Cuba’s charter rewrite adds a premier
HAVANA — Cuba is revealing new details about plans to reshape its government, courts and economy with a constitutional change set to be approved by the national assembly this month.
The revision of the 1976 constitution would create the position of prime minister alongside the president, splitting the roles of head of government and head of state.
The constitution keeps the Communist Party as the sole political force in the country and says the communist state will remain the dominant economic force.
The constitution does, however, create new recognitions of the free market and private property in Cuban society, and creates a new presumption of innocence in the justice system.
The proposed constitutional revision described in the main state paper Saturday is also expected to be approved in a later national referendum.
Iraqi city calmer after day of protests
BEIRUT — Iraqi security forces deployed on the streets of the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Saturday after a day of angry demonstrations over failing public services and high unemployment.
Protesters chanting against politicians on Friday attacked the ruling Dawa party’s office downtown and stormed the airport outside Najaf, forcing it to shut down.
Calm returned to the city on Saturday, but security apparatuses remained on high alert after demonstrations spread across the country’s predominantly-Shiite south.
Rumors circulated on social media on Saturday that the government had shut down the Internet in Baghdad, Najaf, and Basra, Iraq’s premier oil city and the site of the first protests against joblessness and neglect. Communications links appeared severely limited in the three cities.
Basra, despite producing most of Iraq’s oil, is plagued by crumbling infrastructure and widespread poverty. The city suffers from rolling blackouts and water cuts that are felt acutely in the summer months, where temperatures regularly approach 122 F.
Algeria said to resume desert expulsions
PARIS — Algeria’s government has resumed expelling migrants into the Sahara Desert to die, leaving 391 people to wander through some of the world’s most hostile terrain in the middle of summer, a U.N. migration official said Saturday.
The migrants, from 16 countries, were abandoned at the border with Niger, according to a tweet from Giuseppe Loprete, the head of the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration in Niger.
The Associated Press reported last month that Algeria has left more than 13,000 people in the desert of Niger and Mali since May 2017, forcing them to walk or die under searing heat. The International Organization for Migration in Mali later said the normally secretive Algerian government seemed to be trying, after the report, to make an effort to communicate the movement of the migrants.
The U.N. agency has been forced to find the migrants as they stumble through the desert, and many told the AP some of their companions died along the way.
Algeria has an agreement with Niger’s government to deport its citizens by convoy directly to the city of Agadez. But migrants from other countries who have been rounded up in repeated sweeps are trucked to around 9 miles from the nearest water and ordered to march through some of the world’s most hostile terrain, where summer temperatures reach well above 104 F.
Italy says 2 nations to take 100 migrants
ROME — Italy said Saturday that Malta and France had agreed to take 100 of the 450 migrants who were rescued from a fishing boat in the Mediterranean.
Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte said the two nations had come forward in response to his request to all 27 other members of the European Union to share the burden of welcoming the migrants.
“It’s an important result,” Conte wrote on Facebook.
The migrants had been aboard a large fishing boat when the Italian and Maltese coast guard control centers began squabbling Friday over who was responsible for taking them in.
Malta said it had fulfilled its obligations by monitoring the vessel to see if it needed help. Malta says the ship’s crew members made clear they didn’t need help and were heading toward the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Interior Minister Matteo Salvini and his transport minister insisted that Malta should have opened its ports to the ship. In his first month in office, Salvini has taken a hard line against migrants, upending years of policy to deny them entry.