The U.S. Navy says it has its first Black female fighter pilot.The Naval Air Training Command tweeted that Lt. j.g. Madeline Swegle is the Navy’s “first known Black female [tactical aircraft] pilot.”The 2017 Naval Academy graduate recently completed her Tactical Aircraft training and will receive her “Wings of Gold” insignia later this month.Military.com says that a 2018 investigation it conducted with Navy-provided data revealed that only 1.9 percent of the service’s pilots assigned to fighter jets were Black.   Swegle is assigned to the Redhawks of Training Squadron 21 in Kingsville, Texas.     
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A fish eagle swoops over the water to grab a fish in its talons and then flies to its nest.Nearby are a martial eagle, a black eagle, an Egyptian vulture and hundreds of other birds. With an estimated 400 species of birds on an idyllic spot on Zimbabwe’s Lake Chivero, about 40 kilometers south of Harare, the Kuimba Shiri bird sanctuary has been drawing tourists for more than 15 years.The southern African country’s only bird park has survived tumultuous times, including violent land invasions and a devastating economic collapse but the outbreak of coronavirus is proving a stern test.”I thought I had survived the worst, but this coronavirus is something else,” said owner Gary Strafford. “One-third of our visitors are from China. They stopped coming in February … and when we were shut down in March, that was just unbelievable.”Gary Strafford, a Zimbabwean falconer, holds an owl inside one of the cages at his bird sanctuary, Kuimba Shiri, near Harare, Zimbabwe, June 17, 2020.A lifelong bird enthusiast, Strafford, 62, established the center for injured, orphaned and abandoned birds in 1992, and tourism has kept the park going.With Zimbabwe’s inflation rising to over 750 percent, tourism establishments are battling a vicious economic downturn worsened by the new coronavirus travel restrictions.Zimbabwe’s tourism was already facing problems. The country recorded just over 2 million visitors in 2019, an 11 percent decline from the previous year, according to official figures. However, tourism remained one of the country’s biggest foreign currency earners, along with minerals and tobacco.Now tourism “is dead because of coronavirus,” said Tinashe Farawo, the spokesman for the country’s national parks agency. National parks and other animal sanctuaries such as Kuimba Shiri are battling to stay afloat, he said.”We are in trouble. All along we have been relying on tourism to fund our conservation … now what do we do?” he asked.Kuimba Shiri, which means singing bird in Zimbabwe’s Shona language, was closed for more than three months. It’s the longest time the bird sanctuary, located in one of the global sites protected under the United Nations Convention on Wetlands, has been shut.On a recent weekday, the only sound of life at the place usually teeming with children on school trips was that of singing birds perched on the edges of large enclosures. Horses, zebras and sheep fed on grass and weeds on the lakeshore.A parrot standing on a flowerpot at the entrance repeatedly shouted “Hello!”A child interacts with a bird at the Kuimba Shiri bird sanctuary near Harare, Zimbabwe, June 17, 2020.”He misses people, especially the children,” said Strafford, who established Kuimba Shiri on the 30-acre spot on Chivero, the main reservoir for Harare. Now it is home to many rare species including falcons, flamingos and vultures.”This place is a dream place for me,” he said.Things turned nightmarish however when then president, the late Robert Mugabe, launched an often-violent land redistribution program in which farms owned by whites were seized for redistribution to landless Blacks in 2000.Animal sanctuaries were not spared and Kuimba Shiri was targeted “30 to 40 times,” said Strafford. Eventually, the sanctuary was endorsed by Mugabe and returned to a measure of stability.In 2009, Zimbabwe’s economy collapsed as hyperinflation reached 500 billion percent, according to the International Monetary Fund. The sanctuary struggled to make ends meet. Many birds starved to death while those that could fend for themselves were released into the wild.”We sold our vehicles and a tractor to feed the birds. When it really got desperate we had to kill our horses,” he said.Now, a decade later, Strafford is again being forced to sell some items as coronavirus and a new economic crisis take their toll. A land excavator, a boat, a truck, a tractor and sheep are among the items he hopes to urgently sell.A bird handler prepares a bird for flight at the Kuimba Shiri bird sanctuary near Harare, Zimbabwe, June 17, 2020.But there is some hope. As Zimbabwe relaxes some of its restrictions, the sanctuary is now able to open to limited numbers of visitors.On a recent weekend, Strafford displayed the talents of his trained falcons and other raptors to a small group for the first time since March.Strafford enthusiastically described the various traits of the birds and supervised as a barn owl perched on a 5-year-old boy’s gloved hand.”Everything got to start afresh,” he said after the show. “I have started training the birds again. We are beginning to fly again!” 
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Former special counsel Robert Mueller sharply defended his investigation into ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, writing in a newspaper opinion piece Saturday that the probe was of “paramount importance” and asserting that Trump ally Roger Stone “remains a convicted felon” despite the president’s decision to commute his sentence.The op-ed in The Washington Post marked Mueller’s first public statement on his investigation since his congressional appearance last July. It represented his firmest defense of the two-year probe, whose results have come under attack and even been partially undone by the Trump administration, including the president’s extraordinary move Friday evening to grant clemency to Stone just days before he was to report to prison.Mueller said that though he had intended for his 448-page report on the investigation to speak for itself, he felt compelled to “respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office.  “The Russia investigation was of paramount importance. Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so,” Mueller wrote.Mueller did not specify who was making the claims, but it appeared to be an obvious reference to Trump, who as recently as Saturday derided the investigation as this “whole political witch hunt and the Mueller scam.”The mere publication of the op-ed was striking in itself for the former FBI director, who was tight-lipped during the investigation, refusing to respond to attacks by the president or his allies or to even make public appearances explaining or justifying his work.In his first public appearance after the conclusion of his investigation, Mueller had said that he had hoped his report would speak for itself. When he later testified to House lawmakers, he was similarly careful not to stray beyond the report’s findings or offer new evidence.But that buttoned-up approach created a void for others, including at the Justice Department, to place their own stamp on his work. Even before the report was released Attorney General William Barr issued a four-page summary document that Mueller said did not adequately capture the gravity of his team’s findings.
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Thousands of Bulgarians, frustrated with endemic corruption, protested Saturday for a third day in a row, demanding the resignation of the center-right government of Prime Minister Boyko Borissov and the country’s chief prosecutor.Protesters, who chanted “Mafia” and “Resign” on Saturday, accuse Borissov’s third government and chief prosecutor Ivan Geshev of deliberately delaying investigations into links between graft-prone officials and local oligarchs.Protests against what many called “state capture” and “mafia-style” rule were held in several other cities in the Balkan country.Police arrested 18 people late Friday after scuffles during the anti-corruption protests, but the demonstration Saturday was largely peaceful.Bulgaria, the European Union’s poorest and most corrupt member state, has long pledged to root out graft but has yet to jail any senior officials on corruption charges.Public anger escalated following prosecutor raids on the offices of two of the Bulgarian president’s staff as part of investigations, which many saw as a targeted attack on President Rumen Radev, a vocal critic of the government.In an address to the nation Saturday, Radev said the protests showed that Bulgarians had had enough and called for the resignation of the government and the chief prosecutor.’We have done so much’Borissov, whose third government took office in 2017, prided himself on building new highways, boosting people’s incomes and getting the country into the eurozone’s “waiting room,” and said he does not plan to step down amid a looming coronavirus crisis.”We have done so much already, we have made so much efforts, nothing is keeping us in office except for responsibility,” Borissov said in a posting on his Facebook page.His GERB party said Radev, who was nominated for the post by opposition Socialists, was stoking a political crisis. GERB remains Bulgaria’s most popular political party, according to opinion polls. The next general elections are due in spring 2021.At another demonstration Saturday on the Black Sea coast near Burgas, hundreds of Bulgarians demanded access to a public coastline near the summer residence of Ahmed Dogan, a businessman and senior member of the ethnic Turkish MRF party. The demonstration was organized after the head of a small liberal party was denied access to the coast by armed guards of the National Protection Service, who were protecting Dogan.Protesters say the move was a sign of toxic links between the ruling elite and shady interests in the Balkan country.
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The Czech people, occupied by Germany during World War II and then forced into the Soviet bloc, are no strangers to foreign coercion. That may be a factor in the anger in Prague over what many there see as Beijing’s heavy-handedness in dealing with their country.In a series of conversations centered on history and identity, Zdenek Beranek, the second-highest official at the Czech Republic Embassy in Washington, told VOA that even though his government had made it clear “on multiple occasions” that mutually beneficial economic cooperation with China was very much welcome, “there is still room for improvement, to put it diplomatically.””Personally, I do not believe that ‘standing up to China’ should be a goal, per se; quite the contrary, the unity of democratic countries is a precondition to balanced and mutually beneficial relations with China,” he said.A series of Chinese retaliatory actions prompted by Prague’s friendly relationship with Taiwan appears to have alarmed the Czech society.China has threatened action against Czech companies in China if Czech senate leaders go ahead with a visit to Taiwan. Last March, Taiwan’s top diplomat in Prague was asked to leave a conference organized by the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Trade and Industry in response to pressure from Beijing.Orchestra trip scrappedThe dispute over Taiwan also prompted Beijing to cancel a long-planned 14-city tour of China by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, costing the orchestra tens of thousands of dollars.Beranek, who describes himself as Czech by birth, European by heart, historian by training and diplomat by accident, relied on the latter skill as he discussed the issue.He said he doubted his country was the only one “being sensitive to the sometimes combative rhetoric or coercive approach” from Beijing. But, he said, the “traumatizing experiences” of the past century may contribute to his country’s aversion to that pressure.Czechoslovakia, the predecessor of the Czech Republic, was invaded by Nazi Germany two decades after its founding at the end of World War I. After Adolf Hitler’s defeat, it became a satellite of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.The country’s “postwar elites did little to resist Soviet Russia, wrongly believing that Stalin was someone they could have negotiated with,” Beranek said.Yet even under communist rule, the ideal of a “humanistic nation” that honors democracy and human rights had taken root, he said, as witnessed in 1968 by the so-called Prague Spring, an eight-month period of protest and democratic reform that eventually was brutally crushed.Two decades later, the Soviet empire itself collapsed, democracy was reintroduced and the people of Czechoslovakia — Czechs and Slovaks — peacefully divided themselves into two independent nations.Cooperation ‘essential’Beranek’s training as historian keeps these events fresh in his mind. But when asked how that training has shaped his career in diplomacy, Beranek said, “It’s the other way around,” meaning that his diplomatic work has enabled him to see historical events with a clearer lens.As a historian, he also appreciates having a front-row seat as modern-day history unfolds. But he is not happy about everything he sees.”It’s clear that all democratic countries are facing unprecedented challenges; ever closer cooperation is essential,” he said.Such challenges have led his country to form closer ties with democratic nations far from Europe, he added, including Australia.Beranek identifies his country’s strategic decision to reintegrate with the West, including through memberships in both NATO and the EU, as crucial.”However, the upcoming era of global power competition will be yet another thorough test of our ability to make strategic decisions,” he said.He hopes that his countrymen will always bear in mind what their founding fathers had envisioned for their homeland: that efforts devoted to democracy and human rights outside their own boundaries will ultimately contribute to shaping an international environment “conducive to our own freedom and prosperity.”
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The southern Chinese province of Jiangxi issued its highest flood warning on Saturday, predicting a big overflow from a lake that joins the Yangtze River as torrential rain continued to batter much of the country, state media said.The provincial government raised its flood-control response level to I from II, the People’s Daily said, the top of China’s four-tier scale, signaling disasters such as dam collapses or extraordinary simultaneous floods in several rivers.With downpours continuing to wreak havoc across swathes of China, several other cities along the Yangtze have issued their highest-level flood warnings, with parts of the river threatening to burst its banks because of the incessant rain.The Jiangxi authorities expect severe regional flooding in Poyang, state television said, which is China’s largest freshwater lake and joins the Yangtze near the city of Jiujiang.The level of the lake was rising at an unprecedented pace and had reached 22.65 metres by 9 p.m. Saturday (1300 GMT), above the record high set in 1998 and well over the alert level of 19.50 metres, the CCTV said.Jiangzhou county, an island in the middle of Asia’s longest river at the end of the lake, issued a call on social media for everyone from the town aged 18 to 60 to return and help fight the flood, citing a severe lack of hands to reinforce dams.As of 5 p.m. on Saturday, flooding had affected 5.2 million people in Jiangxi province since Monday, with 432,000 people evacuated. It had also damaged 4.56 million hectares of crops and toppled 988 houses, leading to direct losses of 6.5 billion yuan ($929 million), CCTV reported.China’s emergency management ministry said it had diverted assault boats, tents, folding beds and blankets to the province.China’s national observatory renewed its yellow alert for rainstorms on Saturday, warning of heavy weekend rain in places including Sichuan and Chongqing in the southwest, the central province of Hubei and Hunan province in the south.Authorities in Jiangsu province in the Yangtze Delta issued orange flood alerts on Saturday – the second-highest – saying huge, long-lasting volumes of water would pour from the river.
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Jasmin Pierre was 18 when she tried to end her life, overdosing on whatever pills she could find. Diagnosed with depression and anxiety, she survived two more attempts at suicide, which felt like the only way to stop her pain.Years of therapy brought progress, but the 31-year-old Black woman’s journey is now complicated by a combination of stressors hitting simultaneously: isolation during the pandemic, a shortage of mental health care providers and racial trauma inflicted by repeated police killings of Black people.”Black people who already go through mental health issues, we’re even more triggered,” said Pierre, who lives in New Orleans. “I don’t think my mental health issues have ever, ever been this bad before.”Health experts have warned of a looming mental health crisis linked to the coronavirus outbreak, and the federal government rolled out a broad anti-suicide campaign. But doctors and researchers say the issues reverberate deeper among Black people, who’ve seen rising youth suicide attempts and suffered disproportionately during the pandemic.Mental health advocates are calling for more specialized federal attention on Black suicides, including research funding. Counselors focusing on Black trauma are offering free help. And Black churches are finding new ways to address suicide as social distancing has eroded how people connect.”There has been a lot of complex grief and loss related to death, related to loss of jobs and loss of income,” said Sean Joe, an expert on Black suicides at Washington University in St. Louis. “There’s a lot of hurt and pain in America going on right now, and you only are getting a sense of depth in the months ahead.”Protesters hold their fists in the air during a rally in Las Vegas against police brutality sparked by the death of George Floyd,June 5, 2020.Suicides overall have increased. Roughly 48,000 people in the U.S. died by suicide in 2018, with the rate increasing 35% since 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death among all ages. For ages 10 to 19, it’s second after accidents.The rates of suicides and suicide attempts for Black adults have trailed white and Native American adults. But newer research shows an alarming rise in Black young people trying to take their own lives.Suicide attempts rose 73% between 1991 and 2017 among Black high school students while suicidal thoughts and plans for suicide fell for all teens, according to a study  published in November in the journal Pediatrics. The findings, including troubling suicide trends among Black children, prompted the Congressional Black Caucus to issue a report in December deeming  the situation a crisis.Experts say the reasons are a complex mix requiring more study.Suicide risk factors include a diagnosis like depression or trauma or having a parent who committed suicide. Many factors are amplified for Black families, who often face higher poverty rates, disproportionate exposure to violence and less access to medical care.The pandemic has heightened the disparities.  Black people are dying from COVID-19 at higher rates, leaving them to grieve more in isolation with restrictions on funerals and gatherings. Added to the mix is a national reckoning with racism after George Floyd’s killing.”Dealing with racism and stereotypes and all the inequity that we have to face, it’s bandaged up,” said Arielle Sheftall, an author of the Pediatrics study. “It feels like the bandage is ripped off and everybody is looking at it and staring at it, and we are bleeding profusely.”Part of the problem is the study of suicide remains largely white, with little race research. There’s also been a misconception of suicide as only a “white problem.”Michigan psychologist Alton Kirk was among the first to study Black suicides in the 1970s, outlined in his 2009 book, “Black Suicide: The Tragic Reality of America’s Deadliest Secret.”  “When I first started, a lot of Black people were in denial about suicide,” he said. “We had suffered enough. We survived slavery and segregation and all this other stuff. They almost saw it as being a weakness.”While many attitudes have changed, obstacles to health care persist.For one, there aren’t enough mental health professionals. Also, treatment has traditionally been based on white experiences, potentially leaving some clinicians unprepared.Each time there’s a publicized episode of police brutality against Black people, calls to the Trevor Project’s suicide-prevention lines spike immediately. The organization focuses on LGBTQ youth, including addressing racial disparities.”You’re already starting at a different point because you spent your life fighting back racism,” said Tia Dole, the organization’s chief clinical operations officer. “People are walking around with a half-filled tank of emotional resources because of their identity.”For suicide attempt survivors, navigating the pandemic means more uncertainty.Kiauna Patterson, who graduated from Pennsylvania’s Edinboro University this year, tried to end her life in 2018 as she felt pressure from school and working three jobs to help support family.Since losing university health care, she meditates daily and focuses on her goal of becoming a doula.  “You don’t really know what’s going on or what’s going to happen,” she said. “You’re taking each day, just one at a time, to try and grasp some type of control or calmness.”  Pierre, who uses her experiences to counsel others, doesn’t want people struggling alone. She created The Safe Place, a free Black-oriented mental health app that’s seen more signups during the pandemic.  Others are also trying to fill care gaps.  Donna Barnes, who runs the National Organization For People of Color Against Suicide, plans a free online counseling course. After losing her son to suicide in 1990, she noticed a lack of resources for Black families and started the group.”It took me four years before I could smile again,” Barnes said. “It wasn’t easy. My friends and family didn’t know what to do with me.”Trinity United Church of Christ, an influential Black church once attended by former President Barack Obama, has met increased need in Chicago with Zoom chats and calls.The Rev. Otis Moss III used a recent podcast  to discuss his sister’s suicide, which occurred before his wedding in the 1990s.  He called it an effective medium as people remain isolated with services canceled. Moss said it took years to talk openly share about his sister’s schizophrenia and to stop blaming himself.”It is an appropriate time to let people know there are many people who are walking the same road they are walking,” he said. “I found how to punch holes in the darkness and witness light shine through.”
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Five people were killed in an attack on a church west of Johannesburg in the early hours of Saturday, South African police said, with some of the attackers taking hostages who were later freed.Police arrested around 40 people and seized 40 firearms, including rifles, shotguns and handguns, related to the attack on the International Pentecost Holiness Church in Zuurbekom, police spokesman Vishnu Naidoo told the eNCA television station.Police earlier posted pictures of some of the confiscated weapons on Twitter, saying they were dealing with a “hostage situation and shooting”.One potential motive for the attack is a power struggle at the church between rival factions, local media reported.”(E)verything was in complete disarray, so we have arrested all those that we reasonably believe are suspects, we are busy interviewing and interrogating them to establish exactly what the motive was,” Naidoo told eNCA. (Reporting by Alexander Winning and Lynette Ndabambi; Editing by Toby Chopra) 
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China now has the chance to reconsider its 10-year-old Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement with Taiwan, the biggest-ever trade pact between the two rivals, and a Chinese media outlet hints at the agreement’s demise.The agreement, cutting tariffs on about 800 items on both sides and heralding more to come, capped two years of trust-building between governments that had gotten along poorly for decades. Now though, analysts say, the trust is gone and Taiwanese exporters have learned to rely less on the Chinese market over the past decade. A Chinese media outlet says the deal will “expire” this year.The demise of the agreement would mark the biggest undoing of a China-Taiwan deal, upsetting Taiwanese who are part of a $149 billion trade relationship with China and cutting one of the few threads left in political relations between the two.“It’s rather hard to imagine that ECFA will be canceled but because China-Taiwan relations are very poor now and there’s no more of the earlier political foundation for negotiating ECFA,” said Huang Kwei-bo, vice dean of the international affairs college at National Chengchi University in Taipei.“So, if this matter perhaps gradually becomes reality, then for Taiwan society it definitely would become an extremely, extremely hot topic,” Huang said.The deal lacks a formal renewal deadline, but international trade agreement language suggests that agreement signatories anywhere take no more than 10 years to establish customs union or free-trade zones. Taiwan’s Bureau of Foreign Trade calls the 10-year idea nonbinding.China and Taiwan had agreed via ECFA to reduce more trade and investment barriers, but they never implemented further liberalization.The Chinese side is now hinting the deal may be ending, a media outlet says.“The trade agreement is about to expire at the end of September this year,” the state-run China Global Television Network said last month without elaborating.Withdrawal from the pact requires 180 days’ notice.Any renegotiation would be tough because China stopped formal dialogue in 2016 because Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen refused to describe both sides as one country. Her predecessor had agreed to call both sides “China,” allowing for talks that spawned the ECFA.China had seen the pact in 2010 as a way to bring the two sides closer – key to its unification agenda – by offering trade concessions. China eliminated tariffs on 539 Taiwanese imports while Taiwan cut tariffs on 267 Chinese products. Taiwanese farming, fishing, vehicle manufacturing, textiles and machinery industries benefited.The end of the ECFA would hurt just under 5 percent of Taiwan’s commerce with China, government officials have said.China wants to make “life more difficult economically” for Taiwan, said Derek Grossman, senior analyst with the Rand Corp., a U.S. research institution. Over the past four years Chinese military ships and aircraft have passed near Taiwan, which is 160 kilometers away, and Chinese tourist arrivals to Taiwan began tapering in 2016.Taiwan is ready in case China scraps the deal, analysts say. Tsai’s government is trying to expand trade with 19 other countries via its New Southbound Policy, a strategy aimed at expanding Taipei’s relations with countries in South and Southeast Asia, Grossman noted.“I think part of the reason for [the] New Southbound Policy was kind of this expectation that China would cut them off economically at some point plus not trying to get overly dependent on Beijing,” he said.Taiwanese entrepreneurs in many industries, including finance, depend on China less now than they did 10 years ago because of the Chinese internal issues such as China’s battle with COVID-19, said Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief Asia-Pacific economist with Natixis, a French financial services firm.“Unless [ECFA] can be renewed automatically, this thing might simply go,” Garcia said, as neither side would have an interest in pushing for it. 
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