Month: March 2017

American Michael Sharp told his mother two years ago he was committed to helping the Congolese people in his role as a U.N. investigator and was “not afraid to die,” she recalled Thursday after he was murdered this week along with a colleague in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“He said the hardest thing for him was to think about pain he would cause his family,” Michele Miller Sharp said in a telephone interview from her home in Kansas. “I told him we all supported him and we would handle any pain and he should continue his work.”

Sharp’s mother learned of his death on her birthday. United Nations peacekeepers in Congo this week discovered his body and that of Zaida Catalan, a Swedish national, who had been missing in an area engulfed in violence.

Sharp, 34, was in a group of experts monitoring sanctions imposed on Congo by the U.N. Security Council when he and others were kidnapped this month in Kasai Central province.

Despite the risks, Sharp’s parents, who live outside Wichita, “were fully supportive of him because he was passionate. This was his calling,” said his father, John E. Sharp, 65.

“We were not about to step in the way of that, in spite of our fears,” he added. “Although we hoped and prayed something like this would never happen, we knew it was a possibility.”

Passion, respect

Michael Sharp was raised in Indiana and learned from his Mennonite Christian faith the core values of peace building and nonviolence, his 62-year-old mother said. After studying history in college, Michael headed to Germany, where he volunteered and then earned a master’s degree in international conflict resolution.

Sharp resided in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when he was on breaks from his work. In Congo, he worked three years building relationships with militia leaders, convincing them to lay down their weapons and release the children they had dragooned into being soldiers.

“That was his passion, to work at helping this war-torn country,” said his mother. “He cared deeply about the Congolese people.”

Michael joined the U.N. in 2015 as a militia group expert, presenting information to the Security Council and making recommendations on sanctions, his parents said.

Colleagues told his parents that Congolese militia leaders respected their son, who would travel for miles, unarmed, to meet them under a banana tree and just listen to them.

Michael would no doubt be amazed at the fuss about him as he was very unassuming and humble, his father said. While he understood the risks involved, he worried more about the effect his death might have on his family.

“About two years ago, he sat down beside me and said, ‘Mom you know I don’t have death wish in the work I do, but I want you to know I’m not afraid to die either.'” his mother said. She said the family supported him.

“From a toddler on up, every day was lived to the fullest,” she added.

U.N. leaders react

Meanwhile, his parents and two sisters wait for the return of Michael’s body to the United States, where U.S. officials will perform an autopsy. His parents said U.N. officials have been in constant communication with them.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday said the world body would “do everything possible to ensure that justice is done.” U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley called the death senseless.

“Michael was working on the front lines of what we try to do at the United Nations every day: find problems and fix them,” she said in a statement. “He selflessly put himself in harm’s way to try to make a difference in the lives of the Congolese people.”

Congo’s Kasai Central region is the center of the Kamuina Nsapu insurgency that has now spread to five provinces in the loosely governed Central African country.

The parents said they hope the U.N. doesn’t abandon its work in Congo due to their son’s death. “We would not want this tragedy to be compounded by withdrawal from that region,” the father, John, said. “We also want the U.S. to continue its funding to the U.N.”
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Several environmental groups filed lawsuits against the Trump administration on Thursday to challenge its decision to approve construction of TransCanada Corp’s controversial Keystone XL crude oil pipeline.

In two separate filings to a federal court in Montana, environmental groups argued that the U.S. State Department, which granted the permit needed for the pipeline to cross the Canadian border, relied on an “outdated and incomplete environmental impact statement” when making its decision earlier this month.

By approving the pipeline without public input and an up-to-date environmental assessment, the administration violated the National Environmental Policy Act, groups including the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and the Northern Plains Resource Council said in their legal filing.

“They have relied on an arbitrary, stale, and incomplete environmental review completed over three years ago, for a process that ended with the State Department’s denial of a cross-border permit,” the court filing says.

In the other filing, the Indigenous Environmental Network and North Coast Rivers Alliance sought injunctive relief, restraining Transcanada from taking any action that would harm the “physical environment in connection with the project pending a full hearing on the merits.”

Trump surrounded by supporters

U.S. President Donald Trump announced the presidential permit for the Keystone XL at the White House last week. TransCanada’s Chief Executive Officer Russ Girling and Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, stood nearby.

Trump, a Republican, said the project would lower consumer fuel prices, create jobs and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

His Democratic predecessor, former president Barack Obama, rejected the pipeline, saying it would lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions and do nothing to reduce fuel prices for U.S. motorists.

“This tar sands pipeline poses a direct threat to our climate, our clean water, wildlife, and thousands of landowners and communities along the route of this dirty and dangerous project, and it must and will be stopped,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.

Earlier lawsuit targets coal leases

The lawsuits came on the heels of a lawsuit filed on Wednesday challenging other recent moves to undo Obama’s climate change regulations.

Conservation groups and the Northern Cheyenne Native American tribe of Montana sued the administration on Wednesday for violating the National Environmental Policy Act when it lifted a moratorium on coal leases on federal land.

All lawsuits have been filed in U.S. District Court in Montana’s Great Falls Division.
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Members of Congress looking into Russian interference in last year’s presidential election have been invited to the White House to examine relevant secret documents.

Lawmakers confirmed such a letter was received by the Senate and House intelligence committees Thursday, a move that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer defended as “doing the responsible thing.” The documents to be reviewed apparently were the basis for controversial comments by Congressman Devin Nunes that were seen by some as bolstering President Donald Trump’s charge that his campaign team was “wiretapped” last year on the orders of former President Barack Obama.

Even as he announced the offer to bring relevant lawmakers to the White House to review secret information, Spicer deflected reporters’ questions Thursday about Nunes’ unusual visit to the White House grounds more than a week ago to see the intelligence reports.

Spicer answered “no” when asked whether he knew who invited Nunes to the White House complex on March 21, and he steered clear of confirming or denying details of a news report that named two officials who allegedly gave Nunes intelligence information.

The New York Times posted a story online just prior to Spicer’s briefing Thursday naming two White House officials who it said helped provide Nunes with highly classified intelligence reports indicating that Trump and his associates were swept up in surveillance of foreign officials by U.S. spy agencies.

Process vs. substance

The press secretary has repeatedly criticized White House correspondents for focusing their questions on process — essentially, who told what to whom — rather than substance, the details of the information that Nunes received.

“Process here is the whole story,” Ken Gude, an analyst who specializes in national security issues, told VOA. “The White House basically used Nunes here, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, to filter, to ‘launder’ some of the information.”

Gude, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said it appeared that White House officials fed information to Nunes to give Trump “some cover.” The president had been widely criticized following his allegation on March 4 that Obama ordered electronic surveillance against Trump’s campaign team — an assertion that has been repeatedly denied by senior U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials.

The Times said the two officials who provided Nunes with highly classified intelligence reports were former Defense Intelligence Agency official Ezra Cohen-Watnick, now the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a former House Intelligence Committee staffer who now works on national security issues at the White House counsel’s office.

Spicer declined to discuss the Times report, saying, “I’m not going to get into further details on this.”

WATCH: Spicer Stresses Substance Over Process

Russian meddling

A government investigation of Russian meddling during the U.S. presidential campaign last year has stayed in the headlines for weeks, particularly since Trump tweeted his belief that his headquarters in New York City had been “wiretapped.” U.S. intelligence officials have said there were no surveillance orders from Obama aimed at Trump, and that no such order could come from the president, under domestic intelligence-gathering procedures in place for years.

Nunes, a former adviser to Trump’s presidential transition team, subsequently said that he did not believe Trump Tower had been bugged, but that the campaign team’s communications could have been caught up in a wider investigation that inadvertently targeted the transition office.

On March 22, a day after his mysterious nighttime visit to the White House grounds — a large area that incorporates the adjacent Executive Office Building, which is the headquarters of the National Security Council — Nunes told reporters he had been shown intelligence indicating communications involving Trump and/or his associates had been captured in a legal “but inappropriate” manner.

Nunes has been mum on who at the White House showed him the materials.

His behavior has been strongly criticized by Democrats, and the party’s ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, has called on Nunes to step down from his chairman’s post.

“Why all the cloak and dagger stuff? That’s something we need to get to the bottom of,” Schiff told reporters Thursday.

Schiff added that while the matter of incidental collection is important, “This issue is not going to distract us from doing our Russia investigation, and Democrats on the committee are committed ‘to get the bottom of just what the Russians did.'”

Gude, the senior fellow for national security at the Center for American Progress, said White House officials “have not been dealing with this in a forthright and honest manner.”

“They keep not telling the truth about what is going on in this,” Gude told VOA, “and it certainly appears as if there’s an effort to obstruct these investigations.”

VOA’s Elizabeth Cherneff contributed reporting for this story.
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Reducing inequality, securing water supplies and strengthening disaster prevention is crucial to bolster Chile’s quake-prone capital against climate change and other hazards, Santiago’s authorities said.

In a new strategy to make the city more resilient, they laid out plans this week to cut congestion and air pollution, improve public transport and build more parks in low-income areas.

But better governance is essential to the strategy, said Claudio Orrego, governor of the Santiago metropolitan region, which has 34 municipal districts and mayors.

“Santiago is a city of disasters — we have had in the last year the worst fires ever, we had two floods in the city [and] two important water supply cuts,” said Orrego by telephone from Santiago, which is home to more than 6.1 million people.

“All of this is due to the climate change impact on the city, and that requires protocols, coordination and infrastructure to cope,” he said in an interview.

Resilient cities

The strategy, released as part of Santiago’s participation in the 100 Resilient Cities initiative, brings together programs underway in the city, one of the most unequal in Latin America because of wide gaps between rich and poor in housing, education and services, as well as gender inequality.

Rapid, uncoordinated urban growth has led to low-income housing being built on the poorly connected fringes of Santiago with inadequate infrastructure and few green spaces, said the report, noting that around 18 percent of residents of the greater metropolitan region live in poverty.

“We are sitting everyone at the table,” Orrego said. “Be it flooding, be it earthquakes, we’re taking an integrated approach to the future.”

With climate change expected to reduce rainfall and increase temperatures in the area, Santiago wants to end overexploitation of its water supply. It is developing a water fund to help secure supplies for the city, and protect water sources such as glaciers high in the surrounding Andes.

“Having a public-private endeavor, trying to protect in a very holistic way all the water supply we use in the city is something new,” said Orrego, stressing the urgency of the task.

The city’s resilience plan includes measures to develop an early warning system to lower the risk of floods and wildfires — after recent devastating blazes reached the outskirts of the city, blanketing it with smoke — and to strengthen emergency relief efforts.

Improving governance

Situated in a dry, mountain valley, Santiago is likely to be increasingly affected by problems such as urban heat waves and shortages of water and power, while agricultural demand for water could exacerbate drought conditions in rural areas, according to the report.

The San Ramon fault line runs along the edge of the city. So the resilience strategy lays out plans to link emergency response efforts and set up a system to monitor seismic activity, while tightening building regulations and factoring vulnerabilities into urban planning.

In the long term, the city may need to redefine its approach to zoning and land use, taking into account transport, social exclusion and disaster risks, Orrego said.

Michael Berkowitz, president of 100 Resilient Cities, which is backed by The Rockefeller Foundation, said cities across Latin America need to improve governance to stop crime, inequality and exposure to natural hazards hampering their development.

“It’s understanding that if you have a safer, more equitable city, that will make you better able to withstand the next earthquake or the next flood,” Berkowitz said.

The perception of high corruption is hindering the growth of public-private partnerships in the region and hobbling cities’ resilience efforts, he added.

“If they can get some of these governance, transition, empowerment issues right, I think you could see Latin American cities make some real progress over the next 10 or 15 years,” Berkowitz said.
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More than 200,000 people have signed an online petition calling for U.S. first lady Melania Trump to leave New York City and move into the White House or pay the cost of protecting her in the Trump Tower.

The Change.org petition was started after a senior White House aide indicated the president’s wife and son, Barron, will remain in New York until the school year ends.

“The U.S. taxpayer is paying an exorbitant amount of money to protect the First Lady in Trump Tower, located in New York City,” the petition says. “As to help relieve the national debt, this expense yields no positive results for the nation and should be cut from being funded.”

The New York Police Department estimated it costs between $127,000 and $146,000 per day to protect Melania Trump and her son.  

Comments beneath the Change.org petition highlighted the signers’ dissatisfaction over the first family’s use of taxpayer funds.

“Living in the White House is what you do when you are married to the president,” one commenter identified as Sheila Forsyth of Newport, Rhode Island, wrote. “The tax money saved by eliminating these extra protection expenses can be used to feed senior citizens. Why is our tax money being spent on people who already have more than their fair share?”

Local authorities in Florida have voiced similar frustration at the costs of protecting the president during his frequent visits to his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort and golf club.

Since taking office January 20, Trump has visited the estate on five weekends.
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From the exploitation of workers in carnivals to forcing people into door-to-door sales, more under-reported forms of modern slavery are emerging in the United States which need to be tackled, according to a report released Wednesday.

The anti-slavery group Polaris said it had analyzed data from 40,000 likely cases of human trafficking and labor exploitation based on calls to a national hotline since 2007 and divided these into 25 different types of modern slavery.

While sexual exploitation in bars and forced labor in tobacco fields, nail salons and homes is well known, other forms of slavery are going under the radar with little action taken to tackle these crimes, said Polaris CEO Bradley Myles.

Polaris, which runs the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline, said its study was based on the largest amount of data gathered on human trafficking in the United States.

“We found cases of personal sexual servitude where gang members hold someone basically in captivity in their house for purposes of their own sexual pleasure,” Myles told Reuters, adding that traffickers had unique ways of recruiting and controlling victims.

Trafficking on rise

Last year, 7,572 trafficking cases were reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, a rise of 24 percent on 2015, according to Polaris, with at least 5,550 cases related to sex trafficking and 1,057 to trafficking for forced labor.

The most common form of trafficking was sexual exploitation taking place in hotel rooms and private parties, described in the report as escort services.

The report also uncovered more obscure types of trafficking, involving victims forced to work in acting, choir and dance troupes or made to operate rides and food stalls at carnivals and fairs. It also uncovered children being forced to beg.

“Our minds need to be as wide open as possible to see the totality of it than to narrow in on certain types,” Myles said.

Who is most at risk?

The report found that trafficked victims working in the beauty business, such as nail and hair salons, were most likely to be women from China and Vietnam.

While the majority of labor trafficking victims in construction were men from Mexico and Central America, those working in the hotel industry were typically from Jamaica, the Philippines and India.

U.S.-born adults and children are most likely to be victims of sexual exploitation and be forced into door-to-door sales, the report said.

Children who have run away from home, those who have been sexually abused, and those in the care of social services or foster parents are most vulnerable.

Myles said that, all too often, it was assumed that trafficking happens elsewhere and doesn’t involve U.S.-born citizens.

“Manipulative and very predatory U.S. citizen pimps see a market opportunity to re-exploit those already vulnerable U.S. citizen girls and boys,” he said.
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Trump administration trade officials want a revamped North American Free Trade Agreement to improve access for U.S. farm products, manufactured goods and services in Canada and Mexico, said lawmakers who met with them Tuesday.

Members of the House Ways and Means Committee met with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and acting U.S. Trade Representative Stephen Vaughn to discuss the administration’s plans for renegotiating the 23-year-old trade deal.

Representative Bill Pascrell, a New Jersey Democrat, said Ross told lawmakers in the closed-door session that the administration was still aiming to complete NAFTA renegotiations by the end of 2017.

‘Ambitious’ schedule

That time frame is viewed by some members as “ambitious,” especially because it is not clear when the administration will formally notify Congress of its intention to launch NAFTA renegotiations, Pascrell said.

The notification will trigger a 90-day consultation period before substantial talks can begin. Tuesday’s meeting was a legal requirement to prepare the notification and preserve the “fast track” authority for approving a renegotiated deal with only an up-or-down vote in Congress.

President Donald Trump has long vilified NAFTA as draining millions of manufacturing jobs to Mexico, and he has vowed to quit the trade pact unless it can be renegotiated to shrink U.S. trade deficits.

Lawmakers said Ross and Vaughn discussed broad negotiating objectives, but did not get into specific issues such as U.S. access to Canada’s dairy sector or rules of origin for parts used on North American-assembled vehicles.

Key objectives

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican, told reporters that market access, modernizing NAFTA and “holding trading partners accountable” were key objectives articulated by Ross and Vaughn.

“They were very clear. They want to open access in ag, manufacturing and services as well, so they want this to be a 21st-century agreement,” Brady said.

Spokesmen for the Commerce Department and USTR were not immediately available for comment on the meeting.

Lawmakers said the administration has not settled on the form of the negotiations, whether NAFTA will remain a trilateral agreement or whether it would be split into two bilateral trade deals.

“My sense is that they are not prejudging the form. They are focused on the substance of the agreement itself with Mexico and Canada,” Brady said.

Some lawmakers expressed frustration that the Trump officials were short on specific answers.

“I wouldn’t exactly call this meeting as moving the ball forward very much,” said Representative Ron Kind, a Wisconsin Democrat.
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Embattled House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes threw a formerly bipartisan investigation of Russian election interference into doubt Tuesday, as he rejected calls for his recusal and stopped the committee’s work for the rest of the week.

Nunes cancelled a closed-door briefing with FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers, deepening the frustrations of Democratic members who said Nunes’ actions over the last week-and-a-half jeopardized his credibility and undermined his ability to lead the investigation.

Nunes met a source on White House grounds before making his disclosure last week that President Donald Trump was caught up in “incidental” surveillance, according to his spokesman, who added that Nunes wanted “to have proximity to a secure location where he could view the information provided by the source.”

That revelation led ranking Democratic committee member Rep. Adam Schiff to call for Nunes to step away from the Russia investigation.

“Why would I do that?” Nunes asked a small group of reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday. “Everything is moving as is,” he added, saying scheduling an open hearing would be “a logical first step” after a meeting with Comey.

But Democrats said the committee’s work has stalled.

“To suggest that we need to hear from Comey and Rogers is to suggest that there’s only two hours in the day and we have to make a decision,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democratic committee member. “We could have done both.”

Swalwell said he asked Nunes to meet with all committee members to diffuse the situation.

“Just to sit in the same room and talk about what he saw, who he received it from and how it’s relevant for what we’re trying to do with the Russia investigation. I think that would take a lot of tension out of this process,” he said.

Nunes has still not revealed the identity of the source.

He spoke with reporters and the president about the material last week without informing any of the other 21 members of the House Intelligence Committee, angering Democrats who questioned Nunes’ credibility. Nunes later apologized to the committee.

“We’re trying to get those documents as rapidly as possible,” Nunes told VOA Tuesday on efforts to brief other committee members. He maintained that his relationship with other members is “good” and that its Russia probe is moving forward.

Former AG Yates

Nunes’ meeting on White House grounds was not the only concern Tuesday.

A Washington Post report said the Trump administration tried to block former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates from testifying at an open House Intelligence Committee hearing this week “about the events leading up” to former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s firing, “including his attempts to cover up his secret conversations with the Russian ambassador.”

Nunes’ cancellation of that hearing prompted Schiff to question “whether the White House’s desire to avoid a public claim of executive privilege to keep her from providing the full truth on what happened contributed to the decision to cancel today’s hearing. We do not know. But we would urge that the open hearing be rescheduled without further delay,” Schiff said.

The White House denied taking action to prevent Yates from testifying.

Congress reaction on Nunes

Fellow Republicans defended Nunes’ actions.

“He did the exact right thing from beginning to end and there really is a concerted effort out to undermine him,” Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York, told VOA. “He’s really on to something, that’s why.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling on House Speaker Paul Ryan to replace Nunes as head of the Intelligence Committee, while House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi says the speaker should at least insist that Nunes is not involved in the Russia investigation.

“He has not been operating like someone who is interested in getting to the unvarnished truth,” Schumer said. “His actions look like those of someone who is interested in protecting the president and his party.”

But King said members of the committee stand by Nunes.

“Obviously, the president had nothing to do with it, the information is totally controlled, and it did not leak out at all,” King said. Ryan also said Nunes should not recuse himself.

The White House has defended Nunes’ actions, saying he had done his job to investigate allegations of surveillance and was being up front with journalists about his activities.

Trump, who earlier this month tweeted unsubstantiated allegations that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped his campaign while he ran for office, has said he was “somewhat vindicated” by Nunes’ statement about the surveillance.

Comey has said that there is no information to support Trump’s allegation that Obama ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower in New York. Trump has asked Congress to investigate.
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U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer says President Donald Trump’s choice for the Supreme Court, Judge Neil Gorsuch, faces an “uphill climb” for confirmation.

“The bottom line is very simple,” Schumer said Tuesday. “Gorsuch did not acquit himself well at the hearings and did not impress our caucus.” He said it will be a “real uphill climb” for the nominee to get the simple 51 vote majority he needs to join the court.

Durbin will vote no

The number two Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin, said Tuesday he will vote against Gorsuch. Schumer and 23 other Democrats already have said they will vote no.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to vote on Gorsuch next Monday. If he wins there, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has scheduled a vote in the full Senate on April 7.

McConnell says Gorsuch is “extraordinarily well qualified” to sit on the Supreme Court, and predicts he will be confirmed.

Democrats plan to filibuster 

Durbin echoed the fears of many Democrats when he said Gorsuch would “favor corporations and special interest elites at the expense of American workers and families.”

Democrats are still seething that McConnell refused to hold hearings last year for former President Barack Obama’s choice to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland. They plan to filibuster the Gorsuch nomination in the hopes it will be withdrawn.

It would take 60 votes to break the filibuster. Republicans hold a 52 to 48 majority in the Senate.

‘Nuclear option?’

If McConnell cannot get the 60 votes to end debate, he could call for what is known as the “nuclear option” — a change in Senate rules calling for a simple majority to end the filibuster and hold a conformation vote.

The Supreme Court is currently split between four liberal-leaning and four conservative-leaning justices since conservative Antonin Scalia died last year.

If Gorsuch is confirmed, the court would be restored to a five-to-four conservative-leaning majority.
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