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Sunday, June 11, 2017

Melania Trump finally moves into White House

The First Lady has officially moved to the White House after son Barron finished his school year in New York.

Melania Trump tweeted a message on Sunday evening after travelling to the White House with 11-year-old Barron.

In her tweet, she wrote: "Looking forward to the memories we'll make in our new home! #Movingday."

Image:The first lady and son Barron had been living at Trump Tower in New York

It was accompanied with a photograph of the Washington Monument seen from what was apparently the Red Room in the famous building.

Mrs Trump has been living in Trump Tower, New York, until the end of her son's school year. Barron will attend a private school in Maryland later this year.


President Trump spent the weekend at his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

It comes after the White House denied reports that Mr Trump told Theresa May he does not want to go ahead with his controversial state visit to the UK if he will be faced by large-scale demonstrations.

The Guardian newspaper reported that the US President wanted to be sure he had the support of the British public before travelling.

His comments were said to have been made in a telephone call in "recent weeks".

Image:The First Family arrive at Joint Base Andrews before travelling on to the White House

A White House spokesman said: "The president has tremendous respect for Prime Minister May. That subject never came up on the call."

Downing Street has refused to comment, saying that the invitation - given by Mrs May on behalf of the Queen - remains unchanged.


US-backed forces seize second Raqqa district from Islamic State

US-backed forces have seized a western district of Raqqa, Islamic State's stronghold in Syria, following two days of fighting.

In a statement, Syrian Democratic Forces said their fighters had "liberated the neighbourhood of al Romaniya on the western front of Raqqa, after two days of continued clashes".

It follows the capture of an eastern part of the city two days ago.

Islamic State has held Raqqa since 2014 - and the city is considered the group's 'capital'.

The fighting - backed by bombing from the US-led coalition - left at least 12 IS jihadists dead in al Romaniya, the SDF said.

Image:Female members of the Syrian Democratic Forces stand just outside of Raqqa ahead of their advance on the city

The alliance captured the eastern neighbourhood of al Mishlab within a day of first entering Raqqa.

The SDF, a group of Kurdish and Arab militias supported aerially from allies including the UK, spent seven months surrounding the city before finally entering it last Tuesday.

The coalition believes the city in central northern Syria is defended by 3,000 to 4,000 jihadists.

Fighters from the US-backed alliance, meanwhile, continued to battle to dislodge jihadists from a key military base north of Raqqa.

TURNING PAIN INTO HOPE

Angel was 11 the last time her mother tried to kill her. She remembers the handful of rat poison pellets, the urging: Take this. She screamed until a neighbor rushed over and pulled her away.

That was a decade ago, before the counseling, and now Angel’s mother is bending over her shoulder, pouring her a cup of black tea. They share a bed, a concrete house without electricity and a history that horrified the world.

Over a hundred days in 1994, genocide devastated Rwanda, an East African country the size of Maryland. The assailants claimed roughly 800,000 lives and raped an estimated 250,000 women, which, according to one charity’s count, produced up to 20,000 babies.

Angel is part of this generation in the shadows. These young people are now stepping into adulthood, coming to terms with an identity no parent would wish on a child. Yet they are defying expectations that tragedy would define their lives.

Historically, such children often met an early death. Thousands of Chinese women endured sexual violence during the Rape of Nanking in 1937, for example, but none publicly acknowledged raising a Japanese soldier’s child, as far as historians can tell. Reports from the time suggest that victims who became pregnant widely committed infanticide.

A UNICEF study on the “war babies” of Bosnia’s 1992-1995 conflict, meanwhile, concluded that many were probably abandoned or killed by their mothers. The number of survivors remains unknown.

In Rwanda, data from support groups provide a clearer picture. The “children of killers,” as they are often disparaged, tend to live in poverty, facing higher rates of HIV and domestic abuse than their peers.

But that’s not the whole story.

“We hear everyone’s lives are destroyed, that they’re the walking dead,” said Dara Kay Cohen, a Harvard University professor who studies sexual assault in conflict. “Then you talk to people and hear there’s this hopeful underbelly.”

Researchers are just starting to explore how children overcome such trauma. The Rwandan government, tasked with rebuilding a shattered nation, laid out no formal policy to help those conceived in the mass rape.

Ingvill Mochmann, founder of the International Network for Interdisciplinary Research on Children Born of War, recently published a report summarizing a decade of studies on the effects of war on children.

“Many have coped fairly well with their lives,” Mochmann wrote. “The interesting question is — what makes the difference?”

Interviews with three families, just before the massacre’s 23rd anniversary, offer a clue.
Angel and Jacqueline

Sunlight streams through Angel’s window, catching her metallic hoop earrings. She sits at a wooden table next to her mother, Jacqueline. They split a loaf of bread for breakfast and wash it down with tea. Jacqueline sprinkles brown sugar into their cups.

“Murakoze,” Angel tells her in Kinyarwanda. Thank you.

They live together under a tin roof in a rural village, where a Catholic church pays their monthly rent, the equivalent of $5. The cracked walls are painted turquoise. A mosquito net dangles above their full-size bed. A rooster outside crows.

Angel is 22 now, with a quick grin and braids down her back. She was born HIV positive, so she takes free pills from the government to stay healthy. She has just finished high school and is waiting for the test score that will shape her future.

High marks would net her a scholarship. The results will appear online in a couple of weeks. Angel and her mother will pray before heading to the Internet cafe.

Tourism is her dream career. Her backup plan is selling tomatoes.

“We don’t have money,” she explains.

Angel learned early how she came to be. Jacqueline would tell her: You’re not my real daughter.

“Whenever she would go somewhere, and if I asked her to let me come with her, she always refused and locked me inside,” Angel says softly through an interpreter. “She would also not permit me to play with other kids.”

Jacqueline tears up when she thinks of this.

Before the genocide, she was someone else’s mom. They were in fourth and sixth grade, her girls. They complained about bullies hounding them for being Tutsis, a minority ethnic group. Jacqueline was on her way to Kigali, the nation’s capital, to secure spots for them in a new school when the violence started. Rwandan government leaders had commanded the majority population, the Hutus, to exterminate the Tutsis. Neighbors slaughtered neighbors. Colleagues murdered colleagues. Hutu fighters found Jacqueline hiding in a Catholic school and took turns raping her. She remembers praying to die.

But three months passed, and a Tutsi rebel army overthrew the government, and there she was, following a U.N. soldier out of the rubble. Her husband and children were dead. She now had HIV and a baby on the way.

Jacqueline once poured soap and hair dye into Angel’s bottle and decided to drink the toxic mix, too. She wanted everything to go black. But instead they vomited, and Jacqueline reluctantly decided to keep going.

She would hug Angel, then beat her. Affection and rage, affection and rage. This pattern held until they started therapy in 2007, run by an organization called Foundation Rwanda. (The Washington Post agreed to a request from the foundation and the families interviewed for this article to withhold their last names, so they can avoid discrimination and harassment.)

The charity organized weekly support groups, and the other moms inspired Jacqueline to become a Christian. She began to feel that Angel had come from God.

Foundation Rwanda paid Angel’s school tuition through graduation. Which has brought her to this point, this limbo.

She mostly hangs around her house, except to buy food or refill her medicine or go to church. She recently broke up with her boyfriend of five years — he wanted to get married, and she didn’t want to tell him about her HIV.

Beyond her plank fence, the hills burst with banana trees. Adobe homes dot the horizon — tiny from here, like Monopoly pieces. Men play checkers outside a shuttered dive bar. Someone’s cow moos.

Angel is comfortable in her universe, but she is curious about what else is out there. She waits for the test score.

Trump says Comey leaks are the real issue, in Sunday morning Twitter flurry

President Trump fired a preemptive Twitter strike ahead of the Sunday morning news shows, saying former FBI Director James Comey’s admission to a Senate panel that he leaked his own notes of a discussion with the president are the real issue.

"I believe the James Comey leaks will be far more prevalent than anyone ever thought possible. Totally illegal? Very 'cowardly!' " Trump tweeted.


He was referring to Comey’s testimony that he sent an associate a memo he wrote about a one-on-one talk with Trump; the details emerged in The New York Times.

Trump and his legal team already have denied certain parts of Comey’s allegations, including that he sought Comey’s “loyalty” months before he fired him from the FBI.

The move to focus on leaks comes as the Russia investigation proceeds on multiple tracks – one investigation conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller, and others being led by Capitol Hill committees including the Senate intelligence panel that heard from Comey last week.

Trump, as he tries to focus on infrastructure and other policy goals, also tweeted Sunday about the economy.

"The #FakeNews MSM doesn't report the great economic news since Election Day. #DOW up 16%. #NASDAQ up 19.5%. Drilling & energy sector...,” he wrote. “...way up. Regulations way down. 600,000+ new jobs added. Unemployment down to 4.3%. Business and economic enthusiasm way up- record levels!”

Gaddafi's son Saif al Islam is released from prison in Libya

Colonel Gaddafi's son, Saif al Islam, has been released from prison by rebels in western Libya.

He was being held by an armed group controlling the town of Zintan since November 2011.

The Abu Bakr al-Sadiq Brigade said Saif al Islam was released on Friday, "the 14th day of the month of Ramadan" under an amnesty agreed by the parliament based in the east.

Image:Saif al Islam soon after his capture in November 2011

According to reports from Libya, the son of the dead dictator is now with his relatives in the city of Al-Bayda, where he is expected to make a speech to the nation.

Saif, who studied at the London School of Economics, is the most high profile of Colonel Gaddafi's eight children.

He was captured by rebels as he tried to flee to neighbouring Niger in November 2011 when Tripoli was taken by opposition fighters.

Image:Saif al Islam at his trial in Zintan in 2014

He was sentenced to death by a court in Tripoli two years ago and remains on the wanted list of the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Colonel Gaddafi was captured and killed in October 2011 after he was found hiding near the city of Sirte.

Since then, Libya has struggled to establish a national government, with armed groups in the east and west challenging the Tripoli authority's government.

George Osborne says Theresa May is a 'dead woman walking'

George Osborne has branded the Prime Minister "a dead woman walking".

In a withering attack on Theresa May, who sacked him as chancellor on her arrival in Downing Street last year, Mr Osborne said it was simply a question of "how long she is going to remain on death row".

He predicted she could be out of office as early as the middle of next week.

Image:Theresa May and her husband Philip arrive at St Andrew's Church in Sonning, Berkshire

Tory MP Anna Soubry also said Mrs May's position in the long-term was "untenable", but argued she should not quit now because of the need for stability.

Ms Soubry told Sky News' Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme: "She will have to go, but not for some time."

The speculation over the PM's future came as she moved to shore up her precarious position following the loss of her Commons majority at the election.

:: Live updates - General Election fallout

However, this was dealt an early blow after Downing Street mistakenly announced a deal had been reached with the Democratic Unionists to prop up Mrs May's minority Tory government.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn, buoyed by Labour's showing at the polls, said it was "quite possible" there would be another election this year and that his party was "ready to fight".

Earlier, Mr Osborne, who is now editor of the London Evening Standard, told BBC1's The Andrew Marr Show: "Theresa May is dead woman walking. It is just how long she is going to remain on death row.

"I think we will know very shortly. We could easily get to the middle of next week and it all collapses for her."

Asked what he thought of Mr Osborne's comments, former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said: "I don't think anything at all of what George Osborne says. I make it a rule."

Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said he and other senior colleagues had told the PM she would need to adopt a more collective approach after seeing her majority swept away.

Will the GCC crisis undermine the Palestinian cause?

The current Qatar-Gulf crisis has offered Israel a golden opportunity to normalise its presence in the region, undermine the Palestinian cause and deliver a diplomatic blow to the Islamic Resistance movement, Hamas, analysts say.

Under the pretext of fighting "terrorism", the anti-Hamas, anti-political Islam coalition seems to be emerging with the Saudi-led bloc and Israel at its heart, they added.

Researcher and expert on Israeli affairs, Antoine Shalhat, believes that Israel's rapid adoption of the Saudi position confirms that the two countries share Israel's vision on regional developments and the Palestinian cause.

Shalhat told Al Jazeera that Israel is hoping to make political gains from the Gulf crisis and the blockade on Qatar by weakening Hamas and undermining its influence in the Gaza Strip, and demonising it in the Arab world under the pretext of "terrorism".

He added that the Saudi attack on Hamas and its portrayal of the movement as a "terrorist organisation" serves the Israeli agenda and is consistent with Israel's goal to eliminate the Palestinian cause.

On June 5, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain announced they were cutting diplomatic ties with Qatar for its support for "terrorism".

Along with severing diplomatic ties, the Riyadh-led blockade was imposed against Doha. Saudi, which shares the only land border with Qatar, shut the crossing and stopped goods being transported to its gas-rich neighbour. Saudi, UAE and Bahrain also closed their airspace to flights to and from Qatar, forcing airlines to remove Doha from their list of destinations.

Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir also said Qatar needed to end its support for Hamas before ties with other Arab Gulf states could be restored. Hamas responded to the statements saying they "constitute a shock for our Palestinian people and the Arab and Islamic nations", and that the remarks gave Israel an excuse "to carry out more violations against the Palestinian people".

Analysts say Israel, which has only signed peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, stands to benefit most from the Qatar-Gulf crisis.

Writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz, commentator Amos Harel said that the Gulf crisis "will serve to undermine Hamas and redraw regional policies in accordance with the Israeli visions as Israel seeks to normalise its relations with the Arab states while isolating the Palestinian question".

READ MORE: Israel, Saudi, UAE team up in anti-Qatar lobbying move

Following the crisis, Israeli officials' repeated statements centred on fighting "terrorism" and hopes for "cooperation" with the Gulf states on security concerns.

"The Arab states who broke off diplomatic relations with Qatar didn't do so because of Israel, nor … because of the Palestinian issue. They did it because of their own concerns about radical Islamic terror," Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli defence minister, said at the Israeli parliament on June 6.

"There can be no doubt that this opens many opportunities for cooperation in the war against terror. The state of Israel is more than open to such cooperation. The ball is now in their court," he added.

Eran Zinger, Arab and Middle East correspondent for Radio Israel, believes that Israel is in need of Qatar's mediation to deal with some of the pricklier issues in the Hamas-administered Gaza Strip, such as funds for reconstruction.

The Gaza Strip, a small enclave that is home to about two million residents, has been under an Israeli blockade for more than a decade. It has witnessed three Israeli assaults that have resulted in the destruction of essential infrastructure and the impoverishment of its residents. In the face of the Israeli siege and its occupation of Gaza, Qatar has been one of the biggest financial contributors to the strip's reconstruction.

Zinger told Al Jazeera that in spite of official Israeli statements that support Saudi Arabia and oppose Qatar and Hamas, Tel Aviv fears that there could be widespread instability in the region if the situation between Riyadh and Doha deteriorates further.