The US Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-10 Friday to send the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the full Senate.

Prior to the party-line vote, Republican Sen. Jeff Flake said that he reached an accord with the Democratic minority to call for the Senate to delay a final vote on Kavanaugh by one week to allow an FBI investigation of sexual abuse allegations against the nominee, Efe reported.

Friday’s session ended in confusion, as the committee chair, Republican Chuck Grassley, called an abrupt halt, citing the two-hour limit on hearings when the full Senate is in session.

Three women have accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting them several decades ago.

One of those women is Christine Blasey Ford, who attended a judiciary committee hearing on Thursday to testify that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her in 1982.

During Friday’s session, Democrats accused Republicans of ignoring the alleged victim, who had to testify in public before a committee made up of a large majority of men, while they insisted on the need for the FBI to carry out an investigation into the allegations.

The ranking Democrat on the committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, also criticized Kavanaugh’s declarations on Thursday, when he appeared defiant and angry.

“This was not someone who reflected an impartial temperament or the fairness and even-handedness one would see in a judge, this was someone who was aggressive and belligerent,” she said.

“I have never seen someone who wants to be elevated to the highest court in our country behave in that manner,” Feinstein added.

Despite the meeting of minds between Flake and committee Democrats, the decision on whether to delay a vote rests with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

President Donald Trump said he was prepared to let the Senate leadership decide on the timing of vote.

“I’m going to rely on all of the people, including Sen. Grassley, who’s doing a very good job,” Trump said.

“That’ll be a decision that they’re going to make, and I suspect they’ll be making some decision soon, whether to take a vote or to do whatever else they want to do,” the president added.

“I will be totally reliant on what Sen. Grassley and the group decides to do,” Trump told reporters during a photo opportunity in the Oval Office with visiting Chilean President Sebastian Piñera.

(IANS)

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas spoke in harsh and unflinching terms about Israel and the US at the UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday, while Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the platform to once again brand the Iran nuclear deal a “lie”.

Abbas began his address by stating that “Jerusalem is not for sale”, drawing applause from the room. He then turned to denouncing in turn Israel’s “racist” nation-state law, the Trump administration’s uncritical support of Israel, and both states’ refusal to abide by international agreements and UN resolutions.
Abbas seeks alternative to US as peace mediator
“This law will inevitably lead to the creation of one racist state, an apartheid state, and thus nullifies the two-state solution,” he said.

In his first speech to the UN since the US moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Abbas said Palestinians now see the US “with new eyes” and no longer as a fair mediator in the peace process.

“This administration has reneged on all previous US commitments and undermined the two state solution,” he said.

The PLO leader called on more countries to recognise the state of Palestine and for the UN to enforce the resolutions it has passed on Israel.

“It is insufficient for the general assembly to pass a reinstitution without implementation,” he said, saying that Israel had not implemented even one of the over 700 resolution passed by the assembly since 1949.

Abbas raised the issue of UNRWA, which provides relief and humanitarian assistance to over five million Palestinians, and is battling for survival since the US pulled $300m in funding for the organisation.

He accused the US of attempting to “obliterate” UNRWA, and rubbished its estimate that there are only 40,000 Palestinian refugees.

He reiterated several times that the PLO is fully committed to peace and rejects all forms of violence outright, but stressed that cooperation was a two-way street and Palestine would not be bound by agreements that are reneged on by other countries.

Concluding, Abbas paid tribute to martyrs and prisoners and said to all Palestinians that “we are soon approaching our day of freedom and independence and that the darkness of occupation will soon vanish.”

Netanyahu targets Iran
Speaking shortly after, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used his address to publicly identify what he claims is a secret, previously unknown nuclear facility in Tehran.

Holding up a printed satellite photo with geographic coordinates, he encouraged the public to use Google Maps to locate the site for themselves as proof that Iran has been dishonest about its nuclear ambitions.

He claimed that Israeli intelligence found Iranian authorities had disposed of 15kg of nuclear material across Tehran, exposing residents to dangerous radioactivity.

Calling on the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency by name, he asked Yukiya Amano to investigate the facility “right here, right now”.

“I will never let a regime that calls for our destruction to develop nuclear weapons. Not now, not in 10 years, not ever,” he said, calling on European leaders to join the US and other in abandoning the Iran deal.

He accused EU states of “appeasement” and “rolling out the red carpet” for Iranian president Hassan Rouhani as he expands his military influence in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere.

Netanyahu praised the thousands of Iranians who have take to the streets in recent months to protest the government and its response to an economic crisis resulting in dramatic rises in inflation and unemployment.

Withdrawal of funding for Palestinian refugees key in UN talks
“The people of Iran are bravely standing up to a regime that has oppressed them for four decades and squanders their money in bloody wards across the Middle East,” said the Israeli leader.

The only positive result of the Iran deal, he claimed, was bringing Israel and several Arab states “closer together than ever before in an intimacy and friendship that I’ve not seen in my lifetime and would have been unimaginable a few years ago”.

Netanyahu then called for a brief round of applause for US president Donald Trump and US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley for their unwavering support of Israel before defending at length the nation state law from the accusations of Abbas, human rights organisations and the international community.

Claims that Israel is racist or an apartheid state are “shameful” and simply “antisemitism with a band new face,” he claimed, before branding his Palestinian counterpart a Holocaust denier.

Regardless of the new legislation, Jews and non-Jews enjoy equal individual rights in Israel, he said.”

‘Same sort of speeches’
“We have got the same sort of speeches now for quite a few years,” said Yossi Mekelberg, Professor of International Relations at Regent’s University London, referring to the speeches by the Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

“Netanyahu concentrates on Iran because that where he’s comfortable and confident about what he’s saying, and he’s comfortable with the support of the US in the region,” he told Al Jazeera.

“He tries to minimise talking about Palestinian issues because he know that he is in a very small minority in the UN.

“For Abbas, the cutting of the money to UNRWA, the moving of the American embassy to Jerusalem, it’s all going in one direction. The US can’t even be seen as an honest broker in peace negotiations… It’s obviously not something the PA can accept.”

Elizabeth Tsurkov, a Research Fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking, said Abbas’ wish for more international mediation would likely not be forthcoming.

“European and other nations that may play a constructive role in this context are focused on their own domestic concerns or more pressing international crises, relegating the Palestinian issue to the back-burner,” she said.

“This means a continuation of military rule over the Palestinian people and the daily humiliations and human rights abuses this rule entails.”

Aljazeera

Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has asked for early repatriation of Rohingya refugees to Myanmar.

In her speech at the UN General Assembly General Debate here on Thursday, Hasina regretted the fact that repatriation had not started in a permanent and sustainable manner, reports Xinhua news agency.

“Myanmar is one of our neighbours. From the outset, we have been trying to find a peaceful solution to the Rohingya crisis through bilateral consultations,” she said.

“So far, three bilateral arrangements have been concluded between Bangladesh and Myanmar for Rohingya repatriation. Despite their verbal commitment to take back the Rohingya, in reality the Myanmar authorities are yet to accept them back.

“The Rohingya crisis has had its origin in Myanmar. As such, its solution has to be found in Myanmar… We want an early, peaceful solution to the Rohingya crisis,” the Prime Minister added.

The Rohingya in Bangladesh are living in an uncertain situation, she said.

Bangladesh has made arrangements for their food, clothing, health care, child care and security to the best of its ability. Many countries and organisations, including the UN and the Commonwealth, have shown solidarity with the Rohingya and extended support and assistance for them.

Bangladesh has started working on a new housing facility for the refugees.

“So long the Rohingya are not able to return home, they should, as a temporary arrangement, be able to live in a good and healthy condition,” she said.

Hasina called upon international organisations to work with her country in the relocation of the Rohingya to the new facility.

According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), over 720,000 Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority living in mostly Myanmar’s Rakhine state, have fled to Bangladesh since violence broke out in August 2017.

They joined another 200,000 Rohingya who earlier fled into adjacent Bangladesh, said the UNHCR.

(IANS)

US President Donald Trump “looks forward” to visiting India but the timing will depend on his other commitments, according to a senior State Department official.

“I am certain that President Trump looks forward to being able to visit India at an appropriate time,” Alice Wells, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia, told IANS in an interview.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has invited Trump to be the chief guest at the Republic Day celebrations next year.

Asked if Trump would come to the celebrations or would schedule his visit for another time, Wells said that the White House will decide taking into account “both the domestic commitments he has here in the US as well as overseas”.

Wells pointed to the steady stream of US officials who visit India as a symbol of the close ties between the two countries at the official level.

“As somebody who helps manage India relationship, it’s amazing the number of cabinet officials and high-level visitors that we have in India every month of the year,” she said.

“That too reflects the density of the ties between our countries that I think we have over 40 major dialogues that take place between our government agencies and departments.”

Modi first met Trump in Washington in 2017, and also at other multilateral meetings.

A military parade is the centre of the Republic Day celebrations and Trump has been a fan of such parades and wants the US to have one, too.

While these parades are held annually across the globe world as part of patriotic celebrations, the US does not have one.

At Trump’s suggestion a parade was scheduled for November on Veterans Day, which honours former servicemen, and this year it would coincide with the centenary of the conclusion of the First World War.

However, having never having held such a parade, the Defence Department postponed it to possibly next year.

(IANS)

Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has reiterated India’s support to the Palestinian cause while asserting New Delhi’s backing for a two-state solution to the conflict in West Asia.

Speaking at a meeting of the Ministerial Committee of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) on Palestine here on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly Session on Wednesday, Sushma Swaraj recalled the visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Palestine in February, the first by an Indian Prime Minister, and described it as a “historic occasion”.

“During the visit, the Prime Minister announced a substantial upscaling of our development partnership efforts in solidarity with the Palestinian people,” she said.

“India is investing in projects of healthcare, educational infrastructure, women empowerment and a printing press, in addition to other capacity building programmes.”

Sushma Swaraj said that development partnership projects in Palestine worth around $70 million are under implementation during the last five years.

“These include flagship projects like the super-specialty hospital in Beit Sahour and the India-Palestine Technology Park, which was inaugurated last year in Ramallah,” she stated.

She said that India’s longstanding friendship with Palestine is built around three core dimensions: solidarity with Palestinian people; steadfast support to the Palestinian cause; and development partnership to assist nation building and capacity building efforts.

Sushma Swaraj also mentioned India’s increasing of its contribution to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East from $1.25 million to $5 million annually.

“A negotiated two-state solution remains the only viable solution to the issue to bring sustainable peace and lasting security,” she said.

Calling for restraint and moderation from all sides, she stated: “The stagnation since the collapse of talks four years ago and the deterioration in the security situation continues to cause serious concern. We hope for an early resumption of talks between Israel and Palestine that can move towards finding out a comprehensive resolution of the issue.”

The NAM Ministerial Committee on Palestine was established under India’s Presidency during the Seventh NAM Summit in New Delhi in 1983.

(IANS)

The Maldives’ President-elect Ibrahim Mohamed Solih has invited Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to attend his oath-taking ceremony in November.

Solih’s spokesperson Mariya Ahmed Didi said on Wednesday that Modi was invited to the ceremony during a telephonic conversation between the two sides following Solih’s victory in the presidential elections on Sunday, The Edition reported.

Solih, the opposition Maldivian Democratic Party’s candidate, emerged victorious over incumbent President Abdulla Yameen. He will be sworn in on November 17 and his term is expected to continue until 2023.

India welcomed the election result and both sides agreed to work closely to strengthen bilateral relations.

The spokesperson said Modi had also invited Solih to make an official visit to India, which was accepted by the latter.

The atoll nation’s relations with India grew strained during Yameen’s rule, with tensions peaking after India criticized Male’s refusal to enforce a Supreme Court ruling quashing the convictions of nine opposition figures, among them former President Mohamed Nasheed.

(IANS)

An Indian woman is facing deportation in New Zealand after being duped by men who she says took more than $30,000 from her in return for work visas for jobs that did not exist.

Damanpreet Kaur told Radio New Zealand (RNZ) that she paid two Tauranga men over $18,000 for a work visa and job last year and later paid a Hamilton man $15,000 for the same.

In both cases, Kaur said she received a two-year work visa that restricted her to employment by the company named on the visa, but found there was no job, according to the report on Thursday.

The woman said she wanted justice served on the men and had already provided immigration authorities details of her claims in the hope that it will allow her to stay in the country.

Her immigration adviser, Tuariki Delamere, urged the New Zealand government to crack down on the group, who he described as “parasites”.

RNZ said that it first interviewed Kaur about her situation in February and though she shared secret recordings of the men who scammed her she was not ready to go public that time.

Now she has sent the Associate Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi a statement detailing the allegations, as well as bank statements showing payments to the two Tauranga men and to a company where the Hamilton man was a director, as well as cash withdrawals she said were later given to the men.

The Tauranga men denied the allegations while the Hamilton man didn’t return phone calls, according to RNZ.

Kaur said immigration officials had told her she could be served with a deportation notice because she was not working for the company specified on her current two-year work visa.

She said she was surviving by depending on money from her parents in India and support from her friends in New Zealand, but her parents would not support her if she returned to India.

Kaur admitted to have broken immigration rules by paying for a job, but said she found it too hard to find work in the field that she had studied. “It’s my mistake, I apologize… But I need one last chance from immigration.”

(IANS)

A woman was shot dead in the US city of Boston, leading to an extensive manhunt for her estranged husband who had allegedly chased her in a motor vehicle before the deadly attack.

Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz identified Allen Warner, 47, the woman’s “soon to be ex-husband”, as a person of interest in the shooting which took place on Monday evening on Main Street in Marshfield, reports The Boston Globe daily.

Warner is “considered armed and dangerous”, Cruz told the media on Monday night.

Cruz asked for the public’s help in finding Warner, who the police believe was driving a gray 2013 Toyota Corolla with a Massachusetts license plate.

The woman, believed to be in her late 30s, was taken to South Shore Hospital with a gunshot wound, where she was pronounced dead.

No weapons were recovered at the scene, authorities said.

IANS

India will be focusing on a multilateral agenda at the high-level UN General Assembly (UNGA) session that begins on Tuesday and let Pakistan be a “one-trick pony” on Kashmir if it wants to, India’s Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin has said.

The UN works best on the basis of multilateralism and “India’s positions based on partnerships get a great resonance”, he said on Sunday at a news conference while replying to a reporter’s query about the possibility of Pakistan raising Kashmir at the UNGA.

He said: “If somebody else would like to be a one-trick pony, it is for them to regurgitate that act. We’ve handled this act many times in the past and are confident we’ll do so again.”

“Solo players in a multilateral context have neither a past nor a future” and get “no resonance in such matters”, he added.

Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has said that Islamabad would bring up Kashmir at the UNGA and give “unequivocal support to the cause”, Radio Pakistan has reported.

Pakistan has been raising Kashmir at all UN forums, regardless of the topic of the meetings, but no other country has joined it in making it an issue or even talking about it.

During the 2017 UNGA meeting, Pakistani zeal produced a major embarrassment when its Permanent Representative Maleeha Lodhi was caught out trying to pass off a picture of a wounded Palestinian girl as a Kashmiri.

Akbaruddin said that even when India talks about terrorism, it does not treat it as just a bilateral issue but deals with it in the international context of havoc it wreaks around the world, for example the Boko Haram in Africa, and terrorist groups elsewhere.

Led by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj at the UN session, India will focus on five topics: reformed multilateralism, climate change action, health, development and peacekeeping, he said.

Fresh from India’s launch of the world’s biggest public health insurance programme, Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda will be joining the Indian delegation to represent the country at a high-level event on Ending Tuberculosis and on Non-Communicable Diseases.

Sushma Swaraj is scheduled to address the UNGA on Saturday at the morning session scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Listed as the fifth speaker, she will likely speak around 7.15 p.m. (India time).

Qureshi’s speech is set for Saturday’s afternoon session, which will give him an opportunity to react to Sushma Swaraj’s address.

If he raises issues relating to India, the nation would have a right of reply which could take place towards the end of that session or Monday’s session.

Customarily a junior diplomat exercises the right of reply at the UNGA high-level meeting.

IANS

The ongoing trade war between the US and China has escalated after American President Donald Trump’s administration’s new 10 per cent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods kicked in on Monday, spanning thousands of products, including food seasonings, baseball gloves, network routers and industrial machinery parts.

China retaliated immediately with new taxes of 5 to 10 per cent on $60 billion of US goods such as meat, chemicals, clothes and auto parts, reports CNN.

Trump’s latest tariffs on China now apply to over $250 billion of Chinese goods, roughly half the amount the country sells to the US.

The latest round affects thousands of products bought by US consumers, including hundreds of millions of dollars of furniture and electronics imports.

The US tariffs imposed earlier in the year mostly hit industrial goods.

The measures are meant to punish China for what the Trump administration says are unfair trade practices, such as intellectual property theft.

Beijing has rejected the US assertions, accusing Washington of protectionism and bullying. It has fired back with tariffs on American goods worth more than $110 billion.

Monday’s tariffs are set to increase at the end of the year from 10 to 25 per cent, CNN said.

Trump has also threatened tariffs on another $267 billion of Chinese products which would mean the US measures effectively cover all Beijing’s annual goods exports to Washington (the total for 2017 was about $506 billion).

Trump’s decision to move ahead rapidly with the latest tariffs appears to have put the brakes on plans for a new round of negotiations between the two sides.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had invited Chinese negotiators to Washington to resume talks, but a senior White House official said on Friday that no new meetings are planned for the time being.

(IANS)