Tensions are growing outside the Hong Kong government headquarters, known as the Legislative Council (LegCo), where protesters have smashed multiple windows and torn down barriers, so far without any reaction from police.
Several thousand protesters are packed into the demonstration zone outside LegCo’s public entrances, wearing helmets and masks. Their arms are wrapped in cling film to protect them from pepper spray.
There is little to no leadership and only spontaneous coordination. That's led to confusion about how and when protesters should break in to LegCo ... and what they’ll do even if they can get inside.
The protesters are all very young and very aware of the risks they are taking, hiding their faces and blocking reporters from taking photos. Some have even demand that images be deleted if they fear someone has been compromised.
As the sun starts to go down here, the feeling is that we’re headed for an ugly, violent night.
Police patience cannot last forever and official statements suggests it’s almost run out. Protesters, meanwhile, are determined to stay on, even if that means fighting.
Tensions are growing outside the Hong Kong government headquarters, known as the Legislative Council (LegCo), where protesters have smashed multiple windows and torn down barriers, so far without any reaction from police.
Several thousand protesters are packed into the demonstration zone outside LegCo’s public entrances, wearing helmets and masks. Their arms are wrapped in cling film to protect them from pepper spray.
There is little to no leadership and only spontaneous coordination. That's led to confusion about how and when protesters should break in to LegCo ... and what they’ll do even if they can get inside.
The protesters are all very young and very aware of the risks they are taking, hiding their faces and blocking reporters from taking photos. Some have even demand that images be deleted if they fear someone has been compromised.
As the sun starts to go down here, the feeling is that we’re headed for an ugly, violent night.
Police patience cannot last forever and official statements suggests it’s almost run out. Protesters, meanwhile, are determined to stay on, even if that means fighting.
WASHINGTON — Iran has exceeded a key limitation on how much nuclear fuel it can possess under the 2015 international pact curbing its nuclear program, effectively declaring that it would no longer respect an agreement that President Trump abandoned more than a year ago, state media reported on Monday.
The breach of the limitation, which restricted Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium to about 660 pounds, does not by itself give the country enough to produce a nuclear weapon. But it signals that Iran may be willing to abandon the limits and restore the far larger stockpile that took the United States and five other nations years to persuade Tehran to send abroad.
The developments were first reported by the semiofficial Fars news agency, citing an “informed source.” Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister of Iran, was later quoted confirming the news, according to another semiofficial outlet, the Iranian Students’ New Agency, or ISNA.
The report from Fars said that representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency determined last week that Iran had passed the threshold, but a spokesman for the agency said on Monday that inspectors were “on the ground” and would “report to headquarters” once the stockpile had been verified.
It was unclear how much the action would escalate the tensions between Washington and Tehran after the downing of an American surveillance drone in June nearly resulted in military strikes.
But it returns the focus to Iran’s two-decade pursuit of technology that could produce a nuclear weapon — exactly where it was before President Barack Obama and President Hassan Rouhani of Iran struck their deal four years ago.
While the Trump administration had no immediate reaction to the announcement, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last month that the United States would never allow Iran to get within one year of possessing enough fuel to produce a nuclear weapon. His special envoy for Iran, Brian H. Hook, has often said that under a new deal, the United States would insist on “zero enrichment for Iran.”
Iran has so far rejected beginning any negotiation, saying that the United States must first return to the 2015 agreement and comply with all of its terms.
“Now the inevitable escalation cycle seems well underway,” Philip H. Gordon, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Obama administration national security official, wrote in an article this spring for Foreign Affairs magazine shortly after Mr. Rouhani telegraphed that he intended to walk away from the deal’s restrictions. Iran was on a “slippery slope” to fully pulling out of the agreement, Mr. Gordon added.
On June 28, after meeting in Vienna with European officials who had promised to set up a barter system with Iran to compensate for the effects of American sanctions that Britain, France and Germany say are unwise, Iranian officials said the effort was insufficient. Mr. Hook has estimated the sanctions have cost Iran $50 billion in lost oil sales, far more than the system the Europeans are putting in place would generate.
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Advocates of the Iran deal, including former members of the Obama administration, say President Trump pushed Tehran to violate a key part of it.CreditGabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
As they left the meeting, Iranian officials hinted that the breaking of the limit would go forward, though it could just as easily be reversed in the future.
For now, however, Iran seems on a pathway to step-by-step dissolution of key parts of the accord. Mr. Rouhani has said that Iran will begin raising the level of uranium enrichment this month.
It is possible that exceeding the stockpile limit is largely a negotiating tactic, a way for Tehran to impose costs on Washington after enduring more than a year of sanctions. But the move is risky. Mr. Rouhani and his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who negotiated the deal with the secretary of state at the time, John Kerry, are betting that the Europeans will declare that Mr. Trump, not Iran, is responsible for the collapse of the nuclear accord.
That may prove the case. European officials, in their most vivid split from Mr. Trump, are scrambling to preserve the agreement, fearful that if it falls apart, the United States and Iran could be headed toward military conflict — and perhaps war.
But a section of the pact allows the Europeans to invoke a so-called snapback of sanctions if Iran violates the terms. The Iranians say they are within their rights because the reimposition of sanctions last year by the United States gave them the grounds to halt their commitments, as well.
For advocates of the 2015 deal, like former members of the Obama administration, Mr. Trump pushed Iran into the announcement. Among the recently imposed sanctions was one that threatened action against any country that bought low-enriched uranium from Tehran. To comply with the stockpile limits, Iran shipped low-enriched uranium to Russia in return for natural uranium. With that exchange now barred, it was only a matter of time before Iran exceeded the limits.
Even before the announcement, the Pentagon and the nation’s intelligence agencies — led by the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency — were beginning to review what steps to take if the president determined that Iran was getting too close to producing a bomb.
A decade ago, the Obama administration conducted a highly classified cyberattack, code-named Olympic Games, at the Natanz enrichment site. The breach neutralized Iran’s centrifuges, which spin at supersonic speeds to enrich uranium, and destroyed about 1,000 of the 5,000 machines then in operation. But after two years, Iran rebounded, and when the nuclear accord came into effect, it had more than 17,000 centrifuges, most of which were dismantled under the agreement.
If the United States targets Iran’s uranium enrichment operations, experts say, it is likely to take aim again at the Natanz site. But this time, the Iranians appear far better prepared. Other major nuclear sites, including the primary production facility for converting raw uranium to a gas form, and factories that produce next-generation centrifuges, are also likely targets, according to former officials.
In the weeks before the announcement, Saudi Arabia’s state news media has called for “surgical strikes” against Iran, as has Senator Tom Cotton, who pressed for military action after the downing of the drone. Mr. Trump initially agreed, then pulled back.
But any operation against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, either with conventional arms or cyberweapons, would be highly risky. And some administration officials warn that acting now would be premature. Even if Iran possesses 800 or 900 kilograms of uranium, it would be insufficient for a single bomb. That threshold is not likely to be crossed until later this summer.
“If there is conflict, if there is war, if there is a kinetic activity, it will be because the Iranians made that choice,” Mr. Pompeo said last week during a visit to New Delhi. “I hope that they do not.”
HONG KONG — A small group of protesters smashed out the bottom of a floor-to-ceiling window at Hong Kong’s legislature Monday as a crowd of thousands marched through the city demanding democracy on the 22nd anniversary of the former British colony’s return to China.
The protesters repeatedly rammed a cargo cart and large poles into the glass panel. After the cart got wedged into the damaged window pane, police inside grabbed it and repelled the protesters with pepper spray. Officers lined up with riot shields on the other side of the broken window to prevent anyone from entering.
The clash prompted organizers to change the endpoint of the protest march from the legislature to a nearby park, after police asked them to either call it off or change the route. Police wanted the march to end earlier in the Wan Chai district, but organizers said that would leave out many people who planned to join the march along the way.
The protesters are opposed to a government attempt to change extradition laws to allow suspects to be sent to China to face trial. The proposed legislation, on which debate has been suspended indefinitely, increased fears of eroding freedoms in the territory, which Britain returned to China on July 1, 1997.
Protesters want the bills formally withdrawn and Hong Kong’s embattled leader, Carrie Lam, to resign.
Lam, who has come under withering criticism for trying to push the legislation through, pledged to be more responsive to public sentiment.
In an address after a flag-raising ceremony marking the anniversary of the handover, she said a series of protests in recent weeks and two marches that attracted hundreds of thousands of participants have taught her that she needs to listen better to youth and people in general.
“This has made me fully realize that I, as a politician, have to remind myself all the time of the need to grasp public sentiments accurately,” she told the gathering in the city’s cavernous convention center.
She insisted her government has good intentions, but said “I will learn the lesson and ensure that the government’s future work will be closer and more responsive to the aspirations, sentiments and opinions of the community.”
Security guards pushed pro-democracy lawmaker Helena Wong out of the room as she shouted at Lam to resign and withdraw the “evil” legislation. She later told reporters she was voicing the grievances and opinions of the protesters, who could not get into the event.
The annual July 1 march is expected to be larger than usual because of the extradition bill controversy, which has awakened broader concerns that China is chipping away at the rights guaranteed to Hong Kong for 50 years under a “one country, two systems” framework. The two marches in June drew more than a million people, according to organizer estimates.
Police officers with shields and rifle stand guard inside the Legislative Council after protesters try to break into in Hong Kong.AP
Jimmy Sham, a leader of the pro-democracy group that organized the march, told the crowd that Lam had not responded to their demands because she is not democratically elected. The leader of Hong Kong is chosen by a committee dominated by pro-China elites.
“We know that Carrie Lam can be so arrogant,” Sham said, rallying the crowd under a blazing sun before the start of the march at Victoria Park. “She is protected by our flawed system.”
The protesters are also demanding an independent inquiry into police actions during a June 12 protest, when officers used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse a demonstration that blocked the legislature on the day that debate on the bill had been scheduled to resume.
The police say the use of force was justified, but since then have largely adopted softer tactics, even as protesters besieged police headquarters in recent days, pelting it with eggs and spray-painting slogans on its outer walls.
The area around Golden Bauhinia Square, where the flag-raising ceremony took place, was blocked off from Saturday to prevent protesters from gathering to disrupt it. Before the morning ceremony, protesters trying to force their way to the square were driven back by officers with plastic shields and batons, the retreating protesters pointing open umbrellas to ward off pepper spray.
“We are horrified, this is our obligation to do this, we are protecting our home,” said Jack, a 26-year-old office worker who would only give his first name. “I don’t know why the government is harming us. It’s harming the rule of law, the rule of law is the last firewall between us and the Chinese Communist Party.”
KABUL, Afghanistan — A complex attack including a car-bombing and militant assault killed at least 40 people in Kabul on Monday, badly damaging a private war museum and adjoining television station, officials said.
The attack came as American and Taliban negotiators were to meet for a second day in Qatar amid hopes for a deal on an American troop withdrawal. But the pace of violence in the 18-year Afghan war has only picked up, with each side increasing attacks.
A senior Kabul defense official put the death toll at six security force members, with another 20 of them wounded, and 34 civilians, with at least 63 civilians wounded. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. There were reports that children were among the victims, but it was unclear whether they had been visiting the museum, or were hurt in a nearby school that collapsed from the force of the explosion, which was heard throughout Kabul.
Officials said that attackers were still holed up in a nearby ministry of defense building that they had run to after the bomb explosions.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a Twitter message on the account of the Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, and said that a logistics and engineering unit of the ministry of defense was the intended target.
“According to some reports, some civilians slightly have been wounded,” the spokesman said. “But civilians were not the target.”
Image
An injured man being brought to a hospital.CreditMohammad Ismail/Reuters
Nasrat Rahimi, the spokesman for the interior ministry, said that a car bomb detonated near the museum and television complex, after which attackers entered a defense ministry building, where they were fighting with security forces who had surrounded them.
There were unconfirmed reports that journalists were among the victims, as well as reports that the actual target was a government facility nearby. The Taliban have recently threatened Afghan journalists; in a statement a week ago that drew widespread condemnation, the insurgents said journalists who did not stop publishing what they considered anti-Taliban propaganda would be considered legitimate targets.
But the centerpiece of its displays are the many anti-personnel and other mines planted through the country, which has more mines than anywhere else in the world, and which has lost 30,000 civilians to mines since 1989. Schoolchildren tour the museum, which in the past has received funding from the United States government, to educate them about the dangers of handling mines and explosive projectiles.
Fazel Rahim, the director of the museum, said Monday’s bombing had damaged the television station, which was also attacked by Islamic State gunmen in 2017.
“The poor Shamshad TV was destroyed again,” he said. “Some colleagues are wounded. I got out. The situation is bad.”
Image
Students visiting the Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation museum in Kabul last month.CreditJim Huylebroek for The New York Times
But Abid Ihsas, the news manager for Shamshad TV, said the station had been forced off the air by the blast but resumed broadcasting within 13 minutes.
At the museum, the largely outdoor exhibit houses British rifles, American cluster bomblets, Italian and Egyptian land mines, rusted artillery pieces, and dilapidated Soviet jet fighters in a cement-walled compound ringed by sandbags, barbed wire and a machine gun-mounted guard tower.
Almost all of the exhibits inside are painted with three letters “FFE,” or Free From Explosives.
The museum, opened in 2004 after the Taliban were run out of the capital three years earlier, gets around 1,000 visitors a year, but its contents hark back to an earlier period in Afghanistan’s long history of war. They include artifacts from the Soviet-led invasion and the brutal civil war that followed.
Glaringly absent from the displays are weapons and equipment from the American-led occupation since 2001 except for a few remnants of clusters bombs that were dropped in the early months of the war. (This is largely because the State Department has subsidized OMAR, spending $400 million since 2001 helping rebuild the museum and funding other demining programs across the country).
The United States military dropped roughly 1,228 cluster bombs in Afghanistan between October 2001 and March 2002, according to a Human Rights Watch report from December 2002. At least 60 civilians have been killed, along with the two de-miners, by the unexploded ordnance left behind.
A small glass case filled with the American munitions is what evidence remains, wedged near an Italian plastic anti-tank mine and some Russian rocket-propelled grenades.
Image
An empty FIM-92 Stinger case alongside mortars, a pressure-cooker explosive and suicide vest materials at the museum.CreditJim Huylebroek for The New York Times
What isn’t in the museum is spread out across roughly 1,000 square miles of the country: anti-personnel mines, anti-tank mines, explosive remnants of war and booby traps, according to a recent quarterly report by the Mine Action Program of Afghanistan.
Since 1989, more than 30,000 civilians have been wounded or killed by the explosive remains and de-miners have cleared nearly 1,800 miles of the country. That means Afghanistan won’t be cleared of buried explosives for decades.
“We are deminers. We are not talking about political issues, we’re showing what’s happening in Afghanistan,” Mr. Rahim said about the museum in an interview in late May.
And that’s also to stop more people from dying.
That’s why there is an aging YAK-40 Soviet airliner affixed to the museum’s roof. It serves as an ad hoc classroom, with airline seats plastered with the OMAR logo and a flat-screen TV.
Around 100 students, mostly children, sit in those seats a month, where they’re taught the dangers of unexploded munitions. What they look like. Not to touch them. Not to play with them. And what happens if you do. According to the mine action report, 161 boys and girls were wounded or killed by such devices between January and March 2019.
Menro, a 13-year-old in the sixth grade at Qahraman High School in Kabul, along with 34 other students, sat in the fuselage of the defunct jet on a recent simmering day in June. She had seen buried explosives in her village, read about them in books, but now she saw them, harmless, through a glass case.
“Now I have a clear picture of mines in my head,” she said. “I will talk about mines to my friends. I want them to know how dangerous mines are.”
KABUL, Afghanistan — A complex attack including a car-bombing and militant assault killed at least 40 people in Kabul on Monday, badly damaging a private war museum and adjoining television station, officials said.
The attack came as American and Taliban negotiators were to meet for a second day in Qatar amid hopes for a deal on an American troop withdrawal. But the pace of violence in the 18-year Afghan war has only picked up, with each side increasing attacks.
A senior Kabul defense official put the death toll at six security force members, with another 20 of them wounded, and 34 civilians, with at least 63 civilians wounded. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. There were reports that children were among the victims, but it was unclear whether they had been visiting the museum, or were hurt in a nearby school that collapsed from the force of the explosion, which was heard throughout Kabul.
Officials said that attackers were still holed up in a nearby ministry of defense building that they had run to after the bomb explosions.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a Twitter message on the account of the Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, and said that a logistics and engineering unit of the ministry of defense was the intended target.
“According to some reports, some civilians slightly have been wounded,” the spokesman said. “But civilians were not the target.”
Image
An injured man being brought to a hospital.CreditMohammad Ismail/Reuters
Nasrat Rahimi, the spokesman for the interior ministry, said that a car bomb detonated near the museum and television complex, after which attackers entered a defense ministry building, where they were fighting with security forces who had surrounded them.
There were unconfirmed reports that journalists were among the victims, as well as reports that the actual target was a government facility nearby. The Taliban have recently threatened Afghan journalists; in a statement a week ago that drew widespread condemnation, the insurgents said journalists who did not stop publishing what they considered anti-Taliban propaganda would be considered legitimate targets.
But the centerpiece of its displays are the many anti-personnel and other mines planted through the country, which has more mines than anywhere else in the world, and which has lost 30,000 civilians to mines since 1989. Schoolchildren tour the museum, which in the past has received funding from the United States government, to educate them about the dangers of handling mines and explosive projectiles.
Fazel Rahim, the director of the museum, said Monday’s bombing had damaged the television station, which was also attacked by Islamic State gunmen in 2017.
“The poor Shamshad TV was destroyed again,” he said. “Some colleagues are wounded. I got out. The situation is bad.”
Image
Students visiting the Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation museum in Kabul last month.CreditJim Huylebroek for The New York Times
But Abid Ihsas, the news manager for Shamshad TV, said the station had been forced off the air by the blast but resumed broadcasting within 13 minutes.
At the museum, the largely outdoor exhibit houses British rifles, American cluster bomblets, Italian and Egyptian land mines, rusted artillery pieces, and dilapidated Soviet jet fighters in a cement-walled compound ringed by sandbags, barbed wire and a machine gun-mounted guard tower.
Almost all of the exhibits inside are painted with three letters “FFE,” or Free From Explosives.
The museum, opened in 2004 after the Taliban were run out of the capital three years earlier, gets around 1,000 visitors a year, but its contents hark back to an earlier period in Afghanistan’s long history of war. They include artifacts from the Soviet-led invasion and the brutal civil war that followed.
Glaringly absent from the displays are weapons and equipment from the American-led occupation since 2001 except for a few remnants of clusters bombs that were dropped in the early months of the war. (This is largely because the State Department has subsidized OMAR, spending $400 million since 2001 helping rebuild the museum and funding other demining programs across the country).
The United States military dropped roughly 1,228 cluster bombs in Afghanistan between October 2001 and March 2002, according to a Human Rights Watch report from December 2002. At least 60 civilians have been killed, along with the two de-miners, by the unexploded ordnance left behind.
A small glass case filled with the American munitions is what evidence remains, wedged near an Italian plastic anti-tank mine and some Russian rocket-propelled grenades.
Image
An empty FIM-92 Stinger case alongside mortars, a pressure-cooker explosive and suicide vest materials at the museum.CreditJim Huylebroek for The New York Times
What isn’t in the museum is spread out across roughly 1,000 square miles of the country: anti-personnel mines, anti-tank mines, explosive remnants of war and booby traps, according to a recent quarterly report by the Mine Action Program of Afghanistan.
Since 1989, more than 30,000 civilians have been wounded or killed by the explosive remains and de-miners have cleared nearly 1,800 miles of the country. That means Afghanistan won’t be cleared of buried explosives for decades.
“We are deminers. We are not talking about political issues, we’re showing what’s happening in Afghanistan,” Mr. Rahim said about the museum in an interview in late May.
And that’s also to stop more people from dying.
That’s why there is an aging YAK-40 Soviet airliner affixed to the museum’s roof. It serves as an ad hoc classroom, with airline seats plastered with the OMAR logo and a flat-screen TV.
Around 100 students, mostly children, sit in those seats a month, where they’re taught the dangers of unexploded munitions. What they look like. Not to touch them. Not to play with them. And what happens if you do. According to the mine action report, 161 boys and girls were wounded or killed by such devices between January and March 2019.
Menro, a 13-year-old in the sixth grade at Qahraman High School in Kabul, along with 34 other students, sat in the fuselage of the defunct jet on a recent simmering day in June. She had seen buried explosives in her village, read about them in books, but now she saw them, harmless, through a glass case.
“Now I have a clear picture of mines in my head,” she said. “I will talk about mines to my friends. I want them to know how dangerous mines are.”
