North Korea began a closely watched ruling party meeting led by Kim Jong Un, state media reported Sunday, amid signs Pyongyang is set to announce a firmer stance toward the United States. 
 
Kim is widely expected in the next week to announce the details of his “new way” for North Korea, following the expiration of its self-imposed end-of-year deadline for the U.S. to offer a better proposal in stalled nuclear talks. 
 
State media coverage of the Workers’ Party of Korea meeting offered few hints about the country’s direction. 
 
The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) mentioned an “anti-imperialist” stance and the building up of national defense but gave no other details. 
 
“The plenary meeting goes on,” KCNA said, apparently indicating a multiday meeting. 
 Talks boycotted
North Korea has boycotted nuclear talks for months and recently threatened to resume long-range missile and nuclear tests. An official said earlier this month that denuclearization was off the negotiating table. 
 
Those threats — mostly made by lower-level officials — were widely seen as an attempt to increase pressure on the U.S. ahead of North Korea’s deadline. 

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks during the 5th Plenary Meeting of the 7th Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea in this undated photo released Dec. 28, 2019, by the Korean Central News Agency.Kim’s annual New Year’s speech is expected to offer much firmer evidence of the country’s direction in 2020. In his speech last year, he warned of a “new way” if the talks didn’t progress. 
 
North Korea also threatened to deliver a “Christmas gift” to the U.S., leading many analysts to predict a North Korean holiday missile test. But Christmas passed with no signs of what that “gift” might be. 
 
There are multiple possible explanations for why North Korea has refrained from a major provocation, including last-minute progress between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump or a warning from China, which typically frowns on North Korean missile and nuclear tests. 
No ‘cold feet’
 
“But Kim, nevertheless, probably did not get cold feet,” said Duyeon Kim, a senior adviser for Northeast Asia and nuclear policy at the International Crisis Group. 
 
“North Korea’s course of action after the year-end deadline will be far more significant than a gift timed to coincide with what it sees as an American holiday. After all, anything can happen in the remaining six days of 2019 after Christmas. And presents can be delivered any time the giver feels so compelled,” Kim said. 
Even without a North Korean launch or other provocation, tensions have been high, especially after Japan’s public broadcaster NHK erroneously reported Friday that North Korea had launched a missile that landed in the waters east of Japan. The broadcaster later apologized for the false report, saying it was a media training alert. 

FILE – Soldiers from the 2nd Infantry Division of the U.S. participate in a drill at Camp Casey in Dongducheon, north of Seoul, South Korea, March 3, 2011.A tense moment also occurred late Thursday when Camp Casey, a U.S. Army base in South Korea, accidentally blasted an emergency siren instead of taps, a bugle call typically played at military bases at the end of the day. 
 
The false alarms are even more notable considering the relative silence from North Korea during the last couple of weeks, after having ramped up threats in early December. 
‘Deafening’ silence
 
“It has been the uneasy calm before the storm,” said Robert Carlin, a former U.S. intelligence official with decades of experience researching North Korea. 
 
“The air was certainly heavy with Pyongyang’s warnings earlier. But then, beginning on December 15, these abruptly stopped and the North became extremely quiet, preternaturally quiet,” Carlin said in a post on 38 North, a website specializing in North Korea.
“The silence, in fact, has been deafening,” he said. 

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An international aid group said Saturday that conditions in northwest Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province were at a “breaking point.” 
 
The International Rescue Committee warned that continued violence could displace as many as 400,000 in the coming weeks. 
 
After weeks of intense bombardment, Syrian government forces launched a ground offensive on the southern and eastern parts of Idlib in the northwest last week, forcing tens of thousands to flee their homes. 
 
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that as a result of hostilities more than 235,000 people had been displaced between Dec. 12 and Wednesday. Many of those fled from the town of Maaret al-Numan, toward which Syrian troops have been advancing since Thursday. 
 
On Saturday, activists and the war monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported limited clashes on the southeastern edge of the enclave as well as an airstrike that destroyed a bakery in Maasran. 
 
Rehana Zawar, the IRC’s country director for northwest Syria, said the enclave was already in the midst of a major humanitarian crisis. Zawar warned that if violence escalated, 400,000 could be forced to leave their homes, pushing the number of the displaced inside Idlib to over 1 million. The province is home to over 3 million people. 
 
The enclave is already home to many displaced from previous rounds of violence in the nine-year war. “Conditions in Idlib are already at a breaking point,” Zawar said, calling for an immediate cease-fire. 

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Dozens of Lebanese protesters held a brief sit-in inside a bank in Beirut and another in the country’s south on Saturday, part of their focus on banking policies they complain are inefficient and corrupt. 
 
Lebanon is facing its worst economic crisis in decades, while protests against corruption and mismanagement have gripped the country since October. The local currency has taken a nosedive, losing more than 40% of its value after over 20 years of being pegged to the dollar. Banks are imposing unprecedented capital controls to protect their deposits amid a deepening confidence crisis.  
Meanwhile, layoffs and salary cuts are becoming the norm while politicians bicker over forming a new government. 
 
Dozens of protesters entered a private bank in the commercial Hamra district in Beirut, protesting capital controls and insisting that no one would leave without the money they came for. Banks have put a withdrawal ceiling of $200 a week on most accounts, while totally blocking outside transfers. 
 
“Thieves! Thieves!” two dozen protesters chanted, some sitting on counters and others on the floor. Bank staff watched and security guards did not interfere. 
 
The protesters later helped a woman with a cane get to the second floor, again shouting that she wouldn’t leave until she got the money she needed. The protesters posted videos of their actions on a Twitter account linked to the protest movement. 
 ‘Enough of that!’
At another bank in the southern town of Nabatiyeh, a dozen protesters entered the branch chanting, “Down with bank rule.” Inside the bank, a citizen complained about how he couldn’t withdraw money to pay for his son living abroad, as well as for his employees, yet the bank continued to charge him for a loan he took out. “Enough of that!” the man said, according to another video posted on Twitter. 
 
The protesters have also organized a campaign called “We are not paying,” asking depositors not to pay their loans amid the tight capital controls. 
 
The anti-bank protests were fanned by the Central Bank governor’s recent remark that no one knew how much more value the local currency would lose. Riad Salameh’s comment to reporters Thursday deepened panic in the highly dollarized economy. 
 
Lebanon imports most of its basic needs and is one of the world’s most indebted countries. Some protesters are calling for banks to finance imports instead of servicing debts. 
 
Lebanese officials have asked foreign countries and financial institutions to help secure needed capital for imports. Donors have called for major reforms before extending help — a request that will likely be delayed amid infighting among political groups over the shape of a new government. 
 
Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned on Oct. 29 and continues in a caretaker capacity. 

Anti-government protesters chant slogans outside of the residence of Hassan Diab, Lebanon’s prime ninister designate, Dec. 28, 2019, in Beirut.Successor struggles
 
The prime minister designate, Hassan Diab, was named on Dec. 19 and is backed by the militant Hezbollah group and its allies. However, he has failed to win the backing of the main Sunni Muslim groups. 
 
Some protesters have also rejected him, saying he is still part of the ruling elite they accuse of corruption. 
 
Later on Saturday, about 300 protesters rallied outside Diab’s house in Beirut, chanting: “We don’t want Hassan Diab,” or “Don’t dream of it, Diab.” One protester told the gathering, which included many who had traveled from the northern city of Tripoli, that from now on the protests would take place outside Diab’s home until he withdrew. 

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U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has slammed Iran for using “violence” and internet disruption to prevent memorials for those killed during a November crackdown on anti-establishment protests.  
“The Iranian people have the right to mourn 1,500 victims slaughtered by @khamenei_ir during #IranProtests,” Pompeo tweeted Friday, directly accusing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on religious and political issues in the Islamic republic. 
 
According to the semiofficial ILNA news agency, internet access was effectively cut off Wednesday in several Iranian provinces ahead of memorials planned Thursday. 
 
Several people were reportedly detained at a mourning in Karaj marking 40 days since the death of a slain protester. 
 
“The regime fears its own citizens and has once again resorted to violence and shutting down the internet,” Pompeo tweeted Friday. 
 
The protests in Iran were touched off by a significant increase in the price of gasoline. The United States said earlier this month that Iranian authorities might have killed more than 1,000 people in the crackdown in mid-November. 
 
Reuters quoted anonymous government officials as saying about 1,500 people had died during the protests, though that figure could not be confirmed. 
 
Amnesty International has said that at least 304 were killed and thousands injured in the unrest. 
 
Tehran has dismissed the figures by rights groups and others while failing to publish an official death toll. 
 Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report.  

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Health authorities say about two dozen people, mostly laborers, were killed Saturday when a minibus collided with a truck on a highway in Port Said in northern Egypt.
Officials said in a statement that the minibus, a vehicle widely used in Egypt as communal taxis, was bringing the laborers from a garment factory in Port Said. The city is around 200 kilometers (around 125 miles) north of the capital, Cairo.
At least 22 people were killed in the crash, which took place on a highway linking the cities of Port Said and Damietta, the statement said. The workers were from Damietta.
Eight others were injured, some of them severely. All the victims were taken to nearby hospitals and morgues for treatment and identification, the statement said.
Egypt has a history of serious bus and car crashes because of speeding, careless driving, poor road conditions and poor enforcement of traffic laws.
The country’s official statistics agency says more than 8,000 road accidents took place in 2018, leaving more than 3,000 dead and around 12,000 injured.

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A U.S. astronaut set a record Saturday for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, breaking the old mark of 288 days with about two months left in her mission.
Christina Koch, a 40-year-old electrical engineer from Livingston, Montana, arrived at the International Space Station on March 14. She broke the record set by former space station commander Peggy Whitson in 2016-2017.
Koch is expected to spend a total of 328 days, or nearly 11 months, on board the space station before returning to Earth. Missions are typically six months, but NASA announced in April that it was extending her mission until February.
The U.S. record for longest space flight is 340 days set by Scott Kelly in 2015-2016. The world record is 15 months set in the 1990s by a Russian cosmonaut aboard the former Mir space station.
Koch’s extended mission will help NASA learn about the effects of long spaceflights, data that NASA officials have said is needed to support future deep space exploration missions to the Moon and Mars.
Before breaking the endurance record for a woman in space, Koch set another milestone as part of the first all-female spacewalking team in October. It was Koch’s fourth spacewalk.
She previously said she took a lot of helpful advice from Kelly’s 2017 autobiography “Endurance.”

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The Sudanese government and nine rebel groups on Saturday signed an agreement on a roadmap towards ending the bloody conflict in the Darfur region.
The deal outlines different issues the parties will need to negotiate during the latest round of talks in Juba.
“We believe this is an important step,” said Ahmed Mohamed, the chief negotiator on Darfur matters from the Sudan Revolutionary Front or SRF, a coalition of nine rebel groups involved in talks with the Sudanese government.
“This step no doubt will help the process to achieve a lasting peace in Darfur and also it will enable the transitional process in Sudan to move smoothly without hindrances,” Mohamed told AFP.

map of DarfurAmong the issues they agreed need to be tackled are the root causes of the conflict, the return of refugees and internally displaced people, power sharing and the integration of rebel forces into the national army.
The deal also states that the Sudanese government will address land issues, such as the destruction of property during the conflict.
Khartoum has been negotiating with different rebel groups in the capital of South Sudan for two weeks, in the latest round of efforts to end conflicts in Darfur, Blue Nile and South Kordofan.
Rebels in these areas fought bloody campaigns against marginaliZation by Khartoum under ousted president Omar al-Bashir.
The Darfur fighting broke out in 2003 when ethnic minority rebels took up arms against Bashir’s Arab-dominated government.
Human rights groups say Khartoum targeted suspected pro-rebel ethnic groups with a scorched earth policy, raping, killing, looting and burning villages.
Bashir, who is behind bars for corruption and awaiting trial on other charges, is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for his role in the conflict that left around 300,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced, according to the United Nations.
However, there is fresh hope for peace after Sudan’s transitional government, led by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, made peace in these areas a priority.
“We failed to achieve a lasting peace for Darfur simply because the previous government was not ready to take strategic decisions to resolve the conflict in Darfur,” said Mohamed who has been involved in previous failed peace talks.
General Samsedine Kabashi, the top Sudanese government representative at the talks said: “We are committed to ending all the problems in Darfur and ensuring that we restore peace and stability not only in Darfur but across all parts of the country.”
The peace process began in August and mediators aim to reach a final deal by February 2020.

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A NASA robotic rover is nearing completion ahead of a journey next year to search for evidence of past life on Mars and lay the groundwork for the space agency’s mission to send humans into deep space.
The U.S. space agency on Friday showed off its Mars 2020 rover, whose official name will be chosen early next year. NASA will in February ship the rover to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center where its three sections will be fully assembled. A July launch will send the rover to a dry lake bed on Mars that is bigger than the island of Manhattan.
The four-wheeled, car-sized rover will scour the base of Mars’ Jezero Crater, an 820-foot-deep (250-meter-deep) crater thought to have been a lake the size of Lake Tahoe, once the craft lands in February 2021. The crater is believed to have an abundance of pristine sediments some 3.5 billion years old that scientists hope will hold fossils of Martian life.
“The trick, though, is that we’re looking for trace levels of chemicals from billions of years ago on Mars,” Mars 2020 deputy project manager Matt Wallace told Reuters. The rover will collect up to 30 soil samples to be picked up and returned to Earth by a future spacecraft planned by NASA.
“Once we have a sufficient set, we’ll put them down on the ground, and another mission, which we hope to launch in 2026, will come, land on the surface, collect those samples and put them into a rocket, basically,” Wallace said. Humans have never before returned sediment samples from Mars.
The findings of the Mars 2020 research will be crucial to future human missions to the red planet, including the ability to make oxygen on the surface of Mars, Wallace said. The Mars 2020 Rover is carrying equipment that can turn carbon dioxide, which is pervasive on Mars, into oxygen for breathing and as a propellant.
LESSONS FROM CURIOSITY
If successful, Mars 2020 will mark NASA’s fifth Martian rover to carry out a soft landing, having learned crucial lessons from the most recent Curiosity rover that landed on the planet’s surface in 2012 and continues to traverse a Martian plain southeast of the Jezero Crater.
The Soviet Union is the only other country to successfully land a rover on Mars. China and Japan have attempted unsuccessfully to send orbiters around Mars, while India and Europe’s space agency have successfully lofted an orbiter to the planet.

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Thousands of koalas are feared to have died in a wildfire-ravaged area north of Sydney, further diminishing Australia’s iconic marsupial, while the fire danger accelerated Saturday in the country’s east as temperatures soared.
The midnorth coast of New South Wales was home to up to 28,000 koalas, but wildfires in the area in recent months have significantly reduced their population. Koalas are native to Australia and are one of the country’s most beloved animals, but they’ve been under threat thanks to a loss of habitat.
“Up to 30% of their habitat has been destroyed,” Environment Minister Sussan Ley told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “We’ll know more when the fires are calmed down and a proper assessment can be made.”
Images shared of koalas drinking water after being rescued from the wildfires have gone viral on social media in recent days. 
“I get mail from all around the world from people absolutely moved and amazed by our wildlife volunteer response and also by the habits of these curious creatures,” Ley said.
About 5 million hectares of land have burned nationwide during the wildfire crisis, with nine people killed and more than 1,000 homes destroyed.

Smoke rises from wildfires, Dec. 27, 2019, in the Blue Mountains, New South Whales, Australia. Firefighters battling wildfires in Australia’s most populous state face increased fire danger thanks to higher temperatures.Fire danger in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory was upgraded to severe Saturday, as high temperatures built up over the region. Sydney’s western suburbs reached 41 degrees Celsius (105 F) Saturday, while the inner city is expected to hit 31 C (87 F) Sunday before reaching 35 C (95 F) Tuesday.
Two wildfires in New South Wales are at the “watch and act” level issued by fire services.
Canberra, Australia’s capital, peaked at 38 C (100 F) Saturday, with oppressive temperatures forecast for the next seven days.
Meanwhile, New South Wales Emergency Services Minister David Elliott has gone on an overseas family vacation in the wake of Prime Minister’s Scott Morrison’s much-criticized family trip to Hawaii recently.
Morrison, who apologized for going away, eventually cut short his vacation and returned to Sydney last weekend.
Elliott said he will be briefed daily while overseas. 
“If the bushfire situation should demand it, I will return home without hesitation,” he said.

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A Vietnamese court Saturday sentenced an ex-minister to life in prison in a multimillion-dollar corruption case that also saw another minister and a dozen executives receive lengthy prison terms, state media reported.
Nguyen Bac Son was accused of taking a bribe of $3 million to orchestrate the 2016 acquisition of a digital television service on behalf of state-owned Mobifone, one of major mobile network operators in Vietnam, when he was minister of information and communication.
Son, a former military officer, ordered the transaction that involved the purchase of 95% of shares of the indebted Audio Visual Global (AVG) company for an equivalent of $383.83 million, a price that had been inflated almost 10 times, national television VTV reported.
Son was sentenced to life for taking bribes plus 16 years on a charge of violating public investment management regulations. His combined punishment is life imprisonment, VTV quoted the presiding judge as saying after the two-week trial concluded in Hanoi.
Truong Minh Tuan, Son’s former deputy who succeeded him as minister at his retirement, was sentenced to 14 years in prison on the same charge. Tuan was accused of taking $500,000 in bribes to ink the acquisition deal.
Le Nam Tra, the former chairman of Mobifone, and Cao Duy Hai, the company’s former executive director, were handed 23 years and 14 years in prison, respectively, on bribery and mismanagement charges. Tra was accused of taking a $2.5 million bribe while Hai pocketed $500,000.
AVG CEO Pham Nhat Vu was sentenced to three years in prison on a charge of giving bribes.
Nine others, including officials and executives, got between two and six years in prison in the same case.

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Lee Mendelson, the producer who changed the face of the holidays when he brought “A Charlie Brown Christmas” to television in 1965 and wrote the lyrics to its signature song, “Christmas Time Is Here,” died Christmas day, his son said.
Mendelson, who won a dozen Emmys in his long career, died at his home in Hillsborough, California, of congestive heart failure at age 86 after a long struggle with lung cancer, Jason Mendelson told The Associated Press.
Lee Mendelson headed a team that included “Peanuts” author Charles Schulz, director Bill Melendez, and pianist and composer Vince Guaraldi, whose music for the show, including the opening “Christmas Time Is Here,” has become as much a Christmas staple as the show itself.
Mendelson told The Cincinnati Enquirer in 2000 that he was short on time in finding a lyricist for the song, so he sketched out the six verses himself in “about 15 minutes on the backside of an envelope.”
He found a choir from a church in his native Northern California to sing the song that sets the show’s unforgettable tone, beginning with Mendelson’s words: “Christmas time is here, happiness and cheer, fun for all that children call, their favorite time of year.”
The show won an Emmy and a Peabody Award and has aired on TV annually ever since. The team that made it would go on to create more than 50 network specials, four feature films and many other “Peanuts” projects.
Mendelson also took other comic strips from newspapers to animated TV, including “Garfield,” for which he produced a dozen television specials.
His death was first reported by The Daily Post of Palo Alto.
Northern Californian
Born in San Francisco in 1933, Mendelson’s family moved to nearby San Mateo when he was a boy, and later to nearby Hillsborough, where he went to high school.
He graduated from Stanford in 1954, served in the Air Force and worked for his father’s fruit-and-vegetable company before going into TV for the Bay Area’s KPIX-TV.
In 1963 he started his own production company and made a documentary on San Francisco Giants legend Willie Mays, “A Man Named Mays,” that became a hit television special on NBC.
Show that nearly wasn’t
He and Schulz originally worked on a “Peanuts” documentary that proved a hard sell for TV, but midway through 1965 a sponsor asked them if they could create the first comic strip’s first animated special in time for Christmas.
Schulz wrote the now-familiar story of a depressed Charlie Brown seeking the meaning of Christmas, a school Christmas play with intractable actors including his dog Snoopy, a limp and unappreciated Christmas tree, and a recitation of the nativity story from his best friend Linus.
Mendelson said the team showed the special to executives at CBS a week before it was slated to air, and they hated it, with its simplicity, dour tone, biblical themes, lack of laugh track and actual children’s voices instead of adults mimicking them, as was common.
“I really believed, if it hadn’t been scheduled for the following week, there’s no way they were gonna broadcast that show,” Mendelson said on a 2004 documentary for the DVD of the special.
Holiday classic
Instead, it went on to become perhaps the biggest holiday classic in television.
“It became part of everybody’s Christmas holidays,” Mendelson told The Los Angeles Times in 2015. “It was just passed on from generation to generation. … We got this huge initial audience and never lost them.”
Mendelson is survived by his wife, Ploenta, his children Lynda, Glenn, Jason and Sean, his stepson Ken and eight grandchildren.
 

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Somali officials say at least 30 people were killed and dozens wounded when a huge car bomb exploded at a busy junction on the southwestern side of Mogadishu.
Witnesses say the blast occurred at a security checkpoint at an intersection used by vehicles leaving and entering Mogadishu from Afgoye town. An officer said it was a truck bomb.
Early reports indicated the vehicle filled with explosives was targeting a busy taxation office at the junction where vehicles stop to pay their road taxes.
A witness who went to the scene told VOA Somali that he saw blood and pieces of bodies scattered throughout the scene.

Civilians help a woman injured in a car bombing at a security checkpoint as she arrives to a hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia, Dec. 28, 2019.“It’s hard to quantify, but many people died,” he said. Mogadishu’s Aamin Ambulance Service told VOA Somali they have collected 61 dead bodies and 50 wounded people.
The first pictures from the scene show at least 15 dead bodies lying on the ground.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast. However, the al-Qaida-linked terror group al-Shabab has carried out similar attacks in the past.

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