UK raises terror threat level after concert carnage

British police patrol through Trafalgar Square in central London on Tuesday, a day after a deadly terror attack at the Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena. (AFP / Daniel Leal-Olivas)
Updated 24 May 2017
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UK raises terror threat level after concert carnage

MANCHESTER, England: Britain is imminently facing another terror attack, Prime Minister Theresa May warned Tuesday as she deployed soldiers at key sites after a suicide bomber killed 22 people at a pop concert in Manchester.
May said the national terror threat level was being raised from severe to critical, which means another attack is expected “imminently.”
Her dramatic statement came after 22-year-old Salman Abedi, reportedly a Briton of Libyan descent, was identified as the perpetrator behind Monday’s deadly attack, whose victims included an eight-year-old girl.
“It is a possibility we cannot ignore that there is a wider group of individuals linked to this attack,” May said at her Downing Street office.
She announced that the army would be deployed on the streets to support armed police under a plan codenamed Operation Temperer, which was developed in the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris terror attacks.
“This means that armed police officers responsible for duties such as guarding key sites will be replaced by members of the armed forces, which will allow the police to significantly increase the number of armed officers on patrol in key locations.”
“You might also see military personnel deployed at certain events such as concerts and sports matches, helping the police to keep the public safe,” she said.
Started in 2006, the terror threat level is set by a unit based in the MI5 domestic security service.
“Critical” is the highest of five levels and has only been briefly reached twice before and “means an attack is expected imminently.”
Police named Abedi as the suspected suicide bomber, as the Daesh jihadist group claimed responsibility for the carnage.
British media said he was born in Manchester, northwest England, and that his Libyan parents had fled the regime of dictator Muammar Qaddafi.
Monday’s attack came just over two weeks before Britain votes in a general election and is the latest in a series of deadly incidents across Europe.
Earlier attacks, including vehicle-borne assaults in Berlin and Stockholm, have coincided with an offensive on Daesh redoubts in Syria and Iraq by US, British and other Western forces.
Threatening more attacks, Daesh said in a statement published on its social media channels: “One of the caliphate’s soldiers placed bombs among the crowds.”
The suicide bombing came at the conclusion of US pop star Ariana Grande’s concert at the 21,000-capacity Manchester Arena, one of Europe’s largest indoor venues.
Witnesses described the horror when the bomber blew himself up.
“When we left, down the stairs there was probably early teenagers lying on the floor covered in blood and blood on the walls where they’d been laid, so it was just horrifying,” female concert-goer Alex Grayson told AFP.
Police staged an armed raid on a Manchester address believed to be where Abedi lived, carrying out a controlled explosion to gain entry after arresting a 23-year-old man earlier Tuesday in connection with the attack.
In an earlier statement following an emergency ministerial meeting, May said: “A single terrorist detonated his improvised explosive device near one of the exits of the venue, deliberately choosing the time and place to cause maximum carnage and to kill and injure indiscriminately.”
She said during a visit to victims in Manchester that police would look at the security of such venues.
Police promised extra measures at showpiece events coming up such as Saturday’s FA Cup football final.
Campaigning for the June 8 election was suspended by the main parties after the attack and May insisted the country stood tall as defiant chants of “Manchester! Manchester!” broke out at a vigil held in the city center.

'Broken'
Terrified fans, many of them teenage girls, fled the arena in panic after the explosion in the foyer as they began to leave at the end of Monday’s performance by Grande, a 23-year-old former child television star who described herself as “broken” by the attack.
US President Donald Trump and European leaders issued vows of defiance.
Eight-year-old Saffie Rose Roussos and teenager Georgina Callander were among the first of the 22 victims to be confirmed.
Another 59 people were taken to hospital, many with life-threatening conditions.
Witnesses reported seeing bodies on the floor after the blast around 10:30 p.m. (2130 GMT) on Monday, and some fans were trampled as panicked crowds tried to flee the venue.
Families were separated, with dozens of young people taken to nearby hotels overnight, and some parents were still desperately searching for their children on Tuesday.
“I’m just hearing nothing — her phone’s dead,” Charlotte Campbell, whose 15-year-old daughter Olivia was at the concert, told BBC radio.
The attack was the deadliest in Britain since July 7, 2005 when four suicide bombers inspired by Al-Qaeda attacked London’s transport system during rush hour, killing 52 people and wounding 700 more.
It revived memories of the November 2015 attack at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris in which armed men wearing explosive belts stormed in and killed 90 people.
That attack was also claimed by IS, as was one in March by a knifeman at the gates of the British parliament — although police downplayed that claim.

'Act of barbarity'
Queen Elizabeth II condemned the Manchester attack as an “act of barbarity” and observed a minute’s silence at a Buckingham Palace garden reception.
Trump said during a visit to Bethlehem: “So many young, beautiful, innocent people living and enjoying their lives murdered by evil losers.”
In a city famed globally for its musical traditions and football teams, showbusiness stars and teams expressed their horror at the carnage.
“We are deeply shocked by last night’s terrible events,” said Manchester United.
A support center for people caught up in the attack was set up at the Etihad Stadium, the home of their rivals Manchester City.
Britain’s third biggest city was hit in 1996 by a massive car bomb planted at a shopping center by Irish Republican Army paramilitaries which wounded more than 200 people.


US designates group that claimed Kashmir attack as terrorists

Updated 2 sec ago
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US designates group that claimed Kashmir attack as terrorists

  • Gunmen in April shot dead 26 people, almost all Hindus, in Pahalgam, a tourist hub in the Indian-administered side of divided Kashmir

WASHINGTON: The United States on Thursday designated as terrorists a shadowy group that claimed an April attack in Kashmir, which triggered Indian strikes on Pakistani territory.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio described The Resistance Front as a “front and proxy” of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a UN-designated terrorist group based in Pakistan.
The terrorist designation “demonstrates the Trump administration’s commitment to protecting our national security interests, countering terrorism, and enforcing President (Donald) Trump’s call for justice for the Pahalgam attack,” Rubio said in a statement.
Gunmen in April shot dead 26 people, almost all Hindus, in Pahalgam, a tourist hub in the Indian-administered side of divided Kashmir.
Little had been previously known about The Resistance Front, which claimed responsibility for the attack.
India designates TRF as a terrorist organization and the India-based Observer Research Foundation calls it “a smokescreen and an offshoot of LeT.”
Pakistan has denied responsibility for the attack.


US House passes landmark crypto bills in win for Trump

Updated 21 min 57 sec ago
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US House passes landmark crypto bills in win for Trump

  • It will now head to the Senate, where Republicans hold a thin majority

WASHINGTON: The US House passed landmark cryptocurrency bills on Thursday, delivering on the Trump administration’s embrace of the once-controversial industry.
US lawmakers easily passed the CLARITY Act, which establishes a clearer regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and other digital assets.
The bill is intended to clarify rules governing the industry and divides regulatory authority between the Securities and Exchange Commission  and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission .
It will now head to the Senate, where Republicans hold a thin majority.
House legislators also easily passed the GENIUS Act, which codifies the use of stablecoins — cryptocurrencies pegged to safe assets like the dollar. That bill was due to immediately go to Trump for his signature to become law.
The GENIUS Act was passed by the Senate last month and sets rules such as requiring issuers to have reserves of assets equal in value to that of their outstanding cryptocurrency.
The raft of legislation comes after years of suspicion against the crypto industry amid the belief that the sector, born out of the success of bitcoin, should be kept on a tight leash and away from mainstream investors.
But after crypto investors poured millions of dollars into his presidential campaign last year, Trump reversed his own doubts about the industry, even launching a Trump meme coin and other ventures as he prepared for his return to the White House.
Trump has, among other moves, appointed crypto advocate Paul Atkins to head the Securities and Exchange Commission .
He has also established a federal “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” aimed at auditing the government’s bitcoin holdings, which were mainly accumulated by law enforcement from judicial seizures.
The Republican-led House is also considering a bill it calls the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act that aims to block the issuance of a central bank digital currency  — a digital dollar issued by the US Federal Reserve.
Republicans argue that a CBDC could enable the federal government to monitor, track, and potentially control the financial transactions of private citizens, undermining privacy and civil liberties.
It would require a not-easily-won passage in the Senate before going to Trump for his signature.
An aborted effort to set the anti-CBDC bill aside caused a furor among a small group of Republicans and delayed the passage of the two other bills before a solution was found.


‘A trap’ — Asylum seekers arrested after attending US courts

Updated 25 min 39 sec ago
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‘A trap’ — Asylum seekers arrested after attending US courts

NEW YORK: In gloomy corridors outside a Manhattan courtroom, masked agents target and arrest migrants attending mandatory hearings — part of US President Donald Trump’s escalating immigration crackdown.
Trump, who campaigned on a pledge to deport many migrants, has encouraged authorities to be more aggressive as he seeks to hit his widely-reported target of one million deportations annually.
Since Trump’s return to the White House, Homeland Security agents have adopted the tactic of waiting outside immigration courts nationwide and arresting migrants as they leave at the end of asylum hearings.
Missing an immigration court hearing is a crime in some cases and can itself make migrants liable to be deported, leaving many with little choice but to attend and face arrest.
Armed agents with shields from different federal agencies loitered outside the court hearings in a tower block in central New York, holding paperwork with photographs of migrants to be targeted, an AFP correspondent saw this week.
The agents arrested almost a dozen migrants from different countries in just a few hours on the 12th floor of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building.
Brad Lander, a city official who was briefly detained last month by ICE  agents as he attempted to accompany a migrant targeted for removal, called the hearings “a trap.”
“It has the trappings of a judicial hearing, but it’s just a trap to have made them come in the first place,” he said Wednesday outside the building.
Lander recounted several asylum seekers being arrested by immigration officers including Carlos, a Paraguayan man who Lander said had an application pending for asylum under the Convention Against Torture — as well as a future court date.
“The judge carefully instructed him on how to prepare to bring his case to provide additional information about his interactions with the Paraguayan police and make his case under the global convention against torture for why he is entitled to asylum,” Lander said.
After his hearing, agents “without any identifying information or badges or warrants grabbed Carlos, and then quickly moved him toward the back stairwell,” he said.
Lander, a Democrat, claimed the agents were threatening and that they pushed to the ground Carlos’s sister who had accompanied him to the hearing.
The White House said recently that “the brave men and women of ICE are under siege by deranged Democrats — but undeterred in their mission.”
“Every day, these heroes put their own lives on the line to get the worst of the worst... off our streets and out of our neighborhoods.”
Back at the building in lower Manhattan, Lander said that “anyone who comes down here to observe could see... the rule of law is being eroded.”


US prosecutor in Epstein, Maxwell cases abruptly fired

Updated 38 min 57 sec ago
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US prosecutor in Epstein, Maxwell cases abruptly fired

WASHINGTON: A US federal prosecutor who handled the case of notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and is the daughter of a prominent critic of President Donald Trump has been abruptly fired, US media reported.
Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, was dismissed on Wednesday from her position as an assistant US attorney in Manhattan, several major US outlets reported.
The Justice Department declined to confirm Comey’s firing to AFP, saying it would have “no comment on personnel.”
Politico published a message Comey, who spent 10 years in the US attorney’s office, sent to her former colleagues in which she said she had been “summarily fired” by the Justice Department with no reason given.
She also encouraged them not to fall prey to “fear.”
“If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decisions of those who remain,” Comey said. “Do not let that happen. Fear is the tool of a tyrant.”
Comey’s dismissal comes a week after the Justice Department confirmed it had opened an unspecified criminal investigation into her father, a long-time Trump adversary.
It also comes amid mounting pressure on Trump to release material from the probe into Epstein, who committed suicide in a New York prison in 2019 after being charged with sex trafficking.
Comey was among the prosecutors who handled the case involving the wealthy financier, which never went to trial because of his death.
She also prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell, the only former Epstein associate who has been criminally charged in connection with his activities.
Trump is facing the most serious split in his loyal right-wing base since he returned to power over claims his administration is covering up lurid details of Epstein’s crimes to protect rich and powerful figures.
The Trump-supporting far-right has long latched on to the scandal, claiming the existence of a still-secret list of Epstein’s powerful clients and that the late financier was in fact murdered in his cell as part of a cover-up.
The Justice Department and FBI said this month that there was no evidence that Epstein kept a “client list” or was blackmailing powerful figures.
Comey’s father, the former FBI chief, has had a contentious history with Trump dating back to his first term in the White House.
Trump fired Comey in 2017 as the then-FBI chief was leading an investigation into whether any members of the Trump campaign had colluded with Moscow to sway the 2016 presidential vote, in which the Republican beat Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Since taking office in January, Trump has taken a number of punitive measures against his perceived enemies, stripping former officials of their security clearances and protective details, targeting law firms involved in past cases against him and pulling federal funding from universities.


Slashed US aid showing impact, as Congress codifies cuts

Updated 46 min 14 sec ago
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Slashed US aid showing impact, as Congress codifies cuts

WASHINGTON: The United States’ destruction of a warehouse worth of emergency food that had spoiled has drawn outrage, but lawmakers and aid workers say it is only one effect of President Donald Trump’s abrupt slashing of foreign assistance.
The Senate early Thursday approved nearly $9 billion in cuts to foreign aid as well as public broadcasting, formalizing a radical overhaul of spending that Trump first imposed with strokes of his pen on taking office nearly six months ago.
US officials confirmed that nearly 500 tons of high-nutrition biscuits, meant to keep alive malnourished children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, were incinerated after they passed their expiration date in a warehouse in Dubai.
Lawmakers of the rival Democratic Party said they had warned about the food in March. Senator Tim Kaine said that the inaction in feeding children “really exposes the soul” of the Trump administration.
Michael Rigas, the deputy secretary of state for management, acknowledged to Kaine that blame lay with the shuttering of the US Agency for International Development , which was merged into the State Department after drastic cuts.
“I think that this was just a casualty of the shutdown of USAID,” Rigas said.
The Atlantic magazine, which first reported the episode, said that the United States bought the biscuits near the end of Biden administration for around $800,000 and that the Trump administration’s burning of the food was costing taxpayers another $130,000.
For aid workers, the biscuit debacle was just one example of how drastic and sudden cuts have aggravated the impact of the aid shutdown.
Kate Phillips-Barrasso, vice president for global policy and advocacy at Mercy Corps, said that large infrastructure projects were shut down immediately, without regard to how to finish them.
“This really was yanking the rug out, or turning the the spigot off, overnight,” she said.
She pointed to the termination of a USAID-backed Mercy Corps project to improve water and sanitation in the turbulent east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Work began in 2020 and was scheduled to end in September 2027.
“Infrastructure projects are not things where 75 percent is ok. It’s either done or it’s not,” she said.
The Republican-led Senate narrowly approved the package, which needs a final green light from the House of Representatives, that, in the words of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, will rescind funding for “$9 billion worth of crap.”
The bill includes ending all $437 million the United States would have given to several UN bodies including the children’s agency UNICEF and the UN Development Programme. It also pulls $2.5 billion from development assistance.
Under pressure from moderate Republicans, the package backs off from ending PEPFAR, the anti-HIV/AIDS initiative credited with saving 25 million lives since it was launched by former president George W. Bush more than two decades ago.
Republicans and the Trump-launched Department of Government Efficiency, initially led by tycoon Elon Musk, have highlighted spending by USAID on issues that are controversial in the United States, saying it does not serve US interests.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said that the Republicans were getting rid of “egregious abuses.”
“We can’t fund transgender operas in Peru with US taxpayer dollars,” Johnson told reporters, an apparent reference to a US grant under the Biden administration for the staging of an opera in Colombia that featured a transgender protagonist.
The aid cuts come a week after the State Department laid off more than 1,300 employees after Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended or merged several offices, including those on climate change, refugees and human rights.
Rubio called it a “very deliberate step to reorganize the State Department to be more efficient and more focused.”
Senate Democrats issued a scathing report that accused the Trump administration of ceding global leadership to China, which has been increasing spending on diplomacy and disseminating its worldview.
The rescissions vote “will be met with cheers in Beijing, which is already celebrating America’s retreat from the world under President Trump,” said Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.