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The attack comes days after President Trump announced he wants to label Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.

At least 21 people have died due to a battle between Mexican police officers and cartel gunmen, just days after President Donald Trump said that he planned on labeling Mexican drug cartels as terrorists.

Armed gunmen stormed Villa Union, a town near the Texas border with Coahuila state, on Saturday and attacked local govement offices, including that of the mayor. Security forces responded, and 10 gunmen and four policemen were killed during the resulting shootout in the village. Seven additional cartel members were killed by security forces after the attackers fled.

The attack will likely fuel Trump’s argument for categorizing drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations,” just as groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Boko Haram are classified. He has a history of seeing drug cartels as a major threat, and he often cites the cartels in stump speeches when speaking about the need to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. Trump’s latest position on the cartels, however, has alarmed a number of experts because it could give the president license to use US military force against the groups without authorization from the Mexican govement.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has made it clear that he will not allow foreign intervention, and has offered to increase cooperation with the US on fighting drug gangs instead, according to Al Jazeera. His govement already works with the US intelligence community and drug and law enforcement officials from the State Department to combat cartel violence.

“Since 1914, there hasn’t been a foreign intervention in Mexico and we cannot permit that,” Lopez Obrador said at a regular news conference on Friday. “Armed foreigners cannot intervene in our territory.”

Things, however, aren’t looking great for Lopez Obrador, who was elected into office in 2018 in part on a platform of cracking down on cartels. Murders are at a record high rate, according to the Los Angeles Times: there have been 29,414 homicides so far this year in comparison to 28,869 in the same period of 2018 — which was already considered an all-time high.

Attoey General William Barr is supposed to visit Mexico next week to discuss joint security efforts. With these numbers, Trump’s plan, and the most recent gun battle in Villa Union fresh in everyone’s memory, all eyes are on what will come out of his meeting with Mexican officials.

Trump wants to categorize Mexican drug cartels as terrorists

Although Trump has long pointed to Mexican drug cartels as a problem, they resurfaced as a key issue for him after gang members killed and ambushed a US Mormon family traveling northe Mexico on November 5. Six children and three mothers died.

“This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth,” Trump tweeted following news of the ambush.

Trump was also likely encouraged to intervene after the Mexican govement failed to detain El Chapo’s son, Ovidio Guzmán López. Although the notorious drug lord’s son was captured on October 17, the police released him shortly after they were ambushed by other gang members.

By categorizing drug cartels under “foreign terrorist organizations,” the US will be able to sanction those who support the groups, deport members in the US, and bar associates from entering the country. It could also open doors to the US military using force against the cartels. And although reclassifying cartels as terror organizations doesn’t automatically authorize the president to launch overseas military operations, many are worried that Trump could attempt to push the limits.

It’s also unclear how effective this designation actually would be. The cartels are well funded and well established, and as Vox’s Alex Ward reported, many Mexicans see cartel violence as a problem created by US policy:

“There is no political will in Mexico to invite US troops in. It is both an issue of nationalistic pride and an understanding in Mexico that what fuels drug cartels are weapons sold to them in the United States and drugs consumed by Americans,” Jana Nelson, a Mexico expert at the Wilson Center think tank in Washington, DC, told me. “From the Mexican perspective, the root cause of violence is on the other side of the border.”

“Cutting the cartel’s access to military-grade weapons, bought in the United States and smuggled into Mexico, is an effective way to limit the their firepower,” Nelson continued. “Intelligence coordination between the Mexican and the American govement for operations against the cartels is also effective, especially when using the Mexican Navy for operations, which is less likely to tip off drug cartels.”

It is unlikely that Lopez Obrador will ever be on board with a US military intervention, partially because it would mean the death of his political career. With rising homicide numbers in Mexico and the issue of border security being one that animates his base, it also seems unlikely that Trump will back down anytime soon.

source : https://www.vox.com/world/2019/12/1/20990250/mexico-cartel-gun-battle-attack-union-villa-texas-border

A US teen says the video-sharing platform suspended her account for criticizing China’s treatment of Muslims.

A US teenage TikTok user’s attempt to spread awareness about China’s oppression of its Uighur Muslim population has renewed questions about censorship on the China-based social media company’s platform.

Earlier this week, 17-year-old Feroza Aziz, who lives in New Jersey, posted on TikTok what was presented as a three-part tutorial on how to get longer eyelashes but quickly switched to a call-out about China’s treatment of its Muslim population. Several human rights groups have accused China of putting 1 million Muslims, mostly from the Uighur ethnic group, into concentration camps and shutting down or destroying mosques. China’s govement denies this and claims that the camps are merely vocational training centers.

In her TikTok videos, Aziz begins her beauty tutorial simply enough. “The first thing you need to do is grab your lash curler, curl your lashes, obviously,” she says. Then she changes her message: “Then you’re gonna put [the curler] down and use your phone that you’re using right now to search up what’s happening in China. How they’re getting concentration camps, throwing innocent Muslims in there, separating their families from each other, kidnapping them, murdering them, raping them ... this is another Holocaust.”

Aziz said she sandwiched her political commentary between eyelash improvement tips in order to circumvent censorship she anticipated from the platform. Less than two days after her first video was posted, she tweeted that she had been suspended from TikTok for a month

source 

olitical and military engagement in the Middle East has for decades seemed an integral component of American foreign policy, as experts discussed at Brookings at an event on November 13. However, today, U.S. engagement in the Middle East is under intense scrutiny. According to experts, recent events like the muted U.S. response to the Iranian-orchestrated attacks on Saudi Arabia’s Aramco facilities, as well as the blunt withdrawal of American troops from Syria demonstrate the long-assumed commitment to the Middle East may no longer be the case. In order to understand how we got here, it is important to examine the beginnings of U.S. engagement in the region.

 

At the event, Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel and Senior Fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy and Deputy Director of Foreign Policy Suzanne Maloney discusses his newest book, “Beirut 1958.” The book examines the factors that contributed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s momentous decision in July 1958 to send U.S. Marines to the Middle East, focusing especially on the roles that political upheavals and influential individuals played in the buildup and eventual resolution of the crisis. Introducing the event, Senior Fellow Tamara Wittes reiterated the importance of examining past policy decisions and their results in order to inform decisions going forward.

Riedel provided an overview of events in the Middle East leading up to Eisenhower’s decision to launch Operation Blue Bat, and described the complex political landscape of the region at the time. Following his remarks, he and Maloney discussed in more detail the lessons that policymakers can take from examining this first U.S. military engagement in the Middle East. They noted the impact of ideologies, especially the oft-forgotten ideology of Arab nationalism that played such a defining role in the 20th century, as well as the implications of diminished U.S. involvement in the region today. They also grappled with the difficult line between patience and apathy in foreign policy decisionmaking. Riedel emphasized the importance of level-headedness when dealing with a tumultuous and unpredictable part of the world.

source : https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/11/21/highlights-experts-discuss-the-first-ever-us-military-intervention-in-the-middle-east/

CAIRO (AP) — One Egyptian woman is taking on the country’s inheritance laws that mean female heirs inherit half that of men.

Since her father's death last year, Huda Nasrallah, a Christian, has stood before three different judges to demand an equal share of the property left to her two brothers by their father. Yet courts have twice issued rulings against her, basing them on Islamic inheritance laws that favor male heirs.

Nasrallah, a 40-year-old Christian human rights lawyer, is now challenging the rulings in a higher court. A final verdict is expected to be handed down later this month. She has formulated her case around Christian doctrine which dictates that heirs, regardless of their sex, receive equal shares.

"It is not really about inheritance, my father did not leave us millions of Egyptian pounds," she said. "I have the right to ask to be treated equally as my brothers.”

Calls for equal inheritance rights began to reverberate across the Arab world after the Tunisian govement had proposed a bill to this effect last year. Muslim feminists hailed the bill.

But there has been a blacklash from elsewhere in the Arab world. Egypt’s Al-Azhar, the highest Sunni religious institution in the Muslim world, vehemently dismissed the proposal as contradictory to Islamic law and destabilizing to Muslim societies. But there is hope that Tunisia could have broken the taboo on the topic for the region.

Nasrallah belongs to Egypt's estimated ten million Coptic Christians, who live in a predominantly Muslim society goveed by a constitution in which Islamic Shariah is the main source of legislation. Christians face restrictions in inter-religious marriages and church building, and are banned from proselytizing to Muslims.

Egypt’s legal system grants the Coptic church full authority over personal status matters of Copts, namely marriage and divorce. But the church does not have the same powers over its followers’ inheritance rights.

One of the oldest Christian communities in the world, the Egyptian Coptic church is also deeply conservative on social matters, banning divorce except in cases of adultery or conversion to Islam.

Nasrallah says she is making her case on religious grounds because she believes the court is more likely to respect existing structures within the society. She says she is trying to capitalize on a rare Christian doctrine that respects gender equality.

Karima Kamal, a Coptic female columnist at the privately-owned al-Masry al-Youm daily, says that Nasrallah's case highlights the double discrimination that Coptic women can face in a society where religion is printed on govement-issued identification cards.

"You should not implement the rules of one faith on people of another faith," she says.

In early December 2018, Nasrallah's father, a former state clerk, died, leaving behind a four-story apartment building in a Cairo low-income neighborhood and a bank deposit. When she and her brothers filed their request for inheritance at a local court, Nasrallah invoked a church-sanctioned Coptic bylaw that calls for equal distribution of inheritance. She says she was encouraged by a 2016 ruling that a Cairo court handed down in favor of a Coptic woman who challenged Islamic inheritance laws.

Nasrallah's brothers also testified that they would like their father's inheritance to be divided fairly between them, but the court has twice ignored their testimony.

Many Coptic men prefer to benefit from the Islamic laws, Nasrallah said, using the excuse that it's out of their hands.

“The issue of inheritance goes beyond religious rules. It has to do with the nature of the society we are living in and Egypt’s misogynistic judicial system,” said Hind Ahmed Zaki, a political science assistant professor with Connecticut University.

She says the state fears that if they grant equal property rights to Christian women, Muslim women will soon ask for the same.

Girgis Bebawy, a Coptic lawyer, has represented dozens of Copts in similar cases over the last two years, though he has yet to win a single one. He's hoping that the latest case, which is currently before Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court, could end differently.

"It's religious intolerance," he says.

Many Coptic families decide to settle inheritance matters outside the legal system, but Nasrallah says that as a lawyer, she hopes her case could set a precedent for others.

"If I didn’t take it to court, who would?" she said.

source : https://news.yahoo.com/egyptian-woman-fights-unequal-islamic-121431819.html

BEIJING (AP) - Asian stocks sank Wednesday after President Donald Trump threatened more tariff hikes on Chinese imports if talks aimed at ending a trade war fail to produce an interim agreement.

Market benchmarks in Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia all declined.

Trump said Tuesday agreement on the “Phase 1” deal announced last month “could happen soon.” But he waed he was ready to raise tariffs “very substantially” if that fails.

The two sides disagree publicly about whether Washington agreed to roll back some punitive tariffs imposed in the fight over Beijing’s trade surplus and technology ambitions. The Chinese govement said last week that was settled, but Trump denied that.

Trump’s Idea “served as a reminder of the challenge that the two sides face,” said Jingyi Pan of IG in a report. However, she said, investors saw them as “positioning statements,” reducing their impact.

Trump’s Idea did little to jolt Wall Street, which closed with modest gains.

The Shanghai Composite Index lost 0.4% to 2,905.06 and Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 sank 0.9% to 23,3154.90. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng tumbled 2% to 26,511.11.

South Korea’s Kospi retreated 0.9% to 2,123.74 and Australia’s S&P-ASX; 200 sank 0.8% lower at 6,698.30. India’s Sensex opened down 25 points at 40,319.59. Taiwan, New Zealand and Singapore also declined.

Hong Kong shares have been jolted by growing violence in the anti-govement protests. Police shot a protester in a scuffle Monday and a man who was defending China in an apparent argument was set on fire. Activists also this week have damaged trains and transit stations while clashing with police using tear gas and other crowd control measures.

The protests began in June over an extradition bill that was subsequently withdrawn, but the movement expanded to demands for greater democracy, police accountability and other grievances. The protests, the U.S.-China tariff war and economic factors have sent Hong Kong tumbling into its first recession in a decade.

On Wall Street, the benchmark S&P; 500 index rose past the 3,100 level for the first time, but the gains 

source : washingtontimes

Mexico granted asylum to Bolivia's former President Evo Morales on Monday as unrest shook the South American nation, helping cement the Mexican govement's emerging role as a bastion of diplomatic support for left-wing leaders in Latin America.

Mexico's Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said Morales' life was in danger, and the decision to grant him asylum was in Mexico's long tradition of sheltering exiles.

Morales' govement collapsed on Sunday after ruling party allies quit and the army urged him to step down in the wake of a disputed election, adding to a sense of crisis in Latin America, which has been hit by weeks of protests and unrest.

Looting and roadblocks convulsed Bolivia after Morales stepped down. He said “violent groups” attacked his house. His exact whereabouts were unknown, though it was believed he had left in the presidential plane for his stronghold of Chapare province.

“His life and integrity is at risk,” Ebrard told reporters. “We will immediately proceed to inform Bolivia's foreign ministry that under inteational law, it should offer safe conduct.” 

Mexico has informed the Organisation of American States, and will inform the United Nations, he added. The Washington-based OAS delivered a report on Sunday citing serious irregularities during Bolivia's October vote.

The departure of Bolivia's first indigenous president, one of a wave of leftists who dominated Latin America's politics at the start of the century, comes amid a widespread rejection of incumbent leaders from either side of the political divide in the region, from Mexico to Brazil and Argentina.

Mexico elected its first left-leaning govement in decades last year, moving closer to like-minded govements and distancing itself from diplomatic initiatives aimed at pushing socialist president Nicolas Maduro from power in Venezuela.

Argentina last month elected a left-leaning leader, as voters rejected economic policies aimed at stabilising the economy but that deepened poverty and inflation.

The resignation of Morales, who goveed for 14 years, followed protests in Ecuador and Chile that forced their govements to step back from policies raising fuel and transport prices.

Ebrard said earlier on Monday his govement viewed Sunday's events in Bolivia as a “coup” because the military broke with the constitutional order by pressing Morales to resign

source : independent

BERLIN (AP) - The U.S. Embassy in Berlin unveiled a statue of Ronald Reagan on Friday at a site overlooking the location of the former president's iconic speech imploring the Soviet Union to remove the Berlin Wall.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the inauguration of the work a "monumental moment" before helping remove the cover from the larger-than-life statue on the Embassy's terrace, at eye-level with the top of the landmark Brandenburg Gate.

Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Pompeo was winding up a two-day trip to multiple cities and towns for commemorations.

The gate, which was just on the East German side of the Wall, was the backdrop for Reagan's 1987 speech in which he challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to go further with the reforms he was instituting.

Reagan implored him: "If you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

Pompeo praised Reagan for his bold defense of freedom, telling a gathering of politicians, diplomats, donors, and others that the former president "courageously denounced the greatest threat to that freedom, the Soviet Empire, the Evil Empire."

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas drew domestic and inteational flak recently for failing to mention Reagan - or any other American - in an op-ed published in 26 European newspapers focused on the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of communism.

"Dear Minister Maas, on behalf of the late President Reagan, whom you don't mention, and the millions of American Soldiers who served in West Germany along with your other NATO Allies, you're welcome," former U.S. Army Europe commander, retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, wrote on Twitter.

Maas sought to defuse the criticism Thursday at an event with Pompeo, saying "we owe you our freedom and unity to a decisive degree," while singling out contributions from Reagan and former President George H.W. Bush.

U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell earlier this year opened a multimedia exhibit on the same terrace focusing on Reagan's Brandenburg Gate speech, and said the statue was a tribute to a president whose "willingness to defend people seeking greater freedom around the world remains an inspiration today to Germans, Americans and every human being."

"As a Califoian, I'm personally proud to have our former goveor and president of the United States standing atop the Embassy, reminding visitors of America's commitment to democracy and freedom," he told The Associated Press.

Several American presidents visited Berlin during the Cold War to express their solidarity with those in the democratic West of the city that was divided by the Wall from Aug. 13, 1961, to Nov. 9, 1989.

Perhaps the best-known speech delivered by an American president came in 1963 when John F. Kennedy appeared at West Berlin's city hall.

He told the thousands gathered: "All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'"

Today a plaque marks that location and the square have been renamed "John F. Kennedy Platz."

The site of the Reagan speech is marked with an information sign. The lawmaker who heads the state committee in charge of memorials in Berlin, Sabine Bangert, rejected the suggestion that Reagan had somehow been given short shrift.

"The contributions of U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan to Berlin as well as to German unity are well known in Berlin," she told the AP.

"Kennedy's ... 'Ich bin ein Berliner' speech and Ronald Reagan's memorable Berlin sentence from 1987, 'Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall,' as well as Barack Obama's speech at the Brandenburg Gate in 2016, are in all of our memories."

source : cbn

One firefighter was injured fighting a brush fire that consumed 34 acres in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles Saturday night before crews stopped the still-active fire's forward progress.

The fire, referred to as the Barham Fire by the Los Angeles Fire Department, could be seen from Universal Studios and Waer Bros. Studios and sent smoke billowing near the iconic Hollywood sign. LAFD reported no civilian injuries or structure damage. No structures were threatened as of about 6:30 p.m. Saturday, according to a LAFD release.

The injured firefighter is being taken to an area hospital; the injury is not life-threatening, a LAFD release says.

The forward progress of the fire was stopped around 5 p.m., according to a LAFD release.

The Waer Bros. Studio lot in Burbank was evacuated Saturday due to the fire, CNN reports.

The fire was 15% contained, LAFD reported at about 6:30 p.m. Saturday.

More than 200 fire personnel, five helicopters and two aircraft were used to fight the fire, according to a Saturday evening tweet from Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti.

source : https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/09/barham-fire-near-hollywood-hills/2549725001/

With a chip that can track your every move, New York’s city-issued ID cards are about to take a seriously dystopian tu.

More than a million New Yorkers could soon willingly agree to carry a govement-issued tracking device, whether they realize it or not.

That’s the proposal from Mayor Bill de Blasio, who having recently retued from the cofield-dotted campaign trail in Iowa, is setting his sights on transforming New York City into something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel. But some critics are urging caution about the move.

The fuss is about a tiny RFID chip that the mayor wants to embed into each and every municipal ID card for New York residents as part of the “IDNYC” program.

The latest proposal might seem modest, but the reality is that it potentially puts hundreds of thousands of us at greater risk of identity theft, stalking, and (for undocumented New Yorkers) deportation. And sadly it’s part of the global trend towards so-called “smart cities”—a series of high-tech undertakings that claim to improve municipal efficiency at the modest price of stripping us of our privacy and autonomy.

It’d be a dubious trade-off if the technology delivered, but increasingly we see that these systems take more than we feared while delivering far less than we were promised.

Smart cities proponents claim that by integrating the inteet of things, artificial intelligence, and networks of sensors that we can make our children smarter, our commutes faster, and even save lives. The outlandish claims don’t end there. Smart cities are heralded as the solution to everything from the opioid crisis to de facto school segregation. Perhaps the most outlandish claim yet is that knock-off RoboCops will even prevent crimes before they even happen.

The movement is only in its infancy, but smart city programs already include every municipal service from schools, to hospitals, to sanitation, to law enforcement. And those outside major cities aren’t exempt either. Increasingly, towns big and small are being taken in by the promise of a data-driven society.

MORE DATA, MORE PROBLEMS

The privacy risk is hard to overstate. Govement agencies will have increasing amounts of extremely sensitive data about our health, our children’s school performance, and where we spend our free time. Go to the bar? The smart city knows. Go to a protest? It probably knows that too. And so will anyone who hacks in.

Hacking isn’t some theoretical risk, it’s already happened. As early as 2014, security researchers starting raising the alarm that critical city systems were unencrypted and completely vulnerable to attack.  That same year, the Department of Homeland Security admitted that hackers had broken into a public utility by simply guessing the password.

More recently, we’ve seen entire cities held hostage by hackers. Both Baltimore and Atlantasaw large swaths of their govements grind to a halt when attackers used ransomware to encrypt govement computer systems, demanding a large payment in exchange for the key. Residents lost access to everything from online bill payments, to deed transfers and even court scheduling. In the case of Baltimore, not only was the city out of action for weeks by the attack, but crucial data was permanently lost.

Disturbingly for those whose health and financial data is held in these systems, hackers can just as easily post what they find in public. As The Wall Street Joual recently noted: “The more connected a city is, the more vulnerable it is to cyberattacks.” Even with the best security protections, cities can’t eliminate the threat—not as long as we continue to collect the data.

Sadly, for many smart city projects, privacy protections are not just an unwanted expense, but an existential threat. After all, even though these systems are sold with the promise of promoting govement efficiency, the true product is often the public itself and all our data. Ventures like Firefly and LinkNYC use public location data to do what so many tech ventures have done: better target their ads. Smart cities create a captive, highly segmented audience ready to be told what they need to buy.

But the dangers don’t end with the exploitation of surveillance capitalism. As these systems are increasingly integrated into city services, we run the risk of automating age-old biases and further discriminating against marginalized communities. Some of the most visible examples to date have stemmed from the use of racially-biased facial recognition in law enforcement and racially or socioeconomically biased algorithms in child risk assessments. The risks likely go even further than what we can imagine now.

Rather than accept the New York’s new chip proposal, advocates are speaking out, and now the New York City Council is considering a bill that would outlaw this type of feature. If the bill passes, it will be a milestone in the backlash against smart cities and a clear signal we need to slow down and think more clearly about implementation before accidentally rushing into a dystopian future we can’t come back from.

source : patriotrising