America’s Test at the Border - NYT Editorial | malaysia airlines MH17 crash - GS
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malaysia airlines MH17 crash - GS
The crisis of young migrants at the Texas border is a test of American values, one of those surprise exams that history now and then throws our way: Here are 57,000 helpless children. We are a nation of 300 million. Do we spit on them, or give them blankets and beds?
It is a test that many are flunking. In Arizona, no surprise, people are losing their minds. Hearing that migrant children were being sent to the town of Oracle, a county sheriff instigated a protest that ensnared a busload of bewildered YMCA campers. A disbarred former county attorney running for governor has an ad showing a Mexican flag swallowing up a map of Arizona and the slogan “Before It’s Too Late.”
The fever is hot in other states, too: graffiti denouncing “illeagles” in Maryland. A mayor whipping up a bus blockade in Murrieta, Calif. The call going out on YouTube for militias to get their weapons and boots, and man up to keep the little ones on their side of the river.
In Congress, which gave up on creating an orderly immigration system, Republicans are watching President Obama struggle to get a handle on the problem, and trying very hard not to help. Their reaction is one part panic, two parts glee. Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia is warning the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about migrants carrying the Ebola virus. For Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, it’s H1N1 flu virus. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is using the crisis to demand an end to President Obama’s program deferring deportations of young people known as Dreamers. There is no time like a crisis to blow up earlier efforts to fix the system’s failures.
As the crisis emboldens demagogues in Washington, Mr. Obama has the obligation to act the grown-up. But he can be a tepid ally where unauthorized immigrants are concerned, since he sees the issue through a calculating lens that overlooks the moral urgency to act. As Republicans issue absurd calls to send in the National Guard to seal the border, it’s worth remembering that the Obama administration already did that — years before the child-migrant crisis erupted.
This volatile situation demands courage and calm. Mr. Obama has the calm, but does he have the courage? Can he send a clear message like the one given by Maryland’s governor, Martin O’Malley, who told fellow governors: “It is contrary to everything we stand for as a people to try to summarily send children back to death.” Mayor Stephanie Miner of Syracuse wrote to Mr. Obama offering shelter in her city for the children. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, are pushing back at Republican efforts to speed the children’s deportations. Clergy members in Texas and other states are teaming up to welcome and shelter the migrants.
With Republicans in a frenzy, public support for immigrants is being tested. Leadership is needed.
The president, who has sought $3.7 billion from Congress, including humanitarian and legal aid for the migrant children, has the better argument. He has every right to defend his policies on moral as well as practical grounds, to confront the Tea Party’s fear and loathing with a call to treat traumatized children as refugees and protect them from harm.
It would be good to see Mr. Obama join other Democrats and Republicans in making the moral and legal case for compassionate action, to lead a backlash against the nativist backlash.
And while he’s at it, he can reaffirm his commitment to protecting, through executive action this year, millions of immigrants who have been here for years, who deserve the chance to legalize that Congress has refused them. He made this vow before the border crisis exploded; we could all benefit from hearing him repeat it.
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin issued a brief statement early on Monday saying that Russia would work to ensure that the conflict in eastern Ukraine moves from the battlefield to the negotiating table, and he again said that a robust international investigating team must have secure access to the Malaysia Airlines crash site. He also accused unspecified nations of exploiting the disaster in pursuit of “mercenary political goals.”
The statement posted on the Kremlin website came a day after mounting international criticism and anger against Russia and specifically Mr. Putin for the chaotic, unsecured condition of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash site and what some nations said was the desecration of the victims’ bodies. President Obama and other leaders have accused Mr. Putin of arming and abetting the rebels in their insurgent battle against the Ukrainian government.
“Russia will do everything it can to shift the conflict in eastern Ukraine from today’s military stage to the stage of discussion at the negotiating table,” Mr. Putin said in the video statement posted at 1:40 a.m. on Monday, suggesting it emerged from a late-night discussion.
In eastern Ukraine, clashes continued between rebels and government forces as the recovery effort remained hampered by a lack of access to the crash site. Near the train station in Donetsk, about 50 miles from the crash site, artillery fire was heard. A witness said that rebel tanks were in the area, and that Ukrainian forces were firing back. It was unclear exactly where they were firing from. Ukrainian forces have occupied the nearby airport for weeks.
Rebel fighters said they believed Ukrainian forces were attempting to enter the city, perhaps to create a corridor for their forces, which were marooned at the Donetsk airport. “They’re trying to come in,” said a rebel fighter, who would identify himself only by his first name, Sasha, before he headed into battle.
A spokesman for the Donetsk People’s Republic, Sergei Vladimirovich, said that the Ukrainians had begun to push into the city from the northwest. “A fight is going on,” he said by telephone. “There are casualties but we don’t know how many. We are still trying to figure out what is happening.”
A Ukrainian military spokesman, Vladislav Seleznyov, said he could not give details about what was happening, citing military secrecy, and would say only that the military was entering “an active phase of the antiterrorist operation.” He insisted that the military would not bomb or shoot artillery in the city, but he did not explain how specifically the Ukrainians were pushing forward. He said a “special unit,” was taking action to “reinforce the city.” Witnesses reported heavy shelling in the area and damage at a children’s hospital.
Also on Monday, the Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, said at a news conference in Kiev that the Ukrainian authorities had discovered 272 bodies from the flight, which left Amsterdam bound for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 251 of which had been loaded onto refrigerated train cars that had been sent to the crash site. He said the separatists were refusing to allow the train to leave the area, and that the Ukrainian government was ready to transfer an international investigation to “our Dutch friends.”
Mr. Yatsenyuk, who had been speaking in Ukrainian, then switched to English and adopted an even more forceful tone in condemning Russia.
“Those who committed this international crime, those responsible will be held accountable and together with the entire international community,” he said, “we will bring to justice everyone responsible, including the country which is behind the scene, but supplied illegal weapons, provided the financial support, trained these bastards and supported and even orchestrated this kind of despicable crime. "
Mr. Putin again endorsed an investigation by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency.
“It is essential for a robust team of experts to work on the site of the catastrophe under the auspices of I.C.A.O., the relevant international commission,” Mr. Putin said. “Everything must be done to ensure its full and absolute safety and to secure the humanitarian corridors needed for its work.”
It is unclear whether such an indirect call to allow the investigation to proceed would satisfy the growing chorus of critics who have demanded that Mr. Putin intervene directly with the pro-Russian separatists to end the combination of disorder and threats that have marked the crash site thus far. He also did not directly address the repeated accusations that Russia played a role in the disaster.
The United States and Ukraine have both accused Russia of not just supplying the rebels with weapons, but actively training them in the use of antiaircraft missiles, and they accuse the separatists of spiriting the battery used to down the civilian jetliner over the border into Russia just hours after the disaster.
Australia dispatched its foreign minister to the United Nations to lead the effort on Monday to get the United Nations Security Council to approve a resolution demanding that pro-Russian separatists grant unrestricted access to the crash site.
In addition, European leaders meeting on Tuesday are expected to discuss tougher economic sanctions against Russia, based on the sense that Moscow, while publicly supporting an investigation, is secretly trying to thwart it.
From the start, Mr. Putin has blamed Ukraine for the crash and said it was its responsibility to carry out the investigation. Russia’s state-run television has also maintained a steady drumbeat of reports suggesting Ukraine had the means to shoot down the passenger jet, while stopping just short of accusing it of doing so.
In his statement released early Monday, Mr. Putin again said that if Ukraine had not abandoned a cease-fire in southeastern Ukraine, the tragedy would not have happened, and he accused others of trying to exploit it for political gains.
“At the same time no one should, and no one has a right to, use this tragedy for mercenary political goals,” he said in the statement, recorded at one of his residences near Moscow. “Such an event should not divide but unite people.”
There was no indication that the Kremlin would abandon what Ukraine and Western governments have said is its extensive support for the separatists, and analysts here suggested that Mr. Putin would not unless there was irrefutable evidence that they shot down the plane. Mr. Putin is riding a wave of popular support at home for his robust foreign policy, starting with the annexation of Crimea in March.
Politicians around the world expressed anger on Sunday at the lack of action by Mr. Putin. The American secretary of state, John Kerry, said he was warning Mr. Putin “for the last time” to stabilize eastern Ukraine and halt the flow of weapons to separatists there. He called their handling of the victims, which the rebels seized from Ukrainian rescue workers, “grotesque.”
The United States, along with Ukraine, has been the most vocal in accusing Russia of supplying the separatists with the surface-to-air missile believed to have brought down the Malaysia Airlines flight last Thursday, killing all 298 people on board.
In Australia on Monday, the prime minister, Tony Abbott, said attempts to secure the crash sight remained “an absolutely shambolic situation.”
“It does look more like a garden cleanup than a forensic investigation,” he said.
Those remarks came after he said earlier that he had talked to Mr. Putin by telephone and that the Russian leader had “said all the right things” about making sure that the international investigation was able to proceed.
Speaking on Sunday on television in Australia, Mr. Abbott summed up what much of the Western world was thinking: “Russian-controlled territory, Russian-backed rebels, quite likely a Russian-supplied weapon, Russia cannot wash its hands of this.”
Forensic experts from the United States and other countries whose citizens died aboard the Malaysia Airlines jet arrived in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv early Monday as part of an international push to recover, identify and repatriate bodies still under the control of pro-Russian rebels.
“We are here to get the bodies back to their countries and to their families. We will try our utmost to do this as quickly as possible,” Michel Oz, the group’s Dutch coordinator, said. But he added that it was still unclear whether the separatist rebels who control the crash site and the nearby railway station at Torez would allow a train loaded with corpses to leave for Kharkiv. “We have no information,” he said.
At 11:30 a.m., Dutch body identification specialists arrived together with representatives from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe at the train station in Torez. The two body identification experts bowed their heads for a few seconds of silence before climbing into the second car and starting to work. They put on blue latex gloves and masks over their mouths and noses. One asked for a flashlight. The bodies lay in black trash bags in a pile toward the back of the wagon. Incongruously, a large tree branch lay next to them. One worker, in rimless glasses with a round face, stood up inside and paused, and looked around him, appearing overwhelmed. They bent down touching some of the bags. They repeated the process in two other train cars.
“We need to get this train out of here before darkness,” Alexander Hug, deputy chief monitor of the O.S.C.E. special monitoring mission, said to a separatist leader, standing in front of a rusty train wagon. He added: “If we wait any longer it won’t be good for anyone.”
Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine’s biggest city, lies around 190 miles north of the crash site and is under the control of the central government in Kiev, which has repeatedly accused the pro-Russian rebels of firing the missile that downed the plane. The Ukrainian authorities have set up a forensic laboratory and other facilities in Kharkiv to identify remains and investigate the crash.
Mr. Oz said the international team now assembling in Kharkiv included experts from the American Federal Bureau of Investigation, a unit of the German federal police that handles the identification of disaster victims, as well as officials from Britain and Australia. Malaysia is also due to join the effort.
An Australian official who declined to be identified voiced dismay that the bodies were effectively being held hostage by separatist rebels. “We have no idea what is going on and when we can get the bodies,” he said.
Igor Baluta, the governor of Kharkiv, complained that the separatists were frustrating efforts to identify corpses and return them to their families. “We are all ready here. We are prepared to receive the bodies but everything depends on getting an agreement” with the rebels, Mr. Baluta told reporters on Monday.
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Updated July 21, 2014 12:33 a.m. ET
The U.S. accused Russia of hiding evidence after the downing of Flight 17 and cited video posted on social media. An image from footage released by the Ukrainian Interior Ministry purports to show a truck carrying a missile system out of Ukraine toward Russia. Associated Press
The U.S. leveled its most-explicit allegations yet of Russia's involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU 0.00% Malaysian Airline System Bhd Malaysia RM0.20 0.00 0.00% July 21, 2014 4:58 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 180.44M P/E Ratio N/A Market Cap RM3.34 Billion Dividend YieldN/A Rev. per Employee N/A 0.2050.2000.19510a11a12p1p2p3p4p 07/21/14 Ukraine Offers to Hand Over Ma... 07/21/14 Markets Slip as Russia, Middle... 07/21/14 Australian Shares End at Six-Y... More quote details and news » 3786.KU in 
Your Value Your Change Short position Flight 17 and subsequent efforts to conceal evidence, and European leaders threatened broad new sanctions against Moscow, marking a turning point in the standoff between the West and the Kremlin.
Your Value Your Change Short position Flight 17 and subsequent efforts to conceal evidence, and European leaders threatened broad new sanctions against Moscow, marking a turning point in the standoff between the West and the Kremlin.
Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday warned Russian President Vladimir Putin "for the last time" to accede to Western demands to disarm pro-Russian separatists and stabilize Ukraine. (Follow the latest updates on the Malaysia Airlines crash in Ukraine.)
Officials in Europe, meanwhile, departed from their initially muted reaction as anger grew across the continent over the attack that left 298 people dead and the chaos at the crash area in eastern Ukraine. Reports that bodies were being handled haphazardly and that separatist guards on the scene were drunk have caused fury in European countries where victims came from, including the Netherlands.
Mr. Putin, in a Kremlin-website posting overnight, called for an international investigation of the crash site and said that "Russia will do everything possible to shift the current conflict in the east of Ukraine from today's current military stage to the state of discussion at the negotiation table."
The Obama administration for the first time publicly charged Mr. Putin's government with supplying the rebels the long-range rockets used in last Thursday's strike and also likely providing the separatists with training.
U.S. officials said intelligence also showed the missile batteries used in the attack were returned to Russian soil shortly after the jetliner crashed, suggesting an attempted coverup. American and European leaders demanded Mr. Putin use his influence with the rebels to assist international investigators to examine the crash site, which many believe has already been compromised.
People sign a book of condolence Sunday in Hilversum, Netherlands, during a mass in memory of the victims of the Malaysia Airlines flight. Getty Images
But despite the powerful new impetus to act, there were questions over whether European leaders would at last agree on more-aggressive action and whether the U.S. and Europe would take the most-economically punishing steps against Moscow. The sanctions imposed so far have been narrowly targeted and haven't applied to broad swaths of the Russian economy.
European Union diplomats said the 28-nation body could start freezing assets of companies and business people close to Mr. Putin as soon as Tuesday.
"We have enormous input about this, which points fingers," Mr. Kerry told CNN on Sunday. "It points a very clear finger at the separatists."
Mr. Kerry was cautious about directly blaming Mr. Putin for the disaster, noting that "culpability is a judicial term." But he and other U.S. officials said the Kremlin bore responsibility for fueling the conflict in eastern Ukraine with arms and heavy military equipment, leading to the tragedy.
U.S. and European officials also cited as a basis for new action the chaos at the crash site and the aggressiveness of the rebels, who they charged are trying to destroy evidence of their involvement in the crash.
Mr. Putin, in his website posting, didn't directly blame the Ukrainian leadership, saying the downing was a consequence of the renewed hostilities after a failed ceasefire.
"It's essential for a robust team of experts to work on the site of the crash under the auspices of ICAO, the relevant international commission," Mr. Putin said, referring to the International Civil Aviation Organization. "Everything must be done to ensure its full and absolute security and guarantee the humanitarian corridors necessary for its work."
Photos: Bodies Are Removed from MH17 Crash Site
The White House in part is viewing the MH-17 tragedy as a catalyst for a de-escalation of violence that has eluded the West, senior U.S. officials said.
The main assessment the White House is making: What can the U.S. do to shape a response to the dramatic turn in events this past week? Part of that involves quietly sussing out if there is a possible "off-ramp" they could entice Mr. Putin to take to de-escalate the crisis. With that in mind, officials are closely watching Mr. Putin's response but said they aren't likely to give him too much time without retaliation.
Some officials who have been pushing Europe to take a harder stance believe the crash marks a watershed.
"In my assessment, this is really a turning point," Lithuanian foreign minister Linas Linkevicius said in an interview on Sunday. "If anyone had the illusion that this was only happening in Ukraine, that it had nothing to do with our common concerns—now we can see all these victims from the West."
French President François Hollande, after phone calls with U.K. and German leaders, demanded the Kremlin compel pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine to provide "free and total" access to the crash site.
"If Russia does not immediately take the necessary measures, consequences will be decided by theEuropean Union when its foreign-affairs council meets on Tuesday," Mr. Hollande's office said, publicly hinting for the first time since the crash that France would support ratcheting up sanctions.
Later on Sunday, Mr. Hollande spoke by phone to Mr. Putin, urging him to persuade the separatists to "stop impeding the investigation…and to hand over the black boxes," Mr. Hollande's office said.
Italy, a past skeptic of sanctions, issued some of its toughest language yet. "If Russia doesn't cooperate with the investigation" into the crash, "we are very much ready to support the sanctions," an Italian foreign-ministry spokesman said.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told reporters his country is sending a delegation to the U.N. to build support for a tough response against Russia in an attempt to get access to the site.
But it remained unclear how hard Europe is willing to push Russia to alter its overall policy in Ukraine.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been at the center of Europe's diplomacy, on Sunday worked the phones with leaders of the U.K., France, Australia, the Netherlands, Finland, Ukraine and Russia.
Of the 298 people on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, remains of some 100 passengers are still missing. The Ukrainian government has criticized lack of full access to the site in an area controlled by pro-Russian rebels. The WSJ's Ramy Inocencio reports.
Her spokesman described the aftermath of the jet's downing as "intolerable," highlighting "the separatists' catastrophic treatment of the victims." He declined to comment on statements by Mr. Hollande and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron indicating the EU's three most-powerful leaders agreed new sanctions were needed against Russia if it didn't change course.
Mr. Cameron expressed frustration on Sunday at reluctance in Europe to confront Mr. Putin. "For too long, there has been a reluctance on the part of too many European countries to face up to the implications of what is happening in Eastern Ukraine," Mr. Cameron said in an article in London's Sunday Times.
European diplomats had initially hoped Moscow would respond cooperatively to the crash and that this could lead to a broader political reconciliation over Ukraine. European leaders largely avoided directly blaming the Kremlin.
But over the weekend, EU officials became increasingly convinced that the separatists' denials of responsibility were false.
—Naftali Bendavid, Siobhan Gorman, Alan Cullison, Carol E. Lee and Julian E. Barnes contributed to this article.
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