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LA PAZ, Bolivia — Bolivian President Luis Arce said Friday a former general planned to "take over" the government and become president in a failed coup, and he denied that the Andean nation was in an economic crisis. In an interview with The Associated Press, the embattled leader denied once again that Wednesday's attack on the government palace was a "self-coup" designed to garner him political points. "I didn't escape. I stayed to defend democracy," Arce said. Arce washed his hands of claims by relatives of the 21 people detained by the government that they were innocent of attempting a coup and had been tricked by ex-Gen. Juan Jose Zúñiga. "It's a problem of those who were involved, it's not the government's problem," Arce told AP. Arce said also his government has been "politically attacked" by his one-time ally turned rival, former President Evo Morales, saying the infighting has snarled legislative activities and hamstrung his government confronting economic problems. Despite that, he said, Bolivia's economy is growing and his administration is working to "diversify" means of producing, investing in things like lithium and industrializing. Bolivia has the largest reserves of lithium — a metal known as "white gold" and considered essential in the green transition — in the world that has gone largely untapped, in part due to government policy. Arce said the government "has taken action" to address intermittent gasoline and dollar shortages and other hurdles ailing the South American nation's economy. "Bolivia has an economy that's growing. An economy in crisis doesn't grow," he said. He said it was "completely normal" for Bolivians to run to stockpile food in supermarkets and make a run on ATMs upon seeing an emerging coup in the capital, instead of following his call to take to the streets in support of the government. He said Bolivians were traumatized by the political turmoil in 2019 that led Morales to resign as president and flee and also caused 37 deaths. "Where there is a political situation, this rupture, a coup d'état, of course people will be scared that there won't be food … so they'll go get money to go stock up," Arce said. He added that the government was investigating if the attack was organized by the country's political opposition. That same day, Arce's governmental minister, Eduardo del Castillo, said the government claimed that there were "snipers who did not arrive in time to the Murillo square" where the coup was staged.

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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Yemen's Houthi militant group on Friday claimed responsibility for attacking a Liberia-flagged vessel in the Red Sea that a maritime agency said had survived five missiles. The Houthis said they also targeted three other vessels including two in the Mediterranean. The Iran-aligned Houthis say their attacks on shipping lanes are in solidarity with Palestinians in the war between Israel and the militant Islamist group Hamas. Yahya Saree, the Houthi military spokesperson, said in a televised statement that the group launched ballistic missiles at the Delonix, an oil tanker, and that it took a "direct hit." However, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations monitor said earlier in the day that the ship, which was targeted 278 kilometers northwest of the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, reported no damage and was heading northward. Saree also said the Houthis attacked the Ioannis ship in the Red Sea, as well as the Waler oil tanker and the Johannes Maersk vessel in the Mediterranean. He said the Johannes Maersk, which is owned by Maersk, the world's second-largest container carrier, was targeted because it belongs to "one of the most supportive companies for the Zionist entity and the most that violates ban decision of access to the ports of occupied Palestine." International shipping has been disrupted since November by attacks in the region launched by the Houthis. Many vessels have opted to avoid the Red Sea route to the Suez Canal, taking the longer journey around the southern tip of Africa instead. 

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Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia — Mongolian Prime Minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene declared victory early Saturday in parliamentary elections, after a contest dominated by deepening public anger about corruption and the state of the economy.  People across the vast, sparsely populated nation of 3.4 million, sandwiched between China and Russia, voted Friday to elect 126 members of the State Great Khural.  With 100 percent of votes counted by machine, the prime minister told a press conference in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, a few hours after polls closed that his ruling Mongolian People's Party (MPP) had won a majority of seats.  "According to the pre-results, the Mongolian People's Party has 68 to 70 seats," he said.  The vote, he said, represented a "new page" in "democratic debate."  The votes were being counted by hand, and an official result was expected later Saturday.  If the preliminary results hold, the MPP will see its overall share of parliamentary seats fall, from a supermajority of 79% in 2020 to about 54% in the new one.  Results tallied by local media outlet Ikon based on official data also showed the MPP winning 68 seats, with the main opposition Democratic Party winning 42.  The minor anti-corruption HUN party won eight, Ikon reported.  Voter turnout was 69.3% nationally, a screen at the country's Electoral Commission headquarters showed.  Julian Dierkes, a professor at the University of British Columbia and an expert on Mongolian politics, wrote that "everything points to a reduced MPP majority with a surprisingly strong showing" by the Democratic Party.  "The relatively strong turnout," he said, also suggests "desire for some change." Deep frustration  Analysts had expected the MPP to retain the majority it has enjoyed since 2016 and govern for another four years.  They say the party can credit much of its success to a boom in coal mining that fueled double-digit growth and dramatically improved standards of living, as well as to a formidable party machine and a weak, fractured opposition.  Yet there is deep public frustration over endemic corruption, as well as the high cost of living and lack of opportunities for young people who make up almost two-thirds of the population.  There is also a widespread belief that the proceeds of the coal-mining boom are being hoarded by a wealthy elite – a view that has sparked frequent protests.  Broad spectrum  The streets of Ulaanbaatar, home to almost half of Mongolia's population, have been decked out this week with colorful campaign posters touting candidates from across the political spectrum, from populist businessmen to nationalists, environmentalists and socialists.  Parties are required by law to ensure that 30% of candidates are women in a country where politics is dominated by men.  Preliminary results Saturday suggested that 25% of seats in the new parliament would be held by women, up from 17% in 2020.  The MPP is the successor to the communist party that ruled Mongolia with an iron grip for almost 70 years.   It remains popular, particularly among rural, older voters, and commands a sprawling, nationwide campaign apparatus.

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LAJAS BLANCAS, Panama — Panama's President-elect Jose Raul Mulino announced Friday that he wanted an agreement with the United States on deporting migrants who cross into the world's busiest migration route, the perilous Darien Gap, along his country's border with Colombia. In a visit to the jungle region, Mulino said he would discuss the possible deal with a U.S. delegation, led by U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, that's expected to attend his inauguration next week. The 65-year-old lawyer, who will take the reins of Panama on Monday, promised during his campaign to shut down the Darien Gap, calling the daily crossings "an odyssey that does not have a reason to exist.” More than half a million people traversed the corridor last year, and 186,000 people are estimated to have crossed so far in 2024, with most of the migrants hailing from Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia and China. Until now, Panama has helped speedily bus the migrants across its territory so they can continue their journey north — and reports of abuses, human rights violations and testimonies of deaths along the route have persisted. “I hope to sign a respectful and dignified agreement with the United States so the two countries can begin the repatriation processes of all these people who are accumulated here,” Mulino said during the visit Friday.  He did not elaborate on the details of such an agreement or say how the migrants would be deported to their home countries. “I’ve seen other crises in the Darien, but this is the worst I’ve seen. It breaks my heart to see children my grandchildren's age ask me for a bottle of water,” he told a news conference at the migrant camp of Lajas Blancas.  The migrant route through the narrow isthmus grew exponentially in popularity in recent years with the help of criminal gangs and migrant smugglers who made it an affordable, if dangerous, pathway for hundreds of thousands of people. The popularity of the Darien also grew after countries, under pressure from the U.S. government, imposed visa restrictions on various nationalities, including Venezuelans and Peruvians, to stop migrants flying into the country just to continue toward the U.S. border. Still, masses of people took the challenge and set out on foot through the jungle spanning the Colombia-Panama border. A crossing that initially could take a week or more was whittled to two or three days as the path became more established and entrepreneurial locals set up a range of support services. Mulino, who was accompanied by members of his future Cabinet, visited a temporary reception center where thousands of migrants arrive every week, including pregnant women and children. On Thursday night, migrants staying in the camp of Lajas Blancas after crossing the Darien recounted their economic and security difficulties, and several expressed their support of Mulino's plans to close the migration route. Mulino "will have to close it,” said Pedro Monte, a Venezuelan migrant who lost his wife on the way to the Darien Gap. "It’s the most dangerous thing ... there are thieves, there are deaths. It’s a pity that people lose their lives there.” Mulino has said he will deport migrants who continue crossing the Darien, but experts caution it will be a difficult and expensive task.  “With the government we have [in Venezuela], we never had a life,” another migrant, Jorbys Ocampo, told The Associated Press. He left his family and 8-year-old daughter in Venezuela's coastal city of Maracaibo. “My daughter was born with a heart problem," he said. "There are no supplies, there is no money, there is not enough for anything. “It would be good if they gave more legal ways for people to migrate and to not have to make this terrible journey,” Ocampo said. Asked what would happen if the Darien Gap was closed, he said, “If they close it on one side, it will open on another.”

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islamabad — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump sparred over Afghanistan in their Thursday night debate, but both were silent on the worsening human rights crisis following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country.     During the presidential debate hosted by CNN, Trump blasted Biden for his handling of the August 2021 U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden defended his record, but neither of them discussed the human rights and women's rights crisis in the South Asian nation under Taliban rule.     The fundamentalist group stormed back to power as the U.S.-led foreign forces departed the country after almost two decades of war with the Taliban. The de facto Afghan rulers have imposed their harsh interpretation of Islamic law, banning girls from schools beyond the sixth grade and many Afghan women from public and private workplaces, among other curbs on their freedoms.    "Since the U.S. withdrawal, Afghanistan has sadly become out of sight and out of mind in both public and policy debate in the U.S., so it's not that surprising that the two candidates would fixate on the last days of the pullout instead of the broader and quite depressing state of play in Afghanistan today," Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center, told VOA.     The U.S. presidential debate came as the United Nations prepares to host crucial talks between Taliban and international envoys in Doha, Qatar, on Sunday. Afghan civil society and women representatives will not be involved, however, a move drawing strong backlash from global human rights defenders.     "It's hardly surprising that neither Trump nor Biden has a word to spare for the rights of Afghan women and girls," said Heather Barr, women's rights associate director at Human Rights Watch.     "I wish the moderator had asked them specifically about the contributions they both made to creating what is now the world's most serious women's crisis, and a crisis that deepens every day," Barr told VOA via email.     She noted that Trump oversaw the Doha agreement his administration signed with the then-insurgent Taliban in 2020, and those negotiations did not involve Afghan women, nor were their rights on the agenda. The pact set the stage for all American and allied troops to pull out from what is described as the longest war in U.S. history.     "Now Biden is sending his diplomats off to the Doha 3 meeting, where it will be exactly the same — no women on the agenda, no women at the table," Barr said. 'Doha process'    The two-day conference will be the third in Qatar's capital since U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres initiated what is referred to as the "Doha process" a year ago to try to establish a unified international approach to increase engagement with the Taliban.     The de facto Afghan leaders were not invited to the first Doha meeting in May 2023 and refused an invitation to the second in February.     John Fortier, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said Afghanistan and post-withdrawal issues facing the country are no longer high on the American people's agenda.    "I think American institutions and foreign policy experts have concerns, but as a political matter … we are not thinking about Afghanistan in the same way as we were after the events of September 11 [2001]. For many years, we do not have troops in the same way that we had for many years," Fortier told VOA.     Speaking on Thursday, Trump accused Biden of being responsible for the deaths of 13 American soldiers in an Islamic State group-claimed suicide bombing of the Kabul airport just days before the last American troops left Afghanistan.     "No general got fired for the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, Afghanistan, where we left billions of dollars of equipment behind; we lost 13 beautiful soldiers. … And by the way, we left people behind, too. We left American citizens behind," Trump stated. "I was getting out of Afghanistan, but we were getting out with dignity, with strength, with power. He got out, it was the most embarrassing day in the history of our country's life," he claimed. Biden defended his Afghan exit policy, saying he "got over 100,000 Americans and others out of Afghanistan during that airlift" and sharply criticized Trump's blistering attacks. "I've never heard so much malarkey in my whole life," the president stated.    VOA's Afghan Service contributed to this report.

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Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas today announced the extension and redesignation of Haiti for Temporary Protected Status for 18 months, from Aug. 4, 2024, to Feb. 3, 2026, due to extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti.

new york — The United States and its allies warned Friday that expanding military cooperation between Russia and North Korea is dangerous, illegal and a growing threat to the wider international community. "Last week, Russian and DPRK leaders signed a 'Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership,' paving the way for further deepening their military cooperation," Robert Wood, U.S. deputy U.N. ambassador, told reporters, surrounded by representatives of nearly 50 like-minded countries. "We are deeply concerned about the security implications of the advancement of this cooperation for Europe, the Korean Peninsula, the Indo-Pacific region and around the world." DPRK is the abbreviation for North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Wood spoke ahead of a meeting of the U.N. Security Council requested by the United States, Britain, France, Japan and South Korea to discuss North Korea's transfer of arms and munitions to Russia, which are helping drive the Kremlin's war machine in Ukraine. Such transfers would violate a U.N. arms embargo on North Korea. "Before February 2022, it was hard to imagine that the war in Ukraine would pose such a direct threat to the security of the Korean Peninsula," South Korean Ambassador Joonkook Hwang told council members. "But now we are facing a new reality." He said South Korea's national defense ministry has assessed that since North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a summit in Russia in September, Pyongyang has shipped at least 10,000 containers to Russia that can hold a total of as many as 5 million artillery shells. His government has also determined that 122-millimeter artillery shells made in North Korea were included in the weapons Russia has used against Ukraine. In return for the weapons, North Korea is seeking trade and military assistance from Russia, which would violate U.N. sanctions. It is also benefiting from Russia’s political protection in the Security Council. "All these developments can bring about a shift in the global security landscape, and the potential long-term effects are dangerously uncertain," Hwang said, adding that Seoul would "resolutely respond" to any threats to its security in a "prudent and measured" way. U.N. sanctions experts detailed prohibited transfers of military equipment and munitions from North Korea to Russia in a report in February — which Moscow denied. Russia then used its Security Council veto to shut down the 14-year-old monitoring panel in April. Russia's envoy again dismissed accusations it is getting weapons from North Korea at Friday's meeting. "This is completely false," Vassily Nebenzia told the council, adding that the two countries' cooperation "is exclusively constructive and legitimate in nature." Nebenzia dismissed the panel of experts' findings as controlled and directed by the West. "The panel of experts have been following those orders given them and turning in the direction they were told to turn," he said. North Korea's envoy defended Pyongyang and Moscow's treaty, saying relations between the two countries "are completely peace-loving and defensive in nature." "Therefore, there is no reason whatsoever to be concerned about development of their bilateral relations, unless they have intention to undertake a military invasion of the DPRK and Russian Federation," Ambassador Song Kim said. China, which has traditionally been North Korea's closest ally, expressed concern about heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula. "China calls on parties concerned to be rational and pragmatic and to find joint efforts to find a solution," Deputy Ambassador Geng Shuang said. Washington's envoy urged Beijing to use its influence with both Pyongyang and Moscow to persuade them to cease their "increasingly dangerous cooperation." "So I appeal to my Chinese colleague to understand that if indeed the situation on the Korean Peninsula continues on the trajectory it's going, the United States and its allies will have to take steps to defend their security," Wood said.

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pentagon — The United States and 28 partner nations have begun the world's largest naval war exercise off the shores of Hawaii, known as the Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC.  This year's exercise brings international cooperation on a scale like no other: 40 surface ships, more than 150 aircraft, three submarines and 25,000 people. Nations from around the globe are practicing a wide range of missions, from natural disaster response to attack skills needed for war. While most participants are nations with Pacific coastlines, this year's RIMPAC also includes non-Pacific nations, including the United Kingdom, France, Brazil and Israel. "Every nation in the world that has interests in the Pacific and will adhere to the same values is more than welcome to participate," said Chilean Navy Commodore Alberto Guerrero, RIMPAC deputy commander. One country not invited? China. Why? Because the warm welcome RIMPAC gave to China in 2014 and 2016 backfired, according to Markus Garlauskas, director of the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council. "There was this outreach to China, and definitely the U.S. and its allies and partners were essentially burned by the Chinese taking advantage of it … as an opportunity to essentially collect intelligence and to try and get more acceptance of what should be considered unacceptable behavior," Garlauskas told VOA. Since China's last RIMPAC in 2016, he said, Beijing ramped up its aggressive behavior, building and militarizing more artificial islands in international waters, conducting aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan in recent months and pummeling Philippine ships with water cannons in recent days. But the biennial exercise, officials say, can send a strong message to China to stop bullying its neighbors. RIMPAC nations this year will practice targeting the decommissioned assault ship USS Tarawa, in a rare chance to learn how effective their weapons are at sinking a large and protected adversary in open waters.  "They're not just going to be facing the United States in the country they're targeting, but they're potentially going to have to deal with a response from a wide range of countries that have common interests in deterring and confronting Chinese aggression as threats to a free and open Indo-Pacific," Garlauskas said. Israel's inclusion this year sparked calls from pro-Palestinian activists wanting countries to skip the exercise in protest. Malaysia's prime minister addressed the protesters ahead of the exercises, saying that while his country would continue to speak out in support of the Palestinian people, Malaysia needed to act in a way that was "not driven by anger," while also considering the practical implications of missing the major military exercise. RIMPAC is set to end in early August.  

washington — The temporary, floating pier built by the U.S. military to deliver aid to civilians in Gaza has been disconnected and officials say there is a chance it will not be reattached. Pentagon officials Friday announced the pier, also known as the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (JLOTS) capability, was detached from its connection on the Gaza shoreline and was being moved to the Israeli port of Ashdod because of high seas. It is not the first time the temporary pier has been taken offline because of rough weather off the coast of Gaza. And officials said, as with previous disruptions, they intend to monitor sea conditions before deciding what happens next. "I don't have a date," said Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh, briefing reporters Friday. "The commander will continue to assess the sea states over the weekend,” she said. “We're going to continue to monitor the environmental and weather factors." But even if the waters calm, there is a chance the temporary pier will not go back into service. The U.S. credits the pier with helping to bring more than 8,800 metric tons of aid into Gaza since operations began.  However, because of ongoing fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas, a U.S.-designated terror group, much of the aid has not left the Gaza beach. "We are pretty close to full on the marshaling yard in terms of how much aid is there," Singh said. "If there's not enough room on the marshaling yard, then it doesn't make sense to put our men and women out there when there's nothing to move,” she said. “We do need to see that marshaling yard open up to allow for aid groups to continue that distribution so that we can get more aid in as we get it from Cyprus." The U.N. World Food Program suspended distribution of aid coming in via the U.S. military pier on June 9, saying it was not confident its staff or the staff of partner agencies could move safely. U.S. officials envisioned the temporary pier to Gaza, which has cost at least $230 million, as a supplemental route to deliver aid to civilians impacted by the fighting. In recent weeks, however, it has become one of the main routes to get aid shipments into Gaza. “The pier provided the second-highest volume of aid from any entry point into Gaza this past week,” Singh said, adding that more than 4,500 metric tons of aid had transited the pier over the past seven days. But she said the U.S. remained engaged with Israel to try to make sure other avenues for delivering aid expand. "We continue to urge for those land routes to be opened. That is the most effective way to get aid in," she said. "We continue to urge the Israelis to open up those crossings."