Month: July 2019

The Trump administration is urging Turkey to stop oil-and-gas drilling off the coast of the divided island of Cyprus. “This provocative step raises tensions in the region,” the State Department said late Tuesday. “We continue to believe the island’s oil-and-gas reserves, like all of its resources, should be equitably shared between both communities in the context of an overall settlement.” There has been no comment so far from Turkey which sent a drilling ship to the Mediterranean off Cyprus Monday, sparking a protest by the Greek Cypriots. Cyprus has been split between a Turkish Cypriot north and Greek Cypriot south …

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The United States hopes to enlist allies over the next two weeks or so in a military coalition to safeguard strategic waters off Iran and Yemen, where Washington blames Iran and Iran-aligned fighters for attacks, the top U.S. general said Tuesday. Under the plan, which has only been finalized in recent days, the United States would provide command ships and lead surveillance efforts for the military coalition. Allies would patrol waters near those U.S. command ships and escort commercial vessels with their nation’s flags. Marine General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, articulated those details to …

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The Justice Department can’t replace nine lawyers so late in the dispute over whether to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census without explaining why they are doing so, a judge said Tuesday. U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman, who earlier this year ruled against adding the citizenship question, put the brakes on the government’s plans a day after he was given a three-paragraph notification by the Justice Department along with a prediction that the replacement of lawyers won’t “cause any disruption in this matter.” “Defendants provide no reasons, let alone `satisfactory reasons,’ for the substitution of counsel,” Furman …

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The powerful Mojave Desert earthquakes that rocked California ended a years-long lull in major seismic activity and raised new interest in an early warning system being developed for the West Coast. The ShakeAlert system is substantially built in California and overall is about 55% complete, with much of the remaining installation of seismic sensor stations to be done in the Pacific Northwest, said Robert de Groot of the U.S. Geological Survey. Areas that have the appropriate number of sensors include Southern California, San Francisco Bay Area and the Seattle-Tacoma region, de Groot said. The system does not predict earthquakes. Rather, …

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Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said on Tuesday the extradition bill that sparked the territory’s biggest political crisis in decades was dead, admitting that the government’s work on the bill had been a “total failure.” The bill, which would have allowed people in Hong Kong to be sent to mainland China to face trial, sparked huge and at times violent street protests and plunged the former British colony into turmoil. In mid-June, Lam responded to huge protests by suspending the bill, but on Tuesday she said “there are still lingering doubts about the government’s sincerity or worries whether the government …

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People packed the decks of the Japanese whale-watching boat, screaming in joy as a pod of orcas put on a show: splashing tails at each other, rolling over, and leaping out of the water. In Kushiro, just 160 kilometers south of Rausu, where the four dozen people laughed and cheered, boats were setting off on Japan’s first commercial whale hunt in 31 years. Killed that day were two minke whales, which the boats in Rausu also search for glimpses of – a situation that whale-watching boat captain Masato Hasegawa confessed had him worried. “They won’t come into this area – …

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Steve Herman contributed to this report. WHITE HOUSE / CAPITOL HILL – When U.S. President Donald Trump delivered a speech on “America’s environmental leadership” from the East Room of the White House on Monday, his daughter Ivanka Trump was seated at the front row, where she watched with a beaming smile on her face.   But when Trump recounted how in 2017 he withdrew the United States from what he called “the unfair, ineffective and very, very expensive Paris Climate Accord”, the smile disappeared from Ivanka Trump’s face as she clapped politely but unenthusiastically.   Even before her father’s inauguration, …

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The $6 billion loan package for Pakistan approved by the International Monetary Fund last week will require “very ambitious” fiscal measures and sustained commitment for the bailout to succeed, IMF officials said on Monday. The three-year agreement approved by the IMF board last week, Pakistan’s 13th bailout since the late 1980s, has seen a sharp drop in the value of the rupee currency after the central bank agreed to a “flexible, market-determined exchange rate.” It also foresees structural economic reforms and a widening of the tax base to boost tax revenues that are currently estimated to account for less than …

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