NEWS OF THE DAY
From Around the World
1 Military intervention: Brazil’s lower house approved a decree to put the military in charge of Rio de Janeiro’s security forces amid a spike in violence. The military took over Friday. Overnight, the armed forces and police spread out in several neighborhoods in Rio in the first major operation since the change in command. Armored vehicles rolled through the streets of one neighborhood on Guanabara Bay on Tuesday, while boats patrolled the waters. Soldiers and police set up checkpoints and searched everyone leaving or entering during the morning commute.
2 Iran clashes: Three Iranian police officers and two paramilitary troops were killed overnight during clashes with members of a Sufi Islam order in Tehran, Iranian news outlets reported Tuesday, the most casualties the security forces have suffered in one evening since the height of antigovernment demonstrations in 2009. State news media reported that police arrested more than 300 protesters, most of them members of the Gonabadi dervishes, a mystical Sufi strain of Islam that the clerical government has designated a challenge to mainstream Shiite theology.
3 No meeting: Vice President Mike Pence was all set to hold a history-making meeting with North Korean officials during the Winter Olympics in South Korea, but Kim Jong Un’s government canceled at the last minute, the Trump administration said Tuesday. Pence led the U.S. delegation to the opening ceremonies in Pyeongchang, South Korea, amid dramatic speculation that the U.S. and North Korea might finally sit down to talk. North Korea had no immediate response to the news out of Washington. But North Korean officials had said previously that they had no intention of meeting with Pence during the Games.
4 Rohingya refugees: Myanmar agreed with Bangladesh on Tuesday to resettle more than 6,000 Rohingya Muslims who have been stranded in a no-man’s-land between the two countries, as plans for the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of others have been delayed over concerns for their safety if they return to Myanmar, officials said. About 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled armyled violence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar since August and are living in refugee camps in Bangladesh. Some, however, became stranded at the Tombru border point after Myanmar reportedly began building bunkers and threatened the refugees to leave and enter Bangladesh, which denied their entry. Myanmar’s security forces have been accused of atrocities against the Rohingya, including killing, rape and arson. The United Nations and the U.S. have described the army crackdown as “ethnic cleansing.”
5 Warsaw Ghetto: Two remaining fragments of the wall that isolated the Warsaw Ghetto should be put on a list of historical monuments, a regional conservation official in Poland said Tuesday. The proposal published on Tuesday says the red brick wall at 53 Sienna Street should be protected as a witness to history and preserved for future generations. The wall was built in 1940, when Nazis closed the area of Warsaw they called the “Jewish district.” It was 13 feet high, including 3 feet of barbed wire on top. About 450,000 residents died of hunger and disease there or in the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp. The Germans destroyed the ghetto and most of the wall in 1943. Hundreds of residents resisted, but the Ghetto Uprising was crushed in May 1943 and almost all its fighters were killed.