NEWS OF THE DAY
From Around the World
_1 Syria war: Air strikes on a Syrian village in the rebel-held northwestern province of Idlib killed at least 17 people, including women and children, activists and rescue workers said Wednesday. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the overnight strikes killed at least four children and two women, and wiped out an entire displaced family. Idlib is a rebel stronghold where President Bashar Assad’s forces have recently launched an offensive to try retaking the province after losing it nearly three years ago.
_2 Human rights sanctions: The United States is slapping five Russians with sanctions under a law that lets the U.S. target violators of human rights. The Treasury Department says it’s designating the Russians under the Magnitsky Act. Congress passed it in 2012 in response to the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. He died in prison after exposing a tax fraud scheme involving Russian officials. Three of the five being targeted are accused of involvement in the criminal conspiracy that Magnitsky exposed. The two others are accused of “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” in Chechnya. The Treasury says one allegedly was involved in abusing gay men in Chechnya in 2017.
_3 Car plows into pedestrians: Australian media say up to 19 people have been injured after a car drove into pedestrians on a sidewalk in central Melbourne on Thursday. Police have arrested the driver of the white SUV, which crashed into a cable car stop, but were not able to immediately confirm the cause of the incident or whether it was terrorismrelated. Media reports say up to 19 pedestrians have been treated for injuries, with 12 taken to hospitals, including a pre-school aged child in serious condition with head injuries, after the vehicle entered the sidewalk outside Melbourne’s iconic Flinders Street station just after 4:30 p.m.
_4 Porn scandal: Britain’s First Secretary of State Damian Green was forced to resign Wednesday after an investigation concluded he had made misleading statements about pornographic images found on a Parliament computer in his office in 2008. The key ally to Prime Minister Theresa May was ousted from his post on Wednesday night even though he maintains he did not use pornography on his office computers. He acknowledged that he had not been forthcoming in statements made about the matter in November. Green was a vital political ally who acted as a de facto deputy prime minister and supported May in her difficult Brexit negotiations. His removal will cost her an important supporter as she tries to balance competing visions of Brexit within her Cabinet.
_5 No aid: President Trump threatened Wednesday to cut off U.S. aid to any country that votes in favor of a resolution at the U.N. General Assembly denouncing his recent decision to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Trump’s statement, delivered at his last Cabinet meeting of the year, followed a letter from the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, in which she warned that the United States would take note of any country that votes in favor of the measure. “All these nations that take our money and then vote against us at the Security Council or the assembly, they take hundreds of millions of dollars and billions of dollars and they vote against us,” Trump said. “Well, we’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us, we’ll save a lot. We don’t care.”