Dems sue Russia, Trump campaign:
The Democratic Party sued the Russian government, US President Donald Trump’s campaign and WikiLeaks on Friday, charging that they carried out a wide-ranging conspiracy to influence the 2016 US presidential election.
In its federal lawsuit in Manhattan, the Democratic National Committee said that top officials in Trump’s campaign conspired with the Russian government and its military spy agency to hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and tilt the election to Trump by hacking Democratic Party computers.
The lawsuit alleged that Trump’s campaign “gleefully welcomed Russia’s help” in the 2016 election and accuses it of being a “racketeering enterprise” that worked in tandem with Moscow. “During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” said Tom Perez, chair of the DNC. “This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery.” (RTRS)
Thursday. “We can confirm that Mohammad Haydar Zammar, a Syrian-born German national, was captured more than a month ago by SDF partners,” Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon said in a statement, referring to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
A senior Kurdish commander told AFP the previous day that Zammar had been detained “and is now being interrogated.”
Zammar, in his mid-fifties, has been accused of recruiting some of the September 11 Al-Qaeda hijackers who carried out attacks on Washington and New York, killing almost 3,000 people.
He was detained in Morocco in December 2001 in an operation involving CIA agents, and was handed over to the Syrian authorities two weeks later.
A Syrian court sentenced Zammar to 12 years in prison in 2007 for belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, a charge that at the time could have resulted in the death penalty. (AFP)
Canada braces for more seekers:
The number of asylum seekers from the United States crossing forests and farmers’ fields on foot to reach Canada jumped at the beginning of this year, and authorities are bracing for more. The surge in walk-in arrivals started in 2016 with the election of US President Donald Trump, who has sought to crack down on legal and undocumented immigration.
Nearly 21,000 border jumpers were intercepted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in 2017 and allowed to file a refugee claim, officials told reporters on Friday. Another 6,373 made their way into Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia provinces from January to mid-April this year, which was more than double the number of arrivals during the same period last year. (AFP)
“There’s a likelihood that we will see even more people” as this year’s particularly stormy and cold winter cedes to warming spring temperatures, said a senior border security official.
“We have right now roughly 75 to 80 people a day crossing (into Quebec). A few weeks ago that might have been as low as 50 a day.”
Most of the recent arrivals had travelled to the United States from Nigeria before coming to Canada. Others originated mostly from Colombia, Pakistan and Haiti. (AFP)