Tour Bus Crashes In Portugal, Killing At Least 29 - NPR

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Rescue workers help a person who was inside a tour bus that crashed Wednesday in Caniço, a coastal town on Portugal's island of Madeira. Rui Silva/AP hide caption

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Rui Silva/AP

A tour bus has crashed in Portugal, killing at least 29 people and injuring dozens, authorities said.

The incident occurred Wednesday evening on the island of Madeira, a vacation destination known as the pearl of the Atlantic. The bus swerved off a winding street in the coastal town of Caniço and then tumbled down a hill. Many of the victims are German citizens, whose identities have not yet been made public.

By Thursday morning, nine people who had been injured in the crash were discharged from a local hospital, according to Lusa News Agency, while 18 remained in care.

A Portuguese man and woman are among the injured, Tomasia Alves, head of the Funchal hospital, told reporters on Thursday, according to The Associated Press.

Heiko Maas, Germany's minister of foreign affairs, announced that he would fly to Madeira on Thursday with doctors, psychologists and consular officers. He planned to speak to people who had been affected by the crash. The office also had set up a hotline for families.

Photographs from the scene show ambulances parked near the wrecked vehicle and rescue works helping wounded passengers on the lush hillside.

Many of the victims were said to be between 40 and 50 years old.

"It's with sadness and dismay that I think of our compatriots and all the other people who were affected by the terrible bus accident on Madeira," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a statement posted on Twitter by spokesman Steffen Seibert‏.

Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa expressed his regrets to the families and said he conveyed his condolences to Merkel.

Authorities have launched an investigation into the crash. Pedro Calado, the vice president of the island's regional government, told reporters that the bus was five years old and had passed inspections, according to AP.

The company that owns the vehicle, Madeira Automobile Society, reportedly vowed its "deep commitment" to uncovering the "facts, causes and responsibilities" that led to the fatal bus ride.

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https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/714582566/bus-carrying-tourists-crashes-in-portugal-at-least-29-reported-dead

2019-04-18 14:14:00Z
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North Korea’s Latest Weapons Test: Short in Range but Long in Message - The New York Times

SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Jong-un’s test of what analysts said could be a new short-range guided or cruise missile shows the North Korean leader reverting to saber rattling as he seeks to end sanctions that are derailing his hopes of rejuvenating the North’s economy.

Embarrassed at home by the failure to reach a peace deal with President Trump during their recent summit meeting in Vietnam, he is struggling to regain leverage over the United States without provoking the president, analysts said on Thursday.

This week, Mr. Kim escalated pressure on Mr. Trump by resuming his visits to military units and weapons sites, which he has generally refrained from during his diplomatic engagements with the American leader.

Since the Vietnam meeting, Mr. Kim has voiced misgivings about dealing with Mr. Trump or with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, whose efforts to mediate between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump have faltered.

In a rare policy speech last week, Mr. Kim told his people not to expect sanctions relief anytime soon and to brace themselves for a “protracted” struggle against the United States. But he also said he would consider meeting Mr. Trump again if Washington offered a new deal that he could accept by the end of the year.

His visit Tuesday to a military airfield — where he watched air force pilots flying Russian-made MiG fighter jets — put a spotlight on an air force that has been hit hard by sanctions, with its warplanes grounded by shortages of fuel. In what analysts called a show of defiance against sanctions, the North Korean news media released photos of fighter jets roaring off while Mr. Kim watched.

But it was Mr. Kim’s attendance at the testing of “a new-type tactical guided weapon,” announced on Thursday, that was the clearest signal to Washington that the North’s tactics are hardening.

United States, South Korean and Japanese officials declined to comment on what type of weapon North Korea tested, saying that they were still analyzing available data. The projectile covered a short range, flying so low that it was not caught by the radar of the American military’s Northern Command, which routinely tracks North Korean missiles, said the South Korean news agency Yonhap, quoting unnamed defense sources.

The weapon was most likely a short-range guided missile, like the Israeli-made Spike missile, which flies low and usually covers only a very short distance, said Shin Jong-woo, a weapons expert at Korea Defense Forum, a Seoul-based network of military analysts.

“It’s part of the North’s efforts to improve its decrepit conventional weapons systems, now that it has completed a nuclear arsenal,” he said.

But Kim Dong-yub, a military expert at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul, said the new weapon was apparently a short-range cruise missile.

“It is highly likely that this missile is a short-range cruise missile that can be converted to a land-to-land, air-to-land and ship-to-ship missile,” Mr. Kim said, noting that North Korea said the test was “conducted in various modes of firing at different targets.”

North Korea’s latest weapons test underscored the sensitivity around confronting North Korea’s broad arsenal of missiles. While Washington is preoccupied with North Korea’s attempt to build nuclear-tipped ICBMs, South Korea and Japan worry more about its short- and medium-range missiles. These missiles also target American military bases in the region, which serve as launching pads for American reinforcements should conflict break out on the Korean Peninsula.

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Intercontinental ballistic missiles during a military parade in Pyongyang in 2017.CreditDamir Sagolj/Reuters

Shin Won-sik, a retired three-star general in Seoul, said North Korea had never stopped trying to improve the accuracy of its short-range missiles despite Mr. Kim’s diplomatic engagement with Mr. Trump.

During a news briefing in Seoul on Thursday, a South Korean defense official dodged repeated questions from journalists seeking more information. Japanese officials were similarly reluctant to address the development.

North Korea conducted its last major weapons test in November 2017, when it launched an intercontinental ballistic missile. But Mr. Kim has since declared a moratorium on nuclear and ICBM tests.

By testing a short-range tactical weapon, North Korea is playing its cards cautiously, analysts said. Mr. Kim can raise pressure on Washington with such a test but still be able to claim that he has not reneged on the moratorium.

Karl Dewey, a senior analyst at Jane’s by IHS Markit, said that North Korea’s “stress on the weapon’s tactical nature” was “primarily aimed at a domestic audience, rather than signaling a shift in North Korea’s strategic approach to U.S. talks.”

But other analysts said the test was a more ominous signal aimed at Washington.

“It is a message from Kim Jong-un that he no longer trusts Trump or Moon Jae-in, and that he is ready to go his own way,” said Lee Byong-chul, another North Korea expert at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies. “He is showing that there will be no buckling under or compromising under American pressure. This may well be Mr. Kim’s first step to raise tensions on the Korean Peninsula.”

In a speech on Thursday at Auburn University in Alabama, Gina Haspel, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency said, “I am very proud that we’ve been able to support this administration’s efforts to engage the North Koreans in a dialogue.”

“After years of failure, I do think that President Trump has shown a lot of wisdom in reaching out his hand to the North Korean leader and to suggest there might be a different future for the North Korean people,” she added.

The test by North Korea came amid news reports that Mr. Kim planned to meet President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in the far eastern city of Vladivostok next week. On Thursday, the Kremlin said in a brief statement that the two would meet this month, giving no specific date.

North Korea relies on China and Russia, which have veto power on the United Nations Security Council, to serve as a buffer against American efforts to impose more sanctions. Both China and Russia also host tens of thousands of North Korean laborers, who are an important source of badly needed hard currency for Mr. Kim’s regime. A report by the United Nations sanctions committee has accused Russian entities of involvement in illegal ship-to-ship transfers of oil and coal to help North Korea evade sanctions.

North Korea depends on China for more than 93 percent of its external trade. But with Beijing tied up by the trade war with Washington, the North Koreans may need Russian help more than ever in helping to blunt the pain of sanctions, analysts said.

“Kim doesn’t want to put all his eggs in China’s basket since there is heavy reliance on the country for North Korea’s economic livelihood,” David Kim, a research analyst at the Washington-based Stimson Center, said by email. “Kim Jong-un wants to show the U.S. that China is not their only option.”

In a further sign of its exasperation in dealing with the United States, North Korea said Thursday that while Mr. Kim’s relations with Mr. Trump remained good, negotiations could not continue unless Washington removed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from its team. It blamed his “meddling” for the breakdown of the Vietnam meeting.

“Even if talks are resumed with the United States, I hope that we can have as an interlocutor not Pompeo but someone else who is better in communication and more mature,” Kwon Jong-gun, a North Korean Foreign Ministry official in charge of American affairs, told the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/world/asia/north-korea-weapons-test.html

2019-04-18 14:13:51Z
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Notre-Dame: Family in viral photo found after search - BBC News

A family pictured outside Notre-Dame cathedral minutes before the fire erupted has been found after a viral search.

Brooke Windsor, 23, says the father and child she photographed about an hour before the blaze have come forward.

Her photo, showing them playing in front of the 850-year-old landmark, was shared widely on Twitter.

She told the BBC she wanted to share the "memory" with them, prompting an international hunt.

Confirming they had been found, Ms Windsor tweeted: "The search is over! The photo has reached the dad and family."

The man and his family, Ms Windsor says, do not wish to be identified.

Instead, Ms Windsor says he wrote a message to her, which reads: "Thanks again for that beautiful photo, we will find a special place for it."

Ms Windsor's tweet was shared more than 240,000 times and liked 467,000 times, with people across the world joining the hunt to find them.

Her poignant photo was described as "historic" and a "special moment in time" by Twitter users as the extent of the damage to Notre-Dame shocked the world.

France's President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to re-build the cathedral. More than €800m ($902m; £692m) has already been pledged to help reconstruct the Unesco World Heritage site.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47980564

2019-04-18 13:38:19Z
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Rebuilding Notre Dame: The next steps for Paris's famous cathedral - The Washington Post

On Monday, flames engulfed Notre Dame Cathedral's roof, toppling its steeple.

A frame of massive centuries-old wood beams under the roof fueled the fire.

Debris from the collapsed steeple and roof fell onto the vaulted ceiling below, creating three large holes.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/world/rebuilding-notre-dame/

2019-04-18 13:44:11Z
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Trump Administration Announces Measures Against Cuba, Venezuela And Nicaragua - NPR

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National security adviser John Bolton discusses new administration policy regarding Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua on Wednesday in Florida. Wilfredo Lee/AP hide caption

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The Trump administration has announced new sanctions and penalties against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua aimed at both ending the rule of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and weakening Cuba's communist regime.

One of the measures will allow lawsuits against foreign firms operating on property in Cuba that was seized from U.S. citizens during the Cuban revolution — a reversal of more than 20 years of U.S. policy.

Announcing the crackdown in Coral Gables, Fla., on Wednesday, national security adviser John Bolton called Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua the "troika of tyranny" and said the new measures would "end the glamorization of socialism and communism."

The measures come as the U.S. pushes for Venezuela and the international community to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó as interim president.

"This is just the beginning," Bolton said. "As long as the people of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua stand for freedom, the United States will stand with them."

Earlier on Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the U.S. would no longer suspend Title III of the Helms-Burton Act.

That provision allows U.S. citizens to file lawsuits in U.S. courts against foreign companies "trafficking" in property confiscated after the 1959 revolution in Cuba. Previous administrations had a long-standing policy of waiving the provision for six months at a time. But the Trump administration had signaled its intent to tighten the U.S. trade embargo with Cuba earlier this year when it only renewed the waiver for 45 days.

The new policies announced Wednesday also include sanctions on Venezuela's central bank and a financial services provider in Nicaragua that the administration calls a "slush fund" for President Daniel Ortega.

But Havana took the brunt of the measures, which experts say are likely to impact the country's stagnant economy.

Bolton said the U.S. would institute restrictions on "non-family" travel in order to decrease the amount of money Americans spend on tourism in the country, an industry that Bolton said is controlled by the regime.

Tourism is a structural factor in Cuba's economy, and a rush of visitors hit the island when President Obama made it easier for U.S. citizens to make the trip. But the industry has seen a decline since President Trump took office and rolled back several Obama-era policies.

Bolton also announced a cap on remittances to Cuba of $1,000 per person per quarter. The Obama administration had removed remittance limits, and the State Department says remittances to Cuba from the United States amounted to $3 billion in 2016, The Associated Press reports.

One attendee of the speech told the AP he believes the measures announced by Bolton will bring down Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel's government.

"Today is a big day," said Rafael UsaTorres, who was a member of Brigade 2506 that worked for the CIA during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. "But I feel very sad — too many years waiting."

Fernando Cutz, who helped shape Latin America policy on the National Security Council in both the Trump and Obama administrations, says that the policies announced on Wednesday are likely to bring hardship to Cuba, but not regime change.

"What we are leading the Cuban people toward is a darker day where there will be less economic opportunity, there will be less of a middle class and essentially just very hard times to come for the people of Cuba," he told NPR's Carrie Kahn.

As NPR's David Welna reports, ending the Title III waiver opens the door to hundreds of thousands of lawsuits seeking billions of dollars from Cuba. According to Robert Muse, a Washington attorney with expertise in Cuban expropriations, the decision will likely trigger a flood of lawsuits against the Cuban government.

"It puts virtually every commercial enterprise on the island in question at this point and subject to a lawsuit," Muse told Welna.

Pompeo called the move a "chance at justice" for Cuban-Americans and urged anyone doing business in Cuba to examine whether they were "abetting" the regime.

"Those doing business in Cuba should fully investigate whether they are connected to property stolen in service of a failed communist experiment," he said.

"No one is going to take away from us, neither by allurement or by force," Cuba's Díaz-Canel responded on Twitter. "... We Cubans are not surrendering."

Title III is not any worse than Titles I and II, that are part of the array of actions against all the people of #Cuba. No one is going to take away from us, neither by allurement or by force, "the Homeland the forefathers won us standing". We Cubans are not surrendering. pic.twitter.com/rtg70vsSvK

— Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (@DiazCanelB) April 17, 2019

In a joint statement, the European Union and Canada called the Trump administration's decision regarding Title III "regrettable" and said it would have "an important impact on legitimate EU and Canadian economic operators in Cuba."

With regard to Venezuela, Bolton said the state's central bank had been crucial to Maduro's continued rule and that the sanctions imposed on it "should be a strong warning to all external actors, including Russia, against deploying military assets to Venezuela to prop up the Maduro regime." The sanctions do not bar humanitarian aid or private remittances, the AP reports.

And he announced sanctions on Nicaragua's BanCorp, which the U.S. Department of the Treasury said on Wednesday has financially supported President Daniel Ortega and played a role "in corruption and money laundering for the personal gain of the Ortega regime."

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https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/714552854/trump-administration-announces-measures-against-cuba-venezuela-and-nicaragua

2019-04-18 12:57:00Z
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North Korea doesn't want Mike Pompeo involved in nuclear talks - CBS This Morning

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpVP09gbA1g

2019-04-18 11:34:13Z
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North Korea wants Pompeo removed from nuclear talks - Aljazeera.com

North Korea wants United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo replaced with someone "more careful and mature" in talks over its banned nuclear programme, a senior official told state media, hours after the country announced a missile test.

Describing Pompeo as "reckless" the foreign ministry said a summit in Vietnam earlier this year showed that talks could go wrong "whenever Pompeo pokes his nose in".

The April meeting in Hanoi between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump collapsed after the US president reportedlygave Kim a document demanding that North Korea transfer its nuclear arsenal and weapons fuel to the US.

The model proposed was one that Pompeo and US National Security Adviser John Bolton had supported. 

"I am afraid that, if Pompeo engages in the talks again, the table will be lousy once again and the talks will become entangled," Kwon Jong Gun, director general of the ministry's Department of American Affairs said, according to the official KCNA news agency.   

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"Therefore, even in the case of possible resumption of the dialogue with the US, I wish our dialogue counterpart would be not Pompeo but... (another) person who is more careful and mature in communicating with us."  

It is not the first time North Korea has singled out Pompeo for special criticism.

When the top US diplomat met North Korean officials in Pyongyang in July, he was condemned for his "gangster-like" insistence that the North move towards unilateral disarmament.

Kwon said leader Kim had made clear that the US attitude has to change, adding that Pompeo was standing in the way of a resumption of talks.  

"We cannot be aware of Pompeo's ulterior motive behind his self-indulgence in reckless remarks; whether he is indeed unable to understand words properly or just pretending on purpose," he said.

'New weapon tested'

Thursday's attack on Pompeo came hours after KCNA announced Kim had supervised the test-firing of a new "tactical-guided weapon" with a "powerful warhead".

It also comes after satellite imagery suggested heightened activity at a nuclear test site.

Wednesday's test was "conducted in various modes of firing at different targets," KCNA reported, adding that Kim described its development as one "of very weighty significance in increasing the combat power of the People's Army".

The report gave no details of the weapon.

Mark Fitzpatrick, a former US state department official, told Al Jazeera that it was a "tactical weapon and not a missile".

"North Korea is maybe exaggerating a bit in order to get America's attention and that's what it is all about," said Fitzpatrick.

"Kim would like to make Trump think again about a deal that might be in the interest of both countries [following the failed Vietnam summit]."

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Earlier in the week, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US monitor, said activity had been detected at Yongbyon, the North's main nuclear testing facility.

The think-tank said evidence suggested Pyongyang may be reprocessing radioactive material into bomb fuel.

Kim's Hanoi summit with Trump, the second between the two men, ended abruptly, with North Korea later protesting that the US was being unreasonable.

Since then, North Korea has said it is mulling options for its diplomacy with the US, and Kim said last week he was open to talks with Trump only if Washington came with the "proper attitude".

SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies

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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/north-korea-removal-pompeo-nuclear-talks-190418085836661.html

2019-04-18 10:55:00Z
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