Six In The Morning Sunday 4 August 2019

 

Texas Walmart shooting: Twenty killed in El Paso gun attack

Twenty people have been killed and 26 injured in a mass shooting in the Texas city of El Paso.

Governor Greg Abbott described it as “one of the most deadly days in the history of Texas”.

The massacre happened at a Walmart store near the Cielo Vista Mall, a few miles from the US-Mexican border.

A 21-year-old man is in custody and is believed to be the sole gunman. Mr Abbott praised the police officers who apprehended him.

The suspect has been named by US media as Patrick Crusius, a resident of Dallas-area city of Allen, about 650 miles (1,046km) east of El Paso.

Third Mexican journalist killed in a week amid record murder rate

A journalist shot in his own home despite being offered official protection reflects Mexico’s struggle with rising violence

An investigation has been launched into the death of a reporter in the Mexican state of Veracruz after he became the third journalist to be murdered in a week.

As the country grapples with a record murder rate, Mexican officials in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz where Jorge Ruiz Vazquez worked for the Grafico de Xalapa newspaper in Veracruz’s capital, said the investigation would examine why procedures to protect him failed.

“The prosecutor will investigate why protection measures granted to the victim and his family, which were active, were not enforced,” the state’s prosecutor said.

Battle for Tripoli: The secret network fighting to end Libya’s war

Meet the group of activists risking their lives to provide a ‘third voice’ in the conflict

Borzou DaragahiInternational Correspondent @borzou

A network of Libyan activists in the country’s east opposed to warlord Khalifa Haftar’s months-long offensive to seize the capital, Tripoli, has emerged; evidence that the civil society idealists who originally began the 2011 uprising against the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi persist, even if they are often cowering in fear.

Ahmed Sharksi, a 29-year-old activist and petroleum engineer now living in exile in Tunisia, is one of the coordinators of the Society for Civic Cooperation, a largely secret network of activists in eastern Libyan cities including Benghazi, Ajdabiya and Beida – the metropolises that make up the ancient Roman province of Cyrenaica.

Murder in FrankfurtThe Struggle to Find Answers to Random Crime

On Monday, an eight-year-old boy got pushed in front of a train in Frankfurt and died. The crime has horrified the entire country and right-wing populists have sought to instrumentalize it. But can such acts of violence really be prevented? By DER SPIEGEL Staff

It is Friday evening in Frankfurt, three days before an 8-year-old boy will die at the city’s central station after a stranger suddenly shoves him in front of an incoming ICE long-distance train. A 42-year-old Eritrean who has lived in Frankfurt for 30 years stops his Peugeot in front of a hotel at the convention center. An aunt of his is staying there and his girlfriend accompanies the aunt to her room. He says that in the time that his girlfriend was in the hotel, he got out of his car to make a phone call.

At exactly that moment, he says, a man ran up to him from the direction of the train station and jumped into the passenger seat. He spoke Tigrinya, one of the languages spoken in Eritrea. He told me: “Drive! The police are following me!” Then, the 42-year-old continues, “he tried to convince me to drive him to the Swiss border.” When the Peugeot driver refused and waved the hotel porter over for help, the man got out of his car and disappeared into the darkness.

Riot police fire tear gas to disperse Hong Kong protesters

By Jessie Yeung and Ben Westcott, CNN

Here’s a rundown of today’s protests

The protests in Hong Kong’s Kowloon district have wrapped up on this ninth consecutive weekend of mass demonstrations.

Here’s what happened today:

  • Rival protests: There was the main anti-extradition bill, anti-government march in Kowloon, and a smaller pro-police assembly in Causeway Bay’s Victoria Park that ended in the late afternoon.
  • Illegal assembly: The Kowloon march began in Mong Kok, but instead of finishing at the designated end point, protesters continued to Nathan Road. By deviating from the police-approved route, the march became an illegal assembly.
  • Siege on police station: The protests quickly got ugly as night fell, with protesters surrounding and vandalizing the Tsim Sha Tsui police station. They broke car windows, lit a blaze outside the station, threw eggs, shone laser pointers at officers’ faces, and graffitied obscenities onto the station walls.

PUSHING OUT THE BORDER: HOW THE U.S. IS WAGING A GLOBAL WAR ON MIGRATION

Cora Currier

A PRINCIPAL GOAL of the Trump administration’s policy at the U.S.-Mexico border —and in Central America, considered of late only in relation to that border — has been to get other governments to handle the increase in migrants seeking to enter the United States.

This means getting Mexico to send troops to its border with the U.S.; to enforce the system of “metering,” which limits the number of asylum-seekers who may approach a U.S. port of entry each day; to surveil caravans; and to deport more non-Mexicans than the United States does. It means sending Mexican forces to the border with Guatemala — and ignoring those forces’ record of human rights abuses, particularly of migrants.