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Sabtu, 11 Januari 2020

Puerto Rico earthquake - magnitude 6.0 earthquake hits 8 miles south of Indios, United States Geological Survey says today - live updates - CBS News

A magnitude 6.0 earthquake shook Puerto Rico on Saturday, causing further damage along the island's southern coast where previous recent quakes have toppled homes and schools. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake hit 8 miles south of Indios at a shallow depth of 6 miles.

There were no immediate reports of the extent of damage or injury.

It was the strongest shake yet since a magnitude 6.4 quake struck before dawn on Tuesday, knocking out power across the island and leaving many without water. In the southwestern part of the island, that quake knocked some homes right off their foundations.

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More than 2,000 people remained in shelters as of Saturday, many fearful of returning to their homes, and others unable to because of extensive damage.

Since December 28, there have been nearly 2,000 earthquakes in Puerto Rico, 60 of which were felt.

PUERTORICO-QUAKE — A Puerto Rican flag waves on top of a pile of rubble as debris is removed from a main road in Guanica, Puerto Rico on January 8, 2020, one day after an earthquake. RICARDO ARDUENGO/AFP via Getty Images

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2020-01-11 13:46:00Z
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In Blow to Beijing, Taiwan Re-elects Tsai Ing-wen as President - The New York Times

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taiwan’s voters delivered a stinging rebuke of China’s rising authoritarianism on Saturday by re-electing President Tsai Ing-wen, who vowed to preserve the island’s sovereignty in the face of Beijing’s intensifying efforts to bring it under its control.

Ms. Tsai’s victory highlighted how successfully her campaign had tapped into an electorate that is increasingly wary of China’s intentions. It also found momentum from months of protests in Hong Kong against Beijing’s encroachment on the semiautonomous Chinese territory’s freedoms.

For China’s ruling Communist Party, the outcome is a dramatic display of the power of Hong Kong’s antigovernment protest movement to influence attitudes toward the mainland in other regions the party deems critical to its interests.

China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, has warned Taiwan that unification between the sides was inevitable. His party has sought to court Taiwanese with opportunities to work in the mainland while isolating Ms. Tsai’s administration and said that China would use force, if necessary, to prevent the island from taking steps toward formal independence.

The vote, which was a reversal of Ms. Tsai’s political fortunes, suggested that Beijing’s pressure campaign had backfired. It could widen the political and cultural gulf across the Taiwan Strait and might raise the specter of armed conflict, which could have implications for the United States.

In her victory speech, Ms. Tsai called for unity as she pledged to work to defend the island’s sovereignty and improve the economy.

“With each presidential election, Taiwan is showing the world how much we cherish our democratic way of life,” she said at a news conference in Taipei. “We must work to keep our country safe and defend our sovereignty.”

The vote drew a large turnout including thousands who flew home from abroad. Lines of voters snaked through schools and other public spaces. Willie Yu, 23, who cast his ballot at the Taipei Municipal Jinhua Junior High School, said he had come out to vote because “I hope Taiwan can preserve its democracy and freedom.”

Ms. Tsai’s main opponent, Han Kuo-yu, a populist mayor, conceded defeat on Saturday evening, saying he had called Ms. Tsai to congratulate her on her re-election.

“I can only say that I didn’t work hard enough to live up to everyone’s expectations,” he told his supporters.

During his campaign, Mr. Han had pledged to restore closer relations with the mainland but then found himself on the defensive because of China’s increasingly authoritarian actions. Ms. Tsai and her supporters had cited the Hong Kong protests as an ominous example of what unification on the Communist Party’s terms would portend for Taiwan’s young and vibrant, if messy at times, democratic society.

“Taiwan must be Taiwan,” Hiro Huang, a 30-year-old filmmaker, said this past week at a rally for Ms. Tsai and her party, the Democratic Progress Party. He cited national security and the protection of Taiwan’s sovereignty as the principal reasons for his vote for Ms. Tsai.

“After all, we are completely different from the system on the other side,” he added.

That much was clear in the campaign, in which the candidates offered divergent visions of Taiwan’s economic and political path and contested them openly in ways that would be unthinkable in today’s China, where the party cracks down on dissent.

Ms. Tsai defeated Mr. Han and a third candidate, James Soong. She exceeded her vote total from four years ago, surpassing eight million votes, the most garnered by any candidate since direct presidential elections began in 1996, according to unofficial results.

The victory completed a remarkable comeback for Ms. Tsai, who only a year ago appeared to have little chance of winning. The election underscored support for a distinct Taiwanese identity and the extent to which public sentiment had drifted further from the idea of a single, unified China.

China’s efforts to intimidate Taiwan allowed her to portray herself as a defender of the island’s democracy and sovereignty. In the months leading up to the vote, officials warned that China was trying to sway the outcome with online disinformation campaigns. A would-be defector detailed what he claimed were covert efforts by Chinese military intelligence to manipulate the outcome of elections in Taiwan.

Taiwan became the Republic of China after the national Kuomintang forces of Chiang Kai-shek retreated to the island following the Communist revolution in 1949. It has never been part of the People’s Republic of China, and since its transition to democracy following decades of martial law, it has developed a distinct identity that makes unification with China seem more unlikely than ever — despite Mr. Xi’s efforts to encourage it.

Mr. Xi has said that Taiwan could join the People’s Republic and still preserve its political and social freedoms under the “one country, two systems” political formula that governs Hong Kong and Macau, former colonies that returned to Chinese rule in the 1990s. Ms. Tsai has rejected the proposal.

“Young people in Hong Kong have used their lives and blood and tears to show us that ‘one country, two systems’ is not possible,” Ms. Tsai said at a large rally in Taipei on Friday night. “Tomorrow it’s the turn of our young people in Taiwan to show them that the values of democracy and freedom will overcome all difficulties.”

China’s efforts to isolate Ms. Tsai’s administration and to punish the island economically — by, forbidding tourist travel by Chinese citizens this year, for example — failed to deliver the desired outcome. Ms. Tsai’s government has presided over an improving economy, with the lowest unemployment rate in two decades (3.8 percent on average) and rising wages. She also lured manufacturers back from overseas, which might be a benefit of the trade war between the United States and China.

The question now is whether China will change its tactics, reaching out at last to Ms. Tsai’s administration or, as some hawkish voices in Beijing have suggested, turning to more forceful actions.

“Xi Jinping will be under enormous pressure at home for failing the ‘one country, two system’ model,” said Su Chi, a former legislator and government minister for the Kuomintang who served as an adviser to Mr. Han’s campaign.

He warned that Mr. Xi’s government could very likely take steps to halt what officials there view as Taiwan’s further drift away from the possibility of unification. “Short of military conflict, short of an invasion,” he said, “it will take punitive actions to teach Taiwan a lesson.”

The potential for military conflict has always hovered over the relationship. At a conference in Beijing last month, hawkish officials openly called for China to take more aggressive measures. Wang Hongguang, a retired lieutenant general in the People’s Liberation Army, declared that “the window for peaceful reunification has already closed in Taiwan.”

In her first term, Ms. Tsai sought to revive the island’s military in the face of a much larger, more ambitious project by Mr. Xi to modernize the People’s Liberation Army, particularly its ability to project naval power beyond its coastal waters. China’s newest aircraft carrier, the Shandong, has twice sailed through the Taiwan Strait during the presidential campaign.

Only days before the vote, Taiwan’s top uniformed officer, Gen. Shen Yi-ming, died when the American Black Hawk helicopter he was flying in crashed near the capital.

Ms. Tsai’s predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou, sought to forge closer economic and political ties with the mainland, and even met with Mr. Xi in 2015. Without a drastic shift in tactics by Beijing, the prospect of warming relations during a second Tsai term appears slim.

“This cold confrontation between the two sides of the strait will continue,” Zhu Songling, a professor at Beijing Union University, said.

Beijing has insisted that Ms. Tsai disavow the provision of her party’s charter recognizing Taiwan as an independent country as a condition for any improvement in relations. Ms. Tsai has refused, carefully maintaining a balance among her own supporters between a declaration of independence and de facto steps to strengthen diplomatic and economic ties with other nations, especially the United States and Japan.

Mr. Han, who in 2018 was elected mayor of the southern city Kaohsiung, said that Ms. Tsai and her party had harmed Taiwan’s economy by pivoting away from reliance on China. At a Thursday-night rally attended by tens of thousands, he led supporters in a call and response.

“Dear friends, are you satisfied with the current situation?” he asked the crowd, which responded in unison: “We’re dissatisfied!”

At the Kuomintang’s office in Kaohsiung on Saturday, Tsai Jie-wen, a 60-year-old retired soldier, blamed the president for the chill in relations with Beijing.

“There is no diplomatic contact with the mainland China at all,” he said. “This is a very, very big loss for Taiwanese people.”

In the end, however, people seemed more worried about the fate of Taiwan’s de facto independence from China.

“Having seen what’s happening in Hong Kong, I get it: the so-called one country, two systems is a Communist lie,” said Allen Hsu, a student in Hong Kong who returned home to vote.

“I hope Taiwan doesn’t end up sharing the same fate, with my children having to take to the streets 20 years from now to oppose the Communist Party.”

Amy Chang Chien in Taiwan contributed reporting. Claire Fu and Amber Wang contributed research from Beijing.

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2020-01-11 13:19:00Z
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Taiwan President Tsai set to win re-election - Reuters

FILE PHOTO: Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen smiles as she arrives to cast her vote at a polling station during general elections in New Taipei City, Taipei, Taiwan January 11, 2020. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen is set to win re-election on Saturday, with figures from the election commission showing her leading her main opponent by more than two million votes with more than 86% of votes counted.

Tsai is expected to hold a news conference in Taipei shortly.

Reporting by Yimou Lee and Ben Blanchard. Editing by Jane Merriman

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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2020-01-11 12:19:00Z
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Qassem Soleimani killing sparks concerns, deepens divide in Iraq - Al Jazeera English

Baghdad, Iraq - In the late hours of a crisp winter's night, Ahmed al-Rikabi and others are huddled under blankets in a tent in Baghdad's Tahrir Square.

For these men, most of whom did not know each other before coming to the square but have now formed strong friendships, this tent has been home for almost three months. They are but few of thousands of young Iraqis who have taken to the streets in an effort to change Iraq's political system - a system which, since 2003, has been dominated and defined by foreign powers and corruption.

Across the Tigris River, in the capital's Green Zone, momentum has been building for an effort by pro-Iranian politicians to expel United States forces from the country in the wake of last week's US assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis near Baghdad's airport.

A non-binding parliamentary motion tabled on Sunday passed with a landslide - though almost all Kurdish and Sunni ministers of parliament boycotted the vote.

Yet, while the political tide is moving in one direction, those in the square - the hub of the months-long protest movement - are not convinced it is flowing the right way.

For some like al-Rikabi, there is the fear that the Baghdad elite may try to hijack the sacrifices of his fellow protesters - at least 500 have been killed in a vicious clampdown by security forces since October - and many of those in Tahrir Square allege that Iran was partly to blame for it.

"We here have all seen and felt what this government has done," al-Rikabi said. "They have done it with Iranian help, they did it with Qassem Soleimani too."

Meanwhile, there was President Donald Trump's threat of sanctions in the event of a US withdrawal.

"It'll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame," Trump warned, referring to the punishing economic measures reimposed by Washington as part of a "maximum pressure" campaign against Tehran.

That threat evoked memories of the 1990s when Iraq's economy and infrastructure was punished by crippling sanctions in the wake of President Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait - then it was the people who paid the price.

We don't want our politicians to force us into camps to either be pro-US or pro-Iran.
Sajad Jiyad, managing director of Bayan Center

For some in Parliament, the killing of Soleimani and al-Muhandis was the final straw for an unwelcome US presence in the country that had already lasted too long.

Baghdad's political class claims it has galvanised political support for Tehran and Iraq's pro-Iran leaders.

"They lost a person [Soleimani] but they regained the people," said Sami al-Askari, a former minister of parliament and chief of staff to former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

"I think the Iranians have now won most of the Iraqi Shias, even the voices against Iran have vanished."

For almost three months, thousands of Iraqis have taken to the streets in an effort to change Iraq's political system [Gareth Browne/Al Jazeera]

Yet for many protesters, the assassination of Soleimani in Baghdad and the events that followed - including Iran's retaliatory missile strikes on Wednesday at Iraqi bases housing US troops - raised fears their country could become a playground of conflict between Tehran and Washington.

"We do not hate America, we just want the world to respect our sovereignty. This is about Iran just as much - it is about anyone who tries to violate our sovereignty," said Asrhad al-Karbali, who said he gave up his job as a policeman to come to Tahrir.

Others said the effort by some politicians and militia heads to capitalise on the moment laid bare a significant disconnect between those who have camped out in cities across the country and Iraq's political class.

"We don't want our politicians to force us into camps to either be pro-US or pro-Iran - I don't think that's healthy," said Sajad Jiyad, managing director of Bayan Center, a think-tank based in Baghdad.

"For the average Iraqi, the protesters, they don't want to be talking in terms of the US and Iran," he added. "They want to be talking about what's happening for us on the ground in terms of services, the protection of rights and political reforms".

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2020-01-11 12:06:00Z
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Right-wing hawk attack tactics aren't working this time — and here's why - Salon

Earlier this week, before Donald Trump backed down from escalating the conflict with Iran, I wrote a piece arguing that the one improvement over the 2003 run-up to the war with Iraq was that this time around anti-war voices were being taken seriously. Now that the week is over and Trump seems disinclined to do more than thump his chest while (thankfully) sidestepping a real war, it's worth taking a step back and looking at another shift from the George W. Bush era: The efforts by hawks to silence antiwar critics by calling them traitors, terrorist sympathizers, and other slurs aren't working anymore.

To be clear, Republicans tried to use these old demonizing tactics in the wake of Trump's order to assassinate Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the second most powerful man in Iran.

On Monday, Trump's former UN ambassador Nikki Haley said, "The only ones that are mourning the loss of Soleimani are our Democrat leadership, and our Democrat presidential candidates."

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina declared that anyone who questioned Trump's obvious lies justifying the killing of Soleimani was "empowering the enemy."

Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia claimed that Democrats "are in love with terrorists" and that Democrats "mourn Soleimani more than they mourn our Gold Star families."

This is a game conservatives perfected in the Bush years: Bullying liberals with false accusations of being sympathetic to Islamic terrorism, simply for daring to question the bloodthirsty and provocative approach that Republicans prefer.

It's an accusation that never made sense, starting with the fact that the liberal values of secularism, sexual liberation, and feminism that homegrown conservatives hate are also despised by Islamic theocrats. But it's also an accusation that doesn't grapple with one main reason that most liberals prescribe a dovish approach: More violence only breeds more terrorism — a theory proved by the way ISIS grew from the ashes of Bush's war in Iraq.

But, during those bad old days, this outrageous lie tended to get traction, and liberals were often on the defensive, trying haplessly to argue that, no, they don't love terrorists.

This time around, however, the tactic ... simply didn't work. Collins found himself forced to explicitly apologize. There was absolutely no reason to believe his apology, however, as he's still fundraising off this "Democrats love terrorists" sentiment — and was still making this outrageous claim on Fox News only two hours before his supposed apology. But even the fact that Collins had to pretend to be sorry shows that the current political environment is no longer so friendly to this strategy.

Similarly, Haley is now playing a bizarre game of clean-up, trying to pretend she was using some other, more obscure definition of the word "mourning" to justify saying what she did. As with Collins, it's utter nonsense, but the fact that she's scrambling demonstrates that casually equating criticism of a president's actions with treason isn't working quite as well as it used to.

The ultimate display of how the McCarthyite tactics conservatives have long used to silence anti-war voices are falling flat might have been that truly epic rant unleashed by Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, who, along with Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, broke ranks with other Republicans to argue that Trump's weak excuses for killing Soleimani and escalating tension with Iran simply weren't good enough.

Lee complained that the Trump administration was using accusations that "you will be emboldening Iran" in order to convince senators that "we need to be good little boys and girls and not debate this in public". He called such pressure tactics "un-American" and "absolutely insane."

So yeah, when even Republicans are bristling under these kind of intimidation tactics, it's safe to say things have changed a lot from the days when anyone offering criticism of the Bush administration's warmongering ran the risk of being labeled a "terrorist sympathizer."

This shift has two major causes. First, the Iraq war was such an epic disaster that it casts a pall over any and all tactics that were used to support it. Second of all, Trump is president and no one in their right mind thinks he had good intentions with this Soleimani killing, since Trump has never experienced a good intention in his life.

On the first part, the big problem facing conservatives rehashing the same tactics they used to defend the Iraq war is their opponents can simply, calmly ask how their methods worked out the last time. Sure, they were able to accomplish the immediate goal of quashing meaningful debate over the war, but in the end, their critics were proved right and they were proved wrong. Silencing good faith arguments is bad. Silencing arguments that later turn out to be correct makes you look foolish, cowardly and tyrannical.

On the second part, it's hard for pro-war people to claim they are defending the nation when it's clear that Trump, the guy who started all this, doesn't give a fig about national security, but cares only about himself. With Bush, there was at least an argument that he was trying to do the right thing, as ill-conceived as it was. But with Trump, even the illusion that he has some noble purpose that his critics could be undermining is a joke.

Common sense alone should tell us this about Trump's character. But just in case there was any doubt, reporting from this week confirms it: Trump's motive in killing Soleimani wasn't national security, but a belief that it would help him politically.

A report from the Wall Street Journal released Thursday contained this newish nugget of information: "Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate, associates said."

On Friday, Maggie Haberman, a New York Times reporter who covers the White House, noted that Trump "actually was surprised [killing Soleimani] was not more of a unifying event for the country" and had hoped he could distract from impeachment by generating the same rally-round-the-flag environment "along the lines of what you saw around the Iraq War lead-up," which successfully silenced criticism of Bush during that time.

This is in line with Washington Post reporting that the White House believed "the attack on Soleimani would be politically popular" and the fact that, shortly after the killing, the Trump campaign blanketed Facebook with nearly 800 separate ads bragging about the strike. It also comports with everything we know about Trump's character, that is, as a man who never does anything for any reason outside of self-interest.

All of which means that if you yell "terrorist sympathizer" you're actually attacking someone who is questioning the wisdom of nearly starting a war in hopes of getting a polling boost going into an election year. Not exactly the most morally compelling of arguments for behavior that was already pretty shady.

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2020-01-11 12:00:00Z
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Iran admits to shooting down plane unintentionally: Live updates - CNN International

The black box recordings of the downed Ukrainian airliner will be downloaded in France, the head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization’s Accident Investigation board said on Saturday, according to state media.

Although Iran made use of all its facilities to examine the content of the black box inside the country, the content will be sent to France so that any possible damage to the data would be avoided, Hassan Rezaeifar told state news agency IRNA.

Rezaeifar said Iran asked Canada, France and the US to bring their software and hardware equipment to Tehran to download the data of the black box of the Ukrainian plane, but they did not accept Iran's proposal, according to IRNA.

Then, Iran asked Ukraine, Sweden, Britain, Canada, and the US to send the black box to an impartial laboratory -- and France was the only one all five countries agreed on, he said.

The decision to send the black box over to France was made before Saturday’s statement from the General Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, which admitted to downing the Ukrainian airliner, according to IRNA.

No details were provided as to when Iran will send the black box over.

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2020-01-11 11:49:00Z
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Iran admits to shooting down plane unintentionally: Live updates - CNN International

Then, Iran asked Ukraine, Sweden, Britain, Canada, and the US to send the black box to an impartial laboratory -- and France was the only one all five countries agreed on, he said.

No details were provided as to when Iran will send the black box over.

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Sabtu, 11 Januari 2020

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