The future of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is in question as Israel prepares to annex parts of the West Bank in coming weeks. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he has ended all security cooperation with Israel. The Israeli army has stepped up its alert in advance of July 1, the date Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the annexation will happen. Linda Gradstein reports for VOA from Jerusalem.Camera: Ricki Rosen  Produced by:  Jason Godman 
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Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian says he and his family have recovered from the coronavirus.Pashinian said on Facebook that he and his family members tested negative Monday for a second time in as many days.Pashinian announced that he was infected a week ago, adding that he probably contracted the virus from a waiter who brought him a glass a water at a meeting without wearing gloves and later tested positive for the virus.Armenia has so far reported over 13,000 infections, including 211 deaths, among its population of nearly 3 million.  
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Mourners are set to gather Monday in the U.S. city of Houston to view the casket of George Floyd, the African American man whose death in police custody sparked renewed protests against police brutality in cities across the country and in other parts of the world. Floyd’s funeral and burial will take place Tuesday. An aide for former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said the Democratic presidential candidate planned to travel to Houston to meet with Floyd’s family and to give a video message at the funeral. President Donald Trump on Sunday ordered National Guard troops to start withdrawing from the nation’s capital after they deployed there to assist law enforcement.  Similar withdrawals are happening in other states with protests in recent days taking place with few clashes between demonstrators and authorities. Trump has consistently expressed his backing for what he calls “law and order” and in a tweet Sunday he criticized those who want to see police departments have their budgets slashed or eliminated entirely.President Donald Trump returns to the White House in Washington, June 1, 2020.“I want great and well paid LAW ENFORCEMENT. I want LAW & ORDER!” Trump said. Senator Mitt Romney, a member of Trump’s Republican Party, joined protesters in Washington during a march Sunday, the first known instance of a Republican lawmaker taking part in the demonstrations during the past two weeks. Romney tweeted several photos along with the caption, “Black Lives Matter.”  One photo was a selfie among protesters carrying signs that included the messages “RACISM KILLS” and “BE JUST, LOVE MERCY, WALK HUMBLY.” “We need a voice against racism, we need many voices against racism and against brutality,” he told NBC News. In Minneapolis, where the 46-year-old Floyd died May 25 after a white police officer held him face down on the street and pressed a knee against his neck for several minutes, nine of the 12 city council members pledged to disband the city’s police department. “A veto-proof majority of the MPLS City Council just publicly agreed that the Minneapolis Police Department is not reformable and that we’re going to end the current policing system,” Council Member Alondra Cano tweeted Sunday. Mayor Jacob Frey, who supported bringing charges against the officer who held Floyd, told protesters on Saturday that he favors reforming the department instead of fully abolishing it.  The crowd gathered outside his home greeted his answer with boos.Social media video grab of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey walking through a crowd of jeering protesters, June 7, 2020, in the aftermath of the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd.Frey told the Star Tribune newspaper Sunday, “People continue to require service in many forms from our public safety offices, whether in times of domestic violence, or assistance in some of the most dire conditions.” The city council voted last week to ban police from using of chokeholds and neck restraints. Thousands of people kept up protests Sunday in other parts of the country, including in Los Angeles where the city’s mayor has pledged to cut the police department’s budget as part of an effort to invest in community programs. Protesters also assembled Sunday in major cities such as New York, Chicago and Atlanta, where leaders have lifted nighttime curfews put in place after earlier demonstrations were marred by vandalism and looting. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday his administration plans to move an unspecified amount of funding from the police department to “youth initiatives and social services.” “The details will be worked out in the budget process in the weeks ahead. But I want people to understand that we are committed to shifting resources to ensure that the focus is on our young people.  And I also will affirm while doing that, we will only do it in a way that we are certain continues to ensure that this city will be safe,” de Blasio said. Sunday also brought protests in the northwestern city of Seattle, where a man drove a car toward a crowd in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, then shot a man who reached into the car.  The gunman got out of the car and walked through the crowd, and later approached a line of police officers who took him into custody. Police gave few details on the incident, saying only that a suspect was in custody and a gun was recovered.  The Seattle fire department said the gunshot victim was approximately 27 years old and was taken to a local hospital in stable condition. 
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Humanitarian aid groups operating in southern Bangladesh are bracing for a potential worst-case scenario now that COVID-19 is spreading in Rohingya refugee camps. Considerable progress has been made to improve the treatment available. But as Dave Grunebaum reports, if there is a major outbreak medical teams may be forced to ration health care. 
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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attended a meeting of the politburo of the country’s ruling Workers Party, where economic projects including the chemical industry were discussed, state news agency KCNA said on Monday. The two-day meeting comes at a time of economic uncertainty amid the global COVID-19 pandemic that is putting additional pressure on the North’s economy, already battered by international sanctions aimed at stopping its nuclear program. The meeting discussed “crucial issues arising in further developing the self-sufficient economy of the country and improving the standard of people’s living,” KCNA said. The 13th political bureau meeting repeatedly stressed that the chemical industry is “a major thrust front of the national economy,” it said. “He stressed the need to give top priority to increasing the capacity for producing fertilizer,” KCNA said, citing Kim. After weeks of intense speculation about his health, KCNA reported Kim attended the opening of a fertilizer plant on May 1. The meeting also emphasized construction of residential houses as a way to better North Korean’s standard of living. “Pointing out in detail the issues that have to be urgently settled to ensure living conditions of citizens in the city, the Supreme Leader stressed to take strong state measures for ensuring the living conditions of people including the construction of dwelling houses,” KCNA reported. Kim has made an unusually small number of outings in the past months, with his absence from a major holiday prompting speculation about his condition, as Pyongyang has stepped up measures against the COVID-19 pandemic. While North Korea says it has no confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, South Korea’s main intelligence agency has said an outbreak there cannot be ruled out. 
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The Minneapolis police department could soon undergo a radical change following the death two weeks ago of George Floyd, an African American man, while in the custody of four city officers.Nine of 12 members of the city council announced at a rally in a city park that they support dismantling the police department and replacing it with what is being described as a community-based public safety model.Details on exactly what this new model would look like are unclear.The 12-member council still has to approve the plan and, under council rules, the decision would be veto-proof.A group of demonstrators rallied outside the home of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey Saturday to demand the police department be defunded, accusing it of long-standing racism and rough treatment of black suspects.“It shouldn’t have taken so much death to get us here,” said Kandace Montgomery, the director of Black Vision which organized the gathering outside the mayor’s house. “We’re safer without armed, unaccountable patrols supported by the state hunting black people.”Frey told the crowd that he does not support getting rid of the police department as it looks now.”I told them the truth about where I stand. I’ll work relentlessly toward deep structural reforms to change policing, rethink our system, and directly address systemic racism. However, I do not support abolishing the department,” Frey said.Many of the demonstrators who have been protesting across the country have demanded that big city police departments be defunded. Supporters say that doesn’t mean literally getting rid of law enforcement but say much of the money used to run police departments can be reinvested into social services, arguing that creating better lives for citizens means little need for a gun-toting officer.Opponents say they want people to ask themselves what happens when someone calls 911 to report a rape in progress or a murder or armed robbery and few officers are available.Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden will be in Houston Monday to meet with George Floyd’s family before a funeral service.A Biden aide says a video message from Biden will be played at the service, but Biden himself will not attend.Floyd was born near Fayetteville, North Carolina, but grew up in Houston, where he will be buried Tuesday.Biden got a huge endorsement Sunday when former Secretary of State Colin Powell said he would be voting for the Democrat in November.”I cannot in any way support President Trump this year,” Powell told CNN Sunday.He added that he is “very close to Joe Biden on a social matter and on a political matter. I think what we’re seeing now, this massive protest movement I have ever seen in my life, I think it suggests the country is getting wise to this and we’re not going to put up with it anymore,” Powell told Tapper.Trump shot back, calling Powell a “stiff” and “overrated.”Powell is another major voice from the U.S. military critical of the way the Trump administration has been calling for force to deal with protest marches against the harsh police treatment of black men.The National Guard will start pulling out of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, and other California cities as the violence by Floyd protesters has eased.Sunday’s marches in California were peaceful, but Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti says a “small number of units” will be stationed nearby for at least two more days in case of emergency.A group of primarily African Americans calling themselves The Compton Cowboys held a peaceful protest on horseback in some southern L.A. suburbs Sunday while a group of classic car fans held their own march in East Los Angeles.The situation in Oakland was a bit more tense when demonstrators tried to close down an interstate highway but backed down after a brief standoff with police. Another gathering painted the words Black Lives Matter in a downtown Oakland street, just like the one painted on a Washington street.Several hundred families, many pushing baby strollers, marched peacefully around a lake in Oakland. A similar march was held in San Francisco and thousands also gathered peacefully along that city’s waterfront.In Washington, Republican Senator Mitt Romney marched with protesters, the first known instance of a Republican lawmaker joining the demonstrations. He posted photos of the march on Twitter along with the caption, “Black Lives Matter,” as well as photos of his father from a civil rights march in the 1960s. 
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Protesters around the globe march on, rallying against racism and police brutality nearly two weeks after an African American man – George Floyd – died in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  As VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports, the protests come amid memorial services for Floyd in North Carolina and planning for his funeral in Texas.
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After George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, some officers around the country knelt in solidarity with protesters condemning racism. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias met with the sheriff and protest organizers in Prince William County, Virginia, where “taking a knee” may spearhead permanent change.
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U.S. Attorney General William Barr has justified use of force to clear Lafayette Park across the street from White House last Monday evening of protesters just ahead of President Donald Trump walking through the park for a photo-op in front of a nearby church.“They were not peaceful protesters,” Barr contended on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” show. “And that’s one of the big lies that the media is, seems to be perpetuating at this point.”Barr, the top law enforcement official in the U.S., said protesters were given three warnings to clear the park before police and authorities clad in riot gear advanced on them, firing pepper balls.The police action against the protesters came in the midst of nationwide protests against the May 25 death of George Floyd, an African American man who was held face down by a white police officer on a street in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes even as he said repeatedly he could not breathe.Attorney General William Barr, center, stands in Lafayette Park across from the White House as demonstrators gather to protest the death of George Floyd, June 1, 2020, in Washington.Barr denied the use of chemical irritants such as tear gas in clearing Lafayette Park, although the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines the pepper spray that was used as a type of “tear gas” or “riot control agent.”Barr said the park was cleared because of violent clashes that had erupted there from Friday to Sunday a week ago, May 29-31, with police “under constant attack.”  “On Sunday, things reached a crescendo,” Barr said. “The officers were pummeled with bricks. Crowbars were used to pry up the pavers at the park and they were hurled at police. There were fires set in not only St. John’s Church (that Trump stood in front of Monday night), but a historic building at Lafayette was burned down.”After the May 31 clashes, Barr said, U.S. Park Police decided to expand the fenced-in perimeter around the White House, where Trump, first lady Melania Trump and their son Barron live.“When I came in Monday, it was clear to me that we did have to increase the perimeter on that side of Lafayette Park and push it out one block,” Barr said. “That decision was made by me in the morning. It was communicated to all the police agencies.”Tear gas floats in the air as a line of security forces move demonstrators away from St. John’s Church across Lafayette Park from the White House, as they gather to protest the death of George Floyd, June 1, 2020, in Washington.The attorney general said he saw projectiles being thrown at police, but added, “Here’s what the media is missing. This was not an operation to respond to that particular crowd. It was an operation to move the perimeter one block.”CBS’s Margaret Brennan told Barr that to Americans watching on television it appeared that the park was cleared of protesters so Trump, accompanied by heavy security and top aides, could walk to St. John’s for his brief photo opportunity with a Bible held aloft.“In an environment where the broader debate is about heavy-handed use of force in law enforcement, was that the right message for Americans to be receiving?” she asked.“Well, the message is sometimes communicated by the media,” Barr said. “I didn’t see any video being played on the media of what was happening Friday, Saturday and Sunday” of the authorities being attacked by projectiles.“All I heard was comments about how peaceful protesters were,” Barr said. “I didn’t hear about the fact that there were 150 law enforcement officers injured and many taken to the hospital with concussions. So, it wasn’t a peaceful protest. We had to get control over Lafayette Park, and we had to do it as soon as we were able to do that.” 
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U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday ordered the 5,000 National Guard troops brought to Washington last week to quell protests against the death of a black man in police custody to begin to withdraw, saying the national capital was “under perfect control.” “They will be going home, but can quickly return, if needed,” the U.S. leader said on Twitter. “Far fewer protesters showed up last night than anticipated!”  I have just given an order for our National Guard to start the process of withdrawing from Washington, D.C., now that everything is under perfect control. They will be going home, but can quickly return, if needed. Far fewer protesters showed up last night than anticipated!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Demonstrators talk to National Guard soldiers as they protest Saturday, June 6, 2020, near the White House in Washington, over the death of George Floyd, a black man who was in police custody in Minneapolis.Even as he withdrew the National Guard troops, however, key former U.S. military leaders continued to voice their opposition to Trump’s reported threat a week ago to use as many as 10,000 active duty military troops to augment local police in Washington  against demonstrators protesting the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The death of the 46-year-old Floyd, who was held down on a city street for nearly nine minutes by a white policeman who pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck, has spawned nearly two weeks of protests in the U.S., some of them angry, violent clashes with authorities.  But tens of thousands of Americans protested peacefully in dozens of U.S. cities on Saturday against police abuse of authority against minorities, with few reports of clashes with authorities. In the end, 1,600 members of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division were dispatched to Washington but not activated to calm the protests.  Defense Secretary Mark Esper broke with Trump last week, saying that active duty troops should only be used as a last resort to quell insurrection in the U.S., a stance Attorney General William Barr told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” show he also supported.  Attorney General William Barr, center, stands in Lafayette Park across from the White House as demonstrators gather to protest the death of George Floyd, June 1, 2020, in Washington.Barr, the nation’s top law enforcement official, disputed news accounts that Trump wanted 10,000 active duty military personnel ready to take on protesters. Barr said he met with Trump last Monday at the White House after violent clashes in Washington on the night of May 31. “I was called over and asked if I would coordinate federal civil agencies and that the Defense Department would provide whatever support I needed or we needed to protect federal property at the White House, federal personnel” Barr said. “The decision was made to have at the ready and on hand in the vicinity some regular troops,” he said. “But everyone agreed that the use of regular troops was a last resort and that as long as matters can be controlled with other resources, they should be. I felt, and the secretary of Defense felt, we had adequate resources and wouldn’t need to use federal troops. But in case we did, we wanted them nearby.” He said Trump “never asked or suggested that we needed to deploy regular troops at that point. It’s been done from time to time in our history. We try to avoid it. And I’m happy that we were able to avoid it on this occasion.” Acting Homeland Security chief Chad Wolf rejected the suggestion that bringing active duty military personnel to Washington amounted to “overkill.” Wolf told the “Fox News Sunday” show that U.S. law enforcement authorities need to “make sure we keep all our tools in the toolbox.” But former Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, once the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, voiced his opposition to use of active duty military personnel to control demonstrations in the U.S. as Trump wanted. “We have a military to fight our enemies, not our own people,” Mullen told Fox News. He said the U.S. military could lose its bond with the American public with use of troops against protesters. “We could lose that trust when you don’t really need that force,” Mullen said. Retired Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, another former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, echoed Mullen’s thoughts, telling ABC News’ “This Week” show, “America is not a battleground. We have to be very careful in how we use our military.” He said the U.S. military lost standing with the American public five decades ago during contentious, often violent protests against the Vietnam War. “It took us a while to improve the relationship with the American public,” he said. “The relationship has to be one of trust.”  
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Brazil’s government has stopped publishing a running total of coronavirus deaths and infections in an extraordinary move that critics call an attempt to hide the true toll of the disease in Latin America’s largest nation.Saturday’s move came after months of criticism from experts that Brazil’s statistics are woefully deficient, and in some cases manipulated, so it may never be possible to understand the depth of the pandemic in the country.Brazil’s last official numbers showed it had recorded over 34,000 deaths related to the coronavirus, the third-highest number in the world, just ahead of Italy. It reported nearly 615,000 infections, putting it second, behind the United States. Brazil, with about 210 million people, is the globe’s seventh most populous nation.On Friday, the federal Health Ministry took down a website that had showed daily, weekly and monthly figures on infections and deaths in Brazilian states. On Saturday, the site returned but the cumulative numbers of infections for states and the nation were no longer there. The site now shows only the numbers for the previous 24 hours.Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro tweeted Saturday that disease totals are “not representative” of the country’s current situation.A Bolsonaro ally contended to the newspaper O Globo that at least some states had sent falsified data to the Health Ministry, implying that they were exaggerating the toll. Carlos Wizard, a businessman expected to assume a high-level post in the Health Ministry, said the federal government would conduct a review to determine a “more accurate”‘ toll.“The number we have today is fanciful or manipulated,” Wizard said.A council of state health secretaries said it would fight the changes by Bolsonaro, who has dismissed the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic and tried to thwart attempts to impose quarantines, curfews and social distancing, arguing those steps are causing more damage to the economy than the illness.A patient with symptoms related to COVID-19 is brought to a field hospital by workers in full protective gear in Leblon, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 4, 2020.”The authoritarian, insensitive, inhumane and unethical attempt to make the COVID-19 deaths invisible will not prosper,” the health secretaries council said Saturday.While precise counts of cases and deaths are difficult for governments worldwide, health researchers have been saying for weeks that irregularities with Brazilian statistics were making it impossible to get a handle on an exploding situation.Around the world, coronavirus deaths are being undercounted to varying degrees due to lack of universal testing. Academic groups in dozens of nations have tried to figure out the magnitude of the undercount by studying the total number of deaths in a set period compared to the average of prior years in a nation, state, province or city. Where they find unexplained surges in deaths, it is likely due in large part to undiagnosed cases of the coronavirus.In Brazil, such efforts have been handicapped by problems with the government statistics that serve as a baseline.“It is very difficult to make predictions that you think are reliable,’’ said Fabio Mendes, an adjunct professor in software engineering at the federal University of Brasilia, who studies coronavirus statistics. “We know the numbers are bad.”At the end of April, 42-year-old Leivane Bibiano da Silva became feverish and developed an incessant cough and diarrhea — all symptoms of the new coronavirus that was devastating Manaus, the Brazilian Amazon’s most populous city.Bibiano, who had HIV and tuberculosis, was scared of checking herself into Manaus’ overwhelmed hospitals, relatives said. She died in her home about two weeks later, and was buried in a mass grave at the public cemetery. She was never tested.“I’m upset, not just about my mother, but about all of those who didn’t enter into the statistics,” said Leonardo Bibiano, her eldest son. “To be honest, I don’t believe in the numbers.”Brazil’s Health Ministry did not respond to queries about allegations of problems with the data.The gravity of the problems with Brazil’s data became clear last month when academics reviewing death certificates compiled by the federal Civil Registration office — which compiles data from all Brazilian states — found drastic, unexplained fluctuations in monthly deaths in recent years, and puzzling discrepancies between states.In Rio de Janeiro state, the number of average monthly deaths fell sharply starting in January 2019, a change the Civil Registration office said stemmed from the state court providing duplicate data for previous years. The number of average monthly deaths in Manaus, the capital of the northern state of Amazonas, more than doubled when the shift occurred, which the office chalked up to delay in data submission.Emergency workers carry Jose Rocha on a hammock to a field hospital treating suspected COVID-19 patients in Manacapuru, Amazonas state, Brazil, June 1, 2020.On May 14, as independent investigators were questioning the inconsistencies, the Civil Registration office pulled more than 500,000 death certificates from its website, saying most were from Rio and it needed to review how the figures were tallied nationwide in order to make sure statistics were consistent year over year.That made it virtually impossible to produce statistically significant analyses of excess death in Rio or Amazonas, two of the Brazilian states hit hardest by the coronavirus.“Wow,” said Jesús Gómes-Gardeñes, an associate professor in physics and computational epidemiology at the University of Zaragoza, who has studied coronavirus statistics in his native Spain. “Half a million is a hell of a lot.”Another way to detect uncounted deaths from the virus is by looking at deaths attributed to other conditions, like pneumonia and respiratory insufficiency. In the absence of widespread testing, deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, are often attributed to one or more of these conditions.Brazil”s second most populous state, Minas Gerais, has recorded just 368 coronavirus deaths and has been praised for its handling of the pandemic. But data from Fiocruz, a respected, state-run biology foundation, show deaths from severe acute respiratory infections in the state rose eightfold from 2019 to 2020, to 1,796.Health workers from Doctors Without Borders visit a squatters camp to conduct medical examinations for the COVID-19 in Sao Bernardo do Campo, greater Sao Paulo area, Brazil, June 3, 2020.In Rio, the total number of deaths from pneumonia and respiratory insufficiency in the nine weeks through May 18 were 6,909 higher than in the same period last year. But the federal Health Ministry’s COVID-19 death toll for the same period was 2,852 — less than half the suspected number.On May 22, as media and independent researchers debated the discrepancy, the Civil Registration office’s number of pneumonia and respiratory insufficiency deaths in the state fell from 6,909 to 3,599. The office said it was due to reclassification of death certificates that list several related causes of death.Beyond the shifting and incomplete information, critics say, the Brazilian federal government has further eroded trust in its count-keeping with cosmetic changes to official sites that appear designed to de-emphasize the gravity of the epidemic.One bulletin published by the president’s press office refers to patients in hospitals and intensive care units as “recovering,” even though a significant number eventually die of COVID-19.“We are becoming an international joke in terms of public health,” said Domingos Alves, an associate professor of social medicine at the University of Sao Paulo. “Deaths cannot be hidden by decree.” 
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India and China will resolve a dispute on their contested borders “peacefully” the Indian External Affairs Ministry said Sunday, a day after military commanders from the two countries met to find a solution to their monthlong standoff in the Himalayas.  The face-off, in eastern Ladakh, a region bordering China, which controls access to several strategic points on their Himalayan border, began with a confrontation between patrolling soldiers from the two countries in early May. While Indian officials have said Chinese soldiers entered Indian-controlled territory, erecting tents and posts in three places, China has denied it breached the “Line of Actual Control” — the border between the countries  —  and said there is stability in the area.   Analysts said while the talks may have defused the tensions that have led to a buildup of troops from both sides, they do not see an early resolution to the latest border dispute between the Asian giants.   Both sides have since deployed additional troops, artillery and weapons in the Himalayan region.     Several stretches of the 3,488-kilometer border in the high mountains between India and China are contested and have triggered confrontations in the past.     Saturday’s talks were held at a Himalayan region border post.   “Both sides agreed to peacefully resolve the situation in the border areas in accordance with various bilateral agreements and keeping in view the agreement between the leaders that peace and tranquility in the India-China border regions is essential for the overall development of bilateral relations,” according to the ministry statement.    The statement said that the two countries will continue the military and diplomatic engagements to ensure “peace and tranquility in the border areas,” and that an early resolution “would contribute to the further development of the relationship.”   However, observers in New Delhi are not optimistic that much headway was made during the recent talks.  “I don’t think either side is backing down. They may have agreed to not take the next escalatory step, but it is not an end to the confrontation,” according to security expert, Bharat Karnad at New Delhi’s Center for Policy Research.    Analysts say the spark for the military standoff between the Asian neighbors could have been building of roads and other border infrastructure by India in recent years to match the Chinese infrastructure on its side.    India wants restoration of status quo in the area. According to Karnad, though, “the Chinese keep presenting India with new status quo’s and you are stuck with it. So what status quo are we talking about? We are losing out.”     The India-China standoff is likely to drag on through the summer as troops from both sides dig in, the Times of India newspaper said this week.  
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