A Chinese military supply ship has made its first transfer from a civilian vessel, Chinese media say. Routine though that may sound, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported that the mid-November operation near the southeast coast kicks off a bigger program to resupply naval ships without requiring a return to shore.   Improved at-sea resupply capacity in turn will enable the People’s Liberation Army Navy better to control tracts of disputed waterways in East Asia and operate in other parts of the world, particularly the Indian Ocean, analysts believe.   Leaders from Vietnam to the United States would watch warily as China – which lacks far-flung maritime bases – bolsters its resupply fleet  after adding a list of other hardware to the navy.   “What it would mean is that China aims to diversify its means of supplying its naval vessels and to consolidate its control of the region, of the maritime domain,” said Yun Sun, East Asia Program senior associate at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington.   “We all know the Chinese navy is not just looking at the coastal area,” Sun added. “They are looking at the blue water navy, so in that sense their ambition …

One person is confirmed dead and the toll is likely to rise after a volcano began erupting Monday afternoon off New Zealand’s North Island, one of the country’s two main islands. While several people are still missing and some of the injured have been transported to the area hospitals, emergency teams say it is too dangerous to continue the rescue operation. Emergency officials say around 50 people were on White island when the eruption began, fewer than initially reported by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who said 100 tourists were “on or around” the White Island volcano, also known as Whakaari in the Maori language. AFP reports that cameras providing a live feed from the volcano showed a group of tourists walking on the crater floor moments before the eruption occurred. White Island sits 50 kilometers northeast of the town of Tauranga on North Island. Authorities urged people to avoid areas on North Island near to the eruption.  GeoNet agency classified the volcanic eruption as moderate and raised its alert level to four, on a scale where five represents a major eruption. GeoNet says White Island is New Zealand’s most active cone volcano and about 70 percent of the volcano is …

Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential campaign launched new attacks on Donald Trump on Sunday, advocating a reevaluation of U.S.-Saudi relations and calling North Korea’s apparent weapons test a “rebuke” to the U.S. president in a statement to Reuters. The statement comes as Trump faces pressure to examine his administration’s approach to Riyadh after law enforcement officials said a Saudi Arabian Air Force lieutenant killed three people at a U.S. Navy base in Pensacola, Florida, before being fatally shot. The man was on the base as part of a Navy training program designed to foster links with foreign allies. Authorities said they believe the man acted alone. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Trump on Sunday the kingdom would aid an investigation into the shooting, the Saudi state news agency reported. Still, the incident put a spotlight on the Trump administration’s warm ties with the Saudis as fallout continues from the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year at a Saudi consulate in Turkey, as well as Saudi involvement in the war in Yemen and tensions with Middle East rival Iran. In a statement emailed to Reuters, Biden campaign spokesman TJ Ducklo said the Trump administration has written Saudi’s …

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren released information on Sunday about her past legal work, showing nearly $2 million in compensation from dozens of clients, as a dispute intensified with her rival Pete Buttigieg over transparency. Warren, a leading candidate among the 15 Democrats vying for the party’s nomination to take on President Donald Trump in the November 2020 election, had already put out 11 years of tax returns in April and called on other candidates to follow suit. Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has said in recent days that Warren, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, should release older tax documents detailing her corporate legal work. In return, Warren has called on Buttigieg to allow media coverage of his private donor events and to disclose information about his past work at the consultancy company McKinsey. Warren does not hold big-ticket fundraisers and has focused her campaign on combating Washington corruption and corporate greed. Democratic presidential candidate South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaks during the Iowa Farmers Union Presidential Forum, Dec. 6, 2019, in Grinnell, Iowa. Buttigieg’s campaign said on Saturday it was working on making the details of his employment at McKinsey “fully transparent” and called on Warren …

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will welcome his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday — the Russian’s first visit to Washington since a controversial 2017 meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, the State Department announced. The brief statement about the meeting, to be held at the State Department, said Pompeo and Lavrov would “discuss a broad range of regional and bilateral issues.” On Friday, a Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman said the meeting was being “prepared” for Tuesday. The situations in war-wracked Syria and Ukraine are likely to top the agenda. The Washington meeting will come on the heels of talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy over the conflict in Ukraine’s east in Paris on Monday. Iran and North Korea are also of mutual concern in Washington and Moscow. Pompeo and Lavrov met in September on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. But Lavrov has not been on an official visit to the U.S. capital since his encounter with Trump in the Oval Office in May 2017, which was followed by allegations that the U.S. leader divulged classified intelligence in the meeting. Photographs of the meeting showed Lavrov, Trump and subsequently sacked …

Renee Zellweger, Brad Pitt and Eddie Murphy are locks. But whether “Cats” has it in the bag, too, we won’t know until the 77th annual Golden Globes are announced Monday morning. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association will unveil their nominations in Los Angeles beginning at 8:04 a.m. EST. They will be live-streamed on the Golden Globes’ Facebook page and their website, with the second wave of nominees carried live on NBC’s “Today” show at 8:15 a.m. Dakota Fanning, Susan Kelechi Watson and Tim Allen will announce the nominations from the Beverly Hilton hotel. The Globes separate their top categories between drama and comedy/musical, giving some movies well outside the awards conversation an opportunity. While movies like Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” and Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story” are widely expected to come away with numerous nods, few would be surprised if the press association — a group known for its sometimes quirky picks, its penchant for A-listers and its fondness for musicals — also included the upcoming, much-memed big-screen adaptation of “Cats.” The HFPA, a group with 87 voting members, was shown an unfinished cut of Tom Hooper’s film. Brad Pitt arrives at …

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin on Sunday welcomed a Lebanese-born Swiss real estate mogul who purchased Nazi memorabilia at a German auction and is donating the items to Israel. Rivlin called Abdallah Chatila’s gesture an “act of grace.” Chatila, a Lebanese Christian who has lived in Switzerland for decades, paid some 600,000 euros ($660,000) for the items at the Munich auction last month, intending to destroy them after reading of Jewish groups’ objections to the sale. Shortly before the auction, however, he decided it would be better to donate them to a Jewish organization. Among the items he bought were Adolf Hitler’s top hat, a silver-plated edition of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and a typewriter used by the dictator’s secretary. The items are to be donated to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. Chatila said he initially bought the items for personal reasons. “He is the personification of evil — evil for everyone, not evil for the Jews, evil for the Christians, evil for humanity,” he said. “And that’s why it was important for me to buy those artifacts.” But Chatila decided that he “had no right to decide” what to do with these artifacts, so he reached out to Keren Hayesod-United Israel …

A deadly virus called Nipah carried by bats has already caused human outbreaks across South and South East Asia and has “serious epidemic potential,” global health and infectious disease specialists said on Monday. The virus, identified in 1999 in Malaysia and Singapore, has sparked outbreaks with mortality rates of between 40% and 90% and spread thousands of kilometers to Bangladesh and India – yet there are no drugs or vaccines against it, they said. “Twenty years have passed since its discovery, but the world is still not adequately equipped to tackle the global health threat posed by Nipah virus,” said Richard Hatchett, chief executive of the CEPI Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is co-leading a Nipah conference this week in Singapore. CEPI, a partnership between disease experts, and public, private, philanthropic, and civil organizations, was set up in 2017 to try to speed up the development of vaccines against newly emerging and unknown infectious diseases. Among its first disease targets is Nipah, a virus carried primarily by certain types of fruit bats and pigs, which can also be transmitted directly from person to person as well as through contaminated food. Within two years of being first discovered, Nipah had …

Minutes before a recent show, “VOD Roundtable” host Lim Thida readied notes and warmed up the day’s guests. Control room staffers prepped to go live with all the trappings of the kind of on-air radio broadcast that, until a few years ago, was typical for the longtime Voice of Democracy program. But this was 2019, and instead of radio, “VOD Roundtable” was being reborn online. Producer Srey Sopheak ran a final check with the engineers, then gave Lim a go-ahead via walkie-talkie. “Hi, this is me, Thida, welcoming all TV viewers who are watching this live ‘VOD Roundtable’ show, which is broadcast via the Facebook page of vodkhmer.news. Today, we will look at measures to eliminate corruption in Cambodia’s judicial system.” Lim Thida, VOD production chief and a co-host of VOD Roundtable, Phnom Penh, Sept. 11, 2019. (Tum Malis/VOA Khmer) Over the next hour, the panelists included a top government spokesperson, a prominent human rights activist, and a member of an advisory body representing a consortium minority parties – a mix underscoring the balance and independence that have been VOD’s hallmark. A glimmer of hope in an otherwise bruising environment for independent media in Cambodia, VOD is one of multiple …

You didn’t know his name, but you certainly knew his voice and alter ego. Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who played Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch for nearly 50 years on TV’s Sesame Street, died Sunday at his home in Connecticut. He was 85. The Sesame Workshop, which produces the show, says Spinney had been suffering from dystonia — a disease that causes involuntary muscle movements. Spinney introduced Big Bird and Oscar on Sesame Street’s first episode in November 1969. The show’s young audience immediately embraced both characters. The yellow feathered Big Bird stood two and a half meters tall and had a child’s view of the world – he was filled with curiosity, questions, and innocence. FILE – Big Bird, voiced by Caroll Spinney, reads to children during a taping of Sesame Street in New York, April 10, 2008. Oscar lived in a garbage can and was perpetually grubby and miserable. But he was still lovable even when he grumbled at anyone who lifted the lid of his can. Oscar let young kids understand that it’s OK to be angry sometimes. “Before I came to Sesame Street. I didn’t feel like what I was doing was very important. Big …

Reuben Panchol was forced to leave war-torn Sudan decades ago as a child, embarking on an odyssey that eventually brought him to the American Midwest and left him eternally grateful to the country that took him in. “I am an American citizen, a North Dakotan,” said Panchol, a 38-year-old father of four. “And without North Dakota, I couldn’t have made it.” Panchol hopes to share his story on Monday with members of a local commission who are set to vote on whether their county will stop accepting refugees. If they vote to bar refugees, as expected, Burleigh County — home to about 95,000 people and the capital city of Bismarck — could become the first local government to do so since President Donald Trump issued an executive order making it possible. The county postponed a vote last week when more than 100 people showed up and overflowed the commission’s normal meeting space. Monday night’s meeting will be held in a middle school cafeteria to accommodate public interest that Chairman Brian Bitner said is the most intense he’s seen in more than a decade on the commission. Though he declined to predict which way the commission would go, Bitner said he …

The House Judiciary Committee holds another hearing Monday in the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.  Proceedings have been centering on allegations that the president abused his power by pressuring Ukraine to announce an investigation into political rival Joe Biden, the leading Democratic presidential contender. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports, the hyper partisanship in Washington promises to intensify. …

Actress Sally Field, singer Linda Ronstadt and the disco-funk band Earth Wind and Fire awaited their turn in the spotlight Sunday night as part of the latest group of recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievements in the arts. Also in this year’s class are conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and long-running children’s TV show “Sesame Street.” Once again, the attendance of President Donald Trump had been an open question until the White House said Friday that neither he nor first lady Melania Trump would attend. Trump skipped the past two celebrations; in 2017, after multiple recipients threatened to boycott the event if he attended. The Kennedy Center’s president, Deborah Rutter, said in an interview earlier this year that “they are always invited.” Field, 72, was a television star at age 19 and went on to forge a distinguished career that included two Academy Awards and three Emmys. She starred last year in a Netflix miniseries called “Maniac.” FILE – Puppeteer Caroll Spinney is interviewed during a break from taping an episode of “Sesame Street” in New York, April 10, 2008. “Sesame Street” debuted in 1969 and remains a force in children’s educational television. The show now airs new …

Thousands of people gathered in the center of Kyiv on Sunday to send a message to Ukraine’s president, who meets his Russian counterpart on Monday, that Ukrainians will not accept a peace deal at the cost of the country’s independence and sovereignty. “We are here because we are not satisfied with the peace at any costs … the peace at the costs of capitulation,” Inna Sovsun, a lawmaker of opposition Golos (Voice) party, told the rally. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Vladimir Putin are meeting in Paris alongside the French and German leaders in a renewed effort to end a conflict between Ukrainian troops and Russia-backed forces in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 13,000 people since 2014. Zelenskiy, who won a landslide election victory in April promising to bring peace, said this week that his first face-to-face meeting with the Russian president would give Kyiv a chance to resolve the more than five-year-old war in the Donbas region. But many Ukrainians are concerned over a possible compromise with Russia, which they see as an aggressor seeking to restore the Kremlin’s influence over the former Soviet republic and ruin Ukraine’s aspiration to closer European ties. The Ukrainian government wants to …

The leader of the House of Representatives committee weighing articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump contended Sunday that there is a “rock solid case” against the U.S. leader. Congressman Jerrold Nadler declared on CNN that Trump would be found guilty in “three minutes flat” if he were facing charges before a criminal court jury that he abused his office by soliciting Ukraine to investigate one of his chief 2020 Democratic presidential challengers, former Vice President Joe Biden. Nadler said if Trump “had any exculpatory evidence,” he would be making it known rather than rejecting participation, as the White House has, before the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee’s consideration of impeachment allegations against the Republican president. Nadler said the Judiciary panel, after a hearing Monday on evidence already collected by the House Intelligence Committee on Trump and his aides’ interactions with Ukraine, could possibly vote on the articles of impeachment by the end of the week. The full House then could be on track to impeach Trump before it recesses for its annual Christmas holiday break in two weeks, setting the stage for a January trial in the Republican-majority Senate, although Trump’s conviction and removal from office remains unlikely. But Nadler …

Kenyan rescuers digging through the rubble of a six-story building found two survivors alive Sunday, two days after it collapsed in Nairobi, as the death toll rose to 10. When the survivors of Friday’s building collapse were found Sunday morning, a crowd of onlookers burst into cheers and claps. A military member at the scene told The Associated Press they had been communicating with people believed to have been trapped in pockets of debris. He said some were screaming for help but the sounds of their voices had died down as time wore on. He insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the media. Nairobi Police Chief Philip Ndolo said four bodies were recovered from the scene Sunday including that of a child, while a fifth person died in a hospital. According to authorities, that brings the overall toll to 10 dead, 30 injured and 20 missing. Ndolo said the rescue of a man and a woman had invigorated emergency workers with hopes of finding other survivors. He said the two were in stable condition in a hospital. “Given we have rescued two people two days after the incident, we hope to find more survivors. Remember …

Hundreds of thousands of protesters packed the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday to mark six months of an unprecedented, sweeping anti-government movement in this Chinese-ruled, semi-autonomous city. The police-sanctioned march on Sunday which started at 3pm local time was largely peaceful but tensions escalated in the evening, when riot police got locked into a tense standoff with a large group of black-clad protesters who split off from the authorized rally to occupy a major thoroughfare in the business district of Central, the end point of the protest route. Protesters set up makeshift barricades with plastic roadside barriers, metal sheets, bamboo poles and other objects on the thoroughfare and a box marked with the message “Do not kick, it may explode” was placed on the road. Some riot police officers pointed their non-lethal shotguns at people and journalists gathered there and ordered them to leave.  The police’s water-cannon-equipped anti-riot vehicle also stood by. The protest movement, sparked by a controversial extradition bill which could see individuals sent to mainland China for trial, started with a mass demonstration attended by around a million protesters on June 9, but it has since morphed into a broader and increasingly violent movement.   Protesters …

An Ebola survivor has fallen ill with the disease for a second time in eastern Congo, the Congolese health authorities said on Sunday, saying it was not yet clear if it was a case of relapse or reinfection. The Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo has infected over 3,300 people and killed more than 2,200 since the middle of last year, making it the second worst year on record. Experts say there has been a working assumption that Ebola survivors generally have immunity from the disease. There have been no documented cases of reinfection but some researchers consider it to be at least a theoretical possibility, while the recurrence of a previous infection is considered extremely rare. In a daily report on the epidemic, the Congolese health authorities reported that a survivor in Mabalako, North Kivu province, had fallen ill with the virus again, but did not give further details. Representatives of the World Health Organization and Congo’s National Institute of Biomedical Research (INRB) said tests were being carried out to determine what had happened. “Clinically, we will check whether it is a reinfection to know if it is the same virus and if the person has been infected …

France is ready to go to the World Trade Organization to challenge U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to put tariffs on champagne and other French goods in a row over a planned French tax on internet companies, the finance minister said on Sunday. “We are ready to take this to an international court, notably the WTO, because the national tax on digital companies touches U.S. companies in the same way as EU or French companies or Chinese. It is not discriminatory,” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on France 3 television.     …

3D-printed cocktails, a traffic jam sculpture made of hundreds of tons of sand and more celebrity sightings than a Kardashian Christmas party were all part of over-the-top festivities during the week of Art Basel Miami. Art collector Wayne Boich hosted a lavish dinner at his home Friday night that included Dan Marino, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. The after-party crowd, including Floyd Mayweather, Hannah Bronfman, and Alesso, watched a performance by Wyclef Jean, who did a throwback to the Fugees with “Ready or Not,” and later brought dozens of girls onstage to dance with him before passing the mic to “Country Grammar” singer Nelly. Rapper 2 Chainz closed out the night. Across town, rapper Travis Scott didn’t take the stage until 3:30 a.m. at a sold-out performance at 24-hour nightclub E11even. Scott stood on top of the DJ booth tossing dollar bills into the crowd and yelling at partygoers to put away their phones and enjoy the moment. Later in the night, he partied with Nelly in the owner’s booth. Singer Kehlani and model Winnie Harlow were also spotted in the crowd. On the art side, the most talked about work of the week was titled “Comedian” – a spotty …

Will Smith still feels “emotional” about homelessness years after playing a destitute man in one of his most acclaimed film roles, the Hollywood star has told charity campaigners braving a fierce New York winter night to sleep rough. Hundreds of people had gathered in Times Square on Saturday, rugged up and ready to bunk down in freezing temperatures, in a campaign to raise funds for what organizers said was record homelessness globally. Smith told the crowd that his Oscar-nominated role in “The Pursuit of Happyness” — a 2007 biopic of a salesman forced to live on the streets of San Francisco with his young son — was a “life-changing experience” that had allowed him to understand the misery of poverty. “It makes me emotional thinking about it right now,” Smith said. “To not have a place to go and to be able to lay your head down with your children at night is a horrendous tragedy.” Smith also charmed crowds with a “bedtime story” — a rap rendition of the theme tune to his 1990s hit sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” People in over 50 cities around the world slept on the streets to support the World’s Big Sleep Out campaign, the …

OELWEIN, IOWA – Joe Biden said Saturday that it is “bizarre” for Bernie Sanders to propose withholding U.S. military aid from Israel if the government there doesn’t moderate its treatment of Palestinians. The remarks highlight a nuanced but significant distinction between the Democratic presidential contenders. Biden and Sanders support a “two-state solution” for Israel and the Palestinians, and both men have criticized political leaders on each side of the long-standing conflict. But Biden’s take, offered during a question-and-answer session with Iowa voters, hewed a more traditional U.S. establishment line by reaffirming a financial commitment to Israel regardless of its actions toward Palestinians. The former vice president, while casting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “counterproductive” and “extreme right” leader and accused Palestinian leaders of “fomenting” the conflict and “baiting everyone who is Jewish,” while suggesting that some on the U.S. political left give the Palestinian Authority “a pass” when criticizing Israeli leadership. “In terms of Bernie and others who talk about dealing with Zionism, I strongly support Israel as an independent Jewish state,” Biden said in rural northeastern Iowa. He added, “The idea that I’d withdraw military aid, as others have suggested, from Israel, is bizarre. I would not …

Four gold miners trapped underground after a tremor caused a rockfall in northeast South Africa have been found dead, their union said Sunday. A fifth miner was rescued with serious injuries on Friday after the accident at the Tau Lekoa Mine in the town of Orkney, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) said. “The four mineworkers were found dead,” a union statement said after the rescue team lost contact with the four men deep underground early Saturday. “The last person we talked to said: ‘We are suffocating please, bring us some oxygen’,” said NUM president Joseph Montisetse. Deadly accidents involving miners are common in South Africa, which has the deepest mines in the world. Last year 81 people died in the country’s mines, according to the department of mineral resources.   …

 The flaming barricades are mostly gone, protesters have largely dissipated and traffic is once again clogging the streets of Haiti’s capital, but hundreds of thousands of people are now suffering deep economic aftershocks after more than two months of demonstrations. The protests that drew tens of thousands of people at a time to demand the resignation of President Jovenel Moise also squeezed incomes, shuttered businesses and disrupted the transportation of basic goods. “We are nearing a total crash,” Haitian economist Camille Chalmers said. “The situation is unsustainable.” Haiti’s economy was already fragile when the new round of protests began in mid-September, organized by opposition leaders and supporters angry over corruption, spiraling inflation and dwindling supplies, including fuel. More than 40 people were killed and dozens injured as protesters clashed with police. Moise insisted he would not resign and called for dialogue. The United Nations World Food Program says a recent survey found that one in three Haitians, or 3.7 million people, need urgent food assistance and 1 million are experiencing severe hunger. The WFP, which says it is trying to get emergency food assistance to 700,000 people, blames rising prices, the weakening local currency, and a drop in agricultural production …