Day: October 16, 2023

The U.S. and Israel develop a plan for humanitarian aid for Palestinians as President Biden plans to travel to Israel on Wednesday. We visit Jerusalem’s Old City, and we revisit the Turkish border with Armenia. Plus, we’re in Poland to examine the election results.

Israel’s ambassador to South Korea believes North Korean weapons are being used by Palestinian militant group Hamas to attack Israel, even as Pyongyang has denied the accusations that have surfaced online as groundless.

Akiva Tor, the Israeli ambassador serving in South Korea since 2020, told VOA’s Korean Service on the phone from Seoul on Saturday that Hamas militants are using weapons manufactured by North Korea.

“In Gaza, as it is the one which attacks us, they use North Korean weapons,” said Tor. “It could be that these North Korean weapons have been in Iran for quite a long time.”

“We will destroy these weapons in Gaza,” he added.

Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, photos of F-7 rocket-propelled grenades with a claim they were made by North Korea have been surfacing on X, formerly known as Twitter.

A self-proclaimed weapons researcher, who uses the name War Noir, posted photos of rockets and machine guns with the caption that Israel Defense Forces allegedly captured the North Korean-made weapons belonging to the Al-Qassam Brigades near Gaza.

Bruce Bechtol, a former intelligence officer at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency who is now a political science professor at Angelo University in Texas, told VOA Korean via email that the F-7s in the photos that are “identified [as] looking like North Korean in origin, look that way to me as well.”

“It appears likely that considerable number of the weapons that Hamas has [been using came] from the North Koreans,” said Bechtol.

Bechtol continued that more North Korean weapons are likely to be found in Gaza after the Israeli Defense Forces begin a ground offensive in the territory.

North Korea denied its weapons were used by Hamas to attack Israel through a statementissued on its state-run KCNA on Friday.

The U.S. is spreading “groundless and false rumors” that North Korean weapons were used in the attack on Israel as a way “to shift the blame for the Middle East crisis caused by its wrong hegemonic policy onto a third country,” said the KCNA.

Analysts said it is not surprising that Hamas appears to be using North Korean arms as Pyongyang has a long history of supplying arms to Hamas, the Lebanon-based armed group Hezbollah and Iran, which supports both groups.

James Jeffrey, who from 2018 until November 2020 served as U.S. special representative for Syria engagement and special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, is currently chair of the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program. He told VOA Korean during an Oct. 10 telephone interview, “North Korea has long provided weapons and technical knowledge to radical forces in the Middle East.”

He continued, “I wouldn’t be surprised because North Korea is engaged in illicit arms sales and deliveries, both to make money and to destabilize the international order in a big way. Therefore, every time we have a crisis or a new conflict, there’re North Korean fingerprints.”

Fred Fleitz, who spent 19 years with the CIA and served as acting national security advisor during the Trump administration, said, “It certainly appears that either through a direct deal in which Hamas paid the North Koreans or through the IRGC, the Iranian Republic Guard Corps, they smuggled those weapons in or through Hezbollah.”

Fleitz, who is now the vice chair of the Center for American Security, continued, “But the latter seems more convincing. Iran is closer to both North Korea and Palestine and likely has many more routes.”

Multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions ban North Korea from exporting weapons.

Matthew Miller, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, at a press briefing on October 10 said the U.S. will “look to counter” actions by any country that is providing either financial or military support to Hamas.

U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Thursday that he could not confirm reports of North Korean weapons being used by Hamas.

The possibility of arms dealings between North Korea and Hamas first surfaced in 2009.

In December of that year, a North Korean plane carrying about 35 tons of weapons including rockets and rocket-propelled grenades were seized at a Bangkok airport while the aircraft landed there for a refueling stop. The next month, the Thai government submitted a report to the U.N. Security Council saying the weapons were headed to Iran.

White House’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes said in November 2012 that Thailand’s interdicted shipment from North Korea in 2009 were “bound for Hamas.”

In 2013, a UNSC report included photographs of North Korea weapons in the cargo plane.

At the time of the weapons shipments, Israel was fighting a proxy war with Iran for supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, according to then-Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon.

Tor told VOA’s Korean Service that “there’s no question” Iran is supporting Hamas politically, financially and strategically. But he said he is “not able to say” what exact role Iran has played in this conflict.

Tor also dismissed speculation that Tehran used $6 billion of its funds unfrozen from South Korean banks to support Hamas in this conflict.

“We don’t have any evidence that the release of the funds, which were held in [South] Korean banks, have reached Hamas in any way,” he said.

Tor continued, “Israel’s view, in general, is that sanctions against Iran should not be eased up, and that funds that go to Iran, even when they’re directed to humanitarian purposes, [could be used] for improper purposes.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week that Iran has not been able to tap any of the funds that were released from South Korean banks and that those funds “could only be used for humanitarian purposes.”

The transfer of funds was arranged as part of a prisoner swap between the U.S. and Iran. Iran released five U.S. citizens held hostage in exchange for the release of the funds and transfer of five Iranians held in the U.S.

Jiha Ham and Sangjin Cho of the Korean Service contributed to this report.

 

Auditing firms hired to investigate the overseas operations of American and European companies often fail to protect workers from exploitative practices by “design,” industry insiders and experts told The Guardian as part of the latest tranche of stories in the Trafficking Inc. investigation.

Specialist auditors hired by corporations to identify labor abuses described instances of clear labor violations: scared workers, false records, confiscated documents. But these insiders told The Guardian that pushback from managers and a lack of regulation means there is little auditors can do to address violations.

“Nobody is working for the sake of betterment of workers,” one anonymous auditor in India told The Guardian. “Everybody is here to make money.”

The reporting is part of ICIJ’s Trafficking Inc. investigation, a collaboration with The Guardian, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and NBC News that seeks to document the people, systems and businesses that enable and profit from human trafficking.

For the latest installments of the investigation, ICIJ spoke with nearly 100 current and former migrant workers in the Persian Gulf, who said they were subjected to repressive labor practices while working for locations of Amazon, McDonald’s, Chuck E. Cheese and the InterContinental Hotels Group.

Several of the practices the workers described are considered hallmarks of labor trafficking, including hefty recruitment fees, obfuscation of real employers, confiscation of passports and limited freedom to quit. They’re also what so-called “socal audits,” investigations of conditions inside factories and workplaces, are supposed to identify.

According to The Guardian, the auditing industry emerged in the 1990s amid damaging revelations about the use of overseas sweatshops by American companies. By 2020, the industry was valued at $80 billion.

But researchers say many auditing firms are more likely to protect companies from costly PR scandals than to  prevent labor abuses.

“Since 2016 I’ve been scrutinizing the audit industry, and I’ve read about 80 social audit reports and I’ve not seen one that inspires confidence,” Aruna Kashyap, associate director on corporate accountability at Human Rights Watch, told The Guardian.

Kashyap, who interviewed dozens of auditors and industry experts for a Human Rights Watch report, found that auditing practices often lack the independence and transparency needed to keep workers safe.

A 2021 analysis by Cornell professor Saroh Kuruvilla of more than 40,000 social audit reports from multiple countries revealed almost a third of audits were falsified. Kuruvilla’s research also uncovered a parallel industry focused on gaming the audit system, including coaching services in China that promised to ensure a “100%” pass rate, in some cases by falsifying wage and overtime records..

Even if auditors were more diligent, Kashyap told The Guardian, there is scant legal impetus for companies to act on auditors’ findings. Often audits are conducted inside workplaces and under surveillance by management, she said.

“It’s a report that’s dropped into a corporate blackhole and no one knows what’s in it or how these reports improve workers’ lives,” Kashyap told The Guardian.

While American companies could potentially be criminally liable for trafficking overseas under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, human rights advocates have struggled to use the law to protect workers or punish companies.

“It is scandalous how much power has been afforded to multinational corporations, American brands, to dictate the terms of their own complicity,” Elena Shih, an assistant professor at Brown University, told The Guardian.

A new European Union proposal — the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive —  would require companies to identify risks of human rights abuses in their supply chains, including large American companies operating in Europe.

The directive would subject companies in violation to sanctions such as fines, and allow victims of abuse to seek compensation. But its success, The Guardian noted, hinges on effective enforcement mechanisms.

As Genevieve LeBaron, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, put it: Corporate efforts to clamp down on labor trafficking “are failing because they are designed to fail.”

North Korea’s nuclear programme is a self-defensive move to head off a nuclear war in the face of the U.S. pursuit of “nuclear supremacy,” state media KCNA said on Tuesday.

Kim Kwang Myong, whom KCNA described as a researcher at the Foreign Ministry’s Institute for Disarmament and Peace, accused the U.S. of stoking regional tension with its nuclear programme and blamed it for strategic instability destroying world peace.

The comments come as nuclear-armed North Korea has raised alarm in the region with regular launches of missiles, including intercontinental ballistic missiles that can strike the continental United States.

Kim singled out the recent findings by the U.S. Strategic Posture Commission calling for enhancing the country’s nuclear weapons modernisation programme in preparation for potential simultaneous wars with Russia and China, as yet another “extremely risky” sign and a “hegemonic move”.

“The U.S., the world’s biggest nuclear weapons state and the world’s first nuclear user which adopted the preemptive nuclear attack on other countries as its national policy, is talking about ‘nuclear threat’ from someone. This is a sophism,” Kim said.

Kim said Washington was seeking to improve its preemptive nuclear strike capability against North Korea by building a missile defence system, while sending strategic assets to the region and “ultra-modern military hardware” to its allies.

“The reality urgently requires the DPRK, which is standing in confrontation with the U.S. imperialism, the most aggressive nuclear war criminal force, to bolster up its self-defensive military capabilities for deterring a nuclear war,” Kim said.

DPRK, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is North Korea’s official name.

In another KCNA article, Kim Tong Myong, a researcher of the Society for International Politics Study, criticised NATO’s annual nuclear exercises, called “Steadfast Noon“, which kicked off on Monday to practise the use of U.S. bombs based in Europe.

“The reality goes to prove once again that the dark clouds of a dreadful thermonuclear war can never be wiped out as long as the U.S., a heinous nuclear war killer which regards nukes as the key for its hegemonic foreign policy, exists,” Kim said.

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Donald Trump has four criminal trials with a combined ninety-one felony counts between now and the next election, and he’s going to be convicted on most or all of them. His future consists of prison and nothing more. He was reminded of that today when Judge Chutkan laughed off his attempt at delaying his Washington DC criminal trial.

Now it appears Trump is beginning to accept the reality that he’s going to prison. How do we know this? Well, he just said it in exact words:

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Actually, he said he’s willing to go to jail in order to “win.” This is complete nonsense. No one wins by going to jail. There’s a lot of room for debate about what constitutes winning and losing in life, but we can all agree that going to prison for the rest of your natural life means you’ve lost.

Yet Trump is now at a point where he’s talking how it’ll be a “win” for him if he goes to jail. Based on the rapidly declining cognitive abilities he’s displaying in his public appearances, he’s not capable of having thoughts of his own anymore. He’s at a point of pliability where whatever opinion he’s stating on any given day is merely whatever the people around him told him to think that day.

This suggests that Trump’s own people have now convinced him that if he goes to prison it’ll mean he’s “winning.” This is one way to keep Trump sated as he gets marched closer and closer to prison. If they can keep a senile Trump convinced that his criminal trials, convictions, and even his imprisonment are somehow a good thing for him, he won’t fire them on his way down. Which at this point is likely the only goal Trump’s handlers have left, given that there’s nothing they can do to actually help him.

The post Donald Trump just appeared to admit that he’s going to prison appeared first on Palmer Report.

A Somali television journalist was killed Monday evening in a suicide bombing at a restaurant in Mogadishu, police said.

Abdifatah Moalim Nur Qeys, who worked for Somali Cable Television, was fatally injured in the explosion at Blue Sky restaurant near the national museum.

“At around 21:00 a Khawarij suicide bomber detonated explosives on people who were having tea outside the Blue Sky restaurant in Bondhere district,” police in Mogadishu said in a brief statement.

Khawarij, or “deviants,” is a term the government uses to refer to al-Shabab.

Four other people were injured in the explosion, according to police.

“Security forces provided assistance to those impacted by the attack,” police said. “There is an ongoing investigation, and any updates will be shared with the public.”

The station Qeys worked for confirmed his death in a Facebook post. It said Qeys was the director of the station’s branch in Mogadishu.

“He was pronounced dead after we brought him to Recep Tayyip Erdogan hospital,” said Abdishakur Mohamed Mohamud, who was among the journalists who took Qeys to the hospital.

“He had shrapnel on the upper part of his body,” he told VOA Somali.

In a Telegram message, the al-Shabab militant group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. In the message, al-Shabab said a suicide bomber was behind the blast.

The local media watchdog, Somali Journalists Syndicate (SJS) condemned the violence.

“SJS strongly condemns this atrocious attack targeting our colleague Abdifatah Qeys. Our hearts go out to other community members whose loved ones were affected by this heinous attack,” SJS said in a statement.

The attack comes as Somalia President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud welcomed home new troops who had been training in Eritrea.

Speaking at Mogadishu airport, Mohamud told the soldiers to take one-month leave before returning to join other soldiers engaged in the military operations against al-Shabab.

(NewsNation) — Mourners in Illinois grieved at a funeral for the 6-year-old Palestinian American boy authorities say was fatally stabbed by a man who targeted him and his mother for their Muslim faith.

A funeral was held Monday for the boy identified as Wadea Al-Fayoume by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. His mother, who had been stabbed over a dozen times, was unable to make it to the funeral as she was still in the hospital. Both were found by authorities Saturday morning in their home in unincorporated Plainfield Township.

Large crowds gathered at the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, Illinois, a community southwest of Chicago, to remember Al-Fayoume, whose uncle called him a “very kind kid” during a press conference Monday before the service.

During Monday’s press conference, women and children huddled and cried in the mosque’s basement while dozens of people flanked the speakers, including two men waving Palestinian flags.

Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said at a different news conference Sunday that Al-Fayoume was a lovely boy who loved his family and friends as well as soccer and basketball.

 “He paid the price for the atmosphere of hate,” Rehab said.

The boy’s mother had come from the West Bank to the United States 12 years ago, and his father immigrated nine years ago, according to Rehab.

“We live in a country called USA. We’re not in war,” Al-Fayoume’s uncle said Monday. “We’re not bringing war here too — we need to save our kids. I’m not just saying (this) about Palestinians — I’m saying (this) about all our kids.”

Rehab said Sunday he ultimately blames the person responsible for the killing but also asks leaders and media: “To what extent was this person radicalized and brainwashed by this lopsided, one-sided atmosphere that has fanned the flames of hatred against Muslims and Palestinians?”

Police have made it clear that they believe Joseph Czuba, 71, the man accused of killing Al-Fayoume, targeted the boy and his mother because they were Muslims. Czuba, who was denied bail in court Monday, is facing first-degree murder, hate crime and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon charges.

During the attack, Czuba reportedly said, “You Muslims must die,” according to text messages sent to the boy’s father by the mother while she was still in the hospital that were shown to CAIR. CAIR says Czuba had been angry with what he saw on the news about the Israel-Hamas war.

The Muslim civil liberties organization said the boy’s horrible death comes at the end of a week of “bigotry, dehumanization, hysteria and propaganda aimed at Muslims and Palestinians.”

“We ask Allah to enter Wadea into paradise, comfort his grieving family and grant them justice,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations said on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

Reuters and NewsNation digital producer Cassie Buchman contributed to this story.

(NewsNation) — Authorities are asking for help after four inmates escaped from a Georgia detention center, NewsNation affiliate WRBL reported.

The inmates escaped through a damaged day room window and cut a fence as a blue Dodge Challenger pulled up to aid in the escape around 3:00 a.m. Monday, according to the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office.

The inmates were being held on a variety of charges.

The inmates are Joey Fournier, 52, who was being held at the Bibb County Detention Center for murder. Marc Kerry Anderson, a 24-year-old, was being held for aggravated assault. Johnifer Dernard Barnwell, 37, and Chavis Demaryo Stokes, 29, held for firearm possession and drug trafficking, also escaped.

Georgia officials, along with the Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force, the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Office, are conducting the search for these inmates, according to a press release.

Police are urging anyone with information to call the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office at 478-751-7500.

Ford (F.N) executive chairman Bill Ford on Monday urged the United Auto Workers union to end a 32-day strike and reach a new labor agreement, and warned of the growing impact to the automaker and the U.S. economy.

“We can stop this now,” Ford said of the strike that expanded last week to shut down the Kentucky plant. “I call on UAW colleagues … We need to come together to bring an end to this acrimonious round of talks.”

Ford made his appeal in a press conference at the automaker’s historic Rouge assembly plant near company headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan.

UAW President Shawn Fain replied with a statement warning Ford that the union could “close the Rouge” with a strike. “If Ford wants to be the all-American auto company, they can pay all-American wages and benefits,” Fain said.

More than 34,000 union members working at Ford, General Motors (GM.N) and Chrysler parent Stellantis (STLAM.MI) are out on strike and Ford has furloughed 2,480 other workers, citing impacts of the strike.

Meanwhile, talks between Stellantis and the UAW remained active on Monday, sources said.

The strikes have cost the Detroit Three automakers, suppliers, dealers and workers a total of $7.7 billion through Oct. 12, Anderson Economic Group of East Lansing, Michigan, estimated in a new report Monday.

“We’ve entered the danger zone for many suppliers,” AEG said in a statement.

Ford, the great grandson of company founder Henry Ford, said Toyota, Honda, Tesla and other automakers “are loving this strike because they know the longer it goes on, the better it is for them.”

In reply, Fain said workers at Tesla and other non-union U.S. auto producers “are not the enemy – they’re the UAW members of the future.”

The UAW’s walkout at Kentucky Truck, Ford’s largest and most profitable assembly operation globally, “harms tens of thousands of American workers,” Ford said. “If it continues, it will have a major impact on the American economy.”

On Friday, Fain accused Ford of trying to game the talks with inadequate offers and insisted Ford sharply boost compensation. Ford CEO Jim Farley should “go get the big checkbook – the one Ford uses when it wants to spend millions on company executives or Wall Street giveaways,” Fain said.

Fain also vowed to strike at additional plants at any time.

On Thursday, a senior Ford executive said the automaker was “at the limit” of what it can spend on higher wages and benefits for the UAW. Its latest offer includes a 23% wage hike through early 2028, which is higher than GM or Stellantis has offered. Ford has said the UAW’s proposals would have meant bankruptcy if implemented in 2019.

Ford has long portrayed himself and his family’s company as the most union friendly in the industry, a message he repeated Monday.

The union has called Ford “the enemy,” Ford said. “It should be Ford and the UAW against Toyota, Honda, Tesla and all the Chinese companies” that want to enter the U.S, market, he added.

Harley Shaiken, labor professor at University of California Berkeley, said Ford was looking to speak directly to workers.

“He’s doing it to move the talks in a way that he would find more desirable,” Shaiken said, but added “This is likely not going to work.”

He said UAW could be targeting and pressuring Ford because it has the best offer on the table and the union feels it can get the automaker to a deal that it could then pressure GM and Stellantis to match. GM and Stellantis did not immediately comment.

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The United States has finalized a 20-year extension to its agreement on ties with the strategic Marshall Islands and expects to sign the $2.3 billion deal on Monday, chief U.S. negotiator with the Pacific island nation Joseph Yun told Reuters.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) is one of three sprawling but sparsely populated nations that have U.S. ties governed by so-called Compacts of Free Association (COFAs), under which Washington is responsible for their defense and provides economic assistance, while gaining exclusive military access to strategic swathes of ocean.

After decades of relative neglect, the nations have found themselves at the center of a U.S. battle for influence with China in the Northern Pacific and the Biden administration agreed new deals with the two other states, Palau and Micronesia, earlier this year.

It had been haggling for months over details with the RMI, which had called on Washington to better address the legacy of nuclear testing there in the 1940s and 1950s.

Yun told Reuters he planned to sign the COFA deal with RMI Foreign Minister Jack Adding in Honolulu, Hawaii, at 2 p.m. local time (0000 GMT Tuesday). He said he understood Marshallese President David Kabua would also attend.

“This is the last of the three compacts that we have been doing. The other two have been done,” Yun said. “Once we have signed, we will transmit it to the U.S. Congress, where together with the other two, I hope they will be enacted soon.”

Yun, appointed last year by President Joe Biden to negotiate the COFA agreements, said Washington would be providing the Marshall Islands with $2.3 billion dollars over the next 20 years, made up of grant assistance and trust-fund contributions.

He said the grant assistance would go to areas such as education, healthcare, environment and infrastructure, and added: “In terms of trust fund, the money, where it goes to, the new trust-fund money is determined by the Marshallese government.”

Analysts and former officials had blamed a delay in finalizing the Marshall Islands COFA on U.S. State Department lawyers wanting to control how new funds were spent and objecting to their being earmarked to address the nuclear legacy, fearing this could lay the U.S. open to more claims.

The Biden administration had hoped to see Congress endorse new funding for the three COFA totaling $7.1 billion over 20 years by Sept. 30, but that did not prove possible amid budget haggling in the U.S. Congress.

A 45-day stopgap funding measure passed by Congress last month averted a U.S. government shutdown but has left potential funding shortfalls for the COFA states until their deals can be endorsed by the U.S. legislature, which analysts and former officials said makes the U.S. allies economically vulnerable and possibly more receptive to Chinese approaches.

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