Month: December 2019

Melania Trump on Friday appeared to condone her husband’s criticism of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, saying through a spokeswoman that her 13-year-old son, Barron, is in a different category than the teenage climate activist “who travels the globe giving speeches.”

“He is a 13-year-old who wants and deserves privacy,” spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in an emailed statement the day after President Donald Trump lashed out at Thunberg  because Time magazine had named her “Person of the Year.”

The first lady’s apparent acceptance of her husband’s actions stood in contrast to the work she’s doing through her “Be Best”  initiative to combat online bullying and teach children to be kind.

The president tweeted Thursday that “Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend!” He said it was “ridiculous” that Time had chosen her for the honor.

Trump mocked the teenage activist, who has Asperger’s syndrome, a week after the first lady tweeted angrily at Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan for mentioning Barron during her testimony as a Democratic witness at a House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing.

“A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics. Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it,” Melania Trump tweeted.

At one point during her testimony, Karlan said that while Trump can “name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron.” Karlan was trying to make a point that Trump is a president and not a king. At the end of the hearing, Karlan apologized for the comment.

Grisham said the first lady will continue to use “Be Best” to help children.

“It is no secret that the president and first lady often communicate differently — as most married couples do,” Grisham said.

Former first lady Michelle Obama encouraged Thunberg, saying, “don’t let anyone dim your light.”

Michelle Obama wrote on Twitter from Vietnam, where she was traveling this week. “Like the girls I’ve met in Vietnam and all over the world, you have so much to offer us all,” she wrote. “Ignore the doubters and know that millions of people are cheering you on.”

…

Three months after being sworn into office, the civilian-led transitional government in Sudan has been trying to overcome political and economic challenges in the African country after decades under the former regime of Omar al-Bashir, who was toppled in April this year after months of popular protests against his government.   

One major objective for the new government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok has been the removal of Sudan from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

During his recent visit to Washington, where he met with senior U.S. officials, Hamdok emphasized that removing his country from the list of the states sponsoring terrorism was essential for the success of the new government in carrying out necessary reforms.

“This issue has a lot of bearing on so many processes, not to mention debt and investment but also opening the country at large,” Hamdok said last week during remarks at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

“This is something, unless it is addressed, all these other processes will not take place,” he added, linking the removal of Sudan from the U.S. terrorism list to top priorities his government has taken on for the transitional period.

Sponsoring terrorism

Sudan was added to the U.S.  list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1993 over charges by Washington that Bashir’s Islamist government was supporting terrorism. The country was also targeted by U.S. sanctions over Khartoum’s alleged support for terror groups, including al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah.

“When Bashir took over the country [in 1989], and then the fundamentalists and Islamists gained more and more power, Sudan was harboring some very bad people, including Osama bin Laden,” said former U.S. Ambassador Mary Carlin Yates, co-chair of the Sudan Task Force at the Atlantic Council, who was the U.S. chargé d’affaires to Sudan from 2011 to 2012.

“The more power the Islamists had within the government then, the more of whom we would call the bad actors [and] terrorists came to spend time in Sudan,” she told VOA.

But Sudanese officials maintain that it was the former regime that supported terrorism and that the Sudanese people shouldn’t be published for crimes committed by Bashir’s regime.

Normalized relations

Since the overthrow of Bashir, U.S. officials have expressed support for the new Sudanese government.

Earlier this month, U.S. and Sudan announced the warming of their diplomatic relations through an exchange of ambassadors for the first time in 23 years.

Pleased to announce that the United States and #Sudan have decided to initiate the process to exchange ambassadors for the first time in 23 years. This is a historic step to strengthen our bilateral relationship.

— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) December 4, 2019

This move, experts say, could be a gesture of goodwill as both sides are trying to open a new page in their relations.

“Having ambassadors in both countries will certainly make efforts to delist Sudan from the terrorism list more effective,” said al-Noor Mohammed, a Sudanese researcher based in Khartoum.

“It gives our government a great deal of legitimacy as it seeks to turn this opening into meaningful outcomes, such as the removal of Sudan from the U.S. [terrorism] list,” he told VOA in a phone interview.

Essential for Sudan’s economy

Experts believe lifting economic sanctions imposed on Sudan and removing the country from the terrorism list will significantly help alleviate economic hardships that Sudan has faced  for many years.

“The new government has inherited a country with an enormous debt of about $60 billion,” said Yousif al-Jalal, a Khartoum-based political analyst.

He told VOA that “removing the country from that list will allow Hamdok’s government to reach out to international monetary lenders to address the debt issue.”

The designation of Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism bars the country from debt relief and financing from international financial lenders such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Some groups such as the Sentry, an organization that monitors conflicts in Africa, have called on the U.S. government to accelerate the process of taking Sudan off the terrorism list.

Removing Sudan from the list “will help unlock essential financial support and bolster Sudan’s economic prospects,” the Sentry said in a statement Thursday.

“If it occurs in conjunction with meaningful economic, governance and human rights reforms, the prospects for economic recovery and democratic transformation in the country will grow exponentially,” it added.

U.S. conditions

U.S. officials say that one of the important steps in removing Sudan from the list is reaching a settlement with families of those killed in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last week, Sudan’s Hamdok said in addition to settling with the victims’ families, his government was also pursuing a deal with those injured in the 2000 bombing of the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole.

Sudan is accused of providing material support to al-Qaida, which was responsible for all those attacks.

U.S. officials  have also expressed concerns about the presence of some military personnel in the newly established authority in Sudan who had ties with the former regime.

“Sudan needs to give assurances to Washington that these military people won’t have the power to take over the government at some point,” analyst al-Jalal said.

The U.S. also raised questions during Hamdok’s recent visit to Washington about Sudan’s intelligence agency and whether it has fully been transferred to a civilian leadership.

The delisting process

Removing Sudan from the U.S. State Department list requires approval from Congress after a six-month review.

“There is an interagency discussion that happens,” Yates said, adding that the State Department, Defense Department and the intelligence community discuss the outcome and “then they refer the decision to the president.”

She noted that Congress has to be notified after the process is over.

“But after a 45-day period, if the Congress does nothing, then [Sudan would be] delisted,” Yates said.

…

It was nighttime when Pedro Lucas came home, clutching receipts showing he had paid a funeral home to have the bodies of three immigrant laborers returned to Guatemala from Oregon.

The three, including two of Lucas’ cousins, were killed when a pickup truck slammed into a van carrying them and 10 other Guatemalans home from work at a Christmas tree farm. Lucas’ father, who arrived in America seven months ago and sent part of his earnings to his wife in the village of Chacaj, was also in the van and remains in a coma, his back broken.

“It’s unknown if he’ll walk again,” Lucas said in Spanish.

The Nov. 29 crash was a blow to Oregon’s immigrant farm workers, the driving force behind the state’s $121 million Christmas tree industry, the nation’s largest.

On Wednesday, spirits were lifted for some when the U.S. House passed a bill that would loosen restrictions on hiring foreign agricultural workers and create a path to citizenship for more than 1 million farm workers estimated to be in the country illegally. The bill’s fate in the Senate is unclear, and the White House hasn’t said if President Donald Trump would sign it. But the 260-165 vote was a rare stroke of bipartisanship on immigration.

The administration has expressed support for growers who say they are desperate for immigrants to fill jobs, even though Trump pinned his 2016 campaign and his domestic agenda to building a border wall with Mexico and introduced policies that make it far more difficult for immigrants to win asylum.

‘Invisible work’

Both growers and Latino workers in Oregon say native-born Americans won’t take these arduous field jobs.

“The person who works in an office, he doesn’t know what it’s like to work out there, how much one suffers out there,” Lucas said as he sat at his dining room table, the funeral home documents in front of him. “In this season — here we’re warm inside — but outside, in the morning when it’s cold and there’s ice, you suffer a lot.”

The deadly crash shed light on an “invisible work” happening in Oregon, said Reyna Lopez, executive director of a farm worker union called PCUN, an acronym in Spanish for Pine Workers and Farmers United of the Northwest.

The labor takes place mostly out of public view, in Christmas tree farms that blanket parts of Oregon’s foothills and the Willamette Valley, an area renowned for its moist climate and fertile soil.

“People don’t realize that the majority of this industry is immigrant labor,” said Lopez, whose own father, a Mexican immigrant, was a Christmas tree planter.

Christmas tree farmers in Oregon, facing a tight labor market this year, used farm labor contractors who found migrant workers in California to help with the tree harvest, according to Oregon Employment Department officials.

The victims of the crash spent their last day loading Christmas trees onto trucks at Holiday Tree Farms, one of the world’s largest Christmas tree farms. They received paychecks from a contractor that Friday night in Salem and were headed home when the pickup truck crumpled their van. The Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division is investigating, though a spokesman declined to provide details.

Migrants numbers

In 2017, 4.7 million Christmas trees were harvested in Oregon, 4 million in North Carolina and 1.5 million in Michigan, the country’s three largest producers, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Oregon doesn’t compile records on the percentage of immigrants in the Christmas tree industry, but it clearly relies on them. So do North Carolina and Michigan.

As the sun burned through fog one recent morning at Hupp Farms, nestled in the foothills of the Cascade Range near Silverton, Oregon, Jan Hupp surveyed stacks of bound Noble and Nordmann firs about to be loaded onto trucks. They were the last among the 30,000 trees that employees and contractors downed with chain saws during this year’s harvest.

“Without immigrants, we couldn’t have done this,” Hupp, a trucker cap pushed back on his head, his blue jeans stained brown and green from soil and trees, told The Associated Press. “People born here don’t want to do this work.”

His farm has 20 employees, 15 of them from Mexico and the rest U.S.-born. Members of contract crews that helped with the harvest were from Mexico or Central America.

Asked Thursday about passage of the U.S. House bill, Hupp replied: “If it’s a pathway to get more people who are willing to work, I’m all for that.”

Felling trees

Harvesting is the hardest part of the job, requiring the cutter to bend over with a heavy chain saw to sever the trunk 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) or less above the ground, said Daniel Garibay, a Hupp Farms employee. He originally is from Zarquillas, a town in Michoacan, Mexico, that he said is plagued by shootouts between rival drug gangs.

If the chain saw touches the ground, the chain is immediately dulled and must be replaced, said the bearded 41-year-old.

Asked what was the biggest number of trees he has felled in one day, Garibay responded matter-of-factly: “One thousand.”

Lucas, sitting in a rented house in Gervais, Oregon, that he and his wife, Raquel, share with his father, his cousins and their sons, described dealing with the aftermath of the van crash. He has relied on donations to pay a funeral home $21,750 to have the bodies of his cousins and a third worker, aged 18, sent home.

“They supported me from Florida, Atlanta, Tennessee, Chicago, and many who work on farms in Oregon. All of Woodburn supported me,” Lucas said, referring to a nearby predominantly Latino town. The Guatemalan Consulate in Seattle said it is prepared to assist.

While arrangements are being made for the bodies to be transported, they are being kept in their caskets in an unheated room at City View Funeral Home in Salem.

Standing tall in the lobby, so perfect that it could be mistaken for a fake if not for the piney scent, is a Noble fir Christmas tree.
 

…

A 30-year-old Laotian blogger has been imprisoned for five years for questioning the adequacy of the government’s response to deadly flooding in the country’s south this fall.

In September, Tropical Storm Podul and Tropical Depression Kajiki dumped an estimated 40 centimeters of rain across Laos’ six southern provinces, killing at least 19 people and displacing an estimated 100,000, according to the United Nations and ASEAN humanitarian and disaster relief agencies.

The Vientiane Times put the death toll at 28, and international media reported that flooding also damaged hospitals and schools, and destroyed hundreds of roads and nearly 100 bridges.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said video blogger Houayheuang Xayabouly, known online as Muay Littlepig, posted a video to Facebook on September 12 drawing attention to what she described as a negligent government response to the disaster in her native Champasak and neighboring Salavan provinces.

As of Thursday, the video had been viewed more than 172,000 times.

RSF learned Tuesday that Houayheuang had already been given the maximum sentence and incarcerated for “spreading propaganda against the Lao People’s Democratic Republic,” and “trying to overthrow the party, state and government.” 

“By disseminating anti-government messages, she violated Article 117 of Criminal Law. So, she could be imprisoned between one and five years, and be fined between 5 and 20 million Kip ($568 and $2,272),” Lieutenant Colonel Phaychit told VOA’s Lao service shortly after the September 12 arrest.

Phaychit also said she “pleaded guilty as alleged and provided the important information of her association with the anti-government groups both inside the country and overseas.”

‘Grim warning’

“By acting as the voice of her fellow citizens with great courage, Muay Littlepig served the public interest in a country where the news media are completely ossified,” said Daniel Bastard, RSF’s Asia-Pacific chief, who is quoted in RSF’s news alert.

“Her harsh sentence is a grim warning to the entire Laotian population,” he said. “As the charges lacked any substance, we call for her immediate and unconditional release.”

According to Bastard, Houayheuang had “previously posted videos about cases of corruption and the failure to adequately address the widespread damage in the southern province of Attapeu, resulting from the collapse of a dam in July 2018.”

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Survivors Recount Horror of Laos Dam Collapse

Samled Inthavong had almost finished hoisting his family members into a boat when a building uprooted by the collapse of a dam upstream slammed into his house.Bobbing atop the surging floodwaters in the inky midnight darkness, he could only watch as his house caved in on his grandparents trapped inside.“My grandparents couldn’t move.

RSF describes Laos as “a news and information black hole in which the state apparatus has complete control over the media, and relatively few people have internet connections.”

The international press freedom watchdog ranks Lao 171 out of 180 countries in its 2019 World Press Freedom Index.

Phaysarn Vorachak of VOA’s Lao service contributed to this report.

…

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party will win an overwhelming victory in Britain’s election with a majority of 86 seats in parliament to deliver Brexit on Jan. 31, an exit poll showed Thursday.

The exit poll showed Johnson’s Conservatives would win a landslide of 368 seats, more than enough for a very comfortable majority in the 650-seat parliament and the biggest Conservative national election win since Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 triumph.

Labour were forecast by the poll to win 191 seats, the worst result for the party since 1935. The Scottish National Party would win 55 seats and the Liberal Democrats 13, the poll said.

The Brexit Party were not forecast to win any.

“That would be a phenomenal victory for the Conservative Party and Boris Johnson will feel completely vindicated with the gamble that he took,” said John Bercow, the former speaker of the House of Commons.

“That would be an absolutely dramatic victory,” he said.

Sterling surged after the exit poll, hitting its highest against the euro since July 2016, shortly after the Brexit referendum. Versus the dollar it jumped 2.3% to $1.3480.

Official results will be declared over the next seven hours.

In the last five national elections, only one exit poll has got the outcome wrong — in 2015 when the poll predicted a hung parliament when in fact the Conservatives won a majority, taking 14 more seats than forecast.

If the exit poll is accurate and Johnson’s bet on a snap election has paid off, he will move swiftly to ratify the Brexit deal he struck with the European Union so that the United Kingdom can leave on Jan. 31, 2020 — 10 months later than initially planned.

Britain’s paralysis 

Johnson called the first Christmas election since 1923 to break what he said was the paralysis of Britain’s political system after more than three years of crisis over how, when or even if to leave the European Union.

The face of the “Leave” campaign in the 2016 referendum, 55-year-old Johnson fought the election under the slogan of “Get Brexit Done,” promising to end the deadlock and spend more on health, education and the police.

The exit poll was produced by three broadcasters — the BBC, ITV and Sky — who teamed up to jointly produce similar surveys in the last three elections, held in 2010, 2015 and 2017.

In 2010 and 2017, their exit polls accurately predicted the overall outcome and were close to forecasting the correct number of seats for the two main parties.

Johnson’s strategy was to breach Labour’s so-called “Red Wall” of seats across the Brexit-supporting areas of the Midlands and northern England where he cast his political opponents as the out-of-touch enemies of Brexit.

Brexit far from over

While a majority will allow Johnson to lead the United Kingdom out of the club it first joined in 1973, Brexit is far from over: He faces the daunting task of negotiating a trade agreement with the EU in just 11 months.

After Jan. 31, Britain will enter a transition period during which it will negotiate a new relationship with the EU27.

This can run until the end of December 2022 under the current rules, but the Conservatives made an election promise not to extend the transition period beyond the end of 2020.
 

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Debris believed to be from a military transport plane carrying 38 people that vanished two days ago en route to the Antarctic has been discovered in the frigid, treacherous waters between the icy continent and South America, Chile’s Air Force said Wednesday.

Air Force Gen. Eduardo Mosqueira said “sponge” material, possibly from the plane’s fuel tank, was found floating roughly 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the place the C-130 Hercules last had radio contact.

The debris will be analyzed to see if it corresponds to the missing plane, he said, adding that the process could take up to two days.

The C-130 Hercules took off Monday afternoon from a base in far-southern Chile on a regular maintenance flight for an Antarctic base. Radio contact was lost 70 minutes later.

The debris was spotted by a private plane assisting in the search, and officials said a Brazilian ship in the area equipped with instruments will next scan 3,200 meters (10,499 feet) underwater at the site.

“We estimate that the debris may in fact be from the C-130 fuel tank,” Mosqueira said.

The discovery came as Chilean officials had expanded the search for the missing military plane.

Mosqueira said the search area covered an area of about 400 by 450 kilometers (250 by 280 miles) and he said improved visibility was helping the crews of searchers using planes, satellites and vessels from Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and the U.S. as well as Chile.

The search area extended over treacherous waters of Drake Passage between the tip of South America and the Antarctic. The plane was carrying 17 crew members and 21 passengers, three of them civilians.

The two pilots had extensive experience, according to the Chilean air force, which said that while the plane was built in 1978, it was in good condition. The air force said it flies this route monthly.

The four-engine C-130 is a “military workhorse” and experts say in general well maintained airplanes can fly for 50-plus years.

The aircraft would have been about halfway to the Antarctic base when it lost contact, officials said, adding that no emergency signals had been activated.

The plane had taken off in favorable conditions, though it was flying in an area notorious for rapidly changing weather, with freezing temperatures and strong winds. Seven hours after contact was cut off, the air force declared the plane a loss, though there was no sign of what happened to it.

Ed Coleman, a pilot and chair of the Safety Science Department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, said rapidly changing weather in the Antarctic makes it a difficult place for pilots.

Air masses converge there, driving storms with powerful wind gusts, while stirring the sea with swells 6 meters (20 feet) or bigger, he said. Flying becomes challenging, and making a smooth sea landing nearly impossible, he said.

“You can have a clear sky one minute, and in a short time later storms can be building up making it a challenge,” he said. “That causes bigger swells and rougher air.”

The inhospitable Antarctic is equally formidable to rescuers, who have to respond quickly to pull any survivors from the cold, rough waters, he said.

…

The House on Wednesday passed its annual defense policy measure, which combined a $738 billion Pentagon price tag with legislation to provide federal employees with 12 weeks of paid parental leave.

The sweeping 377-48 vote followed weeks of arduous House-Senate negotiations that finally yielded a traditionally bipartisan measure, stripped of many add-ons sought by Democrats controlling the House.

The result came over outnumbered protests by some of the chamber’s most liberal members, who said Democratic negotiators should have fought harder for House-passed liberal policies. They are also unhappy about the spiraling defense budget.

The compromise between the Democratic-controlled House and the GOP-held Senate broke free after Republicans agreed to accept a Democratic demand — endorsed by Trump in end-stage negotiations — for the landmark parental leave provision. Negotiators also endorsed Trump’s call for a new “space force” — a provision previously backed by the House on a bipartisan basis.

Trump has said he’ll sign the measure, which is expected to pass the Senate next week at the latest.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., absorbed a lot of criticism for abandoning Democratic provisions that ran into a wall of opposition from the White House and congressional Republicans.

Democrats drop wanted provisions

Democrats dropped a provision to block Trump from transferring money from Pentagon accounts to constructing a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. They also dropped protections for transgender troops, and tougher regulations on toxic chemicals that are found in firefighting foam used at military installations.

“It’s basically hard to negotiate when your side wants 100 things and the other side wants nothing,” Smith said in an interview. But he hailed the parental leave benefit, as well as a repeal of the so-called widow’s tax on military death benefits. That provision required 65,000 people whose spouses have been killed in action to forfeit part of their Pentagon death benefit when they also received benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I was able to get them to enthusiastically support the largest expansion of the social welfare state since the Affordable Care Act — the widow’s tax and paid parental leave,” Smith said. “That was an enormous accomplishment, OK? I got them to do things that they never wanted to do.”

Democrats also agreed to let go of House-passed provisions to restrict Trump from waging war against Iran unless Congress approves; ban deployment of new submarine-launched, low-yield nuclear weapons; and ban U.S. military assistance for strikes by Saudi-led forces in Yemen.

While Democrats retreated from their assault on Trump’s ability to transfer Pentagon money to his border wall, Republicans agreed to drop a Trump demand to budget $7.2 billion in defense funds for the wall. The wall battle has instead migrated to talks on a mammoth government-wide spending package.

59 years in a row

The annual defense policy bill has now passed for 59 years in a row, reflecting strong support among lawmakers for military personnel — who would receive a 3.1 percent pay raise, the largest in a decade — and the economic boost that military installations and defense contractors provide back home.

Trump crowed about the “U.S. Space Force” provision, which mostly reorganizes existing personnel into a new branch of the Air Force. The House had passed the idea in previous years under GOP control only to see it die in the Senate.

“This was our idea,” Smith said. “The idea that the White House got anything out of that is something I find deeply amusing.”

Debate featured a stream of lawmakers from both sides mostly congratulating each other and praising the military.

“We once again tacked to the middle and moved to garner bipartisan support,” said Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va.

The only sour note was struck by left-leaning California Rep. Ro Khanna: “When are we going to do our Article I duty and stop funding these endless wars and start funding our domestic priorities?”

…

Fears mounted Wednesday that a deadly shooting at a Jewish market in Jersey City was an anti-Semitic attack as authorities recounted how a man and woman deliberately pulled up to the place in a rental van with at least one rifle and got out firing.

A day after the gun battle and standoff that left six people dead — the two killers, a police officer and three people who had been inside the store — state and federal law enforcement officials warned they have not established the motive for the attack.

“The why and the ideology and the motivation — that’s what we’re investigating,” New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said, adding that authorities are also trying to determine if anyone else was involved.

But Mayor Steve Fulop said surveillance video of the attackers made it clear they targeted the kosher market, and he pronounced the bloodshed a hate crime against Jews, as did New York’s mayor and governor.

Also, investigators believe the two dead attackers — who were believed to be a couple — identified themselves in the past as Black Hebrew Israelites, a movement whose members have been known to rail against whites and Jews, according to a law enforcement official who was briefed on the matter but was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

In addition, authorities have found social media postings from at least one of the killers that were anti-police and anti-Jewish, the official said. The FBI on Wednesday searched the Harlem headquarters of the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, which is the formal name of the Black Hebrew group, according to the official.

The killers were identified as David N. Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 50 — both of them also prime suspects in the slaying of a livery driver found dead in car trunk in nearby Bayonne over the weekend, Grewal said. Anderson served about four months in prison in New Jersey on weapons charges and was paroled in 2011, authorities said.

Two of the victims at the store were identified by members of the Orthodox Jewish community as Mindel Ferencz, 31, who with her husband owned the grocery, and 24-year-old Moshe Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn who was shopping there. The Ferencz family had moved to Jersey City from Brooklyn. Authorities identified the third victim as Miguel Douglas, 49.

“The report from the Jersey City mayor saying it was a targeted attack makes us incredibly concerned in the Jewish community,” said Evan Bernstein, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil rights organization. “They want answers. They demand answers. If this was truly a targeted killing of Jews, then we need to know that right away, and there needs to be the pushing back on this at the highest levels possible.”

The bloodshed in the city of 270,000 people across the Hudson River from New York City began at a graveyard, where Detective Joseph Seals, a 40-year-old member of a unit devoted to taking illegal weapons off the street, was gunned down by the assailants, authorities said. They then drove the van about a mile to the kosher market.

Grewal said that within seconds of pulling up to the market, Anderson got out with a rifle and immediately began shooting, and Graham followed him into the store. He would not say whether Graham had a weapon.

A pipe bomb was found in the van, FBI agent Gregory Ehrie said.

Jersey City’s mayor said it was clear that the killers deliberately made their way toward the kosher market, passing many other possible targets along the way, and calmly and promptly opened fire.

“We shouldn’t parse words on whether this is a hate crime at this point. This was a hate crime against Jewish ppl + hate has no place,” he tweeted, adding: “Some will say don’t call it anti-semitism or a hate crime till a longer review but being Jewish myself + the grandson of holocaust survivors I know enough to call it what this is.”

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio likewise said the attack was a “premeditated, violent, anti-Semitic hate crime,” while New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called it a “deliberate attack on the Jewish community.” They announced tighter police protection of synagogues and other Jewish establishments in New York as a precaution.

The drawn-out battle with police filled the streets with the sound of high-powered rifle fire and turned the city into what looked like a war zone, with SWAT officers in full tactical gear swarming the neighborhood. The attackers were killed in the shootout with police.

A fourth bystander was shot at the store when the attackers burst in, but escaped, Grewal said. His name was not released.

Rabbi Moshe Shapiro said he spoke with the survivor at a hospital. “He said the guy next to him fell to the ground,” Shapiro said. “He suffered two gunshot wounds but managed to run out of the store and climb over fences.”

In the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, 11 people were killed in an October 2018 shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Last April, a gunman opened fire at a synagogue north of San Diego, killing a woman and wounding a rabbi and two others.

The kosher grocery is a central fixture in a growing community of Orthodox Jews who have been moving to Jersey City in recent years and settling in what was a mostly black section of Jersey City, causing some resentment.

Mordechai Rubin, a member of the local Jewish emergency medical services, said the small Jewish community has grown over the past three or four years, made up mostly of people from Brooklyn seeking a “nicer, quieter” and more affordable place to live. Next to the store is a synagogue with a school and day care center where 40 students were present at the time of the shooting, he said.

“It’s unfortunate what happened, but we don’t even want to think about what would have happened if they made their way up to the day care or to the synagogue,” he said.

Authorities also warned that several fake Go Fund me pages have popped up purporting to be raising funds for the family of the slain officer, a father of five.

…

A child prodigy from Belgium will enroll in a doctoral program in a U.S. university after his parents pulled him out of his Dutch college.

Laurent Simons, 9, will attend an unnamed U.S. college and study for a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, his parents told CNN Tuesday.

Simons was studying at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE). His parents wanted him to finish the three-year engineering program in 10 months, before his birthday on Dec. 26, so he could be the world’s first 9-year-old university graduate.

His parents rejected a TUE offer to let him graduate in mid-2020.

TUE said in a statement that it would not be feasible for Simons to complete the course before turning 10, while also developing “insight, creativity and critical analysis.”

It also warned against placing “excessive pressure on this 9-year-old student” who, it said, had “unprecedented talent.”

Alexander Simons, Laurent’s father, told CNN he and his wife withdrew their son from TUE because he had received an offer from an American school, and it would be impossible for him to split his time between the two schools.

“Sometimes, you have to make choices,” Alexander Simons told CNN. “If he lets it go, you never know if he will get that opportunity again.”

Had Laurent Simons graduated before his birthday, he would have unseated Michael Kearney, who graduated from the University of Alabama in 1984 at the age of 10.

Kearney became the world’s youngest college graduate, a mark recognized by the Guinness World Records.

…

Myanmar’s State Counsellor — the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi — appeared at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on Tuesday to defend her government against accusations of genocide against the Rohingya Muslim community. The leader of Myanmar’s civilian government, Aung San Suu Kyi was held under house arrest for fifteen years — but she is now defending the military that once imprisoned her. Henry Ridgwell reports.

…

In opting for a narrow rather than a broad set of charges, Democrats sought to blunt Republican criticism that the impeachment proceeding against Trump is a reckless attempt to undo a democratically elected president, according to some experts

As they conducted a two-month-long impeachment inquiry into the conduct of President Donald Trump, Democrats considered a range of charges against him, including articles stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and violations of the emoluments clause to the U.S. Constitution.

In the end, however, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democratic leaders settled on just two charges: abuse of office and obstruction of justice.

In opting for a narrow rather than a broad set of charges, Democrats sought to blunt Republican criticism that the impeachment proceeding against Trump is an illegitimate attempt to undo a democratically elected president, according to some experts.

Kim Wehle, a former associate independent counsel in the Whitewater impeachment investigation against former President Bill Clinton, said the Democrats’ decision is a smart play, if only to make it more difficult for Republicans to be totally dismissive of the historic action.

“If it had been a laundry list of articles of impeachment, the Republicans could say, The Democrats are out of control. This is a witch hunt, or this is overreaching.’ And they can hide behind that rhetoric to basically walk away from impeaching this president,” said Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore.

Articles of impeachment

Articles of impeachment are similar to criminal charges. The two articles of impeachment revealed on Tuesday are focused on Ukraine and are related to Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a political rival, and a discredited theory about Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign and Trump’s subsequent attempt to impede a congressional inquiry.

Though not a criminal offense, abuse of power is a long-running theme in U.S. presidential impeachments, according to Louis Michael Seidman, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University. Obstruction of Congress is less common; Richard Nixon faced a similar charge of contempt of Congress.

Article 1

The first article accuses Trump of using the power of his office to solicit Ukrainian interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.  It alleges that the president asked Ukraine to conduct investigations that would “benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States presidential election to his advantage.”

It says that Trump “sought to pressure” Ukraine to take these steps by conditioning nearly $400 million in military aid and a White House meeting between Trump and the president of Ukraine on the investigations.

Throughout the impeachment inquiry, Democrats sought to prove that Trump pushed for the investigations in exchange for military aid and an Oval Office meeting with Ukraine’s president.  But establishing an explicit quid pro quo proved more challenging than they’d anticipated. That may explain why the resolution plays down a quid pro quo in making its case.

Article 2  

The second article is centered on Trump’s effort to impede the congressional impeachment inquiry. After Democrats announced the investigation in late September, Trump ordered the White House and executive branch agencies not to cooperate with the inquiry.

“In the history of the Republic, no president has ever ordered the complete defiance of an impeachment inquiry or sought to obstruct and impede so comprehensively the ability of the House of Representatives to investigate high crimes and misdemeanors,” the resolution states.

Narrow set of charges

In recent weeks, House Democrats seemed divided over the scope of a possible Trump impeachment. Many advocated including a charge of obstruction of justice related to Trump’s alleged effort to interfere with the Mueller probe, a lengthy investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome. That investigation found no evidence of collusion, but cited nearly a dozen instances of possible obstruction.

Others wanted charges of bribery, extortion and campaign finance violations included in the articles of impeachment.

In the end, however, the Democrats opted for a straight-forward case they felt was easy to prove. The decision to drop the extraneous charges won praise from an unlikely critic: Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who was invited by Republicans to testify in the House Judiciary Committee last week.

“While my fellow witnesses made good-faith arguments for those articles, my testimony primarily focused on the legal and constitutional flaws in claiming those criminal acts,” Turley wrote on his personal blog.

Rush to judgment

The impeachment proceeding is set to barrel ahead. On Thursday, the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on the articles, followed by a vote by the full House next week. Should the House approve one or both articles of impeachment, Trump would become only the third U.S. president in history to be so charged. He then would face a trial in the Senate early next year.

The Democratic push has raised charges that they’re rushing to judgment. Turley told lawmakers last week that while Trump could be impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, the Democrats have not fully developed their case.

“The problem is that the House has not bothered to subpoena the key witnesses who would have such direct knowledge,” Turley testified.

But Democrats say they don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of subpoenas. Adam Schiff, House Intelligence Committee chairman, noted that it took a federal court eight months to rule in favor of a congressional subpoena for former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify.

Even if takes another eight months to get a second court order, Schiff said, Trump administration officials could still claim executive privilege over certain documents sought by Congress.

“The argument, Why don’t you just wait?’ amounts to this: Why don’t you just let him cheat in just one more election? Why not let him cheat one more time? Why not let him have foreign help just one more time,” Schiff said Tuesday.

Democrats also appear intent on getting impeachment out of the way ahead of the November 2020 election, in part to prevent Democratic senators running for president to be pinned down in Washington during a prolonged impeachment trial.

“But I think the danger is that it could be done so soon that it will be in the rearview mirror (for) most people, most voters, when they actually go to the polls in November,” Wehle said.

Republicans insist Trump has done nothing wrong. They say the president simply asked Ukraine to root out corruption, and that no evidence of a quid pro quo has emerged.

They also defend Trump’s right to bar members of his administration from cooperating with the impeachment inquiry on the grounds of executive privilege.

Ultimately, though, it matters little how strong the impeachment case is. Impeachment is a quasi-judicial and political process. And with Republicans controlling the Senate, it is highly unlikely that Trump will be convicted and removed from office.

…

Argentine bond prices rose on Monday in the first session since President-elect Alberto Fernandez named debt restructuring expert Martin Guzman as economy minister, the central figure in a cabinet that will start serving after Tuesday’s inauguration.

Over the counter bond prices popped an average 2.1% higher and country risk spreads tightened, showing the market took Fernandez’s cabinet picks in stride.

Guzman, 37, will be responsible for sparking growth, taming inflation and steering restructuring talks with creditors and the International Monetary Fund over about $100 billion in debt.

Creditors had feared that Peronist Fernandez might take a tough stance in upcoming restructuring talks. But Guzman, who sees the problem as one of liquidity rather than solvency, has advocated for a debt revamp based on a suspension of payments that would preserve eventual repayment of principal.

Such an approach would avoid a “haircut,” or outright cut in the return of creditors’ principal investment.

“There had been uncertainty about the debt restructuring proposal. Guzman does not want to implement a haircut on the principal. So this clears some of the fear that had been priced into bonds,” said Gabriel Zelpo, director of economic consultancy Seido.

Sovereign risk spreads tightened 123 basis points to 2,194 over safe-haven U.S. Treasuries on JP Morgan’s Emerging Markets Bond Index Plus, having blown out from the 480 basis points where the index stood when outgoing President Mauricio Macri, a proponent of free markets, took office in late 2015.

Inflation has risen under Macri, and the peso has lost 83.75% of its value while Latin America’s No. 3 economy has stalled. Consumer prices are up more than 50% so far this year after a 47.6% rise in 2018. The peso was stable on Monday at just under 60 to the dollar.

Guzman, an academic and protégé of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, is an expert in bond restructurings.

He opposed Macri’s austerity drive, which included public utility subsidy cuts that jacked up power and heating bills paid by Argentine families and businesses.

Those utility bill increases fueled the inflation that dogged Macri’s four years in power, killed his once-high popularity and undermined his re-election campaign.

Markets had been on edge since Fernandez thumped Macri in the August primary election. The lopsided victory signaled a shift away from Macri’s strict pro-business policy stance. The inauguration will take place around midday on Tuesday.

…

A Maryland law approved by state legislators to prevent foreign interference in local elections is unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment, a federal appeals court has ruled.

A three-judge panel of the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the law targets political expression and compels certain speech, and affirmed a lower court’s ruling to strike down the law.

Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote that the changing nature of elections and novel technological challenges have made it harder for states to manage elections. But, he wrote, the legislation approved by Maryland’s General Assembly in 2018 went too far.

“Despite its admirable goals, the Act reveals a host of First Amendment infirmities: a legislative scheme with layer upon layer of expressive burdens, ultimately bereft of any coherent connection to an offsetting state interest of sufficient import,” Wilkinson wrote in the ruling released Friday.

The law’s sweeping scope sparked a First Amendment outcry from more than a half dozen newspapers, including The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun.

Newspapers’ arguments

The newspapers and the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association argued in a lawsuit the the statute violates the First Amendment because it requires them to collect and self-publish information about the sponsors of online political ads. It also requires them to keep records of the ads for inspection by the state Board of Elections.

“In the end, each banner feature of the Act — the fact that it is content-based, targets political expression, and compels certain speech — poses a real risk of either chilling speech or manipulating the marketplace of ideas,” Wilkinson wrote.

In January, U.S. District Judge Paul Grimm ruled that parts of the law appeared to encroach on the First Amendment and granted a preliminary injunction to prevent the state from enforcing those provisions.

One provision required online platforms to create a database identifying the purchasers of online political ads and how much they spend. The law, written to catch ads in smaller state and local elections, applied to digital platforms with 100,000 or more monthly visitors.

That made the threshold in the Maryland law very broad when compared to a similar law in New York, which applies to digital platforms with at last 70 million monthly visitors.

The newspapers contended the law amounted to the government telling the press what to publish, which violates the First Amendment. They also argued the law wouldn’t prevent the kind of foreign interference seen during the 2016 election, when free postings on social media — not paid political ads on newspaper websites — were the primary means used to try to sow discord in the U.S. electorate.

More than a dozen news organizations and press advocacy groups, including The Associated Press, filed legal briefs supporting the newspapers’ challenge.

State arguments

The state argued that the law does not infringe on the newspapers’ right to exercise their editorial control and judgment.

“These modest burdens do not outweigh the State’s important interests in electoral transparency, deterring corruption, enforcing the substantive requirements of the campaign finance laws, and protecting against foreign meddling in the State’s elections,” Assistant Attorney General Andrea Trento wrote in a legal brief.

Raquel Coombs, a spokeswoman for Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, wrote in an email Monday that the attorney general’s office was reviewing the decision.
 

…

Deaths among journalists killed in the line of duty are lower this year, but a journalism advocacy group said Monday that one reason appears to be that media workers are refraining from going to the most dangerous areas.

The International Federation of Journalists said that 49 journalists have been killed so far this year, down from 95 deaths last year. The group said that even if journalists are showing more caution, it also means the public is less informed about some of the most deadly conflicts and human rights abuses. Another reason for the lower number of deaths is decreased fighting in Iraq and Syria.

“Although we welcome the fewer losses of lives that we have recorded, we mourn the fact that these conflicts are no longer properly covered by professionals,” the IFJ’s head of human rights and safety Ernest Sagaga told The Associated Press.

Mexico is the most dangerous place for a journalist to work, with 10 on-the-job slayings that account for more than half of Latin America’s 18 killings this year. The Asia Pacific region had 12; and Africa, nine. The figures may still slightly rise in the last weeks of the year, Sagaga said. It will likely remain the lowest year since 2000 when 37 media staff were killed.

Sagaga said emphasized that the better numbers was not the result of steps being taken by governments to protect journalists. In fact, the increased lawlessness and lack of protection for journalists has resulted in some shying away from the most dangerous assignments.

“Due to the extreme violence, many journalists are now reluctant to go to these conflict areas,” said Sagaga. “So that would explain the drastic reduction that we have seen during 2019.”

The IFJ released the list a few weeks ago to mark Human Rights Day.  The IFJ represents 600,000 media professionals from 187 trade unions and associations in more than 140 countries.

…

A deadly virus called Nipah carried by bats has already caused human outbreaks across South and South East Asia and has “serious epidemic potential,” global health and infectious disease specialists said on Monday.

The virus, identified in 1999 in Malaysia and Singapore, has sparked outbreaks with mortality rates of between 40% and 90% and spread thousands of kilometers to Bangladesh and India – yet there are no drugs or vaccines against it, they said.

“Twenty years have passed since its discovery, but the world is still not adequately equipped to tackle the global health threat posed by Nipah virus,” said Richard Hatchett, chief executive of the CEPI Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is co-leading a Nipah conference this week in Singapore.

CEPI, a partnership between disease experts, and public, private, philanthropic, and civil organizations, was set up in 2017 to try to speed up the development of vaccines against newly emerging and unknown infectious diseases.

Among its first disease targets is Nipah, a virus carried primarily by certain types of fruit bats and pigs, which can also be transmitted directly from person to person as well as through contaminated food.

Within two years of being first discovered, Nipah had spread to Bangladesh, where it has caused several outbreaks since 2001.   A 2018 Nipah outbreak in Kerala, India, killed 17 people.

“Outbreaks of Nipah virus have so far been confined to South and Southeast Asia, but the virus has serious epidemic potential, because Pteropus fruit bats that carry the virus are found throughout the tropics and sub-tropics, which are home to more than two billion people,” Hatchett said.

He said since Nipah can also pass from person to person, it could, in theory, also spread into densely populated areas too.   The two-day Nipah conference, the first to focus on this deadly virus, is being co-hosted by CEPI and the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore and starts on Monday.

“There are currently no specific drugs or vaccines for Nipah virus infection, even though the World Health Organization has identified (it) as a priority disease,” said Wang Linfa, a Duke NUS professor and co-chair the conference. He hoped the meeting would stimulate experts to find ways of finding Nipah.
 

…

Minutes before a recent show, “VOD Roundtable” host Lim Thida readied notes and warmed up the day’s guests. Control room staffers prepped to go live with all the trappings of the kind of on-air radio broadcast that, until a few years ago, was typical for the longtime Voice of Democracy program.

But this was 2019, and instead of radio, “VOD Roundtable” was being reborn online. Producer Srey Sopheak ran a final check with the engineers, then gave Lim a go-ahead via walkie-talkie.

“Hi, this is me, Thida, welcoming all TV viewers who are watching this live ‘VOD Roundtable’ show, which is broadcast via the Facebook page of vodkhmer.news. Today, we will look at measures to eliminate corruption in Cambodia’s judicial system.”

Over the next hour, the panelists included a top government spokesperson, a prominent human rights activist, and a member of an advisory body representing a consortium minority parties – a mix underscoring the balance and independence that have been VOD’s hallmark.

A glimmer of hope in an otherwise bruising environment for independent media in Cambodia, VOD is one of multiple outlets whose operations were threatened in the run-up to the 2018 elections, as the incumbent government of President Hun Sen sought to smother dissent.

Some news outlets were hit with exorbitant tax bills, while others, including five VOD radio affiliates, saw their broadcast licenses revoked, costing them millions of listeners.

This, said Daniel Bastard, Asia-Pacific chief for Reporters Without Borders, was part of a broader campaign that has “led to the quasi-total destruction of independent media” in Cambodia.

Among the casualties: closure of the venerable Cambodia Daily and dozens of radio stations; silencing of foreign media outlets, including Radio Free Asia (a sister broadcaster to Voice of America); and sale of the Phnom Penh Post to a Malaysian investor whose public relations firm worked for Hun Sen.

“Media like Cambodia Daily, Radio Free Asia or VOD helped Cambodians to access non-government-controlled information,” Bastard said. “Most Cambodian citizens are deprived of [access] now, and have to cope with official propaganda.”

‘People’s voice’

VOD aims to change that. Launched in 2003 by the Cambodian Center for Independent Media (CCIM), a Phnom Penh non-governmental organization, VOD aimed to air “educational, informative and unbiased public service radio in Cambodia.”

Human rights and democracy-themed programming became a staple as VOD worked to live up to the “People’s Radio” logo on its control room walls. The line-up includes “VOD Roundtable,” a call-in show where listeners engage with guest panelists on a range of news-related topics.

Prior to Hun Sen’s 2017 crackdown, VOD boasted an extensive network of provincial radio stations across several provinces and a stable of pioneering citizen journalists. Audience reach was deep – an estimated 7 million of Cambodia’s 9 million registered voters.

In part, VOD may have survived the crackdown because its parent entity, CCIM, is registered with the Cambodian government and is supported by a smorgasbord of international foundations and organizations. Among its founders are the U.S.-based Open Society Foundations, Bread for the World, Sweden’s Diakonia, and Denmark’s DanChurchAid.

In suspending five FM radio frequencies across rural provinces, the government stripped VOD of its audience without shuttering VOD itself. Left with a staff of radio producers but no airwaves, VOD was forced to rethink its strategy, CCIM Media Director Nop Vy said.

“We had to immediately organize a series of consecutive trainings in early 2018, and from that time on we quickly evolved into digital,” said Nop, adding that VOD focused on video broadcast production while repurposing traditional radio shows for online dissemination.

For the flagship “VOA Roundtable,” the decision was to relaunch as a live-video broadcast on Facebook and YouTube in 2018.

Fraught topics

Operating out of a studio tucked away in Phnom Penh’s trendy Boeung Keng Kang neighborhood, the show continues to tackle topics considered politically taboo.

Lim — one of a trio of hosts for the show — looked tired but pleased after wrapping up a recent one-hour panel discussion on judicial corruption, a fraught topic in a country where even high-level officials tasked with rooting out malfeasance in the courts are suspected of complicity.

“We are proud when we’re able to broadcast news and people’s concerns that officials higher up have to find a solution for,” said Lim, savoring a small journalistic triumph of sorts.

Only moments earlier, one of Lim’s guest panelists, Justice Ministry spokesperson Chin Malin, took the unusual step of acknowledging that Hun Sen’s government has a less-than-perfect record when it comes to disciplining its own officials.

“We have taken measures and solved many cases,” Chin said during the broadcast, explaining that nearly 20 judges and prosecutors alone received disciplinary action in 2018. “But we acknowledge that problems remain.”

It was then that another of the show’s panelists, Pich Sros, called Chin out. Sros is the head of a minority party and member of the Supreme Consultative Council — a government-sanctioned advisory body consisting of minority parties that contested but failed to win any seats in the 2018 elections. Sros said the government’s disciplinary measures were insufficiently transparent.

Lim then took a few callers and concluded the audience participation in the show by reciting comments from a Facebook viewer.

“Corruption in the legal system is laughable,” she said, quoting the viewer. “Even the legal system that is responsible for enforcing the [anti-]corruption law [is itself corrupt], so we can only imagine how deeply corrupt other public administrative bodies are.”

Common solutions

So far, Lim’s roundtable discussion programs haven’t prompted run-ins with government officials, something she attributes to the show’s consistently balanced curation of views.

Even Chin, who appeared to discuss judicial corruption alongside Yi Soksan, a senior investigator with the human rights group Adhoc credited “VOD Roundtable” with helping to get his government message out.

“We had a good discussion,” Chin told VOA. “Like our guest [today] from civil society, we all work for the same social development goals, but the ways we work are different and our challenges are different. So it is good to sit down for a discussion, exchange concerns, and come to a common solution.”

If “VOD Roundtable” represents a flicker of hope in Cambodia’s otherwise darkened media landscape, it has yet to prove that its online format can regain the millions of radio listeners lost in the crackdown.

“As radio, we had a lot of fans and we could receive up to five or six callers during the one hour [show],” Lim said. “But after our transition, there are fewer callers.”

Facebook recently surpassed television and radio as a primary news source for many Cambodians, but digital media remains a new beast. Advertising and hidden algorithms decide what gets visibility as controversies about censorship and disinformation swirl.

Bastard, of Reporters Without Borders, is a skeptic about the potential for digital media to grow.

“Things could have been much worse without the internet, of course, but radios were a great way to inform communities in remote areas and to reach people who are not literate enough to read written articles,” he told VOA.

“Online information cannot replace this,” he said, “especially given the biases indicated by the platforms themselves.”

Government officials routinely deny that there are any efforts to suppress media. Phos Sovann, director-general of the Ministry of Information’s department of information and broadcasting, told VOA that radio license revocations during the 2017 crackdown were justifiable “legal enforcement measures and nothing else.”

Nop Vy, the media director of VOD’s parent, said he’s hopeful that ongoing digital innovation, including plans for an English website, can generate an audience that compensates for the millions of listeners lost in the crackdown.

And if “VOD Roundtable” continues to foster public debate by involving citizens and the government alike, he said, it can survive by having an impact.

“We will have to take it step by step,” he said.

This story originated in VOA’s Khmer Service.

…

The Justice Department’s internal watchdog will release a highly anticipated report Monday that is expected to reject President Donald Trump’s claims that the Russia investigation was illegitimate and tainted by political bias from FBI leaders. But it is also expected to document errors during the investigation that may animate Trump supporters.

The report, as described by people familiar with its findings, is expected to conclude there was an adequate basis for opening one of the most politically sensitive investigations in FBI history and one that Trump has denounced as a witch hunt. It began in secret during Trump’s 2016 presidential run and was ultimately taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller.

The report comes as Trump faces an impeachment inquiry in Congress centered on his efforts to press Ukraine to investigate a political rival, Democrat Joe Biden — a probe the president also claims is politically biased.

Still, the release of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s review is unlikely to quell the partisan battles that have surrounded the Russia investigation for years. It’s also not the last word: A separate internal investigation continues, overseen by Trump’s attorney general, William Barr and led by a U.S. attorney, John Durham. That investigation is criminal in nature, and Republicans may look to it to uncover wrongdoing that the inspector general wasn’t examining.

Trump tweeted Sunday: “I.G. report out tomorrow. That will be the big story!”

He previously has said that he was awaiting Horowitz’s report but that Durham’s report may be even more important.

Horowitz’s report is expected to identify errors and misjudgments by some law enforcement officials, including by an FBI lawyer suspected of altering a document related to the surveillance of a former Trump campaign aide. Those findings probably will fuel arguments by Trump and his supporters that the investigation was flawed from the start.

But the report will not endorse some of the president’s theories on the investigation, including that it was a baseless “witch hunt” or that he was targeted by an Obama administration Justice Department desperate to see Republican Trump lose to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

It also is not expected to undo Mueller’s findings or call into question his conclusion that Russia interfered in that election in order to benefit the Trump campaign and that Russians had repeated contacts with Trump associates.

Some of the findings were described to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity by people who were not authorized to discuss a draft of the report before its release. The AP has not viewed a copy of the document.

It is unclear how Barr, a strong defender of Trump, will respond to Horowitz’s findings. He has told Congress that he believed “spying”  on the Trump campaign did occur and has raised public questions about whether the counterintelligence investigation was done correctly.

The FBI opened its investigation in July 2016 after receiving information from an Australian diplomat that a Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, had been told before it was publicly known that Russia had dirt on the Clinton campaign in the form of thousands of stolen emails.

By that point, the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, an act that a private security firm — and ultimately U.S. intelligence agencies — attributed to Russia. Prosecutors allege that Papadopoulos learned about the stolen emails from a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud. Papadopoulous pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about that interaction.

The investigation was taken over in May 2017 by Mueller, who charged six Trump associates with various crimes as well as 25 Russians accused of interfering in the election either through hacking or a social media disinformation campaign. Mueller did not find sufficient evidence to charge a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

He examined multiple episodes in which Trump sought to seize control of the investigation, including by firing James Comey as FBI director, but declined to decide on whether Trump had illegally obstructed justice.

The inspector general’s investigation began in early 2018. It focuses in part on the FBI’s surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. The FBI applied in the fall of 2016 for a warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Page’s communications, with officials expressing concern that he may have been targeted for recruitment by the Russian government.

Page was never charged and has denied any wrongdoing.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is scheduled to hear testimony from Horowitz on Wednesday, said he expected the report would be “damning” about the process of obtaining the warrant.

“I’m looking for evidence of whether or not they manipulated the facts to get the warrant,” Graham, a Republican, said on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

The warrant was renewed several times, including during the Trump administration. Republicans have attacked the procedures because the application relied in part on information gathered by an ex-British intelligence operative, Christopher Steele, whose opposition research into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia was funded by Democrats and the Clinton campaign.

In pursuing the warrant, the Justice Department referred to Steele as “reliable” from previous dealings with him. Though officials told the court that they suspected the research was aimed at discrediting the Trump campaign, they did not reveal that the work had been paid for by Democrats, according to documents released last year.

Steele’s research was compiled into a dossier that was provided to the FBI after it had already opened its investigation.

The report also examined the interactions that senior Justice Department lawyer Bruce Ohr had with Steele, whom he had met years earlier through a shared professional interest in countering Russian organized crime. Ohr passed along to the FBI information that he had received from Steele but did not alert his Justice Department bosses to those conversations.

Ohr has since been a regular target of Trump’s ire, in part because his wife worked as a contractor for Fusion GPS, the political research firm that hired Steele for the investigation.

This is the latest in a series of reports that Horowitz, a former federal prosecutor and an Obama appointee to the watchdog role, has released on FBI actions in politically charged investigations.

Last year, he criticized Comey for a news conference announcing the conclusion of the Clinton email investigation, and for then alerting Congress months later that the probe had been effectively reopened. In that report, too, Horowitz did not find that Comey’s actions had been guided by partisan bias.
 

…

U.S. Representative Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, has been a leading voice defending President Donald Trump throughout the congressional Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. 
 
But the 300-page impeachment report released Tuesday by the Democratic majority on the Intelligence Committee revealed that the California congressman has connections to the Trump-Ukraine scandal that have raised questions about his own official conduct. 
 
House Democrats obtained phone records of Nunes’ calls with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who Democratic investigators say led a shadow effort to subvert U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine in a manner that would benefit the president’s own political interests in the 2020 election campaign. 
 
Logs show five calls between Giuliani and Nunes on April 10, 2019. Two of those were missed calls and the longest was almost 3 minutes in duration. The phone calls occurred at a time when Giuliani has been accused of waging a smear campaign to oust U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as part of an effort to clear the way for pressuring the Ukrainian government to announce investigations of one of Trump’s leading political rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter.  

The previously undisclosed phone records provided to the committee by AT&T and Verizon also showed Nunes spoke at least four times with Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian American associate of Giuliani who has been indicted on charges of campaign finance violations. Parnas allegedly was part of Giuliani’s efforts to dig up damaging information on the Bidens. Parnas has pleaded not guilty to the campaign finance charges. 
 
The phone calls raised suspicions among House Democrats that Nunes was working behind the scenes to help the president. 
 
Nunes: Calls not suspicious 
 
Nunes told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday that the timing of his calls with Giuliani, whom he has known for some time, should not be considered suspicious and were more focused on former special counsel Robert Mueller and his report on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.  

Asked about his contact with Parnas, Nunes said he found it unlikely he would be taking calls from random people. 
 
“l haven’t gone through all my phone records,” Nunes told Fox News. “I don’t really recall that name, I remember that name now because he’s been indicted.” 

According to the phone records in the impeachment report, Nunes spoke with Parnas at least four times on April 12, 2019, including one 8-minute phone call. 
 
Parnas has alleged through his attorney that Nunes used taxpayer funds for official travel to Vienna in 2018 to meet with former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, according to CNN reports. Parnas’ lawyer has also said his client is willing to testify that he met with a Nunes aide and Giuliani to discuss Biden. 
 
Nunes has called those allegations “fake.” He has filed a lawsuit against CNN for its reporting on his conversations with Parnas and has threatened internet publication The Daily Beast with similar litigation. 
 
“It’s not unusual for members of Congress to have contact with persons in foreign countries,” said Todd Belt, professor and political management program director at The George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management. 
 
Members of Congress routinely coordinate official trips through the State Department to learn more about areas receiving aid from the United States. “But this sort of freelance thing is pretty unusual,” Belt said. 
 
Nunes-Trump relationship 
 
Nunes is no stranger to defending his close relationship with the Trump White House. 
 
In 2017, during his time as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he investigated Trump’s tweeted claims that the Obama administration had him “wiretapped” in Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign. 
 
Reporters discovered Nunes was coordinating with White House officials to release classified information supporting that allegation. 
 
Nunes later told reporters the incidental collection of intelligence was legal, part of routine surveillance of Trump campaign officials in discussion with foreign agents after the election. 

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US House Intelligence Panel Weighs Future of Wiretap Probe

The House of Representatives Intelligence Committee met behind closed doors Thursday, a day after its investigation into wiretapping allegations involving President Donald Trump and his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, was thrown into disarray.Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, chairman of the panel, defended his disclosure Wednesday that legal, wiretapped conversations of foreign agents talking with Trump officials after the November election, but before he took office in late January led…

Nunes, however, was forced to recuse himself from the House Intelligence Committee investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and temporarily relinquish his chairmanship because of his apparent conflict of interest. A House Ethics Committee investigation subsequently cleared him. 
 
Belt said Nunes has a “really cozy relationship with the president.” 
 
Relevance to impeachment inquiry 
 
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff told reporters Tuesday that he would reserve comment on Nunes but said it was “deeply concerning” a member of Congress could be complicit in behind-the-scenes efforts to assist the president at the public’s expense. 
 
“There’s a lot more to learn about that, and I don’t want to state that that’s an unequivocal fact,” Schiff said. “Our focus is on the president’s conduct first and foremost. It may be the role of others to evaluate the conduct of members of Congress.” 
 
Belt noted Democrats would have to prioritize their investigations, focusing on the impeachment investigation into Trump rather than the allegations against Nunes. 
 
“The fact that they’re trying to move ahead as fast as possible really doesn’t give them much, you know, wiggle room to sort of revisit this,” he said. 
 
During the impeachment inquiry hearings, Nunes has consistently pushed the unfounded theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election, arguing that the interference gave Trump a good reason to suspect the country’s motives and temporarily withhold military aid. 

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Top US Diplomat Open to Investigation of Ukraine for Election Meddling

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says US should ‘chase down’ any information related to possible election interference

That theory has been rejected by U.S. intelligence agencies, who conclusively found Russia meddled in the 2016 election. 
 
Democratic Representative Jackie Speier, another member of the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted: “If Devin Nunes was using taxpayer money to do ‘political errands’ in Vienna for his puppeteer, Donald Trump, an ethics investigation should be initiated and he should be required to reimburse the taxpayers.” 
 
What’s next for Nunes? 
 
The House Committee on Ethics considers cases of misconduct by members of Congress and could likely end up weighing in on this matter. Unlike other House committees, membership is evenly divided among Democrats and Republicans. This ensures that each party has veto power over disciplinary action of a member of Congress. 
 
The committee cleared Nunes of wrongdoing in the 2017 wiretapping controversy. 
 
Members of Congress facing ethics investigations often resign to save political face. The committee can refer the matter to a full House floor vote, censuring or expelling the member of Congress, although such action is extremely rare. 

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Israeli aircraft bombed several militants’ sites in Gaza early Sunday, hours after three rockets were fired from the Palestinian enclave toward southern Israel. 
 
The military said in a statement the airstrikes targeted military camps and a naval base for Hamas, the Islamic militant group controlling Gaza. There were no immediate reports of casualties. 
 
On Saturday evening, Israel announced that its air defenses, known as “Iron Dome,” had intercepted two of three missiles coming from Gaza. Later, it said all three rockets had been shot down. 
 
No Palestinian group claimed responsibility for the rocket fire. The Israeli army said Hamas was responsible for any attack transpiring in Gaza. 
 
Cross-border violence between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza has ebbed and flowed in recent years. Fighting last month was the most violent in months. 
 
Leaders from Hamas and the smaller but more radical Islamic Jihad are in Cairo, talking with Egyptian officials about cementing a cease-fire that would see some economic incentives and easing of restrictions on Gaza. 
 
Hamas has fought three wars with Israel since seizing Gaza in 2007 and dozens of shorter skirmishes.

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U.S. Democratic lawmakers met privately Saturday to work on the investigation into President Donald Trump, inching closer to an impeachment vote, possibly before the Christmas holiday recess. 
 
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee were working through the weekend to review evidence against the Republican president and to draft charges that they could recommend for a full House vote as early as Thursday. 
 
The legislators disclosed a 55-page report Saturday that outlined what they viewed as the constitutional grounds on which the charges, known as articles of impeachment, could be based. 
 
On Friday, the White House said it would not cooperate with the remaining House impeachment proceedings against Trump.  

“As you know, your impeachment inquiry is completely baseless and has violated basic principles of due process and fundamental fairness,” read a letter from Pat Cipollone, counsel to the president, addressed to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler. 
 
The response was issued less than an hour before a Friday afternoon deadline for lawyers of the president to state whether they would represent him in the next round of the committee’s impeachment proceedings. 
 
“You should end this inquiry now and not waste even more time with additional hearings,” Cipollone said in the letter. 
 
The counsel reiterated the president’s tweeted words that “if you are going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so that we can have a fair trial in the Senate and so that our Country can get back to business.” 

‘He cannot claim’ unfairness
 
Later Friday, Nadler expressed disappointment Trump had decided not to participate.   
 
“We gave President Trump a fair opportunity to question witnesses and present his own to address the overwhelming evidence before us. After listening to him complain about the impeachment process, we had hoped that he might accept our invitation,” the committee chairman said in a statement. “If the President has no good response to the allegations, then he would not want to appear before the Committee. Having declined this opportunity, he cannot claim that the process is unfair.” 
 
Democrats contend the Republican president defied the norms of conduct for the office and violated his sworn obligation to uphold the U.S. Constitution by asking Ukraine to launch an investigation of Joe Biden, the former vice president running for the Democratic Party nomination to challenge Trump next year, and his son Hunter. 

Trump contends his phone conversations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy have been perfect and he did nothing wrong. Republicans have defended the president, saying Trump was right to press Ukraine to scrutinize the work that Biden’s son did for a Ukrainian natural gas company. 
 
Republicans are also pushing a debunked theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election that Trump won. The U.S. intelligence community concluded it was Ukraine’s neighbor, Russia, that was doing the meddling. 
 
Trump’s request to Kyiv came at a time when his administration was withholding $391 million in military assistance approved for Ukraine to fight pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country. The aid was released in September without Ukraine opening investigations of the Bidens. 
 
The request for such an investigation in exchange for military assistance is expected to be among the articles of impeachment against Trump. 

Congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson contributed to this report. 

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The Supreme Court on Friday blocked the Trump administration from restarting federal executions next week after a 16-year break. 

The justices denied the administration’s plea to undo a lower-court ruling in favor of inmates who have been given execution dates. The first of those had been scheduled for December 9, with a second set for December 13. Two more inmates had been given execution dates in January. 

Attorney General William Barr announced during the summer that federal executions would resume using a single drug, pentobarbital, to put inmates to death. 

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington temporarily halted the executions after some of the chosen inmates challenged the new execution procedures in court. Chutkan ruled that the procedure approved by Barr most likely violates the Federal Death Penalty Act. 

The federal appeals court in Washington had earlier denied the administration’s emergency plea to put Chutkan’s ruling on hold and allow the executions to proceed. 

Longer delay

Federal executions are likely to remain on hold at least for several months, while the appeals court in Washington undertakes a full review of Chutkan’s ruling. 

The Supreme Court justices directed the appeals court to act “with appropriate dispatch.” 

Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a short separate opinion that he believes the government ultimately will win the case and would have set a 60-day deadline for appeals court action. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh joined Alito’s opinion. 

Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said the legal fight would continue. “While we are disappointed with the ruling, we will argue the case on its merits in the D.C. Circuit and, if necessary, the Supreme Court,“ Kupec said in a statement. 

Four inmates won temporary reprieves from the court rulings. Danny Lee was the first inmate scheduled for execution, at 8 o’clock Monday morning. Lee was convicted of killing a family of three, including an 8-year-old. 

Inmate with dementia

The government had planned next Friday to execute Wesley Ira Purkey, who raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl and killed an 80-year-old woman. His lawyers say Purkey is suffering from dementia and he has a separate lawsuit pending in federal court in Washington. 

Then in January, executions had been scheduled for Alfred Bourgeois, who tortured, molested and then beat his 2½-year-old daughter to death, and Dustin Lee Honken, who killed five people, including two children. 

A fifth inmate, Lezmond Mitchell, has had his execution blocked by the federal appeals court in San Francisco over questions of bias against Native Americans. Mitchell beheaded a 63-year-old woman and her 9-year-old granddaughter. 

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Elon Musk did not defame a British cave explorer when he called him “pedo guy” in an angry tweet, a Los Angeles jury found Friday.

Vernon Unsworth, who participated in the rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach trapped for weeks in a Thailand cave last year, had angered the Tesla CEO by belittling his effort to help with the rescue as a “PR stunt.”

Musk said Unsworth’s comments in an interview with CNN were an unprovoked attack on his sincere and voluntary efforts to help in the rescue. Musk had engineers at his companies, including Space X and The Boring Co., develop a mini-submarine to transport the boys. Despite working around the clock to build the sub, Musk arrived in Thailand late in the rescue effort and the craft was never used.

Musk, who said his stock in Tesla and SpaceX is worth about $20 billion, insisted in his testimony that the phrase he tweeted off-the-cuff “was obviously a flippant insult, and no one interpreted it to mean pedophile.”

A jury of five women and three men deliberated for less than an hour in the afternoon in U.S. District Court.

Jury foreman Joshua Jones said the panel decided that Unsworth’s lawyers spent too much time trying to appeal to their emotions and not concentrating on the evidence.

“The failure probably happened because they didn’t focus on the tweets,” Jones said after the verdict was announced. “I think they tried to get our emotions involved in it. In a court of law you have to prove your case, which they did not prove.”

Unsworth’s attorney suggested to a federal jury Friday that it award $190 million in damages to the cave explorer.

Attorney Lin Wood said the suggested award would include $150 million as a “hard slap on the wrist” to punish Tesla CEO for what he said was akin to dropping an atomic weapon on his client.

“What in the world would it take to discourage Elon Musk from ever planting a nuclear bomb in the life of another person?” Wood said.

In his closing argument, Wood called Musk a “billionaire bully” who lied when he claimed “pedo guy” only means “creepy old man” and said his apologies to Unsworth were insincere.

“When Elon Musk tweets something it goes around the world,” Wood said. “It can never be deleted.”

Unsworth testified that he had to sue Musk for defamation because if he didn’t, the allegation would seem true.

Musk’s lawyer told the jury the tweet did not rise to the level of defamation. Attorney Alex Spiro said Unsworth also failed to show actual damages.

Spiro mocked Unsworth’s claims that he had been shamed and humiliated and that the tweet effectively sentenced him to a life sentence without parole.

Spiro noted that Unsworth had been honored by the queen of England and the king of Thailand, had his photo taken next to British Prime Minister Theresa May and been asked to speak at schools and contribute to a children’s book, which showed that no one took Musk’s insult seriously.

“People accused of pedophilia don’t get celebrated by world leaders,” Spiro said. “Kings and queens and prime ministers don’t stand next to pedophiles.”

…

The United States imposed sanctions Friday on three Iranian-backed Iraqi militia leaders over their alleged role in violently suppressing protests that have shaken Iraq.

The militia leaders are accused of ordering their forces to fire on civilians protesting government corruption and high unemployment. Since the protests began in October, around 400 protesters have been reported killed by security forces.

“Peaceful public dissent and protest are fundamental elements of all democracies,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement that announced the sanctions Friday.

In a subsequent statement, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: “The Iraqi people want their country back. … They are calling for genuine reform and accountability and for trustworthy leaders who will put Iraq’s national interests first. Those demands deserve to be addressed without resort to violence or suppression.”

The sanctions target two brothers, Qais al-Khazali and Laith al-Khazali, from the Asaib Ahl al-Haq Iran-backed militia, as well as Husayn Falih Aziz al-Lami, who was accused of running a militia on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Trump administration will consider imposing further sanctions if violence against Iraqi protesters does not stop, according to David Schenker, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs.

“We are not done. This is an ongoing process,” Schenker told reporters Friday.

The punitive measures also targeted an Iraqi businessman, Khamis al-Khanjar, for alleged bribery and corruption.

The sanctions allow the U.S. government to freeze any assets the men might have in the United States and bar Americans from doing business with them.

The protests in Iraq have led to the resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdel-Mahdi, an ally of Iran. Along with economic concerns, the protesters are also demonstrating against what they perceive as increasing Iranian influence in Iraqi affairs.

…

Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, on Thursday set a share price for its initial public stock offering — expected to be the biggest ever — that puts the value of the company at $1.7 trillion, more than Apple or Microsoft. 
 
The company said it would sell its shares at 32 riyals ($8.53) each, putting the overall value of the stake being sold at $25.6 billion. 
 
Aramco is floating a 1.5% stake in the company, or 3 billion shares. Trading is expected to happen on the Saudi Tadawul stock exchange as early as December 11. 
 
The company is selling 0.5% to individuals who are Saudi citizens and residents  and 1% to institutional investors, which can be sovereign wealth funds, asset managers or government-run pension programs. 
 
The pricing of the shares was at the top of the range Aramco had sought. The company had priced its shares ranging from 30 to 32 riyals each, or $8 to $8.53 a share. 
 
In the announcement Thursday, Aramco said the offering drew heavy demand.

Most orders from Saudis

The company’s financial advisers had said earlier that most orders came from Saudi funds or companies, with foreign investors, including from neighboring Persian Gulf Arab states, accounting for 10.5% of the bids. It was not immediately known what the final figures released Thursday represented and how much of that was generated by foreign investment. 
 
The highly anticipated sale of a sliver of the company had generated global buzz since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced plans for it more than two years ago. That’s in part because it would clock in as the world’s biggest IPO, surpassing record holder Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the Chinese conglomerate and e-commerce company, which raised about $25 billion in 2014. 
 
The kingdom’s plan to sell part of the company is part of a wider economic overhaul aimed at raising new streams of revenue for the oil-dependent country. It came as oil prices have struggled to reach the $75-$80-per-barrel range that analysts say is needed to balance Saudi Arabia’s budget. Brent crude is trading at just over $63 a barrel. 
 
Prince Mohammed has said listing Aramco is one way for the kingdom to raise capital for the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which would then use that money to develop new cities and lucrative projects across Saudi Arabia. 
 
Despite the mammoth figures involved in the IPO, they are not quite what the prince had envisioned based on his remarks over the past two years. He’d previously talked about a valuation for Aramco of $2 trillion and a flotation of 5% of the company involving a listing on a foreign stock exchange. There are no immediate plans for an international listing. 

Another sale?
 
Aramco said Thursday that it would retain the option of an even bigger offering of a 3.45 billion-share sale, representing $29.4 billion. 
 
Despite Aramco’s profitability, the state’s control of the company carries risks for investors. Two key Aramco processing sites were targeted by drones and missiles in September, an attack that was claimed by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in neighboring Yemen but that the U.S. blamed on Iran. Iran denies the allegation. 
 
The Saudi government also stipulates oil production levels, which directly affects Aramco’s output. 
 
On Thursday, the countries that make up the OPEC oil-producing cartel, led by Saudi Arabia, were meeting in Vienna to decide whether to cut production and push up prices of fuel and energy around the world. 

…

A piece of paper no bigger than a business card could enrich struggling coffee farmers and their soil, a growing challenge as temperatures rise and prices fluctuate. 
 
Enveritas, a U.S. nonprofit, signed an agreement with International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) on Thursday to pilot the AgroPad, which analyzes soil samples remotely and quickly. 
 
Powered by artificial intelligence, the AgroPad can perform a chemical analysis in 10 seconds, reading nitrate or chloride levels from a drop of water or small soil sample, said IBM. 
 
Enveritas plans to provide the devices for free to farmers in coffee-growing regions of Latin America and Africa, and IBM said it aims to make them affordable for everyone. Its target production cost: less than 25 cents. 
 
The nonprofit, which works with 100,000 farms, mills and estates in Latin America and Africa, did not say how many would be in the pilot but, if successful, “the plan is to scale it out,” CEO David Browning told Reuters. 
 
Coffee farmers have been struggling with a slump in global prices while climate change is threatening vast swaths of land in Latin America, Asia and Africa. 
 
Enveritas, which verifies the sustainability of coffee farmers, said most of its growers live on less than $2 a day. 
 
Chemical analysis of soil is vital to improve yields but is complicated, expensive and time-consuming because it requires laboratory equipment, said Mathias Steiner from IBM Research-Brazil. 
 
AgroPad costs less and could reduce the use of fertilizers, which would save money and help the environment, said Steiner, one of its inventors. 
 
Last week, engineers from Britain’s Brunel University also unveiled an AI device for farming: small red pods, costing £92 ($118) each, that could be planted into the soil. The pods collect data hourly and would show farmers what the soil needs. 

…

President Donald Trump said on Thursday the United States may take action on trade with countries that are not contributing enough to NATO.

Trump, fresh from a trip to London for a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, has been pushing member countries to contribute more to the organization.

The U.S. president said a lot of countries were getting close to the goal of 2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product for NATO contributions.

“A lot of countries are close and getting closer. And some are really not close, and we may do things having to do with trade. It’s not fair that they get U.S. protection and they’re not putting up their money,” he said.

Trump and French leader Emmanuel Macron clashed over the future of NATO on Tuesday before a summit intended to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Western military alliance.

In sharp exchanges underlining discord in a transatlantic bloc hailed by many as the most successful military pact in history, Trump demanded that Europe pay more for its collective defense and make concessions to U.S. interests on trade.

He also was upbeat about the alliance on Thursday, saying his meetings went well and that “NATO is in very, very good shape and the relationships with other countries are really extraordinary.”

…