News today: June 2020

Tuesday, 30 June 2020

West Bengal urges Centre not to schedule flights from 8 cities with high COVID-19 cases

In a letter to Civil Aviation Secretary P S Kharola, West Bengal Chief Secretary Rajiva Sinha requested him to stop the movement of flights from eight cities to Kolkata or Bagdogra for two weeks starting July 6.

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Railways to expand Mumbai local services from today, but only essential services personnel allowed

¨Railways to expand to 350 local trains in Mumbai from tomorrow. As identified by State govt., essential staff incl. employees of Centre, IT, GST, Customs, Postal, Nationalised Banks, MBPT, Judiciary, Defence & Raj Bhavan allowed. No services yet for general passengers," Goyal tweeted.

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भारत में 50 वर्षों में 4.58 करोड़ लड़कियां हुईं लापता, 9 राज्यों में बेटों के मुकाबले बेटियां कम

यूएन की एक रिपोर्ट के मुताबिक, चीन के बाद भारत में महिलाओं के लापता होने की संख्या सबसे ज्यादा है।

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Suspicions of Russian bounties on US troops in Afghanistan bolstered by data on fund transfers to Taliban-linked accounts

US officials intercepted electronic data showing large financial transfers from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account, evidence that supported their conclusion that Russia covertly offered bounties for killing US and coalition troops in Afghanistan, according to three officials familiar with the intelligence.

Although the United States has accused Russia of providing general support to the Taliban before, analysts concluded from other intelligence that the transfers were most likely part of a bounty programme that detainees described during interrogations. Investigators also identified by name numerous Afghans in a network linked to the suspected Russian operation, the officials said — including, two of them added, a man believed to have served as an intermediary for distributing some of the funds and who is now thought to be in Russia.

The intercepts bolstered the findings gleaned from the interrogations, helping reduce an earlier disagreement among intelligence analysts and agencies over the reliability of the detainees. The disclosures further undercut White House officials’ claim that the intelligence was too uncertain to brief President Donald Trump. In fact, the information was provided to him in his daily written brief in late February, two officials have said.

Afghan officials this week described a sequence of events that dovetailed with the account of the intelligence. They said that several businessmen who transfer money through the informal hawala system were arrested in Afghanistan over the past six months and were suspected of being part of a ring of middlemen who operated between the Russian intelligence agency, known as the GRU, and Taliban-linked militants. The businessmen were arrested in what the officials described as sweeping raids in the north of Afghanistan, as well as in Kabul.

A half-million dollars was seized from the home of one of the men, added a provincial official. The New York Times had previously reported that the recovery of an unusually large amount of cash in a raid was an early piece in the puzzle that investigators put together.

The three US officials who described and confirmed details about the basis for the intelligence assessment spoke on condition of anonymity amid swelling turmoil over the Trump administration’s failure to authorise any response to Russia’s suspected proxy targeting of US troops and downplaying of the issue after it came to light four days ago.

White House and National Security Council officials declined to comment, as did the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe. They pointed to statements late Monday from Ratcliffe; the national security advisor, Robert C O’Brien; and the Pentagon’s top spokesperson, Jonathan Hoffman. All of them said that recent news reports about Afghanistan remained unsubstantiated.

The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, berated The Times on Tuesday after this article was published, saying that reports based on “selective leaking” disrupt intelligence gathering. She did not address or deny the facts about the intelligence assessment, saying she would not disclose classified information.

On Monday, the administration invited several House Republicans to the White House to discuss the intelligence. The briefing was mostly carried out by three Trump administration officials: Ratcliffe, O’Brien and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff. Until recently, both Meadows and Ratcliffe were Republican congressmen known for being outspoken supporters of Trump.

That briefing focussed on intelligence information that supported the conclusion that Russia was running a covert bounty operation and other information that did not support it, according to two people familiar with the meeting. For example, the briefing focused in part on the interrogated detainees’ accounts and the earlier analysts’ disagreement over it.

Both people said the intent of the briefing seemed to be to make the point that the intelligence on the suspected Russian bounty plot was not clear cut. For example, one of the people said, the White House also cited some interrogations by Afghan intelligence officials of other detainees, downplaying their credibility by describing them as low-level.

The administration officials did not mention anything in the House Republican briefing about intercepted data tracking financial transfers, both of the people familiar with it said.

Democrats and Senate Republicans were also separately briefed at the White House on Tuesday morning. Democrats emerged saying that the issue was clearly not, as Trump has suggested, a “hoax.” They demanded to hear directly from intelligence officials, rather than from Trump’s political appointees, but conceded they had not secured a commitment for such a briefing.

Based on the intelligence they saw, the lawmakers said they were deeply troubled by Trump’s insistence that he did not know about the plot and his subsequent obfuscation when it became public.

“I find it inexplicable in light of these very public allegations that the president hasn’t come before the country and assured the American people that he will get to the bottom of whether Russia is putting bounties on American troops and that he will do everything in his power to make sure that we protect American troops,” said Representative Adam Schiff, D-California, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

He added: “I do not understand for a moment why the president is not saying this to the American people right now and is relying on ‘I don’t know,’ ‘I haven’t heard,’ ‘I haven’t been briefed.’ That is just not excusable.”

Ratcliffe was scheduled to go to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet privately with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, an official familiar with the planning said.

The Times reported last week that intelligence officials believed that a unit of the GRU had offered and paid bounties for killing US troops and other coalition forces and that the White House had not authorised a response after the National Security Council convened an interagency meeting about the problem in late March.

Investigators are said to be focused on at least two deadly attacks on US soldiers in Afghanistan. One is an April 2019 bombing outside Bagram Airfield that killed three Marines: Staff Sergeant Christopher Slutman, 43, of Newark, Delaware; Corporal Robert A Hendriks, 25, of Locust Valley, New York; and Sergeant Benjamin S Hines, 31, of York, Pennsylvania.

On Monday, Felicia Arculeo, the mother of Hendriks, told CNBC that she was upset to learn from news reports of the suspicions that her son’s death arose from a Russian bounty operation. She said she wanted an investigation, adding that “the parties who are responsible should be held accountable, if that’s even possible.”

Officials did not say which other attack was under scrutiny.

In claiming that the information was not provided to him, Trump has also dismissed the intelligence assessment as “so-called” and claimed he was told that it was “not credible.” The White House subsequently issued statements in the names of several subordinates denying that he had been briefed.

McEnany reiterated that claim on Monday and said that the information had not been elevated to Trump because there was a dissenting view about it within the intelligence community.

But she and other administration officials demurred when pressed to say whether their denials encompassed the president’s daily written briefing, a compendium of the most significant intelligence and analysis that the intelligence community writes for presidents to read. Trump is known to often neglect reading his written briefings.

Intelligence about the suspected Russian plot was included in the President’s Daily Brief in late February, according to two officials, contrasting Trump’s claim on Sunday that he was never “briefed or told” about the matter.

The information was also considered solid enough to be distributed to the broader intelligence community in a 4 May article in the CIA’s World Intelligence Review, commonly called The Wire, according to several officials.

A spokesperson for the Taliban has denied that it accepted Russian-paid bounties to carry out attacks on Americans and other coalition soldiers, saying the group needed no such encouragement for its operations. But one US official said the focus had been on criminals closely associated with the Taliban.

In a raid in Kunduz City in the north about six months ago, 13 people were arrested in a joint operation by US forces and the Afghan intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, according to Safiullah Amiry, the deputy provincial council chief there. Two of the main targets of the raid had already fled — one to Tajikistan and one to Russia, Amiry said — but it was in the Kabul home of one of them where security forces found a half-million dollars. He said the Afghan intelligence agency had told him the raids were related to Russian money being dispersed to militants.

Two former Afghan officials said Monday that members of local criminal networks had carried out attacks for the Taliban in the past — not because they shared the Taliban’s ideology or goals, but in exchange for money.

In Parwan province, where Bagram Airfield is, the Taliban is known to have hired local criminals as freelancers, said General Zaman Mamozai, the former police chief of the province. He said the Taliban’s commanders are based in two districts of the province, Seyagird and Shinwari, and that from there they coordinate a network that commissions criminals to carry out attacks.

And Haseeba Efat, a former member of Parwan’s provincial council, also said the Taliban has hired freelancers in Bagram district — including, in one case, one of his own distant relatives.

“They agree with these criminals that they won’t have monthly salary, but they will get paid for the work they do when the Taliban needs them,” Efat said.

Twenty US service members were killed in combat-related operations in Afghanistan last year, the most since 2014.

Charlie Savage, Mujib Mashal, Rukmini Callimachi, Eric Schmitt and Adam Goldman c.2020 The New York Times Company

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With Iran arms embargo set to expire in October, US calls for indefinite extension, but finds few takers at UN

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on Tuesday for an arms embargo on Iran to be extended indefinitely, but his appeal fell flat at the United Nations, where Russia and China rejected it outright and close allies of the United States were ambivalent.

The embargo, which is set to expire on 18 October, stems from the 2015 deal to curb Iran’s nuclear programme. President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018, and Iran has exceeded the accord’s limits on uranium enrichment since then, part of a steady escalation of tensions that have at times pushed the two countries dangerously close to war.

The American bid is all but certain to fail in the UN Security Council; it might not even collect enough support to be put to a vote, diplomats said. The Trump administration has threatened that if the embargo is not extended, the United States will try to invoke a “snapback” provision of the 2015 deal to reimpose former UN sanctions on Iran — a move other nations said would be unwise and legally invalid.

Representatives of Britain, France and Germany voiced unease at both the expiration of the embargo and the US approach, particularly the snapback, which they flatly opposed.

The European powers said they hoped to find some way to limit Iranian access to arms through a compromise negotiated in the framework of the 2015 agreement, not an action imposed by the Security Council.

The arms embargo applies to Iran importing or exporting most kinds of weapons, including aircraft and tanks. Some limits on missile and nuclear technology will remain in place for a few more years.

The resistance to Pompeo’s call — coming not only from only rivals like China and Russia, but also from key allies — illustrates the growing isolation and declining influence of the United States, analysts said, even in dealing with an Iran that members see as a rogue nation destabilising the region.

UN officials presented findings that the missiles used in an attack last September on crucial Saudi Arabian oil facilities were made in Iran, as were weapons bound for Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen that were seized by the US Navy. The findings supported the conclusions of Western intelligence agencies.

“Iran is already violating the arms embargo, even before its expiration date,” Pompeo said in the Security Council meeting, which was held by video link. “Imagine if Iranian activity were sanctioned, authorised by this group, if the restrictions are lifted.”

“Iran will be free to become a rogue weapons dealer, supplying arms to fuel conflicts from Venezuela, to Syria, to the far reaches of Afghanistan,” he added.

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, dismissed claims of Iranian aggression based on what he called “self-serving allegations and forged documents,” adding that it was the United States that “has directly undermined global peace and security.”

Zarif began and ended his remarks by quoting Mohammad Mossadegh, the Iranian prime minister overthrown in a CIA-orchestrated coup in 1953 — a nod to a long history of American intervention.

The meeting on Tuesday marked the first time since 2017 that Pompeo and Zarif had taken part in the same forum, if only virtually, but they did not appear together in the grid view of diplomats shown on the UN website. Pompeo left the meeting before Zarif joined.

Since leaving the nuclear deal, Trump has tried to cut off Iran from doing business with the rest of the world, threatening economic penalties for countries and companies that do not go along. Though most of the world opposes the US stance, much of it has complied.

Noting that the 2015 agreement had been adopted by the Security Council, Zarif said, “for the first time in Security Council history, a permanent member is punishing member States for not violating a Security Council resolution.”

Security Council members and UN officials chastised both Iran and the United States, urging them to return to compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, often referred to as JCPoA.

Some pinned the current crisis on Trump, saying that he had started a long series of provocations and retaliations by withdrawing from the agreement and imposing punishing economic sanctions.

“China opposes the US push for extending the arms embargo on Iran,” said Zhang Jun, the ambassador from China — which, like Russia, France, Britain and the United States, has veto power in the council. China, Russia, Germany, Britain, France and the European Union are signatories to the 2015 agreement.

“Having quit the JCPoA, the US is no longer a participant and has no right to trigger a snapback at the UN,” Zhang said.

The German representative, Christoph Heusgen, said he deplored Iran’s aggressions in the region and its human rights record at home, but he also endorsed the view that Washington had no standing to invoke UN sanctions.

“It is very unfortunate that the United States left the JCPoA, and by doing this actually violated international law,” he said.

Henry Rome, senior Iran analyst for Eurasia Group, said the meeting was “another vivid illustration of Washington’s isolation on the Iran issue — as well as its failure over the past three years to persuade any other signatory of the deal to back its approach.”

In the meeting, Rosemary A DiCarlo, the UN undersecretary-general for political affairs, detailed evidence that arms and weapons parts involved in the US Navy seizure and the oil field attacks were Iranian-made. She added that Iran has begun to violate the nuclear agreement in surpassing limits to its uranium enrichment, a potential step toward being able to produce a nuclear weapon.

But DiCarlo, a US citizen, cited “divergent views” on whether Iranian rockets, launched in February and April, could carry a nuclear warhead, as the United States has claimed.

Richard Pérez-Peña, Lara Jakes and Farnaz Fassihi c.2020 The New York Times Company

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