After migrant boat tragedy, Senegal's president vows sanctions against people smugglers

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After migrant boat tragedy, Senegal's president vows sanctions against people smugglers

2024-09-12 19:44 Last Updated At：19:50

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — President Bassirou Diomaye Faye of Senegal promised severe sanctions against people smugglers during his visit on Wednesday to the town of Mbour, the departure point of a boat that capsized on Sunday, killing at least 37 people.

“We will relentlessly track down and punish with the greatest severity the actors who organize these convoys of death,” Faye said.

Mbour, a coastal city in Senegal nearly 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of the capital Dakar, is one of many places from which young Senegalese people embark on a treacherous journey to Europe, trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean in pirogues, artisanal fishing boats.

One of these boats heading to Europe left Mbour on Sunday afternoon before capsizing a few miles (kilometers) off the coast.

There were 89 people on board, Faye said, and at least 37 died. Only three survivors have been found so far.

“Your life is of inestimable value," Faye told Mbour's residents on Wednesday. “You have a central role to play in the future of our country. We are determined to offer you real and dignified opportunities, here, at home, so that this sea never again becomes a cemetery for our children.”

The French Navy is continuing to search for other bodies, and the captain and owner of the pirogue was arrested after he turned himself in on Monday.

In recent years, the number of migrants leaving West Africa through Senegal has surged with many fleeing conflict, poverty and a lack of jobs. Most head to the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the coast of West Africa, which is used as a stepping stone to continental Europe.

Last month, the Senegalese army said it had arrested 453 migrants and “members of smuggling networks” as part of a 12-day operation patrolling the coastline. More than half of those arrested were Senegalese nationals, the army said.

In July, a boat carrying 300 migrants, mostly from Gambia and Senegal, capsized off Mauritania. More than a dozen died and at least 150 others went missing.

The Atlantic route from West Africa to the Canary Islands is one of the deadliest in the world. While there is no accurate death toll because of the lack of information on departures from West Africa, the Spanish migrant rights group Walking Borders estimates the victims are in the thousands this year alone.

Migrant vessels that get lost or run into problems often vanish in the Atlantic, with some drifting across the ocean for months until they are found in the Caribbean and Latin America carrying only human remains.

Election 2024 Latest: Trump and Harris resume campaigning after apparent assassination attempt

2024-09-18 04:49 Last Updated At：04:50

The presidential campaign is moving forward after a second apparent attempt on Donald Trump ’s life over the weekend. Trump was heading to Michigan on Tuesday for a town hall while Vice President Kamala Harris answered questions at a forum for Black journalists in Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, authorities are investigating the apparent assassination attempt in Florida. Trump was safe after the incident in Florida and praised the Secret Service for protecting him but didn't shy away from blaming his opponents. The Republican nominee claimed without evidence that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris ' comment that he is a threat to democracy had inspired the attempt on Sunday.

The man suspected in the incident, Ryan Wesley Routh, camped outside the golf course in West Palm Beach with food and a rifle for nearly 12 hours, according to court documents filed Monday. Additional and more serious charges are possible as the investigation continues and prosecutors seek an indictment from a grand jury.

Here is the Latest:

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida joined multiple Republican senators in calling for additional resources for Trump’s security detail after an apparent second assassination attempt against the former president in West Palm Beach on Sunday.

In the letter, Scott and seven other Republicans are requesting that acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe give Trump the same level of protection as a sitting president. Scott criticized the Secret Service in a statement, saying the agency “has failed to address the security failures” after an attempt on Trump's life at a Pennsylvania rally in July.

After the NABJ interview on Tuesday, Harris dropped in on a voter registration training for students that her campaign hosted at the Community College of Philadelphia.

She thanked the student leaders for helping her campaign and acknowledged that they could be spending their time on other things.

“Don’t put aside your studies. Shower from time to time. Eat vegetables,” the vice president said.

Tuesday is National Voter Registration Day and Harris’ campaign has launched a week of events to encourage students and young people to sign up to vote.

Brother-and-sister musical stars Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz on Tuesday, releasing a video on social media calling on people to register to vote and cast early ballots.

“We are voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, because they are fighting to protect our reproductive freedom, our planet, and our democracy,” Eilish said.

“We can’t let extremists control our lives, our freedoms and our future,” O’Connell added. “The only way to stop them and the dangerous Project 2025 agenda is to vote and elect Kamala Harris.”

The endorsement is another example of how the pop music world is lining up behind the Democratic ticket. Taylor Swift endorsed Harris and Walz soon after Harris debated with Donald Trump on Sept. 10.

The interview with the vice president, which lasted about 45 minutes, stood in stark contrast to the often contentious and bombastic 30-minute exchange that transpired during Trump’s NABJ appearance.

Whereas Trump called the reporters interviewing him “rude,” and “nasty” and denounced their questions as “horrible,” Harris referred to the reporters who pressed her as “esteemed journalists.”

The crowd was inaudible throughout the Tuesday interview with Harris. In July, Trump’s comments were often met with laughter, shock and confusion from the room, which largely consisted of student journalists and media professionals outside political news.

The vice president said Tuesday she has confidence in the U.S. Secret Service after another apparent attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Harris said she feels safe, but she understands that not everyone does amid violent rhetoric about immigrants and others.

“Yes, I feel safe. I have Secret Service protection, but that doesn’t change my perspective on the importance of fighting for the safety of everybody in our country,” she said.

Harris said she has spoken with Trump after an apparent attempt to assassinate him at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday.

Harris said she checked in on Trump “to see if he’s OK.”

“I told him what I have said publicly, there’s no place for political violence in our country.”

Federal prosecutors say a man waited roughly 12 hours outside his golf course and then stuck the barrel of a gun toward the golf course. The U.S. Secret Service fired on the man who fled and was later arrested. Trump was unharmed.

Harris stressed she supported acknowledging history and working to address victims of racist policies like redlining but declined to embrace efforts by some congressional Democrats for reparations.

“I think Congress will have the ability to do this work,” Harris said. She didn’t endorse any potential executive order on reparations and did not say the word “reparations.”

Harris said Tuesday that her heart breaks for Springfield, Ohio, after threats of violence following baseless comments amplified by Republican Donald Trump about immigrants kidnapping and consuming people’s pets.

“You have that kind of microphone in front of you you really ought to understand at a very deep level that your words have meaning,” she said.

Trump made the comments during the presidential debate. Days later, schools were shut down and government buildings closed because of threats of violence.

While speaking during her NABJ appearance in Philadelphia, Harris said the latest Israel-Hamas war has to end and a ceasefire and hostage deal must get done. She added that far too many “innocent Palestinians have been killed.”

Harris said she believes a two-state solution is the best solution, even if it doesn’t seem feasible right now. She said the goal is to ensure “the Israelis have security and Palestinians in equal measure have security, have self-determination and dignity.”

When asked whether she’d change policy in the region, she stressed the ceasefire must be done.

Harris said it’s important “not to operate from the assumption that Black men are in anybody’s pocket.” She said, like any voting bloc, she needs to “earn their vote.”

She added that she was “working to earn the vote, not assuming I’m going to have it because I’m Black.”

The vice president’s extended and measured comments at the start of her NABJ appearance were received in a quiet venue at the WHYY Philadelphia studio. There was no interjection or reaction from the crowd at the outset. It was a marked contrast from the opening remarks during Trump’s July NABJ interview, which began with a contentious exchange at the beginning of the event.

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is sitting down with a panel of reporters hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia.

Harris was asked whether Americans are better off than they were three years ago.

The vice president said the Biden administration inherited a difficult economy.

Trump is re-upping his threat against election workers, donors and others as he continues to stoke unfounded fears about the integrity of the 2024 vote, posting again on his social media site that, “Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

Trump had posted the same message, which begins with the words, “CEASE & DESIST,” on his Truth Social site earlier this month.

In the post, he warns that he and others will be “watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

There is no evidence of the cheating he continues to insist took place in 2020, even though dozens of courts, Republican election officials and his own government said Biden won fairly.

Trump, in the post goes on to say the 2024 vote “will be under the closest professional scrutiny” and that: “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.”

“Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials,” he adds.

Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday that the death of a young Georgia mother who died after waiting 20 hours for a hospital to treat her complications from an abortion pill shows the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.

Amber Thurman’s death, first reported Monday by ProPublica, occurred just two weeks after Georgia’s strict abortion ban was enacted in 2022 following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn nationwide abortion rights. Trump appointed three of the justices who made that decision and has repeatedly said he believes states should decide abortion laws.

“This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school,” Harris said in a statement. “Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again. Survivors of rape and incest are being told they cannot make decisions about what happens next to their bodies. And now women are dying. These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.”

▶ Read more here.

Voto Latino registered more people in the days immediately after President Joe Biden announced he would not be the Democratic presidential candidate than the organization registered for the entire month of July in previous presidential elections.

Chief Program and Research Officer Ameer Patel said the organization registered more than 50,000 people from July 21 until the end of the month. By comparison, the nonprofit advocacy group registered 2,252 people in July 2016 and 25,156 in July 2020.

Two of the states with the most activity were Texas and Florida, Patel said.

Issues the organization is watching include voter purges, said founder Maria Teresa Kumar, who added that dropping people from voting rolls in smaller communities could have large impacts. “This was not on our radar,” she said.

More than 6 in 10 Latino voters supported Biden in 2020, according to AP VoteCast, and 35% supported former President Donald Trump.

However, a July poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that only about 4 in 10 Latinos said they were somewhat or very optimistic about the future of the Democratic Party, and about one-quarter said the same about the Republican Party.

Vice President Kamala Harris says she was “briefed immediately after” Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump and that she is grateful “he’s OK.”

In an interview recorded on Monday with a Spanish-language radio host Chiquibaby, Harris echoed her past sentiments about the attack, condemning “violence of any kind.”

“We have to have civil dialogue, and be able to talk through our differences,” Harris said. “And violence has no place.”

The interview was airing Tuesday on a show that is syndicated on 100-plus Spanish-language radio stations.

The vice president also talked about her mother, the late Shyamala Gopalan, who was born in India, being an immigrant to the U.S. She blamed Trump for helping to derail a bipartisan border security plan in Congress and detailed her previously announced plans to use tax incentives to encourage first-time home purchases and combat grocery “price gouging” to help tame inflation.

Hours after an apparent attempt on Donald Trump’s life over the weekend, Elon Musk took to his social platform X to post a thinking emoji and a comment that “no one is even trying to assassinate” the Democratic president and vice president.

Amid anti-Muslim riots in the U.K., which were ginned up by a false rumor, Musk declared that “civil war is inevitable” in the country.

And when an anonymous X user distorted data to claim a surge in sketchy voter registrations in three U.S. states, Musk amplified the false post and called it “extremely concerning.”

All three posts sparked quick backlash from public officials who called Musk’s words irresponsible and misleading. As his words amass millions of views and thousands of shares, they also illustrate the ability of one of the world’s most influential people to spread fear, hate and misinformation during fraught political moments around the world.

▶ Read more here.

The election director in Cobb County, an Atlanta suburb where votes will be fiercely contested in this year’s presidential race, recently organized a five-hour training session. The focus wasn’t solely on the nuts and bolts of running this year’s election. Instead, it brought together election staff and law enforcement to strategize on how to keep workers safe and the process of voting and ballot-counting secure.

Having a local sheriff’s deputy at early voting locations and panic buttons that connect poll managers to a local 911 dispatcher are among the added security steps the office is taking this year.

Tate Fall, Cobb County’s election director, said she was motivated to act after hearing one of her poll workers describe being confronted during the state’s presidential primary in March by an agitated voter who the worker noticed was carrying a gun. The situation ended peacefully, but the poll worker was shaken.

▶ Read more about what officials are doing across the country

Florida law enforcement will launch a state-level criminal probe of the apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday.

DeSantis told reporters that the “suspect is believed to (backslash)have committed state law violations.” DeSantis’ announcement comes a day after Ryan Routh was charged with federal firearms crimes.

Routh did not fire any shots, never had Trump in his line of sight and sped away after an agent who spotted him shot in his direction, officials said. He was arrested in a neighboring county.

Tuesday is National Voter Registration Day and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are kicking off a week of action to encourage young voters in battleground states to sign up to vote in the Nov. 5 election.

Walz has events on Tuesday in Macon, Georgia, and Atlanta, followed by a rally in Asheville, North Carolina, while his wife, Gwen, appears in Las Vegas.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and actor Jane Fonda are among a group of high-profile Harris supporters who are set to participate in the registration drive.

More than 130 voter registration events will be held on college campuses — at basketball tournaments, football games and more — in the handful of states where Harris and Walz and the Republican presidential ticket of former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, are focusing their campaigns, the Harris-Walz campaign said.

The campaign will also have a presence at historically Black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions, including setting up kiosks to assist students with registration.