NEWS OF THE DAY
From Around the World
1 No move: President Trump signed an order keeping the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv rather than moving it to Jerusalem as he promised during last year’s campaign, aides said Thursday, disappointing many Israel supporters in hopes of preserving his chances of negotiating a peace settlement. The order waives for six months a congressional edict requiring the embassy be located in Jerusalem, after which he will have to consider the matter again.
2 Cyberwarfare: The head of the French government’s cybersecurity agency is warning of the approaching risk of “permanent war” in cyberspace because of hacking attacks for espionage and fraud by states and criminals. Guillaume Poupard said on Thursday that “in terms of effects and impact, we are clearly getting closer to a state of war.” He lamented a lack of commonly agreed rules to govern cyberspace and said nations “must work collectively, not just with two or three Western countries, but on a global scale.” Poupard also said his agency found no trace of a notorious Russian hacking group in its investigations of a hack and document leak that hit French President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign.
3 Migrant deaths: At least 44 migrants, including babies, have died of thirst after their vehicle broke down in the Sahara Desert as they were making their way to Libya, an official in Niger said Thursday. Niger is a major route for West African migrants making their way toward Europe. Some 300,000 migrants passed through the vast West African nation in 2016 alone, according to the International Organization for Migration. Most of the dead migrants were from Ghana, the official said. The victims included three babies, two children and 17 women. Six people survived.
4 Rape joke: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte denounced Chelsea Clinton in an expletive-laden speech for the second straight day after she criticized a comment he made about rapes committed by soldiers. Duterte on Thursday asked former President Bill Clinton’s daughter how she reacted when her father was having an affair with Monica Lewinsky in the White House. He says he was being sarcastic when he told troops last week that he would take the blame for them even if they rape women as they implement martial law he declared in the southern Philippines to battle Muslim militants. The younger Clinton in a tweet about the rape joke said: “Not funny. Ever.”
5 Auschwitz guard: Reinhold Hanning, a former SS sergeant whose conviction last year on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder for serving as an Auschwitz guard was hailed as a longoverdue victory for Holocaust victims, has died in Germany. He was 95, his attorney said Thursday. Hanning was convicted last June in Detmold state court and sentenced to five years in prison, though he never served time behind bars as his case was still being appealed. Nearly 1 million Jews and tens of thousands of others were killed in Auschwitz, which was located in Nazi-occupied Poland.
6 Surgical castration: The Council of Europe’s antitorture committee is praising Germany’s effective discontinuation of surgically castrating some sex offenders, although the law has not been repealed. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture in Strasbourg, France, in 2012 criticized Germany for the practice, while acknowledging it was done voluntarily under well-controlled circumstances. Germany responded that castration is used only to treat a person’s “serious illness.”