of the Tableeqi-e-Jamaat, said as many as 52 members of his organization were “martyred because of the fire.”
The fire apparently started after one of several small stoves brought on to the train by the the Tableeqi members exploded, setting other gas cylinders used to fuel the stoves on fire, said Deputy Railways Commissioner Jamil Ahmed.
Flames roared through the train engulfing three carriages as it approached the town of Liaquatpur in Punjab. Survivors recounted horrific scenes of fellow passengers screaming as they jumped through windows and off the train, flames billowing from the carriages.
“We could hear people crying and screaming for help,” said Chaudhry Shujaat, who had boarded the train just a few hours earlier with his wife and two children. “I thought we would die. The next car was on fire. We felt so helpless.”
Kaleem Ullah, an official with the district emergency services, said of the 43 people injured, 11 were still in critical condition. Several of them had jumped off the train — many to their deaths — after the fire broke out and before it eventually screeched to a halt, said Ahmed, the railways official.
In Pakistan, poor passengers often bring their own small gas stoves on the trains to cook their meals, despite rules to the contrary, according to Railways Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed. Safety regulations are often ignored in the overcrowded trains.
Railway official Shabir Ahmed said bodies of passengers were scattered over a 2 kilometer- (1 mile-) wide area around the site.
People from nearby villages rushed to the train, carrying buckets of water and shovels to help douse the flames. “But it was impossible,” said Ahmed.
Through the morning hours, rescue workers and inspectors sifted through the charred wreckage, looking for survivors and aiding the injured. Local Pakistani TV footage from the scene showed a huge blaze raging as firefighters struggled to get it under control.
Officials said they were still trying to identify the victims and that the lists of fatalities and those injured were not ready yet. Another train was dispatched to bring the survivors to the city of Rawalpindi, they said.
Yasmin Rashid, a provincial minister in Punjab, told reporters that medical staff were providing the best possible treatment for the injured at a hospital in Liaquatpur. Those critically injured were taken by ambulance to the city of Multan, the largest city nearest to the site of the accident.
Pakistan’s military said troops were also participating in the rescue operation. President Arif Alvi and Prime Minister Imran Khan issued statements expressing their sorrow over the tragedy.
Khan took to Twitter to offer his condolences to the families of those killed and say he was praying for the speedy recovery of the injured. He also ordered an urgent investigation into the incident.
Train accidents in Pakistan are often the result of poor railway infrastructure and official negligence. Media reports on Thursday suggest that railways officials did not notice when passengers boarded the train, carrying individual gas stoves.
In July, a passenger train rammed into a freight train at the Walhar Railway Station in the district of Rahim Yar Khan, killing at least 20 people and injuring 74.
A month earlier, a passenger train traveling to the eastern city of Lahore from the port city of Karachi collided with a freight train in the southern city of Hyderabad, killing three people.
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Associated Press writers Munir Ahmed and Kathy Gannon in Islamabad contributed to this report.
(LONDON) — British police have interviewed an American diplomat’s wife who was involved in a crash that killed a British teenager and have passed their recommendations on to U.K. prosecutors.
Northamptonshire Police interviewed Anne Sacoolas about the crash that killed 19-year-old Harry Dunn in August. His motorcycle collided with a car she was allegedly driving near a British military base used by the U.S. military in southern England. The 42-year-old Sacoolas left Britain shortly after the crash.
She was granted diplomatic immunity. Dunn’s family has launched a campaign seeking its revocation.
President Donald Trump has called what happened “a terrible accident,” noting that the British drive on the left side of the road, while in the United States people drive on the right.
(BEIRUT) — The Islamic State group is mourning the death of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and has announced a successor in a new audio release.
The group identified the new leader as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi in the audio released Thursday by the IS central media arm, al-Furqan Foundation.
The speaker in the audio also confirmed the death of Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, a close aide of al-Baghdadi and a spokesman for the group.
Al-Muhajir was killed in a joint U.S. operation with Kurdish forces in Jarablus, in northern Syria on Sunday, hours after al-Baghdadi blew himself up during a U.S. raid in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province.
The speaker named Abu Hamza al-Qurashi urged followers to pledge allegiance to the new Caliph and addressed the Americans saying; “Don’t rejoice.”
(TOKYO) — A fire broke out early Thursday and spread quickly through historic Shuri Castle on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa, nearly destroying the UNESCO World Heritage site.
Firefighters battled the blaze for about 12 hours before bringing it under control in the afternoon.
The fire in Naha, the prefectural capital of Okinawa, started from the castle’s main wooden structure and quickly jumped to other buildings, in part because of windy weather. Three large halls and four other structures burned down, a fire official said.
No one was injured. The cause was not immediately known.
An annual weeklong castle festival that began Sunday was to run for a week but the remaining events were canceled. Event organizers were preparing the next day’s events at the castle until after midnight, but no one was there when the fire broke out, officials said.
Video on NHK public television showed parts of the castle engulfed in orange flames, then turning into a charred skeleton and collapsing to the ground. Many residents watched from a hillside road and quietly took photos to capture what was left of the castle before it was largely lost. Some people were crying.
“I feel as if we have lost our symbol,” said Naha Mayor Mikiko Shiroma, who led an emergency response team. “I’m shocked.”
Okinawa Gov. Denny Tamaki cut short a trip to South Korea to return to Naha. “My heart is broken,” he said. “But I also feel strongly that we must reconstruct Shuri Castle, a symbol of the Ryukyu Kingdom filled with our history and culture.”
AP—Kyodo NewsThis May 2017, aerial photo shows Shuri Castle in Naha, Okinawa, southern Japan. A fire spread among structures at Shuri Castle on Thursday, Oct. 31, 2019, on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa, nearly destroying the UNESCO World Heritage site.
The castle is a symbol of Okinawa’s cultural heritage from the time of the Ryukyu Kingdom that spanned about 450 years from 1429 until 1879, when the island was annexed by Japan.
It is also a symbol of Okinawa’s struggle and efforts to recover from World War II. The castle burned down in 1945 during the Battle of Okinawa near the war’s end, in which about 200,000 lives were lost on the island, many of them civilians.
The castle was largely restored in 1992 as a national park and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000 as part of a group of ancient ruins, castles and sacred sites that “provide mute testimony to the rare survival of an ancient form of religion into the modern age.”
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters that the central government will do its utmost to reconstruct the castle.
The government dispatched officials from the Agency for Cultural Affairs and other government organizations to join efforts to investigate the cause of the fire and study ways to protect other historical sites from disasters, Suga said.
Tokyo University of Science Professor Ai Sekizawa, an expert on fire prevention, told NHK that the extensive damage occurred because the fire broke out in the middle of the night when nobody was around, delaying the initial firefighting effort. He said the design of the castle might also have allowed the fire to quickly expand in the spacious main hall and move to other buildings connected by hallways.
Kurayoshi Takara, a historian at the University of the Ryukyus who helped reconstruct Shuri Castle, said he was speechless when he saw the fire. He told NHK that the castle reconstruction was a symbolic event for Okinawans to restore their history and Ryukyu heritage lost during the war.
“I still can’t accept this as a reality,” Takara said. “It has taken more than 30 years and it was a monument to the wisdom and efforts of many people. Shuri Castle is not just about the buildings, but it reconstructed all the details, even including equipment inside.”
UNESCO Director General Audrey Azouley expressed her sympathy. “Deep emotion and sincere solidarity with the Japanese people as we see the tragic fire at the beautiful #shuricastle,” she wrote on her Twitter account. “This is a loss for all humanity.”
Okinawa was under U.S. occupation until 1972, two decades after the rest of Japan regained full independence.
(SEOUL, South Korea) — North Korea on Thursday fired two projectiles into its eastern sea, an apparent resumption of weapons tests aimed at ramping up pressure on Washington over a stalemate in nuclear negotiations, according to officials in South Korea and Japan.
The launches followed statements of displeasure by top North Korean officials over the slow pace of nuclear negotiations with the United States and demands that the Trump administration ease crippling sanctions and pressure on their country.
Analysts say the North could dial up its weapons demonstrations in the coming weeks as it approaches an end-of-year deadline set by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for Washington to offer mutually acceptable terms for a deal to salvage the nuclear diplomacy.
Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the weapons were fired from an area near the North Korean capital of Pyongyang and flew about 370 kilometers (230 miles) across the country at a height of up to 90 kilometers (56 miles) before landing off its eastern coast. The Joint Chiefs of Staff urged the North to “immediately stop actions that do not help efforts to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula.”
The military didn’t immediately confirm whether the weapons were ballistic missiles or rocket artillery. The office of South Korean President Moon Jae-in described them as short-range projectiles.
Japan’s Defense Ministry said it believed they were ballistic missiles, but they did not reach Japan’s territorial waters or its exclusive economic zone. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe condemned the launches “as an act that threatens the peace and safety of Japan and the region.”
Seoul’s presidential Blue House said National Security Director Chung Eui-yong presided over an emergency National Security Council meeting where officials expressed “strong concern” and discussed North Korea’s possible intent.
Senior North Korean official Kim Yong Chol on Sunday said his country was running out of patience with the United States over what it described as unilateral disarmament demands, and warned that a close personal relationship between the leaders alone would not be enough to prevent nuclear diplomacy from derailing. He said the administration of President Donald Trump would be “seriously mistaken” if it ignores Kim Jong Un’s end-of-year deadline.
In a speech in Azerbaijan earlier this week, Choe Ryong Hae, considered the second-most powerful official in North Korea, said the deadlocked nuclear negotiations had put the Korean Peninsula at a crossroads between peace and a “touch-and-go crisis,” and demanded that the United States remove its “hostile” policy of sanctions and pressure on the North.
Nam Sung-wook, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Korea University, said more North Korean weapons displays are likely. There’s a possibility that the North will fire some of its powerful midrange missiles over Japan, like it did during a provocative run in weapons tests in 2017, he said.
“North Korea is investing all its strength in a hard-line position against Washington and Seoul,” said Nam, a former president of the Institute for National Security Strategy, a think tank affiliated with South Korea’s main spy agency. “If its missiles fly over Japan, the international impact would be huge because the United States and Japan would find it difficult to let it go,” he said.
Earlier this month, the North test-fired an underwater-launched ballistic missile for the first time in three years. The North has also tested new short-range ballistic missile and rocket artillery systems in recent months in what experts saw as an effort to use the standstill in talks to advance its military capabilities while increasing its bargaining power.
Negotiations have faltered after the collapse of a February summit between Kim Jong Un and Trump in Hanoi, Vietnam, where the U.S. rejected North Korean demands for broad sanctions relief in exchange for piecemeal progress toward partially surrendering its nuclear capabilities.
The North responded with intensified testing activity while Kim said he would “wait with patience until the end of the year for the United States to come up with a courageous decision.”
Washington and Pyongyang resumed working-level discussion in Sweden earlier this month, but the meeting broke down amid acrimony with the North Koreans calling the talks “sickening” and accusing the Americans of maintaining an “old stance and attitude.”
After the breakdown in Sweden, North Korea released a series of photos showing Kim riding a white horse to a snow-covered Mount Paektu, a volcano considered sacred by North Koreans and a place where the leader has often visited before making key decisions. Speaking to officials near the mountain, Kim vowed to overcome U.S.-led sanctions that he said had both pained and infuriated his people.
News of the launches came after South Korea said earlier Thursday that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sent a message of condolence to Moon over his mother’s recent death. The two leaders met three times last year and struck a set of deals aimed at easing animosities and boosting exchanges. But in recent months, North Korea has drastically reduced its engagement and diplomatic activities with South Korea, after Seoul failed to resume lucrative joint economic projects held back by U.S.-led U.N. sanctions.
Last week, Kim ordered the destruction of South Korean-built facilities at a long-shuttered joint tourist project at North Korea’s scenic Diamond Mountain resort. South Korea later proposed talks but North Korea has insisted they exchange documents to work out details of Kim’s order.
“The North Korean leader does not ride a white horse to the top of Paektu mountain because he is satisfied with the status quo,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.
“Kim’s year-end threat is as much a deadline for economic progress as it is a diplomatic ultimatum,” Easley said. “This is why Pyongyang is increasing pressure on Seoul and Washington in the form of announcing plans to bulldoze even stalled inter-Korean projects, such as at Mount Kumgang, while continuing provocative missile tests.”
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Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.
Rival carmakers PSA Group and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles unveiled a plan to combine, pooling resources to confront an expensive new era of trade tariffs, emissions rules and electrification.
Shareholders of each company will own 50% of the combined entity, to be listed in Paris, Milan and New York. Investors in Fiat will receive a dividend of 5.5 billion euros ($6.1 billion) and its robotics arm Comau, while France’s PSA plans to distribute its 46% stake in auto-parts maker Faurecia SE. Cost savings from the deal without plant closures are projected to be about 3.7 billion euros.
PSA shares dropped as much as 9.1% in Paris, the most in more than three years, while Fiat rose as much as 10% in Milan.
The boards of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot and Citroen-maker PSA agreed to work toward a binding agreement in the coming weeks, they said Thursday in a joint statement. The accord would create the fourth-largest automaker with a combined market value of about $50 billion.
A merger of Fiat Chrysler and PSA, the No. 2 for car sales in Europe, would create a regional powerhouse to challenge Volkswagen AG. The tie-up would bring together the billionaire Agnelli clan in Italy and the Peugeot family of France as consolidation sweeps through an industry trying to finance major transformation.
The 11-member board of the new Netherlands-based group will have six members from PSA including Chief Executive Officer Carlos Tavares, who will remain CEO for five years, and five from Fiat Chrysler. Fiat Chairman John Elkann stays in that role. It’s unclear what role Fiat CEO Mike Manley will hold.
The announcement comes several months after Fiat Chrysler and PSA explored a partnership on pooling investment to build cars in Europe, and following the collapse in June of negotiations between Fiat and French competitor Renault SA.
“It’s not as good a partner as Renault, but any partnership is good,” said Felipe Munoz-Vieira, an analyst with Jato Dynamics in Turin. Fiat Chrysler “is not facing very good times, and it seems it’s getting worse as the time passes.”
Both PSA and Fiat Chrysler lag on investments in electrification and neither has a strong presence in China, but a combination could help them grow in the lucrative commercial vehicle market in Europe, Munoz said. Fiat Chrysler, which reports third-quarter earnings on Thursday, is suffering in Europe with an aging Jeep lineup and lack of SUVs under the Fiat brand, he said.
Automakers face tremendous pressure to combine to help pay for platform development, manufacturing and purchasing as they battle through trade wars, a global slowdown and an expensive shift toward electrification and autonomous driving. Producers face the additional burden in Europe of new rules on emissions.
Against this backdrop, the pace of dealmaking has picked up. Volkswagen in July said it will work with Ford Motor Co. on electric and self-driving car technology, while Toyota Motor Corp. is strengthening ties with partners such as Subaru Corp. and China’s BYD Co. The Indian conglomerate that owns Jaguar Land Rover has said it’s open to finding partners for the British automaker but isn’t planning on selling the embattled unit.
Dismal car sales have also added to the mix. Volkswagen on Wednesday lowered its outlook for vehicle deliveries this year due to a faster-than-expected decline in auto markets.
France is one of the biggest shareholders of PSA, whose brands also include Opel and Vauxhall, and the government has signaled support for a deal, while warning it would scrutinize the jobs impact and governance structure of the new company, as well as its commitment to build a European battery-maker.
“The operation responds to a need in the auto industry for consolidation to face the challenges of the future,” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said in a statement Thursday.
PSA had been floated as a logical merger partner with Fiat, because of their complementary product and geographic fit, and the two sides discussed partnership possibilities this year. However, the Italian-American carmaker instead pursued a deal with Renault.
Those talks fell apart in June when Elkann, who also heads Fiat Chrysler’s largest shareholder, Exor NV, walked away amid opposition from the French government and a lack of support from Renault’s Japanese alliance partner Nissan Motor Co.
Tavares has sought to re-establish Peugeot’s foothold in the U.S., a market it exited in 1991. He set plans earlier this year for a return, with shipments starting from Europe or China in 2026.
Fiat has sought to secure its future with a larger partner for several years, dating back to late CEO Sergio Marchionne’s failed courtship of General Motors Co. After being rebuffed by GM in 2015, rumors of talks with other automakers have swirled with varying intensity.
It’s never a good sign when a country’s central bank tightens capital controls just hours after a national election. But when that country is Argentina, it’s not exactly surprising, either.
One in 10 Argentines today can’t find work. More than one-third are impoverished. In a country not generally known for fiscal discipline, reform-minded President Mauricio Macri had good intentions to fix the country’s finances but lacked the political support to do so. He was eventually forced to seek a major $57 billion aid package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but that was mismanaged, aggravating the country’s already dire economic situation; just 40% of Argentines voted to re-elect him. Alberto Fernández–his leftist opponent, who received 48% of the vote–will replace him on Dec. 10. He will be accompanied by his vice-presidential running mate, former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK).
When her second presidential term ended in 2015, CFK was presiding over a country with rampant political corruption and an economic situation pointing seriously south, but one that had yet to fully develop into a crisis. She remains beloved by millions for her generous welfare policies (which the country was ultimately unable to afford). Fernández served as CFK’s chief of the Cabinet of Ministers for her first seven months in office but was always considered the more practical politician of the two. Following CFK’s presidency, they headed separate wings of their Peronist movement, refusing even to talk to each other. Then CFK approached Fernández with a deal–if he would run for the country’s presidency, she would serve as his VP, delivering the votes he needed to unseat Macri.
It was a bargain Fernández couldn’t refuse. Now comes the hard part. Fernández has two distinct challenges ahead of him; the first is the country’s looming credit crunch, which if left unaddressed would lead to its ninth sovereign-debt default. To avoid that fate, Fernández has to play ball with the IMF, an institution widely reviled in Argentina given its history of demanding austerity measures in exchange for financial lifelines, and which Fernández criticized on the campaign trail. But Fernández doesn’t have many good options. Without support from the IMF, no foreign investors would touch the country, especially now as there’s talk of trimmed repayments–a so-called haircut–on existing Argentine bonds. Macri cut public spending in order to bring the country’s finances in line with IMF demands; Fernández just vowed to increase public spending.
The second concern is the person who propelled Fernández to the presidency. CFK, who currently faces multiple charges of corruption, is one of the most divisive political figures in Argentina. While her presence on the ticket secured the presidency for Fernández, he underperformed relative to polls, which may be explained by voters’ wariness of re-electing CFK to a position of power. (Fernández was also unable to secure a majority in the lower house of parliament.) More concerning still, Kirchner has her own political base and influence network, which could complicate Fernández’s ability to govern if he doesn’t manage the relationship properly.
Fed up with the past four years of economic struggle, Argentine voters made their decision. Macri should take heart–in Argentine politics, there is such a thing as second chances. It remains to be seen what Fernández and CFK will do with theirs.
The death of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi may not change the world. Nevertheless, how it came about says a fair amount about the world he has departed.
In the chain of events that led to the Oct. 26 demise of the ISIS leader, every link tells a story. But even as it crystallizes what the war on terrorism looks like 18 years after 9/11, al-Baghdadi’s death may mark the beginning of an uncertain new chapter.
The first link begins with the government of Iraq, which in September arrested one of al-Baghdadi’s wives and a courier. Intelligence pointed to Syria, where the CIA was already working with the Kurdish militia. Both Iraq and the Kurds are committed enemies of ISIS. Iraqis suffered tens of thousands of casualties pushing ISIS out of their country from 2014 to 2017, and Kurdish militias lost some 11,000 fighters finishing the job in Syria, where the group’s claim of a caliphate was erased.
Their involvement underscores that this is a global fight: the U.S. is not going it alone. The people actually prosecuting the war on terror are overwhelmingly local and Muslim–in Iraq and Syria, but also in Libya, Niger, Chad, Mali, Somalia, southern Yemen and much of Afghanistan, where more than 58,000 Afghan national military and police forces lost their lives through 2018. Typically the U.S. military role in these missions is restricted to half a dozen or more special-operations commandos working with local forces by providing intelligence, training and air cover. The local forces are mostly Muslim.
Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria continued to battle ISIS and hunted al-Baghdadi even after American forces retreated from those countries. On Oct. 6, Trump ordered U.S. troops to pull back from territory held by the Kurds, who were left alone to face an attack by Turkey. “I don’t think we could have done this without the help we got from the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds,” a U.S. official told TIME, speaking of the operation against the ISIS leader. The official quickly added that Iraq military and intelligence officers “kicked the whole thing off.”
Maxar Handout/EPA-EFE/ShutterstockThe ISIS leader had gone to ground near the Turkish border, in an area known for smugglers and al-Qaeda
Al-Baghdadi’s trail led east. He appeared to have gone to ground not near the lush Euphrates valley where ISIS fighters made their last stand in Syria–and where his fighters still mount ambushes and suicide attacks–but in Idlib province, the last large section of Syria still controlled by rebel militias, which in turn are dominated by an affiliate of al-Qaeda. That’s the next link in the war on terrorism: it’s far from over. Militant Islam may hold scant appeal to the overwhelming majority of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims (a 2015 Pew Center survey found almost no more support for ISIS in Lebanon than in Israel), but a terrorist attack does not require great numbers, and chaos gives extremism both oxygen and maneuvering room. Not by chance are ISIS, al-Qaeda and their offshoots found in the globe’s least-governed locations.
Like Syria. During its eight-year civil war, the country was a proving ground for jihadists, many drawn by the sectarian nature the conflict quickly assumed. The Damascus government of Bashar Assad is dominated by Alawites, a heterodox religious minority. Assad’s brutal answer to peaceful Arab Spring protests by Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority was answered by a range of armed groups, including extremists who dominated the rebel battlefield. ISIS was a latecomer, having begun across the desert border as al-Qaeda in Iraq. There ISIS fought the U.S. occupation while slaughtering Shi’ite Muslims and religious minorities.
Al-Baghdadi, born Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri 48 years ago in a village in central Iraq, took his nom de guerre from the capital city, where he got a Ph.D. in Quranic studies. He was swept up in arrests by U.S. forces in 2004 and, during almost a year in custody, turned his prison tent into an incubator of extremism. After release he joined the armed group he would in 2010 come to lead. All three of the leaders who preceded him, including the notorious Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, were killed by U.S. forces in tandem with the Iraqi government.
That collaboration formed the next link in the chain that led to al-Baghdadi’s death. This story is one of professional cooperation, shared goals and keeping everyone on the same page. By doctrine and training, U.S. special-operations forces work jointly with others, from the CIA to the Iraqi military and intelligence and the Syrian Kurds who dispatched agents along the routes al-Baghdadi was thought to use, tracing him to a compound near the Turkish border.
The Kurds had a man on the inside, their general Mazloum Abdi told reporters afterward. Abdi said a member of al-Baghdadi’s security detail smuggled out soiled underwear, and even a blood sample, for DNA testing that confirmed the ISIS leader’s presence. The agent also described the layout of the compound in detail, including a tunnel. (The reward for information leading the U.S. to al-Baghdadi was $25 million.) Planning began for a capture-or-kill operation carried out by the Army’s elite Delta Force and Ranger Regiment troops. The mission was named in part for Kayla Mueller, the U.S. aid worker kidnapped by ISIS in 2013 and raped by al-Baghdadi.
Al-Furqan Media/AFP/Getty ImagesAn ISIS video released in April gave the world its first glimpse of al-Baghdadi in five years
On Oct. 26, the operation went off without incident, commandos flying from Iraq in eight CH-47 Chinooks and other helicopters, breaching a high wall surrounding the compound and pursuing al-Baghdadi into the tunnel, a dead end where he detonated a suicide vest, killing the two children he’d taken with him. President Donald Trump watched the video feeds in the White House Situation Room “like a movie,” he said in an announcement the next morning.
But Trump himself had disrupted planning. His abrupt announcement that the U.S. was leaving Kurdish territory in Syria infuriated the U.S. partners in the operation. As the U.S. retreated, and the Kurds scrambled for their lives while under attack by Turkey, raid planners scrambled to coordinate logistics, air power and other military assets required for the operation against al-Baghdadi.
And so the impact of al-Baghdadi’s elimination (and the data recovered from his compound) is not the only question left looming in the aftermath of the raid.
ISIS has operated as an insurgency, a militia, a government and, perhaps most dangerously, as a movement, inspiring followers despite its astonishing brutality. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s death–welcome and important though it may be–is not a catastrophic blow to the quality of leadership in ISIS,” says Michael Nagata, who retired in August as Army lieutenant general and strategy director from the National Counterterrorism Center. Nagata, who served in the Middle East as a special-operations commander in 2014 when the counter-ISIS campaign began, says ISIS now has a cadre of young, battle-hardened leaders who are climbing its echelons and in the terrorist group’s global network. “ISIS isn’t a crippled organization because Baghdadi’s gone,” he says. “The depth and breadth of ISIS leadership, in my judgment, is unprecedented for this type of terrorist group.”
Nor does killing al-Baghdadi reverse Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds. The decision has raised doubts even in Iraq, where the U.S. lost thousands of troops and spent $1 trillion. “The staying power of the United States is being questioned in a very, very serious way,” the President of Iraq, Barham Salih, told Axios in an interview. “And allies of the United States are worried about the dependability of the United States.”
Iraq declared that troops Trump ordered out of Syria can’t stay there, opening the question of how the U.S. will suppress an ISIS that “is stronger today than its predecessor al-Qaeda in Iraq was in 2011, when the U.S. withdrew from Iraq,” as the Institute for the Study of War wrote in a June report. “ISIS’s insurgency will grow because areas it has lost in Iraq and Syria are still neither stable nor secure.”
After Russian and Turkish forces took over territory once held by the Kurds and Americans, Trump ordered a rump U.S. force to protect nearby oil fields. The move underscored the betrayal of the Kurds and reinforced perceptions that the West cares most about resources–never a good outcome in a contest for hearts and minds. After al-Baghdadi, there can be no question such a contest matters.
“It’s good to take out the leader, but it’s not just a terrorist group–it’s an ideology as well,” says Aki Peritz, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst. “Stamping out the idea of the Islamic State will prove to be much more difficult than one successful military-intelligence operation.”
Leonardo Da Vinci was no stranger to France. He spent his final three years in the country, dying at 67 in a Loire Valley château exactly 500 years ago. His Mona Lisa, which has hung in the Louvre Museum since the French Revolution, virtually defines Paris as a city of art treasures.
And so it is Paris–not, to the irritation of many Italians, Leonardo’s native Florence–that’s marking that anniversary by hosting the largest collection of his work ever shown. After all, the Louvre already owns five of his 15 paintings that remain. “Leonardo da Vinci,” which opened Oct. 24 and runs for four months, is a runaway hit, with more than 410,000 advance tickets sold by day five.
Walking through the dark rooms, one can see why. The nearly 120 works range from notebook sketches to spectacularly spotlit paintings, like the Benoit Madonna and St. John the Baptist, as well as infrared reflectographs, all capturing one man’s relentless inquiry into biology, architecture, mechanics, light and texture.
Staging it was not easy. The Louvre spent a decade cajoling museums, including several in the U.S., to lend their Leonardos. Even so, the celebrated Vitruvian Man drawing arrived from Venice just days before the opening after a bitter court battle in Italy over whether it was too fragile to travel. And no amount of begging could bring to Paris the Salvator Mundi painting that sold in 2017 for a record $450.3 million, reportedly to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Also absent: the Mona Lisa, which remains in its regular spot in the Louvre, where more than 30,000 people a day snake past its recessed glass case, jostling for selfies. The Louvre did not want that obsession to overwhelm its Leonardo exhibition, which requires a separate ticket and instead includes a virtual-reality Mona Lisa experience. “If the Mona Lisa was there, there would be no more exhibition,” Louis Frank, one of the exhibition’s curators, tells TIME. “It is the most venerated work in the museum.”
The Mona Lisa also, some Louvre workers say, creates a circus. In May, museum staff went on strike, saying the 10.2 million annual visitors were turning the Louvre into a “cultural Disneyland,” making their work untenable. “The Louvre is suffocating,” their union stated.
This blockbuster Leonardo exhibition will do little to ease the crush. But given that all tickets must be prebooked, it will at least be a more orderly experience, potentially drawing Parisians who typically steer clear of the overrun Louvre. “People want to see works that they know, that they recognize,” Frank says. And France, after all, is no stranger to Leonardo.
Peter Keup can still remember how it felt to hold deutsche marks in his hand.
“It was special to even touch this money,” he recalls. “It felt solid. The East German mark was thinner, flimsier.” As a boy growing up in East Germany, he was sometimes sent West German currency by his grandparents on the other side of the border, be it as a birthday gift or a reward for good school grades. Keup pored obsessively over the notes, minted with the mysterious–sounding titles and images of unknown cities and historical figures. “Names from behind the Iron Curtain, an invisible world,” he reflects. Their worth to him was far more than simply financial.
In any case, there was only so much the 16 million citizens of the communist German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.) could buy in a sealed-off country of scarcity, shortages and joyless austerity. Tantalizing tastes of Western consumer goods could be obtained on the black market and at state-run “Intershops,” which only accepted hard currency, like dollars or deutsche marks. Cigarettes, coffee, chocolate and pop records were on offer to those who could afford them. Others had to find their pleasures where they could. “I loved the smell of Persil and Ariel detergent in the clothes,” reminisces Nicole Hartmann, of receiving packages of hand-me-downs from relatives in the West as a young girl. “I always wanted to keep them unwashed.”
When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, followed by the inner German border that ran from Czechoslovakia to the Baltic Sea, the gates to the West were opened to all, and the bounties and temptations that lay beyond. By foot and by row upon row of Trabant and Wartburg cars, the “Ossis” (as East Germans were known) began to pour across what had been one of the most secure borders in the world. Were that not all reason enough to feel euphoric, there was more awaiting them on the other side: free money.
Nanna Heitmann—Magnum Photos for TIMEA 100 Deutsche Mark bill.
Since 1970, East Germans arriving to the Federal Republic of Germany by whatever means were paid a grant, initially of 30 deutsche marks (DM) twice a year, later rising to 100 DM once a year, under a program known as Begrüßungsgeld or “welcome money.” Under Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik policy of peaceful rapprochement, the measure was intended to help the few people who did manage to depart the G.D.R., legally or otherwise, to pay for food or travel. The amount is equivalent to about $100 in today’s money.
After the abrupt and entirely unforeseen rupture of the Berlin Wall, demand for welcome money surged—and the West German authorities stuck to their promise. As word spread like wildfire among arriving Ossis, long queues began to form outside banks and building societies. The state-sanctioned handout triggered a colossal spending spree across Berlin’s River Spree. It was a commercial revolution, and a moment of mass transactional transference from socialism into capitalism and the material world. Considered a gift by some and a bribe by others, it helped set the tone for full and swift reunification by October 1990, firmly on West German terms.
No official statistics exist as to exactly how much was claimed in all, but by the time payments were halted on Dec. 29, 1989, replaced by a foreign currency fund that both German states contributed to, it’s estimated that at least 4 billion DM had been paid out in a matter of just seven weeks. “I think over 95% [of East Germans] got this money,” speculates Sören Marotz, historian at the DDR Museum of East Germany’s history. “Some people found ways to claim the money more than once.”
On West Berlin’s glittering technicolor shopping boulevard, the Kurfürstendamm, the famous KaDeWe department store was a first port of call for many—to spend or simply to stare in awe at its luxurious abundance. In supermarkets in the borderlands of West Germany, witnesses remember seeing shelves stripped bare. Almost everyone claimed their 100 DM, from the current Chancellor Angela Merkel, then a 35-year-old physicist living in East Berlin, to sports stars, doctors, artists, political dissidents, musicians, families, pensioners and Stasi agents. Even babies were eligible for a payout.
Cash injections to the former G.D.R. have in some ways never ceased. Since 1991, Germans have paid a so-called solidarity surcharge, a fee on income, capital gains and corporate taxes currently set at 5.5%, in order to help the former communist east. Yet despite receiving €243 billion in “Soli” taxes since 1995, the economy in the country’s East continues to lag far behind the West’s. Unemployment is higher, wages are lower, and the population of the former G.D.R.’s territory has dropped to its lowest level in 114 years. It has given rise among some to what is known as “Ostalgia,” a longing for the simplicity and cradle-to-grave comforts of life in the G.D.R. Political disaffection has seen parts of the former East become a heartland for populist parties; in the eastern state of Thuringia on Oct. 27, the far-right anti–migrant Alternative for Germany party finished ahead of Merkel’s -center-right party in local elections.
What East Germans decided to buy when the Wall fell says a lot about that moment in our history, 30 years ago—about the true value of money, about competing economic systems, and about the hopes, freedoms and tensions of reunifying a country. Each purchase tells its own story. Here are 10 of them:
The All-American Doll
Nanna Heitmann—Magnum Photos for TIMESusan Penquitt and her daughter Nora play with the Barbie she bought in 1989.
“There was a long row of cars in the middle of the night,” Susan Penquitt remembers vividly, despite being just 8 years old when her family drove across the border into West Germany for the first time. The road led to the city of Fulda in Hesse, about 65 miles east of Frankfurt, and the toy section of a department store, a sight the little girl had barely dreamed of. “When I saw the Barbie on the shelf, you know, that was it. I don’t remember any other toy in that shop.”Lovingly looked after for three decades, the iconic American doll today belongs to Penquitt’s eldest daughter Nora, 8, in their home outside of Leipzig. It’s a happy token of what was not always a happy time. Like millions of East Germans working in largely state-owned industries, both of Penquitt’s parents lost their jobs following reunification. “They never had so many sorrows really,” she says.
A Grand Scheme for a Piano
Nanna Heitmann—Magnum Photos for TIMEElse Gabriel, left, and Ulf Wrede with their Bösendorfer piano.
The bohemian East Berlin performance artists Else Gabriel and Ulf Wrede celebrated their first days and nights in the West like many Germans did: together in a beer-soaked haze. “We gave pieces of the Wall to people in bars and they gave us drinks,” 57-year-old Gabriel recalls. “Everyone was so out of control. It felt like you could do anything, there was two systems just collapsing into each other.” By ripping out pages from their passports to remove collection stamps, they say they claimed their Begrüßungsgeld multiple times between them. “I spent 27 years of my life in f-cking East Germany,” Gabriel says. “There was no guilt about [taking] a few hundred deutsche marks.”
Gabriel had been permitted to leave the G.D.R. just days before the Wall fell, and had earned some deutsche marks there already. The couple combined their funds left over after the revelries and changed it all back to Eastern currency, taking advantage of a black market exchange rate to convert around 2,000 DM into around 10,000 Eastern marks. After smuggling it back into East Germany in Wrede’s socks (“It stank when we pulled the money out,” Gabriel laughs), the pair used their haul to pay off a loan on a Bösendorfer grand piano. In his Neukölln studio apartment today, Wrede, 51, still plays the dusty black keyboard, now worth many times the price he paid for it 30 years ago. “Best deal ever,” Gabriel grins proudly.
Black Adidas, White Stripes
At the time the Wall fell, Andreas Thom was already living a privileged life. At 24, he had played 51 matches for the East German national soccer team, and won the G.D.R. Premier League five times with Dynamo Berlin. Surely Thom had no need for his Begrüßungsgeld? “Of course I got the money,” he says. “Everybody got the money!” On a shopping trip to the KaDeWe, he purchased a pair of soccer shoes: “Adidas Samba Spezial, black with white stripes.” Just 37 days after reunification, Thom made history as the first East German player to sign for a West German club, when he moved to Bayern Leverkusen for a fee of 2.5 million DM. He thinks back to his debut game in February 1990 vs. FC Homburg. “Everybody was watching [as if] I had four arms, two heads, four legs,” he says. “But I scored, and everything was O.K.”
An Exotic Feast of Rare Foods
A dissident photographer, Harald Hauswald’s evocative black-and-white street scenes from behind the Wall were published in West German magazines as well as in a controversial book, making him a person of interest to the hated state security police. Hauswald escaped serious imprisonment only because of his connections to influential Western journalists, who would help him smuggle his film reels out. Shooting sometimes literally from the hip, he wielded his camera like a weapon. “I felt so trapped by the Wall,” says the 65-year-old. “Taking photographs was the work I did to fight against that feeling.” Hauswald and his friends bought a victory feast of foods unavailable in the East with their welcome money. “Kiwi and radicchio, that kind of stuff,” he says. “Today I know my way around exotic fruits better than many Westerners. And I still love to cook.”
A Pen Unlike All the Others
Nanna Heitmann—Magnum Photos for TIMETasso with an Edding marker pen like the one he bought in 1989.
Jens Müller, a.k.a. graffiti artist Tasso, owns many black Edding 850 marker pens today, but he is pretty sure that jumbled somewhere among them in his warehouse studio in Meerane is the one that changed his life. “For me it was the first time I had seen graffiti tags, on every corner in every place,” he says, of driving with friends around Kreuzberg in West Berlin as a 23-year-old. “I was wondering, ‘How have they done this?’ And then I see it must be a pen, a marker, and so I said, ‘I want to have this marker.’” He found one in a Karstadt department store that cost 10 of his 100 DM. “That was a lot. My friends thought I was crazy.” He worked in construction following reunification, eventually becoming a freelance artist. Today his tag is recognized around the world. He has visited 32 different countries to make, exhibit and promote his work.
Reading Material for the Runway
On a gray day in November 1988, 23-year-old fashion model and designer Grit Seymour was given four hours to leave the G.D.R. Her exit-visa application had been unexpectedly approved. “I had to speed pack,” she says. “My mother walked me to say goodbye. Of course we shed a lot of tears.” She stepped penniless into West Berlin, but remembers feeling instantly liberated. “It was like this huge block of concrete had fallen off my body.” With her Begrüßungsgeld she bought a copy of fashion magazine Vogue Italia, a window into a glamorous new world. On the night the Wall fell, Seymour was already modeling for Gianni Versace in Milan. She returned as fast as she could to Berlin to be reunited with family and friends. “It was like a dream coming true,” she says.
A Bouquet of Flowers for Grandma
“It set me free,” says Peter Keup, of how ballroom dancing made him feel while growing up in Dresden. He excelled at it competitively in partnership with his sister Uta, and in 1981 they were offered the chance to represent the G.D.R. internationally—but only if their family first withdrew a long-standing exit-visa application. They refused. “That’s when I took the decision to escape,” he says. In 1981, aged just 19, Keup set out for Czechoslovakia with a plan to swim across the River Danube from Hungary into Austria. He had 80 DM from his grandparents hidden in the seam of his jeans, which he hoped would pay his way to freedom. Instead he was caught on a train to Bratislava, arrested for currency smuggling and returned to the G.D.R. After a confession extracted under brutal interrogation, he was jailed by the Stasi for 10 months, spending long periods in solitary confinement. Keup’s grandparents’ lawyer helped convince the West German government to pay a $55,000 ransom, and suddenly he really was free. “For the first time it made me feel like an independent human being,” he says, of receiving his Begrüßungsgeld. The yellows and violets of the bouquet of freesia flowers he bought for his grandmother Anna remain bright in his mind. Keup boarded a train for the West German city of Essen and a new life. Years later, the Wall fell, and he and his sister danced together again.
Nothing: “I Was Not a Beggar”
Bernd Roth, a former major in the feared Stasi, is adamant he never claimed his Begrüßungsgeld. “I was not a beggar,” he says. Today Roth, 68, rejects the system that he served, yet is unapologetic about his own actions, which led to the known arrests of 14 people, including a CIA spy. “Why should we be pressured to have a bad [conscience]?” he asks. “We didn’t build concentration camps.” His love of music helped him preserve his individuality, he says. He thought nothing of singing along to “Born in the U.S.A.” at a Bruce Springsteen concert in East Berlin in 1988. “It was just music!” he laughs. Roth still lives in the same town in Thuringia where he grew up. The West has never held any appeal for him, he says. “I found it overwhelming and oppressive. I think oversaturated consumption is harmful.” Was there really nothing that he wanted there? “I might have bought myself some Grundig speakers,” he admits. “That was really just about being able to enjoy a better sound.”
Legos, a Radio and a Trip
Cornelia Guenther first entered the West at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous Cold War crossing point. Then 29, and a single mother working as a translator, she gingerly stepped across the border in late-November 1989. “I looked at my foot,” she says, as she crossed the military checkpoint that she had overlooked every day from her office window. “I thought, ‘Now I’m walking on West Berlin soil; how amazing is this?’” Having collected their 200 DM, she and her son Christian, 6, bought carefully selected spoils at the KaDeWe: a backpack, some Legos, a radio for the kitchen. The rest of the cash they put toward a trip to England a few months later. “Buying experience was much more important to me than material things,” says Guenther.
A Computer, and a Future
When the Wall fell, Gordon van Godin was a 19-year-old newly discharged from national service in the East German army. He put his welcome money toward an Amiga computer so he could play Tetris and Formula 1 games. Today, he is director of Berlin’s DDR Museum of East German history, and qualified to bust some popular myths about Begrüßungsgeld. Is it true, for instance, that many people bought… bananas? “This is really a cliché, 100%,” he replies. “Because bananas we knew. We didn’t know, for example, kiwi fruit.” He believes the money helped establish a lasting hierarchy between West and East in a reunited Germany that still endures today. “I learned in school that in capitalism, nothing is for free,” Von Godin says. “You have to pay for everything sooner or later.”
(MULTAN, Pakistan) — A massive fire caused by a cooking gas stove erupted Thursday on a train traveling in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province, killing at least 71 passengers, officials said.
Flames roared through the train cars as the train approached the town of Liaquatpur in Punjab, they said, the latest tragedy to hit Pakistan’s dilapidated, poorly maintained and mismanaged rail system.
Survivors recounted horrific scenes of fellow passengers screaming as they jumped through the windows and off the train, flames billowing from the carriages.
“We could hear people crying and screaming for help,” said Chaudhry Shujaat who had boarded the train just a few hours earlier with his wife and two children. “I thought we would die. The next car was on fire. We felt so helpless.”
Deputy Commissioner Jamil Ahmed said the fire broke out when a gas stove exploded as breakfast was being prepared on board. He added that the death toll had risen steadily since the early morning.
Kaleem Ullah, an official with the district emergency services, says of the 43 people injured, 11 were still in critical condition.
Several of the injured had jumped off the train — many to their deaths — after the fire broke out and before it eventually screeched to a halt, said Ahmed.
Survivors said it took the train nearly 20 minutes to come to a halt after the fire broke out and passengers began screaming for help. Some pulled at emergency cords that weave through the train to notify the conductor.
Ghulam Abbas, a passenger who had gotten on the train in the town of Nawabshah in neighboring Sindh province with his wife and two children, recounted watching panicked passengers jumping off.
“We learned afterward that most of them had died,” he said.
His wife, Sulai Khan Bibi, said she was horrified what would happen to their two small children. “We were so close to death, but Allah saved us,” she said, clutching the children.
In Pakistan, poor passengers often bring their own small gas stoves on the trains to cook their meals, despite rules to the contrary, according to Railways Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed. Safety regulations are often ignored in the overcrowded trains.
Ahmed said in Thursday’s tragedy, it was cooking oil carried on the train by a group of Islamic missionaries known as Tableeqi-e-Jamaat that had caught fire after the initial cooking stove exploded, contributing to the extent of the blaze and its speedy progress.
Railway official Shabir Ahmed said bodies of passengers were scattered over a 2 kilometer (mile) -wide area around the site.
People from nearby villages rushed to the train, carrying buckets of water and shovels to help douse the flames. “But it was impossible,” said Ahmed.
Through the morning hours, rescue workers and inspectors sifted through the charred wreckage, looking for survivors and aiding the injured. Local Pakistani TV footage from the scene showed a huge blaze raging as firefighters struggled to get it under control.
Officials said they were still trying to identify the victims and that the lists of fatalities and those injured were not ready yet. Another train was dispatched to bring the survivors to the city of Rawalpindi, they said.
Yasmin Rashid, a provincial minister in the Punjab, told reporters that the medical staff were providing the best possible treatment for the injured at a hospital in Liaquatpur. Those critically injured were taken by ambulances to the city of Multan, the largest city nearest to the site of the accident.
The train was on its way from the southern port city of Karachi, the capital of southern Sindh province, to the garrison city of Rawalpindi when the blaze erupted, said Ahmed, the deputy commissioner.
Pakistan’s military said troops were also participating in the rescue operation. President Arif Alvi and Prime Minister Imran Khan issued statements expressing their sorrow over the tragedy.
Khan took to Twitter to offer his condolences to the families of those killed and say he was praying for the speedy recovery of the injured. He also ordered an urgent investigation into the incident.
Train accidents in Pakistan are often the result of poor railway infrastructure and official negligence. Media reports on Thursday suggest that railways officials did not notice when passengers boarded the train, carrying individual gas stoves.
In July, a passenger train rammed into a pared freight train at the Walhar Railway Station in the district of Rahim Yar Khan, killing at least 20 people and injuring 74.
A month earlier, a passenger train traveling to the eastern city of Lahore from the port city of Karachi collided with a freight train in the southern city of Hyderabad, killing three people.
(SEOUL, South Korea) — South Korea’s military said North Korea on Thursday fired two projectiles toward its eastern sea, extending a streak of weapons tests apparently aimed at ramping up pressure on Washington over a stalemate in nuclear negotiations.
Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the weapons were fired from a region near the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. The Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t immediately confirm whether the weapons were ballistic missiles or rocket artillery, or how far they flew.
The North’s latest launch follows statements of displeasure over the slow pace of nuclear negotiations with the United States and demands that the Trump administration ease sanctions and pressure on Pyongyang.
Earlier this month, the North test-fired an underwater-launched ballistic missile for the first time in three years.
News of the launches came after South Korea said earlier Thursday that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sent a message of condolence to South Korean President Moon Jae-in over his mother’s recent death.
The two leaders met three times last year and struck a set of deals aimed at easing animosities and boosting exchanges. But in recent months, North Korea has drastically reduced its engagement and diplomatic activities with South Korea, after Seoul failed to resume lucrative joint economic projects held back by U.S.-led U.N. sanctions.
Last week, Kim ordered the destruction of South Korean-built facilities at a long-shuttered joint tourist project at a North Korean mountain. South Korea later proposed talks but North Korea has insisted they exchange documents to work out details of Kim’s order.
(SYDNEY) — The World Organization for Animal Health says around a quarter of the global pig population is expected to die from African swine fever.
Dr. Mark Schipp, the organization’s vice president, told reporters in Australia that the spread of the disease in the past year to countries including China, which has half the world’s pig population, had inflamed a worldwide crisis.
Schipp says veterinary scientists worldwide are trying to find a vaccine for the disease, but that it’s a “complex challenge” because of the nature of the virus.
While the disease does not spread to humans, it is virtually 100% fatal once embedded in pig populations.
(DAVAO, Philippines) — The third strong earthquake this month jolted the southern Philippines on Thursday morning, further damaging structures already weakened by the earlier shaking.
In the city of Kidapawan, a hotel damaged in the earlier earthquakes further buckled and precariously leaned onto an adjacent hospital that had been emptied of people because it was damaged. Six staffers who were inside Eva’s Hotel managed to run out safely, Mayor Joseph Evangelista said.
Both buildings were cordoned off as they may collapse completely anytime.
Thursday’s 6.5 magnitude quake was centered 10 kilometers deep (6 miles) near Kisante town, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
On Tuesday, a 6.6 magnitude earthquake nearby triggered landslides and caused other damage. At least eight people died, two are missing, 395 were injured and more than 2,700 houses and buildings, including schools and hospitals, were damaged, according to the Office of Civil Defense.
In the same region on Oct. 16, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake killed at least seven people, injured more than 200 and destroyed or damaged more than 7,000 buildings.
The Philippines has frequent seismic activity. The archipelago lies on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” the arc of faults around the Pacific Ocean where most of the world’s earthquakes occur.
The photo of Alaa Salah—standing atop a car in a white toub, leading a crowd of protesters in a chant—made her famous across the world and helped fuel the revolution that ousted President Omar al-Bashir from 30 years of authoritarian rule in her native Sudan. It also came to symbolize the integral role women played on the front lines of the pro-democracy protests, where they often outnumbered men.
But six months later, Salah says women are being excluded as Sudan struggles to form a democratic government. The 22-year-old and other Sudanese advocates for women’s rights traveled to the United Nations in New York City this week to ask for international support as they fight for equal representation in their new government.
“Women led resistance committees and sit-ins, planned protest routes and disobeyed curfews, even in the midst of a declared state of emergency that left them vulnerable to security forces. Many were teargassed, threatened, assaulted and thrown in jail without any charge or due process,” Salah told a United Nations Security Council meeting on women, peace and security on Tuesday. “However, despite this visible role, despite their courage and their leadership, women have been side-lined in the formal political process in the months following the revolution.”
After al-Bashir was forced out, military and opposition leaders negotiated a power-sharing agreement in August, but only one woman participated in those talks, Salah said. Women now hold two of the six civilian positions on an 11-member Sovereign Council that will rule Sudan until elections are held in just over three years, Reuters reported. Under al-Bashir, 25% of seats in Sudan’s parliament were reserved for women, and no women served on his cabinet, according to Reuters. Salah and other activists are pushing to achieve 50% female representation in their new government.
Speaking through an interpreter, Salah tells TIME she wants the government “to listen to women as well” in order to achieve “the Sudan that [we] all envisioned.”
Salah, an architectural engineering student in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, became a symbol of the revolution when her photo went viral in April.
“My life changed after that picture,” Salah tells TIME.“Whenever I have the chance to help my people and serve my people, I will take it.”
Salah says it will be clear the pro-democracy movement has been successful when they see women occupying half of the decision-making leadership roles within the government, and when the political process includes people of different faiths and ethnicities.
“The government had been, for 30 years, systematically attacking women through the laws, discriminatory laws and policies,” Samah Jamous, another Sudanese activist who attended the U.N. event, tells TIME through an interpreter. “It just reached its point where they could not take [it], and the only way to really live the life that we deserve was by having this regime out.”
The protests began last December as Sudanese took to the streets over economic hardships—including the sharply rising cost of bread, shortages of food and fuel and limits on bank withdrawals — and frustration with the regime of al-Bashir, an accused war criminal who now faces charges of corruption and money laundering. He was ousted on April 11.
But military leaders seized power in al-Bashir’s absence, tempering the sense of victory among Sudanese protesters. Protests continued, pitting the generals against pro-democracy activists, who called for a civilian-led government. That tension erupted in a violent crackdown by paramilitary forces in early June, when more than 100 people were killed and dozens were sexually assaulted, according to a doctor’s organization aligned with opposition protesters.
“Given women’s pivotal role in working towards peace and development, in the promotion of human rights, and in providing humanitarian assistance to communities in need, there is no excuse for us not to have an equal seat at every single table,” Salah said at the U.N. “After decades of struggle and all that we risked to peacefully end Bashir’s dictatorship—gender inequality is not and will never be acceptable to the women and girls of Sudan.”
AFP/Getty ImagesA Sudanese anti-regime protester speaks on his mobile telephone in Khartoum as he walks past a huge billboard bearing an image of Alaa Salah on on April 11, 2019.
In addition to equal representation, a coalition of Sudanese women’s civil and political groups has advocated for laws that protect the rights of women and girls, and called for people to be held accountable for sexual and gender-based violence committed before, during and after the revolution.
“We see, every day, a committee that has been formed, and again and again, it’s all men—which is very frustrating,” Jamous says. “Despite what they say, when it comes to implementation, they just go back to the same mindset that does not see the women around—or does not see them as suitable candidates to be in such positions.”
“Every revolution inspires another revolution,” Salah says.
She and other activists say they’re cautiously optimistic about where Sudan is headed now, hoping the country will eventually have the civilian-led government they fought for. If not, Jamous says they’re prepared to protest once again: “The streets are there.”
(SANTIAGO, Chile) — Chilean President Sebastián Piñera said Wednesday that he is canceling two major international summits so he can respond to protracted nationwide protests over economic inequality that have left more than a dozen people dead, hundreds injured and businesses and infrastructure damaged.
The decision to call off the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and U.N. global climate gatherings, planned for November and December, respectively, dealt a major blow to Chile’s image as a regional oasis of stability and economic development.
Piñera said he was forced to cancel both events due to the chaos unleashed by 13 days of protests. Demonstrators are demanding greater economic equality and better public services in a country long seen as an economic success story. Shops have been vandalized and buildings set on fire, shutting down numerous subway stations.
“This has been a very difficult decision that causes us great pain,” Piñera said in a televised address. “A president always has to put the needs of his countrymen first.”
Trade and climate negotiators scrambled to find new locations for their summits, aimed at resolving tariff-related conflicts between China and the U.S. and finalizing countries’ climate rules in advance of a bigger summit next year during which governments will be asked to commit to new emissions limits.
President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping had hoped to sign a modest trade agreement at the APEC summit, formerly scheduled to take place in Santiago on Nov. 16-17. Under the tentative deal, the U.S. had agreed to suspend plans to raise tariffs on $250 billion in Chinese imports, and Beijing had agreed to step up purchases of U.S. farm products.
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said U.S. officials were “awaiting potential information regarding another location,” but it was unclear if any had been proposed. Gidley added that Trump wanted to sign the deal with China “within the same time frame,” hinting that a separate event could occur outside a summit.
The so-called Phase One trade agreement did little to address the underlying U.S. grievances against China, including its alleged practice of forcing foreign firms to hand over trade secrets; stealing technology, and unfairly subsidizing Chinese firms. China’s leaders have been reluctant to make the kind of policy reforms that would satisfy Washington, worrying such concessions would mean scaling back their aspirations to become a world leader in advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and driverless cars.
Still, the apparent cancellation of the summit “removes a hard deadline for action toward a comprehensive agreement in the trade war,” said Jeff Moon, a former U.S. diplomat and trade official specializing in China who is now president of the China Moon Strategies consultancy. “That hard deadline and the relatively short period of time available allowed Trump and Xi to give themselves permission to do only easy things and delay indefinitely resolving tough issues.”
Now, Moon said, “there is no excuse for not pressing forward with the full U.S. agenda of concerns.”
Climate advocates said they were disappointed but expected to relocate their talks. The Santiago climate conference was meant to work out some of the remaining unresolved rules for countries on climate efforts, smoothing the way for the bigger effort in the 2020 summit: encouraging countries to up their commitments to cutting climate-changing emissions.
“The absence of rules does not stop countries from acting either alone or together” to cut emissions, said Nigel Purvis, a climate and environment negotiator in the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “It really shouldn’t slow down climate action.”
But other climate experts said it was important to get those rules worked out in advance.
“To load everything into one conference — I think they’ll work pretty hard not to do that,” said Henry Jacoby, a climate expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Rachel Cleetus, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said she believed there would be “every effort made that some type of … meeting does happen.”
“These … are the venues where the global community comes together to decide how to tackle this problem together,” she said. “The climate challenge requires every country to act, but it requires us to act collectively.”
U.N. Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa issued a statement saying that “alternative hosting options” were being explored. And a U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity for lack of authorization to comment publicly, said that all U.N. venues are being considered as options. Those would include cities such as New York, Geneva, Bonn, Vienna and Nairobi.
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Associated Press writer Ellen Knickmeyer and Paul Wiseman in Washington, and Frank Jordans in Berlin, contributed to this story.
Sporting a short haircut and stylish square-rimmed glasses, Claudia López, 49,shared a jubilant kisswith her partner after winning the mayorship of Bogotá on Sunday. It was a historic moment for Colombia, marking the first time a woman and openly gay candidate was elected as mayor of the capital city. It was also the country’s first local and regional elections since the 2016 signing of a controversial peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which ended a gruesome half century of civil war.
The journalist-turned-politician, who won with over 35 percent of the vote, is a member of the centrist Alianza Verde, or Green Alliance party, and served as a senator of Colombia. She stood as a vice presidential candidate for Green Alliance in the nation’s 2018 presidential elections. This year,López ran for mayoron an anti-corruption platform and challenged the positions of right-wing politicians, promising to advance equal rights for minority communities and women. Her victory marks the country’s shift away from the political elite, and indicates a desire in the residents of Bogotá for a transition to more liberal policies. On January 1, 2020, she will be sworn in as Mayor of Bogotá, a position widely considered the most important political office in the nation after the Presidency.
López’selection to office marks a significant moment for the women and girls of Colombia. Decades of conflict have subjected Colombian women and girls togross human rights abuses, including murder, displacement, physical, emotional and sexual harassment and rape.
Groups of armed actors and gang membershave used, and continue to use, women’s bodies as weapons of war, says Sara Fernández, a professor at the University of Antioquia inMedellín. “They appoint little girls as girlfriends to gang chiefs. There are forced pregnancies, forced maternities, forced abortions as well.”
Sitting in a brighly-painted office adorned with edgy feminist art, women’s rights activist Sandra Isaza of the Feminist Antimilitarist Network inMedellíndiscusses the lack of protection provided by the government and the measures Colombian women are forced to take to protect themselves from femicide (when men kill women or girls based on their gender). Civil society organizations are establishing accountability networks, buddy systems and check-in plans to ensure the safety of vulnerable women, she said. But still, it is not enough. “We reported cases of seven women who filed a lawsuit [in 2018]…and the State didn’t do absolutely anything, and they were killed,” Isaza says.
Most women in the country have experienced, or know someone who has experienced, violence, harassment, rape or even murder. While the full extent of the magnitiude of sexual violence is still being determined, data show that Colombia has the10th highest femiciderate in the world.
“There’s very little credibility, very little legitimacy, and very little trust [in government institutions],” adds Fernández. “And that has a lot to do with sexism, and the misogyny this culture has.”
Colombian women have long been engaged in social activism through grassroots organizations and civil society. The Feminist Antimilitarist Network held several large protests in 2018 and 2019, gathering nearly 1,000 women and marching against femicide, gender-based-violence, discrimination and other challenges they face in society. But for the first time, many women are beginning to recognize the power of working from within the political system to create change.
“I believe that the possibility of saving the lives of women when we’re in power is fundamental. In this moment, feminist organizations are doing the job of the state. We, as a social movement of women, have…put pressure with marches, actions,” says Isaza. “Women have seen the mobilization as a way to influence and denounce the violence against women.”
By joining the political machine, activists believe that women will be able to take their agenda to the next level with the full resources of the state behind them.
“The idea is to create a movement that gets to have representatives, that gets a political base and that lays the foundation for a trustworthy, honest movement that really pushes for women’s policies,” says Fernández.
But it can be dangerous for women running for office, many of whom had to contend with very real threats in the run up to the vote. According toa reportpublished by the Electoral Oversight Mission of the Organization of American States, Colombia’s Ministry of Interior received more than 300 complaints of political violence against women based on gender in 2019. All the complaints were made anonymously, “a fact that reflects the cost it has for women to make this violence visible,” the report states.Seven candidates, including Karina Garcia, a liberal party candidate running for mayor in Cauca, were killed.According to local media,Garcia, a wife and mother, was campaigning when she was attacked by gunmen who then set her car on fire. She had been receiving threats for weeks. One of Garcia’s last acts was to posta videoin which she said that armed men had targeted her volunteers and issued threats against them advertising for her campaign.
Despite the violence, this election became a defining moment for women to raise their voices through the power of their votes. In addition toLópez, female candidate Virna Johnsonwas electedas mayor of Santa Marta. Another eight women were elected to mayoral positions in the region of Cauca.For the first time in Colombia’s history, an indigenous woman—Mercedes Tunabala Velasco—is one of them.
In the city of Medellín, Estamos Listas (We’re Ready), a gender-focused political movement spearheaded by women, also succeeded in placing a candidate on the city council. Estamos Listas’ platform centers around issues of violence, femicide, poverty and other hardships facing women and girls.
The numbers still do not reflect widespread change. There were6.2 men for every 3.7 womencandidates.A surveyanalyzing the results of the mayoral races in different municipalities found 121 women elected out of 1,101 total candidates, representing only 11 percent of the population. The 130 women elected as mayors in the 2019 elections actually represented a three percent decrease from the 134 women elected as mayor in the 2015 elections. And in the city council race inMedellín, two women left and two new women joined, keeping the total number at five women on a council of 21 representatives.
Women’s participation in Colombia has been edging upwards since the year 2000, when the country passed itslaw of quotas, which mandates that at least 30% of public offices are held by women. But now, experts say, simply having female representation is not enough to help address the many problems facing women and girls.
“Being a woman is not enough. We need feminists,” said Rocio Pineda, one of the godmothers of feminism in Colombia, who believes the moment requires liberal female candidates who are unafraid of standing up to men and promoting agendas that prioritize the needs of women and girls.
October’s electoral races held a broader symbolic significance because many of the elected women come from alternative, progressive or liberal sectors, and from feminist social movements. This, and the success of Claudia López’s election, means women in Colombia remain optimistic.
“I’m thrilled with the results in Bogotá,” says Fernández. “A good mayorship by Claudia is a great presentation card for her to run for President later. It’s a big bet, and I think she has the bravery and the brains to aim for that.”
This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation as part of its Adelante Latin American Reporting Initiative.
