Looming U.S. legislation that imposes stringent sanctions on the Syrian government has raised concerns among the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), with Kurdish officials warning that including northeast Syria region in the sanctions could hinder their fight against the Islamic State (IS) terror group.
 
The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, which takes effect June 17, sanctions the Syrian government over human rights abuses and targets companies working with the regime and its military, construction, energy and engineering sectors. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has called it “economic terrorism.”
 
Sinam Mohamad, the SDF representative in the U.S., told VOA that authorities in northeast Syria fear the sanctions could impact their economy, deepening the impoverishment of civilians already struggling to recover from IS destruction.
 
“As Caesar sanctions are about to go into effect, the status of northeastern Syria must be taken into consideration especially when these sanctions might affect the battle to fight IS,” Mohamad told VOA.FILE – A fighter with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) monitors on surveillance screens prisoners accused of being affiliated with the Islamic State (IS) group, at a prison in the northeastern Syrian city of Hasakeh, Oct. 26, 2019.Mohamad said SDF was unsure if the region, known by locals as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, will be protected from the consequences of the crippling sanctions, especially as it uses the Syrian currency, Lira.
 
She said Kurdish officials hope Washington in its sanctions act makes it clear that their area will remain open to commercial transactions with other countries and international organizations providing aid to rebuild infrastructure in their region.   
 
The SDF has been assured by the U.S. deputy special envoy to the anti-IS global coalition William Roebuck, according to Mohamad. The assurance, Roebuck added, was “a positive stand.  But it’s still unclear what are the procedures that will be put in place to exclude this region from the sanctions.”
 US stance
 
A U.S. State Department spokesperson told VOA that the sanctions seek to prevent the Syrian regime from “abusing the international financial system and global supply chain to continue brutalizing the Syrian people.”
 
The official said the U.S. will provide exemptions for humanitarian aid to ensure civilians are not harmed by the sanctions.FILE – A woman walks through a market in the Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli, in Syria’s northeastern Hasakeh province, Oct. 29, 2019.“As the sanctions under the Caesar Act enter into force, the United States will remain in close coordination with our partners, the humanitarian community, and civil society groups, and we will continue our support to help meet humanitarian needs and create the kind of stability and security necessary for a better future for the Syrian people,” the spokesperson told VOA.
The Caesar Act passed the U.S. Senate later last year in a bipartisan effort and as a part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2020. It is named after a pseudonym used by a Syrian military police forensic photographer based in Damascus. The photographer defected from the Syrian regime in 2013 and smuggled out of Syria about 55,000 photographs documenting systematic torture of prisoners between 2011 and 2013 by the Syrian regime security inside detention facilities.  
 
Kurdish officials in a May statement warned that the sanctions, if applied to the northeastern region, could negatively impact their efforts to go after IS remnants and maintain security and stability.
 
“IS danger could return to Syria and the world, and measures must be taken to support the effort to fight IS in our areas,” the statement read. “We will make all necessary efforts to mitigate the effect of the sanctions on our areas as we will work to limit its negative consequences,” the statement said.
 Deteriorating economy
 
Some Syria experts say the approaching U.S. sanctions have already worsened Syria’s fragile economy with the Syrian currency hitting an all-time low, standing Sunday at $0.002 USD. Prices have been rising as Syrians across the country took to the streets recently to protest deteriorating living conditions.
 
To face the possible consequences on the northeast, Kurdish authorities have called on farmers in the region to sell their crops to the local administration and banned exporting it to the areas under the Syrian government.FILE – A shepherd rides a donkey across a pumpjack operating in an oil field in the countryside of al-Qahtaniyah town in Syria’s northeastern Hasakeh province, near the Turkish border, March 11, 2020.However, some experts charge that Caesar Act’s overall effect on the local economy will be limited. The sanctions, they say, will deal a blow to the al-Assad’s regime for its alleged war crimes as well as its main backers Russia and Iran. Similarly, the act could discourage countries such United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and China to reestablish relations with the Syrian government.
 
“Caesar Act is quite targeted in terms of its secondary sanctions, that is specific to the companies contributing to the construction efforts to petroleum and to aircrafts and other things to do with to the military, so it shouldn’t have quite a negative effect on the people as a whole,” Genevieve Zingg, a legal fellow at the Syria Justice and Accountability Center (SJAC), told VOA.
 
Zingg said that the U.S. humanitarian exemptions ensure Syria will have free access to medical and humanitarian supplies, especially as the war-torn country remains vulnerable to a coronavirus outbreak.
 
The sanctions, she said, will not achieve justice for crimes committed during the Syrian war. However, “they are very important as a deterrent mechanism to ensure that we are not normalizing relations with a regime and its allies that perpetrated horrible war crimes and violations of international law throughout this conflict.”
 
Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions have been displaced. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says it has documented during the war more than 16,000 deaths from torture, including some 125 children.   
 VOA’s State Department correspondent Nike Ching contributed to this story. 
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The thousands of people expected to attend next Saturday’s political rally for President Donald Trump in Oklahoma “probably” ought to wear a face mask to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Sunday. The Trump campaign, however, has not said whether it plans to enforce guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control calling for face coverings at large gatherings such as the Trump rally in in Tulsa. As many as 19,000 people could crowd into the city’s BOK Center to take part in the president’s first large-scale rally in three months. Kudlow told CNN that as U.S. workers return to their jobs after being laid off because of the spread of the coronavirus, they should continue to observe social distancing guidelines calling for people to stay two meters away from others and to wear face masks. Asked whether his suggestion for workers to wear a face mask also applied to people at the Trump rally, Kudlow said, “Well, OK. Probably so.”   Asked how the rally can be held safely, one of the president’s biggest supporters, Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford told ABC’s “This Week” show, “I don’t know how they’re going to handle that.” But he said he plans to go. Trump has repeatedly ignored suggestions that he wear a face mask in public to set an example for Americans to prevent the spread of the pandemic that has infected more than 2 million people and killed more than 115,000 in the U.S., both figures by far the most in any nation around the world. Asked about wearing a face mask, Trump at one point said, “I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.” But liability for the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, is worrying the Trump campaign. It claims that 200,000 to 300,000 people have requested tickets for the Tulsa rally in one of the biggest Trump-supportive states in the country. FILE – President Donald Trump walks onstage to speak at a campaign rally, Feb. 28, 2020, in North Charleston, S.C.But anyone requesting a ticket must agree to a disclaimer saying they acknowledge the “inherent risk of exposure to COVID-19 exists in any public place where people are present” and agrees to relinquish any right to sue the Trump campaign or the arena if they subsequently contract the virus. Trump, believing large-scale rallies are a crucial political lifeline leading up to his November national re-election contest against former Vice President Joe Biden, has made it clear he does not want to speak to a two-thirds-empty arena to accommodate social distancing or a sea of faces wearing face masks.
Trump campaign chairman Brad Parscale said last week, “Americans are ready to get back to action and so is President Trump. The Great American Comeback is real and the rallies will be tremendous.” But Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, voiced deep concerns last week about the crowd expected to hear Trump, saying that the pandemic is far from over. “Oh my goodness,” Fauci said. “Where is it going to end? We’re still at the beginning of really understanding.” Some Americans have equated wearing a face mask as a sign of weakness, but U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said Sunday on Twitter, “Some feel face coverings infringe on their freedom of choice — but if more wear them, we’ll have MORE freedom to go out.” He said that with face coverings, there would be “less asymptomatic viral spread, more places open, and sooner! Exercise and promote your freedom by choosing to wear a face covering!” According to the Centers for Disease Control guidelines, the Trump rally would fall into the “highest risk” category, defined as “large in-person gatherings where it is difficult for individuals to remain spaced at least 6 feet (two meters) apart and attendees travel from outside the local area.” The CDC guidance also says that “cloth face coverings are strongly encouraged in settings where individuals might raise their voice (e.g., shouting, chanting, singing)” — all of which is typical of a political rally.  
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Officials in Pakistan have estimated that nationwide confirmed cases of COVID-19 infections could reach up to 1.2 million by the end of July, urging the nation to strictly comply with safety guidelines to help reverse the rising trajectory of new cases.  
 
The national tally of infections has surpassed 140,000, with about 2,700 deaths, since late February when the coronavirus pandemic reached the South Asian nation of 220 million people.  
 
Pakistani officials said Sunday the country has recorded more than 6,800 cases in the last 24 hours.  
 
Asad Umar, the head of the National Command and Operation Center (NCOC) directing Pakistan’s battle against the virus, said Sunday the escalation in COVID-19 infections was a cause of grave concern for the government. 
 
“Unless the current trend is reversed, our experts are telling us the number of cases could double by the end of June and could even reach one million to 1.2 million by the end July,” Umar warned while addressing a news conference in Islamabad.  FILE – People ride on the back of a mini truck after the government resumed public transport services easing the lockdown imposed against the COVID-19 coronavirus, in Pakistan’s port city of Karachi, June 3, 2020.COVID-19 infections have particularly soared since last month when Prime Minister Imran Khan eased restrictions on commercial and public activities to help restore livelihood means for millions of poverty-stricken families.  
 
Scores of government workers and national as well as provincial lawmakers have also contracted the virus while several others have died. 
 
Umar said that despite a sustained government campaign to promote, among other safety measures, the use of masks in public places, a major chunk of the population ignored the instructions, leading to a rise in infections in Pakistan. This has forced the government to go for a “selective” or “smart” lockdown, he said.   FILE – A man wearing a protective face mask gestures while shopping outside an electronics market, after Pakistan started easing lockdown restrictions, as the outbreak of the coronavirus disease continues, in Karachi, Pakistan, June 4, 2020.“Now the government has decided to crackdown on people violating safety guidelines in high-risk areas or hot spots, to protect them against contracting the virus and to ensure they are able to conduct commercial activities at the same time,” he said. 
 
Hundreds of hot spots have already been sealed off in Pakistan, including parts of the national capital, over the past few days to contain the spread of the virus. 
 
Khan has rejected calls for enforcing prolonged and complete fresh lockdowns, insisting such a move would hurt the poorest in a country where two-thirds of the population depend on day-to-day earnings.  
 
The prime minister has from the outset argued that about 150 million people in the country would suffer from starvation and his cash-starved government cannot feed them beyond a few months. 
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Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput, 34, was found dead in his Mumbai home Sunday.Citing police sources, local media reported that the actor was found hanging in his apartment in an apparent suicide, but that no note was found.“It pains us to share that Sushant Singh Rajput is no longer with us,” Rajput’s publicist wrote in a statement, asking for privacy.Rajput, originally from Patna, Bihar, made his Bollywood debut in the film “Kai Po Che” (I have cut) in 2013. He notably portrayed former Indian cricket captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni in the film “M.S. Dhoni” in 2016.Rajput attended New Delhi University to study engineering before dropping out to pursue acting.Indian social media was flooded with messages from politicians, athletes, and fellow Bollywood stars in remembrance of Rajput.“I can’t believe this at all… it’s shocking… a beautiful actor and a good friend,” Nawazuddin Saddiqui wrote on Twitter.  
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During the coming week, the U.N. Human Rights Council will be faced with many important issues left hanging when its 43rd session was suspended in March because of COVID-19.  The meeting, which opens Monday, will employ a so-called hybrid approach, with a mix of both real and virtual presentations.To ensure the safety of participants during this time of coronavirus, U.N. officials say social distancing measures will be strictly enforced.  Delegations will have a reduced number of representatives attending the session and hundreds of side events by nongovernmental organizations will not take place on U.N. premises.Presentation of reports and interactive dialogues on human rights issues will involve experts who are either physically present or speaking by video conference.  Countries that will come under review include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Ukraine, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Central African Republic.One of the highlights of the weeklong meeting will be an urgent debate on institutionalized racism in the United States underlined by the killing of African American George Floyd while in police custody.Geneva director of Human Rights Watch John Fisher calls this a moment of reckoning for the United States.  He said the event will likely be used by some countries to advance their own agendas.“We are also very concerned that China is seeking to exploit this moment of global chaos and the disarray within the U.S. to crack down on rights and freedoms in Hong Kong … And, we are calling upon states to take this moment to bring more attention to Hong Kong, as I mentioned.  We feel this is a time when China will be watching the international response, and, if that response is muted, will feel emboldened to go even further down the track,” he said.A year ago, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Agnes Callemard, presented her report on the killing of Saudi columnist for the Washington Post Jamal Khashoggi, which she claimed was by agents of the Saudi government.  While this issue is not formally on the council agenda, Fisher believes it should be given renewed attention.“In addition to, of course the murder of Khashoggi, while a number of women human rights defenders have been released from prison, a number remain.  There are still allegations of torture.  They still face criminal charges …There continues to be use of the death penalty, flogging, a crackdown on dissent, new waves of arrests,” he said. At the end of the week, the council will take action on decisions and the adoption of more than 40 resolutions.  They include recommendations on improving human rights in countries such as Libya, Iran, Nicaragua, South Sudan, and Myanmar. 
  
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Black Lives Matter protests attracted large crowds in Australia on Saturday in defiance of government warnings about the coronavirus. The marches have been inspired by mass gatherings in the United States following the death in police custody of George Floyd.Across Australia, thousands of anti-racism demonstrators rallied against high rates of indigenous incarceration, deaths in custody and the removal of indigenous children from their families. Aboriginal Australians make up about 3 percent of the population but almost a third of prison inmates are indigenous.“We are here to support our future as indigenous people and to walk against injustices of what happened to our people,” one aboriginal woman said.In Perth, Western Australia, protesters defied calls by the authorities Saturday not to attend because of coronavirus fears. Organizers handed out masks and hand sanitizer.An earlier march in Sydney was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court on public health grounds, but hundreds of people joined the protest.“I am here because there have been 437 deaths in custody since 1991,” a protester in Sydney said. “So I am here to make a stand, and I do not care that the government has said this is illegal.”New South Wales Assistant Police Commissioner Mick Willing was not happy protesters had ignored coronavirus health orders.“It is disappointing to acknowledge that around 300 people chose to ignore the warnings that had been given by police in terms of coming to this public gathering,” he said.There have been separate rallies in Australia by groups protesting the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees.The government had urged demonstrators to stay home because of concerns that mass gatherings could spread the coronavirus, which has been mostly contained in Australia.Two women were arrested after a statue of the British explorer, Captain James Cook, was defaced in Sydney.  Another was damaged in Perth.  However, Peter Dutton, Australia’s Home Affairs minister, criticized calls to remove statues of European colonists in Australia as an “obscure left-wing cause.”This year has marked the 250th anniversary of Cook’s voyage to Australia. British settlement would begin 17 years later.Historical monuments across the world have been torn down in recent weeks by anti-racism campaigners following the death of George Floyd, an African American man, in U.S. police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, last month.  
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Officials in two Southern California communities are investigating the hanging deaths of two African American men.The body of 24-year-old Robert Fuller was found last week in Palmdale, hanging from a tree near City Hall.Late last month, the body of Malcolm Harsch, who was 38, was also found hanging from a tree in Victorville, near a homeless campsite.Authorities in both locations initially suspected the men had committed suicide but are now reserving final decisions in response to community uproar and pending further investigation.Thousands of people turned out Saturday in Palmdale for a memorial for Fuller. Diamond Alexander, Fuller’s sister, said, “We just want the truth. My brother was not suicidal. He was a survivor.”One woman told the Los Angeles Times that while officials suspected “suicide,” she suspected “a lynching.”The Harsch family has issued a statement, saying that they “want justice, not comfortable excuses.” They added, “There are many ways to die but considering the current racial tension, a Black man hanging himself from a tree definitely doesn’t sit well with us right now.”The U.S. has experienced protests across the country recently in response to the death of George Floyd, an African American man who died after a police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes.America has a long history with hanging or lynching black people. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a museum in Montgomery, Alabama, says it is a “national memorial acknowledging the victims of racial terror lynchings.”The museum says on its website that the memorial “is a sacred space for truth-telling and reflection about racial terror in America and its legacy.”
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Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido on Saturday said the opposition would not recognize a “false” electoral body named by the government-friendly supreme court, while his allies pledged to extend the term of the current legislature.An extension past the January 2021 end date would allow Guaido, who is recognized by dozens of countries as Venezuela’s rightful leader due to his position as president of the opposition-held National Assembly, to remain in the role even if the opposition boycotts parliamentary elections due by the end of the year.“We do not recognize any false national electoral council,” Guaido told reporters during a virtual news conference.Venezuela’s constitution grants the power to appoint members of the national electoral council to congress, but the Supreme Court — widely viewed as loyal to President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government — on Friday named its own board after ruling the legislature had failed to do so.Opposition leaders denounced the move as an attempt to rig the election, and some prominent Guaido allies said in response the current legislature should extend its term.“The current legitimate National Assembly will continue as long as no valid constitutional electoral process to substitute it has been held,” Henry Ramos, a senior lawmaker from the large Democratic Action block, wrote on Twitter on Friday night.Asked about a possible extension of the legislature’s term, Guaido said his priority was ousting Maduro before the end of the year, and that the National Assembly would move forward with naming its own electoral rectors.“For us, 2021 is very far away,” he said.Venezuela’s information ministry did not respond to a request for comment.The court’s decision to name its own council has raised the likelihood that opposition parties would boycott the parliamentary election as they did Maduro’s reelection in 2018. 
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Faulty software or poorly calibrated vote-tabulation scanners used to count mailed-in ballots in this week’s chaotic Georgia primary may have prevented thousands of votes from being counted, election officials and voting integrity activists said.The issue was identified in at least four counties, DeKalb, Morgan, Clarke and Cherokee, according to officials who discovered them, including activists who have sued the state for alleged election mismanagement.“The fact that it is in multiple counties tells me that it’s probably systemic,” said Richard DeMillo, a Georgia Tech computer scientist who has testified for the plaintiffs, because identical scanners and software were used to count all absentee ballots across the state. DeMillo said the only way to know for sure is through audits.A top Georgia voting official, voting implementation manager Gabriel Sterling, said Friday that he had seen no evidence yet of the issue and found it difficult to believe the reports were “an active description of what is happening on the ground.”“These are activists who have an ax to grind,” he said.Nearly 1.1 million Georgians voted by mail for Tuesday’s primary, which had been delayed twice due to the coronavirus pandemic.In-person voting Tuesday was beset by cascading failures. Voters waited up to five hours to cast ballots at some polling places due to equipment problems, poll worker unfamiliarity with a new voting system and social distancing measures taken because of the virus. Many voters also showed up to vote in person because absentee ballots they requested never arrived by mail.People vote at voting booths in the Georgia’s primary election at Park Tavern on June 9, 2020, in Atlanta.The scanners and ballot-marking devices used in all 159 Georgia counties Tuesday are part of a voting equipment package the state purchased for $120 million from Dominion Voting Systems after a federal judge ordered it to scrap an outdated, untrustworthy system.In post-election reviews Wednesday, election panels in all four counties detected unregistered votes while examining ballot images flagged by the vote-tallying scanner’s software for anomalies.In Morgan County, Republican-dominated and just southeast of Atlanta, panelists discovered at least 20 votes on scanned ballot images that the program had not recorded, said Jeanne Dufort, a Democrat on the panel. She said it appeared the votes did not register because ovals that were supposed to be filled in were instead checked or marked with X’s.All three panelists agreed to add the unregistered votes to the electronic tally, said Dufort. But on Thursday, the county elections board voted 3-2 not to audit the rest of the roughly 3,000 absentee ballots. The other two panelists, both Republicans, did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment.“It is a head-in-the-sand approach,” Dufort complained.In Clarke County, vote review panelist Adam Shirley estimated at least 30 ballots out of about 300 flagged for anomalies had votes that “the system had not marked at all, that had not processed at all.”Shirley, a Democrat, recommended a review of all 15,000 absentee ballots.In an email Friday to fellow board members, county election board chair Jesse Evans said the problem should be addressed before results are certified.People wait in line to vote in the Georgia’s primary election at Park Tavern on June 9, 2020, in Atlanta.He quoted Shirley as saying “it’s not just possible but probable that a ballot whose voter had clearly but not completely marked their vote would not have its votes counted by the software” and that he was disturbed the software did not flag the uncounted votes.“We only noticed them by sheer luck as we were adjudicating other, flagged contests on ballots,” Shirley wrote to Evans.In Cherokee County, the problem was detected in less than 5 percent of the flagged ballots, said an elections official who spoke on condition they not be further identified, citing fear of political harassment. The official said the number of flagged ballots was in the hundreds.In DeKalb, County, review panel member Elizabeth Burns estimated finding between 20-50 uncounted votes on 530 flagged ballots and said her team had so far only reviewed half its 100,000 absentee ballots. Like Shirley, she said her team had stumbled upon the issue. She said she wondered if other counties were even aware of it.“Maybe not everyone has been as thorough as us and noticed this,” she said.“The detection of this major problem was only because of diligent citizen oversight. The officials charged with the duty to fully test the equipment recklessly failed to responsibly do so, or to audit it,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, which is demanding in court that the state scrap the ballot-marking devices.Dominion spokeswoman Kay Stimson referred questions to the state but said in an email that her company’s systems “are designed to support robust post-election audits, and we support them as a recommended best practice for elections.”A Cobb County absentee ballot is seen May 5, 2020, in Kennesaw, Georgia.Sterling, the state official, said authorities are willing to consider audits if merited.Voting security expert Harri Hursti said inadequate preelection testing may be the cause of the issue. A fix could be as simple as adjusting the contrast settings in the image-capturing software. Or it could be a different coding issue.Amber McReynolds, CEO of the nonprofit Vote at Home that promotes voting by mail, said it may have been possible to avoid the unregistered vote issue by placing the software at the highest sensitivity for discerning markings. The Dominion election system used in Georgia is used in many states with tough standards like Colorado, she said.It was, however, denied certification by Texas, which cited “multiple hardware and software issues” identified by state-appointed examiners. They cited a complex installation process and one called the suite “fragile and error prone.”The system is proprietary, however, and Hursti said it has never been subjected to an independent security review. 
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Atlanta’s police chief resigned Saturday hours after a black man was fatally shot by officers in a struggle following a field sobriety test. Authorities said the slain man had grabbed an officer’s Taser but was running away when he was shot.Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced the resignation of Police Chief Erika Shields at a news conference as roughly 150 protesters marched outside the Wendy’s restaurant where Rayshard Brooks, 27, was fatally shot late Friday. The mayor also said she called for the immediate firing of the officer who opened fire at Brooks.“I do not believe that this was a justified use of deadly force and have called for the immediate termination of the officer,” Bottoms said.She said it was Shields’ decision to step aside as police chief and that she would remain with the city in an undetermined role. Interim Corrections Chief Rodney Bryant will serve as interim police chief until a permanent replacement is found.The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is investigating the shooting, said the confrontation started with officers responding to a complaint that a man was sleeping in a car blocking the restaurant’s drive-through lane. The GBI said Brooks failed a field sobriety test and then resisted officers’ attempts to arrest him.The GBI released security camera video of the shooting Saturday. The footage shows a man running from two police officers as he raises a hand, which is holding some type of object, toward an officer a few steps behind him. The officer draws his gun and fires as the man keeps running, then falls to the ground in the parking lot.Taser apparently pointed at officerGBI Director Vic Reynolds said Brooks had grabbed a Taser from one of the officers and appeared to point it at the officer as he fled, prompting the officer to reach for his gun.“In a circumstance like this where an officer is involved in the use of deadly force, the public has a right to know what happened,” GBI Director Vic Reynolds told a news conference.The security camera video does not show Brooks’ the initial struggle with police.The officers involved in the shooting were not identified.Brooks died after being taken to an Atlanta hospital. One of the officers was treated and released for unspecified injuries.The shooting came at a time of heightened tension over police brutality and calls for reforms across the U.S. following the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Atlanta was among U.S. cities where large crowds of protesters took to the streets.A crowd of roughly 150 demonstrators, including members of Brooks’ family, gathered Saturday outside the restaurant where he was shot. Police shut down streets for several blocks around the restaurant as protesters marched peacefully in the streets.Among them was Crystal Brooks, who said she was Rayshard Brooks’ sister-in-law.“He wasn’t causing anyone any harm,” she said. “The police went up to the car and even though the car was parked they pulled him out of the car and started tussling with him.”She added: “He did grab the Taser, but he just grabbed the Taser and ran.”’The people are upset’Gerald Griggs, an attorney and a vice president of Atlanta’s NAACP chapter, estimated there were 150 people protesting at the scene as he walked with them Saturday afternoon.“The people are upset,” Griggs said. “They want to know why their dear brother Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed when he was merely asleep on the passenger side and not doing anything.”Even though Brooks struggled with officers, Griggs said, “they could have used nonlethal force to take him down.”Reynolds said his agents worked through the night interviewing witnesses and reviewing video. He said their findings showed that Brooks tried to fight off two officers when they tried to arrest him and at one point managed to take a Taser away from one of them.A security camera recorded Brooks “running or fleeing from Atlanta police officers,” Reynolds said. “It appears that he has in his hand a Taser.”During a short foot chase, Brooks “turns around and it appears at that time he points a Taser at an Atlanta officer,” Reynolds said. That’s when the officer drew his gun and shot Brooks, he said, estimating the officer fired three times.Atlanta Deputy Police Chief Timothy Peek told reporters late Friday that both officers deployed their Tasers in an attempt to subdue the suspect but were unable to “stop the aggression of the fight.”District attorney’s involvementReynolds said his agents would turn over results of their investigation to Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard, whose office will decide whether criminal charges are warranted against either of the officers.Howard said Saturday his office had already gotten involved.“My office has already launched an intense, independent investigation of the incident,” Howard said in a statement, saying members of his staff “were on scene shortly after the shooting, and we have been in investigative sessions ever since to identify all of the facts and circumstances surrounding this incident.”
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Five days of protests have shaken Syria’s usually peaceful Druze enclave of Suweida, as rising prices and a falling domestic currency have pushed ordinary Syrians hurt by the crisis to vent their anger.Amateur video has shown scores of people demonstrating and chanting against the government.In Damascus, many shops and businesses reportedly have closed as exchange rates fluctuated wildly. Factories that produce pharmaceutical goods also have closed because of shortages of raw materials, while fuel shortages have forced the government to buy gasoline from Lebanon.Atop these developments, new U.S. economic sanctions on people and businesses trading with the Syrian government are set to take effect June 17.FILE – Syria’s then-Water Resources Minister Hussein Arnous attends a trade show in Damascus, Oct. 2, 2018. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on June 11, 2020, named Arnous interim prime minister.As the crisis intensified, President Bashar al-Assad replaced Prime Minister Imad Khamis on Thursday with Water Resources Minister Hussein Arnous.Several factors — including a major economic crisis in neighboring Lebanon, U.S. economic sanctions on Syria’s top regional ally, Iran, and an internal spat between Assad and his cousin and oligarch, Rami Makhlouf, have added to the decline of the Syrian pound.Makhlouf has said on social media that he has not done anything improper in his business dealings as head of the Syrian mobile phone network Syriatel and insists he has been a top supporter of the government since 2011.Syrian economic analyst Dr. Oussama al Qadi told Arab media the feud between Assad and his cousin had caused the Syrian pound to lose at least a third of its value. A government decision to outlaw black market sales of foreign currency, he said, also inflamed the crisis.Joshua Landis, who heads the Middle East program at the University of Oklahoma, told VOA the unprecedented fall in the value of the Syrian pound has made almost everyone desperate.’Tons of pressure'”There is tremendous discontent in Syria today,” he said. “Everybody I know in Syria is in desperate economic shape. There’s tons of pressure, and these demonstrations are an expression of the pain that Syrians are feeling from the collapse of the Syrian pound.”Despite the desperation, Landis doubts the present crisis is going to cause the Assad government to fall, since he no longer sees any organized opposition inside the country.”The opposition,” he said, “is fragmented and has been driven out of the country,” except for opponents in the Turkish-protected enclave of Idlib.Landis also said the new U.S. sanctions on the Syrian government, “while being framed in humanitarian terms,” are mostly aimed at hurting Russia and Iran “and depriving them of the fruits of their victory.” U.S.-Syria coordinator James Jeffrey explained recently that his job is to make Syria “a quagmire” for Russia.
 
Khattar Abou Diab, who teaches political science at the University of Paris, told VOA that Assad’s administration “has been seriously weakened” by the decline of the pound and that things are fast becoming “intolerable” for many people. He added that U.S. pressure on Lebanon might have contributed to the crisis.Diab said Lebanon was Syria’s economic lungs. More than $3 billion or $4 billion used to transit annually between Lebanon and Syria in various economic dealings.
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Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, one of the world’s oldest and largest, is open for business after being closed for 70 days as part of Turkey’s COVID lockdown. The reopening early this month is an important symbolic step in what the government calls its normalization efforts, a move that cannot come soon enough for the 30,000 people working at the bazaar. Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul.Producer: Rod James. Videographer: Berke Bas.
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The World Health Organization says lessons learned from previous outbreaks of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo and effective therapeutics will allow it to more quickly contain a new outbreak of the deadly disease in Equateur Province.U.N. health officials report there is no link between the Ebola outbreak declared June 1 in Mbandaka, Equateur Province, and the epidemic, which broke out nearly two years ago in DR Congo’s North Kivu and Ituri provinces.   
 
They say the experience gained, however, and lessons learned from tackling this deadly disease in eastern DRC will help them to more quickly stop the spread of the virus in Equateur Province in the western part of the country.
 
WHO Emergency Operations Manager Michel Yao says the World Health Organization has more than 20 staff on the ground and is ready to send in more, if necessary.  He tells VOA that the WHO is working with partners to set up treatment centers, to monitor risks and respond promptly to identify and trace new cases.    “Our objective this time is to work through local authorities that were already trained,” Yao said. “They had some experience.  So, we have just to refresh and we have to remain behind coaching them.  Lesson learned remain the critical one is to work through the community.”    The epidemic in eastern DRC, which has infected more than 3,460 people and killed 2,280, finally appears to be winding down.  The latest reports from western DRC, where the outbreak has just started, put the number of confirmed and probable cases at 12, including nine deaths.
 
Two years ago, the same region was stricken with Ebola.  It took less than four months to contain the outbreak with the help of an experimental vaccine, which provided protection against the virus.
 
Yao says the vaccines, which since have proven to be safe and effective, will help to speedily contain the virus.  So far, he says, more than 600 people have been vaccinated in Mbandaka and Wangata health zones.  He says 3,000 doses of the vaccine are in place and more are expected to be delivered soon.
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