Canada’s federal government will help Newfoundland on the Atlantic coast dig out in the wake of a massive winter blizzard that buried cars and left thousands without power, a Cabinet minister said Saturday.The storm dumped as much as 76.2 cm (30 inches) of snow on St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, and packed wind gusts as high as 130 km per hour (81 mph). The snowfall was an all-time record for the day for St. John’s International Airport.St. John’s Mayor Danny Breen said earlier that a state of emergency declared Friday remained in effect. Businesses were closed, as was the international airport.Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan said military reservists might be called in, but details of the assistance had yet to be worked out. The immediate priority will be snow removal and clearing roads to the snowbound hospital, he said.A man is pictured in a snowy street in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, Jan. 17, 2020.”We have a real issue right now with access to the hospital,” O’Regan told reporters in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is meeting for two days in what it has called a retreat.Commenting on the scale of the blizzard, O’Regan said: “It’s snow and a hurricane, and snow and a hurricane shuts down a city.”The public safety and defense ministers, who were en route to Winnipeg, would be able to provide more details later, O’Regan said. Earlier, the provincial premier asked the government for support, including “mobilizing the Canadian Armed Forces.”Thousands remained without power, and social media showed people had begun to literally dig out of their homes after snowdrifts blocked their doorways.The Canadian Broadcasting Corp (CBC) confirmed a report of an avalanche slamming into a home in St. John’s Battery neighborhood, which sits at the entrance to the city’s harbor on the slopes of a steep hill.A picture of the home on Twitter showed the living room filled with snow. The CBC also said a 26-year-old man has been reported missing after having set out to walk to a friend’s house on Friday during the blizzard.”Help is on the way,” Trudeau tweeted.
 
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Cameroon teachers are protesting what they say is growing violence against them by both students and their parents, and the teachers are urging the government to protect them and reinstate corporal punishment. The teachers say the absence of corporal punishment is encouraging abuse of teachers. This week, several attacks on teaching staffs were reported, including one in which a teenage student fatally stabbed his teacher, in the capital.Students shout Saturday at a government-run school in Obala, a town on the outskirts of Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, protesting the principal’s decision to destroy all mobile phones and knives seized from children Friday at the school.  One of their senior discipline masters, Narcisse Ateba, says the students use mobile phones to access social media platforms that promote violence, and they also use sharp objects such as knives to attack their peers and teachers.Cameroon Teachers Protest Escalating Violence in Separatist Areas

        As students in Cameroon began their annual exams Monday, hundreds of their teachers in English-speaking regions were on the streets protesting. The teachers are demanding better security after three teachers and a student were abducted, adding to scores captured, killed, or whose property was torched during a two-year separatist conflict.Teachers dressed in dark clothes and holding signs demanding better security walk down a street in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s northwest region.  


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He says that some parents and students will want to harass or beat him up, but he has nonetheless decided to publicly destroy the 15 mobile phones found and seized by teachers from students Friday because it is illegal to use them in classrooms. He says he will not allow students to come to school with razor blades, box-cutters and knives.The destruction of the mobile phones and the peaceful marches to administrative offices and palaces are part of protests by teachers at Obala against what they say are increasing acts of violence against them.This week, a 16-year-old student at the public school Nkolbisson in a neighborhood in Yaounde is accused of using a knife to stab his mathematics teacher who died of excessive bleeding as he was being rushed to a hospital. The school said the student insisted on using his mobile phone in class against the teacher’s instruction. The student was arrested and detained by police, and will be answering to charges, including premeditated killing.Another teacher this week was battered by students in Douala for questioning why they were late to school, and yet another teacher in Douala was beaten by a parent and fell into a coma. The parent was said to be angry with the teacher’s decision to use corporal punishment on his son as punishment for making noise in class. In another incident, a student used a machete to chop off another student’s finger in Obala after a fight during a soccer match.Elvis Yisinyuy, an official with the Cameroon Teachers Trade Union in Yaounde, says attacks by students on teachers intensified in 2015 when Cameroon prohibited teachers from beating or severely punishing students.”When a minister says that teachers are not supposed to administer corporal punishment to students, the student will now see that he [the minister] has the right to bring disorder because there is nothing the teacher can do in class,” said Yisinyuy. “The minister should revisit the text and permit teachers to administer corporal punishment with caution.”Cameroon Teachers Celebrate Teachers Day Amid Growing Challenges

        October 5 is World Teachers Day, set aside to mobilize support and to ensure that the needs of future generations will be met by teachers. Some teachers, who work with Central African refugees in camps in eastern Cameroon or on the border with Central African Republic (C.A.R.), face especially difficult challenges.

Emmanuel Mbiydzenyuy asks students to be quiet and follow English language classes here at the government school in Dhahong in eastern Cameroon. Eighty of the 110 students in one class are…
Yusinyuy said the high wave of drug consumption by students and the inability of teachers to use corporal punishment because they have been prohibited from doing so is also responsible for the wave of attacks.Nalova Lyonga, Cameroon minister of secondary education, says corporal punishment can not be tolerated because it is an abuse on the rights of students who are mostly children.”What I have told the teachers is that they themselves have to make a distinction between a disciplinary case and a case which becomes a criminal case, and they should be able to report to the special police at the disposal of the schools,” said Lyonga.Lyonga said Cameroon students are exposed to other cultures of the world because of the increasing use of mobile phones, and they gain access to social media platforms that promote violence, while neglecting the peace and unity that Cameroon traditionally preaches.Carol Kayum, president of Reference Citizens, a non-governmental organization that promotes citizenship education, has been visiting schools in Yaounde to educate both teachers and students against violence. She says Cameroon should uphold it’s culture of non-violence to prevent the growing number of assaults on other students and teachers.”Our cultures are rich. Parents should transmit them to children, and also there should be communication between schools and parents so that we know what our children are doing in school, and we also tell the school authorities what the children do at home,” said Kayum. “School authorities and parents should control the use of drugs.Kayum said many people now join the teaching profession because they lack jobs, and not for the love of teaching, and as such, they are not loved by students.The students also have complained they are harassed by some teachers whom they accuse of behaving poorly or not teaching well.The Cameroon Ministry of Secondary Education has recorded 40 violent attacks by students on their peers, 22 attacks on teachers and 15 attacks by parents on teachers within the past  month. 
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The World Food Program is appealing for $62 million to provide life-saving food assistance over the next six months to 700,000 people suffering from severe hunger in the Caribbean island of Haiti.Millions of Haitians still lack proper shelter, food and other basic necessities 10 years after a devastating earthquake killed 300,000 people and displaced one-and-one-half-million.The World Food Program says one in three Haitians need urgent food assistance in both rural and urban areas.  It says one million of them are suffering from severe hunger, causing rates of acute malnutrition to rise.  Homes are seen in the Taba Isa earthquake survivor camp in Port au Prince, Haiti. (Renan Toussaint/VOA Creole)WFP spokeswoman Elizabeth Byrs says her agency is scaling up its operation to provide emergency food aid to hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable people.  “Ten years after the earthquake, WFP is still concerned about a decline in food security, with 3.7 million people severely food insecure and affected also by rising prices, drop in agricultural production, and social unrest, of course, which has heavily disrupted economic activity in Haiti,” Byrs said.Anti-government riots last year disrupted the ability of humanitarian agencies to bring food and other aid to people in the impoverished country.   Byrs says the WFP responded to this emergency by providing food to more than 230,000 of the most vulnerable.  She says it also furnished 300,000 school children with daily food, including hot meals.Byrs says donors have contributed $5 million since WFP launched its emergency appeal in December.  That means the agency still needs $57 million to continue its life-saving operation for the next six months.  She notes 80 percent of the 700,000 beneficiaries are women and children, many of whom can barely manage to find enough food for one meal a day.
 
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The World Health Organization reports there is no evidence of human-to-human spread of the new coronavirus that has sickened dozens, but says the possibility cannot be ruled out.   Investigations are continuing, aimed at identifying  the source of the new Coronavirus.  Late last year, China reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause.  Many were linked to a fish market in Wuhan, central China’s largest city.  The World Health Organization reports 41 people have been infected with the disease in China, including two deaths.  Additionally, two infections have been identified in Thailand and one in Japan among people who had traveled to Wuhan.  The spread of the disease outside of China is raising concern among health officials and the general public.  Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that range from the common cold to MERS, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, and SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.  They can be spread from animals to humans, but also from human to human.  Maria Van Kerkhove, the head of WHO’s Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses Unit, notes transmission between humans was limited during previous MERS and SARS outbreaks.  However, she warns disease spread can be amplified, particularly in health care facilities.”There is also the possibility of super-spreading events.  The global community is very familiar with what happened with SARS in the past and this is something that is on our radar that is possible and what we need to prepare ourselves for,” said Van Kerkhove.The 2002-2003 SARS outbreak, which originated in China, infected more than 8,000 people globally and killed 774.  Van Kerkhove says it is important to identify the pathogen and find the source of the outbreak, including the animal source.”We need to better understand the modes of transmission.  I mentioned the zoonotic transmission.  So, how are people getting infected from a potential animal source,” said Van Kerkhove. “And, is there any evidence of human-to-human transmission.  From the information that we have, it is possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission, potentially among families.  But it is very clear right now, that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission.”A new scientific study in Britain indicates the coronavirus outbreak may be more serious than reported.  The British experts report as many as 1,700 people may have been sickened by the disease, which can range from mild respiratory symptoms to severe disease and death.  International airports in the United States and a number of countries in Asia, including Hong Kong, Thailand, and Malaysia, have stepped up screening procedures of travelers coming from China.  The World Health Organization urges countries to be vigilant, but does not advise any travel restrictions.  
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Honduras and the Organization of American States failed to reach an agreement Friday to extend the mandate of an anti-corruption mission that had upset a number of national lawmakers by uncovering misuse of public funds.The mandate of the Mission to Support the Fight against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras was set to expire Sunday.“We did not reach a consensus on signing a new covenant between Honduras and the Organization of American States secretary general,” the Honduran government said in a statement.The government said it was important to take into consideration the complaints from some economic and political sectors about the behavior of some of the mission’s members. Their complaints included allegations of “excesses” by the commission and charges that it “trampled their rights and constitutional guarantees,” the statement said.Presidential minister Ebal Díaz, who participated in negotiations with the OAS, said in a video message that the government remained committed to combating corruption.But the OAS said in a statement the insurmountable hurdle was the Honduran government’s insistence that the mission stop collaborating with a special hand-selected and trained unit within the Attorney General’s Office bringing the public corruption cases.OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro considers the end of the commission’s work “a negative event in the fight against corruption and impunity in the country,” the statement said.The announcement of the resignation of the mission’s interim leader, Ana María Calderón, earlier this week amplified concerns that the body’s days were numbered.In December, Honduras’ legislature voted to recommend that the commission not continue past its original four-year mandate.President Juan Orlando Hernández invited the OAS to form the group in 2015 as public demands for his resignation arose from revelations that the country’s social security system had been bilked of millions of dollars.Composed of international lawyers and investigators, the commission set out to strengthen Honduras’ justice institutions and help them carry out investigations of public corruption. But it never had the clout or resources of a U.N.-sponsored effort in neighboring Guatemala that brought three former presidents to trial. Still, it was building capacity among a select group of Honduran prosecutors and making public officials uncomfortable.Among its achievements, the commission uncovered networks of legislative and non-profit front organizations that moved public monies back into lawmakers’ pockets.Honduran lawmakers responded by impeding its investigations and threw up hurdles to prevent the country’s prosecutors from advancing the cases. They also reduced legal sentences for corruption-related crimes and essentially blocked the Attorney General’s Office from investigating improper use of public funds for up to seven years.On Friday, congress asserted that even a renewal of the commission’s mandate without material changes would require lawmakers’ approval. Others had said it could be done with a simple exchange of letters between the government and OAS.The U.S. State Department had urged Honduras to renew the commission without changes, but analysts say Hernández may have felt emboldened to drop it as White House priorities in the region shifted to slowing migration.Honduras signed an asylum cooperation agreement and finalized implementation steps last week that would allow the U.S. to send asylum seekers from other countries to Honduras to apply for protection there. The U.S. was expected to begin shipping asylum seekers to Honduras in the coming weeks.Omar Rivera, head of the Association for a More Just Society, the Honduran chapter of Transparency International, told local press that the end of the commission was disappointing. “The worst thing we could do is lower our arms in front of delinquents, criminals and the corrupt,” he said.Adriana Beltran, director of citizen security at the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy organization for human rights in Latin America, said the commission was “a critical instrument to combating entrenched corruption and widespread impunity in Honduras, and because of this it enjoyed the support of the population.”“Its work threatened powerful sectors that sought to undermine its work to protect themselves from being held accountable,” Beltran added.Hernández already suffered from low approval ratings after overcoming a constitutional ban on re-election and winning in a contest marred by irregularities. Weeks of large street demonstrations against the government re-emerged this summer and in October, his brother Tony Hernández was found guilty of cocaine trafficking in a U.S. federal court.U.S. prosecutors named the president a co-conspirator in the case. He denies any involvement. His brother is scheduled for sentencing next month.The announcement comes as hundreds of Hondurans crossed Guatemala and began gathering at the Mexico border. When they left the northern city of San Pedro Sula Wednesday many chanted that Hernández had to go, a common refrain since the first caravans in 2018.Former President Mel Zelaya, who was removed from office in a 2009 coup, said the government was sending a message that it isn’t interested in fighting corruption. He called for a protest in front of the commission’s offices on Jan. 27.“It’s a logical demonstration,” Zelaya said. “Because as long as that dictatorship is governing the country, Honduras has no hope of moving forward.”
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Iranian state media have given a distorted view of Western news coverage of a rare public sermon by Iran’s supreme leader, ignoring how Western outlets highlighted perceived shortcomings in his responses to domestic problems.Ayatollah Ali Khamenei led Friday prayers in Tehran for the first time since 2012, giving a sermon at the capital’s Grand Mosque. The longtime supreme leader has limited such public sermons to times of national crisis in the past.In his speech, Khamenei harshly criticized the United States and its European allies Britain, France and Germany. He singled out American leaders as “clowns” for professing to stand with Iran’s people while in practice seeking to “stab” Iranians in the back with a “poisoned dagger.”Khamenei’s speech came two weeks after the U.S. carried out what it called a self-defensive strike that killed his top general, Qassem Soleimani, at Baghdad airport. In his remarks, Khamenei accused the U.S. of engaging in a “terrorist” act by killing Soleimani, who led Iran’s elite Quds Force and whom the U.S. had designated as the head of a terrorist organization that killed hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq and directed proxy militias to fight U.S. allies in the region.  The Iranian supreme leader also denounced Britain, France and Germany as U.S. lackeys after they decided this week to trigger a dispute resolution mechanism in their 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, a potential step toward joining the U.S. in re-imposing economic sanctions on Tehran.   Khamenei expressed sorrow over the Jan. 8 shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger plane by Iranian forces that mistook it for an enemy threat shortly after it took off from Tehran. Hours earlier, his forces had fired missiles at U.S. troops in Iraq in retaliation for the Soleimani killing and had braced themselves for a U.S. counterattack. No U.S. forces were killed in the Iranian missile strike, however, and Washington did not hit back.  For three days after the plane crashed, killing all 176 people on board, Iranian officials insisted it was not their fault despite Western media and officials citing intelligence sources as saying Iranian missile fire downed the aircraft. Officials belatedly acknowledged that their denials of responsibility were false on Saturday, angering hundreds of Iranians who joined four days of anti-government protests in Tehran and other cities.  “The plane crash was a bitter tragedy that burned through our heart,” Khamenei said in his sermon. However, he made no apology for his government’s initial false statements about the crash and criticized those who joined the anti-government protests as unrepresentative of the Iranian people.  Prominent Western news agencies had extensive coverage of Khamenei’s rare public sermon.   Iranian state media outlets Fars News Agency  and ISNA published summaries of those Western news reports, highlighting their references to Khamenei’s strong denunciations of the U.S. and European powers. Fars and ISNA also cited the Western news agencies as noting the large size of Khamenei’s audience, with thousands of people cramming into the mosque for the sermon.     A VOA Persian review of Khamenei sermon articles by the eight Western news agencies cited by Fars and ISNA, though, found that the two Iranian state media outlets ignored several key elements of the Western news coverage.   In one example, Fars avoided mentioning that a Reuters report said Khamenei stopped short of a direct apology for the plane disaster. “On social media, some Iranians reacted angrily” to the lack of an apology, the report said.  In another example, ISNA made no mention of the New York Times reporting that Khamenei “offered only scant condolences” to the families who lost victims in the plane crash and dismissed the anti-government protesters as “stooges of the United States.” The New York Times article also noted that Iran “choreographed” the Friday sermon by busing in schoolchildren, civil servants and worshippers from neighboring provinces “to present an image of power and unity.” “When it comes to reporting an important speech by the supreme leader, it is no surprise to see there has been an  attempt to pick and choose  bits of coverage in international media that are either positive or neutral and leave out the negative bits,” said BBC Monitoring journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, a former Iranian state media employee, in a message to VOA Persian.  “Reports about the views and speeches of Khamenei are almost always entirely supportive,” Sardarizadeh said. “It would be highly unusual to see state media highlight any criticism of the supreme leader even in normal times, let alone now.  But Khamenei is one of the few individuals about whom all media sources in Iran tend to be highly cautious and selective in their reporting.”
This article originated in VOA’s Persian Service. It was produced in collaboration with VOA’s Extremism Watch Desk. 
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 Three men linked to a violent white supremacist group known as The Base were charged with conspiring to kill members of a militant anti-fascist group, police in Georgia announced Friday, a day after three other members were arrested on federal charges in Maryland and Delaware.
A senior FBI national security official said police and federal agents intentionally moved to arrest the men ahead of Monday’s rally because they believed some of them intended to commit violence there. It was unknown if the men arrested in Georgia planned to attend the rally in Richmond.
The Base, a collective of hardcore neo-Nazis that operate as a paramilitary organization, has proclaimed war against minority communities within the United States and abroad, the FBI has said. Unlike other extremist groups, it’s not focused on promulgating propaganda – instead the group aims to bring together highly skilled members to train them for acts of violence.
There’s an intensified focus on The Base after the three members were arrested Thursday in Maryland and Delaware on federal felony charges. A criminal complaint included details of how some of the men built an assault rifle using parts, purchased thousands of rounds of ammunition and traded vests that could carry body armor.
“A  big reason why we disrupted it now was based on the timing of the rally on Monday and the intent of some of the individuals to potentially conduct violent acts down in Richmond,” said Jay Tabb, the executive assistant director for national security at the FBI.
Speaking at a homeland security event in Washington, he said the FBI has “got a fair sense of worry” because agents “can’t account for everybody and everything.”
“We have a degree of interest of some individuals that we know are at least saying that they will be there and we have no way to predict where rhetoric turns to violence,” Tabb said.
Organizers of The Base recruit fellow white supremacists online – particularly seeking out veterans because of their military training – use encrypted chat rooms and train members in military-style camps in the woods, according to experts who track extremist groups.
The group, which has the motto “learn, train, fight,” brings together white supremacists with varying ideologies.
The arrests show an intensified focus on the group from law enforcement officials who are concerned that the supremacists may go beyond plotting to violent acts, a threat made more urgent ahead of a pro-gun rally Monday in Richmond, Va.
The arrests only added to rising fears that Monday’s rally  could quickly devolve into violence, with thousands of protesters planning to descend on Virginia’s capital, and become a repeat of the 2017 white nationalist rally  when a man drove his car into counter-protesters in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal and civil rights activist.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed an executive order banning guns from the state Capitol grounds for Monday’s rally, but pro-gun groups filed an appeal seeking to overturn the ban. The Virginia Supreme Court upheld the ban Friday.
“These extremists are going to try to attach themselves to these events in order to exploit these strong feelings, to try to bring in new recruits,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
In encrypted chat rooms, members of The Base have discussed committing acts of violence against blacks and Jews, ways to make improvised explosive devices and their desire to create a white “ethno-state,” the FBI has said in court papers.
On Friday, police in Georgia confirmed that the three other men linked to The Base were arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit murder and participating in a criminal street gang. Authorities said the men planned to kill a married couple who were anti-fascist protesters – part of the Antifa movement – and believed killing the couple would send a message to enemies of The Base.
The arrests came after an undercover FBI agent infiltrated the group and participated in shooting drills in the mountains of northern Georgia, according to a police affidavit obtained by the AP. The drills were being done in preparation for what they believe is an impending collapse of the United States and ensuing race war. At the end of the firearms training, the Georgia men wore tactical gear and balaclava hoods that expose only part of the face while posing for photos with the undercover agent and the photos were later used in the group’s propaganda, the affidavit says.
The men were identified as Luke Austin Lane, Michael Helterbrand, and Jacob Kaderli. The three remained in custody and it was not immediately clear whether they had attorneys who could comment on the allegations.
Lane, Kaderli and the undercover agent drove to the couple’s home in Bartow County to scope it out, according to the affidavit. After checking out the property and the surrounding neighborhood, Lane suggested using a sledgehammer as one way of breaching the door, then kill them with revolvers, according to the affidavit. Kaderli suggested they should burn the house down after the killings, it states.
While other extremist groups are focused on getting people together to produce propaganda and make a name for themselves around a specific ideology, The Base is focused on action, the experts say. They are interested in training their members to use firearms and explosives.
“To have that kind of broad tent, that’s incredibly dangerous,” said Joshua Fisher-Birch, a researcher with the Counter Extremism Project, a policy group formed to combat online extremist ideologies.
Members of The Base also believe in an extreme form of survivalism and preparation, offering real-life survivalist training to resist the “extinction” of the Caucasian race, the FBI has said.
“I think what marks The Base as a particular concern is that it is very blatant about its embrace of accelerationist ideas. This concept that societal collapse is not only imminent, but that they have a role to play in furthering it – so that we can have a race war in this country,” Segal said.
“There are many groups active online that have an on-the-ground presence, but it’s the sub-culture that the base is embracing is so vividly militant,” he said. “It’s so blatantly hateful it’s going to attract a certain type of extremist, one who is looking for action.”
A New Jersey man who authorities say was a recruiter for The Base was arrested by the FBI  in November after he allegedly used the group to find fellow neo-Nazis to vandalize synagogues in Michigan and Wisconsin. Authorities said the group’s plan to vandalize synagogues with anti-Semitic graffiti and break windows was part of what the group called “Operation Kristallnacht,” a reference to a 1938 incident when Nazis torched synagogues in Germany, vandalized Jewish homes and business and killed close to 100 people.
The man, Richard Tobin, 18, had also discussed carrying out a suicide bombing and said he had saved manuals about how to carry out an attack, filling the back of a truck with barrels packed with explosive materials similar to the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in 1995.
Separately on Friday, the Justice Department charged a Wisconsin man who they say was also a member of The Base who spray painted swastikas, the group’s symbol and anti-Semitic words on a synagogue in Racine, Wisconsin in September, at Tobin’s direction. The man, Yousef Barasneh, 22, was arrested on a federal civil rights charge.
Tobin is not specifically named in the charging papers against Barasneh, but the details match those in the criminal complaint that was filed against him in November. Authorities said Tobin and Barasneh were supposed to meet in person at one of the group’s meetups in in Silver Creek, Georgia, from Oct. 30 until Nov. 2. Tobin ultimately didn’t attend.
Prosecutors said recruitment posters for The Base were put up at Marquette University in Milwaukee and the group also held a separate training session for members in Wood County, Wisconsin. 
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