In one of her first moves as Puerto Rico’s new governor, Wanda Vazquez announced late Sunday that she is suspending a pending $450,000 contract that is part of the program to rebuild and strengthen the island’s power grid, which was destroyed by Hurricane Maria.
Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority, which is more than $9 billion in debt, had been expected to sign the contract with Stantec, a consulting firm based in Canada. Vazquez did not explain why she was suspending the deal, saying only that transparency is a priority for her administration.
“We are evaluating all government contracts, no exceptions,” said Vazquez, who on Wednesday became Puerto Rico’s third governor in a week following popular protests over government corruption and mismanagement. “There is no room in this administration for unreasonable expenses.”
A Stantec official based in Puerto Rico did not respond to a request for comment.
However, a power company spokesman emailed a statement to The Associated Press saying that PREPA executive director Jose Ortiz planned to meet with Vazquez on Monday to explain why it was important to sign the contract. Ortiz said the contract has to be submitted before Oct. 6 so the U.S. territory can obtain federal hurricane recovery funds.
It is unclear whether Vazquez’s move will delay efforts to rebuild and bolster the power grid, which remains fragile and is prone to outages that have exasperated many of the island’s 3.2 million people. Power company spokesman Jorge Burgos said that he had no further details and that more information would be released after Monday’s meeting.
Puerto Rico’s power company has awarded several multimillion-dollar contracts since the Category 4 storm hit on Sept. 20, 2017, and many of those deals have come under intense scrutiny, with some being cancelled. Currently, Mammoth Energy Services’ subsidiary Cobra Acquisitions, which has some $1.8 billion in contracts with the power company, is facing a federal investigation.
Economist Jose Caraballo said he hopes Vazquez’s announcement is the first of more changes to come.
“I hope this isn’t a smoke screen and that there’s a real audit,” he said in a phone interview. “That’s what all these people who have lost trust in the government expect.”
Puerto Rico has been mired in political turmoil, with then-Gov. Ricardo Rossello resigning Aug. 2 following large protests. The island’s Supreme Court then ruled that his replacement was illegally sworn in, which left Vazquez, the justice secretary, next in line to become governor. The U.S. territory also is struggling to emerge from a 13-year recession and trying to restructure some of its more than $70 billion public debt load.
Conservative candidate Alejandro Giammattei has won the presidential runoff election in Guatemala.
The election commission said late Sunday that with more than 90% of the polling places counted, Giammattei had won nearly 60% of the vote. His opponent, former first lady Sandra Torres garnered 40%.
Just moments after declaring victory, Giammattei said he would seek to revise a deal that current president Jimmy Morales made with U.S. President Donald Trump, requiring Hondurans and Salvadorans to seek asylum in Guatemala when crossing through the country to reach the U.S. It will be up to Guatemala’s new president, who takes office in January, to sign or nullify the agreement.
The controversial migration pact is highly unpopular in Guatemala.
Giammattei is a 63-year-old doctor. He has campaigned for the presidency three times before this year, finally winning it on his fourth run.
His opponent Torres is a business woman who has operated a textile and apparel company. She married and divorced former President Alvaro Colom who was Guatemala’s president from 2008 to 2012.
As America’s opioid crisis spiraled into a fentanyl epidemic, prosecutors say one young Utah man made himself a drug kingpin by creating counterfeit prescription painkillers laced with the deadly drug and mailing them to homes across the United States.
Former Eagle Scout Aaron Shamo, 29, will stand trial beginning Monday on allegations that he and a small group of fellow millennials ran a multimillion-dollar empire from the basement of his suburban Salt Lake City home by trafficking hundreds of thousands of pills containing fentanyl, the potent synthetic opioid that has exacerbated the country’s overdose epidemic in recent years.
The federal government’s case is expected to offer a glimpse at how the drug, which has killed tens of thousands of Americans, can be imported from China, pressed into fake pills and sold through online black markets to people in every state.
Prosecutors have alleged that dozens of the ring’s customers died in overdoses, though the defense disputes that and Shamo is charged only in connection to one: a 21-year-old identified as R.K., who died in June 2016 after snorting fentanyl allegedly passed off as prescription oxycodone.
Shamo’s family, though, said he’s been singled out even as deeply involved friends are offered more lenient plea deals. His father, Mike Shamo, said his son was a chess whiz as a kid who experimented with marijuana in his teen years, but later earned his Eagle Scout badge crocheting blankets for a hospital.
Aaron Shamo became an internet-savvy aspiring entrepreneur and health-conscious workout buff who loved self-improvement books like “The Secret” and had dreams of starting his own tech-support business, Mike Shamo told The Associated Press.
“He was brought in and saw the opportunity for making money, and he didn’t truly understand the danger behind what he was doing, how dangerous the drugs were,” he said. “I think he was able to separate what he was doing because he never saw the customer. To him, it was just numbers on a screen.”
At the time of Aaron Shamo’s 2016 arrest, authorities said the bust ranked among the largest in the country.
The drug operation
In a raid on his home in the upscale suburb of Cottonwood Heights, agents found a still-running pill press in the basement, thousands of pills and more than $1 million in cash stuffed in garbage bags, according to court documents.
The group had started two years before, and grew to include more than a dozen people, some of whom Aaron Shamo met working at an eBay call center, court documents allege. Prosecutors say it started with a partnership between Aaron Shamo and Drew Crandall, a shy friend he had bonded with over skateboarding and tips for talking to girls. The pair eventually began importing and reselling steroids to gym buddies, and the operation grew from there, according to court documents.
Another man, Jonathan “Luke” Paz, has also pleaded guilty to helping develop the recipe and press the fentanyl-laced pills after Crandall left on an extended international trip.
Attorneys for Crandall and Paz did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Aaron Shamo ordered the fentanyl from China and paid a number of people to receive it at their homes and turn it over to him, according to authorities. He and Paz allegedly cut the powder, added other fillers and pressed it into pills, using dyes and stamps to mimic the appearance of legitimate pharmaceuticals, prosecutors said.
Public health experts warn that such mom-and-pop drug trafficking networks can be especially dangerous: They cut and mix fentanyl — a few flakes of which can be deadly — without sophisticated equipment, meaning in a single batch, one counterfeit pill might contain little fentanyl and another enough to kill instantly.
They were shipping “disguised poison,” prosecutor Michael Gadd said at one hearing. “If you think for a moment about what type of people abuse prescription oxycodone, it’s your neighbor, it’s my neighbor. It’s people who had a knee surgery and got hooked.”
The pills were sold online, through a dark-web marketplace store called Pharma-Master. The dark web is a second layer of the internet reached by a special browser and often used for illegal activity, but it still has sites with user-friendly interfaces and customer reviews, similar to platforms like Amazon and eBay.
Pharma-Master allegedly grew to become one of the most prominent darknet dealers, sometimes processing 20 to 50 orders a day, according to court documents.
When orders came in, packagers counted pills, sealed them with a vacuum sealer and slipped them into envelopes or boxes addressed to homes across the U.S., prosecutors said. They put pills into Mylar bags to mask the contents, wrote fake return addresses like “Jamaica Green Coffee,” and even included phony invoices. The packages were dropped in mailboxes all over the Salt Lake area to hide from police, authorities said.
Some were small orders from people buying for themselves, but in other cases, the group shipped thousands of pills in bulk to gang members and drug dealers who then resold them on the street, prosecutors allege.
Each pill cost less than a penny to make, and could be sold on the street as a legitimate pharmaceutical for $20 or more, prosecutors said.
In June 2016, though, U.S. customs agents seized a package of fentanyl addressed to someone receiving it for Aaron Shamo, and things unraveled from there, according to court documents.
Five months later, investigators had found an incoming shipment from a Chinese company known as “Express,” which is also under investigation. They also scooped up outgoing shipments: A single day’s worth included 35,000 fentanyl-laced pills in 52 packages addressed to homes in 26 states, prosecutors said. One box alone had a wholesale value estimated at more than $400,000, according to court documents.
Aaron Shamo’s house was also raided in late 2016, and the following spring Crandall was arrested in Hawaii when he returned from the globe-trotting trip through Australia, New Zealand and southeast Asia to marry his girlfriend.
In the years since his arrest, Aaron Shamo has become something of an advocate for other jail inmates, starting a letter-writing campaign calling on local churches to write to people behind bars to give them hope for life after incarceration, said his father, Mike Shamo. He’s also written to the governor, calling for more rehabilitation programs for jail inmates.
Meanwhile, Paz and Crandall have already agreed to plea deals and could testify against their onetime friend, along with a potential parade of other alleged co-conspirators.
His family will be watching the trial, too.
“We just want equity. We want equality for everyone in this, so those that were equally guilty are held accountable for their actions,” Mike Shamo said.
Syrian government forces captured an important village in the northwestern province of Idlib on Sunday, drawing close to a major town in the last rebel stronghold in the country, state media and opposition activists said.
The capture of Habeet opens up an approach to southern regions of Idlib, which is home to some 3 million people, many of them displaced by fighting in other parts of the country. Habeet is also close to the town of Khan Sheikhoun, which has been held by rebels since 2012, and to parts of the highway linking the capital, Damascus, with the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest.
Syrian troops have been trying to secure the M5 highway, which has been closed since 2012. Idlib is a stronghold for al-Qaida-linked militants and other armed groups.
Syrian troops have been attacking Idlib and a stretch of land around it since April 30. The three-month campaign of airstrikes and shelling has killed more than 2,000 people on both sides and displaced some 400,000.
The government-controlled Syrian Central Military Media said the Syrian army captured the village after fierce fighting with al-Qaida-linked militants.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition-linked war monitor, described the capture of Habeet as “the most important advance” by government forces since April 30. It said the overnight fighting left 18 insurgents and nine pro-government gunmen dead.
Syrian troops have been pushing their way into Idlib and rebel-held northern parts of Hama province in recent weeks under the cover of intense airstrikes and shelling.
In Damascus, meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar Assad attended Eid al-Adha prayers in a mosque.
State news agency SANA showed Assad attending the Muslim prayers early Sunday at Afram Mosque along with top officials, including the prime minister and the country’s grand mufti.
Over the past few years, Assad’s forces have been able to capture most areas controlled by rebels in other parts of the country, including the eastern suburbs of Damascus.
Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of the Sacrifice, marks the willingness of the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham to Christians and Jews) to sacrifice his son.
Authorities in Indian-administered Kashmir said that they eased restrictions Sunday in most parts of Srinagar, the main city, ahead of an Islamic festival following India’s decision to strip the region of its constitutional autonomy.
Magistrate Shahid Choudhary in a tweet said that more than 250 ATMs have been made functional and bank branches opened for people to withdraw money ahead of Monday’s Eid al-Adha festival.
There was no immediate independent confirmation of reports by authorities that people were visiting shopping areas for festival purchases because all communications and the internet remain cut off for a seventh day.
Authorities appear to be acting with utmost caution because of a fear of a backlash from residents who have been forced to stay indoors since last Monday.
India’s main opposition Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi on Saturday said there are reports of violence and “people dying” in the region. Talking to reporters in New Delhi, Gandhi said “things are going very wrong there,” and called for the Indian government to make clear what is happening.
Authorities in Srinagar said there have been instances of stone pelting by protesters but no gun firing by security forces in the past six days. Television images showed movement of cars and people in some parts of Kashmir.
State-run All India Radio quoted the region’s top bureaucrat, Chief Secretary B.V.R. Subrahmanyam, as saying that people were coming out of their homes for Eid shopping. He also said that Srinagar and other towns witnessed good road traffic Saturday.
Indian paramilitary soldiers patrol a street in Srinagar, Indian-controlled Kashmir, Aug. 10, 2019. Authorities enforcing a strict curfew in Indian-administered Kashmir will bring in trucks of essential supplies for an Islamic festival next week.
Modi promises normalcy
On Thursday, Modi assured the people of Jammu and Kashmir that normalcy would gradually return and that the government was ensuring that the current restrictions do not dampen the Islamic festival.
New Delhi rushed tens of thousands of additional soldiers to one of the world’s most militarized regions to prevent unrest and protests after Modi’s Hindu nationalist-led government revoked Kashmir’s special constitutional status and downgrading its statehood. Modi said the move was necessary to free the region of “terrorism and separatism.”
On Saturday, Pakistan said that with the support of China, it will take up India’s unilateral actions in Kashmir with the U.N. Security Council and may approach the U.N. Human Rights Commission over what it says is the “genocide” of the Kashmiri people.
Kashmir is claimed in its entirety by both India and Pakistan and is divided between the archrivals. Rebels have been fighting New Delhi’s rule for decades in the Indian-controlled portion, and most Kashmiri residents want either independence or a merger with Pakistan.
Jamia Masjid is locked during restrictions ahead of Eid-al-Adha after India scrapped the special constitutional status for Kashmir, in Srinagar, Aug. 11, 2019.
Pakistan: Move toward genocide
“When a demographic change is made through force, it’s called genocide, and you are moving toward genocide,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told reporters in Islamabad after returning from Beijing.
With India moving to erase the constitutional provision that prohibited outsiders from buying property in Jammu and Kashmir state, Indians from the rest of the country can now purchase real estate and apply for government jobs there. Some fear this may lead to a demographic and cultural change in the Muslim-majority region.
Qureshi also said that while Pakistan is not planning to take any military action, it is ready to counter any potential aggression by India.
The Indian ambassador to Pakistan, Ajay Bisaria, left Islamabad on Saturday night after Pakistan retaliated against India by lowering diplomatic ties. Fourteen other Indian mission officials and their families also left Islamabad, airport official Mohammad Wasim Ahmed said.
A regional political party from Kashmir petitioned the Supreme Court to strike down the government’s move to scrap the region’s special status and divide the state into two federal territories. An opposition Congress party activist has already filed a petition challenging the communications blockade and the detentions of Kashmiri leaders.
Pilgrims on the annual Hajj in Saudi Arabia threw stones Sunday at pillars representing the devil, a symbolic casting away of evil.
More than 2 million Muslims have gathered in Saudi Arabia for the annual, five-day-long pilgrimage.
Worshippers spent the night Saturday at a large encampment around the hill where Islam holds that God tested Abraham’s faith by commanding him to sacrifice his son Ismail. It is also where Prophet Muhammad gave his last sermon.
The end of the Hajj coincides with Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, celebrated by Muslims around the world.
Riyadh is using tens of thousands of stewards, who help marshal the crowds to prevent stampedes that have occurred in previous years’ events, such as in 2015 when about 2,300 pilgrims were killed.
The Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam, is required of every Muslim at least once in their lifetime, as long as they are healthy enough and have the means to do so.
The second season of an AMC-TV drama series follows the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and a number of bizarre deaths haunting a community.
“The Terror: Infamy” is set to premiere Monday and stars Derek Mio and original “Star Trek” cast member George Takei as they navigate the forced internment and supernatural spirits that surround them.
It’s the first television series depicting the internment of Japanese Americans on such a massive scale and camps were recreated with detail to illustrate the conditions and racism internees faced.
The show’s new season is part of the Ridley Scott-produced anthology series.
Mio, who is fourth-generation Japanese American and plays Chester Nakayama, said he liked the idea of adding a supernatural element to a historical event such as Japanese American internment. He says he had relatives who lived on Terminal Island outside of Los Angeles and were taken to camps.
Residents there were some of the first forced into internment camps after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
“If you add the supernatural element, it’s a little more accessible and now it’s like a mainstream subject and it can open up more discussion about what really happened and what’s going on right now,” Mio said.
It was a role personal to him as well. “It’s not just another kind of acting job for me,” Mio said. “I really do feel a responsibility to tell this story that my ancestors actually went through.”
From 1942 to 1945, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were ordered to camps in California, Colorado, Idaho, Arizona, Wyoming, Utah, Texas, Arkansas, New Mexico and other sites.
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, forced Japanese Americans, regardless of loyalty or citizenship, to leave the West Coast and other areas for the camps surrounded by barbed wire and military police. Half of those detainees were children.
Takei, who was interned in a camp as a child, said he was impressed with the show’s research into recreating the camp.
“The barracks reminded me again – mentally, I was able to go back to my childhood. That’s exactly the way it was,” Takei said. “So for me, it was both fulfilling to raise the awareness to this extent of the terror. But also to make the storytelling that much more compelling.”
The series also involves others who are connected to historic World War II events. Josef Kubota Wladyka, one of the show’s directors, had a grandfather who was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb dropped and managed to survive.
Max Borenstein, one of the show’s executive producers who lost relatives at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, said the show’s horror genre still doesn’t compare to the horror of the internment camp.
“It was important to do the research, the lived reality that people faced,” Borenstein said. “The fact of taking people who are citizens of the country and (putting them in camps) is a great stain of our country.”
Co-creator Alexander Woo, who is Chinese American, said he believes the series is especially relevant now given the debate over immigration in the U.S. and Europe.
“The struggle that immigrants go through of embracing a country that doesn’t embrace you back is a story, unfortunately, that keeps repeating,” Woo said. “There’s going to be some people who likely didn’t know of the internment. There will be some people who had relatives in camps. We have a responsibility to be accurate.”
A cease-fire agreement has been reached to end fighting in the Libyan capital of Tripoli during the upcoming Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha.
Libyan National Army (LNA) chief Khalifa Haftar agreed to the United Nation’s-proposed cease-fire Saturday, his spokesman, Ahmad al-Mesmari, said at a news conference in Benghazi.
The U.N. refugee agency reports more than half-a-million Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh have received identity documents that will give them better access to aid.
An estimated 900,000 Rohingya refugees are living in overcrowded, squalid camps in the town of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. Most of them fled there two years ago to escape persecution and violence in Myanmar.
A joint registration project by Bangladeshi authorities and the U.N. refugee agency will give identity documents to more than 500,000 of the refugees, many for the first time.
The data on these fraud-proof, biometric cards will give national authorities and humanitarian partners a better understanding of the population and its needs. UNHCR spokesman Andrej Mahecic tells VOA the data collected will allow aid agencies to better help people with specific needs.
“The point of the verification exercise, of conducting a biometric data registration is first and foremost to protect the right of the Rohingya refugees to return to their homes… It is meant to ensure far better planning and far better targeting of the assistance, of very specific types of assistance, that, for example, women would need, that children would need,” said Mahecic.
Mahecic explains the new registration cards indicate Myanmar is the country of origin. He says that information is critical in establishing and safeguarding the right of Rohingya refugees to return to their homes in Myanmar, if and when they decide to do so.
The UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies say they do not believe conditions in Myanmar currently are safe enough for the refugees to return home.
The registration process began in June 2018. On average, some 5,000 refugees are being registered every day. The UNHCR says it aims to complete biometric registrations and provide identification documents for the remaining 400,000 people in Cox’s Bazar by the end of the year.
A federal judge in Virginia ruled Friday that a school board’s transgender bathroom ban discriminated against a former student, Gavin Grimm.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Arenda Wright Allen in Norfolk is the latest of several nationwide that have favored transgender students facing similar policies. But the issue remains far from settled in the country as a patchwork of differing policies governs the nation’s schools.
The Gloucester County School Board’s policy required Grimm to use girls’ restrooms or private bathrooms. The judge wrote that Grimm’s rights were violated under the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause as well as under Title IX, the federal policy that protects against gender-based discrimination.
“There is no question that the Board’s policy discriminates against transgender students on the basis of their gender noncomformity,” Allen wrote.
“Under the policy, all students except for transgender students may use restrooms corresponding with their gender identity,” she continued. “Transgender students are singled out, subjected to discriminatory treatment, and excluded from spaces where similarly situated students are permitted to go.”
Similar claims
Allen’s ruling will likely strengthen similar claims made by students in eastern Virginia. It could have a greater impact if the case goes to an appeals court that oversees Maryland, West Virginia and the Carolinas.
Harper Jean Tobin, policy director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, said last month that she expected Grimm’s case to join the “steady drum beat” of recent court rulings favoring transgender students in states including Maryland, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
But she said differing transgender bathroom policies are still in place in schools across the country. Those polices are often influenced by court rulings or by states and cities that have passed protections for people who are transgender.
“Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times for transgender students really can depend on where you live and who your principal is,” she said.
One fight in long battle
The judge’s opinion is the latest step in Grimm’s yearslong legal battle, which has come to embody the debate about transgender student rights.
Grimm, who is now 20, has been fighting the case since the end of his sophomore year at Gloucester High School, which is about 60 miles (95 kilometers) east of Richmond and near the Chesapeake Bay. Since graduating in 2017, he has moved to California where he’s worked as an activist and attended community college.
Grimm’s lawsuit became a federal test case when it was supported by the administration of then-President Barack Obama and scheduled to go before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017. But the high court hearing was canceled after President Donald Trump rescinded an Obama-era directive that students can choose bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity.
The school board has argued that Grimm remains female, even though he obtained a court order and Virginia birth certificate declaring his sex is male in 2016, when he was still in 12th grade.
The board’s attorney, David Corrigan, argued in court last month that gender is not a “societal construct” and that it doesn’t matter that Grimm underwent chest reconstruction surgery and hormone therapy. Corrigan had told the judge that bathroom policy is based on a binary, “two choices for all” view of gender.
Contacted by The Associated Press after the ruling, Corrigan declined to comment in an email.
Editor’s note: We want you to know what’s happening, why and how it could impact your life, family or business, so we created a weekly digest of the top original immigration, migration and refugee reporting from across VOA. Questions? Tips? Comments? Email the VOA immigration team: ImmigrationUnit@voanews.com.
U.S. border
A month after the start of a program forcing migrants to remain in Mexico while awaiting U.S. immigration hearings, the policy is stranding thousands, most of whom are from Central America. Hundreds are now being bused to Mexico’s southern Chiapas state, in what one Mexican immigration official described to VOA as a policy of “deportation in disguise.”
FILE – A handcuffed woman stares though the chain link fencing at Koch Foods Inc. in Morton, Miss., Aug. 7, 2019.
Raids’ long-term effects
After Wednesday’s raids in the six Mississippi towns where the poultry plants were located, community members said the effects of the roundups would be felt long term.
Migrant children attend school in a bus at the Mexican border city of Tijuana, just kilometers from the U.S. border. They sit in two neat lines and open their notebooks at desks that once served as passenger seats.
FILE – An Immigration and Customs Enforcement official gives direction to a person outside the building that houses ICE and the Atlanta Immigration Court, June 12, 2019.
Immigration court
The Trump administration launched a pilot program in 10 cities, from Baltimore to Los Angeles, aimed at fast-tracking court hearings and discouraging migrants from making the journey to seek refuge in the United States. Immigration lawyers, however, said the new timetable does not give their clients enough time to testify and get documents from abroad to bolster their claims.
July migration statistics
Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan announced U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s enforcement actions for July, indicating more than a 20 percent decrease in U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions at the southwest border for the second month in a row.
VOA Immigration Reporter Aline Barros contributed to this report from Washington.
NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO — Off to the side of the Puente #1, the bridge that connects pedestrians, drivers and cyclists from the Texas city of Laredo to the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, dozens of migrants and asylum-seekers sit on what was built as a parking lot for the customs office.
The concrete radiated after hours of 42-degree Celsius (108-degree Fahrenheit) heat from the sun.
They hadn’t been able to shower in three days, several said. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) often apprehended them within an hour of crossing the river, held them for two to three days, then transported them back to Mexico.
Now a month after the start of the Trump administration’s Migration Protection Protocols (MPP) in Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican government is busing hundreds of returned migrants to faraway Chiapas, in what is described as a thinly disguised deportation program.
Bus departures
VOA witnessed two nights of bus departures from a location adjacent to a pedestrian bridge where CBP dropped off migrants to await their immigration hearings in the U.S. from outside the country.
The first, around 12:30 a.m. on August 7, consisted of eight full buses, transporting 350 to 400 migrants; the next night, another three buses departed from the same location, carrying approximately 120 people, largely families with children under age 10.
Migrants returned to Mexico under MPP have been camping beneath puente 1 (intl bridge) in Nuevo Laredo for days or longer. As of a couple hours ago, buses came to pick them up. Migrants say they are being forced to leave. All of the buses appear to be headed to Chiapas. pic.twitter.com/ZpMBYlMyL1
The majority of migrants VOA spoke with ahead of their 2,100-kilometer (1,300-mile) journey were from Honduras and had crossed the Rio Grande into the United States in the first days of August.
Some of the migrants who spoke to VOA said they felt their hearings stood no chance and would self-deport to their respective countries. Others planned to utilize temporary work permits in southern Mexico while they considered their next moves.
MPP, also known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, began in January 2019 in other border cities. It expanded in earnest in March, and then June, as Mexico scrambled to respond to the U.S. threat of tariffs if the number of unauthorized border crossings did not decrease.
In a statement to VOA, a CBP spokesperson said MPP allows the U.S. “to more effectively assist legitimate asylum-seekers and individuals fleeing persecution while migrants with false or meritless claims no longer have that incentive to make the journey.”
The Trump administration said it created the program to alleviate overcrowding in U.S. detention facilities by making migrants await immigration court dates in Mexico.
The United States has returned more than 30,000 migrants to Mexico under the policy, CBP acting Commissioner Mark Morgan said Thursday.
According to an analysis by Human Rights First, CBP has returned an average of 450 migrants per day to Mexico in early August, more than double the rate of returns in early June.
More than 3,000 migrants have been returned to Nuevo Laredo during MPP’s first month operating in the city, the independent, U.S.-based human rights organization reported.
That number includes children and adults who have been apprehended crossing the Rio Grande without authorization by U.S. Border Patrol agents, as well as people who presented themselves at ports of entry to formally request asylum.
Central American migrants line up for community-donated food and drinks near the Puente Numero I International Bridge in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. (R. Taylor/VOA)
Left in border city
The migrants VOA met hours after their return from the U.S. were predominantly from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Many felt they had no real choice but to leave on the buses, wherever they were headed, just to get out of Nuevo Laredo.
Sitting in the shade of a bus shelter, they were trying to determine who wanted to go where, and how they would get there.
Few had cellphones or money to contact relatives. They had no knowledge of the city, no map and no means to get to a local shelter. All they carried were clear plastic bags with a few toiletries, paperwork, and the phone numbers of relatives to call when they could borrow a phone from someone with cell service in Mexico.
The Mexican city’s reputation as a hub of drug cartel activity and ransom kidnappings kept many migrants within the confines of the parking lot adjacent to Puente #1.
The U.S. State Department posts a maximum “Level 4: Do Not Travel” warning because of crime and kidnapping in the surrounding state of Tamaulipas, where “armed criminal groups target public and private passenger buses as well as private automobiles,” according to its advisory.
“They bring us here, where you’re surrounded by the Zetas drug cartel, and in the end, what security do we have?” said Yuna, a Cuban asylum-seeker returned under MPP, who boarded one of Tuesday’s eight buses to Tapachula, Chiapas. “We can’t [take a taxi] because they’ll send us to the lion’s mouth. If we go to the [bus] station, they’ll kidnap us.”
But according to Nuevo Laredo Mayor Enrique Rivas Montaño, “The issue of insecurity is not exclusive to the border.”
“Everywhere, there are risks, there are dangers in a city you don’t know,” Rivas Montaño told VOA.
A Honduran migrant and her 18-month-old daughter wait to decide their next steps after being returned to Mexico under the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP) earlier in the day. (V. Macchi/VOA)
Awaiting US court hearings
Although Mexican immigration authorities first thinned the number of returnees in Nuevo Laredo by busing some to Monterrey, roughly 220 kilometers (137 miles) to the southwest, this week the buses were bound for Tapachula, Chiapas, roughly 10 times farther away.
Monterrey is at a Level 3 warning, with the caution to “reconsider travel due to crime” and curfews on U.S. personnel in the area.
Chiapas, the more recent destination, is considered a Level 2 safety risk, according to the State Department, which urges visitors to “exercise increased caution due to crime.”
It is also Mexico’s southernmost state, which means that within the country’s boundaries, it gets as close to Guatemala — and in turn, El Salvador and Honduras — as a person possibly could be while remaining in Mexico.
That distance puts 35 hours of road travel between the migrants and their court dates in border cities, some for September, others as late as November, requiring additional expenses few people VOA spoke with could afford. A one-way return economy bus ticket, with a connection in Mexico City, costs $111.
Mexico’s National Institute of Migration did not respond to an emailed request for more information about the busing system.
The first buses bound for Chiapas left on August 2, according to one local media report.
Father Julio López, the head of the Nazareth migrant shelter in Nuevo Laredo, said that southbound trip — while in theory is voluntary but in practice feels like the only option to some migrants — shows that from the outset, even the name of policy was a ruse.
“The Migrant Protection Protocol is, to me, a protocol of lies for migrants,” the priest said. “There is no protocol, and if there were one, it’s not for protection. There is no protection.”
Likewise, a Mexican federal immigration agent at the CBP drop-off site near the bridge said he believed MPP was not a policy of waiting for court dates, but rather one of “dolled-up deportations.”
“Honestly, what we’re seeing here, these are deportations,” he told VOA. “Deportations in disguise.”
CBP deferred comment to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a VOA inquiry about whether the MPP program effectively works as a deportation plan. DHS and Mexico’s National Institute of Migration have not yet responded to similar inquiries.
U.S. President Donald Trump is renewing focus on mental illness as a major cause of gun violence, following two mass shootings in two days in the U.S. that killed 31 people. VOA’s Brian Padden reports that while Trump has called for more treatment and involuntary detention of mentally disturbed individuals, his administration has rolled back federal regulations to restrict the mentally ill from buying guns and has tried to abolish a health care law that expanded access to mental health services.
Climate change is about to hit the world in the stomach, according to the United Nations. A new scientific report from the world body that examines land degradation concludes that climate change will imperil crops and worsen hunger. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi has the story.
Russia appears to be using one of its most powerful weapons — tourism — against Georgia, its smaller neighbor to the south. Moscow has banned direct flights between Russia and Georgia, after the latest wave of protests in Georgia against Russia’s occupation of two of its regions. Moscow has also called for its citizens to return home. That is meant to damage the Georgian economy, which is highly dependent on tourism. Ricardo Marquina reports from Tbilisi in this report narrated by Jim Randle.
Raging floods across Myanmar have forced tens of thousands of people from their homes in recent weeks, officials said Thursday, as monsoon rains pummel the nation.
Aerial images from Shwegyin township in Bago region showed how the area had become a vast lake of water.
Only the rooftops could be seen of many homes lining the Sittaung river.
Emergency services have been helping bring people to dry ground, many seeking shelter in local monasteries.
Others waded through waist-deep floodwaters or rowed on wooden boats with pets and any belongings they could take with them.
Than Aye, 42, who has diabetes and is partially-sighted, struggled to escape the deluge.
“I could not do anything when the flooding started but then the fire service came to rescue me by boat,” he told AFP from the safety of the monastery that has been his home for the last five days.
The most severe flooding is currently in eastern Bago region and Mon and Karen states, according to the social welfare ministry.
“There are currently over 30,000 people (across the country) displaced by floods,” said director general of disaster management Ko Ko Naing.
UN’s Office for Coordinated Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates around 89,000 people have been displaced in recent weeks, although many have since been able to return home.
Damascus on Thursday accused Turkey of “expansionist ambitions,” saying Ankara’s agreement with Washington to set up a so-called safe zone in northeastern Syria only helps such plans and is a violation of Syria’s sovereignty.
The statement by Syria’s Foreign Ministry comes a day after the U.S. and Turkey announced they’d agreed to form a coordination center to set up the safe zone. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the move, which is designed to address Ankara’s security concerns, was important.
The announcement of the deal may have averted for now a Turkish incursion into that part of Syria. Ankara seeks to push out U.S.-allied Syrian Kurdish fighters from the region as it considers them terrorists, allied with a Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey.
The Syrian Kurdish fighters were the main fighting force on the ground against Islamic State militants in the area, and Washington has been hard pressed to protect its partners.
Damascus said the Syrian Kurdish groups “bear historic responsibility” for the U.S-Turkey deal and urged them to drop “this aggressive U.S.-Turkish project” and align with the Syrian government instead.
Damascus has had no presence along the Turkish border since 2012, when Syrian rebels and Syrian Kurdish groups took control of different parts of the region.
After three days of talks in Ankara and repeated Turkish threats of a military incursion in northeast Syria, Turkish and U.S. officials agreed that the coordination center would be based in Turkey and would be set up “as soon as possible,” according to the Turkish defense ministry.
The ministry did not provide further details but said the sides had agreed that the safe zone would become a “corridor of peace” and that all additional measures would be taken to ensure the return of refugees to Syria.
Turkey has been pressing to control _ in coordination with the U.S. a 19-25 mile-deep zone within Syria, east of the Euphrates River, and wants no Syrian Kurdish forces there.
In its previous military incursions, Turkey entered northwestern Syria, expelling Islamic State militants and Syrian Kurdish fighters from the area and setting up Turkish military posts there, with allied Syrian opposition fighters in control. Turkish troops also man observation points that ring the last opposition stronghold in the northwest _ posts that are meant to uphold a now fraying cease-fire.
President Trump and his wife Melania were greeted by dozens of protesters when they traveled to Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas, Wednesday to visit the victims of last weekend’s mass shootings. Richard Green has the full story from Washington.
Greek search crews have found the body of a British scientist who went missing while on holiday on the Aegean island of Ikaria in a ravine near where she had been staying, authorities said Wednesday.
Police said the body of Cyprus-based astrophysicist Natalie Christopher, 34, was found in a 20-meter (65-foot) deep ravine. Christopher had been reported missing on Monday by her Cypriot partner with whom she was vacationing after she went for a morning run.
The cause of death was not immediately clear and authorities planned an autopsy.
Police, firefighters, volunteers and the coast guard had been scouring the area where Christopher had been staying during her vacation, which has paths along ravines and steep seaside cliffs. A specialized police unit with geolocation equipment was sent to the island to help in the search.
Cypriot authorities said they were in close contact with Greek search crews and the woman’s family.
“I express the sincere condolences of the Cypriot state and of myself to the family and friends of Natalie Christopher,” Cypriot Justice and Public Order Minister George Savvides said after being informed that the body had been identified.
They are seen as the shock troops of a burgeoning direct-action environmental movement. Earlier this year, members of Extinction Rebellion brought the center of London and some other major British towns to a standstill by barricading bridges, standing on top of trains, and blocking major thoroughfares and crossroads.
Extinction Rebellion (XR), a campaign of civil disobedience born in Britain and aiming to address a worldwide climate crisis, has been endorsed by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, the teenage poster child of environmentalism. XR has pledged to cause more disruption, arguing that governments are not doing enough to stop the “climate emergency.”
The group, which is spawning similar campaigns in the United States and Australia, says climate activists have no choice but to take matters into their own hands. It demands that governments prevent further biodiversity loss and commit to producing net-zero greenhouse gases by 2025. Otherwise, XR says, there will be a mass extinction of life forms on the planet within the lifetimes of the demonstrators themselves.
The group’s next target is next month’s star-studded London Fashion Week. Activists have promised to shut down the five-day runway event in a bid to raise awareness of the environmental damage caused by the fashion industry.
FILE – Extinction Rebellion climate activists raise a mast on their boat during a protest outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Britain, July 15, 2019.
“We need to change our culture around consumption,” said climate activist Bel Jacobs. “People have no idea how environmentally destructive fashion is.”
Greenhouse gas emissions from making textiles was estimated at 1.2 billion tons of CO2-equivalent in 2015, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a British environmental charity.
‘Cultish nature’
XR’s actions have been applauded by many environmentalists, who say the only way to make governments, people and corporations sit up and take climate action is to shock them into it. But the radical philosophy underpinning the group, which includes wanting to set up citizens’ assemblies that could overrule parliament, is drawing increasing criticism from foes, who compare the group to a millenarian sect.
“The cultish nature of XR’s activities is a little spooky,” said Austin Williams, director of the Future Cities Project, a group that focuses on urban planning and futurist technological solutions.
Sympathizers acknowledge that XR hasn’t helped itself with some of the remarks made by its leaders. Co-founder Gail Bradbrook said her realization that humanity was on the brink of extinction came from taking huge doses of psychedelic drugs, which “rewired” her brain and gave her the “codes of social change.”
Roger Hallam, another co-founder, has said, “We are going to force the governments to act. And if they don’t, we will bring them down and create a democracy fit for purpose. And yes, some may die in the process.”
FILE – Police remove a climate change demonstrator during a march supported by Extinction Rebellion in London, Britain. May 24, 2019.
Hallam is not a scientist but has a track record as a political activist, and holds a Ph.D. on “digitally enhanced political resistance and empowerment strategies.”
BirthStrikers
Several leading XR adherents have announced they’ve decided not to procreate in response to the coming “climate breakdown and civilization collapse,” arguing the world is too horrible a place to bring children into it.
The BirthStrikers, as they are nicknamed, received some endorsement earlier this year from U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said the climate emergency “does lead young people to have a legitimate question — ‘Is it OK still to have children?'”
XR critics have compared the BirthStrikers to the Cathars, a medieval religious sect that encouraged celibacy and discouraged marriage on the grounds that every person born was just another poor soul trapped by the devil in a body.
Defections
XR has also seen defections. Sherrie Yeomans, coordinator of XR blockades in the English city of Bristol, left the group, saying, “I can no longer surround myself with the toxic, manipulative Extinction Rebellion cult.”
Johan Norberg, a Swedish author, historian and XR critic, worries that the group is fueling anxiety while not being practical about the possible solutions to global warming.
“I guess it depends on your definition of cult,” he said. “But I think it is a growing, but very radical, sentiment that I fear plays a part in giving people anxiety about their life choices, and also leads us to thinking about these things in the wrong way,” he told VOA.
On the BirthStrikers he said: “The bizarre thing is that they just think of another human being as a burden, a mouth to feed. But they also come along with a brain to think, and hands to work. I don’t know what scientific insight and which technology will save us from not just global warming but also the many other problems that will affect us — the next pandemic, natural disaster and so on — but I know that the chance that we’ll find it is greater if we have more people alive, who live longer lives than ever, get a longer education than ever, and are more free to make use of the accumulated knowledge and technology of mankind to take on those problems.”
FILE – Protesters from the group Extinction Rebellion walk to Hyde Park in London, April 25, 2019.
Norberg points to a future of “electric cars and, soon, planes,” and biofuels made from algae and extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere. He worries about the economic consequences if the abrupt zero-growth goals of XR were adopted.
“It would result in a reversal of the amazing economic development that has resulted in the fastest reduction of poverty in history. A lack of growth and international trade would result in human tragedies on a massive scale,” he said.
XR response
XR’s co-founders say Norberg’s formula won’t halt climate change and stop extinction. They defended themselves against critics’ cult charges, arguing recently in an article in a British newspaper, “We’ve made many mistakes, but now is the time for collective action, not recriminations.”
“Extinction Rebellion is humbly following in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King,” Hallam said. “After covering basic material needs, human beings are not made happier through consuming more stuff.”
Bradbrook told reporters in London, “We oppose a system that generates huge wealth through astonishing innovation but is fatally unable to distribute fairly and provide universal access to its spoils. … We need a ‘revolution’ in consciousness to overturn the system.”
The last time Samuel Botros stepped into the Lebanese monastery of Saint Anthony of Qozhaya was in 1978. He was 24, newly married, and the country was in the grip of an all-out war. Like many of his generation, he left. It took him 41 years to return.
The 1975-90 civil war may be over in Lebanon, but conflicts in nearby countries like Iraq and Syria have devastated entire communities where Christians once lived alongside Muslims. That has triggered an exodus among people of both faiths, especially among minority sects — like Botros’ Syriac Orthodox community whose roots are in early Christianity.
The monastery, which is nestled in a remote valley in the northern Lebanese mountains and dates from the fourth century, is a meeting place for Christians who have fled conflict.
FILE – The Monastery of Saint Anthony of Qozhaya is nestled in the heart of the Qadisha valley, in Zgharta district, Lebanon, April 26, 2007.
“It is the war that did this to us. It is the wars that continue to leave behind destruction and force people to leave,” said Botros, visiting the monastery as part of a gathering of his community’s scout group — their first in the region since the 1950s.
The scout group’s roughly 150 members include people living in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories and further afield. Lebanon was the only country where they could all meet easily and safely, Botros said.
In Iraq, years of conflict, most recently with Islamic State, erased much of the Christian heritage in ancient cities like Mosul and Sinjar in the north. In Syria’s civil war, some of the oldest churches in Aleppo, Homs and other cities were damaged.
Botros, now 65, is about to retire in Sweden where he made his home years ago. He is father and grandfather to children who know Lebanon only through photos.
“I would like them to visit so that when I pass, there is something to pull them back,” he said.
Ancient sanctuary
On Sundays and public holidays, the monastery’s small church, with the bell tower and facade, etched into the cliffs is full of people huddled in the pews or standing at the back of the vaulted interior.
FILE – A nun looks on as people visit the Monastery of Saint Anthony of Qozhaya in the heart of the Qadisha valley, in Zgharta district, Lebanon, June 23, 2019.
Its patron is Saint Anthony, a monk who is believed to have lived in rural Egypt in the fourth or fifth century.
“This place has always been a shrine … we don’t even know when it started. Even when there was no development … people still came,” said Father Fadi Imad, the priest who gives sermons.
Qozhaya lies within a valley known as the Valley of Saints, or Qannoubine in ancient Syriac, part of a wider valley network called Qadisha that has a long history as a refuge for monks. At one time, Qadisha was home to hundreds of hermitages, churches, caves and monasteries. The monastery of Saint Anthony is the last surviving one.
It was an early home for Lebanon’s Christian Maronites, the first followers of the Roman Catholic church in the East.
The Maronites and sometimes the Druze, a Muslim sect, sought the sanctuary of the mountains away from the political and religious dynasties of the times with whom they did not always agree, Father Imad said.
“The inhabitants of this mountain … and they were not only Christians, came here because they were persecuted and weak,” he said.
“Qozhaya holds in its heart 1,600 years of history and it doesn’t belong to anyone, church or faith, … it belongs to the homeland,” he said.
‘I will never forget’
The monastery is surrounded by forests of pine and cedar and orchards that can only be reached via a narrow, winding road.
Its grounds include a cave where visitors light candles, a museum housing the Middle East’s oldest printing press in ancient Syriac and halls for resident priests.
FILE – The Monastery of Saint Anthony of Qozhaya sits in the heart of the Qadisha valley, in Zgharta district, Lebanon, June 23, 2019.
Visitors nowadays include foreign and Arab tourists and local residents including Muslims who sometimes come to ask for a blessing.
Father Imad said the monastery was the safest it had been in its history despite being surrounded by countries at war or suffering its aftermath.
“No one is telling us that they are coming to kill us anymore … at least in Lebanon,” he said.
Before he left, Botros and his fellows stood for a final photo outside the building with the valley behind. With their flags and scarves around their necks, they smiled and cheered as the bells rang.
“What I have seen today I will never forget for as long as I live,” Botros said. “No matter how long it takes, the son always returns to the mother.”
The National Basketball Association on Tuesday said that Amazon.com’s Twitch would be its exclusive digital partner for streaming USA Basketball games globally through 2020.
Twitch — best known as a platform for video game players to interact and stream their own competitions — will also exclusively stream up to 76 boys and girls youth basketball games during the Jr. NBA Global Championship, which begins Tuesday, the league said.
USA Basketball is the governing body of American basketball and fields men’s and women’s teams for international competitions, including this year’s International Basketball Federation (FIBA) World Cup in China starting Aug. 31 and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. NBA handles media and marketing partnerships for the organization.
The deals will add to the growing library of live sporting content on Twitch, which streams the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, as does Amazon Prime.
They will also allow the NBA to keep experimenting with digital partnerships as more fans dump traditional cable subscriptions.
Some purely digital media subscription services — like Amazon Prime and London-based newcomer DAZN — have drawn viewers, as have ESPN and other networks that have started their own direct-to-consumer products.
Leagues themselves now also stream some games on their own websites, in this case on NBA.com.
Extra content
Even so, leagues still view linear television networks as valuable partners because of their high production capabilities and the huge audiences they continue to capture for big events.
The NBA’s main media rights are tied up with Walt Disney Co’s ESPN and ABC, as well as TNT, a unit of AT&T Inc’s WarnerMedia, through the 2025 season.
That has left the league carving out other rights in order to try out new kinds of content and partnerships.
As part of Tuesday’s deals, Twitch and USA Basketball will develop extra content around each event, including the USA Men’s National Team, certain 3×3 events and USA Women’s National team friendly games, training camps and the 2020 Nike Hoop Summit, the NBA said.
Twitch has already been streaming matches from the NBA’s minor league organization, the G League, as well as its NBA 2K videogame matches. Financial terms of Tuesday’s agreements were not disclosed.
U.S. plans to keep just a residual force in Syria to ensure the enduring defeat of the Islamic State may be on the verge of backfiring, with some military officials warning the strategy is giving the terror group new life.
The doubts, raised in a Defense Department Inspector General report released Tuesday, come as Washington has struggled to secure additional on-the-ground help in Syria from allies and amid renewed warnings that while IS may have lost control of its self-declared caliphate, the group’s fighters are far from defeated.
Some of the strongest criticism for what the report described as Washington’s completed “partial withdrawal” from Syria is from officials with Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), the headquarters responsible for overseeing U.S. and coalition efforts against IS.
“According to CJTF-OIR, the reduction of U.S. forces has decreased the support available for Syrian partner forces at a time when their forces need more training and equipping to respond to the ISIS resurgence,” Principal Deputy Inspector General Glenn Fine wrote, using another acronym for Islamic State.
FILE — A member of U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) watches over people who were evacuated out of the last territory held by Islamic State militants, outside Baghuz, Syria, March 5, 2019.
Additionally, coalition officials told the inspector general the drawdown could cause U.S.-backed forces, including the mostly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to turn away from Washington and seek out “alternate partnerships and resources.”
‘Detrimental’ to U.S. mission
CJTF-OIR warned that such developments could be “detrimental to the United States’ mission in Iraq and Syria.”
Neither the White House nor the Pentagon immediately responded to requests for comment on the report, which also identified other shortcomings with White House strategy and U.S. military efforts in Syria and Iraq.
U.S. President Donald Trump first announced the U.S. withdrawal from Syria this past December via Twitter.
We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.
But the announcement sparked significant divisions within the administration, especially from military officials, ultimately prompting then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to resign.
Despite concerns, Pentagon officials proceeded with what they described as a deliberate and orderly withdrawal of most of the 2,200 U.S. troops in Syria, completing the drawdown in the months following the fall of IS’s last Syrian stronghold in late March.
But since then, there have been numerous warnings that while IS may no longer have outright control of territory, its grip on Syria remains strong.
IS’ “covert network in the Syrian Arab Republic is spreading, and cells are being established at the provincial level,” a United Nations report warned last week, adding the terror group “is adapting, consolidating and creating conditions for eventual resurgence in its Iraqi and Syrian heartland.”
Additionally, U.S. estimates put the number of IS fighters and supporters in Syria and neighboring Iraq at between 14,000 and 18,000.
But U.S. and coalition officials worry the drawdown has made it more difficult for them and for partner forces to keep track of IS activity.
According to the new inspector general report, the U.S. drawdown came as partner forces needed more “training and equipping to build trust with local communities and to develop the human-based intelligence necessary to confront ISIS resurgent cells and insurgent capabilities in Syria.”
Disinformation campaign
At the same time, officials warn the U.S.-backed SDF is falling victim to a damaging disinformation campaign.
“ISIS has been successful in portraying the SDF as the new occupying force in the area ‘to exploit tension between the Kurdish-led SDF and local Arab residents,'” the inspector general report said, citing an assessment by U.S. Central Command.
FILE – A Kurdish policeman checks an Arab Syrian man at a checkpoint controlled by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces on a highway in Hassakeh province, March 28, 2018.
Coalition military officials voiced similar concerns, noting Russia, Iran and the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad also “seek to weaken the SDF by leveraging Arab grievances against it, which could result in ‘overall failure to maintain the mission [against ISIS] in Syria.'”
Adding to the concerns, coalition officials said efforts to increase the size of U.S. and coalition-backed forces are falling short.
CJTF-OIR said by the end of June, partner forces had a total of 100,000 troops — 10,000 less than needed.
U.S. officials have been trying to make up for the drawdown of U.S. forces in Syria by securing commitments from allied nations to send additional forces. But officials admit it has been a challenge.
“I would say that we are well on the way to getting formal commitments by a good number of countries, far more than where they are a year ago,” U.S. Special Representative for Syria, Ambassador James Jeffrey, told a security forum last month.
“This will be a satisfactory outcome,” he added.
But even if U.S. allies send more troops to Syria, U.S. officials admitted efforts to keep IS defeated in Iraq are also struggling.
U.S. military officials said IS still retains significant support, especially in northern and western Iraq, where it has been able to recruit and raise money.
The inspector general report cautioned that coalition officials also worry “Iraq lacks hold forces capable of maintaining security in areas cleared of ISIS.”
IS “is able to operate as an insurgency in Iraq and Syria in part because the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) remain unable to sustain long-term operations against ISIS militants,” the report said.
China says it will take “countermeasures” if the United States deploys ground-based intermediate-range missiles in the Asia-Pacific region.
Fu Cong, the director of the Foreign Ministry’s arms control division, told reporters Tuesday that Beijing “will not stand idly by” if Washington follows through on a pledge made last weekend by new Defense Secretary Mark Esper to deploy the missiles in the region “sooner rather than later,” preferably within months.
He urged China’s neighbors, specifically Japan, South Korea and Australia, to “exercise prudence” by refusing to deploy the U.S. missiles, adding that it would serve those countries national security interests.
Fu did not specify what countermeasures China would take, but said “everything is on the table.”
Secretary Esper’s stated goal to deploy ground-based missiles in the region came after the Trump administration formally pulled the U.S. out of the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty last week. The pact, reached with the former Soviet Union, bans ground-based nuclear and conventional ballistic missiles with a range between 500-5,000 kilometers. Washington said it withdrew from the INF because of continued violations by Moscow.
Fu said China had no interest in taking part in trilateral talks with the United States and Russia due to the “huge gap” in the size of China’s nuclear arsenal compared to the other two nations.
Chinese companies have stopped buying U.S. agricultural products, China’s Commerce Ministry said on Tuesday, a blow to U.S. farmers who have already seen their exports slashed by the more than year-old trade war.
China may impose additional tariffs on U.S. farm products bought shortly before the purchase ban took effect, China’s Commerce Ministry said. China also let the yuan weaken past the key 7-per-dollar level on Monday for the first time in more than a decade.
Before the trade war started, China bought $19.5 billion worth of farm goods in 2017, mainly soybeans, dairy, sorghum and pork. The trade war reduced those sales to $9.1 billion in 2018, according to the American Farm Bureau.
China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a statement it hoped the United States would keep its promises and create the “necessary conditions” for bilateral cooperation.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that Beijing had not fulfilled a promise to buy large volumes of U.S. farm products and vowed to impose new tariffs on around $300 billion of Chinese goods, abruptly ending a truce in the Sino-U.S. trade war.
Earlier, China’s state broadcaster CCTV reported an official from China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) as saying Trump’s accusations were “groundless.”
China is the world’s top buyer of soybeans, the most valuable U.S. export crop. The Trump administration has announced plans to spend up to $28 billion compensating U.S. farmers, a key Trump constituency, for lost income from trade disputes.
American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall called the announcement “a body blow to thousands of farmers and ranchers who are already struggling to get by.”
In this June 25, 2019, photo, farmer Matthew Keller walks through one of his pig barns near Kenyon, Minn. When the Trump administration announced a $12 billion aid package for farmers struggling under the financial strain of his trade.
The National Pork Producers Council said in an email it was important to end the trade war so pork producers could “more fully participate in a historic sales opportunity.”
Farmers can start applying for the next round of trade aid this month, but trade uncertainty makes long-term planning difficult.
“We’ve been thankful for the aid payments. They have helped but we’d rather have open markets because it creates stability in our financial sectors,” said Derek Sawyer, 39, a corn, soybean, wheat and cattle farm from McPherson, Kansas. “There’s just so much volatility right now because nobody knows the rules of the game and nobody knows how to look at things going forward.”
China is buying more soybeans from Brazil. Its overall need for soybeans used to feed livestock has fallen as African Swine Fever kills millions of pigs. U.S. meat exporters had hoped to take advantage of the disease to export more pork to China but 62% retaliatory tariffs have limited exports.
Overall, China has purchased about 14.3 million tons of last season’s soybean crop, the least in 11 years, and some 3.7 million tons still need to be shipped, according to U.S. data.
China bought 32.9 million tons of U.S. soybeans in 2017, before the trade war.
China applied a 25% tariff on soybeans in July of last year in response to U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods.
China is honoring agreements signed earlier to import U.S. soybeans, according to Cong Liang, secretary general of China’s NDRC, CCTV reported. The report said that 2.27 million tons of U.S. soybeans had been loaded and shipped to China in July, since Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Osaka at the G20 summit at the end of June.
FILE – A grain salesman shows locally grown soybeans in Ohio, April 5, 2018.
China bought 130,000 tons of soybeans, 120,000 tons of sorghum, 60,000 tons of wheat, 40,000 tons of pork and products, and 25,000 tons of cotton from the United States between July 19 and Aug. 2, Cong said according to the report.
Weekly U.S. data on Aug. 1 confirmed the first new U.S. soybean sale to China since June, of 68,000 tons from the crop that will be harvested this fall. Additional sales through Aug. 1 could be recorded in the next U.S. government export sales report on Thursday.
Two million tons of U.S. soybeans destined for China will be loaded in August, followed by another 300,000 tons in September, Cong said.
However, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Monday less than 600,000 tons of soybeans were inspected for export to China the week ended Aug. 1, fewer than the previous week.
The escalating trade tensions between the United States and China that sent U.S. stock prices plunging Monday continued to reverberate around the globe as Asian stock prices opened sharply lower at the start of Tuesday’s trading session.
Both Japan’s benchmark Nikkei and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng indexes both opened less than two percent at the opening bell, while China’s benchmark Shanghai index dropped more than 1.5 percent at the start. Australia and South Korea also posted sharp losses in their early morning trading.
Tuesday’s sell-offs in Asia came hours after Wall Street posted its worst losses of the year, with the S&P 500 index losing three percent on Monday, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 3.5 percent and Dow Jones losing nearly three percent. The selloff was triggered by Beijing’s decision to allow its currency to fall to weaken to its lowest point in 11 years, triggering an angry response by U.S. President Donald Trump on Twitter, accusing China of manipulating its currency.
China’s move to devalue its currency gives its exporters a price edge in world markets.
Hours later, the U.S. Treasury Department officially designated China a currency manipulator.
The months-long trade war between the world’s two biggest economies worsened last week when President Trump announced plans to impose a 10 percent increase of tariffs on Chinese exports to the U.S. worth $300 billion. China has retaliated by ending all new purchases of agricultural products from the United States.
China allowed its yuan to fall below the politically sensitive level of seven to the U.S. dollar on Monday for the first time in 11 years, prompting concern Beijing might use devaluation as a weapon in a tariff war with Washington.
The central bank blamed the exchange rate’s decline on “trade protectionism.” That followed President Donald Trump’s threat last week of more tariff hikes on Chinese goods in a bruising fight over Beijing’s trade surplus and technology policies.
The currency weakened to 7.0391 to the dollar by late afternoon, making one yuan worth 14.2 cents, its lowest level since February 2008.
“The thought of a currency war is crossing more than a few traders’ minds,” Stephen Innes of VM Markets said in a report.
The weakness of the yuan, also known as the renminbi, or “people’s money,” is among U.S. grievances against Beijing. American officials complain it makes Chinese export prices unfairly low, hurting foreign competitors and swelling Beijing’s trade surplus.
China’s central bank sets the exchange rate each morning and allows the yuan to fluctuate by 2% against the dollar during the day. The central bank can buy or sell currency or order commercial banks to do so to dampen price movements.
It appears “the currency is now also considered part of the arsenal to be drawn upon,” Robert Carnell of ING said in a report. He said Monday’s move might be part of “a concerted series of steps aimed at pushing back at the latest U.S. tariffs.”
The level of seven yuan to the dollar has no economic significance, but could revive U.S. attention to the exchange rate.
Until now, economists said the potential jolt to financial markets of falling beyond that level was big enough that the People’s Bank of China would step in to put a floor under the currency.
A central bank statement Monday blamed “unilateralism and trade protectionism measures,” a reference to Trump’s tariff hikes. But it tried to play down the significance of “breaking seven.”
“It is normal to rise and fall,” the statement said. It promised to “maintain stable operation of the foreign exchange market.”
Chinese leaders have promised to avoid “competitive devaluation” to boost exports by making them less expensive abroad _ a pledge the central bank governor, Yi Gang, affirmed in March. But regulators are trying to make the state-controlled exchange rate more responsive to market forces, which are pushing the yuan lower.
Trump’s tariff hikes have put downward pressure on the yuan by fueling fears economic growth might weaken.
The U.S. Treasury Department declined in May to label China a currency manipulator but said it was closely watching Beijing.
The yuan has lost 5% since hitting a high in February of 6.6862 to the dollar.
That helps exporters cope with tariffs of up to 25% imposed by Trump on billions of dollars of Chinese goods. But it raises the risk of inflaming American complaints.
Trump rattled financial markets Thursday by announcing plans for 10% tariffs on an additional $300 billion of Chinese goods, effective Sept. 1. That would extend penalty duties to almost all U.S. imports from China.
The Treasury report in May urged Beijing to take steps “to avoid a persistently weak currency.”
A weaker yuan also might disrupt Chinese efforts to shore up cooling economic growth. It would raise borrowing costs by encouraging an outflow of capital from the world’s second-largest economy.
Globally, a weaker yuan might lead to more volatility in currency markets and pressure for the dollar to strengthen, Louis Kuijs of Oxford Economics said in a report. That would be “unwelcome in Washington,” where Trump has threatened to weaken the dollar to boost exports.
A weaker dollar “would be bad news” for Europe and Japan, hurting demand for their exports at a time of cooling economic growth, Kuijs said.
The Chinese central bank tried to discourage speculation last August by imposing a requirement that traders post deposits for contracts to buy or sell yuan. That allows trading to continue but raises the cost.
Beijing imposed similar controls in October 2015 after a change in the exchange rate mechanism prompted markets to bet the yuan would fall. The currency temporarily steadied but fell the following year.
South Korea’s president on Monday described the country’s escalating trade war with Japan as a wake-up call to revamp its economy and issued a nationalistic call for economic cooperation with North Korea, which he said would allow the Koreas to erase Japan’s economic superiority in “one burst.”
President Moon Jae-in’s comments were made during a meeting with senior aides to discuss Japan’s imposing of trade curbs on South Korea. They came as a surprise as North Korea has raised tensions in recent weeks with tests of new short-range weapons that experts say pose a serious threat to the South Korea’s security.
“The advantage Japan’s economy has over us is the size of its [overall] economy and domestic market. If the South and North could create a peace economy through economic cooperation, we can catch up with Japan’s superiority in one burst,” Moon said during the meeting at Seoul’s presidential Blue House.
“Japan absolutely cannot prevent our economy from taking a leap. Rather, [Japan] will serve as a stimulant that strengthens our determination to become an economic power,” he said.
Some analysts say Moon is getting desperate to find any leverage against Japan, which for decades has maintained a huge trade surplus with South Korea, and they question whether there could be any possible way for Seoul to use inter-Korean relations to boost its position against Tokyo.
Even if inter-Korean economic cooperation is fully resumed after quick progress in nuclear diplomacy — a possibility that looks increasingly unlikely — rebuilding the North’s dismal economy following decades of isolation and policy blunders could be a long and excruciating process.
Moon has described Japan’s moves to downgrade South Korea’s trade status and tighten controls on exports to South Korean manufacturers as a deliberate attempt to damage his country’s export-dependent economy. He has accused Tokyo of weaponizing trade to retaliate over political disputes surrounding the countries’ bitter wartime history.
Tokyo says its measures are based on national security concerns and, without providing specific evidence, has questioned the credibility of South Korea’s export controls on sensitive products. Japanese officials have also claimed that South Korea could not be trusted to faithfully implement sanctions against North Korea and suggested that the South may have allowed sensitive materials to reach the North.
North Korea and Japan didn’t immediately respond to Moon’s comments. The North has been demanding that Seoul turn away from Washington and restart inter-Korean economic projects held back by U.S.-led sanctions against the North. The U.S. has said the sanctions should stay in place until the North takes concrete steps to relinquish its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
The North has significantly reduced its diplomatic activity with the South amid a stalemate in the larger nuclear negotiations with the U.S. It has been ramping up its weapons tests, including two test firings of what it described as a new rocket artillery system last week, while expressing frustration over the slow pace of diplomacy and the continuance of U.S.-South Korea military drills that it sees as an invasion rehearsal.
Choi Kang, a senior analyst at Seoul’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies, said Moon’s comments Monday could create friction with Washington and also send a wrong message to North Korea, which may think that its brinkmanship is working and push further to increase pressure on Seoul.
He said Moon’s comments are “a confession that Seoul doesn’t have many cards in its hands.”
He said it was unclear whether Moon’s suggestion that he could create a breakthrough in the trade row with Japan through inter-Korean relations was be realistic.
Choi also said Moon’s words would strengthen views that the trade dispute between South Korea and Japan may signal a larger geopolitical divergence between the U.S. allies over North Korea and other security issues. He said that may complicate Washington’s efforts to maintain cooperation to deal with the North’s nuclear threat and counter the regional influence of China.
Moon met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un three times last year and the leaders agreed to resume economic cooperation when possible, voicing optimism that international sanctions could end to allow such activity. But the inter-Korean peace process has halted since the collapse of a nuclear summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump in February over disagreements in exchanging sanctions relief and disarmament.
Earlier on Monday, South Korea said it plans to spend 7.8 trillion won ($6.5 billion) over the next seven years to develop technologies for industrial materials and parts as it moves to reduce its dependence on imports. The government will also financially support South Korean companies in mergers and acquisitions of foreign companies and expand tax benefits to lure more international investment, while easing labor and environmental regulations so that local companies could boost their production, the country’s trade ministry said.
South Korea’s plans are aimed at stabilizing the supply of 100 key materials and parts in semiconductors, display screens, automobiles and other major export sectors, where its companies have heavily relied on Japanese imports to produce finished products.
On Friday, Japan’s Cabinet approved the removal of South Korea from a list of countries with preferential trade status, which would require Japanese companies to apply for case-by-case approvals for exports to South Korea of hundreds of items deemed sensitive.
The decision followed a July measure to strengthen controls on certain technology exports to South Korean companies that rely on Japanese materials to produce computer chips and displays used in smartphones and TVs, which are key South Korean export products.
South Korean officials have vowed retaliation, including taking Japan off its own “whitelist” of nations receiving preferential treatment in trade. Moon’s office said it will also consider ending its military intelligence-sharing pact with Japan as part of its countermeasures, saying it could be difficult to share sensitive information considering the deterioration of trust between the countries.
