Thousands of Yemenis have rallied in the port city of Aden in support of a so-called autonomous body set up to rule the south by officials of ex-president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.  Protesters, who had reached the southwestern city from several southern provinces, chanted, “Independence is our objective,” the Middle East Eye news portal reported.

The autonomous body to manage the war-wracked country’s south was launched by Hadi’s governor for Yemen’s port city of Aden after he was fired by the Saudi-backed former president.  Hadi sacked Maj. Gen. Aidarous al-Zubaidi over his perceived close ties with the United Arab Emirates after accusing the UAE of acting “like an occupation power in Yemen rather than a force of liberation.”

The autonomous body gathers 26 members, including the governors of five southern provinces and another Hadi minister. It has proclaimed that it aims to “run the southern provinces” and “represent them inside and outside” the country.

Hadi’s loyalists have accused the men of setting up secret liason with the Emirates, buying arms from it and forming military units. Yemen’s Houthi movement has also rejected the new council, calling it a “threat to the territorial unity of the Yemeni republic,” and a part of a “colonial plot.”

Aden has been racked by armed clashes, explosions and assassinations since Houthi fighters were pushed out of the city in July 2015 by Saudi-backed militants. Al-Qaeda and Daesh terrorists are now audaciously driving their armed vehicles around the city, passing checkpoints set up by Hadi loyalists.

The United Arab Emirates has a strong military presence in the area as part of a Saudi-led coalition which has been pommeling Yemen for more than two years now in order to return Hadi to power and dislodge Houthis and their allies from their areas of control.

Aden has been grappling with a spread of arms, where arms possession is unprecedented, especially among young people.  Residents in the city have complained that armed groups usually clash with one another in the streets and go unpunished when they kill civilians.

Source: Presstv

Some 5,000 refugees bound for Italy have been rescued in waters off the coast of Libya between Thursday and Saturday morning by Italian and Libyan coastguards, statements from both countries say.

Around 2,900 people were rescued Thursday, 2,300 of whom were found in international waters and taken to Italy, while 580 picked up in Libyan waters were returned to the North African country.

Through Friday until Saturday morning, coastguards rescued another 2,100 refugees packed in 17 vessels, but found the body of one man who drowned, the Italian coastguard said.

The number of refugees arriving in Italy has soared this year by more than 30 percent in comparison with the same period last year, with 46,000 people arriving so far.

But of every 39 refugees, who survive the perilous journey across the Mediterranean, one dies, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said, adding that 1,244 refugees were known to have died so far this year.

(Source: AFP)

Ousted FBI Director James Comey has agreed to testify in an “open session” of the Senate Intelligence Committee to answer questions on the investigation into possible links between President Donald Trump’s election campaign and Russia.

The committee said in a statement late on Friday that it planned to schedule the hearing for some time after Memorial Day. “The committee looks forward to receiving testimony from the former director on his role in the development of the intelligence community assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 US elections,” said Senator Richard Burr, the committee chairman.

“I am hopeful that he will clarify for the American people recent events that have been broadly reported in the media,” the North Carolina Republican added. Trump fired Comey in a surprise move last week, triggering accusations that the president obstructed justice by seeking to thwart an ongoing FBI probe about alleged Russian interference in last November’s election. The Senate Intelligence Committee is also investigating the alleged meddling by Moscow and any possible links between Russian officials and the Trump team.

Senator Mark Warner, the committee’s vice chairman, said he hoped Comey’s testimony would “shed light on issues critical” to the investigation. “Director Comey served his country with honor for many years, and he deserves an opportunity to tell his story. Moreover, the American people deserve an opportunity to hear it,” the Virginia Democrat said.

The US Justice Department appointed a special counsel to oversee the probe, potentially limiting the Congress’s ability to look into the matter separately. There is concern that the counsel, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, would object to Comey speaking in public about an ongoing probe.

Trump has condemned the investigation as the “greatest witch hunt” in the US history. Last week, the president warned Comey against leaking information to the media. “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press,” he tweeted on May 12.

 The latest twist in the controversy came on Friday when The New York Times reported that Trump allegedly told senior Russian officials visiting the White House that Comey was a “nut job” and that his termination relieved “great pressure.”

Source: Presstv

British police are prepared to arrest WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on charges of skipping his bail if he leaves the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and possibly extradite him to the United States where the Trump administration has prepared charges against him, according to reports.

On Friday, prosecutors in Sweden dropped their rape investigation into Assange, who sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy five years ago.

A spokesman for England’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) told AFP on Friday that after Assange’s arrest his case would be referred to a judge and he could face a maximum one year prison term in the UK.

According to The Guardian, police cars are parked near the Ecuadorian embassy building in Knightsbridge, London, presumably ready to arrest the WikiLeaks founder for breaching his bail, which the Metropolitan Police Force has claimed he is still wanted for.

Dozens of media persons are waiting outside the embassy but there has been no sign of Assange emerging from the building yet, reports said.

Britain ‘must grant safe passage to Assange’

Meanwhile, Ecuador’s foreign minister called on Britain on Friday to “grant safe passage” out of the country to Assange. “The European Arrest Warrant no longer holds. The UK must now grant safe passage to Mr Julian Assange,” Guillaume Long wrote on Twitter, shortly after Swedish prosecutors announced they had dropped their rape probe against the WikiLeaks founder.  Assange took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy in London in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden after Swedish prosecutors issued a European arrest warrant against him.

The Australian has denied the rape accusations, and says the claims are part of an attempt to ultimately have him extradited to the United States, where he could be charged over WikiLeaks’ release of 500,000 secret military files on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. British police said an arrest warrant was issued against Assange in 2012. “The Metropolitan Police Service is obliged to execute that warrant should he leave the embassy.”

Possible extradition to the US 

The police spokesman said he did not know whether Britain had received an extradition request from the United States.

“The UK government’s policy is to neither confirm nor deny any request for extradition until and unless an arrest is made,” he said.

The head of America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has called WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” accusing its chief of helping the enemies of the US.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo on April 13 accused Pompeo WikiLeaks of overwhelmingly focused on the US and encouraging its followers to join the CIA with the sole purpose of obtaining intelligence.

He said WikiLeaks under the leadership of Assange “directed Chelsea Manning to intercept specific secret information, and it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States.”

American whistleblower and former US Army soldier Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning) was released from prison on Wednesday after serving seven years for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

US prepares charges to seek Assange’s arrest

The Trump administration has reportedly prepared charges against Assange in an attempt to arrest him.

Since 2010, US prosecutors have struggled with whether the First Amendment of the US Constitution prohibited the prosecution of Assange.

However, now they believe they have found a way to arrest the man who published thousands of files taken away by Manning, the former US Army intelligence analyst.

In an interview with RT on Tuesday, Assange described the CIA as “dangerously incompetent.” “The CIA is the world’s most dangerously incompetent spy agency. It has armed terrorists, destroyed democracies and installed and maintained dictatorships the world over,” Assange said.

Culled from Presstv

A white policewoman in the US state of Oklahoma, who was accused of fatally shooting an unarmed African American man, has been acquitted from all charges. Officer Betty Jo Shelby, 43, shot dead 40-year-old Terrence Crutcher next to his car on a street in Tulsa on September 16, 2016.

The Tulsa County District Court jury of eight women and four men ruled Wednesday that the officer, who has been on unpaid leave since she was charged, was not guilty of manslaughter. During the proceedings, Shelby said that she acted according to her training because she had reasonable fear that the victim was reaching for a gun.

However, the Crutcher family’s lawyer, rejected her reasoning, saying that video from the killing shows Crutcher was “simply going to the car with his hands up, and making the turn and pivoting to put his hands on the car when the shot is fired.”

Prosecutors also argued against Shelby, noting that she shot Crutcher a few seconds before he made the gesture that the defense cited as the basis for her reaction. Shannon McMurray, Shelby’s lawyer, accused the prosecutors of hypocrisy and said they were attacking the officer in response to the media frenzy surrounding the case.

Crutcher’s father, Joseph, accepted the vote but said he knew the officer was guilty. “I have four grandchildren that are at home that has lost their daddy. I said I would accept whatever the verdict was, and I’m going to do that. But let it be known that I believe in my heart that Betty Shelby got away with murder,” he said.

The ruling makes Shelby the latest white officer to escape unharmed after killing an African American over the past few years. Similar rulings were issued by grand juries in the deaths of Eric Garner on Staten Island, Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, all of them controversial cases that prompted a national debate about race relations and the use of force by law enforcement.

Source: Presstv

Former US President Barack Obama has voiced alarm about climate change, warning that no country would be safe. No country, “large or small, rich or poor, will be immune from the impacts of climate change,” Obama warned on Tuesday at a food summit in Milan, Italy. Speaking at the Seeds & Chips Global Food Innovation Summit he said, “Our changing climate is already making it more difficult to produce food”.

Obama’s warning comes amid speculations that President Donald Trump, who is a skeptic of climate change, could pull the US out of the landmark Paris Agreement, reached at the end of 2015. Under that agreement, world leaders agreed to make sure global warming stayed “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Climate change is a hoax “created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive,” Trump said during his election campaign.

However, the former US president insisted on Tuesday that both the US and China were responsible to lead the way in the fight against climate change. “It’s important that big countries that are big emitters like the US and China… lead the way,” and others follow suit, Obama told the summit. “The current [Trump] administration has differences with my administration in terms of environmental policy,” he said. “Because of the debates taking place in the current administration the steps may be taken more slowly than they would have been done, but I’m confident,” he added.

“The good news is the private sector has already made a determination that the future is clean energy. Those things are locked in now, into the energy sector,” Obama added During his election campaign last year, Trump had vowed to pull out of the landmark 2015 Paris climate deal, if elected.

Source: Presstv

The International Criminal Court (ICC) says it is weighing an investigation into human trafficking and refugee-related crimes in Libya, where the UN says they are being traded in so-called slave markets. Thousands of asylum seekers, including women and children, are being held in detention centers across Libya where “crimes, including killings, rapes and torture, are alleged to be commonplace,” Fatou Bensouda, ICC’s chief prosecutor revealed Monday.

She said that her office was gathering evidence of crimes allegedly committed against the refugees attempting to transit through Libya. I was “dismayed by credible accounts that Libya has become a marketplace for the trafficking of human beings,” Bensouda added.

The Gambian lawyer also said the ICC prosecution is examining the possibility of opening an investigation into refugee-related crimes in Libya provided that they fall under the court’s jurisdiction. Refugees commonly use the western coast of Libya to embark on a risky journey through the Mediterranean Sea toward Europe.

In April, the UN raised alarm over a climbing number of refugees passing through Libya. Refugees are typically traded for as little as $200 to $500, and are held for an average of two to three months and subject to malnutrition and sexual abuses, said the head of the UN migration agency’s Libya mission, Othman Belbeisi.

Source: Presstv

US and European police have shut down the largest global pedophile ring after hacking its website and arresting nearly 900 of its members following a two-year investigation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Europol made the announcement Friday after a court sentenced Florida-based Steven Chase, founder of the so-called Playpen pedophilia network, to 30 years in prison.

The police are said to have arrested 870 people during the investigation into the group’s members around the globe that began after Chase’s arrest back in 2014. Officials said 368 of those arrested were from Europe. The investigation also identified at least 259 sexually abused children. As part of its investigation, called “Operation Pacifier,” the FBI used a malware to seize the Playpen website and server, which allowed authorities to track and identify Playpen users.

The result of that investigation was the harvesting of IP addresses and other identifiable information of more than 1,300 people who either logged in or registered on the site during that period, FBI and Europol said. Chase was sentenced this week in a federal courtroom in North Carolina on multiple child-pornography and child-exploitation charges.

Two of the founder’s aides, Michael Fluckiger and David Browning, both US citizens – who served as administrators of the site – were each jailed for 20 years. “Those individuals involved in the sexual abuse of children are becoming increasingly forensically aware and are actively using the most advanced forms of anonymisation and encryption to avoid detection,” said Steven Wilson, head of Europol’s Cybercrime Center.

“The internet has no boundaries and does not recognize borders. We need to balance the rights of victims versus the right to privacy. If we operate 19th century legal principles then we are unable to effectively tackle crime at the highest level,” he added.

A recent world classification on press freedom has ranked Cameroon 130th among 180 countries. By this position, the country dominated by French speaking political elites took a downward trend from the 2016 classification. In 2016, Cameroon held the 126th position.

This revelation has rubbished statements made by the so-called government spokesman and Minister of Communication, Issa Tchiroma Bakary that journalists in Cameroon were free and independent. The findings noted that Cameroon is considered a “Not Free Zone”, meaning it is one of the countries with a massive media crackdown.

The International Organization for the Defense of Journalists says media professionals in Cameroon are constantly under police harassment and arbitrary arrest. The Yaounde regime operates a vicious media regulatory board known as the National Communication Council that shuts down independent news organizations. Journalists were arrested during demonstrations in the English-speaking regions where Internet connection was cut off in January 2017 for three months.

Source: Cameroon Intelligence Report

Soldiers representing U.S. Army Africa are currently in Cameroon for exercise Unified Focus 17, the second accord event of the year. The accord series is composed of four major events scheduled to take place intermittently on the African continent through the beginning of August. Exercise Justified Accord 17 was held in Ethiopia last month, and the following exercises, United Accord 17 and Shared Accord 17, will take place in Ghana and South Africa, respectively.

The accord series is a U.S. Africa Command program composed of four annual, combined and joint military exercises that take place in African countries and encourage partnerships between participants from United States, African Union, European and other coalition partner forces and agencies. Although each event addresses a specific peacekeeping or security issue, they all share common objectives: communication and interaction between partners, and mutual readiness training, said Col. Anthony J. Healey, the U.S. Army Africa training, readiness and exercises director.

“The exercises facilitate enhancing information sharing and cooperation on regional security issues, strengthening regional access and freedom of movement, and increasing the participating forces’ abilities to collaborate on common missions and increase their readiness for real-world scenarios,” he said.

Until recently, each exercise was named for its targeted region. The current iterations, however, reflect the specific focus of the event instead, according to Healey. “The exercises were regionally aligned: Southern Accord, Eastern Accord, Central Accord … but when AFRICOM changed (from region-based operations) to lines of effort-based operations, they changed the names to match,” he said.

The accord exercises generally can fall into one of three categories: tabletop, command post and field training. Tabletop exercises often include senior personnel working through the decision-making process they would use in a crisis scenario. These exercises can take place in a classroom environment and include instruction from subject matter experts, Healey said.

Command post exercises are expanded tabletop exercises for commanders and staff. They require increased tactical operations and communications and may be simulation driven. These exercises can be conducted on a garrison or in the field.

Field training exercises simulate realistic combat conditions and integrate the total force, involving combat units, drills and situational training exercises, as well as the personnel required for tabletop and command post exercises. A year or more of planning and smaller events with other U.S., partner and host nation organizations go into each exercise, Healey said, which helps coordinators overcome some of the challenges that arise when multiple agencies and cultures work toward one vision and grapple with logistics.

“You’re bringing multiple agencies together and trying to come up with a singular plan to execute,” he said. “Does everyone agree with it? Can you support this? Where is the money coming from? You have to plan transportation well in advance, contracts have to be letted out … those are some of the challenges we have to work through to get from initiation to execution.”

Despite any difficulties that might accompany USARAF’s participation, there is inherent value in building and strengthening partnerships through the accord exercises, Healey said. “Whenever we go anywhere on the globe these days, it’s going to be with another partner. (Through these exercises), we get that cultural understanding from working with partners, not just American forces. … Ensuring that everyone has a shared understanding of how to solve the issue in the scenario builds confidence between the partner nations and interagencies.”

Culled from Defenseweb