VOA news for Friday, January 24th, 2020
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This is VOA news. I'm David Byrd.
On day two of their impeachment arguments, Democratic managers are focusing on what they call President Trump's "dangerous" abuse of power. We get more from AP's Sagar Meghani at the White House.
"This conduct is not America first. It is Donald Trump first.”
House impeachment manager Jerrold Nadler teed up the session by saying "no president" has ever abused power like the current one. From there, colleague Sylvia Garcia zeroed in on the president pressuring Ukraine to investigate political foe Joe Biden, saying there's zero evidence Biden or his son did anything improper.
"There was no basis.”
She says the president wanted it for a reason "... for his own political benefit.”
Republicans largely watched impassively, some visibly bored. Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow says focusing on the Bidens was a mistake by Democrats.
"I was very surprised," and he'll start rebutting the case this weekend Sagar Meghani, at the White House.
The World Health Organization has decided against declaring a deadly coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. We find why from Lisa Schlein.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says the outbreak poses a very high risk in China regionally and globally.
He urges countries to remain vigilant and take precautionary measures to protect their people from becoming infected.
"All countries should have in place measures to detect cases of coronavirus, including at health facilities.”
Tedros says there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission outside China. But he warns that does not mean it will not happen.
Lisa Schlein, for VOA news, Geneva.
For more on these stories, log on to our website voanews.com. This is VOA news.
The International Court of Justice has ordered Myanmar to take urgent measures to protect its Muslim Rohingya population from persecution and atrocities and to preserve evidence of alleged crimes [again them] against them. We get more from Joe Davies of Reuters.
Thursday's court ruling came after the mostly Muslim Gambia launched a lawsuit in November at the U.N.'s highest body for disputes between states. It accused Myanmar of genocide against Rohingya in violation of a 1948 convention.
"It is concluded on reasonable ground that the Rohingya people remain at serious risk of genocide under the terms of the Genocide Convention.”
More than 730,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar after a military-led crackdown in 2017.
Their villages have been in smoke. They left in whatever way they could to neighboring Bangladesh.
That's Joe Davies of Reuters.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several other world leaders were in Jerusalem on Thursday to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Linda Gradstein reports.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence spoke emotionally about the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust and the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
"When soldiers opened the gates of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they found 7,000 half-starved, half-naked prisoners, hundreds of boxes of camp records that documented the greatest mass murder in history.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Auschwitz is a symbol of evil to the world.
Linda Gradstein, for VOA news, Jerusalem.
The Trump administration on Thursday ended federal protection for many of the nation's millions of kilometers of streams, arroyos and wetlands, a sweeping environmental rollback that could leave the waterways more vulnerable [from] to pollution, that is, from development, industry and farms.
The move narrows the types of waterways that qualify for federal protection under the Clean Water Act.
EPA assistant administrator David Ross says the water rule doesn't mean that states can't extend protection to waters as they deem necessary.
"This is not a rule that presumes if the federal government doesn't regulate, there is no regulation. That has been a fault of the former administrations, and it is simply not true.”
Environmental groups and public health advocates say the rollbacks will allow businesses to dump pollutants into unprotected waterways, fill in wetlands and threaten public water supplies downstream while harming wildlife and habitat.
For more, visit our website. I'm David Byrd, VOA news.
