VOA News for Saturday, August 17th, 2013 - 20130817
Channel: ListenAndReadAlong
Date: 2013-08-17

Thanks to http://gandalf.ddo.jp/ for audio and text
VOA NEWS  Saturday August 17th, 2013
From Washington, this is VOA news.  A day of rage in Egypt and 70 people are dead, and in less than two weeks, the U.S. commemorates a profound moment in our history.  I'm Joe Parker reporting from Washington.
Angry Egyptians emerged from midday prayers and took to the streets in a show of defiance, igniting a series of deadly clashes that quickly spread across the country.
Health officials say at least 70 people were killed in Friday's fighting, most of them in violence in and around Cairo's Ramses Square.  Some news reports put the death toll much higher, while witnesses say they saw dozens of bodies laid out in mosques that have become makeshift morgues.
With more from Cairo, here is Edward Yeranian for VOA news.
Heba Morayef, an official with Human Rights Watch, told VOA that the use of live ammunition by police is not acceptable and urged forces to use restraint.
Morayef urged police to take a number of steps to forestall further violence, especially against churches and Egypt's Christian minority.
"The other thing we want to see from the police is effective intervention to protect churches because over the last few days more than 30 churches were attacked around the country.  And that is a clear obligation on the part of the police.  They could have predicted that this would happen, that there would be a sectarian backlash in particular after weeks of sectarian discourse on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood and their supporters from the two sit-ins."
Edward Yeranian for VOA news, Cairo.
The renewed violence gripped Egypt as supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood defied a state-of-emergency to hold a "Day of Rage."
A sudden influx of thousands of Syrians have flocked to Iraq's Kurdistan region.  This is after weeks of fighting between Islamist insurgents and Kurds in northern Syria.
A reporter for VOA's Kurdish service in the northern Iraqi city of Dohuk says about 6,000 Syrian Kurds recently crossed a bridge over the Tigris River into the Kurdistan region.
A National Security Agency internal audit and other top secret documents disclosed by U.S. news media show the agency "has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times" each year since Congress granted NSA broad new powers in 2008.
The Washington Post, which first reported the story, said most of the infractions involved unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the U.S.
The Post reported it acquired the secret documents from NSA leaker Edward Snowden weeks ago.
August 28, the United States will commemorate the 50-year anniversary of one our most profound moments in our history.
With more, here is Meredith Buel for VOA.
"Today I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us."
The nation's attention began to focus on the civil rights movement in the mid-1950s when a young black preacher, Martin Luther King, Jr, led a successful drive to desegregate public buses in Montgomery, Alabama.  King organized non-violent protests against southern segregation to struggle for black equality and voting rights.
Civil rights activist Andrew Young was a friend of King.  "He told us that our job was to redeem the soul of America from the triple evils of racism, war and poverty."
Meredith Buel, VOA news, Washington.
For more on the story, visit our website at voanews.com.
Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy was greeted by thousands of supporters on Friday as he returned from an overseas visit, vowing to lead a campaign to challenge last month's elections.
The Cambodian National Rescue Party leader told the crowd at Phnom Penh's airport that he still does not recognize the results of the election which he says were marred by wide-scale irregularities.
The U.S. for the first time is acknowledging the location of a secretive aerial surveillance test site that conspiracy theorists have long claimed might be the home for extraterrestrials who have invaded the country.
In declassified documents disclosed this week, the Central Intelligence Agency showed a map of the remote Area 51 site in the western state of Nevada, about 130 kilometers northwest of the well-known gambling Mecca of Las Vegas.
The CIA said it used the nearly 1,500-square-kilometer site from 1954 to 1974 as testing grounds for the government's U-2 and Oxcart aerial surveillance programs.  The U.S. [deployed two] deployed U-2 planes, flying at an altitude of 18 kilometers, around the world at the height of the Cold War, including over the Soviet Union.
This is Joe Parker from the VOA news center in Washington.