Category: USA

American Michael Sharp told his mother two years ago he was committed to helping the Congolese people in his role as a U.N. investigator and was “not afraid to die,” she recalled Thursday after he was murdered this week along with a colleague in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“He said the hardest thing for him was to think about pain he would cause his family,” Michele Miller Sharp said in a telephone interview from her home in Kansas. “I told him we all supported him and we would handle any pain and he should continue his work.”

Sharp’s mother learned of his death on her birthday. United Nations peacekeepers in Congo this week discovered his body and that of Zaida Catalan, a Swedish national, who had been missing in an area engulfed in violence.

Sharp, 34, was in a group of experts monitoring sanctions imposed on Congo by the U.N. Security Council when he and others were kidnapped this month in Kasai Central province.

Despite the risks, Sharp’s parents, who live outside Wichita, “were fully supportive of him because he was passionate. This was his calling,” said his father, John E. Sharp, 65.

“We were not about to step in the way of that, in spite of our fears,” he added. “Although we hoped and prayed something like this would never happen, we knew it was a possibility.”

Passion, respect

Michael Sharp was raised in Indiana and learned from his Mennonite Christian faith the core values of peace building and nonviolence, his 62-year-old mother said. After studying history in college, Michael headed to Germany, where he volunteered and then earned a master’s degree in international conflict resolution.

Sharp resided in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when he was on breaks from his work. In Congo, he worked three years building relationships with militia leaders, convincing them to lay down their weapons and release the children they had dragooned into being soldiers.

“That was his passion, to work at helping this war-torn country,” said his mother. “He cared deeply about the Congolese people.”

Michael joined the U.N. in 2015 as a militia group expert, presenting information to the Security Council and making recommendations on sanctions, his parents said.

Colleagues told his parents that Congolese militia leaders respected their son, who would travel for miles, unarmed, to meet them under a banana tree and just listen to them.

Michael would no doubt be amazed at the fuss about him as he was very unassuming and humble, his father said. While he understood the risks involved, he worried more about the effect his death might have on his family.

“About two years ago, he sat down beside me and said, ‘Mom you know I don’t have death wish in the work I do, but I want you to know I’m not afraid to die either.'” his mother said. She said the family supported him.

“From a toddler on up, every day was lived to the fullest,” she added.

U.N. leaders react

Meanwhile, his parents and two sisters wait for the return of Michael’s body to the United States, where U.S. officials will perform an autopsy. His parents said U.N. officials have been in constant communication with them.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday said the world body would “do everything possible to ensure that justice is done.” U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley called the death senseless.

“Michael was working on the front lines of what we try to do at the United Nations every day: find problems and fix them,” she said in a statement. “He selflessly put himself in harm’s way to try to make a difference in the lives of the Congolese people.”

Congo’s Kasai Central region is the center of the Kamuina Nsapu insurgency that has now spread to five provinces in the loosely governed Central African country.

The parents said they hope the U.N. doesn’t abandon its work in Congo due to their son’s death. “We would not want this tragedy to be compounded by withdrawal from that region,” the father, John, said. “We also want the U.S. to continue its funding to the U.N.”
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Several environmental groups filed lawsuits against the Trump administration on Thursday to challenge its decision to approve construction of TransCanada Corp’s controversial Keystone XL crude oil pipeline.

In two separate filings to a federal court in Montana, environmental groups argued that the U.S. State Department, which granted the permit needed for the pipeline to cross the Canadian border, relied on an “outdated and incomplete environmental impact statement” when making its decision earlier this month.

By approving the pipeline without public input and an up-to-date environmental assessment, the administration violated the National Environmental Policy Act, groups including the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and the Northern Plains Resource Council said in their legal filing.

“They have relied on an arbitrary, stale, and incomplete environmental review completed over three years ago, for a process that ended with the State Department’s denial of a cross-border permit,” the court filing says.

In the other filing, the Indigenous Environmental Network and North Coast Rivers Alliance sought injunctive relief, restraining Transcanada from taking any action that would harm the “physical environment in connection with the project pending a full hearing on the merits.”

Trump surrounded by supporters

U.S. President Donald Trump announced the presidential permit for the Keystone XL at the White House last week. TransCanada’s Chief Executive Officer Russ Girling and Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, stood nearby.

Trump, a Republican, said the project would lower consumer fuel prices, create jobs and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

His Democratic predecessor, former president Barack Obama, rejected the pipeline, saying it would lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions and do nothing to reduce fuel prices for U.S. motorists.

“This tar sands pipeline poses a direct threat to our climate, our clean water, wildlife, and thousands of landowners and communities along the route of this dirty and dangerous project, and it must and will be stopped,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.

Earlier lawsuit targets coal leases

The lawsuits came on the heels of a lawsuit filed on Wednesday challenging other recent moves to undo Obama’s climate change regulations.

Conservation groups and the Northern Cheyenne Native American tribe of Montana sued the administration on Wednesday for violating the National Environmental Policy Act when it lifted a moratorium on coal leases on federal land.

All lawsuits have been filed in U.S. District Court in Montana’s Great Falls Division.
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Members of Congress looking into Russian interference in last year’s presidential election have been invited to the White House to examine relevant secret documents.

Lawmakers confirmed such a letter was received by the Senate and House intelligence committees Thursday, a move that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer defended as “doing the responsible thing.” The documents to be reviewed apparently were the basis for controversial comments by Congressman Devin Nunes that were seen by some as bolstering President Donald Trump’s charge that his campaign team was “wiretapped” last year on the orders of former President Barack Obama.

Even as he announced the offer to bring relevant lawmakers to the White House to review secret information, Spicer deflected reporters’ questions Thursday about Nunes’ unusual visit to the White House grounds more than a week ago to see the intelligence reports.

Spicer answered “no” when asked whether he knew who invited Nunes to the White House complex on March 21, and he steered clear of confirming or denying details of a news report that named two officials who allegedly gave Nunes intelligence information.

The New York Times posted a story online just prior to Spicer’s briefing Thursday naming two White House officials who it said helped provide Nunes with highly classified intelligence reports indicating that Trump and his associates were swept up in surveillance of foreign officials by U.S. spy agencies.

Process vs. substance

The press secretary has repeatedly criticized White House correspondents for focusing their questions on process — essentially, who told what to whom — rather than substance, the details of the information that Nunes received.

“Process here is the whole story,” Ken Gude, an analyst who specializes in national security issues, told VOA. “The White House basically used Nunes here, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, to filter, to ‘launder’ some of the information.”

Gude, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said it appeared that White House officials fed information to Nunes to give Trump “some cover.” The president had been widely criticized following his allegation on March 4 that Obama ordered electronic surveillance against Trump’s campaign team — an assertion that has been repeatedly denied by senior U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials.

The Times said the two officials who provided Nunes with highly classified intelligence reports were former Defense Intelligence Agency official Ezra Cohen-Watnick, now the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a former House Intelligence Committee staffer who now works on national security issues at the White House counsel’s office.

Spicer declined to discuss the Times report, saying, “I’m not going to get into further details on this.”

WATCH: Spicer Stresses Substance Over Process

Russian meddling

A government investigation of Russian meddling during the U.S. presidential campaign last year has stayed in the headlines for weeks, particularly since Trump tweeted his belief that his headquarters in New York City had been “wiretapped.” U.S. intelligence officials have said there were no surveillance orders from Obama aimed at Trump, and that no such order could come from the president, under domestic intelligence-gathering procedures in place for years.

Nunes, a former adviser to Trump’s presidential transition team, subsequently said that he did not believe Trump Tower had been bugged, but that the campaign team’s communications could have been caught up in a wider investigation that inadvertently targeted the transition office.

On March 22, a day after his mysterious nighttime visit to the White House grounds — a large area that incorporates the adjacent Executive Office Building, which is the headquarters of the National Security Council — Nunes told reporters he had been shown intelligence indicating communications involving Trump and/or his associates had been captured in a legal “but inappropriate” manner.

Nunes has been mum on who at the White House showed him the materials.

His behavior has been strongly criticized by Democrats, and the party’s ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, has called on Nunes to step down from his chairman’s post.

“Why all the cloak and dagger stuff? That’s something we need to get to the bottom of,” Schiff told reporters Thursday.

Schiff added that while the matter of incidental collection is important, “This issue is not going to distract us from doing our Russia investigation, and Democrats on the committee are committed ‘to get the bottom of just what the Russians did.'”

Gude, the senior fellow for national security at the Center for American Progress, said White House officials “have not been dealing with this in a forthright and honest manner.”

“They keep not telling the truth about what is going on in this,” Gude told VOA, “and it certainly appears as if there’s an effort to obstruct these investigations.”

VOA’s Elizabeth Cherneff contributed reporting for this story.
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Reducing inequality, securing water supplies and strengthening disaster prevention is crucial to bolster Chile’s quake-prone capital against climate change and other hazards, Santiago’s authorities said.

In a new strategy to make the city more resilient, they laid out plans this week to cut congestion and air pollution, improve public transport and build more parks in low-income areas.

But better governance is essential to the strategy, said Claudio Orrego, governor of the Santiago metropolitan region, which has 34 municipal districts and mayors.

“Santiago is a city of disasters — we have had in the last year the worst fires ever, we had two floods in the city [and] two important water supply cuts,” said Orrego by telephone from Santiago, which is home to more than 6.1 million people.

“All of this is due to the climate change impact on the city, and that requires protocols, coordination and infrastructure to cope,” he said in an interview.

Resilient cities

The strategy, released as part of Santiago’s participation in the 100 Resilient Cities initiative, brings together programs underway in the city, one of the most unequal in Latin America because of wide gaps between rich and poor in housing, education and services, as well as gender inequality.

Rapid, uncoordinated urban growth has led to low-income housing being built on the poorly connected fringes of Santiago with inadequate infrastructure and few green spaces, said the report, noting that around 18 percent of residents of the greater metropolitan region live in poverty.

“We are sitting everyone at the table,” Orrego said. “Be it flooding, be it earthquakes, we’re taking an integrated approach to the future.”

With climate change expected to reduce rainfall and increase temperatures in the area, Santiago wants to end overexploitation of its water supply. It is developing a water fund to help secure supplies for the city, and protect water sources such as glaciers high in the surrounding Andes.

“Having a public-private endeavor, trying to protect in a very holistic way all the water supply we use in the city is something new,” said Orrego, stressing the urgency of the task.

The city’s resilience plan includes measures to develop an early warning system to lower the risk of floods and wildfires — after recent devastating blazes reached the outskirts of the city, blanketing it with smoke — and to strengthen emergency relief efforts.

Improving governance

Situated in a dry, mountain valley, Santiago is likely to be increasingly affected by problems such as urban heat waves and shortages of water and power, while agricultural demand for water could exacerbate drought conditions in rural areas, according to the report.

The San Ramon fault line runs along the edge of the city. So the resilience strategy lays out plans to link emergency response efforts and set up a system to monitor seismic activity, while tightening building regulations and factoring vulnerabilities into urban planning.

In the long term, the city may need to redefine its approach to zoning and land use, taking into account transport, social exclusion and disaster risks, Orrego said.

Michael Berkowitz, president of 100 Resilient Cities, which is backed by The Rockefeller Foundation, said cities across Latin America need to improve governance to stop crime, inequality and exposure to natural hazards hampering their development.

“It’s understanding that if you have a safer, more equitable city, that will make you better able to withstand the next earthquake or the next flood,” Berkowitz said.

The perception of high corruption is hindering the growth of public-private partnerships in the region and hobbling cities’ resilience efforts, he added.

“If they can get some of these governance, transition, empowerment issues right, I think you could see Latin American cities make some real progress over the next 10 or 15 years,” Berkowitz said.
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More than 200,000 people have signed an online petition calling for U.S. first lady Melania Trump to leave New York City and move into the White House or pay the cost of protecting her in the Trump Tower.

The Change.org petition was started after a senior White House aide indicated the president’s wife and son, Barron, will remain in New York until the school year ends.

“The U.S. taxpayer is paying an exorbitant amount of money to protect the First Lady in Trump Tower, located in New York City,” the petition says. “As to help relieve the national debt, this expense yields no positive results for the nation and should be cut from being funded.”

The New York Police Department estimated it costs between $127,000 and $146,000 per day to protect Melania Trump and her son.  

Comments beneath the Change.org petition highlighted the signers’ dissatisfaction over the first family’s use of taxpayer funds.

“Living in the White House is what you do when you are married to the president,” one commenter identified as Sheila Forsyth of Newport, Rhode Island, wrote. “The tax money saved by eliminating these extra protection expenses can be used to feed senior citizens. Why is our tax money being spent on people who already have more than their fair share?”

Local authorities in Florida have voiced similar frustration at the costs of protecting the president during his frequent visits to his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort and golf club.

Since taking office January 20, Trump has visited the estate on five weekends.
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From the exploitation of workers in carnivals to forcing people into door-to-door sales, more under-reported forms of modern slavery are emerging in the United States which need to be tackled, according to a report released Wednesday.

The anti-slavery group Polaris said it had analyzed data from 40,000 likely cases of human trafficking and labor exploitation based on calls to a national hotline since 2007 and divided these into 25 different types of modern slavery.

While sexual exploitation in bars and forced labor in tobacco fields, nail salons and homes is well known, other forms of slavery are going under the radar with little action taken to tackle these crimes, said Polaris CEO Bradley Myles.

Polaris, which runs the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline, said its study was based on the largest amount of data gathered on human trafficking in the United States.

“We found cases of personal sexual servitude where gang members hold someone basically in captivity in their house for purposes of their own sexual pleasure,” Myles told Reuters, adding that traffickers had unique ways of recruiting and controlling victims.

Trafficking on rise

Last year, 7,572 trafficking cases were reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, a rise of 24 percent on 2015, according to Polaris, with at least 5,550 cases related to sex trafficking and 1,057 to trafficking for forced labor.

The most common form of trafficking was sexual exploitation taking place in hotel rooms and private parties, described in the report as escort services.

The report also uncovered more obscure types of trafficking, involving victims forced to work in acting, choir and dance troupes or made to operate rides and food stalls at carnivals and fairs. It also uncovered children being forced to beg.

“Our minds need to be as wide open as possible to see the totality of it than to narrow in on certain types,” Myles said.

Who is most at risk?

The report found that trafficked victims working in the beauty business, such as nail and hair salons, were most likely to be women from China and Vietnam.

While the majority of labor trafficking victims in construction were men from Mexico and Central America, those working in the hotel industry were typically from Jamaica, the Philippines and India.

U.S.-born adults and children are most likely to be victims of sexual exploitation and be forced into door-to-door sales, the report said.

Children who have run away from home, those who have been sexually abused, and those in the care of social services or foster parents are most vulnerable.

Myles said that, all too often, it was assumed that trafficking happens elsewhere and doesn’t involve U.S.-born citizens.

“Manipulative and very predatory U.S. citizen pimps see a market opportunity to re-exploit those already vulnerable U.S. citizen girls and boys,” he said.
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Trump administration trade officials want a revamped North American Free Trade Agreement to improve access for U.S. farm products, manufactured goods and services in Canada and Mexico, said lawmakers who met with them Tuesday.

Members of the House Ways and Means Committee met with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and acting U.S. Trade Representative Stephen Vaughn to discuss the administration’s plans for renegotiating the 23-year-old trade deal.

Representative Bill Pascrell, a New Jersey Democrat, said Ross told lawmakers in the closed-door session that the administration was still aiming to complete NAFTA renegotiations by the end of 2017.

‘Ambitious’ schedule

That time frame is viewed by some members as “ambitious,” especially because it is not clear when the administration will formally notify Congress of its intention to launch NAFTA renegotiations, Pascrell said.

The notification will trigger a 90-day consultation period before substantial talks can begin. Tuesday’s meeting was a legal requirement to prepare the notification and preserve the “fast track” authority for approving a renegotiated deal with only an up-or-down vote in Congress.

President Donald Trump has long vilified NAFTA as draining millions of manufacturing jobs to Mexico, and he has vowed to quit the trade pact unless it can be renegotiated to shrink U.S. trade deficits.

Lawmakers said Ross and Vaughn discussed broad negotiating objectives, but did not get into specific issues such as U.S. access to Canada’s dairy sector or rules of origin for parts used on North American-assembled vehicles.

Key objectives

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican, told reporters that market access, modernizing NAFTA and “holding trading partners accountable” were key objectives articulated by Ross and Vaughn.

“They were very clear. They want to open access in ag, manufacturing and services as well, so they want this to be a 21st-century agreement,” Brady said.

Spokesmen for the Commerce Department and USTR were not immediately available for comment on the meeting.

Lawmakers said the administration has not settled on the form of the negotiations, whether NAFTA will remain a trilateral agreement or whether it would be split into two bilateral trade deals.

“My sense is that they are not prejudging the form. They are focused on the substance of the agreement itself with Mexico and Canada,” Brady said.

Some lawmakers expressed frustration that the Trump officials were short on specific answers.

“I wouldn’t exactly call this meeting as moving the ball forward very much,” said Representative Ron Kind, a Wisconsin Democrat.
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Embattled House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes threw a formerly bipartisan investigation of Russian election interference into doubt Tuesday, as he rejected calls for his recusal and stopped the committee’s work for the rest of the week.

Nunes cancelled a closed-door briefing with FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers, deepening the frustrations of Democratic members who said Nunes’ actions over the last week-and-a-half jeopardized his credibility and undermined his ability to lead the investigation.

Nunes met a source on White House grounds before making his disclosure last week that President Donald Trump was caught up in “incidental” surveillance, according to his spokesman, who added that Nunes wanted “to have proximity to a secure location where he could view the information provided by the source.”

That revelation led ranking Democratic committee member Rep. Adam Schiff to call for Nunes to step away from the Russia investigation.

“Why would I do that?” Nunes asked a small group of reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday. “Everything is moving as is,” he added, saying scheduling an open hearing would be “a logical first step” after a meeting with Comey.

But Democrats said the committee’s work has stalled.

“To suggest that we need to hear from Comey and Rogers is to suggest that there’s only two hours in the day and we have to make a decision,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democratic committee member. “We could have done both.”

Swalwell said he asked Nunes to meet with all committee members to diffuse the situation.

“Just to sit in the same room and talk about what he saw, who he received it from and how it’s relevant for what we’re trying to do with the Russia investigation. I think that would take a lot of tension out of this process,” he said.

Nunes has still not revealed the identity of the source.

He spoke with reporters and the president about the material last week without informing any of the other 21 members of the House Intelligence Committee, angering Democrats who questioned Nunes’ credibility. Nunes later apologized to the committee.

“We’re trying to get those documents as rapidly as possible,” Nunes told VOA Tuesday on efforts to brief other committee members. He maintained that his relationship with other members is “good” and that its Russia probe is moving forward.

Former AG Yates

Nunes’ meeting on White House grounds was not the only concern Tuesday.

A Washington Post report said the Trump administration tried to block former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates from testifying at an open House Intelligence Committee hearing this week “about the events leading up” to former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s firing, “including his attempts to cover up his secret conversations with the Russian ambassador.”

Nunes’ cancellation of that hearing prompted Schiff to question “whether the White House’s desire to avoid a public claim of executive privilege to keep her from providing the full truth on what happened contributed to the decision to cancel today’s hearing. We do not know. But we would urge that the open hearing be rescheduled without further delay,” Schiff said.

The White House denied taking action to prevent Yates from testifying.

Congress reaction on Nunes

Fellow Republicans defended Nunes’ actions.

“He did the exact right thing from beginning to end and there really is a concerted effort out to undermine him,” Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York, told VOA. “He’s really on to something, that’s why.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling on House Speaker Paul Ryan to replace Nunes as head of the Intelligence Committee, while House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi says the speaker should at least insist that Nunes is not involved in the Russia investigation.

“He has not been operating like someone who is interested in getting to the unvarnished truth,” Schumer said. “His actions look like those of someone who is interested in protecting the president and his party.”

But King said members of the committee stand by Nunes.

“Obviously, the president had nothing to do with it, the information is totally controlled, and it did not leak out at all,” King said. Ryan also said Nunes should not recuse himself.

The White House has defended Nunes’ actions, saying he had done his job to investigate allegations of surveillance and was being up front with journalists about his activities.

Trump, who earlier this month tweeted unsubstantiated allegations that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped his campaign while he ran for office, has said he was “somewhat vindicated” by Nunes’ statement about the surveillance.

Comey has said that there is no information to support Trump’s allegation that Obama ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower in New York. Trump has asked Congress to investigate.
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U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer says President Donald Trump’s choice for the Supreme Court, Judge Neil Gorsuch, faces an “uphill climb” for confirmation.

“The bottom line is very simple,” Schumer said Tuesday. “Gorsuch did not acquit himself well at the hearings and did not impress our caucus.” He said it will be a “real uphill climb” for the nominee to get the simple 51 vote majority he needs to join the court.

Durbin will vote no

The number two Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin, said Tuesday he will vote against Gorsuch. Schumer and 23 other Democrats already have said they will vote no.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to vote on Gorsuch next Monday. If he wins there, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has scheduled a vote in the full Senate on April 7.

McConnell says Gorsuch is “extraordinarily well qualified” to sit on the Supreme Court, and predicts he will be confirmed.

Democrats plan to filibuster 

Durbin echoed the fears of many Democrats when he said Gorsuch would “favor corporations and special interest elites at the expense of American workers and families.”

Democrats are still seething that McConnell refused to hold hearings last year for former President Barack Obama’s choice to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland. They plan to filibuster the Gorsuch nomination in the hopes it will be withdrawn.

It would take 60 votes to break the filibuster. Republicans hold a 52 to 48 majority in the Senate.

‘Nuclear option?’

If McConnell cannot get the 60 votes to end debate, he could call for what is known as the “nuclear option” — a change in Senate rules calling for a simple majority to end the filibuster and hold a conformation vote.

The Supreme Court is currently split between four liberal-leaning and four conservative-leaning justices since conservative Antonin Scalia died last year.

If Gorsuch is confirmed, the court would be restored to a five-to-four conservative-leaning majority.
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Montenegro is one step closer to becoming NATO’s 29th member.

Ratification of the treaty on Montenegro’s admission into the alliance cleared a procedural hurdle in the U.S. Senate Monday, setting the stage for a final vote later this week. Approving the treaty requires a two-thirds’ vote in the Senate, after which the president can ratify it.

Ninety-seven senators supported the measure.

“It [approval] will enhance our security. It will strengthen the alliance and it will send a strong message of resolve to Russia as it invades its neighbors and the international order,” Sen. Ben Cardin, D-MD, said. “No country outside the alliance gets a veto over who gets to join, especially Russia. So we must send a strong signal.”

A final vote is expected as early as Tuesday.

Tillerson supports addition to NATO

Earlier this month, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sent a letter to the Senate pressing lawmakers to approve the treaty ahead of a summit scheduled for May that will include NATO heads of state and government.

“Montenegro’s participation in the May NATO summit as a full member, not an observer, will send a strong signal of transatlantic unity, and that no third parties have veto power over NATO decisions,” Tillerson wrote in the letter. He said Montenegro’s membership would give NATO a contiguous border along the Adriatic coast.

Montenegro is in the middle of a clash between the West and Russia over influence in the Balkans. The outcome could determine the way the region is heading: toward NATO and the European Union, or back to Russia’s sphere of influence.

Two senators against expansion

All 28 of NATO’s members must ratify Montenegro’s accession before it can formally join the alliance. Only three members have not finalized their approval. The vote in the U.S. Senate was blocked for months by two Republican senators, Rand Paul and Mike Lee, who oppose expanding the military alliance.

Paul spoke on the floor against ratification of Montenegro’s membership and NATO expansion.

“Admitting Montenegro to NATO will do nothing to advance our national security, and will do everything to simply add another small country to the welfare wagon of NATO. Advocates for expanding NATO believe that unless the whole world joins NATO, Russia will conquer the world. but the truth is more nuanced,” he said. “The same cheerleaders for Montenegro being in NATO want Ukraine in NATO. They want Georgia in NATO. If both Ukraine and Georgia were in NATO today, we would be involved in a world war with Russia.”
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U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will not meet members of Turkish opposition groups during a one-day visit to Ankara this week where talks with President Tayyip Erdogan will focus on the war in Syria, senior U.S. officials said on Monday.

Thursday’s visit comes at a politically sensitive time in Turkey as the country prepares for a referendum on April 16 that proposes to change the constitution to give Erdogan new powers.

A senior State Department official said Tillerson will meet with Erdogan and government ministers involved in the fight against Islamic State in Syria.

“It is certainly something we are very acutely aware of and the secretary will be mindful of while he is there,” one State Department official told a conference call with reporters, referring to political sensitivities ahead of the referendum.

American officials expect Erdogan and others to raise the case of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom the government accuses of orchestrating a failed coup last July.

The focus of the Ankara talks is the U.S.-led offensive to retake Raqqa from Islamic State and to stabilize areas in which militants have been forced out, allowing refugees to return home, officials said.

A major sticking point between the United States and Turkey is U.S. backing for the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which Turkey considers part of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party that has been fighting an insurgency for three decades in Turkey.

But the United States has long viewed Kurdish fighters as key to retaking Raqqa alongside Arab fighters in the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

“We are very mindful of Turkey’s concerns and it is something that will continue to be a topic of conversation,” a second U.S. official said.

Turkey, Russia and Iran have held Syrian peace talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, on a ceasefire in Syria. The United States has proposed “areas of stability” where Islamic State has been pushed out and refugees can be returned.

Six years since the start of the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, he is winning on the battlefield although the war is far from over. The once stable country is broken into fiefdoms ruled by rebels and warlords.

“We’re looking forward to discussing with Turkey how we can reinforce ceasefire negotiations through the Astana process,” the second U.S. official said.
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The White House will take a lead role in crafting legislation to overhaul the U.S. tax code, eyeing an August target date as President Donald Trump seeks his first legislative victory following the failure last week of a long-promised bill to undo Obamacare.

Trump’s pledge to cut taxes, including a lowering of the rates paid by corporations, was a pillar of his 2016 presidential campaign and provided much of the fuel for the heady stock market rally that followed his Nov. 8 victory.

The White House said Monday it was moving ahead with tax reform, calling it a “huge priority” for the Republican president and “something that he feels very strongly about.”

“Obviously, we’re driving the train on this,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said during a briefing, adding, “We’re going to work with Congress on this.”

Spicer noted that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has talked about August as a target date for tax legislation, but said the timetable could slip depending on how quickly a consensus could be reached.

Getting a broad tax bill passed by Congress and on Trump’s desk to be signed into law will not be easy, especially after intra-party differences torpedoed the health care legislation, after the Trump administration fiercely lobbied for it.

Republicans for seven years had promised to dismantle Democratic former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare, and the Trump administration made it its top priority when Trump took office in January.

But the effort collapsed on Friday when members of the Freedom Caucus, the most conservative lawmakers of the House of Representatives, refused to support the bill, which was also backed by House Speaker Paul Ryan.

The stinging defeat alarmed investors who began reassessing the chances for passage of the tax agenda this year. Major U.S. stock indexes opened sharply lower on Monday before paring losses, with the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 ending only moderately down.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, the top House Republican tasked with tax reform, said over the weekend that the White House should start with proposals already in the House instead of crafting a separate bill.

“My point is that the Trump tax plan and the House Republican plan started at 80 percent the same. I think it’s grown to 90 percent or better,” Brady told reporters Monday.

“I think it’s critical for the White House and Republicans in Congress to agree on pro-growth tax reform together and move forward together as well,” he added.

Democrats might be open to talks

Analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch predicted in a research note that a tax bill, “if passed at all, could be a very watered-down version of current proposals.”

The White House over the weekend dangled the idea of a compromise tax restructuring that could win support from moderate Democrats. White House chief of staff Reince Priebus on Sunday said such a package could include middle-class tax cuts.

Spicer on Monday remained vague on how much Trump would allow the federal deficit to grow as a result of the tax cuts.

“It’s a really early question to be asking at this point,” Spicer said.

The U.S. tax code has not undergone a major overhaul since 1986, during the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan.

Democratic Senator Christopher Coons signaled his party would be open to discussing tax legislation if it was not merely a giveaway to the rich. Democrats had fought former President George W. Bush’s tax policies for that reason.

“If we have a move toward tax reform that could strengthen manufacturing, strengthen our exports and provide tax relief to the middle class — not overwhelmingly to the wealthiest — there’s a menu for us to start talking about it,” the Delaware senator told MSNBC’s Morning Joe program.

Although winning over Democrats may be tough, the alternative — getting Republicans to vote as a bloc — could be a hard road in light of the health care rebellion by Republican lawmakers.

“Trump is stuck. He can’t cajole the arch conservatives in the Republican Party, and at the same time, my sense is the Democrats don’t want to throw him a bone either, so it is going to be difficult,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at BMO Private Bank in Chicago.

One Republican lawmaker, Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, suggested Congress focus first on such things as getting a “realistic budget” done and passing legislation to raise the national debt ceiling.

“And then start on tax reform,” Cole said on MSNBC. “But start with real hearings and start in a way that everybody at least at the outset is a potential player.”

Representative Ted Poe of Texas, who resigned from the Freedom Caucus after the health care debacle, said that getting an infrastructure spending package — another key piece of Trump’s legislative agenda intended to spur economic growth — through Congress will be no “slam dunk.”

“It’s going to be very, very difficult,” Poe told CNN’s New Day program.
…

Key members of the Trump administration are joining U.S. Congressional leaders for the opening of Washington’s three-day annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as pro-Israel lobbyists and supporters voice hope for bipartisan U.S. support for an array of Israeli objectives.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence was scheduled to address the AIPAC conference Sunday in a speech expected to center on warming ties with the Jewish state and support for new U.S. sanctions against Iran for its ballistic missile program and its widely alleged push to develop nuclear weaponry.

The conference opened just days after a bipartisan coalition of U.S. senators introduced legislation calling for new sanctions against the Islamic Republic, targeting Tehran’s ballistic missile testing and its alleged support of terrorism.

In opening remarks Sunday, Israel’s U.S. Ambassador Ron Dermer voiced hope for improved bilateral ties under President Donald Trump, saying “there was a meeting of the minds” when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump last month at the White House.

“This has made me even more confident that our alliance will be considerably stronger in the years ahead,” Dermer said in comments widely quoted in Israeli media.  

Outside the conference venue, several hundred protesters from the anti-Israeli occupation group “IfNotNow” marched, some of them carrying placards and banners denouncing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

One banner read: “Jews Won’t be Free Until Palestinians Are.  Reject AIPAC, reject Occupation.”

 
…

President Donald Trump will sign an executive order this week scrapping Obama cuts in power plant emissions, Trump’s environmental chief says.

EPA director Scott Pruitt told ABC Television’s This Week broadcast Sunday that Trump believes the U.S. needs what he calls a “pro-growth and pro-environment approach.”

“For too long…we have accepted a narrative that if you’re pro-growth, pro-jobs, you’re anti-environment; if you’re pro-environment, you’re anti-jobs or anti-growth,” Pruitt said.

He said the Trump plan to lift restrictions on emissions by plants that burn coal and other fossil fuels will be both pro-growth and pro-environment, but within the rules spelled out by the the Clean Air Act.

Pruitt pointed out that innovation and technology, particularly in coal and natural gas, have brought the country’s carbon footprint to pre-1994 levels. He said Trump’s move will also bring down also electricity rates for consumers.

Trump has already alarmed environmentalists by ordering completion of the controversial Keystone oil pipeline, promising to revive the moribund U.S. coal industry, and asking the EPA to reconsider rules regulating clean water and fuel economy for cars.

Trump also threatened during his campaign to tear up the Paris Climate Change Agreement. The deal calls on most signatories to cut greenhouse gas emissions,  blamed for global warming, by 2025 at the latest.

While the future of U.S. participation in the deal is still uncertain, Pruitt calls it a “bad deal.”

“China and India…the largest producers of CO2 internationally, got away scot-free. They didn’t have to take steps until 2030,” he said.

Pruitt says the U.S. has penalized itself through lost jobs by signing the agreement.

 
…

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame hailed Rwanda-Israel friendship Sunday in an address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference.

He was the first African head of state ever to address the pro-Israel forum that brings together thousands of activists, experts and elected officials.

“My message today is simple: Rwanda is, without question, a friend of Israel,” said Kagame,who is credited for putting an end to the 1994 genocide in his country.

In a refence to the genocide perpetrated against the Jews in Europe during World War II, he told an audience of close to 18,000 delegates that the shared history of tragedy has brought Israel and Rwanda much closer.

“No tragedy is so great, so vast that human ingenuity and resilience cannot give rise to a better future.” he said. “The survival and renewal of our two nations testifies to this truth.”

AIPAC, with more than 100,000 members from across the United States, works to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship. It opened its three-day annual conference in Washington on Sunday.

David Victor, AIPAC’s past president, hailed Kagame for ushering his people beyond the tragedy of the past to the promise of the future. “He has transformed his nation, grown its economy, redeveloped its infrastructure and reunited its people,” he said.

Victor said he was struck by Kagame’s strong connection to Israel’s story. Last year Kagame hosted Benjamin Netanyahu during the Israeli prime minister’s historic visit to Africa.

For Rwanda and many other countries in Africa, Kagame said, engaging productively with Israel has opened new horizons.

While on an African tour last year, Netanyahu announced his intention to hold an Israel-Africa summit in October.

“We are happy that Israel is engaging with Africa, has come back to Africa and Africa is responding in a good way,” said Kagame.

He said when countries share complementary capabilities and mutual interests there should be no obstacle to pursuing these together.

In 2014, when Rwanda sat on the United Nations Security Council, Kigali abstained from a resolution that advocated the end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

Explaining the vote, Kagame said, “We thought this was going to be prejudicial to other things that had to be addressed – allowing people to determine without allowing the parties concerned to sit and agree on what the way forward should be.”

“It doesn’t mean that when you are a friend of Israel, that you are an enemy of someone else.”

Kagame said Israel has the right to exist and thrive, as a full member of the international community.

“This is not an infringement on the rights of any other people, and should not be seen as such.”

 
…

The gunman in a fatal shooting on the Las Vegas Strip who barricaded himself inside a public bus has surrendered peacefully after shutting down the busy tourism corridor for hours, police said.

The standoff began about 11 a.m. local time Saturday with a shooting that killed one person and injured another. It happened on a double-decker bus stopped on Las Vegas Boulevard near the Cosmopolitan hotel-casino.

Two people were taken to the hospital after the shooting, University Medical Center spokeswoman Danita Cohen said. One died, and the other was in fair condition, Cohen said. That person suffered minor injuries, police said.

Las Vegas Police officer Larry Hadfield said just before 3:30 p.m. that the man had a handgun and surrendered without incident. Police did not open fire. Crisis negotiators, robots and armored vehicles were on the scene.

Police said they believe the man is the only suspect and that they have ruled out terrorism or any relationship to an earlier robbery nearby that shut down a part of the Bellagio hotel-casino.

The casino properties in the area had been cooperating by keeping people from exiting through their front doors onto the Strip, Hadfield said. The boulevard will remain closed until further notice as investigators clean up the scene.

Former NBA player Scot Pollard who is staying at the Cosmopolitan told The Associated Press by phone that he was at a bar at the hotel-casino around 11 a.m. when he saw several people, including staff, running through the area toward the casino and repeatedly screaming “get out of the way.” After he was told that the area would be closed, he went back to his room, which oversees the Strip.

“We can hear them negotiating. We can hear them saying things like `No one else needs to get hurt,’ ‘Come out with your hands up. We are not going anywhere. We are not leaving.’ ”

The bus is operated by the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada.
…

The United Nations begins negotiations Monday on a legally binding treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons.

This comes as the United States commences a review of what role its nuclear weapons should now play.

“Shortly after taking office, the president directed a new Nuclear Posture Review to ensure that the United States nuclear deterrent is modern, robust, flexible, resilient, ready, and appropriately tailored to deter 21st century threats and reassure our allies,” White House senior assistant press secretary Michael Short told VOA Friday. “The review is underway and is being led by the secretary of defense.”

Those around the world yearning for a planet free of nuclear weapons are likely to be disappointed with the outcomes both at the United Nations and the White House.

“I personally support a world without nuclear weapons,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. “But I would also admit it would be very hard to get there.” 

NATO vote

The Obama administration last year strongly encouraged NATO allies to vote against the start of negotiations at the U.N., contending such a ban would hinder cooperation to respond to nuclear threats from adversaries.

The proposed U.N. treaty “aims to delegitimize the concept of nuclear deterrence upon which many U.S. allies and partners depend,” according to a notice Washington sent to NATO on October 17.

Some in the Trump administration would like to see it abandon Obama’s stated goal of a world without nuclear weapons and lift the moratorium on U.S nuclear weapons testing.

“We have not conducted an experiment in over 20 years. Since then we’ve made some changes to our nuclear warheads, and we don’t fully understand how those changes might play out in operational scenarios,” said Michaela Dodge, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

Examining whether global nuclear disarmament “is a realistic goal” is part of the Nuclear Posture Review, according to Christopher Ford, the National Security Council’s senior director for weapons of mass destruction and counter-proliferation, who spoke at a conference in Washington last Tuesday.

The Trump administration “may come to a different conclusion than the Obama administration came to as to how realistic it is to make that a goal that drives your near and midterm policy approaches,” Pifer, director of the Brookings Arms Control Initiative, said during a seminar the following day devoted to how U.S. and Russian leaders can avoid renewed nuclear tensions.

Number of weapons

Also on the table, according to National Security Council officials, are the number of U.S. weapons needed to counter other nuclear-armed countries and whether new devices should be added to its atomic arsenal.

“I think over time President Trump and his team at the Pentagon are going to recognize that we do need to continue to have verifiable arms limits with Russia,” said Pifer, also a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. “We don’t want a new arms race. We don’t want to open the door to new types of nuclear weapons and nuclear testing, which would have grave ramifications for the global arms reduction and nonproliferation process.”

That also appears to be the view in Moscow.

A former Russian arms control negotiator, who attended the Washington seminar told VOA the Kremlin desires resuming dialogue in this arena.

“For the Russian side, if United States is forthcoming and comes up with something interesting, it would be very difficult for Russia to say, ‘Nyet, we’re not interested.’ No. No way,” said Victor Mizin, deputy director of the Institute for International Studies at the Moscow State Institute of International Affairs.

The self-described former Cold Warrior terms the current situation as a “hybrid cold war,” contending the rhetoric is worse than it was in the 1980s.

For the past several years, the United States has accused Russia of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a landmark arms control agreement of the Cold War.

Ford, the only senior nuclear policy official yet appointed by Trump, said the administration is reviewing responses to Russia’s deployment of nuclear-capable cruise missiles, which led to the U.S. accusations.

“What usually happens, as you well know, is the United States over-complies with agreements while permitting Russia to have more wiggle room in an effort to save the agreement itself,” Dodge, at the Heritage Foundation, told VOA.

Arms control

Another influential Russian academic visiting Washington in recent days for conferences and seminars on arms control, Sergey Rogov, expressed concern about the Trump administration’s apparent distaste for multilateral treaties, noting contradictory comments made by candidate Trump on nuclear issues.

“Apparently today there is no nuclear policy for the new administration,” said Rogov, director of the Institute of U.S.-Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who added, however, “it’s still early. But the problem is the Republican Party has almost no arms controllers left.”

President Trump, on the campaign trail, did speak both of a desire to see the abolition of nuclear weapons and of giving an unrivaled arsenal to the United States, which he said had fallen behind in its nuclear capabilities.

The president also mentioned the possibility of using nuclear weapons against the Islamic State and publicly pondered whether countries such as Japan and South Korea, protected under the American nuclear umbrella, might be better off having their own such weapons.

The U.S. nuclear posture review is expected to take 12 to 18 months. The previous one was completed in 2010 during the first term of President Barack Obama.

U.S. nuclear policymakers will now also be keeping one eye on the activities at the United Nations where the negotiations threaten to upset the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That treaty allowed the United States, Russia, China, United Kingdom and France, who are also the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, to retain their nuclear weapons for an unspecified time.

Anti-nuclear activists

Some anti-nuclear activists expressed disappointed with the Obama administration, despite its denuclearization rhetoric, because it requested large increases for nuclear weapons programs at the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. They are not expecting good news from the Trump administration.

“But throwing out even this rhetorical commitment, arguing that a world without nuclear weapons is unrealistic, and hinting at the resumption of explosive nuclear weapon testing means violating international law, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and a clear expression of support for nuclear weapons,” said Ray Acheson, director of the disarmament program of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Acheson told VOA her organization sees this as “posing enormous risks to the existing nonproliferation regime” and “will essentially be equivalent to throwing the last several decades of iterative work towards nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation into the dustbin of history.”
…

The United Nations is to begin negotiations Monday on a legally binding treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons. This comes as the United States begins a review of the role its nuclear weapons should now play. VOA White House Bureau Chief Correspondent Steve Herman reports.
…

Friday’s surprising move by U.S. Republican leadership to pull the bill known as the American Health Care Act was partly because of its rejection by a small group of conservative Republicans known as the Freedom Caucus.

The leader, Mark Meadows of North Carolina, said in a statement Friday that he had promised voters he would fight not only for a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, but also “a replacement with a market-driven approach that brings down costs and provides more choices for the American people.”

For the Freedom Caucus, the Republican health care bill was not conservative enough, even after the Trump administration gave in to demands to withdraw some essential health benefits.

The Republican bill could not pass without the support of the caucus, which has about 30 members.

Trump was reportedly irritated by the decision of the Freedom Caucus when he complained Friday about the lack of compliance by Republicans who refused to back the legislation.

Formed in 2015

The Freedom Caucus is 2 years old, having formed at a Republican congressional retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in January 2015. The nine founders allowed others to join only if they confirmed they were willing to vote against the Speaker of the House — at the time, John Boehner — on issues that the group opposed.

The group soon flexed its collective muscle by helping to oust Boehner in September of that year. Boehner’s successor, Paul Ryan, had the support of a supermajority of Freedom Caucus members, which helped him get elected.

The Freedom Caucus is one of a number of lawmakers’ interest groups, known as caucuses, that meet and vote together on common legislative goals. Other Republican caucuses include the moderate Tuesday Group and the large, conservative Republican Study Committee.

Other caucuses

On the Democratic side, some conservative Democrats are members of the Blue Dog Caucus, while liberals are more likely to join the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Bipartisan groups include the Congressional Black Caucus, for African-Americans, and the Climate Solutions Caucus, for work on climate change.
…

U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has revised and retracted statements it used to buttress claims of Russian hacking during last year’s American presidential election campaign. The shift followed a VOA report that the company misrepresented data published by an influential British think tank.

In December, CrowdStrike said it found evidence that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, contributing to heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s war with pro-Russian separatists.

VOA reported Tuesday that the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which publishes an annual reference estimating the strength of world armed forces, disavowed the CrowdStrike report and said it had never been contacted by the company.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense also has stated that the combat losses and hacking never happened.

Some see overblown allegations

CrowdStrike was first to link hacks of Democratic Party computers to Russian actors last year, but some cybersecurity experts have questioned its evidence. The company has come under fire from some Republicans who say charges of Kremlin meddling in the election are overblown.

After CrowdStrike released its Ukraine report, company co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch claimed it provided added evidence of Russian election interference. In both hacks, he said, the company found malware used by “Fancy Bear,” a group with ties to Russian intelligence agencies.

CrowdStrike’s claims of heavy Ukrainian artillery losses were widely circulated in U.S. media.

On Thursday, CrowdStrike walked back key parts of its Ukraine report.

The company removed language that said Ukraine’s artillery lost 80 percent of the Soviet-era D-30 howitzers, which used aiming software that purportedly was hacked. Instead, the revised report cites figures of 15 to 20 percent losses in combat operations, attributing the figures to IISS.

The original CrowdStrike report was dated Dec. 22, 2016, and the updated report was dated March 23, 2017.

The company also removed language saying Ukraine’s howitzers suffered “the highest percentage of loss of any … artillery pieces in Ukraine’s arsenal.”

Finally, CrowdStrike deleted a statement saying “deployment of this malware-infected application may have contributed to the high-loss nature of this platform” — meaning the howitzers — and excised a link sourcing its IISS data to a blogger in Russia-occupied Crimea.

In an email, CrowdStrike spokeswoman Ilina Dmitrova said the new estimates of Ukrainian artillery losses resulted from conversations with Henry Boyd, an IISS research associate for defense and military analysis. She declined to say what prompted the contact.

CrowdStrike defends report

“This update does not in any way impact the core premise of the report that the FANCY BEAR threat actor implanted malware into a D-30 targeting application developed by a Ukrainian military officer,” Dmitrova wrote.

Reached by VOA, the IISS confirmed providing CrowdStrike with new information about combat losses, but declined to comment on CrowdStrike’s hacking assertions.

“We don’t think the current version of the [CrowdStrike] report draws conclusions with regard to our data, other than quoting the clarification we provided to them,” IISS told VOA.

Dmitrova noted that the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community have also concluded that Russia was behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager.

The release of embarrassing Democratic emails during last year’s U.S. political campaign, and the subsequent finding by intelligence agencies that the hacks were meant to help then-candidate Donald Trump, have led to investigations by the FBI and intelligence committees in both the House and Senate.

Trump and White House officials have denied colluding with Russians.
…

Khmerload, a Cambodian entertainment news website modeled after the American media giant Buzzfeed, has become the country’s first local tech startup to attract the backing of Silicon Valley investors.

A $200,000 investment to be exact.

The money came from 500 Startups, a global venture capital seed fund and startup accelerator founded by PayPal and Google alumni, Dave McClure and Christine Tsai, who took notice of the website, launched five years ago.

The grant pushed the company’s value to more than $1 million, according to In Vichet, Khmerload’s founder and CEO.

Several sites, and growing

Vichet, also the CEO and founder of Cambodia’s popular Little Fashion ecommerce site, said he convinced investors that Khmerload had growth potential, enough for a return on the investment.

“We showed them that we are in the top three websites in Cambodia,” said Vichet, who did his graduate work in economics at the University of Michigan. “We also have traction in Myanmar, where we recently expanded. So they see that we have done a lot while already generating revenue. They saw our potential.”

Khailee Ng, the Southeast Asia-based managing partner of 500 Startups, said Khmerload’s probable growth extends far beyond Cambodia’s borders.

“Getting to the top media position behind Facebook and Google’s properties with such a lean budget is something not many entrepreneurs across Southeast Asia have done,” Ng said.

“I’ve actually never seen anything quite like it. To be profitable, yet have increasing traffic growth rates? This investment decision is easy,” he added. 

The $1 million may not seem like much compared with the $1.7 billion value of Buzzfeed, until measured against Cambodia’s per capita income of $1,070, according to the latest World Bank estimate.

More Cambodians on internet

The 500 Startups grant comes as more and more Cambodians are using the internet and Facebook, according to an Asia Foundation study that found most go online exclusively through their smartphones. This mimics trends for sites like Buzzfeed.

Khmerload has gained more than 17 million page views per month in Cambodia, allowing it to expand into Myanmar last year, opening a sister site, Myanmarload, which already generates about 20 million page views per month.

It has also carried out a successful pilot in Indonesia, said Vichet, and was incorporated in Singapore as Mediaload.

However, Khmerload’s Buzzfeed-style approach of viral content and quick clicks has led to criticism.

Content diversifying

Vichet admits that the site originally relied heavily on tabloid and entertainment content or, as he put it, “nonpolitical content,” an important distinction in a nation where the constitution provides for a free press, but where the state closely monitors the media and — one way or another — controls its content.

But as the site has grown to reach millions, he says, it has diversified to include more informative content, including educational materials and technology news.

And 500 Startups is no doubt aware of Cambodians growing embrace of the online world. In 2000, an estimated 6,000 Cambodians used the internet. Today, the company estimates 5 million active users in Cambodia.

Tech startups are also on the rise. About 120 have sprung up in Cambodia, along with some 10 co-working spaces in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, according to Thul Rithy, founder of Phnom Penh-based co-working spaces SmallWorld and Emerald Hub.

Mediaload’s next moves include expansions into Vietnam and Laos, Vichet said. He’s also keen to help other Cambodians obtain Silicon Valley investment.

“Even with a good idea, it is really hard for Cambodians to get an investment from [Silicon Valley], as there is no precedent of success,” Vichet said. “I hope I can deliver good returns to them so that in the future they will invest in other Cambodian technology startups.”

This report was originally published by VOA’s Khmer Service.
…

President Donald Trump’s startling allegation that former President Barack Obama tapped his phones during last year’s election is pitting the White House against U.S. intelligence officials, sparking grave concern in law enforcement circles and alarming Democrats and Republicans alike.

A look at the controversy:

Trump’s allegation

On March 4, while at his Florida estate, Trump angrily tweeted that Obama was behind a politically motivated plot to upend his campaign. He alleged that the former president conducted surveillance in October at Trump Tower, the New York skyscraper where he ran his campaign and transition. He also maintains a residence there.

He compared the alleged surveillance to “Nixon/Watergate” and “McCarthyism.” Moreover, he called Obama a “Bad (or sick) guy.”

The tweets reflected the president’s growing frustration with swirling reports about his advisers’ alleged ties to Russia. Questions about his campaign’s ties to Russia have been compounded by U.S. intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia interfered with the election to help Trump triumph over Hillary Clinton, along with disclosures about his aides’ contacts with a Russian official.

Obama denies it’s true

No president can legally order a wiretap against a U.S. citizen. Obtaining one would require officials at the Justice Department to seek permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which is shrouded in secrecy.

Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said a “cardinal rule” of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered in Justice Department investigations, which are supposed to be conducted free of political influence.

“As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen,” Lewis said, adding that “any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

Trump kicks it to committee

A few days later, Trump asked Congress to investigate his allegations. Without saying where the president got the information that led to his tweets, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was “going off information that he’s seen.” If the allegation were true, she said, “this is the greatest overreach and the greatest abuse of power that I think we’ve ever seen and a huge attack on democracy itself.”

White House Press Secretary Spars With CNN Reporter on Wiretapping Claims

Trump stands alone

With Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill refusing to embrace Trump’s wiretap allegation, the president was out on a limb.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, pressured Trump to provide the public with more information about his allegation. “The dimensions of this are huge. It’s accusing the president of the United States of violating the law. That’s never happened before,” he said.

For a while, it appeared that the White House was walking back Trump’s tweets.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer tried to clarify Trump’s comments, saying the president wasn’t using the word wiretapping literally. 

“The president used the word wiretap in quotes to mean broadly surveillance and other activities,” Spicer said. He also suggested Trump wasn’t accusing Obama specifically, but instead referring to the actions of the Obama administration.

But Trump himself didn’t back down. He predicted in an interview with Fox News that there would be “some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks.” He didn’t elaborate. It remains unclear if he’s holding onto some evidence that justify his tweets.

Comey: ‘No Information That Supports’ Wiretapping Tweets

Comey talks

In testimony Monday at a politically charged congressional hearing, FBI Director James Comey brought the curtain down on speculation about the wiretap.

“With respect to the president’s tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets, and we have looked carefully inside the FBI,” Comey said. The same was true, he added, of the Justice Department.

With the denial by the nation’s top enforcement official, the controversy appeared dead.

Nunes muddies the water

On Wednesday, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee held a hastily scheduled news conference to make a startling announcement.

“I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition,” Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said. “Details about persons associated with the incoming administration — details with little apparent foreign intelligence value — were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.”

Nunes also said that he had confirmed that Trump transition team identities were unmasked. 

“I want to be clear,” he said. “None of this surveillance was related to Russia, or the investigation of Russian activities, or of the Trump team.”

Nunes told members of the news media before consulting with members of his committee and then went to the White House to share his information with Trump.

Nunes’ actions incensed Democrats on the committee.

“The chairman will need to decide whether he is the chairman of an independent investigation, which includes allegations of potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians, or whether he is going to act as a surrogate of the White House, because he cannot do both,” said the ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

Schiff said the chairman’s actions raised doubt about whether the House intelligence committee’s investigation can be impartial.

Nunes apologized Thursday to members of the committee, which was scheduled to hold its second hearing of the investigation next week.
…

The U.S. State Department has asked American embassies and consulates around the world to identify certain groups that should get extra scrutiny when they apply for visas.

This directive also instructs U.S. posts overseas to review the social media accounts of visa applicants who are suspected of terrorist ties or of having been in Islamic State group-controlled areas.

The diplomatic cables sent by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson directed embassies to convene security and intelligence working groups to determine “a list of criteria identifying sets of post-applicant populations warranting increased scrutiny.”

Even if the applicant otherwise qualifies for a visa, those identified as meeting the criteria would require additional scrutiny and possible denial.

It is the first evidence of the “extreme vetting” of foreigners entering the United States that President Donald Trump promised during his campaign.

Embassy officials must now scrutinize a broader pool of visa applicants to determine if they pose security risks to the United States, according to four cables sent between March 10 and March 17.

The directives, first reported by Reuters, quickly drew criticism from rights groups and others who’ve accused Trump of discriminating against Muslims through his now-suspended ban on travelers from six predominantly Muslim countries.

Amnesty International on Thursday called for the department to publicize the guidance.

“These measures could provide license for discrimination based on national origin and religion,” the human rights group said in a letter to Tillerson. “They could provide a pretext for barring individuals based on their nonviolent beliefs and expression. Social media checks, as well as demands for social media passwords at U.S. borders, have significant implications for privacy and freedom of expression.”
…

The Department of Veterans Affairs is warning of a rapidly growing backlog for veterans who seek to appeal decisions involving disability benefits, saying it will need much more staff even as money remains in question due to a tightening Trump administration budget.

The red flag is included in a Government Accountability Office report released Thursday. The VA says the wait time of as much as five years for veterans seeking resolution of their claims would continue to grow without a “hiring surge” in the next budget year beginning in October.

Without the staff, the VA said, the backlog could exceed 1 million within a decade, and “veterans may have to wait an average of 8.5 years” to have their appeals resolved.

4.1 million veterans receive funds

The department provides $63.7 billion in disability compensation payments each year to about 4.1 million veterans with conditions incurred during their military service.

Setting a goal to decide most appeals within one year by 2021, the VA set aside additional money in 2017 to boost full-time staff by 36 percent, or 242. It also estimated that a hiring surge of up to 1,458 more staff would be necessary in 2018.

But in comments to GAO, the VA acknowledged Thursday that its workforce plan was “highly dependent on VA’s annual budget appropriation,” and that it could not necessarily commit fully to the hiring.

Budget calls for 6 percent boost

Trump’s budget blueprint calls for a 6 percent increase in VA funding, mostly to pay for rising health costs to treat veterans. The VA is one of three agencies slated for more money amid sizable cuts to other domestic programs.

But the White House plan has yet to spell out specific funding for hiring of more VA staff to handle both disability claims and appeals, only saying it planned to continue “critical investments” to transform VA claims processing. In testimony to Congress this week, VA inspector general Michael Missal said the Trump administration was proposing to carry over 2017 funding levels to 2018 for most VA discretionary programs.

Asked for additional detail, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget said, “Stay tuned.”

Appeals process ‘broken’

VA Secretary David Shulkin has pointed to reform of the VA’s disability appeals process as one of his top 10 priorities, calling the current system “broken.” He has backed legislation introduced last year aimed at streamlining the appeals process, but has been less clear about available money for hiring. Last week, after being prodded by members of Congress, Shulkin released a memorandum detailing a few hundred more exemptions to the federal hiring freeze, in part to allow for the hiring of claims processors authorized in 2017.

“These workforce shortages are deeply troubling,” said Senator Jon Tester of Montana, the top Democrat on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. “It’s time we get these folks hired.”

He was among a group of senators, including Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, on Thursday who reintroduced legislation to overhaul the disability appeals system.

Additional staffing urgently needed

In a phone interview, VA officials said they had been devoting additional staff in recent years to address the appeals backlog but that broader reform from Congress, including added staffing, was urgently needed.

“We plan to continue to hire to the extent we can,” said Dave McLenachen, director of the Veterans Benefits Administration’s appeals management office.

In the GAO report, auditors as a whole found the VA’s staffing estimates sound but cautioned the government’s second-largest agency needed a better plan to make sure additional staff are properly trained and have adequate office space.
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President Donald Trump, who has sought to ban travelers from Iran and other Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States, issued a holiday greeting Wednesday to Iranians celebrating the New Year holiday known as Nowruz.

Trump, who has also criticized the nuclear deal between Iran and Western powers negotiated during President Barack Obama’s administration, did not refer to the travel ban in his statement.

“Nowruz means ‘new day’ in Persian. It is an occasion to celebrate new beginnings, a sentiment that is particularly meaningful for so many Iranians who have come to our country in recent decades to make a new start in a free land,” Trump said in a statement issued by the White House.

Nowruz is Iran’s most important national event and is celebrated with family gatherings, vacations and gift-giving. “For many years, I have greatly enjoyed wonderful friendships with Iranian-Americans, one of the most successful immigrant groups in our country’s contemporary history,” he said.

Trump has taken a hard line on immigration, both as a presidential candidate and since taking office. He tried twice with executive orders to prevent people from several Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the United States, and he has promised to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico.

The latest order sought a 90-day ban on travel to the United States by citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. A federal judge struck down parts of the ban on the day it was set to go into effect. Trump’s administration has said it will appeal.
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NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg agreed with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday to look for a date that would allow all NATO allies to attend a meeting of foreign ministers.

Tillerson had initially decided to skip talks set for April 5-6 in Brussels, unsettling European allies who have questioned President Donald Trump’s commitment to the alliance. But the State Department said on Tuesday that Tillerson had proposed new dates for the talks, his first such NATO meeting.

“We have agreed to look into how we can solve this scheduling issue,” Stoltenberg told Reuters at a meeting to discuss the fight against Islamic State. “But I’m absolutely certain that we will find a date which works for all of the allies.”

Stoltenberg sought to put to rest any ambiguity about the Trump administration’s commitment to NATO.

“There’s been a very clear and strong message from President Trump … that the United States is … strongly committed to NATO and to the Trans-Atlantic bond. This is not only in words, but also in deeds,” Stoltenberg said.

Pavel discloses visit with Russian

During his election campaign and on the eve of taking office in January, Trump called NATO “obsolete,” although he has since said he strongly supports the alliance. Trump has also pressed NATO members to meet spending targets.

Stoltenberg also said the head of NATO’s military committee, Petr Pavel, recently held a telephone call with the chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov.

Pavel said last month he hoped to hold the first telephone call in more than two years with Russia’s military chiefs in which he would outline why NATO believes its biggest military build-up since the end of the Cold War is not a threat to the Kremlin.

When asked when the phone call took place, Stoltenberg only said it was recent.

Worried since Russia’s 2014 seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea that Moscow could invade Poland or the Baltic states, NATO is bolstering its eastern flank with troops and war games and warehoused U.S. equipment ready for a rapid response force of up to 40,000 personnel.

Over 1,000 US soldiers in Poland

A U.S.-led battalion of more than 1,100 soldiers will be deployed in Poland from the start of April, as the alliance sets up a new force in response to Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

“And when tensions are high it’s even more important that we talk together and that we have open lines of military and political communications,” Stoltenberg said.

Russia says the alliance build-up threatens the stability of central Europe. It has some 330,000 troops amassed in its Western military district around Moscow, NATO believes.

Stoltenberg said it was too early to tell when the next meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, where the Russian ambassador to the North Atlantic alliance sits with member states’ envoys, would be. 
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