Month: September 2019

An urban climber known as the “French Spiderman” has climbed a high-rise building in the German city of Frankfurt and now faces a fine for his effort.

It took Alain Robert 20 minutes to scale the 153-meter (502-foot) Skyper building in the heart of Germany’s financial capital early Saturday.

Upon his descent from the gleaming glass structure, the 57-year-old was met by German police who escorted him away.

Robert has climbed many of the world’s tallest buildings, often without permission.

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Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives began the formal process of impeaching U.S. President Donald Trump this week.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the first step in the impeachment process Tuesday, following reports that a whistleblower filed a complaint alleging Trump sought foreign interference into the 2020 election.

What triggered House Democrats to begin a formal impeachment inquiry?

Investigations into Trump’s administration and his campaign’s actions during the 2016 presidential election were already underway in six House committees at the beginning of this week. Many House Democrats already backed impeachment, but until this week opposition leaders had resisted calls for launching the impeachment inquiry. They believed such an inquiry had no chance of passing the Republican-led Senate and could end up hurting Democrats in the 2020 election.

The new whistleblower report appears to have dramatically shifted the politics of the issue.

Several additional House Democrats came forward in support of an impeachment inquiry. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Tuesday the House would embark on the first step of the impeachment process to determine if Trump had committed the “high crimes and misdemeanors” the U.S. Constitution lays out as the standard for removing a president from office.

What do we know about the whistleblower?

The whistleblower remains anonymous under laws protecting government workers who expose wrongdoing. But he or she is a U.S. government employee who had knowledge of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and spoke to other U.S. officials who shared similar concerns over the legality of the president’s actions.  Although the whistleblower did not have direct knowledge of the Zelenskiy phone call, an independent investigator for the U.S. government found the allegations were credible.

The New York Times has reported the whistleblower is a CIA employee who has spent some time working in the White House during the Trump administration.
 
The complaint alleges a number of offenses on the part of Trump and U.S. officials. The most serious of the allegations is that Trump implied congressionally-approved U.S. aid to Ukraine was contingent upon Zelenskiy’s government providing information on the son of 2020 presidential election rival, Joe Biden. The complaint also alleges White House officials were aware of the gravity of Trump’s actions and covered up records of the phone call.

How was the whistleblower complaint handled by the government?

Democrats are pledging to investigate both the allegations in the complaint as well as how the Trump administration handled it.

Under the whistleblower process, the complaint was summarized in a letter that was addressed to senior lawmakers in the House and Senate committees, which oversee the intelligence community. That August 12 letter was sent to the inspector general at the CIA, which worked to try to substantiate some of the allegations. But instead of sending the letter on to the lawmakers in Congress after two weeks, as required by law, Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, instead held it from lawmakers while he consulted with the White House and the Department of Justice about the allegations.

Democratic lawmakers argue Trump administration officials tried to keep the allegations from reaching Congress, violating the procedure for dealing with such issues.

Maguire told members of Congress Thursday he had acted lawfully in initially blocking the release of the complaint due to concerns about executive privilege, a legal right of the U.S. presidency to keep some conversations and documents private.

What do we know about the Trump-Zelenskiy phone call?

The White House released a summary of Trump’s phone call with Zelenskiy Wednesday. In a memo reconstructed from the work of White House note takers, Trump asks Zelenskiy to investigate business dealings of former Vice President Biden and his son, Hunter.

Trump also reminds the Ukrainian president that “the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.” Trump ordered a freeze on $400 million of congressionally-approved aid to Ukraine just a few days before that phone call. Trump said this week the order was part of an effort to combat corruption.

Congressional Democrats say the memo is clear evidence of the president proposing a so-called “quid pro quo,” an exchange of one favor for another. But the president’s allies on Capitol Hill said the memo completely exonerated him.

What will happen next in the U.S. Congress?

The House committees investigating the president’s actions will begin building a case that could lead to the drafting of articles of impeachment.

Articles are formal charges against the president that are voted on by the entire U.S. House of Representatives.

Impeachment is a two-step process. If the House votes on and passes the articles, the president is considered impeached and the case moves to the U.S. Senate for a process that is similar to a court trial. If a two-thirds super majority of the U.S. Senate votes to convict, the president is removed from office.

Only two U.S. presidents have been impeached by the U.S. House – Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. The U.S. Senate has never voted to remove a president from office.

How soon can we expect a vote on impeachment?

Pelosi has cautioned that there should be a careful gathering of facts so that lawmakers do not rush to judgement. But many House Democrats want to see the vote on articles of impeachment before the end of the year. The 2020 presidential election gets fully underway with the Iowa caucuses in February. Many Democrats believe it would be politically risky to have an impeachment vote occurring at the same time.

As of Friday, 225 House Democrats and one independent member of the U.S. House of Representatives support impeachment or an impeachment inquiry. Until articles of impeachment are drafted, it is unknown how many members would vote in support of impeaching Trump.

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After the 24-hour storm dumped more rain on his olive trees than 55-year-old Gianluca can recall having seen in a September, the part-time farmer shook his head as he inspected his forlorn crop. 

“This is the third year I have not seen much to harvest,” he lamented. “Last year was even worse, mind you. But look at this,” he said, pointing to trees with few olives and many threadbare branches. 

In the distance, Lago di Bolsena shimmered and the Italian countryside just north of Rome seemed picture perfect. The sun had returned after Monday’s extreme storm and with it warm autumnal temperatures. But for all the surrounding bucolic beauty, farmers and smallholders in northern Lazio, as in much of rural Italy, are becoming alarmed at the increasingly fickle weather with erratic rainfall, spring frost, tempestuous wind and summer drought.

Farmers say the change in climate patterns across Italy is causing poor olive harvests, which are leaving in their wake predictions that the country could become dependent on olive oil imports.

That’s a remarkable turnaround for a country that many see as synonymous with olive oil — although olive trees weren’t natural to Italy and first arrived in Italy from Greece, thanks to Greeks who settled in Sicily.

By early in the first century AD, the Roman historian Pliny could brag that Italians produced more olives than the Greeks and the quality was superior.

Last year, Italy saw a 57 percent plunge in the country’s olive harvest, sparking protests by thousands of Italian farmers who descended on Rome wearing orange vests, calling for climate action. 

According to Riccardo Valentini, a professor in forest ecology at the University of Tuscia in Viterbo, the development of olive trees can suffer greatly when there are sudden extremes in weather.

“Three or four days of 40 (degree Celsius) temperatures in summer, or 10 days without rain in spring — even two days of freezing temperatures in spring — are important,” he said in a recent interview with Italian media. “The alarm bell is ringing loud and clear: If we do not limit emissions and pollution levels, the land that we all know is in great danger.”

Climate change, disease and insects are reducing Italy’s production of homegrown olive oil, say scientists and farmers. Last year’s unusual weather patterns inflicted an estimated $1 billion worth of damage on the olive-oil sector, according to the national farmers’ association Coldiretti. The sharp drop in production was the worst the country has witnessed in a quarter-century. 

Insects, disease

The weather is also hurting the trees by helping insect infestations — especially of a species of fly that lays eggs in the trees after burrowing into them.

Of even greater threat is a bacteria called Xylella fastidiosa, thought to have come from Costa Rica and spread by the meadow spittlebug. The bacteria starts in the leaves, turning them a rusty brown color, then proceeds into the trunks, disrupting arteries that allow the tree to absorb water. 

The disease first broke out around 2013 in the southern region of Puglia, in the heel of the Italian boot. Until recently, Puglia was responsible for more than half of Italy’s olive oil production but it has slipped as a result of hundreds of thousands of olive trees dying. Last year, the region’s production plunged by 65 percent. 

Altogether, an estimated one million Italian trees have died as a result of the disease, and farmers in Lazio are fearful that they will soon see what they dub “tree cemeteries.” While climate change isn’t being held responsible for the appearance of the bacteria in Italy, it is thought to have helped its quick spread. 

The EU has called on Italy to create a buffer zone by cutting down diseased trees, but the work has been patchy and trees elsewhere — in Lazio and Tuscany — are showing early signs of the disease. 
 

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VOA Connect Episode 89 – Meet a homesteader who tries to get by on what he and his family make for themselves; a young seamstress who turns old clothes into fashionable new ones, and visit a church that has been turned into a brewery.  

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An Iranian woman sentenced in the United States for violating sanctions against Tehran was released and has returned home, her lawyer told AFP Thursday, following her country’s unsuccessful attempt at a prisoner swap.

A judge in Minneapolis sentenced Negar Ghodskani to 27 months in prison Tuesday, but determined the time she had spent in custody in Australia and the United States was enough to fulfill her punishment.

Ghodskani “is now free in Iran with her family,” her lawyer Robert Richman said in an email.

Arrested in Australia

A legal resident of Australia, Ghodskani was arrested in Adelaide in 2017 after U.S. prosecutors said she sought U.S. digital communications technology by presenting herself as an employee of a Malaysian company.

U.S. prosecutors said she in fact was sending the technology to Iranian company Fanamoj, which works in public broadcasting.

After extradition to the United States, she confessed to participation in a conspiracy to illegally export technology to Iran in breach of sanctions, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

Pregnant at the time of her arrest, she gave birth while in Australian custody. Her son was sent to Iran to live with his father.

Prisoner swap offered

Her case was raised by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in April, who floated a potential prisoner swap for a British-Iranian mother being held in Tehran.

He suggested exchanging Ghodskani for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, in jail in Tehran for alleged sedition.

Both women have been separated from their young children while being detained.

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The United States is pressing other countries to join its proposed International Religious Freedom Alliance, in what diplomat Sam Brownback calls “the most significant” new human rights initiative in a generation.

“We’re going to call like-minded nations together and ask them to join this alliance and push on the issue of religious freedom and against religious persecution around the world,” Brownback, ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, said at a news briefing earlier this week. “We want to see the iron curtain on religious persecution come down.”

Brownback’s remarks came at a Monday press conference following the “Global Call to Protect Religious Freedom,” a U.S.-sponsored event on the opening day of the annual U.N. General Assembly. At the event, President Donald Trump pledged an additional $25 million to counter a trend of increasing religious intolerance around the globe.

The president’s chief envoy for that mission is Brownback. Since early 2018, the former Republican governor from the Midwestern state of Kansas has headed the office that he helped establish as a U.S. senator. He was a key sponsor of the 1998 Religious Freedom Act, as Religion News Service has pointed out. 

Brownback spoke with VOA after the news conference about what his brief entails — “fighting for religious freedom all around the world for all faiths all the time,” as well as for “people of no faith.”

“We’ll stand up and we’ll do something,” Brownback said of the Trump administration, saying it employs tools ranging from private diplomacy to public designations and “sanctions against countries that persecute people for their faith.”

For instance, the State Department in July publicly designated four Burmese military officials as responsible for “gross human rights violations,” including the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people, the Muslim minority group in Myanmar.

Government restrictions on religion have “increased markedly around the world,” according to the Pew Research Center, which began tracking the issue in 2007. The Washington-based center reported this summer that “52 countries, including some in very populous countries such as China, Indonesia and Russia, impose either ‘high’ or ‘very high’ levels of restrictions on religion, up from 40 in 2007.” It found increases in the number of states enacting restrictive laws and policies, as well as in religion-related hostilities and violence against individuals.

“Approximately 80% of the world’s population live in countries where religious liberty is threatened, restricted or even banned,” Trump said Monday, using a State Department figure extrapolated from Pew’s research.

Pew does not attempt to calculate the share of people around the world who are affected by such restrictions, a spokeswoman for the center told VOA.

Brownback told VOA that he sees religious freedom, enshrined in both the U.N. Charter and U.S. Constitution, as a harbinger of whether other rights are respected or not.

“When you’re willing to protect a person’s religious freedom, you generally are willing to protect the rest of their rights,” the diplomat said. “If you’re willing to persecute a person for their religious beliefs, you’re generally willing to persecute on a number of other rights.”

Brownback said the United Arab Emirates, while “certainly not perfect,” was a model of religious freedom. “They allow faiths to practice. They allow people to build” houses of worship. “And you have this robust, dynamic, growing economy and a lot of other things moving forward.”

He added that he’s “very hopeful” about Algeria and Sudan, African countries where “there are new governments coming in” to replace oppressive regimes.

The U.S. is supporting “better security at religious institutions, where we see a lot of them destroyed around the world, people killed at these houses of worship,” Brownback said at the press conference. He noted that he’s co-hosting a conference in Morocco next week on preserving religious heritage sites.

The Trump administration, which has strong support among evangelical Christians, has been criticized for favoring certain faith groups over others.

“President Trump was elected on the promise of a ‘complete and utter shutdown’ of Muslim immigration to the U.S.,” Rabbi Jack Moline, who leads the Interfaith Alliance, told USA Today. “Since then, his administration has worked tirelessly to redefine ‘religious freedom’ as a license to discriminate.”

The alliance promotes the separation of church and state.

The role of faith-based initiatives in U.S. foreign policy has risen during the last two decades under both Republican and Democratic administrations, according to scholar Lee Marsden, noting a strong interest in curbing radical Islam after the al-Qaida terrorist attacks in September 2001.

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The Trump administration is proposing to accept a maximum of 18,000 refugees in the coming year, in what would be the lowest refugee ceiling in the country’s history, the U.S. State Department said Thursday.

If the government follows through, 2020 will be the third year of significant cuts to refugee resettlement under President Donald Trump.

For now, however, the latest figure remains a proposal.

The final decision, in the form of a “presidential determination,” will be made in the coming weeks after the required consultations with Congress, a senior administration official told reporters in a phone briefing organized by the White House on Thursday.

In fiscal 2018, the first full year of the Trump administration, the ceiling was set at 45,000, and 22,491 refugees were admitted.

In fiscal 2019, the ceiling was 30,000. With only three full days remaining in the fiscal year, the U.S. is close to the limit, with 29,972 refugees admitted, according to State Department data.

Prior to Trump’s election, the refugee ceiling average was 60,000 to 70,000 every year.

The proposed ceiling is one of three fundamental changes to the resettlement program announced Thursday.

Trump also issued an executive order that will require state and local governments to “consent” to accept refugees for resettlement.

While not a widespread issue, the order would allow states like Tennessee, which unsuccessfully sued the federal government to stop resettlement, to potentially prevent willing nonprofit organizations in the state from accepting refugees.

Additionally, the U.S. State Department is creating new categories — a procedure used rarely to meet specific needs, usually for a specific region.

For fiscal 2020, however, the total will include up to 5,000 refugees persecuted on account of their religious beliefs; 4,000 spots for Iraqis who assisted the U.S. during its operations in the country; and up to 1,500 of what the White House called “legitimate refugees” from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Those specific allocations would allow for a maximum of 7,500 refugees who fall outside those categories.

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In an earlier time, boxes on wheels raced on American streets.  Now, an energy drink company sponsors motorless, homemade car races around the world.  VOA’s Arash Arabasadi takes us on this bumpy ride through Jordan.

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Faith Aweko of Uganda describes herself as a “waste-preneur.”  She has come up with an innovative way to transform discarded plastic bags into backpacks for everyday use.  Halima Athumani reports from the town of Mpigi. 
 

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The international community must do more to tackle networks of global corruption that are fueling violence in South Sudan, according to activists. The call follows publication of a report detailing how corporations profited from the country’s civil war. The investigation by The Sentry organization, co-founded by actor George Clooney, shows the links between armed groups involved in the civil war, global oil giants, and British and American citizens. Henry Ridgwell has more.
 

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