Brazil's Lula proposes Mercosur trade deal with China after EU accord

Brazil's President Lula da Silva visits Uruguay


Wed, January 25, 2023

(Reuters) -Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Wednesday that he favored an agreement between Mercosur and China in a plan to modernize and open the South American trade bloc to other regions.

On a visit to Uruguay to dissuade its government from reaching a deal on its own with China, which would undermine the Mercosur customs union, Lula said the long-awaited Mercosur accord with the European Union must be completed urgently.

"Let's intensify the talks and firm up this agreement (with the EU) so that we can then discuss a possible agreement between China and Mercosur and I think it is possible," said the leftist president who took office again on Jan. 1.

"We want to sit down as Mercosur and discuss with our Chinese friends the Mercosur-China agreement," Lula said, adding that China is Brazil's biggest trading partner.

Talks for the EU-Mercosur trade agreement were completed in 2019, but environmental concerns stalled the deal before it was approved by the legislatures of the EU member states.

Uruguay's President Lacalle Pou said that his country needed to open up its economy to the world and it could discuss parallel trade arrangements outside of Mercosur.

Last year, Uruguay entered into formal negotiations for a free-trade agreement with China, a decision criticized by the other Mercosur members, and Uruguay recently advanced in talks to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

"At the same time we are going to create a technical team with Uruguay, Brazil and no doubt the other countries to see what we really want and need from our relationship with China," Pou said.

(Reporting by Gabriel Araujo and Anthony Boadle; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

Haitian police rebels protest is paralyzing Port-au-Prince






PIERRE RICHARD LUXAMA and MEGAN JANETSKY
Thu, January 26, 2023 at 11:05 AM MST·3 min read

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Outraged rebel police officers paralyzed Port-au-Prince on Thursday, roaring through the streets on motorcycles in protest of a slew of killings of police officers by Haitian gangs.

More than a hundred protesters blocked roads, shot guns into the air, and broke through gates in the capital's airport and the Prime Minister's house, with tensions escalating throughout the day.

Gangs have killed at least 10 officers in the past week; another is missing and one more has severe bullet wounds, according to the Haitian National Police.

Video circulating social media — likely recorded by gangs — shows the naked and bloodied bodies of six men stretched out on the dirt, their guns laying on their chests. Another video shows two masked men who are smoking cigarettes from the dismembered hands and feet of the dead men.

The gang who killed them, known as Gan Grif, still has the bodies, police said.

The wave of grisly killings of police is only the latest example of escalating violence in the Caribbean nation, which has been gripped by gang wars and political chaos following the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise.

His unelected successor as head of the government, Prime Minister Ariel Henry, has asked the United Nations to lead a military intervention, but no country has been willing to put boots on the ground.

The deaths enraged members of Fantom 509, an armed group of current and former police officers that has violently demanded better conditions for officers.

Dozens of these men wove through city on Thursday, many wearing hoods along with police uniforms, flak jackets and rifles and automatic weapons. They seized buses to blockade roads and torched tires across the city, leaving smoke plummeting through the streets.

Many demanded tougher crackdowns on the gangs, and called for the end to Henry's administration, which many Haitians view as illegitimate. Demonstrators broke down one of the gates outside Henry’s home and a barrier at the Port-au-Prince airport, where he planned to make an appearance later in the day.

“We need a revolution,” screamed one protester dressed in a bullet proof vest, helmet and gas mask. “We are in the streets to fight, for our brothers and sisters who are victims of the bandits. We have to take to the streets every day to get what we want.”

A video recorded by local Haitian media shows empty streets and closed businesses on a key road of Port-au-Prince where the rebel group passed through.

In addition to the bodies displayed by the gang, a number of officers were killed last week in a firefight with gangs in a neighborhood that was once considered relatively safe.

Since Henry took the reins of the country, 78 police officers have been killed, according to a Thursday report by Haitian human rights group, National Network of the Defense of Human Rights.

The Haitian National Police expressed condolences to the slain officers' families and colleagues, and said it's "calling for peace and invites police officers to come together to bring forward an institutional response to the different criminal organizations that terrorize the Haitian people.”

The U.S. Embassy in Haiti also tweeted Thursday afternoon asking for calm.

The United Nations estimates that 60% of Port-au-Prince is controlled by the gangs. On the streets of the capital, Haitians say it's more like 100%.

This week, the U.N. special envoy for Haiti urged the American and Canadian governments to lead an international armed force to help Haiti combat the gangs. Haitian police, meanwhile, are pleading for more resources.

“The movement will continue, we can’t let police get killed like this,” said one masked man in a police uniform carrying a pistol who did not want to be identified. “We can do the job if they give us ammunition."

___

Associated Press journalist Evens Sanon contributed to this report.

Haiti police block streets, break into airport to protest officer killings

Thu, January 26, 2023 
By Steven Aristil and Harold Isaac

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) -Haitian police officers on Thursday blocked streets and forced their way into the country's main airport to protest the recent killing of officers by armed gangs expanding their grip on the Caribbean nation.

Protesters in civilian clothes who identified themselves as police first attacked Prime Minister Ariel Henry's official residence, according to a Reuters witness, and then flooded the airport as Henry was arriving from a trip to Argentina.

Henry was temporarily stuck in the airport, but returned to his residence in Port-au-Prince later on Thursday, followed by police protesters. A Reuters witness heard heavy gunfire near his home.

Haiti's National Police and the Prime Minister's Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Roads around Port-au-Prince and in several cities to the north were blocked by protesters.

A group of U.S. government officials were visiting Haiti at the time, and a U.S. State Department spokesperson said all Washington's personnel were accounted for and they had moved some meetings as a precaution.

Haitian human rights group RNDDH said in a statement that 78 police officers had been killed since Henry came to power in July 2021, averaging five each month, saying the prime minister and the head of the national police Frantz Elbe were "responsible for each of the 78 lives lost during their reign."

"History will remember they did nothing to protect and preserve the lives of these agents who chose to serve their country," it added.

Late on Thursday, The Bahamas' foreign ministry said the country's prime minister had ordered all Bahamians, including its diplomatic personnel, to leave Haiti as soon as security conditions permit.

Haitian police had earlier in the day stopped the neighboring country's local charge d'affaires and taken their vehicle and weapons, it added, saying all its diplomats were safe, as well as five citizens who had been trapped around the airport.

Last week, four police officers near the capital were killed by the Vitelhomme gang, while shootouts on Wednesday with the Savien gang in the town of Liancourt left another seven officers dead, according to Haiti's National Police and local media reports.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Brian Nichols expressed condolences to the families of police officers killed in the latest violence, and said the United States would continue to "impose costs on those responsible for this heinous violence."

Asked how the developments could affect efforts to craft an international armed intervention, the U.S. State Department spokesperson told Reuters the United States was still working with international partners to develop "a framework" for a security mission to "provide security and stability."

The United Nations is discussing sending a foreign strike force to confront the criminal groups. The proposal was originally made three months ago but no country has offered to lead such a force.

(Reporting by Steven Aristil, Harold Isaac and Ralph Tedy Erol in Port-au-Prince, Brian Ellsworth in Caracas, Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Additional reporting by Sarah Morland; Editing by Sandra Maler and Christopher Cushing)

TALIBAN FEMICIDE

UN food agency: Afghan malnutrition rates at record high

A mother with her malnourished child waits to receive help and check-up at a clinic that run by the WFP, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023. A spokesman for the U.N. food agency says malnutrition rates in Afghanistan are at record highs. Aid agencies have been providing food, education, healthcare and other critical support to people, but distribution has been severely impacted by a Taliban edict banning women from working at national and international nongovernmental groups.

 (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

EBRAHIM NOROOZI
Thu, January 26, 2023

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Malnutrition rates in Afghanistan are at record highs with half the country enduring severe hunger throughout the year, a spokesman for the World Food Program said Thursday.

The Taliban takeover in August 2021 drove millions into poverty and hunger after foreign aid stopped almost overnight. Sanctions on Taliban rulers, a halt on bank transfers and frozen billions in Afghanistan’s currency reserves restricted access to global institutions and the outside money that supported the country’s aid-dependent economy before the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces.

“Half of Afghanistan endures severe hunger throughout the year, regardless of the season, and malnutrition rates are at a record high for Afghanistan," said Phillipe Kropf, a spokesman for the U.N. food agency in Kabul.

"There are seven million children (under the age of 5) and mothers who are malnourished, in a country with a population of 40 million.”

Afghans are not starving to death, he said, but they have no resources left to stave off the humanitarian crisis.

Aid agencies have been providing food, education and healthcare support to Afghans, including heating, cash for fuel and warm clothes. But distribution has been severely impacted by a Taliban edict banning women from working at national and international nongovernmental groups.

“The ban has come at the worst possible moment," said Kropf. “Families and communities don’t know where their next meal is coming from.”

The WFP scaled up its delivery and distribution of aid in anticipation of a tough winter before the ban came in, planning to reach 15 million this month with emergency food assistance and nutrition support. While it is not directly affected by the ban, 19 of its NGO partners suspended operations in Afghanistan following the Dec. 24 edict.

The NGO ban on women workers has seen the suspension of 115 of 437 mobile health clinics, affecting 82,000 children, and pregnant and lactating women. The suspension of a training project is hurting 39,300 people, mostly women, while the pause of a school snack program has hit 616,000 students.

At a nutrition clinic in Kabul, 32-year-old nurse Anisa Samadi said most children and mothers will die without support from agencies like the WFP and World Health Organization. Their help is needed now more than ever, she told The Associated Press on Thursday.

“In the last five months I have seen the number of patients increasing. Three months ago we had 48 patients. Last month, we had 76 and this month so far we have 69 or 70, mostly we have twins who are so weak, while their mothers are also weak.”

Shortages of medicine alongside poverty and a lack of food means even a small illness can turn into a huge problem for many Afghans, she said.

Her colleague, 30-year-old nutrition adviser Sheba Hussanzada, said children at the clinic receive therapeutic food. But the children return with pneumonia, causing unhealthy weight loss. “Mothers are saying that they don’t have wood or any other way to keep their children warm at home. They don’t have enough food to feed them," she said.

First-time mother Fereshta, 24, visited the clinic because she doesn't have enough milk to feed her child. Her husband used to have a job, but now there is no work for him.

“Since the Taliban have come, the economic condition is so bad and people don’t have food to eat. People don't have three meals. If there weren't such a center to support us, I might lose my child," the young mother said.

The NGO ban has followed in a slew of measures restricting the rights and freedoms of women and girls in Afghanistan, and has drawn international condemnation and weeks of campaigning to get it lifted.

The highest-ranking woman at the U.N. Amina Mohammed said Wednesday she used everything in her “toolbox” during meetings with Taliban ministers in Afghanistan to try to reverse their crackdown on women and girls, urging Muslim countries to help the Taliban move from the “13th century to the 21st” century.

On Thursday, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric, asked for Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ reaction to rising malnutrition rates in Afghanistan said: “It’s yet another sign of the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Afghanistan we’re seeing in the midst of particularly harsh winter conditions."

___

Associated Press writer Riazat Butt contributed to this report from Islamabad.

 

Top U.N. officials seek to 'water down' bans on women in Afghanistan


Martin Griffiths, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Kabul

Wed, January 25, 2023 
By Charlotte Greenfield and Michelle Nichols

KABUL/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) -The United Nations is pushing the Taliban administration in Afghanistan for more exemptions to its ban on most female aid workers, top U.N. officials said on Wednesday, while also expressing concern that foreign women working for international organizations and embassies could next be targeted.

Speaking to Reuters during a visit to Kabul, U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths said that his message during meetings with Taliban officials had been: "If you can't help us rescind the ban, give us the exemptions to allow women to operate."

Last month, the Taliban authorities - who seized power in August 2021 - banned most female aid workers and stopped women from attending university after stopping girls from attending high school in March. Griffiths traveled to Afghanistan after a visit last week by U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed.

Griffiths said some exemptions to the female aid worker ban had been granted in health and education and that there were indications there could be a possible exemption in agriculture. But he said much more was needed, with nutrition and water and sanitation services a priority to prevent severe illnesses and malnutrition during a severe humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.

"We have not seen the history of the Taliban reversing any edict. What we have seen is exemptions that, hopefully, if we keep pushing them, they will water down those edicts to a point where we will get women and girls back into school and into the workplace," Mohammed told reporters in New York on Wednesday.

ANOTHER BAN?

Griffiths told Reuters that, following his recent discussions with the Taliban authorities, he was hopeful they would create a set of written guidelines to allow aid groups to operate with female staff in more areas with certainty in coming weeks.

"The next few weeks are absolutely crucial to see if the humanitarian community ... can stay and deliver," he said, while cautioning: "I don't want to speculate as to whether we're going to come out of this in the right place."

The Taliban administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its plans over guidelines.

During her visit last week, Mohammed met with the Shura - the leadership council that issues the bans - in the southern Taliban heartland of Kandahar. She said there is a concern that they may next prohibit "international women from international organizations and embassies."

"It hasn't happened so far," said Mohammed, adding that they had been expecting a possible announcement all month. "I don't say that it won't, but clearly the pressure that we're putting on has stopped that rollback as quickly."

Griffiths said the United Nations would continue operating in Afghanistan wherever it could, but there was a concern that international donors might not want to commit to the huge financial cost of aid at around $4.6 billion a year.

"I lose sleep about this, I really do," Griffiths said, adding that he would meet with donors in coming weeks to make the case for why Afghanistan needed help during an intense humanitarian crisis in which 28 million people were in need of aid, including 6 million on the brink of famine.

(Reporting by Charlotte Greenfield and Michelle Nichols; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis)

UN presses Taliban for 'clarity' on women's role in aid delivery

Jay DESHMUKH
Wed, January 25, 2023 


Two senior UN leaders said Wednesday they were pressing the Taliban to reverse its restrictions on Afghan women, particularly a ban on working in aid delivery, with one official warning that "famine is looming" during the harsh winter.

Speaking in New York, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said she pushed "pretty hard" on women's issues during a visit last week to Afghanistan and sometimes "the reaction wasn't pleasant."

Since returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban government has rapidly squeezed women out of public life, banning them also from secondary education, public sector work, as well as parks and baths.

The country is facing one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, aid agencies say, with more than half of Afghanistan's 38 million population facing hunger and nearly four million children suffering from malnutrition.

The crisis was compounded when Taliban leadership banned Afghan women from working with NGOs, forcing several aid agencies to suspend their vital work.

In recent weeks, the authorities have allowed women to work in the health sector only.

UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, Martin Griffiths, said he hoped that more humanitarian sectors would be reopened for women workers.

"I have been told by a number of Taliban leaders that the Taliban, as an administration, is working on guidelines which will provide more clarity about the role and possibility and hopefully the freedom of women to work in humanitarian work," Griffiths told AFP in an interview at a UN office in Kabul.

"I think it's really important that we keep the light shining on the process to lead to those guidelines," he said, wrapping up a visit to Afghanistan.

Griffiths led a delegation of senior NGO officials to meet several Taliban leaders this week in a bid to push them to further relax the ban on women aid workers.

- 'Protection' or 'oppression'? -

Griffiths's delegation came days after Mohammed concluded a visit, stopping in Kandahar, in which she urged the Taliban government to reverse two recent decrees that have severely restricted women's rights.

Apart from banning women from working in NGOs, the Taliban authorities have also barred them from university education.

"I used everything that I know, that I have in my toolbox, to try to defend and to recover women's rights," Mohammed said in an extensive news conference in New York.

She said the Taliban told her they were seeking to protect women but "their definition of protection would be, I would say, ours of oppression."

She added: "A lot of what we have to deal with is how we travel the Taliban from the 13th century to the 21st. And that's, that's a journey. So it is not just, overnight."

"This is going to be tough to get them back into the space we need them, and women's and girls' rights protected and upheld," Mohammed said.

Griffiths vowed that when it comes to delivering aid in the poverty-stricken country, the global humanitarian community will insist on deploying women workers.

"Wherever there are chances for us to deliver humanitarian assistance and protection in a principled way, which means with women, we will do so," he said, adding that at the moment, exemptions for women workers was paramount.

"We don't have time. The winter is with us, people are dying, famine is looming," he said.

"We need decisions now, which is why I think these practical exceptions that we have been talking about are so important."

jd/abd/tjj/des

Afghanistan: Taliban to set new rules on women's aid work, UN says

Lyse Doucet - Chief international correspondent
Wed, January 25, 2023 

Afghanistan is experiencing a cruel winter, with famine and frostbite knocking at the door

Taliban ministers have told a senior UN official they plan to draw up new guidelines to allow Afghan women to work in some humanitarian operations.

Martin Griffiths told the BBC he had received "encouraging responses" from a wide range of Taliban ministers during talks in Kabul, even if last month's edict banning Afghan women working for NGOs is not reversed.

With Afghan women playing a crucial role in delivering aid, there is concern the ban is endangering urgent life-saving humanitarian operations in the country.

"It's worth remembering that, this year, Afghanistan is the biggest humanitarian aid programme in the world ever," Mr Griffiths, the UN's Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, told me in Kabul.

The aid arithmetic is staggering. This year, agencies will try to reach 28 million Afghans, more than half the population, including six million who are, Mr Griffiths says, "knocking on famine's door".

This year is Afghanistan's coldest winter in a decade, and it's been cruel. In the past two weeks, more than 126 Afghans have perished in freezing temperatures, collapsing from hypothermia, or overcome by toxic fumes from gas heaters.

And winter's icy blast strikes a people already living, perilously, on the edge. Providing aid to Afghanistan is of epic proportions too.

In a mud-and-straw home perched perilously on a steeply-sloped hill blanketed in snow in Parwan province north of Kabul, we met one family whose complaints were as bitter as the cold.

"No aid agencies visit us here," lamented mother Qamar Gul, as the family huddled around a "sandali" - a traditional charcoal heater Afghans have relied on for centuries to keep warm. "No one came from the last government, no one from the Taliban government."

Qamar Gul says no aid agencies visit her family home in Parwan province

This week, as the government's military helicopters struggled to reach the most isolated communities completely cut off by colossal snowbanks and blinding storms, Mr Griffiths was holding back-to-back meetings in Kabul with senior Taliban government leaders about the new edict banning Afghan women from working with aid organisations.

"If women do not work in humanitarian operations, we do not reach, we do not count, the women and girls we need to listen to," Mr Griffiths underlines when we meet at the UN's sprawling compound at the end of his mission. "In all humanitarian operations around the world, women and girls are the most vulnerable."

An aid official with decades of experience in tough environments, including Afghanistan, he was cautious, but clear, about the results of his high-stakes mission.

"I think they're listening," he said of the Taliban ministers he had met, "and they told me they will be issuing new guidelines in due course which I hope will help us reinforce the role of women."

Mr Griffiths's visit comes on the heels of last week's flying visit by the UN's second-in-command Amina Mohammed, a British-Nigerian Muslim woman whose presence underlined the UN's growing alarm over a raft of Taliban edicts threatening to "erase women from public life".

She told us her conversations were "very tough". Some meetings were so candid, they were almost cut short. But she told us she was encouraged by a willingness to engage.

Mr Griffiths's mission - representing the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), the UN's highest-level forum to co-ordinate humanitarian aid - has been to delve into very specific details across a range of vital sectors from agriculture to sanitation and food deliveries.

No one realistically expects the ban, announced last month, to be reversed. But it seems to have many loopholes.

Mr Griffiths highlighted "a consistent pattern of Taliban leaders presenting us with exceptions, exemptions, and authorisations for women to work". So far, a green light has been given to crucial areas like health and community education where women's participation is essential.

The UN's Martin Griffiths pointed out that humanitarian access was significantly better now since the Taliban swept to power in 2021

But it's also clear the most conservative of Taliban leaders are not for turning.

"Men are already working with us in the rescue efforts and there is no need for women to work with us," insists the white-bearded cleric who heads the State Ministry for Disaster Management. When we sat down with him in his office, the acting minister Mullah Mohammad Abbas Akhund accused the UN and other aid agencies of speaking "against our religious beliefs".

"I'm sorry, I don't agree," was Mr Griffith's firm reply, emphasising that the UN and other aid agencies had been working in Afghanistan for decades. "We respect the customs and norms of Afghanistan, as we do in every country that we work."

The race to deliver urgently-needed relief has been slowed by this painstaking process of dealing with an authority ruled by the most senior, most strict Taliban leaders. Other senior figures question edicts but cannot quash them.

But Mr Griffiths pointed out that humanitarian access was significantly better now since the Taliban swept to power in 2021. Areas previously cut off by threats of Taliban attacks or US-led military operations were now much easier to reach. Last winter, 11th-hour humanitarian interventions in remote regions, including the central highlands of Ghor, pulled families back from the brink of famine.

It's a point Taliban officials constantly stress. The acting Minister of Foreign Affairs Amir Khan Muttaqi urged Mr Griffiths to share their "achievements and opportunities... instead of complaints and shortcomings".

But as the worst of winter closes in, the window is closing for an urgent relief effort. Several aid agencies, who rely enormously on their Afghan female staff have already suspended their operations.

"I cannot think of an international priority as high as this one to keep this extraordinarily important massive programme alive," is how the UN's top aid official summed up this moment.

Secret school in Kabul equips Afghan girls with psychological tools to cope with Taliban

 

EQUIP THEM WITH WEAPONS TRAINING

Story by Mehek Mazhar •CBC

Afghanistan's ruling government, the Taliban, does not allow young girls to continue their education beyond Grade 6. But one teacher in the capital, Kabul, is teaching her students how to cope with the tyranny — at a secret school.

Sahar, whose last name CBC News is not disclosing for her safety, is unlike colleagues who teach the girls math, science and geography. In her class, they study psychology and participate in group counselling.

"I teach them some techniques on how to control their lives," Sahar told Nothing Is Foreign host Tamara Khandaker.

In university, Sahar studied educational psychology. But when the Taliban re-took control of Afghanistan in 2021, her life completely changed. She lost her job and many friends fled the country or were detained.

That was when she discovered choice theory, part of American psychiatrist Dr. William Glasser's 1965 model of reality therapy.

Reality therapy is a form of counselling that views behaviours as choices. Those choices are attempts to fulfil five basic human needs: survival; freedom; fun; power; and love and belonging.

"This theory helped me become happy again," said Sahar. "So I thought that it's a very ... positive and good way to help these girls, because we cannot change others. We cannot change the society. We cannot change what is outside, but we can change our mindset."

A teacher, who we're only identifying as Sahar for her safety, instructs a group of girls in a secret high school in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Risks of running secret school

There are 75 to 80 girls in Sahar's class, all between grades 6 and 12, and once a week they sit on a carpet to learn how to soothe their minds.

They defy the Taliban's ban on their education by attending the secret school discreetly, inside a home in a supportive residential neighbourhood. As a precautionary measure, the girls don't even bring their materials — no books, pens or paper.

If the government were to discover the school, and prove that these classes were taking place, everyone involved would be at risk of being detained.

Despite her fears, Sahar provides her students with mentorship and emotional support.

Financial burden on families

The psychological stress of these students is acute. Sahar said one of her students did not have enough food at home to feed her family. It caused the girl so much pain that she considered suicide.

"'The only reason that I did not kill myself [was] that you told me that if I have any kind of issues, I can come and share it with you,'" Sahar recalled her student saying.

The teacher encouraged her student to ask questions and seek alternatives. After a few weeks, she saw that the student was feeling better.

"She understood that she cannot end the poverty. She cannot make bread from somewhere. Neither [can I] bring that for her…. But at least [with] these techniques … she could build good relations with her mother, with her sister, with her father."

Food has been hard to come by in Afghanistan since the resurgence of the Taliban. The U.S. and its allies suspended funding and aid to the country, which the population has relied on for years, due to international policies around interacting with the Taliban.

Economic sanctions are meant to punish the group for its treatment of women and girls, but the broader Afghan population is left facing a severe humanitarian crisis.

"Putting more sanctions on Afghanistan will only hurt the nation," said Sahar.

AND THE TALIBAN'S

24 million need humanitarian aid: Red Cross

In an interview with the Associated Press in November, Martin Schuepp, a top official from the International Committee of the Red Cross, said half of Afghanistan's population — or 24 million people — is in need of humanitarian aid. He added more Afghans will struggle for survival as living conditions deteriorate in the months ahead.

Obaidullah Baheer, a lecturer at the American University of Afghanistan, told Nothing is Foreign that the international community can exercise leverage if they meet with the Taliban and build trust.

"The international community's policies haven't cared for Afghans stuck in the middle," Baheer said about the impact of Western sanctions. "Yes, sure, they're flying in money to help sustain the Afghan currency and the economy from free-falling, but then [the Taliban are] holding multi-billion dollars' worth of reserves."

"The Taliban are to blame as well, because their policies have led to further distance and engagement, further isolation," Baheer said. "It's just a vicious cycle."

In the meantime, Sahar continues to hold her psychology classes to help girls cope with the hardship, despite the fear of being found out.

"We are afraid and scared of the situation, but we are living with our values," Sahar said. "And when you live with your values, you have to accept that there will be some consequences."

This guide from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health outlines how to talk about suicide with someone you're worried about.

Top UN woman urges Muslims: Move Taliban into 21st century

Wed, January 25, 2023



UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The highest-ranking woman at the United Nations said Wednesday she used everything in her “toolbox” during meetings with Taliban ministers to try to reverse their crackdown on Afghan women and girls, and she urged Muslim countries to help the Taliban move from the “13th century to the 21st.”

Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, a former Nigerian Cabinet minister and a Muslim, said at a news conference that four Taliban ministers, including the foreign minister and a deputy prime minister, spoke “off one script” during meetings with her delegation last week.

She said the officials sought to stress things that they say they have done and not gotten recognition for — and what they called their effort to create an environment that protects women.

“Their definition of protection would be, I would say, ours of oppression,” Mohammed said.

Those meetings in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and the Islamic group’s birthplace in Kandahar were followed by a visit this week by U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths and heads of major aid groups. They are pressing the Taliban to reverse their edict last month banning Afghan women from working for national and international non-governmental groups.

Speaking from Kabul on Wednesday, Griffiths said the focus of the visit was to get the Taliban to understand that getting aid operations up and running and allowing women to work in them was critical. The delegation’s message was simple — that the ban makes the groups' work more difficult, he said.

“What I heard from all those I met (was) that they understood the need as well as the right for Afghan women to work, and that they will be working on a set of guidelines which we will see issued in due course, which will respond to those requirements,” Griffiths said.

Mohammed said her delegation, including the head of UN Women, which promotes gender equality and women’s rights, pushed back against the Taliban, including when they started talking about humanitarian principles.

“We reminded them that in humanitarian principles, non-discrimination was a key part … and that they were wiping out women from the workplace,” she said.

As a Sunni Muslim, like the Taliban officials, Mohammed said she told the ministers that when it comes to preventing girls’ education beyond sixth grade and taking away women’s rights, they are not following Islam and are harming people.

In one setting, Mohammed said, she was told by a Taliban official she didn't name that “it was haram (forbidden by Islamic law) for me to be there talking to them.” These conservatives won’t look straight at a woman, she noted, so she said she played “that game” and didn’t look directly at them either.

“I gave as much as I think they gave, and we did push,” she said.

Mohammed said the Taliban have said that in due course the rights taken away from women and girls will come back so the U.N. delegation pressed for a timeline. “What they would say was ‘soon,’” she said.

The Taliban took power for a second time in August 2021, during the final weeks of the U.S. and NATO forces’ pullout from Afghanistan after 20 years of war.

Mohammed said the Taliban, who have not been recognized by a single country, want international recognition and Afghanistan’s seat at the United Nations, which is currently held by the former government led by Ashraf Ghani.

“Recognition is one leverage that we have and we should hold onto,” Mohammed said.

Before arriving in Kabul, Mohammed’s delegation traveled to Muslim majority countries, including Indonesia, Turkey, Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, where she said there was wide support against the Taliban bans.

She said there is a proposal for the U.N. and the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation to host an international conference in mid-March on women in the Muslim world.

“It’s very important that the Muslim countries come together,” she said. “We have to take the fight to the region … and we need to be bold about it and courageous about it because women’s rights matter.”

Griffiths, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, and his delegation, including the heads of Care International and Save the Children U.S., did not travel to Kandahar, where the ban on Afghan women working for NGOs was issued on the orders of the reclusive Taliban supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzdaza.

Griffiths acknowledged Akhundzada’s top status but said there are many important voices among Taliban officials across the country.

“I don’t think it’s a simple matter of simply asking one man to take responsibility and to change an edict,” he said. “There is a collective responsibility for this edict, and I hope we’re building up a collective will to compensate for its ban.”

Save the Children’s Janti Soeripto said that there were meetings with eight ministries in two days and that some among the Taliban seemed to understand the need to reverse the ban.

“There’s resistance, they don’t want to be seen doing a U-turn,” she said. “If people don’t see the consequences as viscerally as we see them, people will feel less inclined.”

Mohammed said it is important for the U.N. and its partners to work more in some 20 Afghan provinces that are more forward leaning.

“A lot of what we have to deal with is how we travel the Taliban from the 13th century to the 21st," she said. “That's a journey. So it's not just overnight."

She said the Taliban told her delegation that it is putting forward a law against gender-based violence, which she called “a big plus” because rape and other attacks are increasing in Afghanistan.

“I want to hold the Taliban to champion implementing that law,” she said.

Mohammed said it is important to maximize whatever leverage there is to bring the Taliban back to the principles underpinning participation in the “international family.”

“No one objects to a Muslim country or Sharia (law),” she said. “But all of this cannot be re-engineered to extremism and taking views that harm women and girls. This is absolutely unacceptable, and we should hold the line.”

___

Associated Press writer Riazat Butt contributed from Islamabad.

Edith M. Lederer, The Associated Press

THE HIVE
US infiltrates big ransomware gang: 'We hacked the hackers'



ERIC TUCKER and FRANK BAJAK
Thu, January 26, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI and international partners have at least temporarily disrupted the network of a prolific ransomware gang they infiltrated last year, saving victims including hospitals and school districts a potential $130 million in ransom payments, Attorney General Merrick Garland and other U.S. officials announced Thursday.

“Simply put, using lawful means we hacked the hackers,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said at a news conference.

Officials said the targeted syndicate, known as Hive, is among the world's top five ransomware networks and has heavily targeted health care. The FBI quietly accessed its control panel in July and was able to obtain software keys it used with German and other partners to decrypt networks of some 1,300 victims globally, said FBI Director Christopher Wray.

How the takedown will affect Hive’s long-term operations is unclear. Officials announced no arrests but said, to pursue prosecutions, they were building a map of the administrators who manage the software and the affiliates who infect targets and negotiate with victims.


“I think anyone involved with Hive should be concerned because this investigation is ongoing,” Wray said.

On Wednesday night, FBI agents seized computer servers in Los Angeles used to support the network. Two Hive dark web sites were seized: one used for leaking data of non-paying victims, the other for negotiating extortion payments.

“Cybercrime is a constantly evolving threat, but as I have said before, the Justice Department will spare no resource to bring to justice anyone anywhere that targets the United States with a ransomware attack,” Garland said.

He said the infiltration, led by the FBI's Tampa office, allowed agents in one instance to disrupt a Hive attack against a Texas school district, stopping it from making a $5 million payment.

It's a big win for the Justice Department. Ransomware is the world's biggest cybercrime headache with everything from Britain's postal service and Ireland's national health network to Costa Rica's government crippled by Russian-speaking syndicates that enjoy Kremlin protection.

The criminals lock up, or encrypt, victims' networks, steal sensitive data and demand large sums. Their extortion has evolve to where data is pilfered before ransomware is activated, then effectively held hostage. Pay up in cryptocurrency or it is released publicly.

As an example of a Hive sting, Garland said it kept one Midwestern hospital in 2021 from accepting new patients at the height of the COVID-19 epidemic.

The online takedown notice, alternating in English and Russian, mentions Europol and German law enforcement partners. The German news agency dpa quoted prosecutors in Stuttgart as saying cyber specialists in the southwestern town of Esslingen were decisive in penetrating Hive's criminal IT infrastructure after a local company was victimized.

In a statement, Europol said companies in more than 80 countries, including oil multinationals, have been compromised by Hive and that law enforcement from 13 countries was in on the infiltration.

A U.S. government advisory last year said Hive ransomware actors victimized over 1,300 companies worldwide from June 2021 through November 2022, netting about $100 million in payments. Criminals using Hive's ransomware-as-a-service tools targeted a wide range of businesses and critical infrastructure, including government, manufacturing and especially health care.

Though the FBI offered decryption keys to some 1,300 victims globally, Wray said only about 20% reported potential issues to law enforcement.

“Here, fortunately, we were still able to identify and help many victims who didn't report. But that is not always the case,” Wray said. “When victims report attacks to us, we can help them and others, too.”

Victims sometimes quietly pay ransoms without notifying authorities — even if they've quickly restored networks — because the data stolen from them could be extremely damaging to them if leaked online. Identity theft is among the risks.

John Hultquist, the head of threat intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, said the Hive disruption won't cause a major drop in overall ransomware activity but is nonetheless “a blow to a dangerous group.”

“Unfortunately, the criminal marketplace at the heart of the ransomware problem ensures a Hive competitor will be standing by to offer a similar service in their absence, but they may think twice before allowing their ransomware to be used to target hospitals,” Hultquist said.

But analyst Brett Callow with the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft said the operation is apt to lessen ransomware crooks’ confidence in what has been a very high reward-low risk business. “The information collected may point to affiliates, launderers and others involved in the ransomware supply chain."

Allan Liska, an analyst with Recorded Future, another cybersecurity outfit, predicted indictments, if not actual arrests, in the next few months.

There are few positive indicators in the global fight against ransomware, but here's one: An analysis of cryptocurrency transactions by the firm Chainalysis found ransomware extortion payments were down last year. It tracked payments of at least $456.8 million, down from $765.6 million in 2021. While Chainalysis said the true totals are certainly much higher, payments were clearly down. That suggests more victims are refusing to pay.

The Biden administration got serious about ransomware at its highest levels two years ago after a series of high-profile attacks threatened critical infrastructure and global industry. In May 2021, for instance, hackers targeted the nation's largest fuel pipeline, causing the operators to briefly shut it down and make a multimillion-dollar ransom payment, which the U.S. government later largely recovered.

A global task force involving 37 nations began work this week. It is led by Australia, which has been particularly hard-hit by ransomware, including a major medical insurer and telecom. Conventional law enforcement measures such as arrests and prosecutions have done little to frustrate the criminals. Australia's interior minister, Clare O'Neil, said in November that her government was going on the offense, using cyber-intelligence and police agents to " find these people, hunt them down and debilitate them before they can attack our country.”

The FBI has obtained access to decryption keys before. It did so in the case of a major 2021 ransomware attack on Kaseya, a company whose software runs hundreds of websites. It took some heat, however, for waiting several weeks to help victims unlock afflicted networks.

____

Bajak reported from Boston. Associated Press writer Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed.

Prosecutor appointed by Trump Justice Department used claims from Russian intelligence to obtain emails from a George Soros aide: NYT


John Durham and Donald Trump.Associated Press; Getty Images

John Durham used Russian intelligence claims to obtain a US citizen's emails, per The New York Times.

Durham was appointed by former Attorney General Bill Barr to examine the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.

But Durham pursued a dubious claim from Russia involving Hillary Clinton and an aide to George Soros.

John Durham, former US Attorney for the District of Connecticut, was supposed to be investigating the investigators, charged with looking into the origins of what former President Donald Trump often termed a "hoax": the FBI's examination of his campaign's dealings with the Russian government.

In the course of his hunt for wrongdoing, culminating in two failed prosecutions, the veteran prosecutor relied on dubious claims from the Kremlin to pursue a conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton, Democratic donor and right-wing boogeyman George Soros, and the former head of the Democratic National Committee, according to an investigation by The New York Times published Thursday.

Durham, appointed as US special counsel by former Attorney General Bill Barr, had been told by a federal judge that his evidence was shoddy. As The Washington Post reported in 2017, a Russian intelligence document, obtained by the US, had claimed there was a plot to shield Clinton from an ongoing investigation into her email storage.

That and other Russian intelligence assessments were provided to Washington by Dutch intelligence, which had infiltrated their Russian counterparts and the specific group responsible for hacking the DNC and laundering the emails it stole through Wikileaks and friendly journalists during the 2016 presidential campaign; the Dutch even caught the hackers doing the job, on video.

The memos were not to be taken at face value, according to those who reviewed them. They "were said to make demonstrably inconsistent, inaccurate or exaggerated claims," the Times reported, "and some US analysts believed Russia may have deliberately seeded them with disinformation." A federal judge, reviewing the claims, deemed them insufficient to subpoena a US citizen's communications.

But Durham pursued them anyway. And he got them, according to the Times, going around the judge's veto by threatening the target with a subpoena from a grand jury, a lower bar to clear (it is not clear if an actual subpoena was obtained).

As Russian intelligence analysts themselves had told it, Moscow had hacked Leonard Benardo, executive vice president of Soros' Open Society Foundations, and in doing so uncovered a plot at the highest level to sway the 2016 election. Specifically, Democratic lawmaker and former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Shultz was charged with discussing — over an email to Benardo — a promise, from then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, that the Obama-era Department of Justice would make sure to limit the investigation into Clinton's private email server to avoid any political fallout.

Although Durham succeeded in obtaining Benardo's emails, he never found any evidence to support the Russian claims, The Times reported, and his investigation ended with fewer successful prosecutions than Special Counsel Robert Mueller's own investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the "hoax" that some hoped he would debunk.

Barr Pressed Durham to Find Flaws in the Russia Investigation. It Didn't Go Well.

Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman and Katie Benner

The New York Times
Thu, January 26, 2023 

The veteran prosecutor John Durham was given the job of determining whether there was any wrongdoing behind the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign's ties to Russia. (Samuel Corum/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON — It became a regular litany of grievances from President Donald Trump and his supporters: The investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia was a witch hunt, they maintained, that had been opened without any solid basis, went on too long and found no proof of collusion.

Egged on by Trump, Attorney General William Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John Durham and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Trump left office.

But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep-state plot alleged by Trump and suspected by Barr.

Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.

Interviews by the Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Trump and Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.

— Barr and Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in autumn 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Durham brought no charges over it.

— Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Durham used grand-jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Durham has cited in any case he pursued.

— There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics.

Now, as Durham works on a final report, the interviews by the Times provide new details of how he and Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign’s myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime.

Barr, Durham and Dannehy declined to comment. The current and former officials who discussed the investigation all spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal, political and intelligence sensitivities surrounding the topic.

‘The Thinnest of Suspicions’

A month after Barr was confirmed as attorney general in February 2019, special counsel Robert Mueller ended the Russia investigation and turned in his report without charging any Trump associates with engaging in a criminal conspiracy with Moscow over its covert operation to help Trump win the 2016 election.

Trump would repeatedly portray the Mueller report as having found “no collusion with Russia.” The reality was more complex. In fact, the report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” and it established both how Moscow had worked to help Trump win and how his campaign had expected to benefit from the foreign interference.

That spring, Barr assigned Durham to scour the origins of the Russia investigation for wrongdoing, telling Fox News that he wanted to know if “officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale” in deciding to pursue the investigation. “A lot of the answers have been inadequate, and some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together,” he added.

At the time Barr was confirmed, he told aides that he already suspected that intelligence abuses played a role in igniting the Russia investigation — and that unearthing any wrongdoing would be a priority.

In May 2019, soon after giving Durham his assignment, Barr summoned the head of the National Security Agency, Paul Nakasone, to his office. In front of several aides, Barr demanded that the NSA cooperate with the Durham inquiry.

Referring to the CIA and British spies, Barr also said he suspected that the NSA’s “friends” had helped instigate the Russia investigation by targeting the Trump campaign, aides briefed on the meeting said.

Durham spent his first months looking for any evidence that the origin of the Russia investigation involved an intelligence operation targeting the Trump campaign.

Durham’s team spent long hours combing the CIA’s files but found no way to support the allegation.

Durham and Barr had not yet given up when a new problem arose: In early December, the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael Horowitz, completed his own report on the origins of the Russia investigation.

The inspector general revealed errors and omissions in wiretap applications targeting a former Trump campaign adviser and determined that an FBI lawyer had doctored an email in a way that kept one of those problems from coming to light.

But the broader findings contradicted Trump’s accusations and the rationale for Durham’s inquiry. Horowitz found no evidence that FBI actions were politically motivated. And he concluded that the investigation’s basis — an Australian diplomat’s tip that a Trump campaign adviser had seemed to disclose advance knowledge that Russia would release hacked Democratic emails — had been sufficient to lawfully open it.

The week before Horowitz released the report, he and aides came to Durham’s offices to go over it. Durham lobbied Horowitz to drop his finding that the diplomat’s tip had been sufficient for the FBI to open its “full” counterintelligence investigation, arguing that it was enough at most for a “preliminary” inquiry, according to officials. But Horowitz did not change his mind.

That weekend, Barr and Durham decided to weigh in publicly to shape the narrative on their terms.

Minutes before the inspector general’s report went online, Barr issued a statement contradicting Horowitz’s major finding, declaring that the FBI opened the investigation “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient.”

But as Durham’s inquiry proceeded, he never presented any evidence contradicting Horowitz’s factual findings about the basis on which FBI officials opened the investigation.

By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the CIA had “stayed in its lane” after all.

An Awkward Tip

On one of Barr and Durham’s trips to Europe, according to people familiar with the matter, Italian officials — while denying any role in setting off the Russia investigation — unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Trump to certain suspected financial crimes.

Barr and Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore. But rather than assign it to another prosecutor, Barr had Durham investigate the matter himself — giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time — even though the possible wrongdoing by Trump did not fall squarely within Durham’s assignment to scrutinize the origins of the Russia inquiry, the people said.

Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned and whether anyone at the White House ever found out. The extraordinary fact that Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Trump had remained secret until October 2019, when a garbled echo became public. The Times reported that Durham’s administrative review of the Russia inquiry had evolved to include a criminal investigation, while saying it was not clear what the suspected crime was. Citing their own sources, many other news outlets confirmed the development.

By the spring and summer of 2020, with Trump’s reelection campaign in full swing, the Durham investigation’s “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election” began to erode Barr’s relationship with Trump, Barr wrote in his memoir.

Trump was stoking a belief among his supporters that Durham might charge former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden. That proved too much for Barr, who in May 2020 clarified that “our concern of potential criminality is focused on others.”

Even so, in August, Trump lashed out in a Fox interview, asserting that Obama and Biden, along with top FBI and intelligence officials, had been caught in “the single biggest political crime in the history of our country,” and the only thing stopping charges would be if Barr and Durham wanted to be “politically correct.”

Against that backdrop, Barr and Durham did not shut down their inquiry when the search for intelligence abuses hit a dead end. With the inspector general’s inquiry complete, they turned to a new rationale: a hunt for a basis to accuse the Clinton campaign of conspiring to defraud the government by manufacturing the suspicions that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, along with scrutinizing what the FBI and intelligence officials knew about the Clinton campaign’s actions.

During the Russia investigation, the FBI used claims from what turned out to be a dubious source, the Steele dossier — opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign — in its botched applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign aide.

The Durham investigation did something with parallels to that incident.

In Durham’s case, the dubious sources were memos, whose credibility the intelligence community doubted, written by Russian intelligence analysts and discussing purported conversations involving American victims of Russian hacking, according to people familiar with the matter.

The memos were part of a trove provided to the CIA by a Dutch spy agency, which had infiltrated the servers of its Russian counterpart. The memos were said to make demonstrably inconsistent, inaccurate or exaggerated claims, and some U.S. analysts believed Russia may have deliberately seeded them with disinformation.

Durham wanted to use the memos, which included descriptions of Americans discussing a purported plan by Hillary Clinton to attack Trump by linking him to Russia’s hacking and releasing in 2016 of Democratic emails, to pursue the theory that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Trump. And in doing so, Durham sought to use the memos as justification to get access to the private communications of an American citizen.

One purported hacking victim identified in the memos was Leonard Benardo, the executive vice president of the Open Society Foundations, a pro-democracy organization whose Hungarian-born founder, Soros, has been vilified by the far-right.

In 2017, The Washington Post reported that the Russian memos included a claim that Benardo and a Democratic member of Congress, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, had discussed how Loretta Lynch, the Obama-era attorney general, had supposedly promised to keep the investigation into Clinton’s emails from going too far.

But Benardo and Wasserman Schultz said they had never even met, let alone communicated about Clinton’s emails.

Durham set out to prove that the memos described real conversations, according to people familiar with the matter. He sent a prosecutor on his team, Andrew DeFilippis, to ask Judge Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington, for an order allowing them to seize information about Benardo’s emails.

But Howell decided that the Russian memo was too weak a basis to intrude on Benardo’s privacy, they said. Durham then personally appeared before her and urged her to reconsider, but she again ruled against him.

Rather than dropping the idea, Durham sidestepped Howell’s ruling by invoking grand-jury power to demand documents and testimony directly from Soros’ foundation and Benardo about his emails, the people said. Rather than fighting in court, the foundation and Benardo quietly complied, according to people familiar with the matter. But for Durham, the result appears to have been another dead end.

In a statement provided to the Times by Soros’ foundation, Benardo reiterated that he never met or corresponded with Wasserman Schultz, and he said that “if such documentation exists, it’s of course made up.”

As the focus of the Durham investigation shifted, cracks formed inside the team. Durham’s deputy, Dannehy, a longtime close colleague, increasingly argued with him in front of other prosecutors and FBI agents about legal ethics.

Now Dannehy complained to Durham about how Barr kept hinting darkly in public about the direction of their investigation. Dannehy urged Durham to ask the attorney general to adhere to Justice Department policy and not discuss the investigation publicly. But Durham proved unwilling to challenge him.

The strains grew when Durham used grand-jury powers to go after Benardo’s emails. Dannehy opposed that tactic and told colleagues that Durham had taken that step without telling her.

By summer 2020, with Election Day approaching, Barr pressed Durham to draft a potential interim report centered on the Clinton campaign and FBI gullibility or willful blindness.

On Sept. 10, 2020, Dannehy discovered that other members of the team had written a draft report that Durham had not told her about, according to people briefed on their ensuing argument.

Dannehy erupted, according to people familiar with the matter. She told Durham that no report should be issued before the investigation was complete and especially not just before an election — and denounced the draft for taking disputed information at face value. She sent colleagues a memo detailing those concerns and resigned.

Two people close to Barr said he had pressed for the draft to evaluate what a report on preliminary findings would look like and what evidence would need to be declassified. But they insisted that he intended any release to come during the summer or after the Nov. 3 election — not soon before Election Day.

In any case, in late September 2020, about two weeks after Dannehy quit, someone leaked to a Fox Business personality that Durham would not issue any interim report, disappointing Trump supporters hoping for a pre-Election Day bombshell.

© 2023 The New York Times Company

Pope Francis Condemns Anti-Gay Laws Around the World: 'Being Homosexual Is Not a Crime'

Jason Duaine Hahn
Wed, January 25, 2023 

Pope Francis leaves the Syriac Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation (Sayidat al-Najat) in Baghdad

AYMAN HENNA/AFP via Getty Pope Francis

In a new interview, Pope Francis spoke out against the criminalization of homosexuality and asked Catholic bishops who support anti-gay laws to welcome the LGBTQ+ community into their churches.

While speaking to the Associated Press this week, the pontiff, 86, called laws that criminalize homosexuality "unfair" and said, "being homosexual isn't a crime."

"We are all children of God, and God loves us as we are," Francis told the AP in Vatican City.

According to Human Rights Watch, at least 67 countries have national laws that criminalize same-sex relations between adults. Another nine countries have national laws criminalizing forms of gender expression aimed at transgender and gender nonconforming people.


Francis admitted there were Catholic bishops that support laws that discriminate against members of the LGBTQ+ community or criminalize homosexuality, and he asked that they reconsider their stance.

RELATED: Pope Francis Says He May Need to Consider 'Stepping Aside' Following Trip to Canada

"These bishops have to have a process of conversion," he said. "[They should apply] tenderness, please, as God has for each one of us."

pope francis

Though Francis voiced his support for the decriminalization of homosexuality, he said he still viewed it as a "sin." But, Francis explained, he does not want "sin" and "crime" to be synonymous in relation to homosexuality.

"It's not a crime. Yes, but it's a sin," he told the AP. "Fine, but first, let's distinguish between a sin and a crime."

Francis added: "It's also a sin to lack charity with one another."

Francis, who became head of the Catholic Church in 2013, has often made statements supporting the LGBTQ+ community.

In 2020, he said he supported civil unions for same-sex couples, which was a break from the official teaching of the Catholic Church.

That same year, he told parents of LGBTQ+ youth that "God loves your children as they are."

Yet, in 2021, the Vatican announced that the Catholic Church could not bless same-sex unions because God "does not and cannot bless sin."

The Church explained that its teachings say marriage should be between a man and a woman to create new life. The statement was approved by Francis.

It shouldn't seem so surprising when the pope says being gay 'isn't a crime' – a Catholic theologian explains

Steven P. Millies, Professor of Public Theology and Director of The Bernardin Center, Catholic Theological Union

Thu, January 26, 2023

Pope Francis leads the second vespers service at St. Paul's Basilica on Jan. 25, 2023, in Rome. Alessandra Benedetti/Corbis via Getty Images

Once again, Pope Francis has called on Catholics to welcome and accept LGBTQ people.

“Being homosexual isn’t a crime,” the pope said in an interview with The Associated Press on Jan. 24, 2023, adding, “let’s distinguish between a sin and a crime.” He also called for the relaxation of laws around the world that target LGBTQ people.

Francis’ long history of making similar comments in support of LGBTQ people’s dignity, despite the church’s rejection of homosexuality, has provoked plenty of criticism from some Catholics. But I am a public theologian, and part of what interests me about this debate is that Francis’ inclusiveness is not actually radical. His remarks generally correspond to what the church teaches and calls on Catholics to do.

‘Who am I to judge?’

During the first year of Francis’ papacy, when asked about LGBTQ people, he famously replied, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” – setting the tone for what has become a pattern of inclusiveness.

He has given public support more than once to James Martin, a Jesuit priest whose efforts to build bridges between LGBTQ people and the Catholic Church have been a lightning rod for criticism. In remarks captured for a 2020 documentary, Francis expressed support for the legal protections that civil unions can provide for LGBTQ people.

And now come the newest remarks. In his recent interview, the pope said the church should oppose laws that criminalize homosexuality. “We are all children of God, and God loves us as we are and for the strength that each of us fights for our dignity,” he said, though he differentiated between “crimes” and actions that go against church teachings.

Compassion, not doctrinal change

The pope’s support for LGBTQ people’s civil rights does not change Catholic doctrine about marriage or sexuality. The church still teaches – and will certainly go on teaching – that any sexual relationship outside a marriage is wrong, and that marriage is between a man and a woman. It would be a mistake to conclude that Francis is suggesting any change in doctrine.

A rosary march in Warsaw in 2019 ended with a prayer apologizing to God for pride parades in Poland. Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Rather, the pattern of his comments has been a way to express what the Catholic Church says about human dignity in response to rapidly changing attitudes toward the LGBTQ community across the past two decades. Francis is calling on Catholics to take note that they should be concerned about justice for all people.

The Catholic Church has condemned discrimination against LGBTQ people for many years, even while it describes homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered” in its catechism. Nevertheless, some bishops around the world support laws that criminalize homosexuality – which Francis acknowledged, saying they “have to have a process of conversion.”

The “law of love embraces the entire human family and knows no limits,” the Vatican office concerned with social issues said in a 2005 compilation of the church’s social thought.

In 2006, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops recognized that LGBTQ people “have been, and often continue to be, objects of scorn, hatred, and even violence.” And expressing care for other human persons – “especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted” by the indifference or oppression of others – represents obligations for all Catholics to embrace.

As the Francis papacy now nears the end of its 10th year, it is becoming more and more common to hear Catholic leaders attempting to make LGBTQ people feel included in the church. Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich has called on pastors to “redouble our efforts to be creative and resilient in finding ways to welcome and encourage all LGBTQ people.” New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan has welcomed LGBTQ groups in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, against the wishes of many New York Catholics.

In this most recent interview, Francis emphasized that being LGBTQ is “a human condition,” calling Catholics to see other people less through the eyes of doctrine and more through the eyes of mercy.

A new ‘political reality’

The rapid change that has happened in prevailing social attitudes about the LGBTQ community in recent decades has been difficult to process for a church that has never reacted quickly. This is especially because the questions those developments raise touch on a gray area where moral teaching intersects with social realities outside the church.

For decades, church leaders have been working to reconcile the church with the modern world, and Francis is stepping in places where other Catholic bishops have already trodden.

In 2018, for example, German bishops reacting to the legalization of gay marriage acknowledged that acceptance of LGBTQ relationships is a new “political reality.”

An LGBTQ couple embraces after a pastoral worker blesses them at a Catholic church in Germany, in defiance of practices approved by Rome.

Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

There are signs that parts of the church are moving even more quickly. Catholics in Germany, in particular, have called for changes to church teaching, including permission for priests to bless same-sex couples and the ordination of married men.
The next chapter

But those actions are outliers. Francis has criticized the German calls for reform as “elitist” and ideological. When it comes to the civil rights of LGBTQ people, the pope is not changing church teaching, but describing it.

I believe the challenge the Vatican faces is to imagine the space that the church can occupy in this new reality, as it has had to do in the face of numerous social and political changes across centuries. But the imperative, as Francis suggests, is to serve justice and to seek justice for all people with mercy above all.

Catholics – including bishops, and even the pope – can think, and are thinking, imaginatively about that challenge.

Portions of this article originally appeared in a previous article published on Oct. 22, 2020.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. 

It was written by: Steven P. Millies, Catholic Theological Union.

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