Month: April 2019

Australia’s indigenous affairs minister and several of his colleagues faced calls to resign on Monday, after they backed a failed parliamentary motion tabled by a controversial senator that declared: "It is okay to be white."

Several government ministers – including those for trade, communications and indigenous affairs minister Nigel Scullion – backed a resolution drafted by populist firebrand senator Pauline Hanson which railed against what it described as "the deplorable rise of anti-white racism".

Luke Pearson, the founder of influential anti-racism group, IndigenousX, echoed a string of calls for Scullion to resign after the vote.

"The minister for Indigenous Affairs, voting in support of what is widely known to be a white supremacist slogan, ‘It’s okay to be white’, makes his position as minister entirely untenable. He needs to resign," Pearson wrote.

Scullion, a white senator for the Northern Territory, has held the Indigenous Affairs portfolio since 2013.

During parliamentary debate Hanson defended trying to codify what opponents see as race baiting.

"Such a simple sentence should go without saying," Hanson told the chamber, before her motion was defeated 31 votes to 28. "But I suspect many members in this place would struggle to say it."

Greens leader Richard Di Natale decried the move.

"It’s not just okay to be white in Australia, it’s actually a ticket to winning the lotto. Look around this chamber and see how many faces aren’t white," he said.

"The reality is this ‘it’s okay to be white’ slogan has a long history in the white supremacist movement where both these clowns get most of their material from," he said referring to Hanson and another senator who supported the motion.

Although one-in-two Australians has a parent born abroad, racial inequality and public discourse on the issue is fraught.

Australia’s treatment of its indigenous population has long been a festering historical and political sore.

The Aborginal population, who have occupied Australia for 50,000 years, were dispossessed of their lands by the arrival of settlers two centuries ago.

They remain among the most disadvantaged Australians.

They were believed to have numbered around one million at the time of British settlement, but now make up only about three percent of the total population of 25 million.

Robert Durst, the New York real estate heir who was the subject of a television documentary series, was ordered Thursday to stand trial for the murder of his close friend in Los Angeles 18 years ago.

A judge ruled that there’s enough evidence to try the eccentric 75-year-old multimillionaire for the point-blank shooting of Susan Berman at her home. Durst has pleaded not guilty.

Durst allegedly killed Berman, his friend from college and the daughter of a Las Vegas mobster, to keep her from telling police what she knew about his wife’s 1982 disappearance in New York, prosecutors contend. Kathleen Durst has been missing for more than 35 years and is presumed dead.

Robert Durst, who has never been charged with a crime related to his wife’s disappearance, has denied killing either woman.

Durst remains jailed without bail and was ordered back to court on November 8 for arraignment. The murder charge against him includes the special circumstance allegations of lying in wait and killing a witness to a crime. There is also an allegation that he personally used a handgun to carry out the murder.

At the end of the preliminary proceedings that were continued over several months, Durst’s attorney, David Chesnoff, argued that there was no hard evidence – such as DNA, fingerprints or witnesses – linking him to Berman’s killing. A call seeking further comment from Chesnoff was not returned on Thursday.

Durst was arrested in New Orleans in March 2015, just hours before the airing of the final episode of HBO’s "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst." The documentary examined the disappearance of his wife, and the killings of Berman and a Texas neighbour, Morris Black, in 2001. A jury acquitted him of Black’s murder after finding that the killing was in self-defence.

The HBO series created a sensation after he was heard during the finale muttering to himself on a live microphone: "You’re caught! What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course."

Prosecutors will try to make the connection between Berman’s death and the mystery around Kathleen Durst’s disappearance, which they want to show as the foundation for the motive for Berman’s slaying.

After Kathleen Durst vanished, Berman served as Robert Durst’s unofficial spokeswoman. But prosecutors and witnesses in a series of earlier hearings said she did much more.

Berman told friends over the years that Durst acknowledged killing his wife and said she helped him cover his tracks. Prosecutors hope to use those hearsay statements at trial, which defence attorneys have vigorously challenged.

Berman told one friend who testified at an earlier hearing that if anything happened to her, Durst would be the culprit.

 

Donald Trump went on an eve-of-poll campaign blitz on Monday, holding three rallies targeting vulnerable Democrats amid hope that Republicans can retain their majority in the US Senate. 

With America returning to the ballot box on Tuesday for the first time since the 2016 election, the US president scheduled campaign stops in Ohio, Indiana and Missouri in a last-minute push for votes. 

All three feature Democrat senators fighting for re-election in states that Mr Trump won two years ago – meaning his late interventions could tilt things in his party’s favour. 

A string of polls published ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections told a similar story – Democrats look likely to win a majority in the House of Representatives while Republicans should retain their hold on the Senate. 

However forecasters urged caution, noting that a string of razor-tight races, the possibility of a record turnout and polling limitations laid bare in 2016 all make predictions impossible. 

Mr Trump has thrown himself into the campaign, holding more events than his predecessors Barack Obama and George W Bush did while in office and urging voters to imagine his name is on the ballot. 

However the decision to make himself the face of his party’s national campaign comes with political risks, not least the difficulty in blaming others if results do not go his way. 

Mr Trump struck an upbeat tone on Monday when speaking to reporters in the White House before departing for his last day of campaigning. 

“There’s a great electricity in the air like we haven’t seen in my opinion since the 2016 election,” Mr Trump said.

“So something’s happening. We’ll see, but I think we’re going to do very well.”

The US president has turned up the dial on warnings about illegal immigration in recent weeks, believing that the issue motivates his base and will drive up turnout – likely to be a key factor in the results. 

He has likened migrant caravans approaching through Central America to an “invasion”, deploying more than 5,000 US soldiers to the southern border and even suggesting he could temporarily shut the crossing entirely. 

The tactic appears to have had an effect, with the number of Republicans saying immigration is “one of the most important issues" in their vote jumping from 14 per cent to 21 per cent in three weeks, according to a Post-ABC News poll. 

However the strategy has caused some tensions with the party’s congressional leaders who planned to put a positive message about America’s booming economy and Mr Trump’s tax cuts front and centre. There are fears Mr Trump’s hardline rhetoric on immigration could put of swing voters. 

It has emerged that Fox News and Facebook have joined CNN, NBC News and other platforms in refusing to show a Trump campaign advert featuring a migrant criminal boasting of cop killing that critics have called racist. 

Barack Obama, the former president, has reemerged to lead the Democrat charge in the final few days of campaigning, breaking with his largely observed silence on Mr Trump with a series of emotive speeches. 

He has urged voters not to be “hoodwinked” and “bamboozled” by the Trump administration’s migrant caravan warnings, saying: “While they are trying to distract you with all this stuff, they are robbing you blind.”

Mr Obama has also lashed out at Republican claims they will protect the right for people with pre-existing medical conditions to get health insurance – a key part of his ‘Obamacare’ health legislation. 

Democrats have zoned in on the issue in recent campaign adverts, seeing healthcare as a weakness for Mr Trump’s party and also one of the issues that voters most care about, according to polls. 

As well as all House of Representative seats and a third of Senate seats up for grabs, a string of state-wide governorships and other offices are being contested.  Voting will take place throughout Tuesday, with results to emerge overnight.

An innovative development fund that champions women and children has raised over US $1 billion to support health systems across the world. 

At a conference in Oslo, co-hosted by the governments of Norway and Burkina Faso, 14 donors pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to enable the Global Financing Facility (GFF) to improve the lives of women in dozens of low and middle income countries.

The $1 billion, which includes £50 million (US$65) from the UK, takes the GFF halfway to its ultimate target of $2 billion – money it projects will save up to 35 million lives by 2030.

Set up in 2015 by the United Nations and World Bank, the GFF fund helps countries identify their priorities in improving the health of women and children and then brings together donors and the private sector to work with them. 

The GFF is unique in that it puts women and children at the forefront of the investment agenda. In doing so, it has become perhaps the biggest feminist fund in the world – one that you’ve probably never heard of.

Another important feature of the fund is that it makes its grants strictly conditional on the receiving country pledging money and support of its own – a mechanism designed to ensure the investment becomes sustainable in the long term.

Each year, more than five million women and children still die from preventable conditions related to pregnancy, such as blood loss and infection, low birthweight and malnutrition.

“We have to have girls, women and children at the forefront of the agenda,” said Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, pledging $200 million to the fund.

“When you invest in them, they invest in everybody else in their family, and life improves – not just in their family, but community by community and country by country.”

The fund’s emphasis on building health systems – rather than focusing on specific issues such as providing antiretrovirals to treat HIV – marks a significant shift in international development funding.

Investing in health and education could transform economies

“All our analysis means nothing unless there is a genuine trust in the country that it serves the interests of the people,” said Kristalina Georgieva, CEO of the World Bank. “We have seen success in development jump up dramatically when there is country led planning.”

When the world failed to meet the 2015 Millennium Development Goal targets to reduce child and maternal mortality, global aid models were criticised on both practical and ethical terms. 

Countries became dependent on aid and vulnerable when money dried up, and investing in the fundamentals of a functioning health system was rarely prioritised, say critics.

More than 35 countries are set to lose official development assistance as they become wealthier and move from low to middle income country status. A model which encourages these "transitioning" countries to drive their own change will be fundamental to achieving the new Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

At the replenishment conference in Oslo this week, “domestic resource mobilisation” were the buzz words.

But the focus on women and children is also critical.

“Health is not a burden on the country, it is an investment, which in the long run enables us to make economic growth and progress overall,” said Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, President of Burkina Faso.

“All the benefits that can be found in maternal and child health –  they are the basis of growth, they are the basis of economic stability.”

Despite evidence that improving the health and education prospects of women, children and adolescents is the fastest way to lift a country out of poverty, these groups have historically been marginalised. For every 100 men in poverty worldwide, there are 122 women.

Young girls and women are most at risk of extreme poverty

“I am a 28-year-old young African woman, but I am a grandmother,” Christina Clilimba, a youth expert who attended the conference from Malawi, told The Telegraph.

“My story is not uncommon, but it has driven me to advocate to allow young women to make the informed decisions.”

For women like Christina, the GFF represents new possibilities.

“I feel GFF will bring systems that were fragmented in the health system into one. The vision set out is the dream, it gives me hope because I can see how it would work on a grassroots level,” she said.

A GFF report earlier this year showed that in Democratic Republic of the Congo the number of births attended by a trained health worker increased by 15,000 during 2017 and 25,000 more children received their five routine vaccinations.

The GFF hopes to expand to 50 countries by 2023

Similarly, Cameroon saw visits to family planning clinics in northern regions increase from less than 15,000 in the first quarter of 2017 to more than 25,000 in the fourth.

But while optimisism is widespread, some supporters remain cautious.

“Women’s health has been ignored in funding, particularly sexual reproductive health,” Katja Iversen, chief executive of global advocacy organisation Women Deliver, told The Telegraph.

“The GFF can be a really good vehicle to enhance funding, but it while it must be country-driven, it needs to make sure at a central level than women are always put at the centre. This is key.

“A health system that is ready to deliver when a woman is ready to deliver is a strong health system. A health system that doesn’t take into account a woman’s status in society will never be a strong health system. We can never ever forget that,” she added.

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Police in Venice have been accused of heavy-handed behaviour after fining a four-year-old-boy nearly 70 euros for riding his scooter in St Mark’s Square.

The little boy was riding his scooter when he was stopped by police, who issued his father with a fine for 67 euros (£60).

Toy scooters and roller skates are banned from being used in the area under by-laws.

The father was accused of allowing his son to use a “velocity accelerator” in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini – an open space adjoining the main part of St Mark’s Square, known for its two red marble lion statues.

The sanction sparked outrage on social media, with Venetians accusing the police of lacking all sense of proportion.

Venice fights a constant battle against loutish and inconsiderate behaviour by tourists, from jumping into canals to eating snacks in public places, but locals said the crackdown on a child was taking zero tolerance too far.

“How sad. Miserable coppers,” said one woman on Facebook, using a Venetian dialect nickname, “ghebi”, for the police.

Another local wrote that police should have just given the father a verbal warning.

“The fine seems to me to be absurd, over-the-top,” said Monica Sambo, a city councilor from the centre-Left opposition Democratic Party.

“St Mark’s Square cannot be allowed to become a playground, but what harm was this child doing?”

The boy’s father said he would seek legal advice and lodge an appeal against the fine.

Andrew Gillum, the Democrat who was running to become Florida’s first black governor, conceded the race on Saturday to Ron DeSantis, a close ally of President Donald Trump, saying he was satisfied with a recount that showed him trailing by more than 30,000 votes.

The race was one of the most closely watched in the country. The candidates come from the far poles of each party and their performances were scrutinised for hints they might offer for the 2020 presidential election.

Mr Gillum, the liberal mayor of Tallahassee, had initially conceded the race to Mr DeSantis, a conservative former congressman. But he later withdrew that concession when the results were close enough for an automatic recount. On Saturday, he said that process was drawing to a close.

"This has been the journey of our lives. We’ve been so honored by the support that we’ve received," Mr Gillum said in a video statement. "Stay tuned, there will be more to come. This fight for Florida continues."

Mr DeSantis responded on Twitter, saying: “This was a hard-fought campaign. Now it’s time to bring Florida together.”

The Republicans held the Senate after the midterms

After Mr Gillum initially conceded the contest on election night, his subsequent calls for every vote to be counted echoed similar appeals from fellow Democrat US Senator Bill Nelson.

A recount is continuing in the race between Mr Nelson and his challenger for the Senate seat, outgoing Republican Governor Rick Scott.

That recount has become the subject of an intense political battle with Republicans including Mr Trump claiming without evidence that the process was marred by fraud.

Both parties and their supporters filed multiple lawsuits challenging the process, with Republicans urging a strict standard on which votes were counted while Democrats contested rules that they saw as disenfranchising voters.