Indaba zesiNdebele Ekuseni - Voice of America
Indaba zesiNdebele Ekuseni - August 01, 2024
This is VOA News, I'm Michael Brown, Israel on Wednesday stepped up security at its embassies around the world and warned citizens to be on alert after Hamas political leader Ismail Anayyay was assassinated in Iran, allegedly by Israel, then the Gratstein reports for VOA from Jerusalem. The assassination comes amid talks for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which could lead to the release of at least some of the 115 hostages still being held in Gaza. Some analysts said the killing of Haniya may further weaken Hamas in Gaza. There was also concern that Iran could respond directly to Israel since Haniya was killed in Iran. In April, Iran fired hundreds of missiles directly at Israel, and Iran has used proxies, including the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah, to attack the country. The defense department says Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two accomplices in the 2001 9/11 attack are expected to enter guilty pleas at the military commission at Guantanamo Bay Cuba as soon as next week, the plea agreement comes more than 16 years after their prosecution began for Al Qaeda's attack, and more than 20 years after militants flew commandeered commercial airliners into buildings, killing nearly 3,000 people. Defense lawyers have requested that they receive life sentences in exchange for the guilty pleas. The head of one group of families of those killed, Terry Strada, reacted to the news, saying that the men were cowards when they planned the attack and says they're cowards today. And for more news, as always, we invite you to join us at our website, that is veawaynews.com also on the Veaway mobile app. This is Veaway News. The families of some of the 346 people killed and two Boeing max jetliner crashes have asked a federal judge to reject the plea agreement Boeing and the U.S. Justice Department have proposed instead the families want the judge to schedule a jury trial for Boeing. The case against Boeing's dims from two Boeing 737 max crashes in Indonesia in 2018 and in Ethiopia in 2019, and Boeing's misrepresentation about a key software feature involved in both incidents. The decision to accept the deal or put Boeing on trial is now in the hands of a U.S. district judge in Fort Worth, Texas. Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday that former President Donald Trump's false assertions about her race were the same old show as she emphasized the need for black women to organize for his defeat this November. The American people deserve better. The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth. A leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strengths. Harris drew chuckles from the audience of a historically black sorority as she mentioned Trump's comments early in the day. At the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump said Harris, the first black woman in Asian American to serve as vice president, had in the past promoted only her Indian heritage. If he corresponded Julie Walker reports a former U.S. green beret is under arrest in connection with a plot to remove Venezuela's president. Jordan Goodrow, the former green beret behind a cross-border raid in 2020 to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with a small cadre of supporters has been arrested in New York. He and Venezuelan Yaxi Alvarez face 14 criminal counts tied to arm smuggling according to a federal indictment. Goodrow, a three-time bronze star recipient for bravery in Iraq and Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the amphibious raid by a ragtag group of soldiers who trained in Colombia. In a video, Goodrow said he was protecting Venezuela's democracy after Maduro's 2018 re-election was boycotted by the opposition and condemned by the U.S., Goodrow's lawyer says his client is innocent, Julie Walker, New York. Iran bows revenge for the assassination of a Hamas leader in Tehran. What has happened to them is a humiliation on a large scale, something that probably hasn't happened ever in the history of Islamic Republic. In the last few weeks, there were no evidence against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's election victory. Our patience and that of the international community is running out. It's running out on waiting for the Venezuelan electoral authorities to come clean. And giving up dating apps for a good run. So I decided in late spring that I was just going to cleanse from the dating apps. Today is Thursday, August 1st, and this is the OA's international edition. I'm Scott Walterman. The Secretary-General's believes that the attacks we have seen in South Beirut and in Tehran represent a dangerous escalation at a moment in which all efforts should instead be leading to a ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all Israeli hostages, a massive increase in humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza, and a return to calm and across the blue line. UN spokesperson Stefan Dejerk talking about the attacks in Lebanon that killed a military leader of Hezbollah and the attack in Tehran that killed a political leader of Hamas. Iran has vowed harsh punishment against Israel for its suspected assassination of Hamas political chief Ishmael Haniah in Tehran on Wednesday. Qatar involved in ceasefire and hostage negotiations condemned in the strongest terms, the killing. Dil Gavlak reports on what's next. Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed harsh punishment and revenge against Israel over its suspected assassination of Hamas chief Ismail Haniah, who was in Tehran for the inauguration of the Islamic Republic's new president, Masoud Pazesqian. Israel has not commented on the killing. Analyst Nicholas Harris of Washington's New Lines Institute told VOA the assassination took place in the heart of Tehran during a high-profile visit, which sends a clear signal from Israel to Iran to de-escalate. "The Israelis have yet to claim credit for the assassination, but it's likely the Israelis. The Israelis can strike the Iranians with their allies anywhere at any time. The Israelis are sending a signal that Israel has superior intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and operational capabilities." Aaron Bregman, Middle East security professor at King's College, London told VOA it's hard to know what Iran might do, but that Iran would prefer not to attack Israel directly, but would likely use one of its proxies in the so-called axis of resistance. "Iran's number one priority is to have an atomic boom on its bent." Analyst Harris said Haniah's assassination is a blow to U.S. Arab partners Qatar and Egypt's negotiations' efforts to win a ceasefire and hostage release. General Gamluk VOA news. "The situation in the Middle East has complicated there, there are a lot of players, all intertwined, in ways that could spark a regional war. Joining us now to help unravel it all is Alex Votenko, founding director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute. This suspected Israeli attack in Tehran is really something we've never seen before, right?" The fact that he's assassinated, isn't the first time a senior Hamas figure or Palestinian political figure has been assassinated, but Israel does a long track record of that going back decades. But the fact that he was done in such a manner in Tehran, the day after the inauguration of the new Iranian president where the city was in high security, really, those realities speak to a new chapter, essentially, in how Iran and Israel are taking this confrontation that they have engaged in to new levels. The Middle East, as a result, the wider world has been on edge for months about this growing tension and conflict. What does this do to that? I mean, it takes it to a new level, like you said, right? Right. I mean, again, we haven't been here before, and we have to keep in mind that the assassination of Hania is one part of what's happened the last few days. You had the killing of Votenko in Beirut, just yesterday, someone that has been described as Hezbollah's number two, certainly on the military side, he was in charge of their missile arsenal. He was taken out just a day before Islam and Hania was assassinated. You've seen the U.S. carrying out attacks on pro-Iranian militias in Iraq in recent days. I want you to go back just a few days ago. We have seen the escalation between Israel and the Houthis. The list of things that can go wrong is, is long, there are lots of moving parts here. You essentially have, in the Middle East today, the axis of resistance, this network of groups and countries that are aligned with Iran in the desire to sort of confront Israel, push the United States out of the region. Then on the other side, you have Israel, the United States, and a lot of countries that are basically hoping that they don't get caught in a firefight here, including the Gulf states. But I do want to just point out, when you look at the key players in all this, Israel, Hezbollah, Iran, United States, none of these main actors are actually interested in the original war. Yeah, when you described it, when you started describing all of the things that have happened in the last week, and all of the players, I was thinking the very same thing, that it's like a big giant, high stakes chess game. There are so many pieces on the board, and so many things that could go wrong. Yeah, plenty could go wrong, and, you know, really the question for all these stakeholders now is to sort of take a step back and reassess and decide what's best for them going forward. And the Iranian regime, the file, I know best, surely right now, even if they wanted to retaliate and they will retaliate one way or another, but I think they need some time to reassess what has happened to them is a humiliation on a large scale, something that probably hasn't happened ever in the history of the Islamic Republic. The assassination of a foreign leader in a compound under the supervision of the Revolutionary Guards, and they just had no way of stopping it. So that speaks to an Iran that is thoroughly infiltrated by the Israeli intelligence and friends of Israel who might have shared information with Israel in this case. And if they are so thoroughly able to infiltrate this Iranian regime, its intelligence and security services, as I wrote for the Middle East Institute just a few hours ago, wouldn't it be wise prudent for them to take a moment to think about perhaps house cleaning and resolving this issue of being badly infiltrated to the extent that they can before upping the anti, if you will, versus Israel. So this idea that we hear right now in the media that Iran is going to retaliate and it's going to retaliate fast and hard, I'm just suggesting that they're a shell shock stand state of mind right now. I mean, they don't know what just hit them. So they might need more time than they needed last time around in April when they retaliated against Israel at their embassy in Damascus. What do these two events have in common? Both of them caught the Iranians by surprise. To a point I made earlier, Israel is increasingly off the belief that they can't wait anymore, that Iran is coming closer and closer with its proxies, with the attacks on Israel, large parts of Israel can no longer can people can't live in the cities anymore in the north and so on. This isn't a place Israel can be in for much longer. So what are they doing? They're taking the fight and raising the stakes and saying to the Iranians, okay, are you still interested in doing this? Will the Iranians get the message and decide actually it's not worth it and they backed out? Again, I don't know. But two things I also say. Iran was in April and now harmony, the Supreme Leader, very quickly promised response under revenge. So we can anticipate something will come from Iran for Haniya's killing. Something will happen. But I also think it will be relatively proportionate. It won't be as some people out there speculating whatever they have, they'll throw at Israel. That's not the Iranian sort of signature for your will. There will be a response. They are now going to spend the next few days, maybe weeks, maybe longer, to think what would be proportionate? How can they show that they can retaliate but without taking it to the level of regional war, which is something that the Iranian regime desperately doesn't want to see, Iran is happy to see a regional war where Iran is out of it and others are fighting. But that's exactly what the Israelis are trying to make sure it doesn't happen, that if there is a regional war, Iran will be at the center of it. And that is why harmony and the revolution guards people will have to think very hard about what they do next. And internally, as you point out, how big do you think the problem is for the Iranian regime, that they have information like where he was staying, when he was going to be there coming out of the country? Look, if this was the one off, you would have said the regime is humiliated. They are not going to go back and sort of hide somewhere and people will forget. This is a regime that, if you look at the last 10, 15 years, from various assassinations against key targets, but a nuclear scientist, members of the revolution guards, or acts of sabotage, parts of the nuclear plant blows up, you can go back to 2009, but they, you know, it's toxic virus that blew up centrifuges. You can talk about Mossad literally taking trucks full of Iranian secret documents out of the country. I mean, the list goes on. So at this point, the Iranian regime knows exactly what the Iranian people think about their ability to protect the country against foreign infiltration in this King's Israel. They know that there is a full appreciation on the part of the public, that at this point is the lost cause. Their entire infiltrated. Are they going to be able to fix it? It's going to be a mammoth task. There are so many intelligence services, there's so much in terms of domestic rivalry going on. God knows how Mossad and others, friends of Mossad, have gotten themselves embedded in the system, but all we know is they clearly have the best intelligence you could possibly have. When you can target someone like Hania the way they did, and other cases, I mean, the case of the killing of Iranian commander, I just see commander Damascus, or this Hezbollah commander, Shuka, just yesterday Beirut, it shows you that it's not just Tehran, but also pretty much the entire axis of resistance at the leadership level has been infiltrated and the common observation you now hear in Iranian social media is it's not that Iran can stop Israel from having access to sensitive intelligence, that battle was lost long time ago. It's when will Israel decide to use the intelligence it has to strike next? Alex, thank you so much for the insight. Alex Vatanka, founding director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro saying if the U.S. government is willing to respect Venezuela's sovereignty and stop threatening Venezuela, we can resume dialogue. That the United States is saying it is losing patience. Our patience and that of the international community is running out, it's running out on waiting for the Venezuelan electoral authorities to come clean and release the full detailed data on this election. White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby. You may have seen the Carter Center, an independent observer just earlier this morning, released a report stating that, quote, Venezuela's 2024 presidential election did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic. Maduro says everyone who came to Venezuela from the Carter Center brought the report already written. The opposition in Venezuela says they have election data from 90 percent of the vote and it shows they got twice the number of votes then Maduro did. The New York Times has reviewed the data and says it does show the opposition won a decisive victory in the election. The man accused of being the main plotter in al-Qaeda September 11, 2001 attacks has agreed to plead guilty according to the Defense Department on Wednesday. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two accomplices in the attack are expected to enter the pleas at the Military Commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As soon as next week, we're following these other stories from around the world. The Congolese government violated the rights of the indigenous Bothwa community by evicting them about 50 years ago from their ancestral lands to expand one of the country's biggest national parks. That's according to the African Union's Commission on Human Rights, Bothwa people lived as hunters and gatherers in the forested areas of Uganda, Rwanda and Congo. Ukraine has received its first long-awaited F-16 jets from partners but the number is small, citing sources familiar with the matter according to Bloomberg reporting on Wednesday. The U.S. State Department has approved the potential sale of attack helicopters and related equipment to Slovakia for an estimated cost of $600 million according to the Pentagon. In our continuing coverage of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump questioned whether his Democratic rival Kamala Harris is black during a contentious interview during the country's largest annual gathering of black journalists. This is the question Donald Trump asked about Kamala Harris at the country's largest gathering of black journalists. Trump is echoing far right in conservative accounts on social media which have been spreading misinformation, questioning Harris' racial identity. Harris has long self-identified as both black and South Asian-American. Her mother is Indian and her father is black, making her the first black and the first Asian-American U.S. Vice President to serve the country. She's faced a barrage of sexist and racist attacks online since launching her White House campaign earlier this month. What he just said, what you just read out to me, is impulsive, it's insulting. This is White House press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre responding to Trump's remarks shortly after. "No one has any right to tell someone who they are, how they identify. That is not one's right." Trump's first-ever appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists Annual Convention on Wednesday was tensed throughout. "Are you with ABC because I think they're a fake news network?" While on stage, he took jabs at ABC, the questions being asked, and even the equipment. "I cannot understand your microphone." There was backlash from some members, prompting a co-chair of the convention to step down in protests. Trump has been actively courting black voters in his held of vents and cities with large black populations, including Atlanta. But President Joe Biden's decision to step down in favor of Harris could make it more challenging for him to hold his gains with black voters. A Reuters Ipsos poll released Tuesday showed Trump leading Harris 43 percent to 42 percent within the poll's margin of error. The latest in a series of surveys that have shown Harris erasing the lead Trump had opened during the final weeks of Biden's faltering campaign. "Greater's correspondent Freddie Joyner. How do autocratic leaders rise to power, and what keeps them there? What can Western democracies do to counter their actions? V.O.A.'s Steve Miller speaks with Ann Applebaum, author of a new book, Autocracy Incorporated the Dictators Who Want to Run the World? For some insight on that question. What do you mean by autocrat autocracy and since it's kind of a broad label, how does it differentiate between other labels like communist dictators, theocrats, nationalists? Autocracy is a political system where there is one leader or clique or party that controls and has absolute power. So it is not, there are no checks and balances, there are no obstacles to power. The judiciary is controlled by the autocrats. The press is controlled by the autocrats, the economy is controlled by the autocrats. When I hear that kind of terminology, I think about constitutions and codes of conduct. In the West we think about rules based order and we look at international organizations like the United Nations that have charters where there's universal declarations of human rights and guidelines for countries' behaviors. Many of the autocracies across the world are signatories to these documents and parts of these organizations. So how did they emerge if they're also part of these organizations where conduct is supposed to be regulated? So autocracies don't have rule of law. Rule of law means that everybody in the state, at least in theory, is subject to the constitution, to the rules, to the legal system as it has been defined by some kind of legitimate body of a parliament or a congress or a constitutional convention. In autocracies they have rule by law and that means that the law is whatever the autocratic leader says that it is and they don't have to obey any kind of neutral bodies, whether it's domestic or whether it's international. And increasingly you see autocracies around the world and here I'm thinking of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and others who don't even pay lip service anymore to international law and to the treaties that they've signed. They don't even pretend to acknowledge them. So how did these individuals and countries get to where we are in 2024? One of the ways we got to where we are is that there was a shift about a decade ago when the leaders of particularly the two most important autocracies Russia and China made a decision to treat Western constitutional democracies and the ideas of Western democracy. So, you know, freedom, rights, the rule of law as threats. And this is literally in a document that was put out by the Chinese Communist Party, you can hear it in speeches made by Vladimir Putin. They identified those ideas as threats to them and to their power. Ann Applebaum, author of Autocracy Incorporated, the Dictators who want to run the world talking with the oA's Steve Miller. And finally… So I decided in late spring that I was just going to cleanse from the dating apps. Every Wednesday, a running club in New York brings together hundreds of people who are not only looking to stay fit by jogging, but also searching for love. A three-mile run is followed by beers at local bars during which the club's members try to find romantic partners or just make new friends. Jun Chu reports. Online dating has been a go-to method of meeting romantic partners for years, but people in New York City seem to be abandoning the apps in exchange for a new dating scene. Run clubs. Annie Jorgensen is a member of lunch run club. So, I decided in late spring that I was just going to cleanse from the dating apps. I wasn't finding any success on it, and I've had a lot of fun and been meeting people in fun and unique ways like this club. According to global ticketing platform Eventbrite, athletic dating event saw a 135% increase in attendance from 2022 to 2023 nationwide. One of the most popular gatherings for athletic people looking for love is lunch run club. It even has a dress code to help its matchmaking mission. Rachel Lansing is a co-founder of lunch run club. So everybody owns black in New York. It's kind of like the New York uniform, so we made it all black if you're single. And then we wanted to just be open to everyone, so even people who were just looking to make friends, we wanted them to still be able to come, enjoy the run club, so we just said wear colors if you're taken. Many of the run club attendees attributed their participation to dating app fatigue, an experience studied by dating experts. Boston University assistant professor Katherine Kuduto studies how people use media to connect with one another. I think there's some disenchantment with dating apps overall of feeling like they're an option, but maybe not the best option, whereas speed dating or something similar, an in-person meeting, a group maybe where they're similar interests allows people to connect in person and have that initial conversation without the phone as an intermediary. The club has grown from 30 participants for its first run earlier this year to over 1,200 people signing up for this latest meetup. It's actually the largest singles event ever recorded in New York City, and we actually break that record every week as we continue to grow. The run spans about three mouths. Boston University's Kuduto says meeting over common interests is an effective strategy. I think there's longevity in connecting over shared interests, whether that's running or whether that's going to see live music, whether that's meeting up at a brewery. According to Eventbrite, in-person dating activities in the United States saw a 42% increase in attendance from 2022 to 2023. June Shoe, VOA News, New York. This has been International Edition on the Voice of America. On behalf of everyone here at VOA, thank you so much for spending this time with us. For pictures, stories, videos and more, follow VOA News on your favorite social media platform and online at VOANews.com. In Washington, I'm Scott Walter.