Month: September 2018

Congress has approved a bill keeping the government open through Dec. 7, as lawmakers move to avert a government shutdown looming next week.

The $854 billion bill also funds the military and a host of civilian agencies for the next year.

The House approved the bill, 361-61, on Wednesday, a week after the Senate approved it, 93-7.

The measure now goes to President Donald Trump, who said he will sign it. Trump’s signature would avert a partial government shutdown set to begin Monday, weeks ahead of the Nov. 6 elections that will determine control of Congress.

$675 billion for military

The spending bill includes $675 billion for the Defense Department and boosts military pay by 2.6 percent, the largest pay raise in nine years. It also increases spending for Health and Human Services, Education, Labor and other agencies, including a 5 percent boost for the National Institutes of Health.

Trump said Wednesday he will sign the bill, telling reporters at the United Nations, “We’re going to keep the government open.”

Trump made the pledge despite his frustration that the bill does not pay for his long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border — a fact Trump called “ridiculous.”

The wall was a centerpiece of Trump’s 2016 Republican presidential campaign, when he repeatedly promised that Mexico would pay for it.

Now, as president, Trump says it is “ridiculous” that Congress has yet to fully fund the project.

“Where is the money for border security and the wall in this ridiculous spending bill?” Trump tweeted last week, adding that Republicans “must finally get tough” against Democrats he said are obstructing law enforcement and border security.

No money for the wall

Many conservatives shared Trump’s frustration that money was included for Planned Parenthood but not the wall, but the spending bill still won easy approval in the House. Leaders from both parties supported it.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., hailed the bill.

“This funds our military, this funds opioids, this does a lot of the things that we all want to accomplish together,” Ryan said before the vote.

Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations panel, also praised the bill, saying it “provides ample resources for our armed services and strengthens military readiness,” while upholding commitments to service members and their families.

Lawmakers also “resoundingly rejected” Trump’s proposed budget, Lowey said. The bill restores $10 billion in proposed cuts that she said would have hurt working families.

“Instead, we have secured increased funding for biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health, expanded opioid abuse treatment and prevention programs and (funded) new initiatives for maternal and child health,” Lowey said.

Most of spending approved 

Together with a spending bill signed by Trump last week, Congress has approved bills accounting for more than 70 percent of discretionary spending for the next budget year. Lawmakers had hoped to approve a third bill that would pay for the Interior, Agriculture, Transportation and other departments, but they could not reach agreement. Those agencies will be funded at current levels under the stopgap bill approved Wednesday.

Texas Rep. Kay Granger, who chairs a defense appropriations subcommittee, said before Wednesday’s vote that she had “a great big smile on my face” anticipating the bill’s approval.

“There’s really nothing more important than securing our nation and making sure our people in the military have the equipment and the training they need,” Granger, a Republican, told reporters.

The bill “shows really major investments in our air superiority, our shipbuilding, our ground forces: the things that (military leaders and troops) need and the things they deserve,” she said.

The bill includes the largest pay raise for the military in nine years, a fact Granger said was about more than money. “It’s to say that we’re with you and we support you,” she said, referring to U.S. troops at home and abroad.

Bills being considered in the House and Senate would provide funding for the border wall. GOP leaders have said they prefer to resolve the issue after the midterm elections.
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The United States and Japan have agreed to begin negotiations on a bilateral free-trade agreement, reducing the prospect that Washington might impose tariffs against another trading partner.

“We’ve agreed today to start trade negotiations between the United States and Japan,” U.S. President Donald Trump said at a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.

“This was something that for various reasons over the years Japan was unwilling to do and now they are willing to do. So we’re very happy about that, and I’m sure that we will come to a satisfactory conclusion, and if we don’t, ohhhhhh,” Trump added.

Fast-track authority

The White House released a statement after the meeting, stating the two countries would enter into talks after completing necessary domestic procedures for a bilateral trade agreement on goods and other key areas, including services.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer called it a “very important step” in expanding U.S.-Japan relations. He told reporters that the U.S. and Japan were aiming to approve a full free-trade agreement soon. Lighthizer said he would talk to Congress on Thursday about seeking authority for the president to negotiate the agreement, under the “fast track” trade authority law.

Lighthizer said he expected the negotiations to include the goal of reaching an “early harvest” on reducing tariffs and other trade barriers.

Tokyo’s reticence

Tokyo had been reluctant to commit to a bilateral free-trade pact and had hoped that Washington would consider returning to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a broader regional trade agreement championed by the Obama administration that Trump pulled out of in January 2017.

Trump has complained about Japan’s $69 billion trade surplus with the U.S. and has been pressuring Abe to agree to a two-way agreement to address it, including during Abe’s visit to Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, in April.

Japanese officials have expressed concern Trump might pressure Tokyo to open up its politically sensitive farm market. They also are wary Trump might demand a reduction in Japanese auto imports or impose high tariffs on autos and auto parts, which would be detrimental to Japan’s export-reliant economy.

Trump is expressing confidence the two sides will reach an agreement.

“We’re going to have a really great relationship, better than ever before on trade,” he said. “It can only be better for the United States because it couldn’t get any worse because of what’s happened over the years.”
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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg voiced support for the #MeToo movement Wednesday in a striking statement on the eve of a high-stakes U.S. Senate hearing into allegations of sexual misconduct by President Donald Trump’s nominee to the court, Brett Kavanaugh.

During a question-and-answer period after an address to first-year law students at Georgetown University in Washington, Ginsburg was asked if there was anything she was excited or disappointed about regarding the current women’s movement.

After discussing the problem of “unconscious bias” that leads to gender discrimination, she said she was “cheered on” by the #MeToo movement, a national reckoning with sexual assault and harassment that has brought down dozens of rich and powerful men.

“Every woman of my vintage has not just one story but many stories, but we thought there was nothing you could do about it — boys will be boys — so just find a way to get out of it,” said Ginsburg, 85.

Ginsburg said that the #MeToo movement showed women coming together in numbers.

“So it was one complaint and then one after another the complaints mounted. So women nowadays are not silent about bad behavior,” she said.

Ginsburg did not mention Kavanaugh or the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.

During a Senate hearing Thursday, one accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, will testify about an alleged 1982 incident in which she said Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when both of them were in high school.

Two other women have come forward with allegations.

Kavanaugh, who was named by Trump to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in July, has denied the allegations. The Supreme Court’s 2018 term officially begins on Oct. 1.
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A meeting between top state law enforcement officials and Attorney General Jeff Sessions about how the government can safeguard the privacy of social media users ended Tuesday without a decision on whether to investigate.

The gathering at the Justice Department was scheduled to discuss whether tech giants are “stifling the free exchange of ideas” and examine whether they “may be hurting competition.” 

But California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, says the one-hour meeting mainly focused on consumer protection and data privacy issues.

Attorneys general from Alabama, California, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah and Washington, D.C., attended. Five other states sent senior deputies.

Justice Department officials said the meeting “centered on ways the Department and state governments can most effectively safeguard consumers using online digital platforms.”

Although there wasn’t an immediate decision on whether to open an investigation, the attorneys general discussed the nuances and interpretation of privacy and what might constitute a monopoly in the tech sector, Becerra said.

“The conversation really zeroed in on privacy,” he said after the meeting. “I think everyone sees the growth of the industry as something that has become of interest to regulators and enforcers. How it might apply, that is still the open question.”

The Justice Department said it would review the “insight” shared by the attorneys general and expected conversations on the topic to continue.
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Automakers sought flexibility while environmental groups blasted the Trump administration’s proposal to roll back fuel economy standards at a public hearing on the plan in the industry’s backyard.

At the hearing Tuesday in Dearborn, Michigan, home to Ford Motor Co. and just miles from the General Motors and Fiat Chrysler home offices, industry officials repeated two themes: They’ll keep working to make cars and trucks more efficient, but they may not be able to meet existing standards because people are buying more trucks and SUVs.

Environmental groups, though, urged the government to scrap its plan to roll back the standards and instead keep in place the ones that were reaffirmed in the waning days of the Obama administration. They said the technology to meet the standards at low costs is available, and they accused President Donald Trump’s Department of Transportation of twisting numbers to justify the rollback.

Nearly 150 people were scheduled to testify at the hearing, the second on the preferred option of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Environmental Protection Agency to freeze the standards at 2020 levels.

In 2016, for the first time since the latest standards started, the auto industry couldn’t meet them without using emissions credits earned in prior years, said Steve Bartoli, vice president of fuel economy compliance for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. The reason is because with relatively low gas prices, people are buying more trucks and SUVs rather than fuel-efficient cars, he said.

Last year, cars made up only 36 percent of the U.S. new-vehicle fleet, something that wasn’t expected when the current requirements were put in place six years ago, he said. “The forecasts referenced by the agencies at that time showed cars increasing from 50 percent to 57 percent of annual vehicle sales by 2025,” Bartoli said.

The Obama EPA proposed raising the standard to 36 miles per gallon (15 kilometers per liter) by 2025, about 10 miles per gallon (4 kilometers per liter) higher than the current requirement. The goal was to reduce car emissions and save money at the pump.

Trump administration officials say waiving the tougher fuel efficiency requirements would make vehicles more affordable, which would get safer cars into consumers’ hands more quickly.

Industry response

Bartoli and other industry representatives said they’ll keep making vehicles more efficient, but need the more flexible standards because of the market shift. Industry officials said they don’t support a full freeze on the standards.

“FCA is willing to work with all parties on a data-driven final rule that results in market-facing fuel economy improvements that also support greater penetration of alternative powertrains” such as electric vehicles, Bartoli said.

Rhett Ricart, a Columbus, Ohio, car dealer who is regulatory chairman for the National Automobile Dealers Association, said trying to force people into efficient cars is like trying to make a 3-year-old eat vegetables. “If he doesn’t like vegetables, you can’t stuff his mouth full of them,” Ricart said.

Environmental response

But environmental groups said the Obama standards should remain in place, arguing that the technology is advancing so fast that automakers can meet the standards without adding huge costs for consumers. They said by the EPA’s own calculations, 60,000 jobs will be lost by 2030 developing and building fuel efficient technologies. They urged NHTSA and the EPA, which are holding the hearings, to scrap their preferred option of a freeze.

John German, senior fellow with the International Council on Clean Transportation, a group that pushes for stronger standards, said outside the hearing that the Trump administration’s cost estimates per car for the Obama standards are inflated to justify the freeze. Consumer savings at the pump are roughly three times the cost, which the ICCT calculates to be $551 per vehicle.

He also said the industry has developed lower-cost improvements to internal combustion powertrains faster than expected, so auto companies can meet standards without selling a lot of electric vehicles.

Environmental groups also said the Obama standards vary with vehicle size and give the industry flexibility to meet them. “The standards are working as designed,” German said.

California response

At Monday’s hearing in Fresno, California, state officials said the proposed rollback would damage people’s health and exacerbate climate change, and they demanded the Trump administration back off.

Looming over the administration’s proposal is the possibility that California, which has become a key leader on climate change as Trump has moved to dismantle Obama-era environmental rules, could set its own fuel standard that could roil the auto industry. That’s a change the federal government is trying to block.

“California will take whatever actions are needed to protect our people and follow the law,” Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, testified at the hearing.

Automakers want one standard for the whole country, so they don’t have to design different vehicles for California and the states that follow its requirements.

Another hearing is planned Wednesday in Pittsburgh.
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China’s growing prowess in cyberspace is a bigger, more dangerous threat to the United States than Russia’s attempt to undermine U.S. elections, Washington’s top intelligence official said, warning that Beijing is on a path that could lead to global supremacy.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats characterized the Chinese threat as deliberate, methodical and subtle, allowing it to escape the type of notoriety that has followed Moscow’s exploits.

Most worrisome, Coats said, is the way in which an increasingly aggressive China is taking advantage of its relative stable relationship with the U.S. and the rest of the world to hone its cyber capabilities internally.

Specifically, he cited China’s use of its ongoing crackdown on Muslims in the Xinjiang region as a testing ground for its cyber capabilities.

Intelligence officials and human rights groups estimate that China has rounded up possibly millions of Uighurs and other Muslims minorities, including families and children, sending them to re-education centers, where they are forced to renounce their religion and their culture.

Surveillance measures

But Coats said the re-education centers are just the start.

“Chinese officials in the Muslim northwest have instituted high-tech surveillance measures, including the collection of DNA and other biological data throughout the region, with Chinese technology companies at the forefront of these actions,” he told a cybersecurity conference Tuesday at The Citadel, a military college in Charleston, South Carolina.

He said China is also experimenting with a “social credit ratings program,” using intrusive surveillance to determine access to bank loans, educational opportunities and even medical care.

“The result of this effort is nothing short of a future that involves the perfection of the surveillance state,” Coats warned, adding it also “threatens the export of these tools abroad to other authoritarian regimes.”

An attempt to reach officials at the Chinese Embassy in Washington for reaction to Coats’ comments went unanswered, though Chinese officials have previously sought to downplay concerns about their use of cybertechnology in Xinjiang.

One Chinese official claimed last week in Geneva that China’s use of surveillance is no more intrusive than that used by Western countries like Britain.

Coats is not the first U.S. official to warn about the threat from China, but his warning is among the most dire, and reflects a growing concern that Beijing is poised to outmaneuver the U.S. in the cyber domain.

‘Huge concerns’

“Do I have concerns with the Chinese? Huge concerns with regards to their ability to leverage their industry,” Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley said last week in Washington, referencing concerns Beijing could use Chinese-made products to spy on Americans.

Already, the Pentagon has banned the sale of mobile phones by Chinese companies Huawei Technologies and ZTE on its military bases because of the potential security risks. Australia, a key U.S. intelligence partner and ally, also banned the two companies from supplying telecommunications equipment.

And military officials, like Ashley, are increasingly worried about the pervasiveness of Chinese-made components in the supply chain and the impact that could have in a range of both combat and noncombat situations.

“My bigger concern may not necessarily be what’s taking place on the battle space if I can’t turn the power on,” Ashley said.

U.S. lawmakers have voiced similar concerns.

“Imagine a world 15 or 20 years from now where our entire communications network is embedded with component pieces made by a company that can remotely control those component pieces by a foreign adversary,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said at a conference this past June during a speech about China. “It would be a threat this country has never faced.”

Cyber targets

A July 2018 report by the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center found that while China’s cyber operations have slowed since a 2015 agreement with the U.S., Beijing “continues to use cyber espionage to support its strategic development goals.”

Most of the Chinese operations target defense contractors and information technology, as well as communications companies “whose products and services support government and private sector networks worldwide.”

And U.S. officials believe China’s malicious cyber activities are growing.

“China is expanding its intrusions,” FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich said Tuesday, calling China the No. 1 counterintelligence threat.

“We find them stealing our ideas, our intellectual property, trying to obtain our innovation,” Bowdich said, calling the Chinese efforts “incredibly effective.”

U.S. intelligence officials are also increasingly concerned that China’s efforts, while methodical, are becoming increasingly bold.

China is no longer “hiding its strengths and biding its time,” Coats warned Tuesday. “Beijing is working against the values that the international community has championed, including protecting personal privacy, the free flow of information and the protection of commercial secrets.”
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A federal judge on Monday ordered Endangered Species Act protections restored to grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park, halting plans for the first licensed trophy hunts of the region’s grizzlies in more than 40 years.

U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen in Missoula, Montana, sided with environmentalists and native American groups by overruling the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decision to strip the grizzlies of their status as a threatened species, the court order said.

The Trump administration’s decision in June of last year to “de-list” the grizzly, formally proposed in 2016 during the Obama era, was based on agency findings that the bears’ numbers had rebounded enough in recent decades that federal safeguards were no longer necessary.

The de-listing, welcomed by big-game hunters and ranchers, had applied to about 700 Yellowstone-area grizzlies in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.

Environmentalists countered that treating those bears separately from other grizzly populations in Montana and elsewhere in the lower 48 states was biologically unsound and illegal under the Endangered Species Act.

The judge’s ruling, if upheld, would make permanent a court order barring Wyoming and Idaho from going ahead with plans to open grizzly hunting seasons allowing as many as 23 bears in the two states to be shot and killed for sport.
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A U.S. government investigation has found that Myanmar’s military targeted Rohingya civilians indiscriminately and often with “extreme brutality” in a coordinated campaign to drive the minority Muslims out of the country.

The hard-hitting State Department report released Monday is based on a survey this spring of more than 1,000 refugees among the hundreds of thousands who have fled the crackdown to neighboring Bangladesh in the past two years. 

The 20-page report does not say whether the abuses constitute genocide and crimes against humanity, as U.N. investigators have surmised.

But the U.S. findings make grim reading and are likely to reinforce calls for the Trump administration to make that determination and strengthen sanctions against the Southeast Asian nation.

Most of those interviewed had witnessed a killing, and half had witnessed sexual violence. Rohingya identified the military as the perpetrator in 84 percent of the killings or injuries they witnessed. 

“The survey reveals that the recent violence in northern Rakhine State was extreme, large-scale, widespread, and seemingly geared toward both terrorizing the population and driving out the Rohingya residents,” the report says.

“The scope and scale of the military’s operations indicate they were well-planned and coordinated. In some areas, perpetrators used tactics that resulted in mass casualties, for example, locking people in houses to burn them, fencing off entire villages before shooting into the crowd, or sinking boats full of hundreds of fleeing Rohingya.”

​The bloodshed has catapulted Myanmar, also known as Burma, back into the ranks of renegade nations where it languished for years when it was ruled by a military junta. The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor also announced last week she is launching a preliminary investigation into the deportations of Rohingya from Myanmar into Bangladesh.

Amnesty International USA said the State Department had missed an opportunity to make a legal determination of crimes against humanity, sending a worrying message about Washington’s willingness to seek justice for atrocities just under international law.

“The United States’ words mean nothing if it fails to pursue genuine accountability for victims and their families,” advocacy manager Francisco Bencosme said. 

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt hosted a meeting Monday of more than one dozen foreign ministers on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly to discuss the Rohingya crisis.

He said in a statement that Myanmar’s military leaders “must face full accountability for any atrocities committed” and that if conditions haven’t improved for the 1 million people affected by the crackdown in Rakhine State in a year’s time, “then we have failed as an international community.”

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley announced $185 million in new humanitarian assistance, mostly for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. She called on the Myanmar government “to do more to hold those who have engaged in ethnic cleansing accountable for their atrocities?.”

Myanmar, a majority Buddhist nation which is now formally under civilian rule, has denied abuses by its military. 

But the U.S. report, coming on the heels of an extensive U.N. fact-finding mission that recommended military leaders be prosecuted for genocide, will make it increasingly difficult for the government to rebut international criticism. 

The report found that in the two months following August 2017 – when attacks by Rohingya militants on security forces triggered massive retaliation – satellite imagery show that more than 38,000 buildings were destroyed by fire in Rakhine state. In many areas, refugees said security forces used flamethrowers or incendiary devices to burn down houses and to kill and injure Rohingya. Sexual violence is also reported as having been widespread.

“Two police from my village raped me,” the report quotes an unnamed 23-year-old woman as saying. “I know these men by sight, but not their names. After they were done, they told me to leave the country, this is not your country.” 

Among the litany of abuses that refugees said they witnessed: 

Soldiers burning or urinating on Qurans. 
Victims of violence being decapitated or dismembered.
Infants and children being beaten or killed
Soldiers attacking women, and their infants, during or just after childbirth.

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Thousands of scientists joined on Monday to accuse the Trump administration of trying to erode the Endangered Species Act in favor of commercial interests with a plan to revamp regulations that have formed a bedrock of U.S. wildlife protection for over 40 years.

The extraordinary critique of the administration’s proposal, which was unveiled in July, came in an open letter addressed to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross from three associations representing 9,000 professional biologists.

A separate letter similarly condemning revisions proposed to endangered species policies was signed by 273 leading university scientists from around the country.

Both came as the 60-day public comment period drew to a close for what would be the most sweeping overhaul in decades of the rules implementing the landmark environmental law.

The 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA) currently protects more than 1,600 species of U.S. animals and plants listed as either endangered — on the brink of extinction — or threatened — deemed likely to become extinct in the foreseeable future.

The ESA is credited with a number of high-profile success stories, including the comeback of the American bald eagle, the California condor and the grizzly bear.

But the act has long been controversial for requiring the government to designate “critical habitat” deemed essential to a listed species’ survival and limiting commercial activities there, such as construction, mining, energy development or logging.

Developers and other critics argue that such restrictions pose an unfair and overly burdensome intrusion on property rights and economic activity.

Under the administration’s proposal, the government would end the practice of automatically treating endangered species and threatened species essentially the same.

The plan also calls for initially evaluating a species’ critical habitat on the basis of its current range, rather than according to the larger area it could be expected to occupy once recovered.

The administration has argued its proposal would enhance wildlife protection by building greater support for a statute that has become outdated and by streamlining the regulatory process.

Scientists, however, said the planned revisions would undermine the ESA and drive some wildlife closer to extinction.

One proposed change, they said, to allow consideration of economic factors when assessing a species’ status, would violate the law’s requirement that safeguards hinge solely on science.

“This is completely disastrous for efforts to save species from extinction,” said Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecology professor at Duke University.

A spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Brian Hires, said the agency encourages “input on our proposed ESA regulatory changes from all stakeholders as part of a robust and transparent public process.”
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