(SEOUL, South Korea) — North Korea fired a possible submarine-launched ballistic missile off the East Coast Tuesday morning, according to the neighboring countries South Korea and Japan, marking the eighth missile test-fire this year alone.
“Our military detected a missile launch eastward from a site in the vicinity of Sinpo, South Hamgyong Province around 10:17 a.m.,” South Korea’s Joint Chief of Staff, General Won In-choul, told reporters.
The unidentified ballistic missile allegedly launched from a submarine and flew 370 miles at an altitude of 37 miles, according to South Korea’s military.
“It is likely a new mini-SLBM that North Korea showcased last week at an arms exhibition,” Shin Beom-chul, director of the Center for Diplomacy and Security at the Korea Research Institute for National Strategy, told ABC News.
Another analyst told ABC News that Kim Jong Un is developing submarine-launched ballistic missiles in order to prepare a more survivable nuclear deterrent able to blackmail his neighbors and the United States.
“North Korea cannot politically afford appearing to fall behind in a regional arms race with its southern neighbor,” Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, told ABC News.
Easley said that although the North Korean missile launch timing is largely driven by a technical schedule for when tests are ready and useful, there’s also a political factor.
“Pyongyang is celebrating the ruling party’s founding and looking to boost national morale after harsh pandemic lockdowns. And the Kim regime likely wants to one-up South Korean missile tests, at least in Pyongyang’s propaganda,” Easley said.
The same day, the intelligence chiefs of South Korea, the United States and Japan held a closed-door trilateral meeting in Seoul to discuss the pending issues in the Korean peninsula, such as the security situation, according to South Korea’s National Intelligence.
Meanwhile in Washington, South Korea’s chief nuclear envoy Noh Kyu-duk discussed North Korea’s missile launch over the phone with the U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy Sung Kim. Noh happened to be in Washington for the meeting to discuss ways to bring the North back to the negotiating table the day before.
North Korea’s missile launch comes only two weeks after Pyongyang made a conditional peace offer to Seoul on reconnecting the military hotline. For Seoul, it was a symbolic gesture that their relations could see an improvement.
As Pyongyang raised international concern by firing yet another missile just 19 days after the latest missile test, South Korea’s presidential office held a presidential National Security Council right after the missile launch.
“The council members expressed deep regret that North Korea’s launch occurred while active consultations are underway with related countries like the United States to advance the Korean Peninsula peace process,” South Korea’s Unification Ministry said in an official statement.
North Korea’s last test-fire of an SLBM was in October 2019.
(NEW YORK) — A Haitian gang has been blamed for kidnapping a group at a Haitian airport that included 17 missionaries, five of them children, according to officials.
Nineteen people were abducted by a gang at a checkpoint in Haiti during an airport run on Saturday, a source at the U.S. embassy told ABC News. The kidnapping occurred at the intersection of “Carrefour Boen” and “La Tremblay 17,” a source at the Haitian presidential office told ABC News.
Included in the group are 17 missionaries — 16 Americans and one Canadian — and two Haitian citizens, according to the U.S. Embassy. Two French priests were also kidnapped in a separate attack at the same location earlier in the day, the source said.
The Haitian government suspects the gang known as 400 Mawozo to be responsible for the abductions, the source said.
It is unclear where the victims were taken. The Embassy is working with a special group of Americans in the country who are investigating.
The Ohio-based ministry Christian Aid Ministries confirmed in a statement that a group of 17 people were “abducted” while on a trip to an orphanage on Saturday.
“We request urgent prayer for the group of Christian Aid Ministries workers who were abducted while on a trip to visit an orphanage on Saturday, October 16,” the statement read Sunday. “We are seeking God’s direction for a resolution, and authorities are seeking ways to help.
Five men, seven women and five children are among the group, according to the ministry.
Haitian police inspector Frantz Champagne told The Associated Press that the 400 Mawozo gang kidnapped the group while they were in Ganthier, about 17 miles east of Port Au Prince.
The country is experiencing a rise in gang-related kidnappings, many demanding ransom, that quelled after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse on July 7 and a 7.2-magnitude earthquake on Aug. 14 that killed more than 2,200 people.
The U.S. State Department told ABC News in a statement that it is “in regular contact with senior Haitian authorities and will continue to work with them and interagency partners.”
“The welfare and safety of U.S. citizens abroad is one of the highest priorities of the Department of State,” the statement read.
The FBI is expected to assist in negotiations, ABC News has learned.
Additional information on the kidnapping was not immediately available.
(WASHINGTON) — “I’m in danger,” the daughter cried to her father from thousands of miles away in Afghanistan.
“We cannot go outside with friends. Before, we were going outside to restaurants, shopping, but now we are like prisoners in our own home,” she said, her voice full of fear, saying Taliban fighters might find her.
“Mina” (ABC News has changed her name for her protection and that of others), a university-educated and unmarried Afghan woman, separated from her family in the U.S., was pleading for help on a call with advocates trying to get her out.
With her father having aided the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, and her immediate family living in New Jersey, Mina is in hiding, saying she fears her ties to the U.S. make her a target.
On a recording of a call ABC News listened to, her voice was breaking.
“I’m not mentally good nowadays because this situation is a burden on me,” she said, adding that she did not know which relative she might find shelter with next.
“She is under pressure,” her father said, helping translate for a daughter he said is normally proficient in English. “Now in this status situation, she forgot her language. She forgot her information. She forgot her mind.”
Mina’s mother says she isn’t used to relying on medication to fall asleep, but after calls like this one, she says she needs it to escape the dark reality facing her only daughter — blaming herself for Mina being left behind.
Mina’s parents and two brothers were able to come to the U.S. in 2016 on her father’s Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, granted to those who helped the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Her oldest brother, who also worked with the U.S., immigrated in 2018 under the same program. But Mina, now 34, aged out to qualify as a dependent.
While her father has petitioned since 2018 to bring her to the U.S. via a Petition for Alien Relative, a route that permanent, lawful residents can use to bring immediate relatives to the U.S., the chaotic evacuation of American troops from the country at the end of August ignited a desperate search for options.
“It’s life or death,” Elizabeth Dembrowsky, the attorney who’s handling Mina’s case from New York, told ABC News. “Her father’s worked and aided the United States — because of their interests — and because of that aid, he’s put his daughter at risk.”
Mina’s father said he sometimes regrets not lying about her age on the SIV application, believing, he said, that if he hadn’t abided by the rules of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, his daughter might already be with them.
He says people in Afghanistan know her immediate family lives in the U.S. and mockingly call her “‘the Americans’ daughter.'”
‘Please help my daughter’
Dembrowsky founded Good Counsel Services, a nonprofit that offers legal advice to other nonprofit organizations, in 2016. Volunteering at an immigration office while studying at Brooklyn Law School, she met a man who had helped the U.S. mission in Afghanistan who then started recommending her legal services to his friends. One of them was Mina’s father who first contacted her in 2018.
“‘Please help my daughter'” were the only words in an email Mina’s father sent her last month.
Dembrowsky is actively working on filing humanitarian parole applications in 13 similar cases, a legal route she took with Mina’s case as U.S. troops left the country, taking with them the hopes of many Afghans desperate to escape.
Granted by USCIS on a “case-by-case basis,” humanitarian parole allows certain individuals to enter and reside in the U.S. without a visa. Each application comes with a $575 fee and extensive paperwork, including an “Affidavit of Support” that serves as proof a sponsor has agreed to provide financial support to the person who is known as the parolee. It’s a process Dembrowsky said has bipartisan backing.
“You can wring your hands and scream and blame the former or current president or the entire decision to go into Afghanistan, but it’s not helpful because the crisis is ongoing. We have people today that need to be taken out of there, and we as Americans can help by volunteering to serve as sponsors,” Dembrowsky said.
Once a sponsor is secured, it can take weeks to months to process applications. There’s currently a backlog of roughly 11,000, according to the National Immigration Forum. That does not include the majority of SIV holders — tens of thousands of people — who were also left behind in the abrupt evacuation. Dembrowsky is calling on the federal government to do more to expedite applications from allies and their families she says the U.S. “abandoned.”
To expedite a parole application, a person can directly write or call immigration services, but advocates say an often more effective route is having a member of Congress contact them about a specific application on their behalf. Dembrowsky said she contacted the offices of Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., on Sept. 2, and of Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. on Sept. 23.
“My office is working closely with the Department of State, USCIS, and family members in New Jersey to bring this young woman safely to the United States. We are making progress on her case and are confident that she will be able to join her family in New Jersey,” Pallone told ABC News in a statement on Thursday afternoon.
MORE: How are the Taliban treating Afghan women and girls?
Dembrowsky learned late Wednesday that Mina’s Petition for Alien Relative application, filed in 2018 to prove she was related to her family, was “processed,” but they haven’t been contacted about next steps. Mina’s humanitarian parole application still hangs in limbo, as they do for thousands of Afghan nationals.
The UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency, has reported more than half a million Afghans have been internally displaced since January due to Taliban advances, 80% of whom are women and children.
‘Matter of political will’
Even if Mina’s parole application is conditionally approved, there’s still a major caveat.
With the U.S. Embassy in Kabul closed, she must make the dangerous and uncertain trek to an embassy or consulate in another country for additional processing. That journey has been made nearly impossible since the former Afghan government collapsed and the U.S. withdrew — with few flights out of the country and uncertainty over how to get a seat, or risky travel over land through Taliban checkpoints.
“It’s extremely difficult and that’s why, while this humanitarian parole application process can offer some hope, it’s not an easy solution,” Danilo Zak, a senior policy and advocacy associate at the National Immigration Forum, told ABC News. “In general, it’s going to be very difficult for people to escape on their own now.”
Mina’s devoted father said in the call reviewed by ABC News that he would personally find a way to get her across the border.
He just needs the paperwork.
“If the government makes excuse that there is no embassy of America in Kabul … if they issue the visa for her, paper-wise, and send by email, I can go to third country and evacuate her from Afghanistan and process her documentation and visa and fingerprint and interview with her — and then I will bring her with me,” he said.
Dembrowsky said her team is also working with veterans groups to help facilitate safe passage if and when Mina is deemed eligible and called for processing at an embassy or consulate.
Despite what may seem like insurmountable obstacles, Zak said granting humanitarian parole is the most effective option right now for those left behind because the process was designed for quick, emergency evacuations. The U.S. has repeatedly granted parole to allies, under presidents of both parties, under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, including 130,000 parolees after the Vietnam War.
“We can’t discriminate against these parolees for the nature of the emergency evacuation — which is really what we’re doing here,” Zak said, arguing the need for an Afghan Adjustment Act to establish a pathway for refugees and parolees to permanent residency.
Further congressional action, such as expediting immigration processes and mandating the U.S. work with allies to create safe evacuation routes, he said, is all “a matter of political will.”
“That’s what we saw before the evacuation, where suddenly we actually were able to ramp up SIV processes. The same thing is true now,” he said. “It’s just a matter of making this a top priority to evacuate those who remain at risk in Afghanistan.”
‘What would I do?’
For now, Mina waits — in hiding.
And volunteers at Good Counsel Services continue lobbying lawmakers — and everyday Americans — on cases like hers.
When Congress passed its continuing resolution last month to prevent a government shutdown, it included a provision of benefits for Afghan parolees they otherwise wouldn’t be able to access without a visa, such as housing, childcare and federal financial support, critical for volunteer agencies and for recruiting all-important sponsors.
“The result is that resettlement agencies can play a much, much larger role for many of those who are coming in under parole, and that means that there’s less of responsibility for the sponsor, and certainly no responsibility to house them,” Zak said.
Dembrowsky, for her part, said she’s asked daily to take on more applications for people still desperate to get out, but lamented she won’t commit to them without securing financial sponsors first.
“I just don’t want to throw this life preserver and not be able to hold on to the other end of it,” she said.
One person who answered her call is Ford Seeman, a social impact entrepreneur in New York, who credited being adopted at birth for giving him a unique understanding of how one’s future can be affected by circumstance. He’s donated $10,000 to Good Counsel Services for the cause, as well as agreed to gather the necessary documents and sign on to sponsor a potential parolee.
“I’m honored and, frankly, feel somewhat obligated to share with those facing overwhelming obstacles,” he told ABC News in an email. “We are all one people and need to look out for each other.”
While thousands of Afghans like Mina face an uncertain fate, Dembrowsky said the U.S. is facing a moment of moral reckoning.
“I wasn’t alive during the Holocaust. I wasn’t alive during the Civil Rights movement in the 60s. But we, as humans, ask ourselves these questions, ‘What would I do in that circumstance?'” Dembrowsky said. “Today in Afghanistan, there is something we can do, and if we refuse to do something — and if anything were to happen to her — it will be on our collective hands.”
(NEW YORK) — Several massive asteroids are expected to whiz close to Earth in the coming weeks, including one nearly the size of the Empire State Building.
On Friday, Asteroid 2021 SM3, which has a diameter of up to 525 feet — bigger than the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt — was projected to zoom by around 3.5 million miles away from Earth, USA Today first reported based off CNEOS data.
Near-Earth objects are defined by NASA as “comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood.”
But fear not, though these asteroids are passing relatively close to Earth, they’re still a great distance away, experts say.
“Astronomically, these are coming close to the Earth. But in human terms, they are millions of miles away and can get no closer than millions of miles away,” Paul Chodas, the director of the CNEOS at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, told ABC News.
The center tracks near-Earth objects for the entire asteroid community so that when close approaches happen astronomers can know where and when and observe their movements.
One of the closest approaches is Asteroid 2021 TJ15, which will pass the Earth at the same distance at the moon, or 238,854 miles away, on Saturday.
“That asteroid has a diameter of 5.6 to 13 meters (18 to 42 feet). That’s a tiny asteroid coming to about the distance of the moon. It’s still a long, long way, it can’t hit the Earth, there’s no chance of that,” Chodas said.
Asteroid 2004 UE is up to 1,246 feet, nearly the size of the Empire State Building, that will make its close approach Nov. 13 about 2.6 million miles from Earth.
“So that is the size of a small building. That’s approaching a medium size. But that’s 11 lunar distances approaching sequence, it cannot get any closer than 11.11 lunar distances,” Chodas said.
The center has discovered and tracked over 27,000 near-Earth objects. Asteroids range in size with most being small-, medium-size asteroids ranging from 300 meters to 600 meters (984 feet to 1,968 feet) in size and large ones 1 kilometer (3,280 feet) and up in size. He said many of the asteroids that pass Earth are tiny and burn up when they enter the planet’s atmosphere.
Unlike the apocalyptic plots in movies, the chances of a massive astroid striking the planet is extremely rare, Chodas said.
“It’s simply the fact that there are very fewer medium- and large-size asteroids that come near the Earth to begin with,” he said. “There are comparatively few large asteroids. The largest near-Earth asteroid is something like 10 kilometers. But there’s only one or two of those.”
The asteroids are discovered through observatories, cameras, telescopes and asteroid surveys that search the night sky for movement. After an asteroid is discovered, the center tracks their measurements and locations, and computes an orbit trajectory to predict its future movements to see if there’s any chance it’ll intersect with Earth.
Just how often do asteroids end up hitting Earth?
“Over the last 20 years of doing this, we’ve had a total of four asteroids — tiny, tiny asteroids — that have been observed in space and headed for the Earth, and have impacted the atmosphere and burned up. They became a bright fireball in each case,” Chodas said. “In two of the cases, we’ve predicted where they would hit ahead of time and predicted where to find the meteorites. Expeditions have gone out and found the meteorites. So our mathematics work pretty well.”
One of the most prominent was the Chelyabinsk Event in Russia in February 2013.
“That was the largest observed impact we’ve had in recent memory, I guess it’s a 100-kind of year event. That was a 20-meter asteroid that blazed through the atmosphere over Russia, and it disintegrated. What was started off as a 20-meter asteroid ended up as a core rock that was only one meter across, and it landed in a frozen lake and made a nice round hole in the ice,” Chodas said.
So far this year, the biggest asteroid to pass by Earth was Asteroid 2001 FO32, dubbed Apophis the “God of Chaos”, in March which was estimated to be 1,100 feet across, NASA said.
Michael Zolensky, an astromaterial curator and researcher at NASA, told ABC News asteroids are ” basically leftovers from planet formation.”
“Some of them have been whacked and broken by impacts from the other asteroids and then have kind of come back together again, as sort of traveling beanbags of loose rubble,” he said.
On Saturday, NASA’s newest asteroid probe named Lucy took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a 12-year mission to study some asteroids known as Trojans around Jupiter.
Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit these asteroids with the hopes of helping scientists learn more about how our solar system’s planets formed and how they ended up in their current configuration, NASA said in a release.
(LIPSK, Poland) — It was pitch black as the activists entered the forest. Even with headlamps and torches, their beams shone only small windows into the darkness, illuminating the trunks of birch trees.
The activists, from the migrants rights group, Grupa Granica, were looking for a small group of men who a short while ago had crossed the border from Belarus into a corner of northeastern Poland.
The men being sought were among hundreds of people trapped in forests where the European Union shares borders with Belarus; men caught in a worsening — and highly unusual– migration crisis on the bloc’s eastern frontier.
For months, the border between Belarus, Poland and Lithuania has seen a surge of migrants, that European countries allege is orchestrated by Belarus’ authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko in retaliation for their support of the pro-democracy protest movement that came close to toppling him last year.
Lukashenko — often dubbed ‘Europe’s last dictator’– is accused of luring migrants, mostly from the Middle East, to Belarus by offering easy access to Europe and then pushing them over the border into Poland and Lithuania. The number of migrants crossing has soared in recent months from what is normally a few dozen to thousands, with many headed to Germany and other Western European countries, according to Polish and Lithuanian authorities.
But in response, Poland and Lithuania have begun blocking the arrivals, deploying extra border guards, erecting fences and also allegedly pushing back many without allowing them to file for asylum, a violation of international law.
The result is that dozens — likely hundreds — of people are now reportedly trapped in a no-man’s land throughout the dense forests between Belarus and Poland, bouncing between the countries’ security forces and without food or shelter, often for weeks, according to testimonies from those trapped.
At least five migrants have died already, according to Polish and Belarusian officials, as temperatures fell close to freezing.
In Poland, activists from human rights groups and charities say they are trying to help the migrants, bringing food, clothes and assistance with asylum claims to prevent border guards from forcing people back across the border
The activists ABC News accompanied last week said they had received a call for help from three men around midnight one day last week. As the activists searched the woods, they shouted, “Don’t be afraid. We are not the police,” and made low whistles, a previously agreed upon signal with the men.
Eventually they found three terrified, shivering men from Yemen. One was without shoes.
“We were there fifteen days, without food, without anything,” one man, Rami Olaqi told the activists as they quickly gave Olaqi and the other men snack bars and tea. “We are drinking from streams and we’re eating from trees. The Belarusian army said, ‘If we see you again, we will kill you,'” he said.
Olaqi, an IT engineer, said he was fleeing Yemen’s civil war. They had been in the woods almost since landing in Belarus’ capital, Minsk, and were from a group of 16 Yemenis, the remainder still stuck on the border’s Belarusian side. They said they had tried to cross the border four times, but each time had been pushed back by Polish guards.
Back on the other side, Olaqi said Belarusian border guards had grabbed them and forced them back toward Poland. Olaqi says the guards shoved them back, and that Belarusian guards had beaten and robbed them, taking anything they wanted from the men’s bags.
He said after catching them again, the Belarusian guards had thrown the men into a river.
“They don’t care,” he said. “It will be better for them if we die, you know. Because ‘Look, Poland is killing refugees.’ That’s what we understand now.”
It’s just a way “for the Belarusian state to intimidate Europe. And using the refugees as a bullet in their war,” Olaqi said.
Lukashenko has publicly threatened to flood Europe with migrants, presumably in retaliation for EU sanctions on his regime for its crackdown on the protests and for hijacking a Ryanair passenger flight in May.
“We were stopping drugs and migrants — now you will catch them and eat them yourselves,” Lukashenko said in a speech in May.
Belarus has eased visa restrictions for many countries. In July, Lukashenko issued a decree allowing citizens of 73 countries to travel to Belarus without a visa for five days. WhatsApp and Facebook groups have sprung up where smugglers offer passage to Germany and other western European countries via Belarus and many migrants said they had used travel agencies to acquire invitations to come.
At the border, several migrants told ABC News that Belarusian security forces were coordinating migrant crossings.
Boushra Al-Moallem, a teacher from Syria who said she had spent 20 days in the forest, said Belarusian guards had separated people into groups and then led them to crossing points at the border, picking the time they would cross.
“They were choosing the people who should go in each group,” she said. Al-Moallem said people like her had been caught up in the conflict between Belarus and Poland. “It’s a bad war — and we are the weapons,” she said.
Several migrants alleged they were robbed of their money, phones and documents by Belarusian guards before being pushed over the border into the forest. When they try to return, Belarusian police shove them back again and threaten them, they said.
Under international and European law, Poland is obligated to consider any asylum applications made on its territory. But some of the migrants and activists say Polish border guards are refusing to accept the applications and instead push people back across the border.
That meant a harrowing choice for Olaqi and other men fleeing from Yemen. The activists helped them fill out asylum papers on the forest floor. But in order to apply they would need to summon the Polish border guards — the same guards that had repeatedly driven them back into the woods.
The activists explained said that they hoped the presence of foreign media would prevent the guards from doing so again but there was no guarantee. With no other plan, Olaqi and another man decided to risk crossing the border.
When the guards arrived they were polite and said they would take the men to a nearby border station, something the activists credited to the media cameras on-site. Poland’s border service later confirmed the two men had been permitted to apply for asylum and would now be sent to a migrant center while they awaited the decision.
Such cases, though, are still the exception. Activists are responding to almost daily calls of people being pushed back from Poland, regardless of whether they claim asylum, said Kalina Czwarnog, from the immigrant rights group Fondacja Ocalenie. Czwarnog said she had witnessed young children being pushed back and that injured migrants were sometimes transported from hospitals back into the woods.
Poland’s government has defended its border service’s actions, arguing it is permitted to push people back to Belarus since they are not in danger there, an argument disputed by most experts in asylum law.
“We are not pushing back those people to Syria or, I don’t know, Afghanistan,” Poland’s deputy foreign minister Marcin Przydacz told the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle this week. He did not deny that Polish border guards were pushing people back across the border, saying most wanted to apply for asylum in Germany, not Poland. He said the focus should be on the fact that this was an “artificial crisis, orchestrated by the Belarusian regime.”
By declaring a state of emergency Poland has created a closed zone along the border, which critics say is mostly intended to prevent activists and media from documenting the treatment of migrants. Police checkpoints block access to many villages in the zone and journalists entering risk arrest. The activists are only able to help those that make it outside the zone.
Lithuania initially allowed more asylum seekers to enter the country, taking in over 4,000 and housing them at first, mainly in tent camps. As the weather grows colder, the country has moved many migrants to more permanent facilities, including a prison at Kybartai.
When ABC News visited last week nearly 700 men were housed at Kybartai, living in a former cell block. Families and more vulnerable people are kept in different centers.
But Lithuania so far has granted just one asylum request of 900 already processed, according to its interior ministry. Over 2,500 more are pending.
On Wednesday there was a possible sign that Lukashenko might be backing down. A travel agency,Anex Tour, published a notice that Belarus was no longer issuing visas on arrival at Minsk airport for citizens Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and Nigeria. Belarus’ foreign ministry however has not confirmed that to ABC News.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Lukashenko’s main opponent, who was forced into exile last year during the mass protests, said she was urging European countries not to lose sight that Lukashenko is the root cause of the crisis.
“I always remind them, don’t forget who’s guilty in this,” she told ABC News in an interview last week. “Migrants are also a hostage of this regime.”
She said EU countries needed to show a unified front against Lukashenko and warned that calls for Poland and Lithuania to accept all migrants arriving would play into his hands. She said Lukashenko was counting on criticism over human rights in European countries forcing them to give in before he did.
“Lukashenko knows that organizations in Europe are worrying about the situation and they can put pressure on the Polish government, Lithuanian government, but they can’t put any kind of pressure to the dictator because he doesn’t care,” she said. “He knows the rules and misuses them. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia are being blackmailed by Lukashenko. That’s why unity is crucial here.”
(ESSEX, England) — David Amess, a conservative British member of Parliament, was stabbed multiple times during a visit to Essex Friday, officials said.
The motive behind the attack is not yet known.
He was attacked while holding an open meeting for his constituents at Belfairs Methodist Church in Leigh-on-Sea, British outlet Sky News reported.
Police were called to reports of a stabbing shortly after 12:05 p.m. local time.
Essex Police tweeted that a man has been arrested following an incident at Leigh-on-Sea. Authorities said they are not seeking any other suspects.
Amess, 69, represents Southend West in Essex.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(ESSEX, England) — David Amess, a conservative British member of Parliament, died Friday after being stabbed multiple times, officials said.
Amess, 69, represented Southend West in Essex.
He was attacked while holding his monthly “meet and greet” with voters at Belfairs Methodist Church in Leigh-on-Sea, British outlet Sky News reported.
The motive behind the attack is unknown.
Essex Police were called to reports of a stabbing shortly after 12:05 p.m. local time and found a man injured.
“He was treated by emergency services but, sadly, died at the scene,” police said in a press release.
Police said a 25-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after the stabbing and a knife was recovered at the scene. Authorities are not looking for any other suspects in the incident.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(BEIRUT) — Casualties have been reported after hours of gun battles in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, following calls led by Hezbollah and their allies to remove the judge leading the investigation into last year’s massive port blast.
At least six people have been killed and 30 wounded in ongoing clashes in the district of Tanouyeh after protesters gathered outside Beirut’s Justice Palace, according to the Lebanese Red Cross, who have dispatched six teams to assist the wounded and transport them to local hospitals.
Videos circulating on social media have shown armed men clashing in the streets with assault rifles, crowds fleeing and children taking shelter in the city’s schools. According to the Shiite group Hezbollah, peaceful protesters were targeted by sniper fire before the clashes broke out. The Lebanese Army has not responded to those claims.
The Lebanese Army warned citizens to go home, saying that anyone armed on the streets would be shot. The caretaker government has instructed citizens to take to basement shelters for the first time since the 1975-90 civil war.
“The deployed army units will shoot at any gunman on the roads and at anyone who shoots from anywhere else, and ask civilians to leave the streets,” the army posted on its official Twitter account.
Over 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, which had been stockpiled in the port of Beirut since 2013, detonated on Aug. 4, 2020, killing at least 200 people, wounding thousands of others and causing widespread damage across the city.
Earlier this week, a legal complaint brought against Judge Tarek Bitar was dismissed, allowing him to resume his work as the head of the investigation into the Beirut blast, which survivors and activists have criticized for a lack of movement. Hezbollah and its allies have claimed that the probe has been politically biased against Shiite ministers, and the politically contentious issue has threatened to derail the current caretaker government.
The investigation had been temporarily suspended pending the outcome of the complaint against Bitar.
An August report by Human Rights Watch alleged that some government officials “foresaw the death that the ammonium nitrate’s presence in the port could result in and tacitly accepted the risk of the deaths occurring.”
The caretaker government refuted the findings.
Lebanon is in the midst of one of the worst economic crises of the modern era, according to the World Bank. Fuel shortages, hyperinflation and a creaking health system have left at least 1.5 million people in need of financial aid.
Over the weekend, the country suffered a national power outage after the two main power stations ran out of fuel, before the army stepped in with an emergency shipment of gas. As a result, most families and businesses struggle with an allocation of four hours a day of electricity, with many neighborhoods relying instead on expensive backup generators, officials said.
The outbreak of violence is the worst seen in the city since 2008, according to observers, threatening to plunge the stricken country into further turmoil.
ABC News’ Leena Saidi and Nasser Atta contributed to this report.
(LONDON) — As Prince William prepares to deliver his Earthshot Prize to people saving the planet, he aimed some criticism at billionaires sending people to space.
“We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live,” William, 39, said in a new BBC interview, referring to the current race for space tourism led by billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson. “I think that ultimately is what sold it for me — that really is quite crucial to be focusing on this [planet] rather than giving up and heading out into space to try and think of solutions for the future.”
William’s comments came just one day after actor William Shatner took a successful 10-minute trip to space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard.
“Everybody in the world needs to do this,” Shatner told Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos after he touched down in Texas Wednesday.
William said he has “absolutely no interest” in going to space and questioned the carbon cost of flights to space, according to the BBC.
On Sunday, William and his wife, Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, will attend the first Earthshot Awards, where five winners working to repair the planet will receive $1 million in funding.
William launched the Earthshot Prize, modeled after former U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s famous moonshot challenge, last October.
Five winners will each receive $1 million each year until 2030. The goal is to create “at least 50 solutions to the world’s greatest environmental problems by 2030,” Kensington Palace said about William’s $50 million initiative.
William and Kate are the parents of three children, Princes George and Louis and Princess Charlotte.
William spoke to the BBC about how his kids motivate his work on the environment.
“I want the things that I’ve enjoyed — the outdoor life, nature, the environment — I want that to be there for my children, and not just my children but everyone else’s children,” he said. “If we’re not careful we’re robbing from our children’s future through what we do now.”
William also described his fear that Prince George, 8, the third in line to the throne, may still be talking about climate change 30 years from now, when it “will be too late.”
“It shouldn’t be that there’s a third generation now coming along having to ramp it up even more,” said William, whose father, Prince Charles, has made addressing climate change a priority of his work. “And you know, for me, it would be an absolute disaster if George is sat here talking to you or your successor, Adam [Fleming, of the BBC], you know in like 30 years’ time, whatever, still saying the same thing, because by then we will be too late.”
(WASHINGTON) — There have been major differences between the administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden on foreign policy — not least over the Iran nuclear deal, with Biden officials blaming Trump’s withdrawal for bringing Iran closer to a nuclear weapon today than before.
But even as Biden’s top diplomat warned more starkly than ever about the threat from Iran and the need to salvage the nuclear deal Wednesday, there was some consistency: Secretary of State Antony Blinken embraced the set of key Trump-era deals known as the Abraham Accords.
Those historic agreements saw Israel establish relations with some of its Arab neighbors — starting with the United Arab Emirates and extending, in varying degrees, to Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
The deals were controversial in some corners not just because they sidelined the Palestinians and did nothing to address long-simmering tensions there, but also because of the big-ticket incentives Trump offered to sweeten the pot for Arab countries, including selling the most advanced U.S. fighter jet, the F-35, to UAE; recognizing Morocco’s claim to Western Sahara; and even offering to pay the Sept. 11 attacks victims to make legal claims against Sudan go away.
But with Israel’s foreign minister and alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid and UAE’s Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Blinken heralded the agreements during a meeting at the State Department Wednesday. He announced the two countries, along with the U.S., was expanding the Abraham Accords with two new working groups on religious co-existence and water and energy — and said the Biden administration is looking to add other countries to them, too.
“Normalization is profoundly in the interests of the people in the countries in question and is providing all sorts of new opportunities,” Blinken said during a press conference with Lapid and bin Zayed. “It simply means that people will have a better life, more opportunity, more security, more prosperity.”
So far, that hasn’t been the case for Palestinians. Palestinian leaders were furious that the UAE, Bahrain and others abandoned a decades-old commitment to not recognize Israel until Palestinian aspirations for a state were granted. But Blinken, Lapid and bin Zayed said Israel and UAE’s growing economic and people-to-people ties were an example for what could be possible for the Palestinians, too.
“The more of a successful UAE-Israeli relationship will be, that would not only encourage the region, but also encourage the Israeli people and the Palestinian people that this path is worth not only investing in, but also taking the risk,” said bin Zayed.
Bin Zayed announced he would visit Israel soon “to meet a friend, but also a partner,” he said, smiling over at Lapid, who made a historic visit to Abu Dhabi earlier this year.
“The Palestinians are going to be the most important element of the success of peace in the region. We cannot just talk about peace in the region without the neighbors; the Palestinians and Israelis are not in talking terms to start with,” he added, saying there had been some progress with recent meetings between Israeli ministers and the Palestinian Authority.
For his part, Lapid — who invited bin Zayed to his house and said his wife was ready to cook for him — added that Israel was now focused on making the existing Abraham Accords successful, while working to expand them to other countries, “including ones you don’t think of,” he added with a smile.
He had little to say about the Palestinians, however, adding during his opening statement, “All people are entitled to a decent way of life. This includes of course the Palestinians. Our goal is to work with the Palestinian Authority to ensure every child has that opportunity.”
Blinken reiterated the Biden administration’s support for a two-state solution and called for both sides to “enjoy equal measures of freedom, prosperity, democracy,” But he backed normalization as a way to get there.
“We believe normalization can and should be a force for progress not only between Israel and other Arab countries in the region and beyond, but also between Israelis and Palestinians,” he said.
To pursue that progress, he also made clear the U.S. is “moving forward” with reopening the American consulate in East Jerusalem, which has traditionally served as a de facto embassy to the Palestinians. Israel, which largely has control as host country, has vocally opposed the move, including in comments by Justice Minister Gideon Saar Wednesday, who said Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett agreed, “No way.”
US, Israel weighing ‘alternative plans’ against Iran as nuclear talks remain paused
Beyond that disagreement, there was another critical difference on display Wednesday over the growing threat of Iran’s nuclear program.
Blinken again warned time is running out for salvaging the Iran nuclear deal as Iran continues to expand its nuclear program, with more enriched uranium, enriched at higher levels, using more and more advanced centrifuges.
He once again declined to put a timetable on it, but in perhaps his strongest language yet, said the U.S. and its partners are looking at “every option to deal with the challenge posed by Iran. We continue to believe diplomacy is the most effective way to do that, but it takes two to engage in diplomacy, and we have not seen from Iran a willingness to do that at this point.”
Hours earlier, his special envoy for Iran, Rob Malley, said the U.S. must “prepare” for “a world in which Iran doesn’t have constraints on its nuclear program” — a world without a nuclear deal. The Biden administration is doing that “now in consultation with our partners from the region,” he added during an event with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
To that end, Malley is departing for United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia on Friday to discuss Iran, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Wednesday.
Those efforts were echoed in what Lapid said Tuesday after meeting National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan at the White House. The two “discussed the need for an alternative plan to the nuclear agreement,” according to his office.
Both he and Blinken declined to spell out Wednesday what those potential plans may be, but Lapid implied it includes the use of force.
“Secretary of State Blinken and I are sons of Holocaust survivors. We know there are moments when nations must use force to protect the world from evil. If a terror regime is going to acquire a nuclear weapon, we must act, we must make clear that the civilized world won’t allow it,” he said.
When asked later about the use of force, he added, “by saying other options, I think everybody understands here, in Israel, in the Emirates, and in Tehran what is it that we mean.”
But while Blinken said all three of them — along with European partners — agree that Iran must not be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon, Lapid’s language was even more stark. He urged less patience with waiting for Iran to resume nuclear talks. Those indirect talks between the U.S. and Iran have been on hiatus since June, with Iran’s new government saying it must get its team in position first.
“Iran is becoming a nuclear threshold country. Every day that passes, every delay in negotiations, brings Iran closer to a nuclear bomb. Iran is clearly dragging their heels, trying to cheat the world to continue to enrich uranium, to develop their ballistic missile program,” Lapid said, adding that Israel had not just a “right,” but a “responsibility” to stop Iran from acquiring the bomb.
Blinken did not answer a question about use of force, saying again the Biden administration believes a “diplomatic solution” is best, but adding, “To be very clear, Israel has the right to defend itself, and we strongly support that proposition.”
Other U.S. allies have joined in recent weeks in urging Tehran to resume those talks. The French Foreign Ministry said Wednesday the situation had reached a “crisis and at a critical moment for the future of the nuclear agreement,” blaming Iran for “refusing to negotiate” and creating “facts on the ground that further complicate the return to the JCPOA,” an acronym for the nuclear deal’s formal name.
Enrique Mora, the European Union’s second highest-ranking diplomat who has coordinated those talks, said Wednesday he was traveling to Iran to “raise the urgency to resume #JCPOA negotiations in Vienna. Crucial to pick up talks from where we left last June to continue diplomatic work.”
But in the meantime, the U.S. is urging immediate action on another front — the release of American citizens detained by Iran. Both Blinken and Sullivan met Wednesday with Babak Namazi, whose brother Siamak and father Baquer Namazi have been detained by Iran for six years — to the day — and 5 1/2 years, respectively.
“The Iranian government continues to subject the entire Namazi family to unimaginable abuse. Through it all, the Namazis have shown remarkable courage,” Blinken said in a statement afterward. “The United States is committed to securing Siamak and Baquer’s freedom as soon as possible, as well as that of the other U.S. citizens wrongfully detained in Iran.”
Jared Genser, a lawyer for the Namazis, filed an urgent appeal with the United Nations last week to call for Baquer Namazi’s immediate release so he can have a lifesaving surgery on a major blockage in his right carotid artery.
“My father’s already lost so much precious time. I’m begging Iran to allow him to spend whatever time he has left with his family,” Babak Namazi told reporters last week in an emotional appeal.
