Day: September 15, 2023

  Trend News Agency

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The last three men to face charges in a foiled plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer were acquitted on Friday in a trial in state court on terrorism and firearms charges.

Eric Molitor and brothers William and Michael Null each faced one count of providing material support for terrorist acts and carrying or possessing a firearm during the commission of a felony.

An Antrim County jury found the men not guilty after deliberating for about a day following a two-week trial.

The three men were the last of more than a dozen men to face federal and state charges in the kidnapping conspiracy. Most had either been convicted or pleaded guilty.

The group of men were accused of taking part in an elaborate plot to abduct the governor from her vacation home, then put her on trial for treason. They hoped the kidnapping would lead to a violent uprising and instigate a civil war, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors say the plan was motivated by grievances related to the 2020 presidential election and opposition to state COVID-19 restrictions imposed by the Democratic governor.

In December, a federal judge sentenced the group’s leader, Adam Fox, to 16 years in prison, while his codefendant, Barry Croft Jr., received a 19-year prison sentence. Both men were convicted of domestic terrorism, conspiracy to kidnap and other charges.

Hurricane Lee barreled across the North Atlantic toward New England and Eastern Canada on Friday, threatening to bring drenching rains, powerful winds and a life-threatening storm surge to the region over the weekend.

Lee is expected to weaken into a strong tropical storm before making landfall in southwestern Nova Scotia as a strong tropical storm late on Saturday, the Canadian Hurricane Center said.

Even so, the storm has the potential to dump as much as 4 inches (10 cm) of rain and produce winds of up to 60 miles (97 km) an hour in some spots, prompting U.S. and Canadian officials to urge residents to prepare for possible flooding and power outages.

“Please plan ahead to stay indoors if possible on Saturday and check on your loved ones and neighbors,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in a statement to the city’s 650,000 residents.

Some 8 million Americans in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine were under a tropical storm warning, with conditions in those states expected to deteriorate on Friday and into Saturday, the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) said.

In Canada, more than 1 million people in Nova Scotia and eastern New Brunswick were also under a tropical storm warning as the massive storm crawls northward over the open waters of the Atlantic.

“Heavy rainfall rates and potential gusty winds are our largest concern for inland areas, with the addition of high surf and minor inundation along the coast,” the NWS said on Facebook on Friday.

Some spots, such as Cape Cod in Massachusetts and eastern Halifax County in Nova Scotia may see storm surge of up to 3 feet (91 cm), forecasters said.

As of Friday morning, the storm was about 490 miles (785 km) southeast of the Massachusetts island of Nantucket as it moved north at about 16 miles per hour. It was expected to pick up speed and weaken through the day, the weather service said.

Lee is the latest storm in what is proving to be a busy hurricane season that has featured a higher-than-average number of named storms.

Just two weeks ago, on Aug. 30, Hurricane Idalia slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coaston. As Idalia moved north, the powerful storm dumped heavy rains across Florida and southeastern Georgia, flooding numerous communities and knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes and businesses.

“They knew.”

When hydrologist Abdul Wanis Ashour began researching the system of dams protecting the eastern Libya port town of Derna 17 years ago, the peril facing residents was already no secret, he said.

“When I gathered the data, I found a number of problems in the Derna Valley: in the cracks present in the dams, the amount of rainfall and repeated floods,” he told Reuters. “I found also a number of reports warning of a disaster taking place in the Derna Valley basin if the dams were not maintained.”

In an academic paper he published last year, Ashour warned that if the dams were not urgently maintained, the city faced a potential catastrophe.

“There were warnings before that. The state knew of this well, whether through experts in the Public Water Commission or the foreign companies that came to assess the dam,” he said. “The Libyan government knew what was going on in the Derna River Valley and the danger of the situation for a very long time.”

This week, the “catastrophe” that Ashour had warned of in the pages of the Sebha University Journal of Pure & Applied Sciences, unfolded just as he said it would.

On the night of Sept. 10, the Derna Wadi, a dry riverbed most of the year, burst the dams built to hold it back when rains pour into the hills, and swept away much of the city below. Thousands of people are dead and thousands more still missing.

Abdulqader Mohamed Alfakhakhri, 22, said he made it to the roof of his four-storey building and was spared, watching as neighbours on their own rooftops were washed out to sea: “holding their phones with lights on and shaking their hands and screaming.”

With the bodies still being gathered from underneath flattened buildings and the seashore where they have been washing up, many Libyans are angry that warnings were ignored that could have possibly prevented the worst disaster in the country’s modern history.

“A lot of people are responsible for this. The dam wasn’t fixed, so now it’s a disaster,” said Alwad Alshawly, an English teacher who had spent three days burying bodies as a rescue volunteer, in an emotional video uploaded to the internet.

“It is human error, and no one is going to pay a price for it.”

Spokespeople for the government in Tripoli and the eastern administration which governs Derna did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Authorities tried to repair the dams above Derna as far back as 2007, when a Turkish company was awarded a contract to work on them. In his report, hydrologist Ashour cites an unpublished 2006 study from the Water Resources Ministry on “the danger of the situation.”

But in 2011, Libya’s long-serving ruler Muammar Gaddafi was toppled in a NATO-backed uprising and civil war, and for years after Derna was held by a succession of militant Islamist factions, including Al Qaeda and Islamic State.

The Turkish company, Arsel, lists a project on its website to repair the Derna dams as having begun in 2007 and been completed in 2012. The company did not answer its phone or respond to an emailed request for comment.

Omar al-Moghairbi, spokesperson for a Water Resources Ministry committee investigating the dams’ collapse, told Reuters the contractor had been unable to complete the works because of the security situation, and had not returned when requested.

“Budgets were allocated but the contractor was not there,” he said.

Even if the renovation work had been carried out, the dams would have failed, Moghairbi said, because the water level after Storm Daniel’s deluge exceeded the structure’s capacity, although the damage to Derna would not have been as severe.

Two officials at Derna municipality also told Reuters work on the dams contracted before Gaddafi’s fall had been impossible to carry out afterwards because the city was occupied by Islamic State and besieged for several years.

Even after the city was recaptured by the administration running the east of the country, work did not resume.

In 2021, a report by Libya’s Audit Bureau cited “inaction” by the Water Resources Ministry, saying it had failed to move forward with maintenance work on the two main dams above Derna.

The report said that 2.3 million euros ($2.45 million) had been earmarked for maintenance and rehabilitation of the dams but only part of the funds were deducted. It did not say whether those funds had been spent, or on what.

Critics of the authorities say they are to blame not only for failing to repair the dams, but for leaving residents of Derna in harm’s way as the storm approached.

Speaking on the pan-Arab al-Hadath channel, Derna mayor Abdulmenam al-Ghaithi said on Friday he “personally ordered evacuating the city three or four days before the disaster.”

However, if such an order was given, it does not appear to have been implemented. Some residents reported hearing police tell them to leave the area, but few seem to have left.

Other official sources told residents to stay: a video posted by the Derna Security Directorate on Sunday announced a curfew from Sunday night “as part of the security measures to face the expected weather conditions”.

Even as the catastrophe was unfolding on Sunday night, the Water Resources Ministry issued a post on its Facebook page telling residents not to worry.

“The dams are in good condition and things are under control” it said. The ministry spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the post.

The head of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Petteri Taalas, said on Thursday that in a country with a functioning weather agency, the huge loss of life could have been avoided.

“The emergency management authorities would have been able to carry out evacuation of the people. And we could have avoided most of the human casualties.”

Apportioning blame is never simple in Libya, where dozens of armed factions have waged war on-and-off with no government having nationwide authority since Gaddafi fell.

The internationally recognised Libyan government based in the capital Tripoli in the west of the country has no sway in the east, under a rival administration controlled by the Libyan National Army of Khalifa Hafter.

In Derna, the situation is even more troubled. Haftar’s forces captured it from the Islamist groups in 2019 and still control it, but uneasily.

Libya’s problem is not a lack of resources. Despite 12 years of chaos it is still a comparatively wealthy country, sparsely populated and pumping out oil that yields a decidedly middle-income per capita GDP above $6,000.

It has a decades-long history of massive engineering projects, above all on managing water in the desert. Gaddafi’s Great Manmade River, for example, brings water some 1,600 km (1,000 miles) from aquifers deep under the Sahara to the coast.

But since Gaddafi’s fall, the oil wealth has been disbursed among competing groups that control the administrative apparatus, becoming almost impossible to trace.

Prime Minister Abdulhamid al-Dbeibah, head of the Tripoli government, on Thursday blamed negligence, political divisions, war, and “lost money” for uncompleted work on the dams.

In the eastern-based parliament in Benghazi, speaker Aguila Saleh sought to deflect blame from authorities, describing what happened as an “unprecedented natural disaster” and saying people should not focus on what could or should have been done.

In Derna, residents have known about the danger posed by the dams for generations, said history teacher Yousef Alfkakhri 63, who rattled off the years of smaller floods dating back to the 1940s. But the terror of Sunday night was incomparable.

“When the water started flowing into the house, me and my two sons with their wives escaped to the roof. The water was faster than us and flowing between the stairs,” he recalled.

“Everyone was praying, crying, we saw the death,” he said, describing the rushing water as sounding “like a snake.”

“We lost thousands in all the wars in the past ten years, but in Derna we lost them in one day.”

Sudan’s main civilian political grouping warned on Friday that the country could be split and enter a protracted civil war if rival military factions that have been fighting for five months form competing governments.

The statement by the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) came after the leader of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, threatened to set up a governing authority in areas under the control of his forces.

The FFC said in a statement that threats by both sides to form a government were “an extremely dangerous issue that will result in the partition and division of the country” and could lead to a “comprehensive civil war”.

Since the outbreak of war between the RSF and Sudan’s army on April 15 the RSF has controlled swathes of the capital Khartoum, as well as areas of south-west and central Sudan. Another faction that has clashed recently with the army, Abdelaziz al-Hilu’s SPLM-N, controls large parts of South Kordofan state.

The army remains in control in other parts of the country, including the eastern Red Sea city of Port Sudan, to which some government officials and international agencies have relocated.

In an audio message released late on Thursday, Hemedti raised the prospect that the RSF could establish a government in Khartoum, warning that any move by the army to form a caretaker government in Port Sudan would split the country.

Last month, a senior figure in Sudan’s Sovereign Council, headed by army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said a caretaker government was needed.

The army, RSF and FFC shared power after long-ruling leader Omar al-Bashir was overthrown during a popular uprising in 2019. The army and the RSF staged a coup in 2021, before falling out over a planned transition to elections under a civilian authority.

Fighting between the two factions has caused a humanitarian crisis in Sudan, which now has more internally displaced people than any other country.

According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 4.1 million people have been displaced internally since April, while over 1.1 million have fled to neighbouring countries.