Daniel Wallis
Pentagon: US team going to Haiti to assess needs
A team of U.S. security and law enforcement experts is traveling to Haiti to determine what assistance Washington can provide following the assassination of the Haitian president last week, the Pentagon said on Sunday. “Today, an inter-agency team largely from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are heading down to Haiti right now to see what we can to do help in the investigative process,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told “Fox News Sunday.” “That’s really where our energies are best applied right now – in helping them get their arms around investigating this incident and figuring out who’s culpable … and how best to hold them accountable,” Kirby said in the interview. President Joe Biden will be briefed by the team when it returns and “then make decisions about the way forwa...
Leaked testimony from Haiti suspects says plan was to arrest, not kill president
A group of Colombians and Haitian Americans suspected of assassinating Haitian President Jovenel Moise told investigators they were there to arrest him, not kill him, the Miami Herald and a person familiar with the matter said on Sunday. Moise was shot dead early on Wednesday at his Port-au-Prince home by what Haitian authorities say was a unit of assassins made up of 26 Colombians and two Haitian Americans, plunging the troubled Caribbean nation into deeper turmoil. The murder and uncertainty about who hatched the plot is the latest in a succession of blows to hit the struggling country, which has appealed for international help. Washington has so far rebuffed Haiti’s request for troops, though a senior U.S. official said on Sunday that Washington was sending a technical team to assess th...
Lobbyist says Myanmar junta wants to improve relations with the West, spurn China
An Israeli-Canadian lobbyist hired by Myanmar’s junta said on Saturday that the generals are keen to leave politics after their coup and seek to improve relations with the United States and distance themselves from China. Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli military intelligence official who has previously represented Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Sudan’s military rulers, said Myanmar’s generals also want to repatriate Rohingya Muslims who fled to neighboring Bangladesh. The United Nations says more than 50 demonstrators have been killed since the Feb. 1 coup when the military overthrew and detained elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy party won polls in November by a landslide. On Friday, a U.N. special envoy urged the Security Council to take action against t...
Joe Biden nominates veteran diplomats for top State posts
Democratic President-elect Joe Biden on Saturday nominated U.S. foreign policy veteran Wendy Sherman, a key negotiator of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, to be the No. 2 official at the State Department. Biden also nominated Victoria Nuland, a retired career foreign service officer who was the top U.S. diplomat for Europe, NATO ambassador and State Department spokeswoman, to be Under Secretary for Political Affairs, effectively the third-ranking U.S. diplomat. Sherman, who has a masters degree in social work, was the State Department counselor from 1997 to 2001, a period when she was also policy coordinator on North Korea. From 1993 to 1996 she served as assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs. Because of her association with the Iran deal, which was fiercely opposed by Repub...
U.S. agents search Nashville blast site, seeking clues behind Christmas explosion
Police and federal agents were scouring the charred site of a Christmas Day explosion in Nashville on Saturday, trying to determine how and why a motor home blew up and injured three people in the heart of America’s country music capital. The fiery blast, heard from miles away, destroyed several vehicles, damaged more than 40 businesses and left a trail of glass shards around the area. The motor home, parked on a downtown street of Tennessee’s largest city, exploded at dawn on Friday moments after police responding to reports of gunfire noticed the recreational vehicle and heard an automated message emanating from it warning of a bomb. The means of detonation and whether anyone was inside the RV when it blew up were not immediately known, but investigators were examining what they believed...
Moderna, McKesson, U.S. Army general begin rolling out new coronavirus vaccine
Distribution of Moderna Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine to more than 3,700 locations in the United States has begun, vastly widening the rollout started last week by Pfizer Inc, U.S Army General Gustave Perna said on Saturday. Moderna has already moved vaccines from its manufacturing plants to warehouses operated by distributor McKesson Corp where they are being packed into containers and loaded on to trucks on Saturday, Perna said during a news conference. Trucks will set out on Sunday and shipments will start reaching healthcare providers as soon as Monday, he said. The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved an emergency use authorization for Moderna’s vaccine, the second COVID-19 vaccine to be approved. The jab developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech SE was approved Dec. 11....
