Month: December 2017

Pakistan has warned the United States against undertaking any “unilateral” military action on its soil and rejected as baseless accusations of “inaction” against the Haqqani Network plotting deadly attacks in neighboring Afghanistan.

Chief military spokesman Major-General Asif Ghafoor reiterated Thursday that Pakistani forces have undertaken “indiscriminate operations” against terrorists, including Haqqanis,” rendering U.S. charges of “inaction” as irrelevant and baseless.

He went on to say the impact of Pakistan’s counterterrorism actions “will be seen in subsequent years and months.”

“Unfortunately, in this context, we are getting signals of a unilateral action from America,” Gafoor said while addressing a news conference at the army headquarters in Rawalpindi.

U.S. officials have long accused Islamabad of turning a blind eye or covertly helping the Afghan Taliban and Haqqanis to stage cross-border attacks against Afghan and U.S.-led forces.

The Pentagon recently told Congress it will work to expand cooperation with Pakistan “in areas where our interests converge and to take unilateral steps in areas of divergence.”

Earlier this month, CIA Director Mike Pompeo warned Islamabad that if it does not eliminate the alleged safe havens inside its territory, the U.S. will do “everything we can” to destroy them.

General Ghafoor questioned and criticized the U.S. threats, saying they ignore a “huge price both in blood and treasure” Pakistan has paid in fighting terrorism in support of coalition efforts in Afghanistan.

“The armed forces of Pakistan are working with friends and want to continue doing so,” he said. “But there can be no compromise on our sovereignty. We do not want a conflict with our friends but would ensure security of Pakistan.”

He noted Islamabad has been cooperating and contributing to peace inside Afghanistan. He said Pakistan will continue to do so.

“No amount of coercion can work. It is only the engagement and trust based cooperation which can take us forward towards enduring peace in the region,” said Ghafoor. “If there are any facilitators and abetters inside Pakistan that can only be addressed if the 2.7 million Afghan refugees are sent back to Afghanistan.”

Ghafoor added that Pakistan is securing its long porous frontier with Afghanistan by building a fence, security posts and forts to control cross-border movement. The fencing project will be completed by December of 2018, he added.

“We have done enough and we cannot do anymore for anyone,” he said.   “… Actually, this is [the] turn and time for Afghanistan and the United States to do more rather than asking Pakistan.”

U.S. officials have not elaborated on what kind of military action they intend to take. In 2011, U.S. special forces conducted a unilateral operation in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad and killed al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.

CIA-run drones have also been targeting suspected militant hideouts in border regions of Pakistan and some anticipate expansion of such strikes deep inside the country.
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U.S. President Donald Trump accused China Thursday of facilitating oil shipments into North Korea, despite China’s insistence it has not violated United Nations sanctions limiting oil shipments to the rogue nation. Writing on Twitter, he said he is “very disappointed.”

A South Korean newspaper reported earlier Thursday that Chinese and North Korean ships had illicitly connected at sea to get oil into North Korea.

The U.N. Security Council last week imposed new sanctions designed to limit North Korea access to oil in response to the country’s recent long-range missile test. In November, it test-launched its latest intercontinental ballistic missile, which many U.S. experts have warned would be capable of striking anywhere on U.S. soil.

The sanctions seek to bar 90-percent of refined oil exports to North Korea by capping them at 500,000 barrels a year and limit crude oil exports at 4 million barrels annually.

China has repeatedly said it is enforcing all resolutions against Pyongyang, despite doubts in the U.S., South Korea and Japan that loopholes continue to exist.

When asked at a recent media briefing whether Chinese ships were illegally loading oil on North Korean vessels, Defense Ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang repeated that China and its military are strictly enforcing U.N. resolutions on North Korea.

“The situation you have mentioned absolutely does not exist,” said Ren.
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By 2020, China could become the world’s second-largest wine consumer, behind the United States, according to a report by Vinexpo, a leading wine exhibition.

“Nowadays, many people in China have given up Baijiu, no more Baijiu,” says Jiawei Wang, a Napa Valley visitor from China, referring to his native country’s traditional grain-based spirits. “Because wine has enough alcohol, but it’s also good for health. It can soften humans’ blood vessels. People are changing.”

Wang is not alone. Chinese are visiting Northern California’s Napa Valley wine region in numbers never seen before.

“It’s interesting because the Chinese market in Napa is the fastest growing international market that we have, according to the statistics from Visit Napa Valley, our visitor bureau here in Napa Valley,” says John Taylor of Yao Family Wines. “China was the number one international market in the Napa Valley last year, composing, I think, about 5.5 percent of total visitation to the valley.”

A must-see stop for Chinese tourists is the Yao Family Wines vineyard, which is owned by retired basketball star Yao Ming. Yao’s celebrity aside, his wines have won praise from wine critics.

“The Cabernet Sauvignon is very nice,” says Wang. “It tastes great.”

About an hour’s drive to the east, the University of California-Davis has one of the country’s top programs for the science of growing grapes and wine making.

“From what I can see, there were not many Chinese students previously,” says Shizhang Han, a Chinese student in the UC-Davis program, “but now in my class and also among those who came after me, there are many more Chinese.”

The Chinese students believe that the wine industry has a promising future in their homeland.

“In Asia, especially in China, people are getting richer,” says student Heigi Wan. “This is one factor.”

“Wine in China is just starting,” says Han. “Before, we imported a lot of wine. And now we start to build new vineyards. The grape vines are still growing. It’s like a newborn baby. Chinese wine carries a lot of hope.”

Hope that has some of the UC-Davis students thinking that their first jobs might not be here in California’s wine country after all, but rather in an emerging wine industry back home in China.
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Americans differ widely in their views of what constitutes sexual harassment, with age and race as well as gender throwing up the dividing lines, posing a challenge for those who police for such conduct in the workplace.

The issue has been thrown into the national spotlight as a string of prominent men in U.S. politics, entertainment and the media have been felled by allegations of sexual misconduct in recent months.

A Reuters/Ipsos national opinion poll, released Wednesday, asked more than 3,000 American adults to consider eight different scenarios and then prompted them to decide if they would personally label each to be an example of sexual harassment. The variation in responses showed a need for employers to spell out expected standards, employment experts said.

While most adults in the Dec. 13-18 poll agreed that acts such as intentional groping or kissing “without your consent” amounted to sexual harassment, they disagreed over a number of other actions.

When asked about “unwanted compliments about your appearance,” for example, 38 percent of adults said this amounted to sexual harassment, while 47 percent said it did not.

Some 41 percent of adults said they thought it was sexual harassment when someone told you “dirty jokes,” but 44 percent said it was not. And 44 percent of adults said that non-consensual hugging was sexual harassment, while 40 percent said it was not.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency that enforces workplace discrimination laws, says sexual harassment can include unwelcome sexual advances as well as other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature that affects an individual’s employment, interferes with their performance, or creates an intimidating or hostile work environment.

But courts have disagreed on when individual actions cross the line into harassment. And many workplace sexual harassment cases are settled by employers before they ever reach a court, so there is not a constant judicial airing of standards.

Touching and hugging

Since people come to work with different ideas of what is appropriate, managers should train their employees and develop clear lines of conduct so that there are no misunderstandings, said Suzanne Goldberg, director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School.

“The onus is on employers” to set the tone, Goldberg said. “Even if the co-workers don’t object or go to management to complain.”

In the Reuters/Ipsos poll, for example, 19 percent of men said that touching someone intentionally without their consent was not sexual harassment, compared with 11 percent of women.

The poll did not specify exactly what was meant by non-consensual touching.

Fifty-two percent of people from racial minorities said that they considered non-consensual hugging to be sexual harassment, compared with 39 percent of whites.

While most adults said they thought that it was sexual harassment to send “pornographic pictures” to someone without their consent, younger people appeared to be more permissive.

Eighty-three percent of millennials, or those adults born after 1982, said it was sexual harassment, compared with 90 percent of gen-Xers (born 1965-1981) and 94 percent of baby boomers (born 1946-1964.)

Experts in sexual harassment law said it is understandable that women, especially women who are racial minorities, define sexual harassment differently than men, given that many have experienced it firsthand.

“Men do not cross the street to avoid people,” said Joanna Grossman, a law professor at Southern Methodist University who specializes in workplace equality. “Virtually all women do, whether or not they’ve been attacked before. It’s part of growing up in a group that’s been victimized for so long.”

Workplace standards

Clear workplace standards would help everyone, including those who are accused of sexual harassment, said Minna Kotkin, director of the Brooklyn Law School Employment Law Clinic.

Kotkin, whose clinic provides legal help for people dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace, said she recently advised a man who said he was fired because he misunderstood where the line had been set.

“He worked in retail, and this was a place where there was sexual banter going around,” Kotkin said. “And one day he made a comment about a co-worker’s breasts. And then later she claimed that he grabbed her by the waist.

“He got fired, and he was really surprised,” she said. “He thought that conduct was part of their relationship. … But the question is, maybe this woman tolerated this all along and then finally had enough?”

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English throughout the United States. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2 percentage points for the entire sample. The credibility interval is higher for subsets based on gender, age and race, as the sample size is reduced.
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The Nigerian air force said on Wednesday the United States had agreed to sell fighter planes to Nigeria, as the West African country continues its eight-year

conflict with Islamist insurgency Boko Haram.

The sale of the 12 A29 Super Tucano aircraft, with weapons and services, is worth $593 million.

The U.S. ambassador to Nigeria presented the letters of offer and acceptance, the official agreement to make the sale, to the country’s air force earlier on Wednesday, the air force statement said.

The agreements are expected to be signed and necessary payments made before Feb. 20, the statement said, adding that the U.S. State Department has already approved the sale.

Reporting by Paul Carsten; Editing by Alison Williams.
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Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday U.S. President Donald Trump would fail in his hardened stance towards Iran, saying Tehran was stronger than during the time of the “more powerful and smarter” Ronald Reagan.

“Reagan was more powerful and smarter than Trump, and he was a better actor in making threats, and he also moved against us and they shot down our plane,” Khamenei said in a speech carried on state television.

In 1988, a U.S. warship shot down an Iranian passenger plane over the Gulf, killing all 290 aboard, in an incident which Washington said was a mistake. Tehran said it was a deliberate attack on Iran, then at war with neighboring Iraq.

“But Reagan is gone and, according to our beliefs, he now faces God’s retribution … while Iran has made great advances in all areas since Reagan’s time,” Khamenei added.

“This trend will continue under the current American president and any hopes on their part that the Islamic Republic would back off or weaken is futile.”

Trump refused in October to certify that Tehran is complying with its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and warned he might ultimately terminate the agreement.

He announced the shift in U.S. policy in a speech in which he detailed a more aggressive approach to Iran over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and its support for militant groups in the Middle East.

Under the nuclear deal, sanctions on Iran were lifted in return for Tehran rolling back technologies with nuclear bomb-making potential.
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Before becoming president, Donald Trump railed against US wars overseas, saying it was better to spend money at home than, in his words, “waste” it overseas. But as VOA’s Bill Gallo reports, Trump has at times struggled to carry out what he calls his “America First” approach to the world during his first year as president.
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At the age of 5, Maame Biney immigrated to the U.S. from Ghana to live with her father. She was an energetic child, and her father wanted to channel that energy into a sport. One day, they drove by a local ice rink in Reston, Virginia, where a sign in front read “Learn to Skate.”

Biney’s father asked if she wanted to give it a try.

“I brought her here, in this particular rink, and she just tried it,” her father, Kweku Biney, said. “And the first day she got on the ice I was scared, you know. I thought she was going to break her head open, so I said, ‘What did I get myself into? This is risky.'”

But Biney was a natural. “She took that thing in stride, and I was just surprised, you know, the way she was skating,” he said. “And she just looked like somebody who’s been doing it for probably a few months prior to that day.

Biney was hooked. Every morning she would bounce out of bed to wake up her father for the early morning practices. She tried figure skating first, but a coach noticed how fast she was and encouraged her to take up speedskating. She competed in local events before moving up to the U.S. Junior Championships, where she won a bronze medal.

This month, she qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team after finishing first in the women’s 500-meter trial in Kearns, Utah. At age 17, she is the youngest speedskater on the U.S. team and the first African American woman to represent the country as a speedskater.

“First time I met Maame, she was 9,” said Sooan Yoo, Biney’s coach in Reston. “Now she’s almost my height as she’s gaining age, and she’s representing the USA team.”

Despite her accomplishments, the high schooler doesn’t take herself too seriously.

“I just hope that everyone sees how fun the sport is when you can just go fast and just be awesome. Not that I am awesome or anything, but just — you feel good about yourself, so yeah. Be proud of yourself. That’s it,” she said.

Biney’s achievements have earned her fans around the world, particularly in West Africa, where skating isn’t common. She hopes girls watch her and become inspired to pursue their own dreams.

“Since speedskating or any ice sport isn’t really an option back in Africa, I would just tell all the little kids back there just to find something that you love, and be happy,” she said. “And just have fun with it. Because why are you going to do something if you don’t have fun?”

Biney hopes to do more than just have fun when she competes at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in February. Her event, the 500 meter, is the shortest and requires intense sprinting ability. She said her strategy is simple: “Go fast and don’t fall.”

Her teammates say her easygoing attitude belies her hard work and competitive spirit. Her team, Dominion Speedskating, practices six to seven days a week.

“She is really kind and everything. She’s really caring,” said 15-year-old Dominion teammate Joonsuh Oh. “Everyone loves her when you first see her. She seems kind of intimidating because you just never know her. But if you actually meet her, she’s really friendly, and when she skates, she’s amazing.”

Despite intense pressure, Biney’s father hopes she can just soak up the moment and have fun. He said seeing her walk with Team USA during the opening ceremony will be enough of a reward. Anything more will be a bonus, he said.

“Once you stay focused, everything will fall in place” he said. “That’s it. That’s all I got for her. She doesn’t need to be afraid of anything, and I don’t think she is.”
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With the number of journalists imprisoned worldwide at an all-time high, press freedom groups are drawing a direct line between President Donald Trump’s verbal slugfest with some of America’s most venerable news institutions and the adoption of his “fake news” mantra by autocrats and dictators around the world.

“We’re seeing an unprecedented attack on both the institution of journalism and the media, as well as very personal attacks on individual journalists and individual media outlets,” says Courtney Radsch, advocacy director for the Committee to Protect Journalists.  “And what this does is it creates an environment in which journalists operate less safely.”

The CPJ’s 2017 press freedom survey shows 262 journalists are behind bars worldwide, slightly higher than the number a year ago.  More than half the total are in Turkey, China, and Egypt.

“We saw the term ‘fake news’ being used in the Philippines, in Russia, in China, in Egypt to justify their own oppression of the media in attempts to delegitimize journalists” Radsch told VOA.  “We’ve also seen China saying, ‘Hey the U.S. is finally waking up to what we’ve been saying the whole time about the media being problematic,’ and that’s not what we want to see around the world.”

An opinion piece in China’s Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper this month said, “If the president of the United States calls leading media outlets a stain on America, then negative news about China and other countries should be taken with a grain of salt, since it is likely that bias and political agendas are distorting the real picture.”

Egyptian scholar Hisham Hellyer, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, says fallout from Trump’s “fake news” charges is serious and should not be underestimated.

“When Trump uses his own freedom of expression to denigrate the media’s ability to report the facts, and often puts forward his own ‘fake news’, it has the effect of empowering others who would like to do the same,” Hellyer said.

Trump has hammered at the “fake news” theme in hundreds of Twitter posts, public comments and speeches, singling out media powerhouses like CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times for special criticism.

He once called CNN, “the enemy of the people.”

The president’s tactics have fueled a polarizing national debate about what Trump defenders call persistent media bias, and critics describe as hard-nosed reporting.

Studies show coverage of Trump has tilted heavily negative.  An analysis by the nonprofit Pew Research Center showed reporting about the first months of the Trump presidency was 62 percent negative and 5 percent positive.

Coverage for the same period of President Barack Obama’s presidency was 42 percent positive and 20 percent negative, according to Pew.  The leader of the Pew Journalism Project cautioned the result is not evidence of media bias.

Trump’s critics see nothing exceptional in those figures given the volume of missteps and misstatements coming from the White House, but the president and his supporters cite them as evidence of the media’s malign intent.

Stung by Trump’s criticisms and polls showing low public trust in the media, CNN and the big newspapers have fought back with ad campaigns and fresh slogans emphasizing their accuracy and objectivity.

But a series of recent high-profile reporting blunders in stories about the White House has damaged the media’s reputation for trustworthiness, and given Trump fresh ammunition.

Earlier this month, CNN erroneously reported that the Trump campaign had been offered the contents of hacked emails from the campaign of his Democratic Party competitor, Hillary Clinton, before they were released by Wikileaks last year. The Washington Post later reported accurately that the offer came days after Wikileaks published the emails.

Now, some of the world’s worst violators of media freedom are using Trump’s “fake news” refrain to justify press restrictions.

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, asked about an Amnesty International report on systematic killings in Syrian prison, replied, “We’re living in a fake news era, as you know.  Everybody knows it.”

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro complained international media are spreading lies about him, saying, “This is what we call fake news, isn’t it?”

Cambodia’s Hun Sen, who regularly quotes Trump’s “fake news” rhetoric, has ordered more than a dozen radio stations to close or stop broadcasting programming from the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, and shut down a leading independent newspaper.

Libyan media used the term in trying to discredit a CNN report on slavery among migrants, and Russia’s foreign ministry has begun posting stories it considers false on its website covered by the words “FAKE NEWS” in big red letters.

China’s top cyber security official cited “fake news” about a report ranking China last in the world in internet freedom.  

Trump has welcomed several known foes of free media to the White House.  He hailed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a friend, despite that country’s reputation as the world’s leading jailer of journalists.

With Trump at his side during a recent ASEAN summit, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte called reporters “spies.”

Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha and Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak have raised the issue of “fake news.”

“It’s hard enough to be a journalist in dictatorships like Cambodia when the United States is setting a good example,” Tom Malinowski, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy and Labor, told VOA.

“Now every dictator who wants to ban media he doesn’t like can say, ‘Trump does it so why can’t I?'” said Malinowski, who served under President Obama.
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