Most of the sailors kidnapped off the Cameroon coast last week were Filipinos, not Chinese as first reported, according to an official document seen by AFP Sunday.

On Friday, an official in the port of Douala told AFP that 17 crew had been abducted, including “nine Chinese civilian sailors” from one of the two ships attacked, along with Ukrainians.

The attacks took place on Thursday in Cameroonian waters off Douala, located at the apex of a gulf that has become a hotspot of seaborne crime. The port document said instead that “nine hostages, all Filipinos,” were seized from a Greek-owned ship while “eight (three Russians, four Filipinos and a Ukrainian)” were taken from a German-owned vessel.

Noel Choong, head of the information service of the International Maritime Bureau based in Kuala Lumpur, confirmed the figures but said he could not be sure of the nationalities on the second ship.

“The IMB has issued a warning to all ships at Douala. We ask all ships to take additional precautions,” Choong said Friday.

In Moscow, press reports citing the foreign ministry said three of the victims were Russian.

The Gulf of Guinea, whose coastline stretches in a huge arc from Liberia to Gabon, is notorious for piracy as well as oil theft, illegal fishing and human and drugs trafficking.

Source: AFP

Senegalese politician and diplomat Jacques Diouf, who was Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) from 1994 to the end of 2011, died at the age of 81. announced Senegalese President Macky Sall.

“Senegal has lost one of its most valuable sons with the death of our countryman Jacques Diouf. He was an effective collaborator for me at the beginning of my first term, “the Senegalese president said on Twitter, offering his condolences.

Senegal has lost one of its most valuable sons with the death of our compatriot Jacques Diouf.
He was an effective collaborator at the beginning of my first term. I salute his memory and offer my heartfelt condolences to his grieving family.

Born August 1, 1938 in Saint-Louis in northern Senegal, diplomat known for his pragmatism, Jacques Diouf died in France after a long illness, said his family, quoted by Senegalese media.Married with five children, he had a post-graduate education in France (agronomist degree, master’s degree in tropical agronomy, doctorate in social sciences) and a higher management diploma in New York.

16 years at the head of FAO

Appointed Secretary of State for Scientific Research of Senegal by President Léopold Sédar Senghor in 1978, he was deputy for Saint-Louis from 1983 to 1984. He then left Senegal to work at the Research Center for International Development in Senegal. Ottawa, at the Central Bank of West Africa, before becoming, in 1991, ambassador of his country to the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Elected to head FAO in 1993, he was to serve three six-year terms. Under his leadership, the UN organization sought the collaboration of the private sector and stars by launching spectacular operations to raise funds for World Food Day. We need to ” let humanity know that it is no longer possible to treat these vital resources as if they were infinite, ” he said about the degradation of land and water in one his most recent interventions as Director General of FAO in November 2011.

That same year, while the famine raged in the Horn of Africa due to an exceptional drought, Jacques Diouf said he could not bear to ” see the image of a child who is at risk of starving “, adding: ” We would not wish that for our children, I do not see why we would accept it for the children of others.”

Source: Agencies

Two Russian pilots safely landed an airliner carrying 233 people in a cornfield outside Moscow after striking a flock of birds, prompting the Kremlin to hail them as heroes who will receive top state awards.

The Russian authorities have said it was a miracle that no one was killed when the Ural Airlines Airbus 321 came down in a field, southeast of Moscow, with its landing gear up after hitting a passing flock of gulls, disrupting the operation of the plane’s engines.

Up to 74 people, including 19 children, were treated for injuries, six of whom have been hospitalized, Russian news agencies quoted the emergencies ministry as saying.

State television said the incident was being dubbed the “miracle over Ramensk”, the name of the district near Moscow where the plane came down, around one kilometer (0.62 miles) from Zhukovsky International Airport.

The Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid praised pilot Damir Yusupov as a “hero,” saying he had saved 233 lives, “having masterfully landed a plane without its landing gear with a failing engine right in a corn field.”

Some drew comparisons with U.S. Airways Flight 1549, which performed a landing on the Hudson River in New York in 2009 after striking a flock of geese.

“We congratulate the hero pilots who saved people’s lives,” Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said, adding that the Kremlin would see that the men were quickly given state honors. “There’s no doubt about this. They will be given awards.”

BELLY-FLOP LANDING

The plane’s engines were turned off when it executed the emergency landing and it also had its landing gear up, according to Elena Mikheyeva, a spokeswoman for Russia’s civil aviation authority.

Footage, shot by passengers, showed the flight lasted less than two minutes and that the engines had experienced difficulties almost immediately after take-off.

Vitya Babin, 11, who was on the plane with his mother and sister, said passengers had not been warned that there was going to be an emergency landing. There was silence in the cabin and then screams began when it touched down, footage showed.

“We were not warned,” said Babin.

An unnamed passenger interviewed by state television said the plane had started to shake moments after it took off.

 “Five seconds later, the lights on the right side of the plane started flashing and there was a smell of burning. Then we landed and everyone ran away,” he said.

(Source: Reuters

Six Philadelphia police officers were shot and wounded on Wednesday (August 14) in a shootout during a drug raid on a house and negotiators were urging the shooter to surrender as two officers remained trapped inside the home, police said.

Three hours into the standoff, Philadelphia Police said all of the wounded officers were in stable condition with non-life-threatening injuries.

Police were serving a drugs warrant at a north Philadelphia home at around 4:30 p.m. when the male shooter entered the house and opened fire on the officers.

“Many of them had to escape through windows and doors to escape from a barrage of bullets,” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross told a news conference. 

The shooter continued to fire on a SWAT truck parked outside the residence in the Nicetown-Tiago neighborhood as officers tried to negotiate his surrender, Ross said.

Police called the man’s phone, talked with him on a bullhorn and involved a family member in the negotiations, Ross added.

“I’m worried about a potential hostage situation and we’ve got to get that resolved,” said Ross, adding that he believed the two officers trapped inside the home were not wounded. 

“We are trying to get him to come out peacefully,” Ross said, declining to confirm whether there was more than one shooter. “There’s no indication that he’s trying to surrender, we do know that he is still alive, there’s no question of that because of the shots that keep ringing out.”

Police told local residents to remain inside their homes and stay out of the area after hundreds of rounds were exchanged.

Local television station Fox 29 reported some kind of movement by police around 7:30 p.m. when a large bang was heard.

Two other officers were also injured in a car accident while responding to the shooting. 

There were reports the shooter was livestreaming the incident on Facebook.

President Donald Trump has been briefed on the shooting and was monitoring the situation, the White House said.

Local media reported the shooter appeared to have a high-powered weapon and a significant amount of ammunition. The incident follows a string of mass shootings in California, Texas and Ohio in which gunmen used semi-automatic rifles.

“I’m a little bit angry about someone having all that weaponry and all that firepower, but we’ll get to that another day,” said Mayor Jim Kenney after visiting three of the wounded officers in hospital.

(Source: Reuters)

US President Donald Trump is cautiously defending that idea that the Clinton family is related to the alleged suicide of notorious financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was in jail for paedophilia.

Before heading to the US state of Pennsylvania for a speech, the president insisted in an address to reporters that all he did was “retweet.”

“The retweet — which is what it was, it was a retweet — was from somebody that is a very respected conservative pundit. So I think it was fine,” Trump said.

He later said he has “no idea” if the reported suicide of the registered sex offender was related to the Clintons.

Trump on Saturday shared a tweet from Terrence K. Williams that blamed Epstein’s death on Bill and Hillary Clinton without providing any evidence.

“I want a full investigation and that’s what I absolutely am demanding,” said Trump, who was close to Epstein like former President Clinton.

Trump in a 2002 interview called Epstein a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do.”

Apart from that Epstein was close to many other high-profile figures such as British royal Prince Andrew.

While awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, Esptein was found dead in his jail cell in the New York federal prison early Saturday.

Source: Presstv

The US government’s deficit widened to $120 billion in July, fueled by increases in spending on health care and the military, according to data released on Monday by the Treasury Department.

The size of the deficit was in line with expectations in a Reuters poll of analysts.

The Treasury Department said federal spending in July was $371 billion, up 23 percent from the same month in 2018, while receipts were $251 billion, up 12 percent compared with July 2018.

The fiscal-year-to-date deficit was $867 billion, compared with $684 billion in the comparable year-earlier period.

The US government’s fiscal position has deteriorated since 2016, hit by an aging of the population that has led to more people drawing on Medicare, a federal health insurance program for the elderly.

Increased spending on the military has also fueled the deficit under President Donald Trump, who took office in January 2017 promising to strengthen the military.

Earlier this month, the US Congress passed a two-year budget deal backed by Trump that would increase federal spending on defense and other domestic programs, which could significantly add to the government’s growing debt.

In July, Washington spent $53 billion on defense programs, up from $43 billion in the same month of 2018. Spending on Medicare rose to $66 billion from $34 billion, though some of that increase was because of calendar adjustments, a Treasury official said.

When adjusted for calendar effects, the US government’s deficit last month was $129 billion compared with an adjusted deficit of $122 billion in July 2018, the Treasury official said.

Even accounting for the calendar adjustments, spending on Medicare rose 11 percent in July compared to the same month a year earlier.

(Source: Reuters)

Beltran Ngi, 33, goes to the Tijuana border crossing to hear someone tick names off the waiting list on a bullhorn around 8 a.m., even though there are more than 8,000 names ahead of him. He is suspicious of asylum seekers who are escorted separately to a waiting Mexican immigration van without having their names called. On a recent Friday, about half of 40 spots were for people whose names weren’t called.

Ngi, who hopes to use his English to work at a Tijuana call center even though his 20-day transit permit through Mexico expired, shared a two-bedroom apartment with seven others but couldn’t afford his roughly $50 share of monthly rent. He moved to a migrant shelter to sleep and eat for free. He said he fled Cameroon after five days imprisoned in a cell with 40 people who shared one pail as a toilet.

 Before he was imprisoned, he was visiting an uncle in a neighboring village when soldiers beat his father and set his house on fire. Ngi, who hopes to join family in North Dakota, followed a route favored by Cameroonians: flying to Ecuador due to loose restrictions on accepting visitors from the African nation and traveling through eight countries. He was famished on his 11-day walk through Panama but reminded himself it was better than Cameroon. “It’s better to die in the jungle than to die of bullets,” he told himself.

He is among the Cameroonian men who share 10 mattresses on the floor of a third-floor apartment above a barber shop walk every morning to the busiest U.S. border crossing with Mexico, hoping against all odds that it will be their lucky day to claim asylum in the United States. Their unlikely bet is that a sympathetic Mexican official will somehow find a spot for them.

English-speaking Cameroonians fleeing atrocities of their French-speaking government helped push Tijuana’s asylum wait list to 10,000 on Sunday, up from 4,800 just three months earlier. At the same time, the U.S. is returning more Central Americans to Mexico to wait for dates in U.S. immigration court, putting asylum seekers in an unexpected, prolonged period of uncertainty.

Based on Mexican government figures and reporting by The Associated Press, at least 40,000 migrants who have reached the U.S. border with Mexico are on a waiting list for an initial attempt to seek asylum or waiting for a court hearing in the U.S. after being sent back.

The figure represents a dramatic increase from earlier in the year. It is unknown how many have entered the U.S. illegally, decided to settle in Mexico or gone back to Central America. The long waits are testing the patience of some asylum seekers and residents in border cities.

More than 100 Cameroonians blocked the path of the government immigration vans last month, demanding more transparency about who gets accepted from the wait list to request asylum. It came after several days on which the U.S. accepted no claims. People getting called now have been in Tijuana about 3½ months, but the wait is expected to lengthen.

Turning Mexico into a waiting room for U.S. asylum seekers may be the Trump administration’s most forceful response yet to a surge of migrants seeking humanitarian protection, many of them Central American families. The effort is part of a broader crackdown on immigration, subject of a polarizing debate that became even more pitched after the discovery of an anti-immigrant screed tied to a man charged with killing 22 people in El Paso, Texas, Saturday.

Source: The Yeshiva World

US immigration authorities have arrested nearly 700 mostly Latino workers at seven food processing plants across the southern state of Mississippi, the largest workplace raid in at least a decade.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said in a statement on Wednesday that the agency detained about 680 people who were working illegally at the plants.

Those arrested were taken to a military hangar to be processed for immigration violations. About 70 family, friends and residents waved goodbye and shouted, “Let them go! Let them go!” Later, two more buses arrived.

About 600 ICE agents spread across the plants operated by five companies, surrounding the perimeters to prevent workers from fleeing.

Many of those detained will be transported to an ICE facility in Jena, Louisiana, the US Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of Mississippi, which partnered with ICE, said in a statement.

Some of those detained will be released for “humanitarian reasons” and required to appear in U.S. immigration court, the US Attorney’s Office said.

ICE did not specify the nationalities of the workers arrested, but most are believed to be migrants from Mexico and Central America.

Matthew Albence, ICE’s acting director, told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that the raids could be the largest-ever workplace operation in any single state. He claimed that the raids are “racially neutral” and based on evidence of illegal residency.

The companies involved could be charged with knowingly hiring workers who are in the county illegally and will be scrutinized for tax, document and wage fraud, Albence said.

The raids, planned months ago, happened just hours before President Donald Trump visited El Paso, Texas, a majority-Hispanic city near the US-Mexico border where a man linked to a white supremacist group was charged with fatally shooting 22 people.

Bill Chandler, executive director of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, called the “terrible” raids “another effort to drive Latinos out of Mississippi,” and he blamed Trump for fanning racism with his past incendiary comments about immigrants.

“This is the same thing that Trump is doing at the border with the Border Patrol,” he said, referring to the increased crackdown on migrants coming into the US.

Major immigration raids were common under former President George W. Bush, including one at a kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, in 2008 that resulted in about 400 arrests. Former President Barack Obama avoided them, limiting workplace immigration efforts to low-profile audits.

Trump resumed workplace raids, but the months of preparation and hefty resources they require make them rare.

Trump has made his hard-line stance on immigration an integral part of his presidency and has promised to build a wall along the US-Mexican border to curb the flow of migrants from Mexico and Central America.

Source: Presstv

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had this week taken Britain one step closer to a no-deal Brexit, following Brexit negotiator David Frost’s meeting with EU officials and their reaction to the newly-appointed Brexit negotiator.

While the bloc is still hopeful of securing a deal, their reaction to Downing Street suggests that they now seriously acknowledge the very real possibility that Johnson will indeed dig his heels in and stick to his guns regarding a no-deal Brexit, whatever the economic cost.

If the UK does go through with a no-deal Brexit, it’s likely to impact the most vulnerable in society. Most of the political class, including Nicola Sturgeon leader of the Scottish National Party, have also warned against a no-deal Brexit.

While it’s impossible to know whether Johnson is bluffing or if the writing really is on the wall regarding a no-deal Brexit, the impact has already and will continue to be felt.

Johnson and his team remain ideologically committed to a no-deal Brexit whatever the cost, despite the evidence that doing so would severely damage the UK’s economy.

Source: Presstv