A U.S. senator who was held as a prisoner of war (POW) in Vietnam and then ran for U.S. president twice was given the honor of lying in state in the U.S. Capitol Friday, two days before his burial. Arizona Senator John McCain lost his battle with cancer. But the 81-year-old will probably be best remembered for his ability to cross party boundaries. VOA's Carolyn Presutti reports.
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The Trump administration is under increasing pressure to speed up the reunification of immigrant families it separated at the Mexican border, following allegations three youngsters were sexually abused while in U.S. custody.
The government of El Salvador said the three, ages 12 to 17, were victimized at shelters in Arizona, and it asked the U.S. to make their return a priority.
“May they leave the shelters as soon as possible, because it is there that they are the most vulnerable,” Deputy Foreign Relations Minister Liduvina Magarin said in San Salvador on Thursday.
Deadline a month ago
The U.S. government already is facing heavy criticism over its slow pace in reuniting more than 2,600 children who were separated from their parents last spring before the Trump administration agreed to stop the practice. Most have since been reunited, but hundreds remain apart more than a month after the deadline set by a judge.
Before the Trump administration reversed course, many of the parents had been deported to their home countries while their children remained in shelters in the U.S.
Attorneys for the U.S. government and the immigrant families discussed how to accelerate the process at a hearing Friday in San Diego in front of U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, who set the deadline.
Magarin gave few details on the three cases other than to say they involved “sexual violations, sexual abuses.” She said her government is ready with lawyers and psychologists to help the families, adding: “The psychological and emotional impact is forever.”
“It’s unbelievable that children who were fleeing violence here were met in the United States with the worst violence a child could encounter,” said Cesar Rios, director of the Salvadoran Migrant Institute.
More information is needed to investigate, the U.S. Department Health and Human Services said in a statement Friday, that adding that “without additional details, we are unable to confirm or deny these allegations took place” at a facility overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. It contracts with nonprofits and other third parties to run shelters for unaccompanied minors arriving at the border.
Administration asks ACLU to find the families
In trying to reunite families, the Trump administration has put the onus on the American Civil Liberties Union, asking that the organization use its “considerable resources” to find parents in their home countries, mostly Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
The governments of those countries and nonprofit organizations have been trying to locate the families. Those efforts have included posting public notices and putting hotline numbers on billboards in the hope a parent missing a child might see the signs and call.
“Every day that these children are separated and left in government facilities does more damage,” said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney representing separated families. “Even if the facilities were palaces, the separation of young children from their parents causes potentially permanent trauma.”
The government and ACLU indicated in the hearing Friday that the process should start to speed up.
200 cases could be resolved soon
Gelernt told the judge as many as 200 cases could be resolved in the next week or two. Those include families who want to be reunited in their home countries and those who want to waive their right to reunification and keep their child in the United States to pursue asylum.
The judge also said the administration can expedite cases where families have expressed the desire for the child to be sent back and not worry about it violating a temporary halt on deportations of families seeking asylum.
Justice Department attorney Scott Stewart said the government wants to remove any roadblocks.
“There are a lot of folks that want to move forward with reunification,” he told the judge.
Parents increasingly anxious
More than 300 parents who have been deported are waiting for their sons and daughters to be returned to them in their homelands. Many are growing increasingly anxious.
Among them is Evelin Roxana Meyer, whose 11-year-old son, Eduardo Almendarez Meyer, was told this week that he won’t be leaving the U.S. until Nov. 27. He has been held at a government-contracted shelter in Brownsville, Texas, since he was separated from his father in early June.
The boy’s mother said her husband was told when he signed his deportation papers that his son would be waiting for him in Honduras.
“Now it’ll be six months before we see him? Oh my God,” Meyer said Friday, crying during a telephone interview from her hometown of La Union. “I don’t know why it’s taking so long. My son is worried. He tells me, ‘More time here, Mommy? Oh, no. Why?’ I don’t know what to tell him.”
Child psychologist Barbara Van Dahlen, founder of Give an Hour, a network of mental health professions that is offering to counsel the separated families, said the reports of abuse are likely to worsen the immigrant parents’ anxieties.
“I can’t imagine the stress, the anxiety, the terror, if I was separated from my child, and then the thought that possibly some of these kids are being abused,” Van Dahlen said. “It would be so debilitating and destructive that it would be hard for some parents to function.”
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The Trump administration has cut funding to the U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees, calling the organization "irredeemably flawed."
The U.S. State Department ended decades of support to the organization Friday, saying "the administration has carefully reviewed the issue and determined that the United States will not make additional contributions to UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency)."
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the U.N. agency's "endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries is simply unsustainable and has been in crisis mode for many years."
UNRWA provides health care, education and social services to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The agency says it provides services to about 5 million Palestinian refugees, most of whom are descendants of Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes during the war that led to Israel's establishment in 1948.
The United States supplies nearly 30 percent of the total budget of UNRWA and donated $355 million to the agency in 2016. However, in January, the Trump administration withheld $65 million it had been due to provide UNRWA and released only $60 million in funds.
Last week, the Trump administration announced it would cut more than $200 million in economic aid to the Palestinians, following a review of the funding for projects in the West Bank and Gaza. A senior State Department official said the decision took into account the challenges the international community faces in providing assistance to Gaza, where "Hamas control endangers the lives of Gaza's citizens and degrades an already dire humanitarian and economic situation."
Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that runs Gaza, seized the coastal territory in 2007 from the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority. That led to Israel and Egypt placing severe economic restrictions on the region.
Under the Trump administration, Washington has taken a number of actions that have angered the Palestinians, including recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital in December and moving the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv in May. The Palestinian leadership has been boycotting Washington's peace efforts since the Jerusalem announcement.
Lawyers for President Donald Trump asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought against his charitable foundation by New York's attorney general, arguing that it was politically motivated.
In the motion Thursday, Trump attorney Alan S. Futerfas argued that former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman "made it his stated mission to `lead the resistance' and attack Mr. Trump whenever possible" and "used his public antipathy for Mr. Trump to solicit donations for his own re-election campaign and advance his career interests and aspirations."
Trump very publicly announced his intention to dissolve the foundation and donate all of its remaining funds to charity, but the AG "actively stonewalled dissolution," Futerfas wrote.
"At the same time, the NYAG turned a blind eye to serious and significant allegations of misconduct involving the Clinton Foundation, including claims that it, and its subsidiaries, violated New York law by failing to disclose $225 million in donations from foreign governments," Futerfas wrote.
Schneiderman began investigating the Trump Foundation in 2016 following Washington Post reports that its spending personally benefited the presidential candidate. Schneiderman ordered the foundation to stop fundraising in New York.
Schneiderman resigned in May after allegations that he physically abused women he had dated; he denied the claims.
His successor, Democratic Attorney General Barbara Underwood, filed the lawsuit in June, claiming the Trump Foundation "was little more than a checkbook for payments from Mr. Trump or his businesses to nonprofits, regardless of their purpose or legality." The suit seeks $2.8 million in restitution and the foundation's disbandment.
The filing said Underwood continued the "inflammatory rhetoric, stating publicly that she considers her battles with the President `the most important work [she] has ever done' and has vowed that such `work will continue."'
Trump's lawyers also argued that several impermissible donations by the foundation were due to clerical errors and were all corrected when brought to the attention of foundation officials.
In a statement Thursday, the attorney general's office said it won't back down from "holding Trump and his associates accountable for their flagrant violations of New York law."
"As our lawsuit detailed, the Trump Foundation functioned as a personal piggy bank to serve Trump's business and political interests," the statement said.
Thousands of mourners have come to pay their respects to music legend Aretha Franklin, who will be laid to rest Friday in Detroit, Michigan. A star-studded roster of performers and speakers are scheduled to attend. From Washington, VOA's Jill Craig has more.
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Notably absent from the final tribute ceremonies for U.S. Senator John McCain, who died last Saturday, is President Donald Trump. McCain and Trump disagreed on a number of issues, including U.S. relations with Russia. Some analysts view the feud as emblematic of the clash of values within the Republican Party. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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The current 115th Congress is the most racially and gender diverse in history, with more women serving in the Senate than ever before, according to data from Pew Research Center and Congressional Quarterly. Women and minorities each constitute just under 20 percent of all House and Senate members. But the percentage of female lawmakers is likely to increase substantially after the November midterm election. That’s because a record 200 female House nominees are headed for the general election, with many likely or certain to win, according to an analysis by the New York Times. Here is a look at the demographic makeup of the current House and Senate members who took office in early January 2017:
President Donald Trump has followed through on pledges to roll-back Obama-era rules that tightened restrictions on greenhouse gases, promising the moves would lead to more American jobs and economic growth. Trump's proposal includes loosening restrictions to the American Clean Cars Standards and the Clean Power Plan. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has more.
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President Donald Trump said Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court chief justice should tell the head of a national security court to question FBI and Justice Department officials about their use of a so-called Russia dossier as part of a collusion probe.
Trump singled out Justice Department official Bruce Ohr in a message on Twitter, apparently quoting a Fox News analyst. Ohr is linked to the dossier of allegations of possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
The dossier was compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele in work partly financed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Republican critics of the dossier have focused heavily on its DNC ties and U.S. surveillance of Trump associates.
Trump's Twitter post misspelled the judge’s name.
Rosemary Collyer is the presiding judge for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees electronic surveillance requests and search warrants sought by federal authorities.
Some Republicans charge that Steele’s Russia dossier, which contains a number of inflammatory and salacious allegations about Trump, was used improperly by Justice and FBI officials to persuade the FISA court to extend an eavesdropping warrant against a Trump campaign adviser.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is currently investigating Russian efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election and whether there was collusion with the Trump campaign.
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia tried to help Trump win the 2016 election, but the Kremlin denies meddling. Trump denies any collusion and has said Steele’s Russia dossier is “bogus.”
An attorney for a woman suspected of being a covert Russian agent said he’s confident she’s not “aware of or guilty of any crimes” in South Dakota as authorities have pursued an unrelated fraud investigation into her boyfriend.
Defense lawyer Robert Driscoll told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Maria Butina, 29, knew “very little” about the fraud case led by the U.S. Attorney’s office in South Dakota. Butina was arrested in July and has pleaded not guilty in Washington to charges of conspiracy and acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Russia.
In court papers filed shortly after Butina’s arrest, prosecutors accused her of using a personal relationship with an unnamed American political operative — identified only as 56-year-old “U.S. Person 1” — as part of her covert activities for Russia. She’s accused of gathering intelligence on American officials and political organizations and working to establish back-channel lines of communications for the Kremlin.
Offer to cooperate
During a July court hearing, Driscoll disclosed that Butina had offered to assist the government in the South Dakota fraud investigation into her boyfriend, U.S. Person 1. Prosecutors confirmed the investigation in court, but provided no further details other than to say it was unrelated to Butina’s charges in Washington.
“When the government incarcerated her, I stopped negotiating with them over her testimony,” Driscoll said Wednesday of the fraud investigation.
Driscoll said he’s operating under the idea that U.S. Person 1 is 56-year-old conservative operative and South Dakota businessman Paul Erickson. Butina’s defense said in a recent court filing that they’ve had a five-year relationship.
A South Dakota U.S. attorney’s office spokeswoman declined to comment, and Erickson hasn’t returned telephone messages from the AP.
South Dakota events
The new court documents were filed in a legal push to allow Butina to be released from jail and put on house arrest with electronic monitoring as she awaits trial. Butina’s defense said in a memorandum that the government has falsely smeared her reputation and painted her as a “Kremlin-trained seductress,” arguing she has genuine ties to the U.S. including her relationship with Erickson — she had planned to move in with him in South Dakota — and her wish to have a career in America.
The memorandum states Butina came to the U.S. to attend graduate school and that her activities weren’t “covert or clandestine.” A status conference in the case is scheduled for Sept. 10.
Erickson in 2015 helped arrange speeches in South Dakota for Butina to talk about freedom and entrepreneurship at a Sioux Falls school, at the University of South Dakota and at a teenage Republican camp held in the Black Hills.
Arranging the events followed an unusual career for Erickson that has included working on Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign and making an action movie with Jack Abramoff.
Republican U.S. Congressman Ron DeSantis came under fire on Wednesday when the President Trump-backed Florida gubernatorial candidate said his state should not "monkey this up" by electing Democratic Mayor Andrew Gillum, who is African-American.
Gillum scored a surprise victory in Tuesday's Democratic primary for one the United States' most competitive races for governor. If the 39-year-old Tallahassee mayor wins the November 6 election, he would become the most populous U.S. swing state's first black governor.
Critics on Wednesday blasted DeSantis, a staunch Donald Trump supporter who won his party's nomination the previous day, for comments they said had racist undertones.
Interviewed on Fox News, DeSantis said, "The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases," after calling Gillum "an articulate" spokesman for far-left views.
Words like "monkey" or "ape" have been used to demean African-Americans and calling a black man "articulate" can be seen as racist.
However, in American colloquial speech, "monkey with" or "monkey around with" can mean handling something carelessly or incorrectly.
Gillum, however, told Fox News his opponent's "monkey" remark "wasn't lost on me. It's very clear that Mr. DeSantis is taking a page directly from the campaign manual of Donald Trump," who has been repeatedly criticized for remarks seen by some as racist or racially inflammatory.
In an interview with Politico, Gillum said Florida would be "looking for a governor that was going to bring us together, not divide us. Not misogynists. Not racists. Not bigots."
DeSantis spokesman Stephen Lawson said the 39-year-old candidate was referring to Gillum's political positions, not his race.
"Ron DeSantis was obviously talking about Florida not making the wrong decision to embrace" Gillum's policies, Lawson said in a statement. "To characterize it as anything else is absurd."
At the White House, Trump told reporters he had not heard about DeSantis' comments, and praised the Republican candidate as "extraordinary." On Twitter earlier on Wednesday, the president slammed Gillum as a "failed" mayor, without citing examples.
The DeSantis-Gillum matchup will be closely watched for clues about the mood of voters and messaging ahead of 2020, when Trump could be seeking re-election against a liberal Democrat.
Florida's two major parties are now looking to their most fervent supporters - progressive Democrats and Republican conservatives - for victory in November.
On Tuesday, more than 3.5 million people voted out of 13 million registered Florida voters for a turnout rate of 27 percent, the highest for a non-presidential primary in the state since 2002.
DeSantis won his primary by touting his closeness to Trump. Gillum won as an unabashed progressive who backed "Medicare for all," impeaching Trump and standing up to the National Rifle Association. He said he hoped to motivate younger progressives and minority voters who often sit out non-presidential elections.
A victory would mark a change in fortunes for Florida Democrats, who have not held the governor's office for 20 years, and have lost close races after nominating moderates who failed to generate enough enthusiasm, particularly among key minority voters.
Just 48 percent of the state's registered Democrats are white, according to state data. Florida's registered Republicans are 83 percent white.
White House counsel Don McGahn, a key adviser to President Donald Trump, will be leaving his position in the coming weeks, Trump said Wednesday.
The U.S. leader said McGahn, who served as the real estate mogul's lawyer during his successful run for the presidency in 2016 before assuming the top White House legal post, will leave after overseeing the inside Washington campaign to win Senate confirmation next month of federal appellate court judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court.
McGahn has been shepherding Kavanaugh to senators' offices in recent weeks for lengthy introductory meetings with the lawmakers ahead of Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings that start next Tuesday. The White House is hopeful the Senate will confirm Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination in time for him to join the court when its new term starts October 1, with McGahn leaving shortly after the confirmation vote.
"I have worked with Don for a long time and truly appreciate his service!" Trump said on Twitter.
Trump has a team of personal lawyers, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who have been advising him about special counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing criminal investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election two years ago, Trump campaign links to Russia and whether Trump, as president, has obstructed justice to thwart the probe.
Trump fired James Comey, the former director of the FBI, who was leading the agency's Russia investigation at the time Trump ousted him, leading to Mueller's appointment, over Trump's objections, to take over the probe.
McGahn has served as the lawyer overseeing White House legal concerns more generally. But his relationship with Trump, by some news accounts, has become more strained in recent weeks when news surfaced that McGahn, with Trump's approval, had voluntarily sat for 30 hours of interviews over several months with Mueller's investigators.
Reports said McGahn answered questions about many of the inside-the-White House events related to actions that Trump has taken, although McGahn's lawyer said he did not implicate the president in wrongdoing.
The 50-year-old McGahn would become the latest in a long line of officials who have left Trump's 19-month presidency, either officials who have been fired, pushed out or voluntarily departed.
President Donald Trump has been accused of dishonesty, spreading falsehoods, misrepresenting facts, distorting news, passing on inaccuracies and being loose with the truth. But does he lie?
It's a loaded word, and some Trump critics believe major news organizations are too timid to use it. The Washington Post, which has documented more than 4,000 false or misleading claims by the president, declared for the first time last week that a Trump misstatement was a "lie."
Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen's plea deal provided "indisputable evidence that Trump and his allies have been deliberately dishonest" about hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal, Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote. The Post put Kessler's assessment on its front page, and it was the newspaper's most-read story online.
Not only was it the first time the Post said Trump had lied, it was the first time the newspaper used the word for any politician since Kessler began his fact-checking operation in 2011.
Many news organizations resist using the word because of the question of intent. Editors feel it's important to establish whether someone is spreading false information knowingly, intending to deceive, and it's hard to get inside a person's head.
While Kessler's team has found 98 instances where Trump falsely claimed responsibility for the largest tax cut in U.S. history, the president may sincerely believe it, Kessler said.
At The Associated Press, "we feel it's better to say what the facts are, say what the person said and let the audience make the decision whether or not it's an intentional lie," said John Daniszewski, the news cooperative's standards editor.
Several readers told Kessler, in effect, that it's about time. One critic, Paul Blest of the website Splinter, wrote, "Can you imagine any other politician being held to this comically low standard?" The Post's milestone represents an abject failure, he wrote.
"It's sort of a cover-up for those in power when you don't call it a lie," said Jeff Cohen, a just-retired journalism professor and a producer of the documentary "All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception and the Spirit of I.F. Stone," about the late journalist. He said journalists need to cut through the fog, and the word "lie" is an effective tool.
Yet one prominent editor wonders whether the whole discussion misses the point.
"I hate the fact that the debate and discussion over the word `lie' has obscured a larger truth, if you will," Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, told CNN earlier this month. "Does it matter if The New York Times or The Washington Post uses the word `lie' three times, seven times, 10 times, 20 times? Or does it matter more that the fact-checker has found 4,229 misleading statements?"
Trump's birther movement questioning former President Barack Obama's citizenship led both the Times and AP to use the word "lie." In January 2017, the Times headlined a story "Trump repeats lie about popular vote in meeting with lawmakers," to refer to his claim that immigrants illegally voting prevented him from receiving more of the popular vote than Hillary Clinton. While "lie" was in the headline, it wasn't in the body of the story.
CNN's "New Day" anchor John Berman said on the air that Trump had lied about his policy of separating families at the U.S. border. Stories surrounding the pre-election meeting between the president's son and Russians about information damaging to the Clinton campaign were "a writhing hydra of dishonesty. You chop off one lie, and two emerge in its place," Berman said.
Cohen said the Post's decision to use the word last week could influence others in the media to do so more often. The night the story appeared, CNN's Chris Cuomo pressed Trump aide Kellyanne Conway to admit the administration lied and that's why people didn't trust Trump. Not surprisingly, Conway demurred.
Kessler urged caution.
"It just seems like a moment," he said. "It's not something we plan to do on a regular basis. You can't speak too soon, but I'd be surprised if it was more than a once-in-a-presidency case."
Using "lie" casually or imprecisely could strike readers more as opinion than fact, said the AP's Daniszewski.
That's a major consideration when Trump rails against the "fake news" media. He has called fact-checkers "dishonest scum" and "crooked as hell" and this month referred to the Post's "Pinocchio" scale measuring the egregiousness of misstatements. "If I'm right, or if I'm 97.3 percent right, they will say, `He's got a Pinocchio' or `He's lying,"' Trump said. "They are bad people."
The result is fact-checkers are as concerned about an erosion of public trust in fact-checking as the media in general are about their coverage. The independent Politifact has tried to build trust among Trump voters by fact-checking politicians in West Virginia, Alabama and Oklahoma, said Aaron Sharockman, the organization's executive editor.
Politifact avoids the use of "lie," though it does proclaim a "lie of the year." Trump "won" in 2015 and 2017. Its rating for the worse misstatements — "pants on fire" — certainly implies the word. Trump has been awarded a total of 85 "pants on fire" designations.
"It doesn't benefit Politifact to call someone a liar," Sharockman said, "because it's not our aim to play `gotcha."'
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President Donald Trump's administration backed off Tuesday on plans to bypass Congress and roll back billions of dollars from the U.S. foreign aid
budget after stiff resistance from lawmakers, a senior lawmaker, congressional aides and U.S. officials said.
Reuters reported August 16 that the White House Office of Management and Budget had asked the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to submit information for a "rescission" package that would have led to sharp cuts in foreign assistance.
Trump's focus on his "America First" agenda has meant less money for foreign assistance, and his administration has pushed repeatedly to cut the amount of money sent abroad since he took office in January 2017.
Aides of members of both parties in Congress said the administration abandoned the plan after objections from lawmakers and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
An OMB spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The rescission process cuts money that has been appropriated by Congress but has not been spent. The nearly unprecedented move by Mick Mulvaney, the former Republican congressman who heads the OMB, would have cut foreign assistance already approved by Congress.
Loophole in law
Several administration officials had said the OMB was targeting roughly $3.5 billion in funds no longer needed for their original purpose, taking advantage of a loophole in the law to do so at the end of the fiscal year on September 30.
The cuts could have included more than $200 million that Trump froze in March for recovery efforts in Syria.
Democratic U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the vice chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said the decision was welcome.
"Rescinding funds that had been agreed to by Congress and signed into law by the president, in the waning days of the fiscal year, would have set a terrible precedent and harmed programs that further United States interests around the world," Leahy said in a statement.
The Trump administration tried to slash foreign aid when it submitted this year's budget, but lawmakers objected and Trump ended up signing a budget that did not include the cuts.
The administration tried to use the rescission process earlier this year to slash $15 billion in domestic spending, including $7 billion for a children's health insurance program. That plan failed to pass Congress.
Iraq will send a delegation to the United States seeking an agreement on financial transactions with Iran following Washington's reimposition of sanctions on Tehran, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said Tuesday.
His statement was the first by an Iraqi official since Reuters reported last week that Baghdad was going to ask Washington for exemptions from some of the sanctions because Iraq's economy is closely linked with neighboring Iran.
"We have requests for the American side, we have presented them and a delegation will go to negotiate within that framework," Abadi told a weekly news conference.
"We have presented a clear vision of what Iraq really needs. This includes Iranian [natural] gas, which is very important, as well as other trade and the electricity sector."
U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States in May from world powers' 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, calling it flawed, and reimposed trade sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
The Trump administration has warned of consequences for countries including European allies that co-signed the nuclear accord, that do not respect the new sanctions. Baghdad is in a difficult position — its two biggest allies are the United States and Iran, themselves arch-adversaries.
"We have had good promises initially, but as you know the American situation is complicated; you do not deal with one person, there are several institutions," Abadi said.
He called the sanctions "unilateral" and "oppressive," adding that Iraq would not be "part of a blockade" due to its own painful experience with international sanctions during the era of Saddam Hussein.
Iraqi government and central bank officials said the delegation would travel to Washington to ask for exemptions in applying the sanctions. They did not say when that trip would take place.
Lawyers for U.S. President Donald Trump have asked a federal judge to dismiss a defamation lawsuit by adult film actress Stormy Daniels, calling it an attempt to suppress the president's free speech.
In a motion filed Monday in Los Angeles federal court, Trump's lawyers also said that Daniels, who has said she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006 and was threatened to keep quiet about it, had actually benefited from the attention brought by her dispute with the president.
Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, called the motion "baseless and desperate."
Daniels' lawsuit, filed on April 30, centers on her account of being accosted by a man in a Las Vegas parking lot soon after she had agreed in May 2011 to talk about her alleged encounter with Trump to In Touch magazine.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has said the man told her to "leave Trump alone" and, after looking at her infant daughter, said: "That's a beautiful little girl. It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom."
On April 17, Avenatti released a composite sketch purporting to depict the man.
Trump, who has denied having an affair with Daniels, responded the next day on Twitter: "A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!"
Daniels said the tweet was defamatory.
In Monday's motion, Trump's lawyers said the lawsuit was "designed to chill the president's free speech rights on matters of public concern." They cited a law in Daniels' home state of Texas requiring that such a lawsuit be dismissed unless Daniels could provide "clear and specific evidence" for her claims, which they said she had failed to do.
They also said that Daniels had not been harmed, and had instead "capitalized" on the dispute with a nationwide tour of strip clubs "for which she admittedly is being paid at least four times her normal appearance fee."
Trump's longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty last week to violating federal election law by paying Daniels $130,000 not to disclose information that would be harmful to Trump.
The White House denied any wrongdoing by the president after the plea, and Trump said on Twitter that Cohen made up "stories" to get a deal with prosecutors.
Lawyers for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on Tuesday said they would seek to move his second trial, scheduled to start next month, out of Washington, D.C., due to the highly politicized environment in the nation's capital.
The motion for change of venue will be the second by Manafort after a failed attempt to move his first trial, which concluded last week in Alexandria, Virginia, with a string of convictions, to farther away from the Washington area on similar grounds.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is presiding over the second criminal case against Manafort in a federal court in Washington, said she would entertain the motion but said she believed a jury could be found in the capital to give him a fair trial.
"This jurisdiction has had very high profile cases before," Jackson said at a hearing on Tuesday. "I'd like to believe that is still possible."
Manafort, a longtime Washington lobbyist and consultant, faces seven criminal counts in the upcoming trial, including allegations of money laundering, obstruction of justice and failing to register as a foreign agent for his work on behalf of pro-Russian politicians from Ukraine.
The Virginia jury last week found him guilty on eight criminal counts of tax and bank fraud and failing to declare his foreign bank accounts. That trial was the first resulting from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Manafort worked for Republican Donald Trump's successful campaign for several months, including serving as chairman.
Jury selection set for Sept. 17
Berman said jury selection for the second trial would start on Sept. 17 and set opening statements for September 24 — a scheduling tweak she said was aimed in part at appeasing Manafort's lawyers, who had requested a week delay in the trial's start date of September 17.
The move came after an earlier bench conference in which Kevin Downing, one of Manafort's lawyers, could be heard complaining to the judge about the time pressure they were under. The conference was supposed to be inaudible to attendees in the courtroom thanks to a white-noise machine.
"We don't have the resources," Downing said. "We just finished a trial last week."
Also on Tuesday, Jackson approved the prosecution's request to allow evidence about Justice Department inspections in the 1980's that found Manafort's had failed to disclose lobbying activities for foreign governments — one way the government planned to show that Manafort knowingly broke the law. But she said she would limit the scope of what it can show.
Jackson said she was concerned the evidence was dated and noted that Manafort was not charged with a crime in those instances. She said some communications would be admissible but asked both sides to come up with a stipulation on how Manafort was notified about lobbying disclosure regulations in the past in a way that would not prejudice the jury.
Mueller's investigation, which Trump denounces as a witch hunt, has resulted in several indictments, guilty pleas and immunity deals. When Manafort was convicted last week, Trump said he felt badly for him and said he had "respect for a brave man!"
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has frequently supported giving the U.S. government wide latitude in the name of national security, including the secret collection of personal data from Americans.
It's a subject Democrats plan to grill Kavanaugh about during his confirmation hearings scheduled to begin next Tuesday. Beyond his writings as an appeals court judge, some senators suspect Kavanaugh was more involved in crafting counterterrorism policies during the George W. Bush administration than he has let on.
Kavanaugh stated in past congressional testimony that he wasn't involved in such provocative matters as warrantless surveillance and the treatment of enemy combatants in the years immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
But legal experts say he could shift the court on national security issues, if he is confirmed to replace retired Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Stephen Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor whose expertise includes national security and counterterrorism, cites opinions he says show Kavanaugh “is a lot less willing (than Kennedy) to look at international law as a relevant source of authority and constraint.” He said on matters such as Guantanamo detention, Kavanaugh is “much more deferential to the executive branch in this context than Kennedy would have been.”
Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, calls Kavanaugh “incredibly well-qualified.” The former U.S. trade representative and White House budget director knows Kavanaugh from their time together in the Bush administration. He said Kavanaugh “believes strongly in the Constitution” and the Bill of Rights.
“I think he's in the mainstream with regard to these issues, and frankly, I don't think it's a difference with any meaning between where he is and where the court is currently,” Portman said.
Democrats facing an uphill battle in blocking Kavanaugh's nomination have focused less on his judicial counterterrorism record than whether he misled senators about his role in Bush policies while testifying in 2006 confirmation hearings.
Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy are among Democrats who want to see more records from Kavanaugh's White House days, saying news media accounts after he was seated on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia raised new questions.
White House spokesman Raj Shah said Durbin has been doing the misleading by taking Kavanaugh's answers out of context.
“As several colleagues have stated, and Judge Kavanaugh accurately said in his 2006 testimony, he was not involved in crafting legal policies that formed the rules governing detention of combatants,” Shah said in an emailed statement.
After meeting recently with Kavanaugh, Durbin said the judge “acknowledged that he was involved in conversations involving enemy combatants.”
Shah responded with a tweet saying Kavanaugh was truthful, and that the conversations Durbin referred to “were about public litigation, not the legal framework or policies that formed the rules governing detention of combatants.”
Kavanaugh's confirmation got past a potential obstacle when libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., endorsed him last month.
Paul had cited Kavanaugh's 2015 defense of the National Security Agency's widescale secret collection of telephone metadata — records of callers and recipients' phone numbers and times and durations of the calls. But after meeting with Kavanaugh, Paul said he's confident Kavanaugh will “carefully adhere to the Constitution and will take his job to protect individual liberty seriously.”
The NSA program didn't include capturing conversations themselves, and Kavanaugh wrote that it served “a critically important special need — preventing terrorist attacks on the United States ... In my view, that critical national security need outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program.”
Larry Klayman, founder of the conservative group Freedom Watch and lead plaintiff in the NSA case, said Kavanaugh approved what a U.S. district court judge had called government use of “almost Orwellian technology.”
Kavanaugh defended the NSA program in an opinion attached to a procedural ruling in which he and his colleagues agreed not to rehear the case, so there was no pressing need for him to weigh in.
University of Louisville law professor Justin Walker, a former Kavanaugh clerk, said that's not unusual for the judge. For example, Kavanaugh added his opinion to a procedural ruling in a case that led to a Supreme Court decision for a drug suspect who had a police-placed GPS tracker on his car.
The high court found in USA vs. Antoine Jones that Jones' Fourth Amendment rights were violated, with a majority opinion that incorporated Kavanaugh's observation that police intruded on the defendant's personal property: his car.
“I've been surprised that his one short opinion (in Klayman) has not been seen in a broader context with more perspective,” Walker said, adding that when senators study Kavanaugh's complete record on civil liberties, “they're going to like what they see.”
But Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to digital privacy rights, worries that “he has a very broad view of the government's ability to do mass surveillance and specifically in the context where the government is claiming national security.”
Cohn has pursued a lawsuit alleging illegal NSA surveillance of “millions of ordinary Americans,” among cases she said could eventually reach the Supreme Court. She questions whether Kavanaugh supports “real checks and balances on the power of the executive branch” on privacy issues.
Kavanaugh discussed judicial restraint on national security in an 87-page 2010 opinion. That one went against a Yemeni citizen U.S. forces captured in Afghanistan.
“Put simply, Congress knows how to limit the executive's authority in national security and foreign policy; there is no reason or basis for courts to strain to do so absent such congressional direction,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Vladeck pointed to such cases as Kavanaugh's 2011 ruling for turning over a U.S. citizen linked to al-Qaida terrorism in Iraq to Iraqi authorities the man said were likely to torture him, and in 2009 joining in a 2-1 vote against plaintiffs who wanted to sue private contractors they accused of beatings, dog attacks and other abuse at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
There are still 40 detainees at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.S. naval base, with the possibility of more.
In a 2013 lecture, Kavanaugh talked about his appeals court's rulings in cases involving Guantanamo detainees and counterterrorism, saying he disagreed with people who believed “the courts should be creating new rules to constrain the executive — that this new kind of war requires new rules created by the courts.”
“He's incredibly smart; he's a thoughtful and thorough judge,” said Vladeck. “He just has pretty exceptionally conservative views about the role of the federal courts in the kinds of cases that I work on.”
Read More Top Court Nominee's Support for Surveilling Americans Raises Concern : https://ift.tt/2oip7kg
The United States and Mexico agreed on Monday to a sweeping trade deal that pressures Canada to accept new terms on autos trade, dispute settlement and agriculture to keep the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the White House was ready to notify the U.S. Congress by Friday of President Donald Trump's intent to sign the bilateral document, but that it was open to Canada joining the pact.
The 24-year-old NAFTA is a trilateral deal between the United States, Canada and Mexico that underpins $1.2 trillion in North American Trade.
Here are some of the main issues at the heart of the negotiations:
Autos Dominate
The new deal requires 75 percent of the value of a vehicle to be produced in the United States or Mexico, up from the NAFTA threshold of 62.5 percent.
The higher threshold is aimed at keeping more parts from Asia out, boosting North American automotive manufacturing and jobs. Even if more plants are built in Mexico, jobs will grow in the United States due to high levels of integration, with studies showing that U.S. parts make up 40 percent of the value of every Mexican-built car exported to the United States.
The pact also requires greater use of U.S. and Mexican steel, aluminum, glass and plastics.
The provision started out as a U.S. demand for 85 percent regional content, with 50 percent coming from U.S. factories.
That plan was vehemently opposed by Mexico, Canada and the auto industry. It later morphed into the U.S.-Mexico deal's requirement of 40 to 45 percent of a vehicle's value to be made in high wage areas paying at least $16 an hour, requiring significant automotive production in the United States.
Although full automotive details have not yet been released, auto industry officials say it will allow Trump the ability to impose higher national security tariffs on vehicles that do not comply with the new thresholds.
Most Mexican auto exports are in a position to comply with the new limits, the country's economy minister said.
No Sunset
Trump backed off from an initial U.S. demand for a "sunset" clause that would kill the pact unless it was renegotiated every five years and which businesses said would stymie long term investment in the region.
Canada and Mexico were strictly opposed to the clause.
Instead, the United States and Mexico agreed to a 16-year lifespan for NAFTA, with a review every six years that can extend the pact for 16 years more, providing more business certainty.
Dispute Settlement
Mexico agreed to eliminate a settlement system for anti-dumping disputes, NAFTA's Chapter 19.
The move, sought by the United States, puts Canada in a difficult position because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had insisted on maintaining Chapter 19 as a way to fight U.S. duties on softwood lumber, paper and other products that it views as unfair. Ottawa now has less than a week to decide to accept a deal without that provision.
A settlement system for disputes between investors and states was scaled back, now only for expropriation, favoritism for local firms and state-dominated sectors such as oil, power and infrastructure.
Agriculture, Labor
The new deal will keep tariffs on agricultural products traded between the United States and Mexico at zero and seeks to support biotech and other innovations in agriculture. It lacks a previous U.S. demand to erect trade barriers to protect seasonal U.S. fruit and vegetable growers from Mexican competition.
It contains enforceable labor provisions that require Mexico to adhere to International Labor Organization labor rights standards in an effort to drive Mexican wages higher.
Now Canada
The U.S.-Mexico NAFTA deal opens the door for Canada to immediately rejoin the talks and is a major step forward in updating the accord.
Canada, which sat out the last leg of discussions while the United States and Mexico ironed out their bilateral differences, is now pressured to agree to the new terms on auto trade and other issues to remain part of the three-nation pact.
Trump has presented this as a bilateral deal and threatened Canada with car tariffs. Some lawmakers have said that a bilateral deal would face a higher vote threshold in Congress because the NAFTA fast-track negotiating authority law calls for a trilateral agreement.
Read More Five Key Takeaways From Trump's US-Mexico Trade Deal : https://ift.tt/2BTKAJY
U.S. Senator John McCain, who died Saturday after a lengthy battle with brain cancer, will lie in state in the Capitol rotunda in Washington this week, a rare honor given to few statesmen.
What does it mean to lie in state?
Lying in state is an honor that has only been given to fewer than three dozen people. Only people who are entitled to a state funeral are allowed to lie in state, which includes a president, a former president, a president-elect or any other person designated by the president. Members of Congress may lie in state. Private citizens have been given a similar privilege, but the honor is called lying in honor.
According to the Architect of the Capitol, the casket of those lying in state rests on the catafalque (coffin support) that was constructed for the coffin of President Abraham Lincoln.
Who decides on the honor?
The approval of the congressional leadership or a resolution by Congress is needed to allow a person to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a longtime ally of McCain, said the decision for McCain to lie in state came "in coordination with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi."
McConnell said in a statement, "I appreciate my colleagues and the entire Senate and House family's assistance with this honor."
Where does the tribute take place?
The casket is placed in the Capitol rotunda, a circular room in the center of the Capitol that sits directly beneath the Capitol dome, which rises nearly 55 meters. According to the Architect of the Capitol, the Capitol's rotunda is considered "the most suitable place for the nation to pay final tribute to its most eminent citizens."
Who has laid in state or honor?
The first person to lie in state was former House Speaker Henry Clay in 1852. Others include former presidents Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson, and Dwight Eisenhower. Private citizens include minister Billy Graham and civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who is the only woman to have received the honor.
A U.S. federal judge on Monday extended a ban on the online distribution of 3D-printed gun blueprints, a win for a group of mainly Democratic-led states that said such a publication would violate their right to regulate firearms, as well as endangering their residents.
U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik in Seattle issued the extension of a nationwide injunction, blocking a Texas-based group from disseminating files for printing plastic weapons on the internet.
Lasnik's prior order, issued on July 31, blocked the release of the blueprints hours before they were set to hit the internet. That ban was due to expire Tuesday and the new one will remain in place until the case is resolved.
Monday's decision blocks a settlement between the Trump administration and Defense Distributed, a group that argues access to the online blueprints is guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution's First and Second Amendments, which protect free speech and the right to bear arms, respectively.
A group of 19 U.S. states and the District of Columbia sued the U.S. government in July, arguing that publishing the blueprints would allow criminals easy access to weapons. They also said the Trump administration had failed to explain why it settled the case.
Lasnik said the states have submitted sufficient evidence that they are likely to suffer "irreparable harm" if the blueprints are published. The judge also said Defense Distributed's First Amendment concerns were "dwarfed" by the states' safety considerations.
Gun control proponents are concerned the weapons made from 3D printers will be untraceable, undetectable "ghost" firearms that pose a threat to global security. Some gun rights groups say the technology is expensive, the guns are unreliable and the threat is overblown. They also say undetectable guns wholly made of plastic are illegal in the United States.
'Intentional insult'
Although Defense Distributed originally had said it would put the files on the internet on Aug. 1, it did so a few days before Lasnik issued the initial temporary ban. The blueprints continue to be available on several other websites.
The files include 3D-printable blueprints for components that would go into the making of a version of the AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle, a weapon that has been used in U.S. mass shootings.
Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson called Lasnik's decision an "intentional insult." "The order is a manifest injustice and literally admits to being an abridgment of the freedom of speech," Wilson said in a statement.
A lawyer for the group said it is currently reviewing the judge's decision and considering all options.
Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who led the states' lawsuit, said in a statement that he was glad about the decision, but criticized the federal government.
"Why is the Trump administration working so hard to allow these untraceable, undetectable 3D-printed guns to be available to domestic abusers, felons and terrorists?" Ferguson said.
Government position
The U.S. State Department, which had previously banned the blueprints as a national security risk and a violation of arms trafficking regulations, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As recently as April, the government in court filings argued downloadable guns would allow extremist groups and criminals abroad unfettered access to arms.
But a lawyer for the State Department said in a court hearing last month that the government had determined in May that the types of guns featured in Defense Distributed's blueprints did not pose a national security risk as they can be bought "in any store."
Lasnik on Monday said the government had failed to comply with procedural rules that mandate a 30-day notice period to the U.S. Congress before allowing the files' dissemination.
"Forcing the federal defendants to evaluate the effect of the proposed delisting on world peace, national security, and the foreign policy of the United States ... may also prompt a reconsideration of the decision," Lasnik said.
Rick Davis, Sen. John McCain's former presidential campaign manager and a family spokesman, read the following farewell statement from the senator at a news conference at the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix on Monday:
"My fellow Americans, whom I have gratefully served for sixty years, and especially my fellow Arizonans,
Thank you for the privilege of serving you and for the rewarding life that service in uniform and in public office has allowed me to lead. I have tried to serve our country honorably. I have made mistakes, but I hope my love for America will be weighed favorably against them.
I have often observed that I am the luckiest person on earth. I feel that way even now as I prepare for the end of my life. I have loved my life, all of it. I have had experiences, adventures and friendships enough for ten satisfying lives, and I am so thankful. Like most people, I have regrets. But I would not trade a day of my life, in good or bad times, for the best day of anyone else's.
I owe that satisfaction to the love of my family. No man ever had a more loving wife or children he was prouder of than I am of mine. And I owe it to America. To be connected to America's causes — liberty, equal justice, respect for the dignity of all people — brings happiness more sublime than life's fleeting pleasures. Our identities and sense of worth are not circumscribed but enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves.
`Fellow Americans' — that association has meant more to me than any other. I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world's greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the process.
We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.
We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do.
Ten years ago, I had the privilege to concede defeat in the election for president. I want to end my farewell to you with the heartfelt faith in Americans that I felt so powerfully that evening.
I feel it powerfully still.
Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history.
Farewell, fellow Americans. God bless you, and God bless America."
The United States told the World Trade Organization on Monday it would block the reappointment of one of the WTO's four remaining appeals judges next month, confirming trade experts' fears of a crisis in the system for
settling global rows.
U.S. President Donald Trump has railed against the WTO, calling it a catastrophe and a disaster. He has said the United States loses cases because other countries have most of the judges.
In fact, trade experts say, the United States has a similar, if not better, lose-win rate than other countries that have taken complaints to the WTO, and it has a rare privilege in that the judges on the WTO's Appellate Body have always included one American.
Trump faces a barrage of disputes at the WTO against his trade policies, including global tariffs on steel and a tariff war with China. Since he came to power, Washington has blocked all appointments to the appeals chamber as existing judges' terms end.
There are normally seven WTO appeals judges, but if Shree Baboo Chekitan Servansing, a trade judge from Mauritius, is not reappointed when his term expires on September 30, only three will remain — the minimum for the system to function.
It looks set to break down finally when two more judges' terms expire in December 2019, but it could seize up sooner if any judges need to recuse themselves from a case for legal reasons.
If the U.S. veto paralyses the dispute system, it would end 23 years of WTO enforcement, the keystone of international efforts to prevent trade protectionism, at a time of heightened global trade tensions.
At the WTO's monthly dispute settlement meeting, 67 member states have repeatedly petitioned Washington to drop its veto and keep the system working.
But U.S. Ambassador Dennis Shea told Monday's meeting that the Appellate Body had consistently over-stepped its authority by reviewing and reversing factual findings by trade arbitration panels, and by interpreting WTO members' domestic laws.
"The invention of an authority to review panel fact-finding ... has added complexity, duplication and delay to every WTO dispute," he told the meeting, according to a transcript of his prepared remarks.
Shea has previously promised to be "disruptive where necessary" to reform the WTO and has said the United States may choose not to accept appeals if they take longer than the allowed 90 days.
The United States has not followed through on the threat, but since legal rulings are routinely delayed, it effectively signaled that Washington reserved the right to ignore rulings that Washington does not like.
Among those remembering the life of U.S. Senator John McCain are leaders and politicians from South Asia and Iraq, where the late senator forged bonds over decades of diplomacy.
“We offer our condolences to the family and friends of Senator John McCain who was a great friend of AFG (Afghanistan). Senator McCain served his country honorably in uniform and his service in the Senate is truly exemplary,” wrote Afghan President Asharf Ghani on Twitter. McCain advocated for more troops and resources for Afghanistan in its fight against militants.
Afghanistan’s Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah also expressed condolences on McCain’s death on his Twitter page.
Condolence messages also poured in from neighboring Pakistan, a country McCain visited several times.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said the thoughts and prayers of the people of Pakistan are with the family and friends of Senator McCain. “As Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator McCain always stood for strong Pakistan-US relations and a cooperative approach for promoting peace and building stability in the region.”
He will be greatly missed in Pakistan, Qureshi added. Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa also conveyed his condolences to McCain’s family.
In Bangaldesh, from where McCain adopted his daughter Bridget in 1993, the country's foreign minister said he was deeply saddened by McCain's passing and called the senator a great friend of Bangladesh “Late Senator McCain, who was a real American hero and a tall leader in the public service of the nation was always a strong voice for global humanity, which was reflected in his many commendable works in the Senate including in recent times his firm stand against the atrocities on the Rohingyas in Myanmar, and for holding the perpetrators accountable,” said Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister Abul Hassan Mohmood Ali.
In Iraq, the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government called McCain's passing a "a tremendous loss for the people of Kurdistan."
"He was a true friend and a staunch advocate of the rights of the Kurdistan people. He did his best, at every opportunity, to defend and protect the basic rights of the people of Kurdistan," said Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani.
The government's top official overseeing the $1.5 trillion student loan market resigned in protest Monday, citing what he says is the White House's open hostility toward protecting the nation's millions of student loan borrowers.
Seth Frotman will be stepping down as student loan ombudsman at the end of the week, according to his resignation letter, which was obtained by The Associated Press. He held that position since 2016, but has been with Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since its inception in 2011.
Frotman is the latest high-level departure from the CFPB since Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump's budget director, took over in late November. But Frotman's departure is especially noteworthy, since his office is one of the few parts of the U.S. government that was tasked with handling student loan issues.
The office was at the center of the lawsuits against for-profit colleges like Corinthian Colleges and is currently heading up a lawsuit between the CFPB and Navient, one of the nation's largest student lenders. The Navient lawsuit has been mired in bureaucratic red tape as the Department of Education, headed by Betsy DeVos, has been unwilling to help the CFPB with their lawsuit. Since its creation, the student loan office has returned $750 million to harmed borrowers.
"You have used the bureau to serve the wishes of the most powerful financial companies in America," Frotman wrote, addressing his letter to Mulvaney. "The damage you have done to the bureau betrays these families and sacrifices the financial futures of millions of Americans in communities across the country."
Congress created the student loan ombudsman office when it established the CFPB, citing a need for a go-to person to handle student loan complaints nationwide. One previous occupant of that position is Rohit Chopra, who is now a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission.
The ombudsman's office is quite powerful, able to work with the bureau's enforcement staff to target bad behavior in the student loan market as well as act as a voice inside the government on behalf of student loan borrowers. The office processed tens of thousands of complaints from student loan borrowers and was among the first major government offices to raise alarms about the growing issue of students being unable to afford repaying their loans.
But despite its work, Mulvaney downgraded the mission of Frotman's student loan office earlier this summer and moved it under the umbrella of consumer education instead of enforcement. While at the time Mulvaney's office said it was a minor organizational shake-up, consumer advocates saw the change as a move to downplay the CFPB's mission when it came to student loans.
The student loan office is not alone. Under Mulvaney, the bureau has scaled back its enforcement work and has proposed revising or rescinding all of the rules and regulations it put into place under the Obama administration.
"Seth Frotman is a public servant who treated every student loan complaint with the seriousness it deserved," said Debbie Goldstein, executive vice president at the Center for Responsible Lending. "His departure raises concerns about the priorities of Mulvaney and CFPB leadership and whether they are fulfilling the mission of the CFPB to focus on protecting consumers from financial abuse."
A spokesman for the bureau was not immediately available to respond to Frotman's letter.
The last remaining memorials to Confederate President Jefferson Davis have been removed from New Mexico rest areas along Interstate 10, the main east-west route across the state, New Mexico officials have said.
The state Department of Transportation announced last week all memorials to the U.S. Civil War-era Confederacy were removed after people posted messages about them on social media, The Santa Fe New Mexican reports .
“We believe that they have all been removed, but we encourage anyone with knowledge of any others to let us know and we will have them removed immediately,” said department spokeswoman Emilee Cantrell.
The move comes amid a national U.S. debate over removing the names of Confederate leaders from public roads and buildings.
Opposition to plans for removing a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, for example, spurred a violent rally of white supremacists that left one anti-racist demonstrator dead.
Davis’ name has become part of the landscape across the South and, for a time, even in New Mexico. But New Mexico has tended to celebrate the Union’s leaders.
New Mexico was the site of the Battle of Glorieta Pass, when Hispanic Union soldiers beat back the Confederate Army.
It is often called the “Gettysburg of the West.”
New Mexico also has counties named for Abraham Lincoln, Schuyler Colfax, Ulysses Grant, Jose Francisco Chaves and Joseph Calloway Lea.
And Albuquerque-born singer Demi Lovato is a descendant of Francisco Perea, who served as a Union Army lieutenant colonel from New Mexico and was a close friend of President Abraham Lincoln. He was seated near the president’s box at Ford’s Theatre when Lincoln was assassinated.
President Donald Trump says the prospects are "looking good" for an agreement with Mexico that could set the stage for an overhaul of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
"A big deal looking good with Mexico!" Trump tweeted Monday morning.
U.S. and Mexican negotiators worked over the weekend to narrow their differences. Once they reach an agreement, the third country in NAFTA — Canada — would be brought back in to finalize a revamp of the 24-year-old pact.
NAFTA reduced most trade barriers between the three countries. But Trump and other critics say it encouraged U.S. manufacturers to move south of the border to exploit low-wage Mexican labor.
The Trump administration wants a higher percentage of auto production to come from within the NAFTA bloc before qualifying for duty-free status.
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Makeshift memorials are building in Arizona, Washington D.C. and Vietnam, in honor of Arizona Senator John McCain, who lost his battle with brain cancer on Saturday, August 25. He was 81. Read More McCain Honored in US, Vietnam : https://ift.tt/2MS9RbB
People in Vietnam are paying their respects to U.S. Sen. John McCain who was held as prisoner of war in Vietnam and later was instrumental in bringing the wartime foes together.
McCain died of brain cancer Saturday in his home state of Arizona, which he had served over six terms in the U.S. Senate.
People paid tribute to McCain at the U.S Embassy in Hanoi on Monday and also at the monument built where he parachuted from his Navy Skyhawk dive bomber in October 1967 and was taken prisoner of war. He was held more than five years at the infamous "Hanoi Hilton'' prison.
McCain and former Sen. John Kerry played an important role in the bilateral normalization of relations in 1995.
Senator John McCain, who died Saturday after a yearlong battle with brain cancer, will be honored at ceremonies in Arizona and Washington.
McCain will first lie in state at the Arizona State Capitol, where a private ceremony will be held on Wednesday, which would have been McCain’s 82nd birthday. Members of the public will be able to pay their respects at the State Capitol.
On Thursday, a private memorial service will take place at the North Phoenix Baptist Church.
In Washington, D.C., McCain will lie in state at the United States Capitol on Friday. The public will be invited to pay their respects.
McCain will become the 13th senator to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, an honor reserved for the nation’s “most eminent citizens,” according to the Architect of the Capitol.
A memorial service in Washington will be held at the Washington National Cathedral on Saturday. Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush are expected to speak at the service.
McCain’s office said a livestream will be available for the services at the National Phoenix Baptist Church and the National Cathedral.
McCain will be buried at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland. His grave site will overlook the Severn River, and will be next his best friend from his Naval Academy days, Admiral Chuck Larson.
Remembrances, condolences pour in
The Vietnam War hero, Senator, and 2008 Republican presidential candidate was remembered for his courage, patriotism and service by fellow Americans and foreign dignitaries.
President Donald Trump tweeted Saturday, “My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!”
His campaign later issued a statement offering condolences and “urging all Americans to take the opportunity to remember Senator McCain and his family in their prayers on this sad occasion.” The White House lowered the flag to half-staff in honor of McCain.
Former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama issued a statement sending their “heartfelt condolences” to McCain’s wife, Cindy and their family.
Obama, who ran against the Republican senator from the western state of Arizona in the 2008 presidential election and defeated him, noted how despite their different generations, backgrounds and politics, “we saw this country as a place where anything is possible.”
Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who served with McCain in the U.S. Senate, said in a statement that he “frequently put partisanship aside to do what he thought was best for the country and was never afraid to break the mold if it was the right thing to do.”
Former President George W. Bush called McCain a friend, he will “deeply miss.”
“Some lives are so vivid, it’s difficult to imagine them ended,” Bush said in a statement. “Some voices are so vibrant, it’s hard to think of them stilled.”
Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush, called McCain “a patriot of the highest order, a public servant of rarest courage.”
“Few sacrificed more for, or contributed more to, the welfare of his fellow citizens – and indeed freedom-loving peoples around the world,” the elder Bush said in a statement.
Former President Jimmy Carter called McCain "a man of honor, a true patriot in the best sense of the word."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Vietnam POW “showed us that boundless patriotism and self-sacrifice are not outdated concepts or clichés, but the building blocks of an extraordinary life.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan said the McCain’s death marks a “sad day for the United States,” which has lost a “decorated war hero and statesman.”
“John put principle before politics. He put country before self,” Ryan said. “He was one of the most courageous men of the century.”
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said the “nation is in tears” and noted McCain’s “deep patriotism, outstanding bravery and undaunted spirit.”
“He never forgot the great duty he felt to care for our nation’s heroes, dedicating his spirit and energy to ensuring that no man or woman in uniform was left behind on the battlefield or once they returned home,” Pelosi said in a statement.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel called McCain “a tireless fighter for a strong trans-Atlantic alliance; his significance went well beyond his own country.” French President Emmanuel Macron called McCain “a true American hero.”
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani called the U.S. lawmaker a great friend of the South Asian country.
"We will remember his dedication and support towards rebuilding AFG," Ghani tweeted.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also offered condolences.
"People of India join me in sincerely condoling the loss of a steadfast friend," Modi tweeted. "His statesmanship, courage, conviction and understanding of global affairs will be missed."
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called McCain "an American patriot and hero whose sacrifices for his country, and lifetime of public service, were an inspiration to millions."
Read More McCain to be Honored in Arizona, Washington : https://ift.tt/2woIcF9
Some critics of U.S. President Donald Trump have urged impeachment proceedings against him after his former attorney implicated the president in a possible campaign finance violation. But in Congress, where an impeachment would take place, the president's political opponents are taking a cautious stance.
Read More Cohen Guilty Pleas Encourage Calls for Trump Impeachrment : https://ift.tt/2BOzk1h
U.S. Senator John McCain is being remembered for his courage, patriotism and service to his country.
McCain died Saturday at age 81 after a battle with brain cancer.
President Donald Trump tweeted, “My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!”
His campaign later issued a statement offering condolences and “urging all Americans to take the opportunity to remember Senator McCain and his family in their prayers on this sad occasion.”
Former presidents
Former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama issued a statement sending their “heartfelt condolences” to McCain’s wife, Cindy and their family.
Obama, who ran against the Republican senator in the 2008 presidential election and won, noted how despite their different generations, backgrounds and politics, “we saw this country as a place where anything is possible.”
Former President Bill Clinton and former Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, who served with McCain in the U.S. Senate, said in a statement that he “frequently put partisanship aside to do what he thought was best for the country and was never afraid to break the mold if it was the right thing to do.”
Former President George W. Bush called McCain a friend he will “deeply miss.”
“Some lives are so vivid, it’s difficult to imagine them ended,” Bush said in a statement. “Some voices are so vibrant, it’s hard to think of them stilled.”
Military career
The son of a U.S. admiral, McCain became a Navy aviator and flew bombing missions during the Vietnam War. Shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese in 1967, he endured more than five years of torture and depravation as a prisoner of war.
House Speaker Paul Ryan said the McCain’s death marks a “sad day for the United States,” which has lost a “decorated war hero and statesman.”
“John put principle before politics. He put country before self,” Ryan said. “He was one of the most courageous men of the century.”
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said the “nation is in tears” and noted McCain’s “deep patriotism, outstanding bravery and undaunted spirit.”
“He never forgot the great duty he felt to care for our nation’s heroes, dedicating his spirit and energy to ensuring that no man or woman in uniform was left behind on the battlefield or once they returned home,” Pelosi said in a statement.
VOA's White House correspondent Steve Herman contributed to this report.
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Best known for having survived as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam and winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, John Sidney McCain remained an ardent and unapologetic believer in American exceptionalism. Michael Bowman has more. Read More US Senator John McCain, Statesman and War Hero, Dies : https://ift.tt/2weE5w9[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Arizona Senator John McCain, an American war hero has died. He was 81. The Senator's office says he died Saturday after a long battle with glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer. Read More US Senator, War Hero John McCain Dead at 81 : https://ift.tt/2weyki1
Arizona Sen. John McCain, the war hero who became the GOP’s standard-bearer in the 2008 election, has died. He was 81.
His office says McCain died Saturday. He had glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer.
Shortly after McCain's death was announced, President Donald Trump tweeted his condolences.
In 1967, his plane was shot down on a bombing mission over North Vietnam. He was severely injured and spent more than five years as a prisoner of war.
He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1982 and the Senate in 1986. A conservative on most issues, he pushed for campaign finance reform and the effort to account for those missing in Vietnam.
He ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, then won it in 2008. But he and running mate Sarah Palin lost to Barack Obama.
After two years of sometimes ugly public fighting, Democratic Party leaders on Saturday voted to limit their own high-profile roles in choosing presidential nominees, giving even more weight to the outcome of state primaries and caucuses.
The debate over the influence of party insiders known as superdelegates was evidence of the fallout from the 2016 fight between eventual nominee Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. His supporters accused the national party of tipping the scales in Clinton’s favor.
The change, which affects the hundreds of Democratic National Committee members, elected officials and party elders who attend presidential conventions as automatic delegates, was seen as a victory for the party chairman, Tom Perez. It comes with the November election nearing, when GOP control of Congress is at stake, and a potentially bruising nominating battle shaping up for 2020, when President Donald Trump is up for re-election.
“We should never ever confuse unity and unanimity,” Perez said after the vote. “Today, demonstrated the values of the Democratic Party.”
Under the new rules for 2020, superdelegates still will be automatic delegates to the party’s convention. But they will not have a vote on the first presidential ballot if the convention remains contested, which is a distinct possibility given the number of Democrats considering running.
Superdelegates would get to vote on any subsequent rounds of voting, though the Democratic nomination has been settled on the first ballot of every convention since the 1970s, when the modern system of primaries and caucuses was established.
The change was approved by acclamation. The key procedural vote before that showed the overhaul had 329.5 “yes” votes to 106.5 votes in opposition.
The approval drew a standing ovation from progressive activists, many of them among the Sanders supporters who had cited superdelegates as the personification of establishment favoritism toward Clinton.
“This is a great day for America and for the party,” said Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ 2016 campaign manager. “When you have a system subject to gaming, there is incentive to game it. To the extent the system can’t be gamed, you have more credibility with voters.”
In a written statement, Sanders called the move “an important step forward in making the Democratic Party more open, democratic and responsive to the input of ordinary Americans.”
Perez said settling the issue means the party can focus exclusively on the November election, when Democrats are aiming to reclaim majorities on Capitol Hill and regain power in statehouses around the country.
“We’re here to win elections. We’re here to restore our democracy as we know it,” Perez said, and “we’re going to kick butt in 73 days.”
Beyond changing the rules for superdelegates, the overhaul is intended to make vote-counting at presidential preference caucuses more transparent and make it easier for voters other than longtime registered Democrats to participate in caucuses and primaries.
That could affect states such as Iowa, which might have to develop paper ballots for caucus sites instead of its usual method of sorting into groups and counting heads. New York, meanwhile, would be pressured to relax its party registration deadline, which in 2016 fell six months before the primary, leaving many independents who wanted to back Sanders no option to vote.
But it was the superdelegate matter that met fierce opposition from some party leaders, including two former national heads, Donna Brazile and Don Fowler, both longtime allies of Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton.
Fowler, Brazile and other opponents cast the efforts as punishing rank-and-file party leaders incorrectly perceived as party bosses trying to override the will of voters. Even Perez noted that superdelegates have never overturned the cumulative results of primaries and caucuses.
In 2016, for example, Clinton got almost 4 million more primary and caucus votes than Sanders, giving her a clear lead in pledged delegates heading into the Philadelphia convention. Still, many superdelegates had declared their loyalty early in the process — even before primary season began — allowing Clinton to claim the mantle of a prohibitive favorite.
Christine Pelosi, a DNC member from California who backed Clinton but supports scrapping superdelegates, recalled media coverage of Sanders’ big victory in the New Hampshire primary being colored by Clinton having unpledged delegate support in the state.
“Sanders went to bed ahead, and he woke up effectively tied” in the delegate count, Pelosi said. “That’s not a ‘perception.’ That’s a reality.”
Read More Democrats OK Limiting Party Leaders' Role in Picking Nominee : https://ift.tt/2MusFypunitedstatepolitics.blogspot.com Adblock test (Why?) "politic" - Google News February 01, 2024 at 03:47AM https://ift.tt...
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