If there is a singular issue for the Biden administration, it is rooting out
domestic terrorism purportedly perpetrated by right-wing
extremists. Nonetheless, Biden nominated as Director of the Bureau of
Land Management (BLM) an unrepentant, honest-to-goodness, fear-inducing,
caught-red-handed domestic terrorist—one Tracy Stone-Manning, who in
1989, engaged in eco-terrorism, which the FBI labeled
as one of the nation’s primary domestic terrorism threats at the
time. Despite indisputable evidence of her culpability in a federal
felony, Biden continues to support her confirmation by the U.S. Senate.
President Biden should withdraw her nomination; failing that, the Senate must reject it.
In 1989, Tracy Stone-Manning was a graduate student at the University of Montana in Missoula. She joined Earth First!, a radical environmental group that proclaimed, “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth” and that engaged in “monkeywrenching,”
which involved the sabotage of equipment used in logging, mining,
construction, and livestock grazing. In fact, according to the federal
official who investigated
her, Stone-Manning “was not only a member of Earth First!, but she
played an active role in Earth First! hierarchy” and “wielded
significant influence among its members.”
Stone-Manning lived in a house filled with fellow Earth First! acolytes and edited its local newsletter, the Wild Rockies Review. In the late winter or early spring of 1989, one of her “roommates” and part of her “circle of friends,”
John P. Blount, conspired with her to spike trees that were part of the
Post Office Timber Sale in the Clearwater National Forest in nearby
Idaho. She agreed to mail the warning letter to the U.S. Forest Service
on Blount’s behalf. To be clear, driving metal spikes into these trees
was both a federal crime and an act of eco-terrorism. It was intended to
prevent the sale of timber by terrifying the loggers and millworkers
who could be injured or even killed if their saws hit the metal spikes as they attempted to harvest the spiked trees.
Blount, who was convicted in 1993 of the tree spiking and sentenced to 17 months in prison, stated
that Stone-Manning “knew about [the tree spiking plot] far in advance, a
couple of months before we headed out.” In fact, he said Stone-Manning
“agreed to mail the letter well in advance. She was supposed to mail the
letter from Billings [Montana] where she had planned on going in two or
three more days, so that it wasn’t postmarked ‘Missoula.’ That was the
agreed-upon plan.”
Instead, Stone-Manning retyped the letter because, as she later explained, her “fingerprints were all over the original,” and she even rented a typewriter because she did not want the letter on her personal computer. Then she mailed it—from Missoula.
The U.S. Forest Service, on receipt of the letter, verified that indeed some 284 trees had been spiked
with 340 “bridge construction-type spikes” in the Clearwater National
Forest. Forest Service Special Agent Michael Merkley undertook an
investigation, which led him and other federal authorities to the house
where Stone-Manning and Blount resided. Seven of the house’s residents, including Stone-Manning, were served with subpoenas to appear before a grand jury and to provide hair and handwriting samples and fingerprints.
Stone-Manning refused to provide the required samples—that is, until
threatened with arrest and prosecution. Her cooperation ended
there. According to Merkley, in a letter he sent
to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Stone-Manning
refused to answer his questions; she also failed to testify truthfully
to the grand jury of her knowledge and role in the tree spiking. Worse
yet, she copped an attitude with the special agent. Merkley said,
“Stone-Manning was extremely difficult to work with; in fact, she was
the nastiest of the suspects. She was vulgar, antagonistic, and
extremely anti-government.”
Despite her contemptuous behavior, Stone-Manning portrayed herself as the victim, telling
an interviewer in 1990 that the investigation was “degrading. It
changed my awareness of the power of government [to do] bad things
sometimes.”
As a result of Stone-Manning’s failure to tell what she knew, the
case was stalled in 1989. Assistant U.S. Attorney George Breitsameter
would later write
in a Pretrial Memorandum that by the end of 1989, “the criminal
investigation did not develop any substantial evidence as to the
identity of the individuals involved in the spiking.”
Three years later, Blount’s former girlfriend contacted
federal authorities and reported that Blount had done the tree-spiking,
and Stone-Manning had mailed the letter. Federal authorities then
contacted Stone-Manning. She hired a lawyer, who obtained an immunity deal, and she testified that Blount had given her the letter to mail.
Thus, Stone-Manning, according to Blount and Merkley, was an
accessory before the fact and, by her own admission, an accessory after
the fact. Nonetheless, she refused to cooperate with federal law
enforcement authorities in 1989, which delayed prosecution for four
years. As a result, she may have aided and abetted the commission of a
felony. Moreover, over the next 32 years, in various newspaper
interviews, Stone-Manning lied about or otherwise misrepresented her
role in the tree spiking crime in the Clearwater National Forest.
In 2013, she was similarly opaque or untruthful before the Montana State Senate after her nomination to lead the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. Finally, this year, as Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) pointed out, she lied to the Senate when she declared that she had never been the subject of a federal investigation.
Before all her lies were exposed, Stone-Manning asserted that she did
the right thing by mailing the letter as Blount requested. She did not
do the right thing. The right thing would have been to contact the FBI
or the U.S. Forest Service or the U.S. Attorney for Idaho. Now we know
that her obligation to contact law enforcement began not when Blount
handed her the letter–if, in fact, that event ever took place—but when
Blount and the others began planning the tree spiking in February of
1989.
The BLM and its nearly 10,000 employees are responsible for 245
million acres of public land, 99.99 percent of which lies in the 11
western states and Alaska—10 percent of the country’s land mass—and for
700 million acres of mineral estate throughout the country. Some 65
million acres of that is managed for timber harvesting, a lawful
activity with which Stone-Manning criminally interfered. Moreover, the
BLM has 300 law enforcement rangers and special agents, like the Forest
Service special agent whom she rebuffed, upbraided, and, who out of fear
of Earth First!, including death threats against him and threats to
harm his family, was forced
into early retirement. Finally, some 155 million acres of BLM-managed
land is devoted to livestock grazing, an economic activity Earth First!
condemned and attacked with “acts of vandalism and violence.”
Westerners, the American public, and the dedicated public servants of the BLM deserve better.
Just a month ago, Los Angeles County and the rest of California celebrated a long-awaited reopening, marking the tremendous progress made in the battle against COVID-19 by lifting virtually all restrictions on businesses and other public spaces. Now, the coronavirus is resurgent, and the nation’s most-populous county is scrambling to beat back the pandemic’s latest charge.
Starting Saturday night, residents will again be required to wear masks in indoor public spaces, regardless of their vaccination status.
The latest order not only puts the county further at odds with both the California Department of Public Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — both of which continue to maintain that vaccinated people need not cover their faces indoors — but puts officials in the precarious position of asking the inoculated to forfeit one of the benefits recently enjoyed.
“This is an all-hands-on-deck moment,” said Dr. Muntu Davis, the county’s health officer.
Vaccinated people are, in essence, being asked to make a sacrifice to help slow coronavirus spread among the unvaccinated.
Officials have stressed that those who have been inoculated have an excellent chance of being protected, even from the easily spread Delta variant, believed to be twice as transmissible as the conventional coronavirus strains. Between Dec. 7 and June 7, the unvaccinated accounted for 99.6% of L.A. County’s coronavirus cases, 98.7% of COVID-19 hospitalizations and 99.8% of deaths.
The new order, which comes a little more than two weeks after the county recommended the same protocols as a precaution, will go into effect at 11:59 p.m. Saturday — and Davis said it will be similar to the masking requirements that were in place before the June 15 reopening.
“We’re not where we need to be for the millions at risk of infection here in Los Angeles County, and waiting to do something will be too late given what we’re seeing now,” he told reporters Thursday.
The order will continue to allow indoor restaurant dining, although people will need to keep their masks on when they’re not eating or drinking.
Long Beach, which has its own independent public health department, will align with L.A. County’s health order. The other city in L.A. County with its own public health department, Pasadena, already recommends that everyone — including the fully vaccinated — wear masks in indoor public settings, and the city is “reviewing options for a mandate,” according to a spokeswoman.
L.A. County’s rise in community transmission has accelerated dramatically since California fully reopened on June 15. For the weeklong period that ended that day, L.A. County averaged 173 new coronavirus cases a day. For the seven-day period that ended Wednesday, the county’s average was 1,077 new cases a day. On Thursday, the county reported 1,537 additional cases.
Countywide, COVID-19 hospitalizations increased over that same time frame — from 223 on June 15 to 452 as of Wednesday. Still, cases and hospitalizations are still more than 93% below what they were at the peak of the winter surge. And deaths remain at historically low levels, at an average of about seven a day.
Although officials don’t expect hospitals to ever be as stressed with COVID-19 patients as they were during the winter surge, it’s still possible the healthcare system could be significantly affected if trends continue.
“There is still time to take action and protect people through vaccination, since we are starting from a lower baseline rate,” Dr. Roger Lewis, who directed COVID-19 hospital demand modeling for the L.A. County Department of Health Services, wrote in an email. “It is critically important that everyone eligible for vaccination who has not already been vaccinated does so as quickly as possible.”
An uptick in cases, combined with the presence of the highly infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus, was behind L.A. County’s urging in late June that all residents wear masks in public indoor spaces.
Cases have increased rapidly since then, and county health officials now believe more direct intervention is needed.
Davis said he expects the new order will remain “in place until we begin to see improvements” in community transmission.
He characterized universal indoor masking as one of the more effective ways to curb the spread without interrupting operations at businesses and venues.
But, he acknowledged, further intervention could be necessary if conditions deteriorate.
“Anything is on the table if things continue to get worse, which is why we want to take action now,” he said.
The vaccines are believed to be essentially as effective against the Delta variant as other variants. During June, 86% of people diagnosed with the Delta variant in L.A. County were not fully vaccinated — in the same range as the Alpha variant, where 91% of people diagnosed were not fully vaccinated; the Gamma variant, 92%; and all other variants, 89%.
But officials suspect that unvaccinated people have stopped wearing masks in indoor public settings and businesses, even though they’re still required to do so.
The new mask order, Davis said, “really is about making this a universal practice. It’s the easiest thing to do in terms of ensuring that we’re all protected, regardless of the risks that we have.”
Still, the renewed restrictions in L.A. County are undoubtedly a blow to some eager to put COVID-19 in the rearview mirror.
“I’m not nervous about the mask mandate again,” said Kali Mashayekhi, a California native and Penn State student. “I’m nervous that this means cases are going up again.”
Mashayekhi said the new order feels like “walking backwards,” but it puts her at ease knowing that the intent is to protect everyone.
“I’m vaccinated now, so I’m not worried,” she said. “But we need to do it for the safety of everyone.”
Elizabeth Diaz, a fourth-grade teacher in Hawthorne, said she’s continued to wear her mask indoors, even when restrictions were eased.
“It’s for our safety,” she said.
One woman, who declined to give her name, said she felt that the mandate was overprotective.
“It’s not selfish,” she said. “Do I like it? No, I don’t. But no one likes to have their face covered.”
Hilda Solis, chairwoman of the county Board of Supervisors, said she hoped this was only “a temporary action, until we can lower our cases and continue getting more people the doses they need.”
With similar increases across the state, other counties are also urging residents to take additional precautions. This week, health officials in Sacramento and Yolo counties issued voluntary calls for all their residents to wear masks in indoor public settings.
UC San Francisco on Thursday ordered a mandatory indoor masking policy everywhere on campus, effective immediately.
“As health leaders of the communities in which we live and work, we have the special responsibility to practice sound COVID-19 hygiene as we serve all those who rely on us,” Dr. Josh Adler, UC San Francisco Health’s chief clinical officer, said in a memo.
Statewide guidance on face coverings remains unchanged, according to the California Department of Public Health. However, the department “supports local health departments, like Los Angeles County, making stricter policies based on the conditions in their community.”
“Vaccines remain the best protection against COVID-19, including the highly infectious Delta variant,” officials wrote in a statement to The Times. “We urge all eligible to get vaccinated, as it is the most important thing we can do to stop the spread of the virus.”
Already, cases are ballooning across California.
Orange, San Diego and San Bernardino counties have all had their daily case averages more than double since late June, and the state’s latest weekly average of 2,980 new coronavirus cases per day is up 175% from two weeks ago.
The CDC now considers L.A., San Bernardino, San Diego, Riverside and Imperial counties to have “substantial” community transmission — the second-worst classification on the agency’s four-tier scale — as all recently recorded seven-day case rates that were over 50 per 100,000 residents.
California as a whole is still categorized as having “moderate” community transmission, the second-lowest tier.
Despite increasingly urgent calls to get vaccinated as cases rise, California’s inoculation pace continues to tail off.
Over the last seven days, providers throughout California have administered an average of just over 56,000 doses per day, Times’ data show. Though that figure could rise as more reports come in, it won’t be anywhere near the high of the rollout, when hundreds of thousands of shots were going into Californians’ arms each day.
Only 52% of all L.A. County residents are fully vaccinated, while nearly 60% have received at least one shot. Some experts think it would take 70% to 85% of all residents to be vaccinated to achieve “herd immunity” against the coronavirus — when the sustained transmission of the virus is interrupted.
Health officials say there are many reasons a person may be unvaccinated.
Some may still be too young to receive the shots, or have an underlying health condition that prevents them from doing so. Others may be wary of potential side effects, or unable to get the time off work.
Another common sticking point is that all three available vaccines have been authorized only for emergency use at this point, and haven’t yet received full approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
But there’s undoubtedly a segment of the population that’s steadfastly opposed to getting inoculated — either for personal or political reasons, or because they’ve come to believe some of the vaccine disinformation that’s spread widely on social media.
Experts say it is possible to persuade people to get the shot. About 1 in 5 adults say they’re now vaccinated after being previously reluctant, according to a national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and many of them said that conversations with family, friends and doctors helped.
Horrifying Things Airlines Do To Keep Their Prices Down
Flying through the
sky with hundreds of other people in a cramped metal tube may seem luxurious,
but you’d be surprised at how many corners airlines will cut behind your back.
Here are the most horrifying things low-cost carriers will do to keep tickets
cheap.
Many budget airlines, including Spirit, Frontier, and
Southwest, have gotten rid of costly trained pilots and replaced them with
anyone who looks decent in aviators.
Rather
than let any monetizable ad space go to waste, turbulence is often sponsored by
big-named brands such as Oreo, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, and Pepsi.
Like
it or not, profit-hungry airline CEOs actually Charging
Orphans More
What are they going to do, complain to their parents?
Padding
Their Staff With Paid Extras
In order to appear fully staffed, one in four
uniformed team members is actually an unsuccessful actor who is paid to
simulate vaguely employee-like behavior.
Pawning
Luggage
Most airlines will take the most expensive item out of
every piece of luggage and pawn it.
The fall of Facebook has only begun. The platform is broken and neither human nor machine can fix it.
Even after
losing roughly a third of its market cap, it still may prove one of the great
shorts of all time.
The following article was originally published in
“What I Learned This Week To learn more about 13D’s
investment research
“There’s no mental health support. The suicide rate is
extremely high,” one of the directors of the documentary, “The Cleaners” told
CBS News last May. The film is an investigative look at the life of Facebook
moderators in the Philippines. Throughout his 2018 apology tour, Mark
Zuckerberg regularly referenced the staff of moderators the company had hired
as one of two key solutions — along with AI — to the platform’s content evils.
What he failed to disclose is that the majority of that army is subcontractors
employed in the developing world.
For as long as ten hours a day, viewing as many as
25,000 images or videos per day, these low-paid workers are buried in the
world’s horrors — hate
speech, child pornography, rape, murder, torture, beheadings, and on and on.
They are not experts in the subject matter or region they police. They rely on
“guidelines” provided by Facebook — “dozens of unorganised PowerPoint
presentations and Excel spreadsheets with bureaucratic titles like ‘Western
Balkans Hate Orgs and Figures’ and ‘Credible Violence: Implementation
standards’,” as The New York Times reported last fall. The rules are not
even written in the languages the moderators speak, so many rely on Google
Translate. As a recent op-ed by John Naughton in The Guardian declares
bluntly in its headline, “Facebook’s burnt-out moderators are proof that it
is broken.”
As we noted in last week’s issue, 41 of the 53
analysts tracked by Bloomberg currently list Facebook as a buy, with
“the average price target… $187, which implies upside of nearly 36%.” That
optimism springs from a basic assumption: the company’s monopolistic data
dominance means it can continue extracting more from advertisers even if
controversy after controversy continues to sap its user growth. Given the depth
and intractability of Facebook’s problems, this is at best short-sighted.
The platform’s content ecosystem is too poisoned for
human or machine moderators to cleanse. Users are fleeing in droves, especially
in the company’s most valuable markets. Ad buyers are already shifting
dollars to competitors’ platforms. Governments are stepping up to
dramatically hinder Facebook’s data-collection capabilities, with Germany just
this week banning third-party data sharing. The company is under
investigation by the FTC, the Justice Department, the SEC, the FBI, and several
government agencies in Europe. It has been accused by the U.N. of playing a
“determining role” in Myanmar’s genocide. An executive exodus is underway at
the company. And we believe, sooner or later, Facebook’s board will see no
option but to remove Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg.
The market is drastically underestimating the peril
the company is in. In the very
short term, the user backlash may simply hinder its revenue growth. In the
longer-term, however, the institutionalized failure to see and respond to
the platform’s downsides may render Facebook the Digital Age’s Enron — a
canonized example of how greed and corruption can fell even the mightiest.
According to data recently released by Statcounter, Facebook’s
global social media market share dropped from 75.5% in December 2017 to 66.3%
in December 2018. The biggest drop was in the U.S., from 76% to 52%. As
Cowen survey results released this week suggest, these engagement declines will
continue to depress the company’s earnings. Surveying 50 senior U.S. ad
buyers controlling a combined $14 billion in digital ad budgets in 2018, 18%
said they were decreasing their spend on Facebook. As a result, Cowen
estimates the Facebook platform will lose 3% of its market share.
No doubt Facebook’s struggles are not just about the
headline scandals. For years, one innovation priority after another has fallen
flat, from VR to its video push to its laggard position in the
digital-assistant race. The company’s most significant “innovation” success of
the past few years was copying the innovation of a competitor — pilfering
Snapchat’s ephemerality for its “moments” feature.
However, it’s the scandals that have most crippled the
company’s brand and revealed the cultural rot trickling down from its senior
ranks. Consider just the most-sensational revelations that emerged in 4Q18:
Oct. 17: The Verge reports that Facebook
knew about inaccuracies in the video viewership metrics that it provided
to advertisers and brands for more than a year. “The inflated video
views led both advertisers and media companies to bet too much on Facebook
video.”
Nov. 14: The New York Times publishes an
investigative report that reveals Facebook hired a conservative PR firm
to smear competitors and minimize the company’s role in Russia’s 2016
election meddling.
Dec. 5: British lawmakers release 250 pages of
internal Facebook emails that show that, “the company’s executives were
ruthless and unsparing in their ambition to collect more data from users,
extract concessions from developers and stamp out possible competitors,” as
The New York Times reported.
Dec. 14: Facebook reveals that a bug allowed
third-party app developers to access photos people may not have shared
publicly, with as many as 6.8 million users potentially affected.
Dec. 17: Two Senate reports reveal the shocking
extent of Russia’s efforts on social media platforms during the 2016
election, including the fact that Instagram was their biggest tool for
misinformation.
Dec. 18: The New York Times reports that Facebook
gave the world’s largest technology companies far more intrusive access to
user data than previously disclosed, including the Russian search firm
Yandex.
Dec. 20: TechCrunch reports that, “WhatsApp
chat groups are being used to spread illegal child pornography, cloaked by
the app’s end-to-end encryption.”
Dec. 27: The New York Times obtains 1,400
pages of Facebook’s moderation guidelines and discovers an
indecipherable mess of confusing language, bias, and obvious errors.
Scandal after scandal, the portrait of the company is
the same: Ruthlessly and blindly obsessed with growth. Overwhelmed by that
growth and unwilling to take necessary steps to compensate. Willing to lie and
obfuscate until the truth becomes inescapable. And all the time excusing
real-world consequences and clear violations of user and client trust because
of the cultish belief that global interconnectedness is an absolute good, and
therefore, Facebook is absolutely good.
The scale of Facebook’s global responsibility is
staggering. As Naughton writes for The Guardian:
Facebook currently has 2.27bn monthly active users
worldwide. Every 60 seconds, 510,000 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are
updated and 136,000 photos are uploaded to the platform. Instagram, which allows users to edit and share
photos as well as videos and is owned by Facebook, has more than 1bn monthly
active users. WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging service that is also owned by
Facebook, now has 1.5bn monthly active users, more than half of whom use it
several times a day.
Relying on tens of thousands of moderators to
anesthetize the digital commons is both inadequate, and based on the reported
working conditions, unethical and exploitative. AI is not the solution either,
as we explored in WILTW April 12, 2018. According to Wired,
Facebook has claimed that 96% of the adult and nude images users try to upload
are now automatically detected and taken down by AI. That sounds like a success
until you consider that that error rate means 1.3 million such images made
it to the public in the third quarter of 2018 alone (30.8 million were
taken down).
In fact, the company has acknowledged that views
with nudity or sexual content have nearly doubled in the 12 months ending in
September. And detecting nudity is a far easier task for a rules-based
algorithm than deciding the difference between real and fake news, between hate
speech and satire, or between pornography and art.
Facebook has economically and culturally empowered
hundreds of millions of people around the world. It cannot be blamed for every
destabilized government, war, or murder in every region it operates. However,
more and more, it’s clear that one profit-driven platform that connects all
of the world’s people to all of the world’s information — the vision Zuckerberg
has long had for his invention — is a terminally-flawed idea. It leads to too
much power in the hands of too few. It allows bad actors to centralize their
bad actions. And it is incompatible with a world that values privacy,
ownership, and truth.
Governments are waking up to this problem. So is the
public. And no doubt, so are competitive innovators looking to expand or
introduce alternatives. Collectively, they will chip away at Facebook’s power
and profitability. Given the company’s leaders still appear blinded by and
irrevocably attached to their business model and ideals, we doubt they can
stave off the onslaught coming.
This article was originally published in “What I
Learned This Week” on January 17, 2019. To subscribe to our weekly newsletter,
visit 13D.com
Pentagon Sees China’s Offensive Space Technology ‘On the March’
Tony Capaccio
(Bloomberg) -- China is making sizable, long-term investments in
weapons designed to jam or destroy satellites as the nation seeks to
rapidly narrow the gap in space technology with the U.S., according to
the top intelligence official for the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific command.
China is pushing to develop antisatellite weapons with capabilities
from “dazzling to jamming, to kinetic kill-from-the-ground, from space
-- all that, they’re on the march,” Rear Admiral Michael Studeman said this week during an intelligence-security trade group’s webinar.
Studeman’s
comments mark the most current unclassified assessment of the
counter-space capabilities of a nation that Defense Secretary Lloyd
Austin repeatedly refers to as the top challenge for U.S. defense
planning and spending.
China’s threats to U.S. satellites as well
as Russian advances in counterspace technologies were among the primary
justifications American officials cited for establishing the U.S. Space
Force, the sixth U.S. military service branch and the regional Space
Command, during the Trump administration.
“They take a look at our
space capability and want to equal and exceed those and be able to
dominate to guarantee themselves the maneuvering they need to be able to
secure their objectives if they’re in a fight,” Studeman said.
The
U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in April that
the Chinese military “will continue to integrate space services -- such
as satellite reconnaissance and positioning, navigation, and timing and
satellite communications -- into its weapons and command-and-control
systems to erode the U.S. military’s information advantage.”
Developing so-called counterspace operations will be integral
to a potential military campaign, the DNI said. Beijing continues to
train its military space elements and “field new destructive and
nondestructive ground- and space-based antisatellite (ASAT) weapons,”
the intelligence office said in its annual Threat Assessment report.
It
has “already fielded ground-based ASAT missiles intended to destroy
satellites in low-earth orbit and ground-based ASAT lasers probably
intended to blind or damage sensitive space-based optical sensors” on
low-earth orbit satellites, according to the report.
The House
Appropriations Committee, in a draft report on the fiscal 2022 defense
bill obtained by Bloomberg Government, signaled its concern over “the
growing threats posed by ground-based lasers capable of damaging or
destroying sensitive space sensors in low-orbit, and the lack of a
coordinated strategy to understand this threat and develop concepts to
mitigate its risks.”
Without mentioning China, the report directed
the Pentagon, in coordination with the ODNI, “to provide a plan to
collect, consolidate, and characterize laser threat activity data of
potential adversaries, and to develop strategies to mitigate these
threats.”
Aside from destructive counterspace technologies, China
also is pursuing parallel programs for military and commercial
communications satellites and owns and operates about 30 of those for
civil, commercial and military satellite communications, the Defense
Intelligence Agency said in 2019. Beijing also operates a small number
of dedicated military communications satellites.
The U.S. has a
“substantial amount of activity going on on our side” as “we recognize
the threat here,” Studeman said. “It will be a game of measures and
countermeasures and counter-countermeasures for some time to come.”
A
top U.S. counterspace weapon designed to temporarily jam but not
destroy Chinese and Russian satellites is known as the Meadowlands
system. The U.S. Space Force is building an arsenal of as many as 48 of
these ground-based weapons over the next seven years and declared the
first one operational in March 2020.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
TOKYO—With
the city under a state of emergency as Covid-19 cases surge across
Japan, Olympic officials announced that in the interests of
public health, all athletic competition at the Tokyo Games would now be
limited to short walks outside. “In order to slow the pandemic’s rapid
spread through the region, each event at the XXXII Olympiad will be
reconfigured so that it entails no more than a quick, 15-minute stroll
around the Olympic village and a few of the stadiums,” said Prime
Minister Yoshihide Suga, adding that after they had quarantined for two
weeks, athletes could also participate in masked events in which they
perform competitive crunches, push-ups, and stretches inside their
single-occupancy rooms. “As we work to limit exposure to this deadly
virus, we hope the world will enjoy watching Olympians put on a face
shield, step outside, and walk in a circle around the same few blocks a
couple of times a day until they inevitably grow bored of it, head back
to their rooms, and lie down in their beds. Whether they traveled to
Tokyo for swimming, gymnastics, or the javelin throw, we urge every
participant in the Summer Games to bring a good attitude, a solid
playlist, and a comfortable pair of walking shoes.” At press time, Suga
stated that in the coming weeks, even more Olympic events could be
added, such as watching TV, crafting, baking bread, and growing an
indoor herb garden.
Fears
that the already fragile country will descend further into turmoil
after the president’s assassination are growing. Two Americans arrested
in the investigation claim to have been only “translators” for the
operation, according to a judge who interviewed them.
The
police used extreme caution in moving suspects on Thursday in the
assassination of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, in the capital,
Port-au-Prince.Credit...Jean Marc Herve Abelard/EPA, via Shutterstock
Haitian
government officials said they had requested that the United States
send in troops to protect Haiti’s port, airport, gasoline reserves and
other key infrastructure as the country has descended into turmoil in
the wake of the brazen assassination of President Jovenel Moïse early
Wednesday morning.
Fears have been
growing that unrest in the streets and political turmoil after the
attack could worsen what is already the country’s worst crisis in years.
Haiti is plagued by political intrigue, gang violence, a public health
crisis driven by the pandemic and difficulties delivering essential
international aid.
The Haitian
minister of elections, Mathias Pierre, said the request was made because
President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken had promised to
help Haiti.
However, a deputy State Department spokeswoman, Jalina Porter, told a news briefing that she could not confirm such a request.
Haitian
authorities have said the assassination involved “foreign” forces, and
the police have identified more than two dozen people involved in the
assassination of the president, including 26 Colombians and two
Americans of Haitian descent.
Mr.
Pierre, the minister of elections, said the country had already been
facing a large problem with “urban terrorists” who might use the
opportunity to attack key infrastructure in the country while the police
are focused on their manhunt.
“The
group that financed the mercenaries want to create chaos in the
country,” he said. “Attacking the gas reserves and airport might be part
of the plan.”
Robenson Geffrard, a reporter for Le Nouvelliste,
one of the country’s leading newspapers, said a “sense of uncertainty”
and the “shadow of violence” was looming over the capital,
Port-au-Prince, raising fears that Friday was but a fleeting interlude
before the situation spirals out of control again.
“In
supermarkets and public markets, people are jostling” to stock up on
basic goods such as rice and pasta, Mr. Geffrard said, and there are
lines at stations selling propane gas, often used for cooking.
The
country is enmeshed in a constitutional crisis, with a nonfunctioning
Parliament and competing claims over leadership. The Caribbean nation’s
interim prime minister, Claude Joseph, says he has taken command of the
police and the army. But the president, days before his death, had
appointed a new prime minister, Ariel Henry. Mr. Henry told a local newspaper after the assassination that he was the rightful prime minister.
Haiti,
the only country in the Americas with no active Covid-19 inoculation
campaign, has virtually no vaccine doses, and public health experts say
that the coronavirus is far more widespread there than publicly
reported.
With the prospect of greater
turmoil looming, international observers worry that a growing
humanitarian crisis could lead to the kind of exodus that has previously
followed natural disasters, coups and other periods of deep
instability.
The Pan American Health
Organization said in a statement that the crisis was “creating a perfect
storm, because the population has lowered its guard, the infrastructure
of Covid-19 beds has been reduced, the security situation could
deteriorate even further and hurricane season has started.”
Police
searched the Morne Calvaire district of Petion Ville for suspects who
remain at large in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Friday. Despite the city’s
activities returning to normal, tension remains high.Credit...Joseph Odelyn/Associated Press
The
usually crowded streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, were
dominated by a form of “calm,” on Friday, three days after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, according to a local journalist.
“But it’s a precarious, apparent calm, it can go awry at any moment,” said the journalist, Robenson Geffrard, a reporter for Le Nouvelliste, one of the country’s leading newspapers.
Mr.
Geffrard described how economic activity had resumed on Friday. Street
vendors took again to the streets; supermarkets, gas stations and banks
reopened; and public transportation and public administration
tentatively picked up. So, he said, had gang violence, an integral part of Haitians’ daily lives.
“Armed
gangs resumed hostilities with a lot of bursts of automatic weapons,”
Mr. Geffrard said, saying that there was gang fighting along one of the
main roads connecting the south of Port-au-Prince to the surrounding
provinces.
And he stressed how a “sense of uncertainty” was looming over the capital.
“In
supermarkets and public markets, people are jostling” to stock up on
basic goods such as rice and pasta, Mr. Geffrard said, while lines have
appeared in front of stations selling propane gas, which is often used
for cooking.
Mr. Geffrard said that in
the hours after the assassination, the shock and fear were such that
people deserted the streets, turning Port-au-Prince into a ghost town.
The silence that had enshrouded the capital was broken only when crowds of protesters gathered outside of a police station to demand justice for the suspects the police had arrested in the search for the president’s killers. A video
from Agence France Presse showed protesters shouting slogans in front
of a police station while cars and tires were being burned in nearby
streets.
“There is still this specter of violence, of insecurity that haunts the minds of the population,” Mr. Geffrard said.
During a news conference
on Thursday, the interim prime minister, Claude Joseph, called on
businesses to reopen despite the 15-day “state of siege” he imposed,
essentially putting the country under martial law.
“It
is true that there is a state of siege, but I want to tell everyone to
resume economic activities,” Mr. Joseph said, as he also ordered the
reopening of Port-au-Prince’s Toussaint Louverture international
airport.
A crowd surrounded a police vehicle carrying two suspects in Port-au-Prince on Thursday.Credit...Jean Marc Herve Abelard/EPA, via Shutterstock
Two
Americans arrested in connection with the assassination of President
Jovenel Moïse of Haiti this week said that they were not in the room
when he was killed and that they had worked only as translators for the
hit squad, a Haitian judge said on Friday.
One of the
Americans was identified as James J. Solages, a U.S. citizen who lived
in South Florida and previously worked as a security guard at the
Canadian Embassy in Haiti. The other was identified as Joseph Vincent,
55.
Judge Noël, speaking by telephone,
said that he could not provide details on the wider plot or a possible
motive, but said the two Americans maintained that the plot had been
planned intensively for a month.
Mr.
Moïse was shot dead in his private residence on the outskirts of the
capital around 1 a.m. on Wednesday, his body riddled with bullets.
Judge
Noël said the Americans had been taken into custody after a shootout
with police that resulted in the death of two Colombians.
When
they were taken into custody, they had in their possession weapons,
clothes, food and other paraphernalia used in the assault.
Judge
Noël said that it was Mr. Solages who had yelled that the assailants
were agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency over a loudspeaker at
the start of the assault.
Mr. Vincent
said he had been in the country for six months and that he had been
staying with a cousin. Mr. Solages said he had been in Haiti for a
month.
The men said the Colombians involved in the plot had been in the country for about three months.
All
that Mr. Vincent would say about the broader plot was that the
mastermind was a foreigner named “Mike” who spoke Spanish and English.
Mr. Solages said that he had found the job to translate for the hit
squad in a listing posted online. They would not say how much they had
been paid.
Judge Noël said Mr. Solages had “replied in a very evasive manner.”
As
the Haitian security forces continued to hunt for suspects in Mr.
Moïse’s assassination, the interview offered the clues into who carried
out the operation. Most of those in custody are Colombian, the
authorities say, and include retired members of the military.
At
a news conference announcing the arrests on Thursday, the authorities
had singled out the Americans as they sat on the floor with their hands
handcuffed behind their backs. It was not clear what evidence the
Haitian authorities had against the two men, when they had entered the
country and what their connection might be to those identified as
Colombian.
Mr. Solages, 35, is a
native of Jacmel, a city in southern Haiti, and lived in Broward County,
the Florida county that includes Fort Lauderdale. He was the president
of a small charity organization that said it focused on giving grants to
women in his home city. But federal tax records show that he claimed to
work 60 hours a week on an organization that in 2019 took in just over
$11,000.
The organization, Jacmel
First, says that its primary objective is reducing poverty and promoting
education and better health systems in Haiti. His biography on his
website said that he was a consultant, building engineer and “certified
diplomatic agent.”
He also claimed to
be chief commander of the bodyguards for the Canadian Embassy in Haiti. A
Canadian government official said that Mr. Solages was briefly a
reserve officer for a security company that had a contract to protect
the embassy in 2010.
By the end of
Thursday, as photographs of Mr. Solages in custody in Haiti circulated
online, the charity group’s website had been taken down. So was a
Facebook page that showed Mr. Solages in sharp suits.
Asked
about the president’s murder and Mr. Solages’s arrest, Jean Milot
Berquin, of Jacmel First’s board members, said, “I’m so sorry about
that,” and declined to comment further.
While
the biography on Mr. Solages’s charity website paints him as a
professional and politician, his LinkedIn profile lists an entirely
different set of jobs that sound more like maintenance positions.
State corporation records
show that he owns maintenance company whose address was the same as the
charity’s: a second-floor office above a restaurant in a strip mall. The
office is now occupied by someone else.
Mr. Solages’s Twitter account, which has been dormant for over a year, includes inspirational quotes
like “Don’t let nobody tell you that you are aiming too high or
expecting too much of yourself, with both Mars, your ruler, and the Sun
about to move to your favor, you should in fact expecting more of
yourself then (sic) ever before.”
After
24 hours filled with intense standoffs and gun battles, the police said
they had identified more than two dozen people involved in the
assassination of President Jovenel Moïse this week, including 26
Colombians and two Americans of Haitian descent.
One of the main questions
surrounding Mr. Moïse’s murder is how the assassins managed to enter the
residence of Haiti’s most guarded man without apparently encountering
resistance from dozens of bodyguards protecting him.
The
authorities have so offered no clue as to who might have organized the
operation or a motive for the attack, but they have pointed to “foreign”
involvement, and arrested 17 people, including two Americans and most
of the rest Colombians.
On Friday, the Taiwanese authorities said that 11 heavily armed people
had been arrested a day earlier on the grounds of its embassy in
Port-au-Prince, about a mile from the assassination. Joanne Ou, a
spokeswoman for Taiwan’s foreign ministry, said the Haitian police were
investigating.
In the aftermath of the assassination, at least two people killed in clashes with police were also identified as Colombians.
Colombia’s
defense minister, Diego Molano, said initial information suggested that
the people from his country in custody were retired members of the
Colombian military.
On Friday,
President Iván Duque of Colombia said that he had spoken with Haiti’s
interim prime minister, Claude Joseph. “We expressed our solidarity and
support at this time,” Mr. Duque said on Twitter.
“We offered full collaboration to find the truth about the material and
intellectual authors of the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.”
Mr.
Joseph says he has taken command of the police and the army. But the
president, days before his death, had appointed a new prime minister,
Ariel Henry. Mr. Henry told a local newspaper after the assassination that he was the rightful prime minister.
Despite
declaring what is essentially martial law and imposing a curfew, Mr.
Joseph asked people to return to work on Friday. Airports resumed
commercial flights, according to a statement from the U.S. Embassy.
More
than a dozen of the suspects — some with physical injuries — were
paraded before the cameras at a late-night news conference on Thursday.At least eight other suspects are on the run, the authorities said.
Claude
Joseph, center, the interim prime minister, has essentially put Haiti
under martial law, but constitutional experts questioned his right to
impose it.Credit...Joseph Odelyn/Associated Press
The
political storm in Haiti intensified on Thursday as two competing prime
ministers claimed the right to run the country, setting up an
extraordinary power struggle over who has the legal authority to govern
after the brazen assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in his home the day before.
Haiti’s
interim prime minister, Claude Joseph, says he has taken command of the
police and the army. He has also declared a “state of siege” that
essentially put the country under martial law, although constitutional
experts questioned his right to impose it, and a rival quickly
challenged his claim to power.
Two days before his death, Mr. Moïse had appointed Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon, as a new prime minister. Mr. Henry, who was supposed to take up the role this week, told a local newspaper after the presidential assassination that he was the rightful prime minister.
The
dueling claims created a volatile political crisis that left
constitutional experts confused and diplomats worried about a broad
societal collapse that could ignite violence or prompt Haitians to flee
the country en masse.
“No one
understands” what is happening right now, said Lilas Desquiron, a
Haitian writer who was culture minister from 2001 to 2004, leaving the
nation’s 11 million people in a “wait-and-see and powerless position.”
Alarmed
that Haiti may be approaching a breaking point reminiscent of the surge
of Haitian refugees fleeing on boats to Florida after a 1991 coup,
American officials have sided with the interim prime minister, Mr.
Joseph.
A hospital employee transporting oxygen tanks in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in June.Credit...Joseph Odelyn/Associated Press
Haiti,
the only country in the Americas without a Covid-19 vaccine campaign,
is also the country with one of the world’s most dysfunctional health
care systems.
Even as Haitians
struggle to understand a shifting political crisis in the wake of the
assassination of the nation’s president and worry about a surge in
violence on the streets, looming in the backdrop is a pandemic whose
scale is essentially unknown.
The
country of 11 million people has yet to receive its first doses from the
Covax vaccine-sharing program, making it one of few places that have
not started an inoculation campaign.
Having
never fully recovered from a 2010 earthquake that destroyed the Health
Ministry’s building and 50 health care centers, Haiti has long depended
on billions of dollars of foreign aid and the work of nongovernmental
organizations to provide basic services.
But
even before the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse this week,
violence posed an increasing challenge to those working to deliver
assistance. Humanitarian groups have become primary targets, and last
month Doctors Without Borders evacuated some of its staff members and closed an emergency center in Haiti after gangs attacked it.
The
dozens of armed gangs that control more than a third of the capital
have also killed hundreds of people and impelled thousands to flee their
homes over the past year.
International
organizations and humanitarian groups warn that the assassination
threatens to worsen a crisis that has been building for more than a
year, ever since Mr. Moise’s decision to remain in office after
opponents said his term had expired essentially paralyzed the
government.
On Friday, UNICEF said
that nearly one-third of all children in Haiti — about 1.5 million of
them — were in urgent need of emergency relief because of the rising
violence.
Against this overall
backdrop, many in the country have viewed the pandemic as an
abstraction. But there are indications that the coronavirus is far more
widespread than officially reported.
The
neighboring Dominican Republic, which has roughly the same size
population, has reported more than 330,000 cases and nearly 4,000
deaths. Haiti has registered 19,000 cases and 467 deaths — but hospitals
have reported struggling in recent weeks to find enough oxygen for a
surge in patients.
UNICEF said that
some patients had died because gang violence prevented ambulances from
reaching them with oxygen and emergency treatment. “Amidst the upsurge
of coronavirus cases in Haiti, any additional day without vaccine puts
hundreds of lives under threat,” Bruno Maes, the organization’s Haiti
representative, said on Friday.
The Rev. Richard Frechette, a doctor at St. Luke’s Hospital in Port-au-Prince, told the humanitarian aid organization Direct Relief that he had pleaded with gang leaders to allow the delivery of critical supplies, including oxygen.
“If
the streets turn into looting and riots, we’re not going to be able to
get oxygen,” he said. “That always happens when there’s instability.”
Haiti
is due to receive about six million coronavirus vaccine doses from the
United States, but it is unclear when they might be delivered.
Some Port-au-Prince residents took shelter in a sports center last month after clashes broke out between two gangs.Credit...Jean Marc Herve Abelard/EPA, via Shutterstock
Armed groups have become
increasingly powerful in Haiti, playing on the nation’s political
instability and growing poverty to seize control of large swaths of
cities like Port-au-Prince, the capital.
About
a third of Port-au-Prince’s territory is affected by criminal activity,
and a recent upsurge in clashes between rival gangs has caused numerous
casualties among civilians and stark levels of displacement of people
fleeing violence.
A report
by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs estimated that in the first three weeks of June over 13,600
people had fled their home in Port-au-Prince, which has a population of
about one million. That was four times the violence-related displacement
in the capital than in the previous nine months, the report said.
Gangs
have attacked businesses, stealing food and other supplies, and engaged
in kidnappings, including the abduction of five Roman Catholic priests
and two nuns in April.
“For some time
now, we have been witnessing the descent into hell of Haitian society,”
Archbishop Max Leroy Mesidor of Port-au-Prince said in a statement at the time.
In June, one of Haiti’s most powerful gang leaders, Jimmy Cherizier, also known as “Barbecue,” warned that he was launching a revolution
against the country’s political and business elites. He called on
people to take back what he said was their money in banks and
supermarkets, prompting looting in several stores in Port-au-Prince.
Jacky
Lumarque, the rector of Quisqueya University, a large private school in
Port-au-Prince, said that in the current situation it was not possible
to hold elections in September, as planned by Mr. Moïse and still
demanded by the international community.
“Which
candidate will be able to campaign in gang-controlled neighborhoods?
Will they even be able to set up polling stations?” he asked.
Holding elections, he said, would amount “to perpetuating the chaos, sustaining the instability.”
In
videos filmed from nearby buildings and synchronized by the The New
York Times, the group of commandos who appeared to be arriving to
assassinate President Jovenel Moïse shouted that they were part of a
U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency operation.
OK,
they say, Everybody do not shoot. They say they are not our enemies,
everybody do not shoot. This is a D.E.A. operation. This is a D.E.A.
operation. This is a D.E.A. operation. Keep moving, guys. Keep moving.
Keep. moving. Keep moving.
In
videos filmed from nearby buildings and synchronized by the The New
York Times, the group of commandos who appeared to be arriving to
assassinate President Jovenel Moïse shouted that they were part of a
U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency operation.
Two
videos filmed at the same time from separate buildings near Haiti’s
presidential compound suggest that the group who killed President
Jovenel Moïse claimed to be agents from the United States Drug
Enforcement Administration.
The videos
appear to show the assailants arriving near Mr. Moïse’s residence. A
witness on one video claims to see the assailants disarming some of Mr.
Moïse’s guards stationed nearby.
In
the videos, about a dozen armed men can be seen walking slowly up a main
street in the Pèlerin 5 neighborhood alongside at least eight vehicles —
a mix of sport utility vehicles and trucks. The men appear calm and do
not encounter resistance or try to hide.
Over a loudspeaker, a male voice shouts multiple times in English: “This is a D.E.A. operation! Everybody, don’t shoot!”
He repeats the command in Creole.
The
D.E.A. has an office in Port-au-Prince to help Haiti’s government
“develop and strengthen its counternarcotics law enforcement program,”
according to the U.S. Embassy. But Haiti’s ambassador to the United
States, Bocchit Edmond, told Reuters that the gunmen had falsely
identified themselves as D.E.A. agents. “No way they were D.E.A.
agents,” he said.
The attack “was carried out by foreign mercenaries and professional killers,” Mr. Edmond said in Washington.
In
one of the two videos, the man holding the camera comments on what is
unfolding, saying that the armed men are coming to the president’s home.
“They’ve
taken Jovenel. Jovenel is gone,” he says, referring to Mr. Moïse by his
first name, as shouting can be heard in the distance. “Don’t you see
the guys disarming the Jovenel guys?”
A police patrol in Port-au-Prince on Thursday.Credit...Valerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The
Taiwanese authorities said on Friday that 11 heavily armed people had
been arrested on Thursday on the grounds of its embassy in
Port-au-Prince, about a mile from where President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti
was assassinated.
It was not
immediately clear whether the people arrested at the embassy were
involved in the assassination. Joanne Ou, a spokeswoman for Taiwan’s
foreign ministry, said the Haitian police were still looking into the
matter.
In a separate statement
posted on Friday, Taiwan’s Embassy in Haiti condemned the assassination
as “cruel and barbaric” and referred to those arrested on its grounds
as “mercenaries.”
Ms. Ou, the
spokeswoman, said that on Thursday morning, security personnel had
discovered a group of “fully armed, suspicious-looking individuals”
breaking through the embassy’s security perimeter and had immediately
notified the police and embassy staff.
She
said that no embassy personnel were on the grounds when the intruders
were discovered, because they had been instructed to work from home
shortly after the assassination in the early hours of Wednesday.
Ms.
Ou said embassy officials had immediately agreed to allow the Haitian
police to enter the grounds to conduct a search and make arrests.
By
4 p.m. on Thursday, the police had arrested the suspects, she said,
adding that no one was harmed and that an initial inspection indicated
only minimal property damage.
It was
not immediately clear whether the 11 people detained at the embassy were
included in the group of 17 suspects who the Haitian authorities say
have been arrested in connection with the assassination.
“At
this difficult time,” Ms. Ou said, “the government of Taiwan reiterates
its support for interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph in leading Haiti
to overcome this crisis and restore democratic order.”
Haiti was gripped by unease on Friday after the nation’s president was killed
at his home on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince earlier in the week.
There are questions about who is in charge of the Caribbean nation even
as the coronavirus is spreading and armed gangs wield growing power.
Bullet holes in a wall at the home of President Jovenel Moïse on Wednesday.Credit...Jean Marc Herve Abelard/EPA, via Shutterstock
The
presidential house peppered with holes and littered with bullet
casings. The front doors badly damaged. The president’s body lying on
the floor at the foot of his bed, “bathed in blood.”
The
Haitian justice of the peace who arrived at the home of President
Jovenel Moïse in the hours after his assassination on Wednesday
described a haunting scene.
“There
were 12 holes visible in the body of the president that I could see,”
the justice, Carl Henri Destin, told The New York Times. “He was riddled
with bullets.”
In the days after the
assassination, the Caribbean country was still reeling, and as details
of the assassination emerged, they seemed to offer more questions than
answers.
Forty to 50 people were
involved in the assault, and they appeared to have been well-trained,
State Department officials told members of Congress on Thursday,
according to three people familiar with the briefing who spoke on the
condition of anonymity. That report was in keeping with earlier comments
by the Haitian ambassador to the United States, Bocchit Edmond, who
described the attackers as “professionals, killers, commandos” in a call
with reporters.
The assailants made
it past two police checkpoints before reaching the president’s gate, the
State Department said, according to people familiar with the briefing,
adding that the security personnel guarding the president’s residence
had suffered no injuries.
There were
also said to be no reports of an exchange of gunfire between the guards
and the attackers — which raised some eyebrows.
“It’s
weird that there was no one was fighting back,” said Laurent Lamothe, a
former prime minister of Haiti, noting that the presidential guard
usually had a detachment of about 100 officers. “There was a lot of
shooting, but no deaths. The only death was the president.”
One
American lawmaker, Representative Andy Levin, a co-chair of the House
Haiti Caucus who is a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,
said the circumstances of the attack, and particularly the apparent lack
of fighting, raised questions about whether the assassination could
have been “an inside job.”
Mr. Destin,
the justice of the peace, said the president’s house had been
ransacked. “Drawers were pulled out, papers were all over the ground,
bags were open,” he said. “They were looking for something apparently.”
And the attack, he said, had been very violent.
President
Moïse had been dressed in a white shirt and jeans, he said, both of
which were torn and covered in blood. Bullet holes perforated his arms,
hip, backside and left ear.
Mr. Destin
said two of the president’s children had been present during the
attack. He took a statement from the president’s 24-year-old daughter,
who had returned to the house from the hospital to collect clothing for
her wounded mother.
She told him that she and her younger brother had hid together in his bathroom, Mr. Destin said.
The
international airport in Port-au-Prince is resuming commercial flights
on Friday, two days after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse
of Haiti led to its closure and a series of canceled flights.
Christopher
D. Johnson, a spokesman for the American Embassy in Port-au-Prince,
confirmed in a statement that flights would resume on Friday. The
facility, Toussaint Louverture International Airport, first closed early
Wednesday, Mr. Johnson said.
Among
the U.S. airlines that operate flights between the United States and
Haiti are American Airlines, JetBlue and Spirit. JetBlue, which averages
five flights per day between the United States and Haiti, has suspended
flights until at least Saturday, a spokesman said, and is evaluating
the situation.
“If and when we add
flights before Sunday, we will reach out to customers to inform them,”
said the spokesman, Derek Dombrowski. The Haiti-based Sunrise Airways,
which flies within the Caribbean, grounded all flights until further
notice.
American Airlines operates two
daily flights from Miami and one daily flight from Fort Lauderdale,
Fla. The airline said it planned to operate both flights out of Miami
but was still evaluating Fort Lauderdale flights because of “early
timing.”
On Thursday, a day after
declaring a “state of siege” and a curfew, Claude Joseph, the interim
prime minister, asked people to return to work and ordered the airport
reopened.
The Dominican Republic’s
president, LuÃs Abinader, had closed the country’s border with Haiti and
also increased security, causing dozens of trucks to back up along the
crucial passageway, according to
Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, in 2017.Credit...Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
Haiti has been thwarted by outside interests from its very foundation as a country.
For decades, European powers, and later the United States, refused to recognize it as an independent republic.
The
Caribbean nation became the world’s first Black-led republic when it
declared its independence from France on New Year’s Day 1804. That day,
Saint-Domingue, once France’s richest colony, known as the “Pearl of the
Antilles,” became Haiti.
It was a
land long coveted for its riches of sugar, coffee and cotton, brought to
market by enslaved people. Its declaration of independence meant that,
for the first time, a brutally enslaved people had wrenched their
freedom from colonial masters. But it came only after decades of bloody
war.
In 1825, more than two decades
after independence, the king of France, Charles X, sent warships to the
capital, Port-au-Prince, and forced Haiti to compensate former French
colonists for their lost property.
Haiti,
unable to pay the hefty sum, was forced into a debt that it had to
shoulder for nearly a century. Throughout the 19th century, a period
marked by political and economic instability, the country invested
little in its infrastructure or education.
In 1915, U.S. troops invaded after a mob killed the Haitian president.
The
United States later justified its occupation as an attempt to restore
order and prevent what it said was a looming invasion by French or
German forces. But U.S. troops reintroduced forced labor on
road-construction projects and were later accused of extrajudicial
killings.
The widely unpopular occupation ended in 1934, but U.S. control over Haiti’s finances lasted until 1947.
After
a series of midcentury coups, the Duvalier family, father-and-son
dictators, reigned over Haiti with brute force until the 1980s. Their
regime plunged Haiti deeper into debt, and introduced the so-called
Tontons Macoutes, an infamous secret police force that terrorized the
country.
In the early 1990s,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, was elected
president. He was then ousted twice from power over the next 15 years.
Haiti, with a population of 11 million, is considered the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
In
2010, it suffered a devastating earthquake that claimed the lives of
about 300,000 people. The country never really recovered, and it has
remained mired in economic underdevelopment and insecurity. A cholera
outbreak in 2016, linked to U.N. peacekeepers, killed at least 10,000
Haitians and sickened another 800,000.
Then early Wednesday, Jovenel Moïse, who became president in 2017, was assassinated at his residence.
