Month: March 2019

U.S. sportswear maker Nike was hit with a 12.5 million euro ($14.14 million) fine on Monday for blocking cross-border sales of soccer merchandise of some of Europe’s best-known clubs, the latest EU sanction against such restrictions.

The European Commission said Nike’s illegal practices occurred between 2004 to 2017 and related to licensed merchandise for FC Barcelona, Manchester United, Juventus, Inter Milan, AS Roma and the French Football Federation.

The European Union case focused on Nike’s role as a licensor for making and distributing licensed merchandise featuring a soccer club’s brands and not its own trademarks.

The sanction came after a two-year investigation triggered by a sector inquiry into e-commerce in the 28-country bloc. The EU wants to boost online trade and economic growth.

European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Nike’s actions deprived soccer fans in other countries of the opportunity to buy their clubs’ merchandise such as mugs, bags, bed sheets, stationery and toys.

“Nike prevented many of its licensees from selling these branded products in a different country leading to less choice and higher prices for consumers,” she said in a statement.

Nike’s practices included clauses in contracts prohibiting out-of-territory sales by licensees and threats to end agreements if licensees ignored the clauses. Its fine was cut by 40 percent after it cooperated with the EU enforcer.

($1 = 0.8839 euros)
…

Russia is ready to improve ties with the United States but it is up to Washington to make the first move, the Kremlin said on Monday after the conclusion of a U.S. investigation into alleged collusion between Donald Trump and Moscow in the 2016 election.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr said in a summary released on Sunday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had found no evidence of collusion in his investigation, though had not determined whether Trump obstructed justice by undermining inquiries that have dogged his presidency.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the report on a conference call and said Russia had never interfered and did not plan to interfere in the United States or other countries’ internal affairs and elections.

“…It’s hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat,” Peskov told reporters.

U.S. intelligence agencies said shortly before Trump took office in January 2017 that Moscow meddled in the presidential election with a campaign of email hacking and online propaganda aimed at sowing discord in the United States.

Commenting on the possibility of an improvement in ties with the United States after the conclusion of the Mueller report, Peskov said President Vladimir Putin had repeatedly stated he was open to shoring up relations.

“In this case, the ball is absolutely in their court. It was given to Trump in Helsinki,” Peskov said, referring to a summit between Putin and Trump in the Finnish capital in July 2018.

 
…

The deadly mosque shootings in New Zealand last week by a gunman who promoted an anti-immigrant manifesto coincide with a surge in the incidents of right-wing extremist killings in the U.S. 

Last year, domestic extremists killed at least 50 people in the U.S., up from 37 murders in 2017, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, which tracks such murders. The last five years have produced a higher number of extremist-related murders than any other five-year period since 1970, according to the ADL.

Mark Pitcavage, a senior fellow at the Center on Extremism, said that every one of the perpetrators of last year’s murders had ties to at least one right-wing movement.

The majority of the murders were committed by white supremacists, with a smaller number perpetrated by anti-government extremists and extreme misogynists who identify as “involuntary celibates” or incels, Pitcavage said.

While a few high-profile incidents such as the massacre of 11 Jewish worshippers by white supremacist Robert Bowers at a Pittsburgh synagogue last October have been widely reported, others have received scant attention. 

Just two months before the synagogue shooting rampage, another man espousing white supremacist views, Joden Rocco, stabbed a 24-year-old black man outside a bar in Pittsburgh. In an Instagram video posted before the killing, Rocco said that he was trying to see how many times he could use a racial slur for African-Americans before getting kicked out of bars. 

“Every year there are a number of incidents like this where one person dies or sometimes two people die, but it was not something where there were mass casualties … or attracted a lot of attention, but it was an extremist killing someone,” Pitcavage said. “Someone died. There was a victim. A life was lost.”

Among other underreported incidents:

In January 2018, Samuel Woodward stabbed to death Blaze Bernstein, a gay Jewish college student. Investigators later found homophobic and neo-Nazi material on Woodward's cellphone, including content related to the violent hate group Atomwaffen
In October, Gregory Bush, a 51-year-old unemployed white resident of Louisville, Kentucky, killed two African-Americans ages 67 and 69, at a supermarket.
In November, Scott Paul Beierle, a man who had posted sexist and racist videos online, killed two women and injured four others at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida

In addition to ADL, other research organizations have also reported increases in extremist-related killings last year, though in smaller numbers. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino tracked 22 ideologically driven murders in 2018, including 17 carried out by white supremacists, up from 15 the previous year. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, said at least 40 people were killed in the U.S. and Canada by “individuals who were either motivated by or attracted to far-right ideologies.” SPLC said 2018 was the deadliest year for victims of right-wing extremism. 

“We’re just seeing a whole lot of violence from people who are influenced by white supremacy and that kind of extremism,” said Heidi Beirich, director of SPLC’s intelligence project.

President Donald Trump said recently that he did not think white nationalism was a growing problem following the New Zealand rampage by self-styled white nationalist Brenton Tarrant that killed 50 Muslim worshippers at two mosques. 

But the SPLC said white nationalism is on the rise. The Alabama-based legal advocacy organization recently reported that the number of hate groups in the U.S. rose to a record 1,020 last year, boosted by increases in the number of both white and black nationalist groups. 

Not all white nationalists are violent. But those who commit acts of violence in the name of white nationalism do so out of fear that immigration into Western countries is sowing the seeds of “white genocide,” experts say.

“If you look at the man who killed all those people tragically in New Zealand, he talks constantly about white people being displaced in their home countries,” Beirich said. 

With demographic fears driving the violence, Beirich said the problem is unlikely to go away any time soon. 

“The demographic trends that they view as destroying them are not going to shift,” Beirich said. 
…

A majority of Americans favor stricter gun laws, and most believe places of worship and schools have become less safe over the last two decades, according to a new poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. 

The survey was conducted both before and after this month’s mass shooting at two mosques in New Zealand. It found that 67 percent of Americans support making U.S. gun laws stricter, while 22 percent say they should be left as they are and 10 percent think they should be made less strict. 

The New Zealand shooting on March 15 did not appear to have an impact on Americans’ support for new gun laws; support for tighter gun laws was the same in interviews conducted before and after the shooting. 

Wide partisan divide

While a majority of Americans have consistently said they support stronger gun laws, proposals have stalled repeatedly in Congress in recent years, a marked contrast to New Zealand and some other countries, such as Australia, that have acted swiftly after a mass shooting. Less than a week after the mosque shootings, New Zealand moved to ban “military-style” semi-automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines; similarly, after a mass shooting in 1996, Australia enacted sweeping gun bans within two weeks. 

The new poll suggests many Americans would support similar measures, but there’s a wide gulf between Democrats and Republicans on banning specific types of guns. Overall, 6 in 10 Americans support a ban on AR-15 rifles and similar semiautomatic weapons. Roughly 8 in 10 Democrats, but just about 4 in 10 Republicans, support that policy.

Republicans are also far less likely than Democrats to think that making it harder to buy a gun would prevent mass shootings, 36 percent to 81 percent. Overall, 58 percent of Americans think it would.

Support across party lines

Still, some gun restrictions get wide support across party lines. Wide shares of both Democrats and Republicans support a universal background check requirement, along with allowing courts to prevent some people from buying guns if they are considered dangerous to themselves or others, even if they have not committed crimes.

In contrast to New Zealand, the United States has enacted few national restrictions in recent years. In part, that’s a reflection of gun rights being enshrined in the U.S. Constitution; in a poll by the Pew Research Center in spring of 2017, 74 percent of gun owners said the right to own guns is essential to their own sense of freedom. 

That poll also found that gun owners were far more likely than those who don’t own guns to contact public officials about gun policy or donate to organizations that take a stance on the issue.

A divided Congress after last year’s midterm elections only serves to make any new national gun laws unlikely for the foreseeable future.

Support unchanged from 2018

Overall support for stricter gun laws is unchanged since an AP-NORC poll conducted one year ago, a month after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead. The post-Parkland poll marked an increase in support for stricter gun laws, from 61 percent in October 2017.

But the strength of that support appears to have ebbed. The percentage who say gun laws should be made much stricter, rather than just somewhat stricter, drifted down slightly after reaching a peak in the post-Parkland poll, from 45 percent then to 39 percent now.

The poll showed a wide share of Americans say safety in churches, synagogues, mosques and other places of worship has worsened over the past two decades. Sixty-one percent say religious houses have grown less safe over the last two decades. Slightly more said so after the New Zealand shooting than before, 64 percent to 57 percent. 

Nearly 7 in 10 believe elementary and high schools have become less safe than they used to be. And 57 percent say the same about colleges and universities.
…

On March 14, New York City Muslims were putting their families to bed when details emerged of a mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, about 15,000 kilometers away. A white supremacist had targeted Friday prayer. Fifty were dead, including refugees, women and children; one as young as three. 

Brooklyn residents Mohammad Khan and Nazrul Islam were returning from a leadership dinner when they heard.

“We stopped our car, we parked, and we were just in tears,” Khan said. “Me and the imam — we were just devastated.” 

For months, Khan and Islam, an imam and a Quranic school principal, had been working on the rollout of an all volunteer-led civilian patrol organization, Muslim Community Patrol & Services (MCPS). “MCPS is aimed at protecting members of the local community from escalating quality-of-life nuisance crimes,” its website says.

Its mission took on added relevance after the attack in New Zealand. 

Traumatized members of the community, who had seen video of the attack on social media, sought help from MCPS at local vigils and rallies. The organization responded with trained counselors and chaplains.

WATCH: New York City Muslims Begin Community Safety Patrol

​‘Here for everyone’ 

On a white-and-blue emblazoned Ford Taurus, a seal matching the style and color scheme of the New York Police Department (NYPD) identifies the MCP volunteer unit. Above it, the words “Assalamu alaikum” are inscribed in Arabic. “Peace be upon you.” 

Patrolling the streets is just one aspect of the group’s mission. Its guiding principle is mentorship, said Khan, MCPS’ director of community affairs. Mentorship can be provided in person or by phone, 24/7, with the aim of bridging the community across religious, ethnic and language divides. New York is one of the most diverse cities in the world.

“If an immigrant came to this country from an Arabic-speaking country — and they might be in trouble or they need help — and they see Assalamu alaikum,” Islam, 28, explained, “they’ll definitely know there are Muslim people in that car, so they can come and they can ask us if they need anything.”

MCPS’ 50-plus volunteers are never armed, and they are trained to deal with crises including drug abuse, financial woes, depression and suicide prevention. They are trained in first aid, mental health, chaplaincy and basic security. Every Friday they deliver meals to the homeless in midtown Manhattan. Serving both Muslims and non-Muslims, they speak English, Arabic, Bangla, Urdu, Hindi and “some Polish.” 

Vital to their success, they work in collaboration with NYPD, whose off-duty officers led a recent training in Sunset Park.

“Once people see our work, [they’ll see that] we’re here to help,” said Mahwish Fathma, MCPS’ director of operations. “We’re here to give. That’s all.”

Fathma, a 22-year-old Muslim-American of mixed Pakistani and Cambodian heritage, remembers earlier patrols, the 1970s-established Shomrim, a volunteer Hasidic Jewish civilian patrol, and the more recently formed Brooklyn Asian Civilian Observation Patrol (BACOP) — both based in Brooklyn. 

“I always thought, ‘Why don’t Muslims have that? Everyone should have this,’” Fathma said. “Dealing with your own families or your own communities, it’s different. It’s always different.” 

​Lessons from their counterparts 

Four avenues across from MCPS’ makeshift office, a cohort of Mandarin-language volunteers don “Brooklyn Asian COP” jackets at the group’s headquarters, a red-walled basement that contains a bar, gym, ping-pong table and wicker lawn chairs. 

Hongmiao Yu, a local pharmacy owner, joined BACOP after a burglary at his business left employees shaken. On days, he volunteers, he doesn’t return home until after 2 a.m. To avoid waking his young children on the second floor, he sleeps downstairs. 

“We’re all Chinese immigrants, so I wanted to do something for this community,” Yu said.

“The more civilian patrols we have, the more beneficial it is for the communities,” said BACOP’s chairman, Louie Liu. “As long as we are serious and sincere in our cooperation with local law enforcement, we’re confident that crimes will go down, [and] our living conditions will improve.” 

Getting past the language barrier has been essential for the group. Members speak English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Fujianese and “Spanish-Chinese,” according to Liu. Over the past five years, he says Brooklyn’s Chinatown, home to more than 200,000 ethnic Chinese residents, has made strides in its relationship with law enforcement as a result of BACOP.

“We enable immigrants to express themselves without any fear or concern, and law enforcement has confidence in the role that we’re playing,” Liu said.

​Evolving relationship 

Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Intelligence Project, sees the potential for law enforcement to restore trust among immigrant and Muslim communities, which are increasingly the targets of U.S. hate crimes, the majority of which are not reported to the police.

“If the cops take hate crime seriously and work with the community, it can show those communities that they care about them, and that they really exist to protect them,” Beirich told VOA.

According to FBI statistics, 59.6 percent of hate crime victims in 2017 were targeted because of race, ethnicity or ancestry bias, while an additional 20.6 percent were targeted based on their religion. 

“Realistically, it’s impossible to eliminate racism, so there has to be an organization speaking on our behalf,” said Tony Jiang, a fish market owner in Sunset Park.

Down the street, MCPS members brush off the accusations and name-calling the group has received on social media: “Sharia Patrol,” “an Islamic invasion on the West,” “the worst-case scenario of multiculturalism,” coupled with slurs and death threats.

Islam, who was born in Bangladesh but moved to East New York when he was 10, recalls the bullying of his Brooklyn childhood. Headed home from mosque as a young boy, he says children would throw eggs at him and others. Once they removed his brother’s taqiyah (cap) and beat him up, sending him to the hospital.

“I’ve seen a lot of hate growing up, and it’s ugly,” Islam said.

The Sunset Park community in Brooklyn he adds, has thrown its weight behind them today: “they see us and they know who we are.”

Adds Khan, “Our actions speak louder than our words.” 

Yuan Ye of VOA’s Mandarin Service contributed to this report.
…

One of the world’s greatest migrations pauses every March in one humble place, central Nebraska’s flat landscape full of cornfields, located in the middle of the United States.

While people may fly over or drive through the area at high speeds on Interstate Highway 80, sandhill cranes stop to appreciate the adjacent wide, braided channels of the shallow Platte River to roost and feed.

Last year, a record 1 million of the lanky, playful birds — about 85 percent of the world’s population — stopped on their northward migration.

In recent decades, more visitors have discovered the migration, looking up from car windshields as wave after wave of cranes fill the sky for six or more weeks, or crowd into river blinds — a structure that allows bird watchers to remain hidden while peering through camera lenses and binoculars in awe.

Scientists here say there is only one other migration as concentrated and spectacular in the world: the wildebeest migration in Africa.

​Getting close to the cranes

On a morning in mid-March, a ritual unfolds. Dozens of tourists gather at 5:45 a.m. at Audubon’s Rowe Sanctuary here and walk arm-in-arm down a dark trail, carefully feeling their way with their feet. As the group gets closer to the riverside blind, they are hit with sound. It’s described as a loud, but somehow gentle croak, chortle or rattle.

It’s a sound that travels far and right into the hearts of those tiptoeing into the blind.

Neseem Munshi said the calls go “deep into my soul.”

“The sound that they make is such a moving, ancient sound. If I could just live and breathe that sound, I would be a very happy person,” said Munshi, who was raised in Kenya and today lives in nearby Colorado.

Hundreds of foreign travelers from 66 countries viewed the migration last year. Overall, the 50,000 tourists who come to this rural state, located nearly midway between the East and West U.S. coasts, spend an estimated $14.3 million, buoying the local economy, a 2017 tourism survey states.

And the cranes, among the oldest known bird species, put on quite a show.

The sandhill crane is a 1.2-meter-tall (4-foot-tall) bird with long legs, neck and beak, and a wingspan of 2.1 meters (7 feet). Their soft grey plumage is sometimes spotted with rust colors, but its signature is the bright red patch on the top of its head. That, and it’s playful hopping, or dancing, which viewers hope to see once the sun rises. 

The migration occurs here as the birds make their way from wintering grounds, fanned out in Mexico and in Southern U.S. states, all pointing toward a thin 130-kilometer-wide (80-mile-wide) center of the hourglass between the cities of Kearney and Grand Island, Nebraska, before fanning out again north toward Canada.

​‘Almost obliterate the sun’

The birds hang around at this staging location, coming in waves, at times as many as 400,000 in one day, feeding in the nearby stubbles of cornfields and wet meadows, where they get energy from leftover grain and protein from critters in the soggy ground.

“They get up in the air and almost obliterate the sun,” said Jim Jewell, who joined the group in a blind. It was his first time, even though he lives in nearby Kearney. “It’s something you see every day but never get used to it.”

Many tourists start the prior afternoon, driving the gravel roads near the river where the birds are feeding. Cars are stopped with binoculars jutting out the open windows. Near sunset, they travel to blinds or river bridges, where platforms are erected to watch the cranes come into the river to roost in water, which is a social and protective behavior. The water acts as a sound warning in the dark to protect them from chasing predators, such as coyotes.

The cranes glide from the sky, not in any strict pattern of leaders and followers like the estimated 9 million ducks and geese that also fill the skies here, but haphazardly descend to the river, floating down with their long legs dangling like landing gear.

“The best description I’ve read is like a dandelion seed falling gently,” said Chris Helzer, science director of the Nature Conservancy in Nebraska, which also gives blind tours to members and donors.

As it grows dark, the river is filled with a roar of chattering sound.

Helzer said climate change may have caused a shift in behavior among the cranes, but the data on the precise cause isn’t in.

Some cranes are arriving earlier, the first in the early part of February, and more now are leaving after a shorter time here, heading to another staging area in North Dakota.

​Stop on the way north

The cranes typically stay for two to three weeks, to feed and rest. They are leaving in worse condition, however, as waste grain has diminished because of better harvesting equipment or competition from the growing numbers of migrating snow geese. But the cranes are showing remarkable adaptation, and their population is increasing, experts say.

The principle ecological issue is the habitat and changing river. As more water is used for agriculture in Western states, the Platte dries up in summer. Trees then grow in the wide and shallow channel, which the cranes don’t like because they could be filled with predators like bald eagles.

The nonprofit Crane Trust is working on the issue by providing 5,300 acres of habitat in an area where only 2 percent of the lowland tallgrass prairie remains and bulldozing the trees from the river channel.

“We think locally but act globally,” said Crane Trust president Brice Krohn. “We want to lead by example for the betterment of the species.”

The trust also leads daily tours to blinds, where photographers flock to capture these photogenic birds in action. But visitors marvel at more than the birds.

“Everyone can’t believe the beautiful colors. The hues in the sky and the river so blue and, as Jane Goodall said, the ‘whiffs of smoke’ as they come from the sky and come into roost,” Krohn said.

Goodall, the famed expert on chimpanzees, has been coming to Nebraska to see the cranes every year since 2001, according to Crane Trust officials.

The culmination for many is the sunrise viewing, however, when people typically attached to mobile devices silently stand in the dark together and wait. As light comes to the river, the cranes begin tossing weeds or sticks in the air and hopping, bowing to each other, then leaping. They might even do-si-do to a neighbor.

Helzer compares it to square dancing, but most of the dancing is pair bonding. The cranes mate for life.

“You see the movement and the nervous energy through the flock,” he said. “You see them waking up after all night on the river; it’s gotta be cold. You see them hopping a bit. Then all the sudden they are jumping in full height and spreading their wings and the morning has started.”

Thousands of birds will later burst into flight, in a roar unlike anything outside a football stadium.

“It’s a very emotional experience for everybody,” Munshi said. “Some people cry.”
…

The nearly 2-year-old probe into potential ties between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian election interference has come to an end.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Friday submitted his confidential report to U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

But will Mueller’s report be the end of the story?

Hardly. Prosecutors from outside the special counsel’s office, including the U.S. attorney’s offices in New York, Virginia and Washington, D.C., are all pursuing cases that have spun off from the Mueller investigation.

State investigators in New York and Maryland have ongoing Trump-related investigations. And in Congress, the House and Senate intelligence and other committees are actively looking into Trump’s finances, potential Russia-Trump ties and other matters.

Besides Mueller, here’s a rundown of who’s investigating what:

​Violations of federal campaign finance law. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York is investigating Trump’s role in silencing former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels with hush payments in August and October 2016, respectively. The two women have previously claimed to have had affairs with President Trump.

Inauguration funding. Trump’s inaugural committee received a subpoena in February 2019 from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Federal prosecutors are looking into where the money raised and spent by the Trump inauguration committee, $107 million, came from and where it went.

​Paul Manafort’s activity. In March, a Manhattan grand jury indicted Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, on 16 counts of mortgage fraud and conspiracy. The state-level indictment came after Manafort was sentenced in federal court in Alexandria and Washington, D.C., to more than seven years in prison for a host of crimes.

Trump Super PAC Funding. Federal prosecutors are examining whether foreigners illegally funneled donations to the pro-Trump super PAC “Rebuilding America Now.” U.S. law prohibits foreign nationals from giving to federal campaigns, PACs and inaugural funds.

Russian Accountant Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova. The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia indicted Khusyaynova in October 2018 for conspiracy to defraud the United States by interfering in the 2016 presidential elections and 2018 midterm elections.

Turkish Influence. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is cooperating with federal prosecutors in eastern Virginia in a criminal case against two former associates. The two worked on behalf of a Turkish entrepreneur who financed a campaign to discredit Fethullah Gülen, the cleric accused by the Turkish government of helping instigate a failed coup. Flynn pleaded guilty Dec. 1, 2017, to lying to the FBI about his contact with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and his plea agreement includes some details of the Turkish case.

Trump Foundation Tax Case. The New York Attorney General’s Office is collaborating with the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance to look into possible criminal charges against the now-defunct Donald J. Trump Foundation for alleged tax evasion and aggressive pursuit of tax breaks. Trump agreed to dissolve the charity in December 2018.

​Emoluments Lawsuit. The state of Maryland and the District of Columbia have sued President Trump for allegedly violating two anti-corruption provisions of the U.S. Constitution. The plaintiffs say Trump has violated the so-called Domestic Emoluments Clause, which prohibits the president from accepting gifts from states and the Foreign Emoluments Clause, which bans him from accepting payments from foreign governments.

Roger Stone and WikiLeaks. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and Mueller’s office are jointly prosecuting the case against Trump’s longtime adviser and confidante, Roger Stone. Stone was charged with witness tampering, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to Congress about Democrats’ emails stolen by Russian hackers and published by the website WikiLeaks before 2016 election. Stone, now under a judge’s gag order, has pleaded not guilty.

Masood Farivar contributed to this report.
…

…

After months of anticipation, special counsel Robert Mueller delivered his report on the Russia investigation involving President Donald Trump to Attorney General William Barr. Mueller was investigating possible collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign and whether as president Trump took any action to impede the investigation. It will now be up to the attorney general to decide how much of the report will be released. VOA National correspondent Jim Malone has more from Washington.
…