Month: December 2019

President Donald Trump said Saturday that Israel has never had a better friend in the White House than him because, unlike his predecessors, “I kept my promises.” Trump energized an audience that numbered in the hundreds at the Israeli American Council National Summit in Florida by recounting his record on issues of importance to Jews, including an extensive riff on his promise to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and relocate the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv. Trump said his predecessors only paid lip service to the issue. “They never had any intention of doing it, in my opinion,” Trump said. “But unlike other presidents, I kept my promises.” Trump also highlighted his decision to reverse more than a half-century of U.S. policy in the Middle East by recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the strategic highlands on the border with Syria. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war but its sovereignty over the territory had not been recognized by the international community. In his speech, the president also claimed there are some Jewish people in America who don’t love Israel enough. “We have to get the people of our country, of this country, to love Israel more, I have to tell you that. We have to do it. We have to get them to love Israel more,” Trump said, to some applause. “Because you have Jewish people that are great people – they don’t love Israel enough.” Aaron Keyak, the former head …

Hong Kong police have conducted raids ahead of Sunday afternoon’s protest rally, uncovering several weapons, including a pistol with more than 100 bullets. Eleven people were arrested during the raids. Daggers, swords, batons and pepper spray were also recovered in the raids at several locations. The city’s organized crime bureau said it believed protesters planned to use the weapons during the demonstration “to  incite chaos” and “impugn the police.” The territory is bracing for a large turnout for Sunday’s protest.  Hong Kong has given its approval for the rally called by the Civil Human Rights Front, a group that has organized some of the city’s biggest demonstrations. Monday marks the sixth month anniversary of the rallies that were initially mounted to rally against a now-withdrawn government proposal that would have allowed Hong Kong criminal suspects to be spent to mainland China’s Communist-controlled courts to stand trial. The demonstrations have transformed into a push for democratic elections for the city’s leader and legislature and an investigation into what protesters say has been excessive force used against them.      …

Myanmar leader and Nobel peace prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi  departed on Sunday for the U.N.’s top court in The Hague to defend the country against charges of genocide of its Rohingya Muslim minority. Suu Kyi was pictured smiling as she walked through the airport in the nation’s capital, Naypyitaw, flanked by officials, a day after thousands rallied in the city to support her and a prayer ceremony was held in her name. Crowds are expected to gather again in the afternoon to send off several dozen supporters who will travel to The Hague in the Netherlands and demonstrations are planned throughout the coming week, with hearings set for Dec. 10 to 12. Gambia, a tiny, mainly Muslim West African country, filed a lawsuit in November accusing Buddhist-majority Myanmar of genocide, the most serious international crime, against its Rohingya Muslim minority. During three days of hearings, it will ask the 16-member panel of U.N judges at the International Criminal Court of Justice to impose “provisional measures” to protect the Rohingya before the case can be heard in full. More than 730,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar in 2017 after a brutal military-led crackdown the U.N has said was executed with “genocidal intent” and included mass killings and rape. Despite international condemnation over the campaign, Suu Kyi, whose government has defended the campaign as a legitimate response to attacks by Rohingya militants, remains overwhelmingly popular at home. On Saturday, thousands rallied in Naypyitaw while senior officials held a prayer ceremony at St …

The FBI has officially identified the shooter at the U.S. naval base in Pensacola, Florida who shot and killed three people Friday. The shooter was Mohammed Alshamrani, a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the Royal Saudi Air Force who was a student naval flight officer at the Naval Aviation Schools Command at Naval Air Station Pensacola.  The FBI has not determined a motive for Alshamrani’s rampage.   The victims were also students at the flight school.  They have been identified as Ensign Joshua Kaleb Watson, 23, from Coffee, Alabama; Airman Mohammed Sameh Haitham, 19, from St. Petersburg, Florida; and Airman Apprentice Cameron Scott Walters, 21, from Richmond Hill, Georgia. “The sorrow from the tragic event on NAS Pensacola will have a lasting impact on our installation and community,” Captain Tim Kinsella, the commanding officer of the naval base said in a statement. Eight people were wounded in the shooting naval base, officials say. The shooter, who was also killed in the incident, is reported to have hosted a dinner party earlier in the week where he showed videos of mass U.S. shootings to his guests, according to media reports. At least one of his guests is reported to have videotaped Friday’s massacre.  Several Saudi students are being held for questioning.   Before the pilot opened fire at the base, he tweeted a will and quoted Osama bin Laden in justifying his actions, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which translates jihadist threats and communications. In the Twitter post, he said America …

Marchers are again expected to fill Hong Kong streets in a rally Sunday that will test the enduring appeal of the city’s protest movement marking a half year of demonstrations. Police granted approval for the march, which could boost participant numbers. The rally was called by the Civil Human Rights Front, a group that has organized some of the biggest demonstrations since hundreds of thousands of protesters first marched on June 9. That rally protested now-withdrawn government proposals that would have allowed criminal suspects to be sent for trial in Communist Party-controlled courts in mainland China. The movement has snowballed from there into a sustained challenge to the government of the semi-autonomous Chinese territory and communist leaders in Beijing.   …

Strikes disrupted weekend travel around France on Saturday as truckers blocked highways and most trains remained at a standstill because of worker anger at President Emmanuel Macron’s policies. Meanwhile, yellow vest protesters held their weekly demonstrations over economic injustice in Paris and other cities, under the close watch of police. The marchers appear to be emboldened by the biggest national protests in years Thursday that kicked off a mass movement against the government’s plan to redesign the national retirement system. As the strikes entered a third day Saturday, tourists and shoppers faced shuttered subway lines around Paris and near-empty train stations. Other groups are joining the fray, too. Nationwide Strike Paralyzes France video player. Embed Copy Link Nationwide Strike Paralyzes France Truckers striking over a fuel tax hike disrupted traffic on highways from Provence in the southeast to Normandy in the northwest. A similar fuel tax is what unleashed the yellow vest movement a year ago, and this convergence of grievances could pose a major new threat to Macron’s presidency. The travel chaos is not deterring the government so far, though. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe plainly told the French in a nationwide address Friday: “You’re going to have to work longer.” He will present details of the plan next week. The government says it won’t raise the official retirement age of 62 but the plan is expected to including financial conditions to encourage people to work longer. Philippe did offer one olive branch, saying the changes would be progressive so …

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday called for the World Bank to stop loaning money to China, one day after the institution adopted a lending plan to Beijing over Washington’s objections. The World Bank on Thursday adopted a plan to aid China with $1 billion to $1.5 billion in low-interest loans annually through June 2025. The plan calls for lending to “gradually decline” from the previous five-year average of $1.8 billion. “Why is the World Bank loaning money to China? Can this be possible? China has plenty of money, and if they don’t, they create it. STOP!” Trump wrote in a post on Twitter. “World Bank lending to China has fallen sharply and will continue to reduce as part of our agreement with all our shareholders including the United States,” the World Bank said in an emailed statement to Reuters. “We eliminate lending as countries get richer.” Spokespeople for the White House declined to comment on the record. The World Bank loaned China $1.3 billion in the fiscal 2019 year, which ended on June 30, a decrease from around $2.4 billion in fiscal 2017. But the fall in the World Bank’s loans to China is not swift enough for the Trump administration, which has argued that Beijing is too wealthy for international aid.   …

One hundred forty bushfires continue to burn across eastern Australia.  A huge blaze near Sydney is bigger in size than the city itself and could take weeks to put out.  Conditions have eased Saturday but the dangers persist.   Sydney is again shrouded in a toxic, smoky haze.  Health warnings have been issued and many weekend sporting activities have been cancelled.  Several blazes have combined to create a “mega fire” north of Australia’s biggest city. The fire’s front is 60 kilometers long and officials warn it is simply too big to put out. Unstoppable ‘Mega fire’ Forms North of Sydney A New South Wales fire official said firefighters can do little more than help residents flee Lauren McGowan works in a bar in the nearby city of Cessnock. “Everyone is a bit on edge, getting a little bit too close to home for around here.  Like, even with people we have working here the fires are practically on their doors,” she said. There are 95 bushfires here in the drought-hit state of New South Wales.  Half are burning out of control.  More than 2,000 firefighters are on the ground.  Their task is unrelenting, but reinforcements have arrived from overseas, including Canada, New Zealand and the United States.   Morgan Kehr, a senior firefighter from Edmonton, has flown in to join his Australian counterparts, who have in previous years battled blazes in Canada. “First time away from Christmas, as it is with all of these guys.  Certainly a tough conversation but we’re …

South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in and US President Donald Trump agreed during a phone conversation to maintain dialogue with the nuclear-armed North, Seoul said Saturday, with the two allies noting the situation had become “grave”. Denuclearisation negotiations have been at a standstill since a summit in Hanoi broke up in February and pressure is rising as an end-of-year deadline to offer concessions, set by Pyongyang for Washington, approaches. The 30-minute talk was the first conversation between the US President and the South Korean leader since they met at the UN General Assembly in New York in September. “The two leaders shared an assessment that the current situation on the Korean peninsula is grave,” said Ko Min-jung, the spokeswoman of the South’s presidential office. “They agreed momentum for dialogue to achieve prompt results from denuclearisation negotiations should be continued,” she went on to say, adding that Trump had requested the call. The discussion came after a week in which exchanges between Trump and North Korea raised the prospect of a return to a war of words, culminating in Pyongyang’s threats to resume referring to the US president as a “dotard” and to take military action if the US military moves against it. The South Korean leader was instrumental in brokering the landmark summit between Trump and Kim in Singapore last year which produced only a vaguely worded pledge about denuclearisation. …

Iran’s foreign minister said Saturday a detained Princeton graduate student will be exchanged for an Iranian scientist held by the U.S., marking a potential breakthrough between Tehran and Washington after months of tensions.         “Mohammad Javad Zarif made the announcement on Twitter. The trade involves graduate student Xiyue Wang and scientist Massoud Soleimani.        Glad that Professor Massoud Soleimani and Mr. Xiyue Wang will be joining their families shortly,” Zarif wrote. “Many thanks to all engaged, particularly the Swiss government.”         In his tweet, Zarif confirmed rumors that had been circulating for days that a deal was in the works to free Wang.         President Donald Trump separately acknowledged Wang was free in a statement from the White House, saying he “is returning to the United States.”         “Mr. Wang had been held under the pretense of espionage since August 2016,” Trump said. “We thank our Swiss partners for their assistance in negotiating Mr. Wang’s release with Iran.”         The Swiss Embassy in Tehran looks out for America’s interests in the country as the U.S. Embassy there has been closed since the 1979 student takeover and 444-day hostage crisis.        Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency later reported that Soleimani was with Iranian officials in Switzerland.         Lawyers involved in the cases could not be immediately reached. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.         Wang was sentenced …

VOA Connect Episode 99 – We look at different educational settings, from Native American studies to training veterans about beekeeping to kids learning how to code.   …

The Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico is a school designed for Native Americans.  We talk to students and professors about a learning environment that specifically addresses tribal cultures and values.   Reporter:  Julie Taboh, Camera: Adam Greenbaum, Adapted by: Zdenko Novacki …

We go to an apiary in New Hampshire where US veterans have turned to beekeeping for post-traumatic stress relief.  Find out how taking care of bees is helping these former fighters use stay grounded and lessen their trauma.   Reporter/Camera: Deborah Block; Adapted by: Martin Secrest …

A Georgetown University program is exposing veterans and their spouses to entrepreneurship and small business, helping families cope with the dislocation disadvantages that are built into work during military life. Reporter/Camera:  Unshin Lee; Adapted by: Philip Alexiou …

What started as workshops to provide skills needed to restore damage from Hurricane Hugo in 1989 has become an accredited college in Charleston, South Carolina.  As its students well know, this College of The Building Arts is fulfilling a direct need for historic restoration. Reporter:   Julie Taboh, Camera: Adam Greenbaum, Adapted by: Zdenko Novacki …

Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, on Thursday set a share price for its initial public stock offering — expected to be the biggest ever — that puts the value of the company at $1.7 trillion, more than Apple or Microsoft.    The company said it would sell its shares at 32 riyals ($8.53) each, putting the overall value of the stake being sold at $25.6 billion.    Aramco is floating a 1.5% stake in the company, or 3 billion shares. Trading is expected to happen on the Saudi Tadawul stock exchange as early as December 11.    The company is selling 0.5% to individuals who are Saudi citizens and residents  and 1% to institutional investors, which can be sovereign wealth funds, asset managers or government-run pension programs.    The pricing of the shares was at the top of the range Aramco had sought. The company had priced its shares ranging from 30 to 32 riyals each, or $8 to $8.53 a share.    In the announcement Thursday, Aramco said the offering drew heavy demand. Most orders from Saudis The company’s financial advisers had said earlier that most orders came from Saudi funds or companies, with foreign investors, including from neighboring Persian Gulf Arab states, accounting for 10.5% of the bids. It was not immediately known what the final figures released Thursday represented and how much of that was generated by foreign investment.    The highly anticipated sale of a sliver of the company had generated global buzz since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced plans for it more than two years ago. That’s in part because it would clock in as the world’s biggest IPO, surpassing …

A piece of paper no bigger than a business card could enrich struggling coffee farmers and their soil, a growing challenge as temperatures rise and prices fluctuate.    Enveritas, a U.S. nonprofit, signed an agreement with International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) on Thursday to pilot the AgroPad, which analyzes soil samples remotely and quickly.    Powered by artificial intelligence, the AgroPad can perform a chemical analysis in 10 seconds, reading nitrate or chloride levels from a drop of water or small soil sample, said IBM.    Enveritas plans to provide the devices for free to farmers in coffee-growing regions of Latin America and Africa, and IBM said it aims to make them affordable for everyone. Its target production cost: less than 25 cents.    The nonprofit, which works with 100,000 farms, mills and estates in Latin America and Africa, did not say how many would be in the pilot but, if successful, “the plan is to scale it out,” CEO David Browning told Reuters.    Coffee farmers have been struggling with a slump in global prices while climate change is threatening vast swaths of land in Latin America, Asia and Africa.    Enveritas, which verifies the sustainability of coffee farmers, said most of its growers live on less than $2 a day.    Chemical analysis of soil is vital to improve yields but is complicated, expensive and time-consuming because it requires laboratory equipment, said Mathias Steiner from IBM Research-Brazil.    AgroPad costs less and could reduce the use of fertilizers, which would save money and help the environment, said Steiner, one of its inventors.    …

President Donald Trump said on Thursday the United States may take action on trade with countries that are not contributing enough to NATO. Trump, fresh from a trip to London for a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, has been pushing member countries to contribute more to the organization. The U.S. president said a lot of countries were getting close to the goal of 2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product for NATO contributions. “A lot of countries are close and getting closer. And some are really not close, and we may do things having to do with trade. It’s not fair that they get U.S. protection and they’re not putting up their money,” he said. Trump and French leader Emmanuel Macron clashed over the future of NATO on Tuesday before a summit intended to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Western military alliance. In sharp exchanges underlining discord in a transatlantic bloc hailed by many as the most successful military pact in history, Trump demanded that Europe pay more for its collective defense and make concessions to U.S. interests on trade. He also was upbeat about the alliance on Thursday, saying his meetings went well and that “NATO is in very, very good shape and the relationships with other countries are really extraordinary.” …

Republican Senator Kevin Cramer prevented the U.S. Senate from voting Thursday on a resolution that would recognize as a genocide the mass killings of Armenians a century ago, saying it was not an appropriate time to pass legislation that would anger Turkey.    The Democrat-led House of Representatives passed the resolution  405-11 in late October. But there has not been a vote in the Senate, where President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans hold a majority of seats.    Congressional aides said the White House did not want the legislation to move ahead while it was negotiating with Ankara on sensitive issues such as Turkey’s offensive against Kurdish fighters in northern Syria and the NATO ally’s purchase of an S-400 missile defense system from Russia, which could provoke U.S. sanctions.    The resolution asserts that it is U.S. policy to commemorate as genocide the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923. The Ottoman Empire was centered in present-day Turkey.    Turkey accepts that many Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed in clashes with Ottoman forces during World War I, but it contests the figures and denies that the killings were systematically orchestrated and constitute a genocide.  Threat to sovereignty Ankara views foreign involvement in the issue as a threat to its sovereignty. It immediately denounced the House vote.    Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas tried to force a Senate vote on the resolution Thursday.    Cramer, of North Dakota, blocked it, saying the time was not right, just after Trump held …

Measles infected nearly 10 million people in 2018 and killed 140,000, mostly children, as devastating outbreaks of the viral disease hit every region of the world, the World Health Organization said on Thursday. In figures described by its director general as “an outrage,” the WHO said most of last year’s measles deaths were in children under five years old who had not been vaccinated. “The fact that any child dies from a vaccine-preventable disease like measles is frankly an outrage and a collective failure to protect the world’s most vulnerable children,” said the WHO’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus. FILE – Signs posted at The Vancouver Clinic in Vancouver, Wash., Jan. 30, 2019, warn patients and visitors of a measles outbreak. The picture for 2019 is even worse, the WHO said, with provisional data up to November showing a three-fold increase compared with the same period in 2018. The United States has already reported its highest number of measles cases in 25 years in 2019, while four countries in Europe — Albania, the Czech Republic, Greece and Britain — lost their WHO “measles-free” status in 2018 after suffering large outbreaks. An ongoing outbreak of measles in South Pacific nation of Samoa has infected more than 4,200 people and killed more than 60, mostly babies and children, in a battle complicated by a vocal anti-vaccination movement. Globally, measles vaccination rates have stagnated for almost a decade, the WHO said. It and the UNICEF children’s fund say that in 2018, around 86% …

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Wednesday led hundreds of people in a march against corruption, calling corrupt people parasites who steal public wealth. Museveni said to end corruption, leaders must develop the economy. “Commercial agriculture, industry services and ICT, because that’s how we can create jobs and wealth and income so that our people do not have a material basis for acute need, which forces them to be corrupt,” Museveni said. President Yoweri Museveni addresses a gathering that had participated in the anti-corruption walk in Kampala, Uganda, Dec. 4, 2019. (Halima Athumani/VOA News) Critics note that last year, Transparency International ranked Uganda as one of the most corrupt countries in Africa, below Kenya, Mauritania and Nigeria. Action Aid International-Uganda says Museveni marching against corruption is ironic, because his government is to blame for much of it. Nickson Ogwal is the director of programs and policy at Action Aid International-Uganda. “He is the chief law enforcement officer of Uganda,” Ogwal said. “He’s therefore the one [to] whom the citizens are supposed to walk and show and demonstrate that they are angry about corruption. Now, to whom is he angry? So, we really think that he is playing politics.” Critics accuse Uganda’s inspector general of holding only lower level officials or private citizens to account for corruption. The inspector, Irene Mulyagonja, acknowledges that some top government officials hide behind Museveni but argues the president is sincere in tackling corruption. “You see when he says, ‘I am ready to fight,’ it means he’s …