Daily: 04/29/2018

Новий держсекретар США: ми прагнемо миру для палестинців та Ізраїлю

Сполучені Штати Америки прагнуть «міцного» миру для палестинців та Ізраїлю, заявив новий державний секретар США Майк Помпео під час візиту до Ізраїлю.

«Ми продовжуємо прагнути досягнення міцного й всеосяжного миру, який забезпечить яскраве майбутнє як для Ізраїлю, так і для палестинців», – сказав Помпео.

Він також заявив, що міцна співпраця з Ізраїлем є «ключовою» для зусиль США «протидіяти іранській дестабілізаційній та злоякісній діяльності на Близькому Сході й у всьому світі».

6 грудня 2017 року Дональд Трамп визнав Єрусалим столицею Ізраїлю і доручив перенести туди американське посольство з Тель-Авіва. За попередніми оцінками, на це могло піти три чи чотири роки.

Рішення розлютило палестинців і їхніх арабських союзників, а також викликало різку критику й на Заході. Президент Палестинської національної адміністрації Махмуд Аббас тоді заявив, що цей крок поклав край ролі США як миротворця на Близькому Сході.

Статус Єрусалима є болючим питанням для всіх сторін близькосхідного врегулювання. Зокрема, палестинці вважають, що Східний Єрусалим має бути столицею їхньої майбутньої держави.

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У МЗС засудили продовження арешту українцю Грибу

У Міністерстві закордонних справ України засудили продовження арешту 19-річному українцю Павлу Грибу.

«Рішуче засуджуємо «рішення» російського суду і вимагаємо звільнення політв’язня Павла Гриба. Також вимагаємо допустити українських лікарів», – написала речниця МЗС Мар’яна Беца у Twitter.

28 квітня Жовтневий районний суд російського Краснодара продовжив арешт 19-річному українцю Павлу Грибу до 4 липня.

Він зник у серпні 2017 року в білоруському Гомелі, пізніше його знайшли в СІЗО у російському Краснодарі. Йому інкримінують вчинення злочину за статтею про тероризм.

Генеральна прокуратура України відкрила провадження через зникнення українця.

Адвокат Павла Гриба в Україні Євгенія Закревська повідомила, що Європейський суд з прав людини вимагає від Росії доступу українських лікарів до хлопця, щоб оцінити стан його здоров’я. За повідомленням батьків, 19-річний Павло Гриб через інвалідність має постійно вживати підтримуючі препарати.

За словами родичів, у Павла Гриба портальна гіпертензія – синдром підвищеного тиску в системі ворітної вени, який супроводжується збільшенням селезінки, варикозним розширенням вен стравоходу і шлунка, асцитом, печінковою недостатністю.

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Комітет виборців України повідомив про порушення на виборах в ОТГ

Комітет виборців України повідомляє про порушення на перших виборах в 40 об’єднаних територіальних громадах.

За даними організації, серед порушень – відкриття дільниць із запізненням, незаконна агітація в день виборів, голосування виборців за межами дільниць, порушення таємниці голосування, підвезення виборців до дільниць.

Міністр регіонального розвитку, будівництва та ЖКГ України Геннадій Зубко повідомляв, що 29 квітня перші вибори відбуваються в 40 об’єднаних територіальних громадах. За його даними, вибори проходять у 4 міських, 14 селищних, 22 сільських ОТГ у 17 областях.

Після проведення виборів 29 квітня загалом в Україні існуватимуть 705 ОТГ.

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White House Mystery: Where is Macron’s Gifted Oak Tree?

A mystery is brewing at the White House about what happened to the oak tree President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron planted there last week.

 

The sapling was a gift from Macron on the occasion of his state visit.

News photographers snapped away Monday as Trump and Macron shoveled dirt onto the tree during a ceremonial planting on the South Lawn. By the end of the week, the tree was gone from the lawn. A pale patch of grass was left in its place.

 

The White House hasn’t offered an explanation.

 

The oak sprouted at a World War I battle site that became part of U.S. Marine Corps legend.

 

About 2,000 U.S. troops died in the June 1918 Battle of Belleau Wood, fighting a German offensive.

 

 

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В Іраку 19 росіянок засудили довічно за участь в «ІД» – AFP

Суд в Іраку засудив 19 росіянок до довічного ув’язнення за участь в екстремістському угрупованні «Ісламська держава», повідомляє Agence France-Presse з посиланням на свого кореспондента, який був присутній на судовому засіданні.

За інформацією AFP, голова Центрального кримінального суду Багдада визнав жінок винними в «участі й підтримці «ІД».

Також до довічного ув’язнення засуджені шість жінок з Азербайджану та чотири з Таджикистану.

Засуджені мають право оскаржити вироки.

У грудні 2017 року Ірак оголосив про завершення війни з угрупованням «Ісламська держава».

У країні затримали щонайменше 560 жінок і 600 дітей. Їх визначили як джихадистів чи родичів підозрюваних в участі в «Ісламській державі».

За даними російського Міністерства закордонних справ, у тюрмах Іраку може перебувати від 50 до 70 жінок, які, імовірно, мають громадянство Росії. Усіх їх підозрюють у співробітництві з терористами.

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Merkel: Europe Will Push Back If Hit with Trade Tariffs

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she and the leaders of France and Britain are ready to push back if the Trump administration does not permanently exempt the European Union from new import taxes on aluminum and steel imports.

 

Merkel said in a statement that she spoke with President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday and Prime Minister Theresa May on Sunday after returning from Friday talks with U.S. President Donald Trump.

 

Merkel says the three leaders “agreed that the U.S. ought not to take any trade measures against the European Union,” which is “resolved to defend its interests within the multilateral trade framework.” The chancellor’s statement did not outline specific steps the 28-nation EU might take.

 

The EU’s temporary exemption from the tariffs expires Tuesday.

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Comedian Draws Laughs, Gasps at Correspondents’ Dinner

If President Donald Trump isn’t comfortable being the target of jokes, comedian Michelle Wolf gave him and others plenty of reasons to squirm Saturday night.

“It’s 2018 and I’m a woman, so you cannot shut me up,” Wolf cracked, “unless you have Michael Cohen wire me $130,000.”

No, Trump’s personal attorney wasn’t there. And, for the second year, Trump himself skipped the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association, preferring to criticize journalists and others during a campaign-style rally near Detroit.

Wolf, the after-dinner entertainment for the White House press corps and their guests, was surprisingly racy for the venue and seemed more at home on HBO than C-SPAN. After one crass joke drew groans in the Washington Hilton ballroom, she laughed and said, “Yeah, shoulda done more research before you got me to do this.”

​Trump in Michigan

As he did last year, Trump flew to a Republican-friendly district to rally supporters on the same night as the dinner. In Washington Township, Michigan, the president assured his audience he’d rather be there than in that other city by that name.

“Is this better than that phony Washington White House Correspondents’ Dinner? Is this more fun?” Trump asked, sparking cheers.

“I could be up there tonight, smiling, like I love where they’re hitting you, shot after shot. These people, they hate your guts … and you’ve got to smile. If you don’t smile, they say, ‘He was terrible, he couldn’t take it.’ And if you do smile, they’ll say, “What was he smiling about?’”

Wolf’s act had some in the audience laughing and left others in stony silence. A blistering critique of press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was seated just feet away, mocked everything from her truthfulness to her appearance and Southern roots.

Among Wolf’s less offensive one-liners:

“Just a reminder to everyone, I’m here to make jokes, I have no agenda, I’m not trying to get anything accomplished, so everyone that’s here from Congress you should feel right at home.”
“It is kinda crazy that the Trump campaign was in contact with Russia when the Hillary campaign wasn’t even in contact with Michigan.”
“He wants to give teachers guns, and I support that because then they can sell them for things they need like supplies.”

Dimmed star power

The dinner once attracted Oscar winners and other notable performers in film and television as well as celebrities in sports and other high-profile professions. The star power dimmed appreciably last year when the famously thin-skinned Trump, who routinely slammed reporters as dishonest and their work as “fake news,” announced he wasn’t attending. He was the first president to skip the event since Ronald Reagan bowed out in 1981 as he recovered from an assassination attempt.

Unlike last year, when Trump aides also declined to attend, the Trump White House had its contingent, including counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Former administration officials were on hand, such as onetime press secretary Sean Spicer, ex-chief of staff Reince Priebus, former chief economic adviser Gary Cohn and political aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman.

At least one Trump antagonist attended — porn star Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti, who tweeted that he and Conway had a “spirited discussion.” And there was comedian Kathy Griffin, who last year posted controversial video of herself holding what appeared to be Trump’s bloody head; she later apologized.

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At Michigan Rally, Trump Takes Aim at Familiar Targets

President Donald Trump took aim at familiar political targets and added a few fresh ones during a campaign-style rally Saturday night in an Upper Midwest state that gave him a surprising victory in the 2016 election.

Trump has been urging voters to support Republicans for Congress as a way of advancing his agenda. In his rally in Washington Township, he repeatedly pointed to Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan as one of the Democrats who needed to be voted out.

After saying Stabenow was standing in the way of protecting U.S. borders and had voted against tax cuts, Trump said: “And you people just keep putting her back again and again and again. It’s your fault.”

​‘I know things about Tester’

Earlier Saturday, Trump tweeted criticism of Democratic Senator Jon Tester of Montana over his role in the failed nomination of White House doctor Ronny Jackson to run the Department of Veterans Affairs, calling for Tester to resign or at least not be re-elected this fall.

In his rally remarks, Trump railed against the allegations Tester aired against Jackson and suggested that he could take a similar tack against the senator.

“I know things about Tester that I could say, too. And if I said ’em, he’d never be elected again,” Trump said without elaborating.

As he has at similar events, Trump promoted top agenda items that energize grass-roots conservatives: appointing conservative judges, building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, ending “sanctuary cities” and protecting tax cuts approved by the Republican-led Congress. He also took credit for the warming relations between North and South Korea, telling his audience “we’ll see how it goes.”

Friendly territory

Trump chose a friendly venue for his rally, which not coincidentally came the same night as the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He skipped the dinner last year, too, and attending a rally in which he took time to attack the news media and assure his audience, as he did in Washington Township, about 40 miles north of Detroit, that he’d rather be with them.

Ahead of the rally Trump said in a fundraising pitch that he had come up with something better than being stuck in a room “with a bunch of fake news liberals who hate me.” He said he would rather spend the evening “with my favorite deplorables.”

During the 2016 campaign, Clinton drew laughs when she told supporters at a private fundraiser that half of Trump supporters could be lumped into a “basket of deplorables,” denouncing them as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.”

Clinton later did a partial rollback, said she had been “grossly generalistic” and regretted saying the label fit “half” of Trump’s supporters. But she didn’t back down from the general sentiment.

Trump soon had the video running in his campaign ads, and his supporters wore the “deplorable” label as a badge of honor.

White, blue-collar voters

Macomb County, the site of Trump’s rally, is among the predominantly white counties known as a base for “Reagan Democrats,” blue-collar voters who abandoned the Democratic Party for Ronald Reagan, but who can be intriguingly movable.

Democrat Barack Obama won the county twice in his White House runs, then Trump carried it by more than 11 percentage points.

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Law Enforcement Effort Hits IS Propaganda Outlets

Law enforcement authorities in the United States, European Union and Canada this week began a joint cybercampaign against Islamic State online communication channels that will “severely disrupt” the group’s propaganda machine, the EU’s law enforcement agency Europol said.

The multinational action, led by Belgian federal prosecutors, was launched  Wednesday and Thursday and targeted IS media outlets, including Amaq news, al-Bayan radio, Halumu and Nashir news.

IS’s Amaq news agency is believed to be a major propaganda outlet for the terror group. The group relies on the outlet to spread propaganda in several languages, including English and French. Amaq has broadcast claims of responsibility for deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels, Berlin and Barcelona.

“With this groundbreaking operation we have punched a big hole in the capability of IS to spread propaganda online and radicalize young people in Europe,” Rob Wainwright, the head of Europol, said in a statement released Friday.

“I applaud the determined and innovative work by Europol and its partners to target a major part of the international terrorist threat prevalent in Europe today,” he added.

Earlier efforts

This is not the first time Western countries joined forces to crack down on IS propaganda capabilities. A coordinated effort in August 2016 hit Amaq’s mobile application and web infrastructure. Another multinational operation led by Spanish Guardia Civil in June 2017 against the outlet helped authorities identify radicalized individuals in over 100 countries around the world.

Europol claimed the two-day effort this week led to the seizure of digital evidence by law enforcement authorities and compromised IS broadcast capabilities and materials.

Europol authorities said the data retrieved as a result of the crackdown would be used to identify the administrators behind IS media outlets.

In a separate statement, Belgian police said the operation also aimed to seize and shut down computer servers used to spread terror propaganda in Europe.

Over the years, IS has weaponized the internet to radicalize, recuit and inspire acts of terrorism in the West and around the world.

The group’s ability to produce and distribute new propaganda has been significantly diminished since it lost nearly 98 percent of the territory it once held in Iraq and Syria, and social media giants Facebook, Google and Twitter increased their efforts to remove radical content from the internet. 

VOA Turkish service’s Arzu Cakir contributed to this report from Paris. 

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Drugmakers Push Back Against Lawmakers’ Calls to Tax Opioids

Facing a rising death toll from drug overdoses, state lawmakers across the United States are testing a strategy to boost treatment for opioid addicts: Force drug manufacturers and their distributors to pay for it.

Bills introduced in at least 15 states would impose taxes or fees on prescription painkillers. Several of the measures have bipartisan support and would funnel millions of dollars toward treatment and prevention programs.

In Montana, state Senator Roger Webb, a Republican, sees the approach as a way to hold drugmakers accountable for an overdose epidemic that in 2016 claimed 42,000 lives in the U.S., a record.

“You’re creating the problem,” he said of drugmakers. “You’re going to fix it.”

Opioids include prescription painkillers such as Vicodin and OxyContin as well as illegal drugs such as heroin and illicit versions of fentanyl. Public health experts say the crisis started because of overprescribing and aggressive marketing of the drugs that began in the 1990s. The death toll has continued to rise even as prescribing has started to drop.

Pennsylvania bill

A Pennsylvania opioid tax bill was introduced in 2015 and a federal version was introduced a year later, but most of the proposals arose during the past year. The majority of them have yet to get very far, with lawmakers facing intense pressure from the pharmaceutical industry to scuttle or soften the legislation.

Drugmakers and distributors argue that it would be wrong to tax prescription drugs, that the cost increases would eventually be absorbed by patients or taxpayers, and that there are other ways to pay for addiction treatment and prevention.

“We have been engaged with states to help move forward comprehensive solutions to this complex public health crisis and in many cases have seen successes,” Priscilla VanderVeer, a spokeswoman for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said in a statement. “However, we do not believe levying a tax on prescribed medicines that meet legitimate medical needs is an appropriate funding mechanism for a state’s budget.”

Two drug companies that deployed lobbyists — Purdue Pharma and Pfizer — responded to questions with similar statements.

A spokesman for the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, which represents drug distributors, said a tax would mean that cancer patients and those in end-of-life care might not be able to get the prescriptions they need.

The pharmaceutical industry has emphasized that the name-brand drug companies that make up its members already give rebates to states for drugs funded by Medicaid. Those rebates amount to billions of dollars nationwide that states could use to address opioid addiction, the trade group says.

State legislation to tax opioids comes as manufacturers and distributors are defending themselves in hundreds of lawsuits filed by state and local governments seeking damages for the toll the overdose epidemic has taken on communities.

​Delaware effort

David Humes, whose son died from a heroin overdose in 2012, has been pushing for an opioid tax in Delaware, which did not increase funding for addiction treatment last year as it struggles to balance its budget.

“When you think about the fact that each year more people are dying, if you leave the money the same, you’re not keeping up with this public health crisis,” he said.

Humes, a board member of the advocacy group atTAcK Addiction, supports legislation that would dedicate opioid tax revenue for addiction services.

The lead sponsor of an opioids tax bill, state Senator Stephanie Hansen, said drug companies told her they already were contributing $500,000 to anti-addiction measures in Delaware, where there were 282 fatal overdoses from all drugs in 2016, a 40 percent increase from the year before.

“My response is, ‘That’s wonderful, but we’re not stopping there,’ ” said Hansen, a Democrat.

She said if her tax measure had been in place last year, it would have raised more than $9 million.

The drug industry’s current spending on anti-addiction programs has been a point of contention in the Minnesota Legislature. There, the overdose rate is lower than it is in most other states, but opioids still claimed 395 lives in 2016, an increase of 18 percent over the year before.

State Representative Dave Baker, a Republican whose son died of a heroin overdose after getting started on prescription painkillers, said opioid manufacturers and distributors should pay for drug programs separately. He said the rebate — about $250 million in 2016 in Minnesota — is intended to make up for overcharging for drugs in the first place.

Drugmakers not ‘part of the solution’

Another Republican lawmaker, state Senator Julie Rosen, said she walked out of a meeting this month with drug industry representatives, saying they were wasting her time.

“They know that they’re spending way too much money on defending their position instead of being part of the solution,” she said.

Representatives of the pharmaceutical industry say they have met with Rosen multiple times and are “committed to continue working with her.”

Drug companies have a history of digging in to defeat measures that are intended to combat the opioid crisis. A 2016 investigation by The Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity found makers of opioids and their allies spent $880 million on politics and lobbying from 2006 through 2015.

The industry so far has succeeded in stalling the Minnesota legislation, which would charge opioid manufacturers by the dosage. With the bill facing resistance, Rosen and a Democratic co-sponsor, state Senator Chris Eaton, said they were considering changing tactics and amending it.

That could include raising the $235 annual licensing fee on opioid manufacturers or requiring drugmakers and distributors to pay $20 million a year based on the proportion of opioids they sell in the state. That approach is based on one adopted earlier this spring as part of the budget in New York — the only state to implement an opioid tax so far.

Eaton, whose daughter died from a heroin overdose in 2007, said her goal is to find a way to create and fund a structure that will ensure addiction treatment is “as routine as treating diabetes or cardiac arrest.”

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