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The pace of U.S. military strikes against al-Qaida affiliate al-Shabab in Somalia this year is nearly on par with the number of strikes against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.The U.S. has carried out 25 strikes against al-Shabab to date in 2020, including one Monday in the vicinity of Janaale, Somalia, that U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) said killed four terrorists.Data released to VOA by a U.S. defense official show the U.S. carried out 29 airstrikes against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria from January 1 to March 1, the latest date in which strike data was available. A full strike report from Operation Inherent Resolve is expected later this week.Strikes in Iraq and Syria have significantly tapered off since the territorial defeat of the so-called Islamic State caliphate last March.In 2019, there were more than 2,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, with at least 1,600 of those carried out in the first couple of months. U.S. Central Command has decreased troop numbers in Syria, where thousands of IS fighters are estimated to remain, but increased troop numbers elsewhere in the Middle East in an effort to counter the threat of Iran.FILE – Al-Shabab fighters march during military exercises in the Lafofe area, some 18 kilometers (11 miles) south of Mogadishu, Somalia, Feb. 17, 2011.Meanwhile, AFRICOM conducted a record 63 strikes in Somalia last year. Most were against al-Qaida affiliate al-Shabab, which has an estimated 6,000 militants in Somalia, with a handful of strikes against Islamic State. There were 47 U.S. military strikes in Somalia in 2018.”Airstrikes are preventative measures to ensure al-Shabab does not increase in size and strength,” AFRICOM spokesman Maj. Karl Weiss told VOA on Monday. “That said, airstrikes and kinetic operations are not the command’s primary effort in Somalia; our core activity is the training of Somali security forces.”Despite the ramped up strike numbers in Somalia, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has appeared averse to adding more U.S. troops to Africa, where Islamic extremists have plagued the continent from Somalia to the Sahel.FILE – Defense Secretary Mark Esper speaks during a briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, March 2, 2020.The Pentagon is in the middle of a review of AFRICOM that could reduce the number of U.S. troops on the continent. The first troop change in Africa under Esper’s leadership withdrew conventional troops and replaced them with specialized military trainers.Esper has said the move would leave “roughly the same number of troops on the continent,” while giving U.S. commanders the capability to bolster partner forces.Members of Congress have pushed back against any potential troop cuts, saying a decrease could provide an opening for strategic competitors Russia and China. Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Jim Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have even called for an increase in the number of U.S. troops deployed to Africa.Esper is trying to follow a shift started by his predecessor, Jim Mattis, away from counterterrorism toward strategic competition with China and Russia. During Mattis’ time as defense secretary, the U.S. pulled 100 to 200 troops from West Africa and was preparing for further cuts.Defense officials said extremist groups in West Africa did not appear to pose a threat to the U.S. homeland, but they have since continued to pummel U.S. allies, especially in countries like Burkina Faso. A top general in U.S. Africa Command admitted to VOA at the time of the troop pullout that the U.S. and its allies were “not winning” the counterterror war for the Sahel.AFRICOM Commander Gen. Stephen Townsend has said al-Shabab is the “largest and most violent” of al-Qaida’s branches worldwide. Defense officials have stressed that while al-Shabab does not possess the capability to strike the U.S. homeland, the group has the intent to do so.”It is important to impact their ability to threaten peace and security in East Africa and prevent their threats against the U.S. from being a reality,” Townsend said in a press release last month.Townsend and CENTCOM Commander Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie testify together in front of the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.
 
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In 2016, Michigan gave Sen. Bernie Sanders one of the most surprising primary wins in U.S. political history.In 2020, the self-described democratic socialist will need another boost from Michigan to revive his campaign to secure the Democratic presidential nomination over his lone remaining major rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.  With 125 delegates, Michigan is the biggest prize up for grabs among the six states holding primaries Tuesday. Sanders signaled the importance of Michigan to his campaign, abandoning a planned rally in Mississippi to hold five campaign events in the state over the weekend, including one in Dearborn, where the nation’s largest Muslim community strongly supports him.Dearborn was one of the areas that helped Sanders secure his 2016 victory in the Michigan primary over eventual Democratic party nominee Hillary Clinton by a narrow margin of 49.8% to 48.3%. After trailing Clinton significantly in the polls, Sanders won by just 17,000 votes.   Sanders aims to improve on that narrow margin of victory in 2020, even though in some states to date, he has struggled to turn out voters in the same numbers he did in 2016. A Detroit Free Press poll released Monday does not look promising for him. The survey of 400 Michigan voters shows Biden outpacing Sanders by a significant margin — 51% to 27%.”If Bernie doesn’t score a big victory in Michigan, you’re really starting to see the end of the possibility of his candidacy,” said Jim Kessler, a senior vice president at public policy think tank Third Way, and former legislative director for then-Congressman Charles Schumer.Watch: Michigan Primary Looms as Showdown for Biden and Sanders  Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders greets supporters after speaking during a rally in St Louis, Missouri, March 9, 2020.African American voteSanders’ weakness with African American voters could be the blow that kills his chances in Michigan.  Democratic delegate math in Michigan is anything but straightforward. Democrats allocate their delegates according to the statewide vote and the vote by congressional districts. Because of this weighting system, winning boils down to securing large population areas such as the predominantly African American city of Detroit. Sanders failed to win the city in 2016, and his poor 2020 performances in southern states with African American electorates does not bode well for his chances in the Motor City.  Hutchings said African Americans make up about 15% of the Michigan electorate overall, and an even larger share of the Democratic voters controlling the results Tuesday. “I would be very surprised, extremely surprised, if Sanders were to win the black vote in the state. And because that vote typically votes in the bloc fashion, that means that it’s going to be difficult, not impossible, but difficult. If that remains the case, it’s going to be difficult for Sanders to win,” said Hutchings.Meanwhile, Biden heads into the primary with major endorsements from two former African American presidential candidates, senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, who were campaigning with him Monday in Detroit.The impact of endorsements  In addition to the Harris and Booker endorsements, Biden also gained the support of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Sanders endorsed Whitmer’s progressive Democratic challenger, Abdul El-Sayed, in 2018, but campaigned for her in the general election.  Analysts differ on the impact of endorsements. Conventional political wisdom holds that endorsements usually do not dramatically alter political races. That appears to have been upended this election cycle with the boost Biden received from Congressman James Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina who gave the former vice president his stamp of approval just days before the do-or-die primary in his home state, which Biden won handily.Biden had pinned his hopes on his ability to mobilize the African American vote in South Carolina after severely disappointing showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, two smaller states that do not reflect the demographic diversity of the United States.  Both Dulio and Hutchings said Whitmer’s endorsement of Biden in Michigan was significant.“It certainly is a highly visible endorsement for the Biden campaign, and it can’t hurt him,” Hutchings said. “It probably helped him increase the (vote) margins.”  Trade warsSanders’ campaign does have a strength that is uniquely suited to Michigan: outreach to blue-collar factory workers, which has been a central point of his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020. Nowhere is that more important than in Michigan, the center of the auto industry.  Sanders has been savaging Biden’s record on trade, citing his support for NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) on the campaign trail and in numerous advertisements airing locally, according to Dulio.  He said that argument could resonate with the all-important suburban women demographic, swinging some of their votes to Sanders. “Michigan is a unique place, because so many people are tied to the auto industry. Whether it’s in a place like Macomb County, where you’re talking about folks who work in manufacturing and do the manufacturing at Ford, GM and Chrysler plants, or part of the auto manufacturers supply chain, or if you’re talking about folks in, say, Oakland County right next door, who are part of the white-collar contingent of auto company employees,” said Dulio.If Sanders can convince those key voters their livelihoods are at stake in this election, his campaign may be able to survive past Michigan. 
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With stock prices plunging amid an oil price war and the coronavirus crisis, U.S. President Donald Trump met Monday afternoon with his economic advisers, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who presented him with policy options to counter the quickly emerging threats to the economy.     White House sources say the options included paid sick leave and emergency help for small businesses.  The meeting was convened after Trump returned to the White House from Florida, where he attended a fundraising luncheon at the home of a wealthy donor.  The president did not speak to reporters after he strode from the Marine One helicopter to the South Portico.As the Dow Jones Industrial Average dived more than 2,000 points during Monday morning trading, Trump, via Twitter, blamed the market drop on Saudi Arabia and Russia arguing over the price and flow of oil.”That, and the Fake News, is the reason for the market drop,” he wrote.  Saudi Arabia and Russia are arguing over the price and flow of oil. That, and the Fake News, is the reason for the market drop!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 9, 2020Trump said the big decline for oil prices will be good for the consumer, as gasoline will cost less.  The Dow closed off nearly 7.8%, recording its largest-ever single-day point drop of 2,013.76.Trump also downplayed Americans’ fears about the novel coronavirus.  The president said the number of deaths in the United States from the new disease is a tiny fraction compared to the tens of thousands who succumb annually to seasonal influenza.”Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on,” tweeted Trump.  So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 9, 2020The number of confirmed U.S. cases of coronavirus, which originated in China, is 566, including 22 deaths, according to state public health authorities and Johns Hopkins University.Left unsaid in Trump’s messaging was that people can be immunized against the flu strains, while there is no vaccine yet to protect against COVID-19, which health experts predict will have a higher mortality rate than influenza.”The markets have obviously been very active today,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar of the historic sell-off on Wall Street.”President Trump has delivered a historically strong economy,” and the economic fundamentals remain strong, stated Azar, a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force. “The public health and protecting the American people is the No. 1 priority for all of us.”Briefly speaking on the White House North Lawn driveway, the Cabinet official declined to answer any questions from a group of reporters who had been waiting while he conducted interviews on Fox News and Fox Business channels, friendly media outlets for the Trump administration.  Vice President Mike Pence and others on the task force are scheduled to speak to reporters at a briefing later in the day.  The White House is denying reports that it has issued formal guidelines to staff instructing them to limit in-person interactions and meetings.”While we have asked all Americans to exercise common-sense hygiene measures, we are conducting business as usual. I want to remind the media once again to be responsible with all reporting,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement.
 
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Relatives of victims in last year’s Ethiopian Airlines crash have arrived in Addis Ababa to commemorate the anniversary of the tragedy and to get answers.  An airline industry final report on what caused the Boeing 737 MAX to crash is expected this week. Families of the 157 victims on board Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 are holding memorials in Addis Ababa Monday before traveling Tuesday to the crash site, about 45 kilometers outside the capital, for a private ceremony.  A monument for the victims of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET302 Boeing 737 Max plane crash is seen during a memorial ceremony at the French Embassy in Addis Ababa, March 9, 2020.At a small gathering at the French Embassy Monday, relatives of the 10 French citizens killed in the March 10 crash commemorated their lost loved ones.   There were no survivors when the nearly new Boeing 737 MAX crashed, just minutes after takeoff.   Virginie Fricaudet is president of the victim’s association ET302 Solidarity Justice.  She lost her 38-year-old brother Xavier, a teacher at the French School in Nairobi.
“I would say that we have created a community between all families — the French families on one side and the other global families on the other side.  It’s a big and huge moment of being all together because we are linked by the same tragedy and destiny.  It’s a moment that we should live like a big family,” she said.Surviving relatives have asked for Boeing not to be involved in the anniversary memorials and have filed lawsuits against the company to seek compensation.Their visit to Ethiopia comes as air safety investigators are expected to release an interim report on the roles played by Boeing, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and Ethiopian Airlines.  The report found that pilots on the 737 MAX were not provided with adequate training by the aircraft’s manufacturer. It also determined that Boeing’s MCAS, or Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which aggressively pushed down the nose of the plane, was “vulnerable to undesired activation.”A woman draws a cross with oil on the forehead of another woman during a memorial ceremony at the crash site of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 airplane accident in Tulu Fara, Ethiopia, on March 8, 2020.Relatives and friends of victims are still waiting for answers and remain critical of how the aftermath of the crash was handled.  Yeshiwas Zeggeye was president of Arline Pilot’s Association of Ethiopia at the time of the crash.“What’s quite interesting up to this point is that the company did not have a consultation with pilots and cabin crews at all after the crash.  That is not something that I would have expected.  I would expect the company would engage more with its pilots, especially those who flew on the Boeing 737 MAX at the time,” he said.Zeggeye also criticized Ethiopian Airlines for not acting after the Lion Air crash in Indonesia, also a 737 MAX, that took place months earlier.   Relatives of the Ethiopian Airlines crash victims agree the 737 Max should have been grounded soon after the Lion Air crash.  FILE – A United Airlines Boeing 737 Max airplane takes off in the rain at Renton Municipal Airport in Renton, Wash., Dec. 11, 2019,Aviation engineer and vice president of ET302 Solidarity Justice Matthieu Willm says Boeing needs to explain why the 737 MAX aircraft were allowed to continue flying.A U.S. congressional report last week into the crash accused Boeing of concealing crucial information from the FAA, making faulty assumptions about critical technologies, and production pressures that jeopardized aviation safety.
Boeing did not immediately reply to a request for comment.But in public statements, the company has said it will review the report, continue to cooperate with investigators, and that its thoughts and prayers are with the relatives who lost loved ones.Boeing last year set aside $100 million to assist the families of victims and communities impacted by the crashes, which killed 346 people in total.The funds are not part of any compensation the aircraft maker might have to pay to those who are suing the company for damages.Boeing has said it is strengthening safety measures and estimates it will be able to re-certify the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft for use around the middle of this year. 
    
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Two American soldiers were killed by “enemy forces” in Iraq Monday, a statement by the military said.The service members were killed “while advising and accompanying Iraqi Security Forces during a mission to eliminate an ISIS terrorist stronghold in a mountainous area of north central Iraq,” said a statement by Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF- OIR) —  the headquarters responsible for overseeing U.S. and coalition efforts against Islamic State.The military has not yet released the names of the victims pending notification of next of kin.The United States maintains more than 5,000 troops in Iraq to train and support Iraqi forces in the fight against Islamic State. 
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Western High School opened in Baltimore, Maryland on November 1, 1844 – four years before the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in New York. It is the oldest all-girls school in the country and is very proud of its traditions. Karina Bafradzhian visited the unique school and talked to students and teachers.
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Some of Virginia’s scores of Confederate monuments could soon be removed under legislation state lawmakers approved Sunday.The Democratic-led House and Senate passed measures that would undo an existing state law that protects the monuments and instead lets local governments decide their fate. The bill’s passage marks the latest turn in Virginia’s long-running debate over how its history should be told in public spaces.The legislation now heads to Gov. Ralph Northam, who has said he supports giving localities — several of which have already declared their intent to remove statues — control over the issue.After white supremacists descended on Charlottesville in 2017, in part to protest the city’s attempt to move a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, many places across the country quickly started taking Confederate monuments down. But Virginia localities that wanted to remove monuments were hamstrung by the existing law.In the two legislative sessions that followed the rally, Republican lawmakers defeated bills like the one that passed Sunday. But Democrats recently took full control of the statehouse for the first time in a generation.One of the bill’s sponsors, Del. Delores McQuinn of Richmond, said she feels great about letting local leaders decide what’s right for their community. But she said she thought many places would opt to keep the monuments.“I think more of them are going to be interested in contextualizing, you know, making sure that there is a sense of truth told and shared with the public,” she said.As for Charlottesville, city spokesman Brian Wheeler said staff would review the new legislation and determine the steps needed to carry out previous City Council votes to remove the Lee statue and another of Stonewall Jackson from its public parks.Virginia, a state that prides itself on its pivotal role in America’s early history, is home to more than 220 public memorials to the Confederacy, according to state officials. Among those are some of the nation’s most prominent — a collection of five monuments along Richmond’s Monument Avenue, a National Historic Landmark.Critics say the monuments are offensive to African Americans because they romanticize the Confederacy and ignore its defense of slavery.“My family has lived with the trauma of slavery for generations. … I hope that you understand that this is a situation that’s so much deeper than a simple vote on simple war memorials,” Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who presides over the Senate, said earlier in the week.Others say removing the monuments is tantamount to erasing history.Republican Amanda Chase said during the same Senate debate that slavery was evil.“But it doesn’t mean that we take all of these monuments down,” she continued. “We remember our past, and we learn from it.”The House and Senate initially passed different legislation, with disagreements about what hurdles a locality must clear before taking down a statue. A conference committee hashed out the differences.The compromise measure says a locality must hold a public hearing before voting to remove or otherwise alter a monument. If it decides to remove one, it must be offered to “any museum, historical society, government or military battlefield,” although the governing body ultimately gets the say on the “final disposition.”The measure, which passed largely but not entirely along party lines, wouldn’t apply cemeteries or the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, which has a prominent statue of Jackson.Northam, who last year was embroiled in a scandal over a racist photo that appeared in his medical school yearbook, announced at the start of the legislative session what he called a historic justice agenda aimed at telling the accurate and complete story of Virginia’s past.In addition to the monuments bill, lawmakers also have advanced bills removing old racist laws that were technically still on the books, substituting the state’s holiday honoring Lee and Jackson for one on Election Day and creating a commission to recommend a replacement for a Lee statue Virginia contributed to the U.S. Capitol. They have also passed legislation that provides protections and funding for historic African American cemeteries.Another bill introduced this year took aim at a controversial statue on Capitol Square, one of Harry F. Byrd Sr., a former Virginia governor and U.S. senator who’s considered the architect of the state’s “massive resistance” policy to public school integration.Republican Del. Wendell Walker introduced the bill that would have removed the bronze figure with the aim of needling Democrats on the larger monuments issue, saying “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Byrd, a Democrat, led a political machine that dominated Virginia politics for decades.But when met with some agreement from across the aisle on removing the statue, Walker asked that the bill be killed.
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From Miami to Seattle, nursing homes and other facilities for the elderly are stockpiling masks and thermometers, preparing for staff shortages and screening visitors to protect a particularly vulnerable population from the coronavirus.In China, where the outbreak began, the disease has been substantially deadlier for the elderly. In Italy, the epicenter of the virus outbreak in Europe, the more than 100 people who died were either elderly, sick with other complications, or both.Of the 21 deaths across the U.S. as of Sunday, at least 16 had been linked to a Seattle-area nursing home, along with many other infections among residents, staff and family members. The Seattle Times reported that a second nursing home and a retirement community in the area had each reported one case of the virus.That has put other facilities in the U.S. on high alert, especially in states with large populations of older residents, such as Florida and California. About 2.5 million people live in long-term care facilities in the United States.“For people over the age of 80 … the mortality rate could be as high as 15 percent,” said Mark Parkinson, president of the nursing home trade group American Health Care Association.The federal government is now focusing all nursing home inspections on infection control, singling out facilities in cities with confirmed cases and those previously cited for not following protocol.Federal rules already require the homes to have an infection prevention specialist on staff, and many have long had measures in place to deal with seasonal flus and other ailments that pose a higher risk to the elderly.Even so, facilities’ response to the coronavirus has varied across the country.In Florida, where about 160,000 seniors live in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, mandatory visitor screening is not in place “because we’re not at that stage,” said Kristen Knapp, a spokeswoman for the Florida Health Care Association.But elder care centers are posting signs urging visitors to stay away if they have symptoms, and are looking into alternate ways for families to connect, such as through video chats, Knapp said.Concierges in the 14 Florida nursing homes run by the Palm Gardens corporation are now giving all visitors a short questionnaire asking about symptoms, recent travel and contact with others, said company Vice President Luke Neumann.Neumann said the nursing homes also have purchased extra thermometers in case they need to check visitors’ temperatures and stockpiled preventive supplies, including medical masks, protective eyewear and gowns. In the laundry rooms, they are making sure to use enough bleach and heat to kill any lingering virus germs, he said.At the South Shore Rehabilitation and Skilled Care Center south of Boston, patient Leo Marchand keeps a container of disinfecting wipes on a shelf by his bed that he uses several times a day. The 71-year-old Vietnam veteran and retired truck driver has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease that makes it difficult for him to breathe. The possibility of contracting the coronavirus scares him.“It’s a concern,” Marchand said. “It really is.”Many facilities across the country have said they were having trouble getting medical masks and gowns because of shortages.More intensive screening of visitors, meanwhile, is not sitting well with some.“Some of the visitors have been quite reluctant to comply, and that has been stressful,” said Janet Snipes, executive director of Holly Heights Nursing Center in Denver.Under federal regulations, nursing homes are considered a patient’s residence, and the facilities want to keep them connected with family, especially when they are near death.“I don’t think you can flat-out prevent visitors,” said Dr. David A. Nace, director of long-term care and flu programs at the University of Pittsburgh Department of Medicine. He oversees 300 facilities in Pennsylvania.For now, facilities in most states are stressing basic precautions, including hand washing and coughing etiquette.Centers throughout the country are also trying to prepare their staffs for the worst.An adult day care center in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood bought long-lasting prepared meals in preparation for possible shortages. The Hebrew Home in Riverdale, New York, is running nursing staff through drills to see how they will handle situations at the 750-bed facility if the virus progresses. Their IT department is setting up infrastructure for staff to work remotely if they become sick.“If one of our sites has an outbreak, we quickly will deplete the staff in that location,” said Randy Bury, CEO of The Good Samaritan Society, one of the largest not-for-profit providers of senior care services in the country, with 19,000 employees in 24 states.Some families are considering pulling their loved ones out of facilities.Kathleen Churchyard said her family has decided to move her 80-year-old mother out of her retirement community near Jacksonville, Florida, and into her sister’s home nearby if the virus is confirmed in the area.Churchyard, who lives in Concord, North Carolina, worries her mother is not taking it seriously, and is particularly worried about her dining hall.“I tried to get her to buy some stuff to prepare. … She said, ‘No. If (the virus) takes me, it takes me,’” Churchyard said.
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Lawmakers from both parties told Pentagon leaders on Wednesday that the Defense Department is undermining its own efforts to get military money by diverting billions of dollars for the construction of President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall.
    
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and the committee’s top Republican warned Defense Secretary Mark Esper that overturning congressional funding decisions to shift money for the wall is an enormous problem that will have consequences.
    
The plan to shift money has triggered rare Republican opposition to one of Trump’s priorities.
    
Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said the result may be that Congress will place greater restrictions on the Pentagon’s ability to move money around to meet military needs. The chairman, Democratic Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, said the money transfer is “very, very damaging to the Pentagon.”
    
“The message it sends is the Pentagon has plenty of money,” said Smith, adding that it “undercuts any arguments for any need for resources.”
    
The Pentagon announced this month that it was slashing billions of dollars in funding for Navy and Air Force aircraft and other military programs to free up money for the construction of the wall.
    
Esper approved the $3.8 billion border wall request from the Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon acknowledged that more cuts could be coming to provide additional dollars for the wall. Trump has repeatedly claimed that Mexico is paying for his promised “big beautiful wall,” but that has never happened.
    
The Pentagon’s decision, announced in “reprogramming” documents provided to lawmakers, stripped money from major aircraft and procurement programs that touch Republican and Democratic districts and states.
    
Despite congressional opposition, Trump faced no consequences when making similar transfers last year, when the Pentagon canceled dozens of military construction projects to free up $3.6 billion and transferred $2.5 billion in counterdrug money.
    
Altogether, Trump has obtained just over $3 billion for border barrier construction by working through regular congressional channels, subject to limitations imposed by lawmakers. He has used various transfer and emergency authorities to shift almost $7 billion more from the emergency declaration, from a forfeiture fund containing money seized by law enforcement and from funding for military counterdrug activities.
    
Specifically, the plan targets money for more than a dozen aircraft, including two F-35 fighters sought by Texas Rep. Kay Granger, the top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, and other members of the Texas congressional delegation.
    
It also cuts money for eight Reaper drones, four Air Force C-130 transport aircraft, two Marine V-22 Osprey helicopters and also for amphibious ships, National Guard equipment and Army trucks. 
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Antebellum Southern plantations were built on the backs of enslaved people, and many of those plantations hold places of honor on the National Register of Historic Places — but don’t look for many mentions of slavery in the government’s official record of places with historic significance.The register’s written entries on the plantations tend to say almost nothing about the enslaved people who picked the cotton and tobacco or cut the sugar cane that paid for ornate homes that today serve as wedding venues, bed-and-breakfast inns, tourist attractions and private homes — some of which tout their inclusion on the National Register like a gold star.The National Register of Historic Places lists more than 95,000 sites that are important to the story of the United States. From some of the most famous places — such as George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate — to scores of lesser-known plantation homes in the rural South, register entries often ignore the topic of slavery or mention it only in passing, an Associated Press review found.FILE – The home of the first U.S. president, George Washington, in Mount Vernon, Va., April 23, 2018.Experts blame a generational lack of concern for the stories of black people and, in many cases, a shortage of records. While some narratives have been updated to include information about enslavement, such changes aren’t mandatory.The National Register’s entry for Mount Vernon, approved in 1977, doesn’t use the word “slave,” although more than 300 enslaved black people worked the first president’s fields, cooked his food and cleaned the house where tourists now roam.The entry for Thomas Jefferson’s mountaintop home, Monticello, notes that the third president owned as many as 200 slaves. Yet it generally avoids discussing them or the details of their ownership by the author of the Declaration of Independence.The same is true for plantation after plantation across the former Confederate states.Those omissions likely contributed to the loss of slave housing and other structures linked to the economy of enslavement because no one deemed them important, preservationist Ashley Rogers said.”The problem is, the damage has been done,” said Rogers, executive director of the Whitney Plantation Museum near New Orleans.FILE – Visitors walk through the Whitney Plantation in Edgard, La., July 14, 2017.The Whitney, which documents slavery at a pre-Civil War plantation near New Orleans, draws tens of thousands of visitors annually and is known for discussing topics that other tourist plantations ignore. Yet even its entry in the National Register, completed in 1992 before the current owner purchased it, doesn’t mention the slaves who toiled there.Similarly, visitors to Mount Vernon or Monticello in Virginia can now hear stories and see exhibits about slave life — but those features were added long after the landmarks became some of the first sites listed in the National Register.The National Register’s incomplete stories reflect the way the public ignores the topic of enslaved people, said Hasan Kwame Jeffries, an associate professor at Ohio State University who specializes in areas including African American history.”It’s telling us what we have been valuing as a society and how we understand slavery,” Jeffries said.Congress established the National Register of Historic Places under a 1966 historic preservation act aimed at coordinating preservation work and highlighting the nation’s most historic sites.Along with bragging rights, a listing on the National Register can help property owners financially. More than $160 billion has been invested in preserving 44,000 historic places nationwide under a tax credit program approved in 1976, according to the National Park Service, which oversees the program.Property owners, local groups and government agencies nominate sites for inclusion on the National Register, noting architectural features, historic significance and other information. State preservation offices review the nominations and submit them to the Park Service for a final decision.Those nomination forms, available on government websites, make up the bulk of information that’s publicly available about places listed on the register, the Park Service said. And they often ignore the enslaved people who provided the labor on antebellum plantations.FILE – Magnolia Grove, an antebellum plantation house in Greensboro, Ala., is seen Jan. 30, 2020.Magnolia Grove, a state-owned antebellum plantation home dating to 1835 in Greensboro, Alabama, has a slave cabin that tourists can visit, plus displays about enslaved people, yet its 1972 entry on the National Register doesn’t mention slaves.The state-operated Kingsley Plantation near Jacksonville, Florida, was home to slaves, yet its National Register entry doesn’t say who they were or how they were forced to work in the Southern heat. Instead, it describes tabby — a kind of concrete made of oyster shells — and the “colorful” slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley, who gets credit for having “carefully trained” enslaved people to farm his cotton.A historian who has researched the antebellum South, Clifton Ellis, said many National Register entries reflect a time when neither African American history nor the cultural importance of buildings were emphasized.”You might see that there’s a relation between lack of information and when they were written,” said Ellis, of Texas Tech University. “It was only during the ’70s that historians were beginning to look at slavery more closely. That took time to work its way through the academy.”Many plantation owners also kept poor records of slave life and did little to preserve reminders of it — another reason for the information void.The civil rights movement drew attention to the need for inclusive history, Ellis said, and nominations have improved with time. Property owners and historical groups are allowed to update National Register entries with new information. Some have done so with information about slaves.Today, any new nomination of an antebellum site that doesn’t discuss its ties to slavery would be rejected for more work, said Sarah David, who oversees the National Register program for North Carolina.”You can’t talk about something that was built before the Civil War without talking about enslaved people,” she said. “They were just in it. They may have built it.”The historical blindness about slavery and enslaved people isn’t limited to plantations in the National Register.The entry for Alabama’s white-domed Capitol details its role as the place where delegates established the Confederate States of America in 1861, but doesn’t cite slavery’s role in the rebellion or Horace King, a onetime slave credited with building the elegant, curved stairways in the building’s main entrance.FILE – Joe McGill, who works with the National Trust For Historic Preservation, sits outside one of the slave cabins at McLeod Plantation in Charleston, S.C., Aug. 14, 2013.Joe McGill routinely sleeps in old slave homes as part of The Slave Dwelling Project, which seeks to tell the forgotten stories of enslaved people. Sketchy accounts of slavery are a product of a decades-long period when white male historians primarily told the stories of white males, he said.”It needs to be corrected because it coincides with an incomplete narrative,” said McGill, who has slept in about 150 slave dwellings in 25 states in the South and the North.But updating all that outdated history would be daunting, historians said.With hundreds of old plantations listed on the National Register and many preservationists focused on saving endangered sites rather than updating information about existing ones, rounding out the history of antebellum farms could take years.”It would take a massive effort,” said Ellis.
 
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U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, the highest-ranking black member of Congress and the kingmaker of South Carolina’s Democratic political orbit, on Wednesday endorsed Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. The backing could provide a much-needed boost for the former vice president heading into South Carolina’s primary.
   
“I can think of no one better suited, better prepared, I can think of no one with the integrity, no one more committed to the fundamental principles that make this country what it is than my good friend,” said Clyburn, appearing with Biden at an event in North Charleston.
   
He called on the people of South Carolina to “stand with”  Biden.
   
It had long been expected that Clyburn, the House majority whip, would support Biden. The men were in Congress together for more than a decade, with Clyburn also working closely with the Obama administration in his House leadership roles. Biden was among the presidential hopefuls and other political notables who attended two days of funeral and homegoing services last year for Clyburn’s wife, Emily.
   
The support could help Biden avoid limping across the finish line in Saturday’s balloting in South Carolina, where he has long led in polling, particularly among the black voters, who comprise most of the Democratic electorate. But that lead has tightened in recent months, in part because of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ momentum after success in other early state contests. Another factor is the focus of candidates including California billionaire Tom Steyer, who has spent millions of dollars on ads in the state and worked to build relationships with black voters.
   
Biden, taking the podium from Clyburn on Wednesday, thanked his longtime friend but then quickly slipped into an opaque reference to Sanders.
   
“Today, people are talking about a revolution,” Biden said. “But what the country’s looking for are results. What they’re looking for is security. What they’re looking for is being able to sustain and maintain their dignity.”
   
Biden went on to note Clyburn’s role in securing the Democratic votes for the 2010 health insurance overhaul that ranks as President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement. Biden said his proposal for a “public option” insurance plan to expand coverage under Obamacare would build on Clyburn’s work rather than “start from scratch” with single-payer government insurance that Sanders proposes.
   
“What people are looking for is some hope, some reassurance, some notion that ‘I can take care of my family,’” Biden said.
   
Following poor finishes in Iowa and in New Hampshire, Biden notched a second-place finish in the Nevada caucuses, a status he said positioned him to do well in South Carolina, a state that can be a bellwether for other Southern states and has been referred to as Biden’s “firewall” of support.
   
Earlier this month, Clyburn gave some insight into his thinking when he said that he was watching efforts by several campaigns aiming to cut into Biden’s support in South Carolina. Clyburn noted that Steyer, in particular, is doing “an incredible job.”
   
Clyburn also said former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg “is doing very good.” Clyburn has previously said Buttigieg may struggle among older black voters because he is gay. Clyburn’s grandson is working for Buttigieg’s South Carolina campaign.
   
Asked directly if South Carolina is Biden’s “firewall,” where success or failure could make or break his campaign in the states that follow, Clyburn said, “Well, I don’t know. We will see.”
   
Clyburn hosted Biden and nearly two dozen other Democratic hopefuls last summer at his fish fry, which began in 1992 in a parking deck near the South Carolina Statehouse as a way to thank volunteers who helped him, secure his first congressional victory. Through the years, the fish fry has blossomed into a showpiece event for Democratic politicians in the state and as a must-stop event for the party’s presidential contenders aiming to build support in the state.
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Ethiopia will skip the latest round of U.S.-brokered talks this week on a disputed Nile dam project with Egypt and Sudan, the country’s water ministry announced Wednesday.A final deal on the massive Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam had been expected this month, but U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in his Ethiopia visit last week that an agreement now might take months as “a great deal of work remains.”The dispute over what will be Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam pits Ethiopia’s desire to pull millions out of poverty against Egypt’s concerns over a critical water supply.Ethiopia will skip the talks in Washington on Thursday and Friday “because the country’s delegation hasn’t concluded its consultation with relevant stakeholders,” the ministry of water, irrigation and energy said on its Facebook page. “The decision has been communicated with the U.S. Treasury secretary.”The announcement came amid widespread concerns in Ethiopia that its delegation has been pressured by the U.S. to reach a deal on $4.6 billion dam that is nearing completion. The U.S. became involved in the talks after Egypt’s invitation.“Ethiopia will never sign on an agreement that will surrender its right to use the Nile River,” the Ethiopian ambassador to the U.S., Fitsum Arega, said on Twitter.Responding to Ethiopia’s decision to sit out this week’s meeting, Egypt’s foreign ministry spokesman, Ahmed Hafez, asserted that Egypt remained “committed to the negotiation track … according to what was agreed upon by the three countries.” He said the Egyptian irrigation minister would attend the talks.Egypt wants the dam to be filled more slowly to reduce restrictions on the flow of the Nile.Ethiopia says the dam is needed to provide electricity for development. In January it announced that it will start filling the dam, now more than 70% complete, in July at the start of the rainy season.“There was lots of discomfort recently due to the behavior and changing role of the U.S. among policy makers in Ethiopia,” political analyst Abel Abate Demissie told The Associated Press.
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A U.S. soldier has tested positive for the coronavirus, U.S. military officials in South Korea said Wednesday – the first confirmed infection of a U.S. service member.The patient, a 23-year-old male, has been placed in self-quarantine at his off-base residence, U.S. Forces Korea said in a statement.The soldier was stationed at Camp Carroll, a U.S. Army base in the southeastern part of the country, but also visited Camp Walker.”Health professionals are actively conducting contact tracing to determine whether any others may have been exposed,” the USFK statement said.Both military bases are near the epicenter of the South Korea coronavirus outbreak, which has put the country on edge over the past week.South Korean officials reported 169 new virus cases Wednesday, bringing the total number of confirmed infections to 1,146. Just last week, that number was only 30.Twelve coronavirus patients in South Korea have died.Most of the South Korean infections are in and around Daegu, the country’s fourth-largest city. The U.S. military has thousands of service members in the region.On Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said upcoming annual joint military exercises with South Korea could be scaled back because of virus concerns.Dangerous new componentThe spread of the virus within military ranks would represent a dangerous new component of the outbreak, since many service members live within close quarters and share common meals.At some bases nearest the outbreak, U.S. soldiers have been prevented from non-essential off-base travel. Many visitors are also prevented from visiting some bases. Some on-base restaurants and entertainment venues have been closed. Department of Defense schools in Korea have also been shuttered.Earlier this week, the U.S. military in South Korea raised its risk level to “high” after reporting that a 61-year-old woman with the coronavirus visited a store at Camp Walker. The woman was the widow of a retired soldier.At least 18 members of the South Korean military have also been infected the virus. Over 9,000 South Korean service members have been quarantined at their bases, the Yonhap news agency reported.Highly contagiousThe coronavirus causes a respiratory illness known as Covid-19. The disease currently has a mortality rate of around 2 percent. But it is highly contagious, in part because those with Covid-19 can spread the disease before showing symptoms.Over 80,000 people worldwide have contracted the virus. Almost 2,800 people have died. Most the cases have been in China, where the virus originated.But over the past week, countries including Iran, Italy, and South Korea have reported a surge in confirmed cases. World health officials are now worried the outbreak could turn into a global pandemic.
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Pressure appears to be building on the White House and U.S. intelligence agencies to declassify some information and brief the public on possible Russian attempts to meddle in the upcoming presidential election.Much of the push is coming from former U.S. intelligence and security officials upset at a series of leaks that led to reports Russia was trying to bolster the campaigns of both President Donald Trump and one of his Democratic challengers, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.  But some of the pressure is also coming from lawmakers who want see the American public get what they describe as an untainted assessment of what Russia is and is not doing, rather than see the allegations used for domestic political gain.Congressional officials say, so far, lawmakers have not made any official requests to the intelligence agencies for any sort of public briefing or official statement on possible Russian meddling, due to concerns about protecting intelligence sources and methods.Still, the officials note some sort of public disclosure is in line with the recommendations of a But on Friday, Sanders confirmed U.S. intelligence had, in fact, warned him about the Russian meddling. He later warned Moscow to stay out of U.S. politics.It is those contradicting narratives that have former intelligence and security officials calling for some sort of public disclosure. “I would certainly encourage it…no matter what it says,” former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin told VOA. “We don’t know the whole story yet.”Other longtime intelligence officials agree. “Indications and warnings of threats to our democratic process are not like fine wine, getting better with age,” Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA chief of station, said. “We learned from 2016, we need a coordinated assessment based on the facts rather than innuendo and poor analysis tinged with confirmation bias.”At least one White House official has indicated an openness to sharing some of the existing intelligence with the public. “I’d have no problem with that,” U.S. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “If there’s intelligence that we can declassify, that we can get out there — all the better — because, again, we weren’t in office in 2016 when the last election meddling took place and the administration did very little about it.”However, some of those who were in office in 2016 accuse the Trump administration of doing even less. “It is vital that the Trump administration declassify what we know so it can be described by our intelligence community publicly, so the voters are armed with this information,” Jeh Johnson, who served as Homeland Security secretary under former President Barack Obama, said during a forum in Detroit Monday.  “That’s what we did in the prior administration,” he added, referring to a statement he and other top officials issued in October 2016 blaming Russia for hacking and then leaking emails from the Democratic National Committee.Some Democratic lawmakers have also seized upon the president’s handling of the latest allegations of Russian meddling. “What does the president do in response to that information? He fires the head of the intelligence community,” Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen said on the floor of the Senate late Tuesday, arguing for the passage of election security legislation.  “He fires them because he doesn’t want them to tell Congress what the Russians are doing,” he said.Trump administration officials have consistently pushed back, arguing the president has made it clear that interference by Russia or anyone else will not be tolerated.  “Meddling in our elections is unacceptable,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters Tuesday. “Should Russia or any foreign actor take steps to undermine our democratic processes, we will take action in response.”Some former intelligence officials caution that President Trump’s long-contentious relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies, dating back to their 2017 assessment that Russia did seek to help Trump win the election, is hurting the administration’s credibility. “One doesn’t get a warm and fuzzy feeling,” said Larry Pfeiffer, a former CIA chief of staff and former senior director of the White House Situation Room, who has been critical of Trump in the past. “The congressional intelligence committees should demand open hearings in order to assure the American people, and closed hearings in order to conduct appropriate oversight of the activities to assess that threat.”Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.
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White supremacist mass murderer Dylann Roof staged a hunger strike this month while on federal death row, alleging in letters to The Associated Press that he’s been “targeted by staff,” “verbally harassed and abused without cause” and “treated disproportionately harsh.”The 25-year-old Roof, who killed nine black church members during a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, told the AP in a letter dated Feb. 13 that the staff at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, feel justified in their conduct “since I am hated by the general public.”FILE – Dylann Roof enters the court room at the Charleston County Judicial Center to enter his guilty plea on murder charges in Charleston, S.C., April 10, 2017.A person familiar with the matter said Roof had been on a hunger strike but was no longer on one, as of this week. The person couldn’t immediately provide specific details about the length of the hunger strike or whether medical staff needed to intervene. The person wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.Roof wrote in his letter to the AP that he went on the hunger strike to protest the treatment he received from a Bureau of Prisons disciplinary hearing officer over earlier complaints that he was refused access to the law library and access to a copy machine to file legal papers.Roof’s Feb. 13 letter indicated he was already “several days” into a hunger strike, and he wrote in a follow-up letter that the protest ended a day later after corrections officers forcibly tried to take his blood and insert an IV into his arm, causing him to briefly pass out.”I feel confident I could have gone much, much longer without food,” Roof wrote in the Feb. 16 follow-up letter. “It’s just not worth being murdered over.”The allegations could not immediately be verified and a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons said the agency had no comment on Roof’s allegations, citing privacy concerns.Roof’s lawyers said in a statement that they were “working with BOP to resolve the issues addressed in the letters.”‘Tainted’ sentencingRoof’s lawyers filed an appeal to his federal convictions and death sentence last month, arguing that he was mentally ill when he represented himself at his capital trial.In a 321-page legal brief, Roof’s lawyers asked a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, to review 20 issues, including errors they say were made by the judge and prosecutors that “tainted” his sentencing. One of their main arguments is that U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel should not have allowed Roof to represent himself during the penalty phase of his trial because he was a 22-year-old ninth-grade dropout “who believed his sentence didn’t matter because white nationalists would free him from prison after an impending race war.”Roof is the first person to be ordered executed for a federal hate crime. Attorney General William Barr announced in July that the government would resume executions and scheduled five executions — though Roof is not included among that group — ending an informal moratorium on federal capital punishment as the issue receded from the public domain. The Supreme Court has temporarily halted the executions after some of the chosen inmates challenged the new execution procedures in court.
 
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U.S. senators are urging stronger sanctions enforcement amid a prolonged stalemate in denuclearization talks with North Korea.Republican Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado, chairman of the East Asia, the Pacific and International Cybersecurity Policy subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called for the return to the “maximum pressure policy.”FILE – Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., Feb. 20, 2020″The successful policy of maximum pressure that was adopted early in the Trump administration, but since abandoned in earnest effort of diplomatic engagement with Pyongyang. … We must immediately enforce sanctions against Pyongyang and its enablers,” Gardner said.However, he said the Trump administration must double down on diplomacy to isolate Pyongyang internationally.The subcommittee held the hearing Tuesday, which marked the one-year anniversary of the second summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam. But the hearing was sparsely attended.Trump and Kim first met in Singapore in June 2018, signing a broad agreement on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, but they failed to agree on how to implement that deal when they met again in Vietnam. Except for a brief working-level meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, last October, North Korea has been refusing serious talks with the U.S.Pursuing diplomatic solutionsDemocratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, ranking member of the subcommittee, also called on the Trump administration to tighten sanctions enforcement on North Korea.FILE – U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., Feb. 18, 2020Senators Gardner and Markey introduced sanctions legislation, called Leverage to Enhance Effective Diplomacy (LEED) Act, expanding U.S. sanctions against North Korea and its enablers, including those engaged in illegal oil transfers to North Korea. So far, they have no other co-sponsors.Markey, while stressing that his sanctions legislation would strengthen Washington’s negotiating position over Pyongyang, also underscored the importance of pursuing diplomatic solutions.”We must not return to the charged rhetoric of ‘fire and fury,’ a war, much less a nuclear war, will lead to unfathomable loss of life,” he said. “Threats are not an alternative to a negotiated agreement.”Markey said he would reintroduce legislation, the “No Unconstitutional War against North Korea Act,” in the coming weeks in an effort to speak out against Trump taking actions against North Korea that mirror the removal of a top Iranian commander, Qassem Soleimani.Promoting human rightsTestifying before the subcommittee, Robert King, former special envoy for North Korea, said the U.S. should not lose sight of human rights in policy toward North Korea.”Since the collapse of the Hanoi summit, sincere efforts by the U.S. to resume dialogue with the North on denuclearization have not been reciprocated. Abandoning our principles on human rights, did not lead to progress on the nuclear issue,” King said.He said the U.S. has backed away in the United Nations from pressing North Korea on its dismal human rights record. Last December, the Trump administration refused to support a U.N. Security Council discussion on North Korea’s human rights situation, effectively blocking the meeting for the second straight year.King said the “United States should be a shining example on the hill, a beacon of hope on human rights, unfortunately we’ve hidden our light under a bushel.”
 
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Most Americans say they are likely to participate in the 2020 census, but some doubt that the U.S. Census Bureau will keep their personal information confidential, a new poll shows.
   
The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds 7 in 10 Americans say it’s extremely or very likely they will participate in the census this year by filling out a questionnaire. Another 2 in 10 say it’s somewhat likely.
   
That’s higher than what the Census Bureau predicts _ a self-response rate of 6 in 10 people. But the bureau’s past research shows that people say they are going to participate in the census at a higher rate than they actually do.
   
“People respond to a survey question as they think they are expected to behave,” Kenneth Prewitt, a former Census Bureau director in the Clinton administration, said in an email.
   
The poll shows that older, white and highly educated adults express greater certainty that they will participate than younger adults, black and Hispanic Americans and those without college degrees.
   
It also shows that the more partisan people are, the more likely they are to participate. At least 7 in 10 Democrats and Republicans are very likely to answer, compared with about half of Americans who don’t identify with or lean toward either party.
   
“It might be that they understand the importance of the census in distributing political representation and want to make sure they get their fair share,” John Thompson, a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau in the Obama administration, said in an email.
    
The 2020 census will help determine how $1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed. It will also determine how many congressional seats each state gets, as well as the makeup of legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.
   
People can start answering the questions in mid-March, either online, by telephone or by mailing in a paper form.
   
“I think it’s important. It’s a civic duty,” said Quintin Sharpe, a 21-year-old college student, who’s studying business at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
   
Compared with the share saying they’ll participate, 57%, say it’s highly important to them to be counted in the census. About a quarter say it’s moderately important.
   
The poll shows about a third of Americans are very or extremely confident that the U.S. Census Bureau will keep their personal information confidential, while roughly the same share say they are moderately confident. About another third have little to no confidence in the agency to keep private information private, even though the bureau is legally required to do so.
   
About a quarter of Americans report a great deal of confidence in the people running the U.S. Census Bureau, and roughly two-thirds say they have some confidence.
   
Joe Domas, a 57-year-old carpenter in Paris, Tennessee, said he plans to fill out the census form but won’t answer every question. The questionnaire asks how many people live in a household; whether their home is owned or rented; the age, race and sex of every person living in the home; and how they are related.
   
“I don’t divulge a lot of personal information. I just give them a head count, pretty much,“ Domas said. “I’m not into government intrusion, and the way the internet is, people leak information.”
 
 A majority say they have heard or read about the count of every person living in the U.S., the largest peacetime operation the federal government undertakes, but just 2 in 10 say they know “a lot.” About a third say they have heard or read little or nothing at all.
   
That will likely change after the Census Bureau expanded its advertising campaign last week. The goal of the $500 million education and outreach effort is to reach 99% of the 140 million U.S. households with messages about the importance of participating in the 2020 census.
   
Many of those who say they will take the survey this year think they will complete it online. Close to half say that’s their likely format, with another 2 in 10 saying they expect to fill out and mail in a paper questionnaire. Just 4% say they prefer phone, but 30% say they don’t know yet how they will respond. This is the first decennial census in which most participants are being encouraged to fill out the form online.
   
Gil Parks, a 60-year-old retired financial planner from Stephenville, Texas, said he still hasn’t decided if he will answer questions online or use the paper form. Parks and his wife often drive to a ranch they own an hour south of where they live to keep tabs on building projects and baby calves.
   
“If we have a paper form, my wife could fill it out while we are driving down there and driving back,” Parks said.
   
Majorities across racial and ethnic groups say they are highly likely to participate, but about half of white Americans are “extremely” likely, compared with about 3 in 10 black and Hispanic Americans.
   
About 8 in 10 college-educated Americans, but just about two-thirds of those without a degree, say they are highly likely to participate.
   
Similarly, roughly 8 in 10 adults older than 45 say they are very likely to complete a census questionnaire, compared with just over half of younger adults.
   
There’s also a significant age gap in the preferred form of answering the questions. Just about a quarter of adults ages 60 and older who will participate say they will take the survey online, compared with more than half of those who are younger. Older adults are also somewhat more likely than younger adults to express high confidence in the Census Bureau to keep their information private, 37% among those 45 and older and 25% among younger adults.
   
“Getting accurate data is important,” said Parks, who also is chair of the local Republican Party. “We need to know who is here, and what not.”
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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday hit out at China and Iran for their response to the outbreak of coronavirus, accusing the two governments of censorship and of trying to cover up the severity of the spread of the deadly illness.Pompeo assailed Beijing for expelling three Wall Street Journal reporters and said a free press was needed to ensure accurate information about the virus is available to the public and medical personnel. He also said Iranian authorities must “tell the truth” about the virus amid signs the outbreak there may be far wider than officially acknowledged.
“Expelling our journalists exposes once again the government’s issue that led to SARS and now the coronavirus, namely censorship. It can have deadly consequences,” Pompeo said of China.
“Had China permitted its own and foreign journalists and medical personnel to speak and investigate freely, Chinese officials and other nations would have been far better prepared to address the challenge,” he told reporters at a State Department news conference.
On Iran, which now has the second highest number of infections after China and where officials said earlier Tuesday that the head of the country’s counter-coronavirus task force tested positive for the virus, Pompeo said the U.S. is “deeply concerned” that the government “may have suppressed vital details about the outbreak.”
 “All nations, including Iran, should tell the truth about the coronavirus and cooperate with international aid organizations,” he said.
The virus that originated in China has now infected more than 80,000 people and killed more than 2,500, mostly in China.  
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The United States will act if Russia seeks to undermine this year’s U.S. presidential election, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Tuesday, but gave no other details about what steps the Trump administration would take.”Meddling in our elections is unacceptable,” Pompeo told  reporters at a news conference. “Should Russia or any foreign actor take steps to undermine our democratic processes, we will take action in response.”
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to open the door for foreign nationals to pursue civil rights cases in American courts, declining to revive a lawsuit by a slain Mexican teenager’s family against the U.S. Border Patrol agent who shot him on Mexican soil from across the border in Texas.The court ruled 5-4 to uphold a lower court’s dismissal of the lawsuit against the agent, Jesus Mesa, who shot 15-year-old Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca in the face in the 2010 incident. The family sued in federal court seeking monetary damages, accusing Mesa of violating the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment ban on unjustified deadly force and the Fifth Amendment right to due process.
The court, with the five conservative justices in the majority, refused to allow people who are not in the United States at the time of a cross-border incident to file civil rights lawsuits in federal court.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for majority, said the case presented “foreign relations and national security implications” and noted that Congress should decide whether such lawsuits can be permitted, backing the position taken by President Donald Trump’s administration.
The incident took place in June 2010 on the border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. Mesa did not face criminal charges, though Mexico condemned the shooting. The family also sued the federal government over the shooting but that was dismissed early in the litigation.
The ruling was issued at a time of high tensions involving the southern border, where Trump is pursuing construction of a wall separating the United States and Mexico.
The dispute hinged on whether the family, despite Hernandez having died on Mexican soil, could seek monetary damages against what they call a “rogue” agent for alleged civil rights violations.
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Seven candidates for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the U.S. presidential race take to the debate stage Tuesday night in the southern state of South Carolina.Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has the momentum of a resounding victory in Saturday’s Nevada caucuses, along with a lead in the overall count of delegates that candidates need to amass in order to be selected as the Democrat to go up against President Donald Trump in November.Front-runner status can make a candidate a target for the others in the debate, but public opinion polls in South Carolina may turn some of that focus on former Vice President Joe Biden.Biden sits third in the delegate count after scoring a second-place finish in Nevada — his best so far since voters began having their say this month.  Polls show him as the favorite in South Carolina, several points ahead of Sanders.Polling also points to a potential opportunity for billionaire Tom Steyer to have his moment in the Democratic race with a level of support he has not yet seen.  Yet to win a single delegate, polls showed him third in South Carolina, ahead of former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.From left, Democratic presidential candidates, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., participate in a Democratic presidential primary debate, Feb. 19, 2020, in Las Vegas.Tuesday’s debate is not only a chance for the candidates to make an impression on voters in South Carolina, but also on those in some of the states voting March 3 that allow people to cast their ballots early.March 3 is set up to be a critical date in shaping the race with voting in 14 states along with the U.S. territory American Samoa.  A total of 1,357 delegates are at stake, compared to the 54 in play in South Carolina.Not on the ballot in South Carolina but taking part in the debate there is former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who decided not to contest the February states in favor of focusing a massive media campaign on the March 3 states.He participated in his first debate last week in Nevada, drawing sharp attacks from his opponents who criticized his approach as trying to buy the nomination, while he countered he is the best choice to oppose Trump.The Democratic Party will formally name its presidential candidate at a convention in July.  Republicans will nominate Trump at their convention in August.
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About 20,000 mourners recalled the lives of NBA basketball great Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna, who were killed in a helicopter crash last month.  Mike O’Sullivan reports from Los Angeles, where Bryant played his entire career with the Lakers.
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U.S. government officials are still considering ways to further curb sales to China’s Huawei Technologies, despite President Donald Trump’s tweets and comments last week in support of sales to China, according to people familiar with the matter.An interagency meeting was held Thursday to discuss national security and China export issues, including proposals to restrict sales of chips to Huawei and a plan to block the sale of jet engines for China’s new passenger airplane.While blocking General Electric Co from supplying jet engines appeared to be off the table after Trump opposed efforts to stop their sale, sources told Reuters on Monday new restrictions aimed at limiting Huawei’s presence in the global telecommunications market were still on the table.Trump told reporters last week that U.S. chipmakers should be able to sell to other countries, but he was not clear on how to handle Huawei, the world’s second-largest smartphone maker. Trump said on Tuesday he wanted U.S. companies “to be allowed to do business.””I mean, things are put on my desk that have nothing to do with national security, including with chipmakers and various others,” he said.National security concerns should not be used as an excuse to make it difficult for foreign countries to buy U.S. products, he said.Trump’s views contrasted with the sharp restrictions his administration has placed on U.S. companies trading with Huawei on U.S. national security and foreign policy concerns.The United States alleges the Chinese government could use Huawei equipment to spy, an accusation Huawei has rejected. Policymakers have been sharply divided ahead of a possible cabinet-level meeting, which had been scheduled for Feb. 28 but has now been pushed to a later date. Some officials have favored a tough line on Huawei and China, while others are more focused on trading with the world’s second-largest economy.
 
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Robert Julian Stone was tired of waiting, afraid that complaints of sexual abuse at the hands of a former University of Michigan doctor would be covered up.So five months after contacting the university to report that he’d been assaulted during a 1971 medical exam — and after learning there were more alleged victims — the 69-year-old Stone turned to The Detroit News.The newspaper last week was the first to report Stone’s allegations against the late Dr. Robert E. Anderson, triggering a flood of similar reports. It was reminiscent of sex abuse scandals at other universities, where the media reported allegations before officials publicly acknowledged complaints against doctors.A 2016 Indianapolis Star investigation of sexual abuse in USA Gymnastics prompted former gymnast Rachel Denhollander to alert the newspaper to the decades-long sexual abuse of girls by Michigan State University doctor Larry Nassar, who’s now in prison.In 2011, the Patriot-News broke the story that former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was being investigated by a grand jury. Sandusky ultimately was convicted of 45 counts of child sexual abuse and sentenced to prison.A former Ohio State University wrestler contacted The Columbus Dispatch in 2018 about a sports doctor’s decades of abuse, although the university announced an investigation before the newspaper could finish reporting. More than 350 alleged victims are suing the university.Kelly McBride, senior vice president at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and chair of its ethics and leadership center, said the media’s role in reporting such abuses and holding institutions accountable shows “the power of local journalism.””You cannot possibly overestimate the importance of public scrutiny on an institution, whether it’s public or private,” said McBride, comparing it to abuse in the Catholic Church.At Nassar’s 2018 sentencing hearing, where more than 150 women and girls gave victim statements, a prosecutor said the doctor likely still would be sexually assaulting girls if not for The Indianapolis Star investigation.”We as a society need investigative journalists more than ever,” Assistant Attorney General Angela Povilaitis said at the time.The praise comes as newspaper readership overall is declining and amid increased attacks on the credibility of news organizations by President Donald Trump, who often derides news he doesn’t like as “fake.”‘Stonewalled’ by universityStone said he emailed two university officials in August 2019 to report that Anderson assaulted him during a 1971 medical exam. He said Anderson had exposed himself and used Stone’s hand to fondle himself. Stone said he did not report it at the time.He said he decided to contact the newspaper in January because he began to feel “stonewalled” by the university as he tried to get a copy of his case file. He said a university official told him he couldn’t have it because a broader investigation involving more victims wasn’t finished.Stone feared the university and the prosecutor could keep the case open indefinitely, and no one would ever know about the allegations, said Detroit News Editor Gary Miles. After preliminary interviews with Stone, Miles said, the newspaper “put our reporter on a plane to meet with him” at his Palm Springs, California, home.”We had the sense … that this could be much bigger than just him. But without people coming forward, how would you know there were other victims?” said Miles.University of Michigan officials said last week that they had begun investigating complaints against Anderson in 2018 after a former wrestler reported that he was fondled during medical exams in the 1970s. They said the investigation involved five ex-students, and documents released to The Associated Press on Friday show Stone was among them.The university said it hadn’t announced the investigation or called for others to come forward while waiting for prosecutors to finish reviewing the case for potential charges.University spokesman Rick Fitzgerald said Saturday the school had been asking the Washtenaw County prosecutor’s office if charges would be coming against Anderson for months and found out none would be authorized on Tuesday at the same time the Detroit News was notified. It’s the same day the university was contacted by the newspaper for comment.’Important function’ of media Stone said he believed contacting the newspaper “did serve my purpose of finally getting the university to own” the situation and reach out to other victims.Others have since come forward with similar allegations. The former wrestler whose complaint in July 2018 set off the investigation also said he’d complained decades ago.Denhollander blasted Michigan’s response, saying it forced the survivors to have to speak publicly to get anything to happen, which she called “re-victimizing and re-violating.”Miles said that he doesn’t underestimate the courage it took Stone to call the newspaper.”It was such a leap of faith,” he said. “But it’s critically important that people realize the important function that the media plays in exposing wrongdoing.”
 
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Tourists walk through an old Victorian-style row house in Washington’s most historic African American neighborhood. As they move through rooms and up narrow stairwells, many are unaware the man who lived and worked here established the first black history observance.The home of Carter G. Woodson stands as a lasting tribute to the black historian, author and teacher who devoted his life to showcasing the treasures of African American history. “Woodson was a man with purpose. He set out to help African Americans uncover a lot of the truth about their history that seemingly was kept from them,” said National Park Service Ranger John Fowler. The group of ethnically diverse visitors listens as Fowler points to the room where Woodson established “Negro History Week” in 1926. Now, the U.S. tradition is observed as Black History Month in February.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
Actor Dexter Hamlett portrays Carter Woodson for tour groups that visit the home in Washington. (Chris Simkins/VOA)These works, shunned at the time by the Library of Congress, were later published by Woodson in the “Journal of Negro History.” It was the first academic publication written for and by people of African descent.Other publications were created for the schoolroom so that teachers could ensure children learned about black history.  A U.S. tradition of celebrating black historyIn 1926, Carter Woodson sought to increase public awareness of black history, establishing the annual February observance of “Negro History Week,” which later became “Black History Month” in 1976.The tradition was born out of the belief that if African Americans were to take their rightful place in American society, people of all races should learn about black contributions to the nation.“He connected us to the rest of the world because our beginnings started in Africa. And even today all over the world, black history month is recognized and people are beginning to understand it was never meant to just be a week or a month but is to be studied for the entire year,” Dunn said.  Carter Woodson is shown working in his home located in Washington’s Shaw neighborhood during the 1940’s. (Chris Simkins/VOA)Historians maintain Woodson chose February for the black history observance because Feb. 12 was President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday and Feb. 14 was the accepted birthday of Frederick Douglass. Both men fought to end slavery in the United States and are viewed as heroes in the African American community and among many Americans of all races.“I wonder even if there would be African American history as it is without Woodson really fighting for that and committing his life to it,” said tourist Julia Goodman-Gafney, a high school history teacher from Prince George’s County, Maryland. “I try to share the rich history with my students and tell them we use Black History Month to celebrate what we learned, not just to learn. This is supposed to be the celebration of the contributions people of African descent made to this country.”Said Fowler: “Dr. Woodson felt that if he could somehow influence the masses by revealing this history, this historical truth that the lives of people of African descent were more than just [victims of] slavery. He believed that education and increasing social and professional contacts among blacks and whites could reduce racism.” Dr. Woodson “knew people would not publish what he was writing. So he started his own publishing company right in this home,” noted Dunn.During Woodson’s life, Washington was a segregated city with blacks only allowed to live in certain neighborhoods. Woodson’s home became an institution in the area where blacks could gather and learn. “This home is where Dr. Woodson would train and mentor a lot of the leading scholars, activists and historians. He wanted this home to be a cultural center and he achieved that,” said Fowler.As visitors filed out of the home, tourist Stan Thompson paused, then said, “Mr. Woodson would be proud that people of all races can live in this neighborhood today and tourists from all over can come here to learn about the history Carter Woodson fought so hard to preserve and publicize.” 
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Harvey Weinstein was convicted Monday at his sexual assault trial, sealing his dizzying fall from powerful Hollywood studio boss to archvillain of the (hash)MeToo movement.
He was found guilty of criminal sex act for assaulting production assistant Mimi Haleyi at his apartment in 2006 and third-degree rape of a woman in 2013. The jury found him not guilty on the most serious charge, predatory sexual assault, that could have resulted in a life sentence.
The verdict followed weeks of often harrowing and excruciatingly graphic testimony from a string of accusers who told of rapes, forced oral sex, groping, masturbation, lewd propositions and that’s-Hollywood excuses from Weinstein about how the casting couch works.
The conviction was seen as a long-overdue reckoning for Weinstein after years of whispers about his behavior turned into a torrent of accusations in 2017 that destroyed his career and gave rise to (hash)MeToo, the global movement to encourage women to come forward and hold powerful men accountable for their sexual misconduct.
The jury of seven men and five women took five days to find him guilty.
The case against the once-feared producer was essentially built on three allegations: that he raped an aspiring actress in a New York City hotel room in 2013, that he forcibly performed oral sex on Haleyi and that he raped and forcibly performed oral sex on “Sopranos” actress Annabella Sciorra in her apartment in the mid-1990s.
Three additional women who said they, too, were attacked by Weinstein also testified as part of an effort by prosecutors to show a pattern of brutish behavior on his part.
The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sex crimes unless they grant permission, as Haleyi and Sciorra did.
Jurors signaled their struggles with the Sciorra charges four days into deliberations. On Friday, after reviewing sections of her testimony and related evidence, they sent a note to the judge indicating they were deadlocked on the counts but had reached a unanimous verdict on the others. After some debate in the courtroom, the judge ordered jurors to keep deliberating.
While Weinstein did not testify, his lawyers contended that any sexual contact was consensual and that his accusers went to bed with him to advance their careers.
The defense seized on the fact that two of the women central to the case stayed in contact with Weinstein through warm and even flirty emails  — and had sex with him  — well after he supposedly attacked them.
The hard-charging and phenomenally successful movie executive helped bring to the screen such Oscar winners as “Good Will Hunting,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The King’s Speech” and “Shakespeare in Love” and nurtured the careers of celebrated filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith.
Weinstein now faces charges in Los Angeles. In that case, announced just as the New York trial was getting under way on Jan. 6, authorities allege Weinstein raped one woman and sexually assaulted another on back-to-back nights during Oscars week in 2013. One of those women testified as a supporting witness at the New York trial.
The trial was the first criminal case to arise from a barrage of allegations against Weinstein from more than 90 women, including actresses Gwyneth Paltrow, Salma Hayek and Uma Thurman. Most of those cases were too old to prosecute.
During the trial, Weinstein regularly trudged into the courthouse stooped and unshaven, using a walker after recently undergoing back surgery  — a far cry from the way he was depicted in court as a burly, intimidating figure whose eyes seemed to turn black with menace when his anger flared.
Many of Weinstein’s accusers described him as a “Jekyll and Hyde” character who could be incredibly charming at first, making jokes and showing interest in using his immense power to help their careers.
But that was an act, they said, meant to gain their trust and get them to a place  — often a hotel room or an apartment  — where he could violate them.
“If he heard the word ‘no,’ it was like a trigger for him,” his rape accuser testified.
Several women testified that Weinstein excused his behavior as the price for getting ahead in Hollywood. One said that when she laughed off his advances, he sneered, “You’ll never make it in this business. This is how this industry works.”
The jury heard lurid testimony that Weinstein injected himself with a needle to get an erection, that his genitals appeared disfigured, that he sent Sciorra a box of chocolate penises and that he once showed up uninvited at her hotel room door in his underwear with a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a video in the other.
The prosecution’s task was made more complicated because two of the women at the very center of the case didn’t just abandon Weinstein after the alleged encounters: Haleyi testified that she had sex with him two weeks later, while the rape accuser whose name was withheld said she had a sexual encounter with him more than three years afterward.
Like Haleyi, she sent Weinstein friendly and sometimes flirtatious emails, such as “Miss you big guy” and “I love you, always do. But I hate feeling like a booty call.”
During a cross-examination from Weinstein’s lawyers so exhaustive that she broke down in tears on the stand, the woman said she sent him flattering emails and kept seeing him because she was afraid of his unpredictable anger and “I wanted him to believe I wasn’t a threat.”
To blunt that line of questioning, prosecutors called to the witness stand a forensic psychiatrist who said that most sexual assault victims continue to have contact with their attackers and that they hope what happened to them “is just an aberration.”
During closing arguments, Weinstein lawyer Donna Rotunno charged that Weinstein had become “the target of a cause and a movement”  — (hash)MeToo  — and asked the jury to ignore “outside forces.”
“This is not a popularity contest,” she said.
She said the case against Weinstein amounted to “regret renamed as rape,” arguing that the women exercised their free will to try to further their careers.
Prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon told the jury that Weinstein considered himself such a big shot in Hollywood that he thought he could get away with treating women as “complete disposables.”
 “The universe is run by me and they don’t get to complain when they get stepped on, spit on, demoralized and, yes, raped and abused by me  — the king,” she said, mimicking Weinstein.
Rumors about Weinstein’s behavior swirled in Hollywood circles for a long time, but he managed to silence many accusers with payoffs, nondisclosure agreements and the constant fear that he could crush their careers if they spoke out.
Weinstein was finally arrested and led away in handcuffs in May 2018, seven months after The New York Times and The New Yorker exposed his alleged misconduct in stories that would win the Pulitzer Prize.
Among other men taken down by the (hash)MeToo movement since the scandal broke: news anchors Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, actor Kevin Spacey and Sen. Al Franken.
Weinstein, the product of a working-class family from Queens, achieved success at two movie studios he created with his brother Bob: Miramax  — named for their parents, Miriam and Max  — and then the Weinstein Co.
The Weinstein Co. went bankrupt after his disgrace. A tentative settlement was reached last year to resolve nearly all lawsuits stemming from the scandal. It would pay Weinstein’s alleged victims about $25 million. Under the proposed deal, Weinstein would not have to admit any wrongdoing or personally pay anything; the studio’s insurance companies would cover the cost.
Weinstein’s efforts to silence his accusers and thwart journalists who sought to expose his secrets included hiring Black Cube, an Israeli spy agency staffed by former Mossad agents. Asked one day as he left court why he hired that firm, Weinstein turned to a reporter and said: “For days like this.”   
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