Growing potatoes and carrots high in the wind-swept mountains of western Venezuela had always proven a challenge for Luis Villamizar.

But as oil production in the South American country has collapsed under years of mismanagement and U.S. sanctions, many in the industry are confronting another hardship: Fuel shortages.

“Nobody’s going to eat this. It’s a loss for sure, said Villamizar, 53, as he dug up potatoes darkened with spots from a damaging infestation. “Who’s going to buy these? This won’t do.”

He’s not alone. Across Venezuela, crops are spoiling in the fields – at a time of unprecedented hunger – as farmers become the latest casualty of the nation’s deepening crisis.

Without a dependable supply of gasoline, critical shipments of pesticides have been entirely cut off, basic equipment has become impossible to operate, field workers cannot be bussed in and crops aren’t arriving at markets – further jeopardizing an already shaky sector in a country that has seen a whopping 10% of the population emigrate.

Oil output has reached record lows, with state run company PDVSA estimated to be producing at 10 to 15% of its capacity. Gasoline is dirt cheap at filling stations, but hard to find – driving the black market price for a 5.3 gallon (20 liter) container up to $100 in remote mountain communities. Many motorists have also grown accustomed to waiting days to fill up their cars or doing without any at all.

Critics blame the downfall on corruption after two decades of socialist rule, while embattled President Nicolas Maduro blames U.S. sanctions that were implemented against PDVSA this year to pressure him from office and put opposition leader Juan Guaido in charge.

In the middle are the nation’s farmers.

While the nation boasts the world’s largest reserves of oil, agriculture and related industries in Venezuela still account for a critical sliver of the country’s GDP, which has shrunk by more than 70% since 2012. In rural places like the western state of Tachira, many manage to eke out livelihoods by tending to crops such as potatoes, carrots, onions, tomatoes and peppers.

The lack of fuel is driving the industry toward collapse.

Robert Maldonado, a sweet pepper famer and outspoken community leader, represents roughly 1,500 farmers across the rural stretch traversed by the Andes, where the highest peak rises to nearly 12,800 feet (3,900 meters) above sea level.

In the past, produce ranging from cabbage to bananas was sent to markets and kitchens across Venezuela.

These days, Maldonado says the price of fuel has eaten up profits and made it impossible for farmers to feed themselves – let alone supply a country where hunger and hyperinflation run rampant. According to survey results published by three of the country’s most prominent universities, six in 10 Venezuelans said they lost weight, an average of 24 pounds (11 kilograms), between 2017 and 2018. Last year, inflation topped 1 million percent.

“We’re quite worried that in three or four months the production will collapse by more than half,” Maldonado said.

Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard University economist and former Venezuelan planning minister who is now an opposition figure, estimates that Venezuela’s farming output is down 90 percent from its 2005-2007 average, with fuel shortages adding to the blow.

“The planted area is the smallest we’ve seen in decades,” he said, calling it a “systemic collapse” of a supply chain for the sector – including shortages of seed, fertilizer and spare parts for tractors.

Before the oil boom started in Venezuela nearly a century ago, agriculture, forestry, and fishing made up more than 50 percent of GDP. In the 1930s farms provided 60 percent of the nation’s jobs.

This landscape began to dramatically change in the 1970s as the petro state took off, and today agriculture makes up a smaller portion of the economy than in any other country in Latin America. As farms declined, the government used its oil windfall to import food.

In the years following the 2010 government takeover of private agricultural company Agroislena, farmers had hunted for everything from seeds to pesticides – or even traveled to neighboring Colombia to secure supplies – in order to sustain production.

Rarely though, had crops spoiled, tractors sat idle and fields left completely fallow.

Villamizar, who has a tanned face and rough hands from years of toiling outside, still farms a small patch of land in the rugged mountains his family has tended for generations and said his last harvest of 14 60-kilogram (132 pound) potato sacks rotted before he could send it into town.

Fellow farmer Hauchy Pereira estimated he would lose 6 tons of onions since the transportation of his seedlings from greenhouses to open fields was delayed.

Pereira said a farming collective overseen by a general had given him a pass to fill up his truck in two months’ time, but his onion sprouts were already wilting.

“If you have the harvest and there’s no gas, you can’t sell it,” the 34-year-old said. “There is no way to transport it without fuel.”

 

Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said on Tuesday any disruption to oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz will be a “major obstacle” for his country’s economy which has too few oil export outlets.

His government was studying contingency plans to deal with possible disruption, including looking at alternative routes for oil exports, Abdul Mahdi said.

“Iraq has too few export outlets,” Abdul Mahdi told reporters at his weekly press conference on Tuesday. “Right now, most of the Iraqi oil exports are being done through southern terminals.”

“We need to diversify our export outlets,” he said.

The prime minister’s comments came in response to a question on whether tensions between Iran and the United States could affect Iraq’s oil exports via the Strait.

A vital shipping route linking Middle East oil producers to markets in Asia, Europe, North America and beyond, the Strait of Hormuz has been at the heart of regional tensions for decades.

Recent months have seen a bout of instability in the region, with six tankers attacked since May amid escalating tensions between Tehran and Washington.

Many fear the tensions could affect the flow of oil. Abdul Mahdi said as part of contingency planning, his cabinet had authorized the country’s oil ministry to move forward on two projects to bolster the country’s future exports.

The ministry was tasked with conducting feasibility studies and looking at investment models to build a major pipeline to export oil from southern Iraq to Jordan’s Aqaba port, he said.
The ministry will also look at establishing an offshore oil installation in the south.

 

Twitter now prohibits hate speech that targets religious groups using dehumanizing language.
 
The social network already bars hateful language directed at individual religious adherents. Tuesday’s change broadens that rule to forbid likening entire religious groups to subhumans or vermin.
 
The company has come under fire – along with fellow social media networks such as Facebook and YouTube – for the prevalence of harassment and offensive language on its service.
 
Twitter’s latest update came after users wrote in thousands of responses when the company asked for suggestions on how to expand its hate speech policies.
 
The company says it may also ban similar language aimed at other groups such as those defined by gender, race and sexual orientation.

 

Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young and the Dave Matthews Band will headline Farm Aid 2019 when the music and food festival visits Wisconsin’s dairy country in September.
 
Tickets for the Sept. 21 event at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy go on sale Friday.
 
Farm Aid says the farming economy this year resembles how things were when Nelson founded Farm Aid in 1985. Nelson says devastating weather, low prices and current federal farm and trade policies pose enormous challenges to family farmers struggling to keep their farms.
 
Other performers include Bonnie Raitt, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, Margo Price, Jamey Johnson, Tanya Tucker, Brothers Osborne, Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real, Yola, and Particle Kid.
 
Farm Aid has raised $57 million since 1985.

Amazon and Microsoft are battling it out over a $10 billion opportunity to build the U.S. military its first “war cloud” computing system. But Amazon’s early hopes of a shock-and-awe victory may be slipping away.

Formally called the Joint Enterprise Department Infrastructure plan, or JEDI, the military’s computing project would store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the Pentagon to use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities. The Defense Department hopes to award the winner-take-all contract as soon as August. Oracle and IBM were eliminated at an earlier round of the contract competition.

But that’s only if the project isn’t derailed first. It faces a legal challenge by Oracle and growing congressional concerns about alleged Pentagon favoritism toward Amazon. Military officials hope to get started soon on what will be a decade-long business partnership they describe as vital to national security.

”This is not your grandfather’s internet,” said Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a defense-oriented think tank. “You’re talking about a cloud where you can go from the Pentagon literally to the soldier on the battlefield carrying classified information.”

Amazon was considered an early favorite when the Pentagon began detailing its cloud needs in 2017, but its candidacy has been marred by an Oracle allegation that Amazon executives and the Pentagon have been overly cozy. Oracle has a final chance to make its case against Amazon — and the integrity of the government’s bidding process — in a court hearing Wednesday.

”This is really the cloud sweepstakes, which is why there are such fierce lawsuits,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives.

Ives said an opportunity that was a “no brainer” for Amazon a year ago now seems just as likely to go to Microsoft, which has spent the past year burnishing its credentials to meet the government’s security requirements.

For years, Amazon Web Services has been the industry leader in moving businesses and other institutions onto its cloud — a term used to describe banks of servers in remote data centers that can be accessed from almost anywhere. But Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform has been steadily catching up, as have other providers such as Google, in both corporate and government settings.

With an acronym evoking Star Wars and a price tag of up to $10 billion over the next decade, JEDI has attracted more attention than most cloud deals. A cloud strategy document unveiled by the Defense Department last year calls for replacing the military’s “disjointed and stove-piped information systems” with a commercial cloud service “that will empower the warfighter with data and is critical to maintaining our military’s technological advantage.”

In a court filing last month, Lt. Gen. Bradford Shwedo said further delays in the Oracle case will “hamper our critical efforts in AI” as the U.S. tries to maintain its advantage over adversaries who are “weaponizing their use of data.” Shwedo said JEDI’s computing capabilities could help the U.S. analyze data collected from surveillance aircraft, predict when equipment needs maintenance and speed up communications if fiber and satellite connections go down.

Amazon was considered an early front-runner for the project in part because of its existing high-security cloud contract with the Central Intelligence Agency. It beat out IBM for that deal in 2013.  

Worried that the Pentagon’s bid seemed tailor-made for Amazon, rivals Oracle and IBM lodged formal protests last year arguing against the decision to award it to a single vendor.

In an October blog post , IBM executive Sam Gordy wrote that a single-cloud approach went against industry trends and “would give bad actors just one target to focus on should they want to undermine the military’s IT backbone.”

The Government Accountability Office later dismissed those protests, but Oracle persisted by taking its case to the Court of Federal Claims, where it has pointed to emails and other documents that it says show conflicts of interest between Amazon and the government. Oral arguments in that case are scheduled for Wednesday. The case has delayed the procurement process, though the Pentagon says it now hopes to award the contract as early as Aug. 23.

Oracle’s argument is centered on the activities of a Defense Department official who later went to work for Amazon. Amazon says Oracle has exaggerated that employee’s role in the procurement using “tabloid sensationalism.”

Some defense-contracting experts say the conflict allegations are troubling.

”No one seems to deny that these were actual conflicts and the players affirmatively attempted to conceal them,” said Steven Schooner, a professor of government procurement law at George Washington University. “That simply cannot be tolerated.”

But Goure, whose think tank gets funding from Amazon but not from its cloud rivals Microsoft, Oracle or IBM, said the criticism is “coming from the also-rans.” He says rivals like Oracle “missed the boat” in cloud technology and are trying to make up lost ground through legal maneuvers.

The Pentagon has repeatedly defended its bidding process, though the concerns have trickled into Congress and onto prime-time TV. Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted a segment last month to the cloud contract that questioned an Amazon executive’s 2017 meeting with then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. Carlson also aired concerns by Republican Rep. Mark Meadows, who said “the allegations are incredible” and should be investigated.

A Wall Street Journal report on Sunday further detailed government emails about that meeting and another one between Mattis and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos later that year. In response, Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said the bidding process should be started over.

Pentagon spokeswoman Elissa Smith said while military leaders are expected to engage with industry, no one in the defense secretary’s “front office” participated in drafting the contract requirements or soliciting bids.

Ives said it remains to be seen how much the conflict allegations will hurt Amazon or help Microsoft. Microsoft has largely stayed quiet during the dispute. In a statement, it focused on highlighting its 40-year partnership supplying the military with services such as email.

VOA Student Union’s Sahar Majid interviewed 2019 Miss District of Columbia Katelynne Cox, who talked about issues including her pageant journey and advocacy organization.

Katelynne Cox was chosen as the 2019 Miss District of Columbia last month.

Cox, a native of Washington state, is the manager of fundraising and events at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation in Washington, D.C.

In the pageant, Cox was able to speak to her advocacy for the #MeToo movement.

Through the organization Silence Is Not Compliance, which Cox founded in 2016, she is providing rehabilitation resources to survivors of sexual assault and educating kids on how to prevent sexual violence.

Cox is a rape survivor, and works to inspire other women who have gone through similar trauma and have not been able to speak up.

“I am a survivor of sexual assault and was raped in college, and I wanted to turn my terrible experience into a way that could help others,” she said.

As she established Silence Is Not Compliance, Cox began lobbying for the victims for sexual assault before the U.S. Congress.

“I would argue right now, in our current policies, that victims are treated as tools for prosecution rather than victims deserving a rescue and that’s what I want to change,” she said.

Before moving to Washington, D.C., Cox attended the University of Missouri where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree. She also has two graduate certificates in nonprofit and public management from the school.

Cox said she became involved with the Miss District of Columbia organization for several reasons. The Miss DC pageant, which is part of the Miss America program, offers over $25,000 in scholarships each year to contestants. The winner receives a $10,000 scholarship and there are a variety of other awards available for academics.

Cox said the scholarship was one of the reasons she got involved with the organization.

Every year, the Miss District of Columbia Scholarship Organization recognizes high-achieving women between the ages of 18 and 25 who have been living or working in Washington, D.C., for at least six months preceding the date of the pageant. The program’s website says that a contestant who is not a district resident can obtain a waiver by showing her education or employment status in the District of Columbia. There is no entry fee to compete. This year’s event was held June 23.

The Miss DC organization has a partnership with Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals – a Utah-based nonprofit organization that raises funds for children’s health care.

“This organization is near and dear to my heart,” Cox said, adding it gave her another reason to become involved with the Miss DC organization. Cox has been working with Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals since she was a child.

In addition, the Miss DC organization provides contestants with an opportunity to pick a social impact initiative with which to become involved. “It was an amazing experience to promote my organization, Silence Is Not Compliance, as Miss DC,” Cox said.

This year, the Miss District of Columbia Pageant eliminated the swimsuit segment. It was a decision by the Miss America organization to replace it with onstage interviews of contestants.

Cox is grateful for the decision because it gave her an opportunity to talk about the #MeToo movement on stage and her experience as a survivor to connect with other survivors.

She highlighted her singing abilities for the talent portion.

“Well, my mom likes to say that I started singing before I could even talk,” she said, while telling the story of her musical journey.

Cox has worked with Red Hammer Records, a label based in Portland, Oregon, and released three albums during her teen years. She also had an opportunity to tour nationwide for her musical shows.

Cox believes scholarship programs, such as Miss America or Miss DC, provide young women with a platform to talk about social issues that need to be addressed.

“I think that inherently there is a problem with the thought that being involved in pageants is somehow sexually objectifying someone. I would argue that if you say that pageants are sexually objectifying me, then you are sexually objectifying me, not the pageant itself,” Cox said.

Cox is now gearing up for the 2020 Miss America contest, to be held on September 8 in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

A delegation of more than 50 Afghans concluded a high-profile conference with the Taliban Monday with a joint statement emphasizing the need to bring civilian casualties in the nation’s civil war to zero and reaching a positive outcome in the on-going negotiations between the Taliban and the United States in Doha. 

They also emphasized the need to include all parties in the negotiations to end the 18-year-long conflict.

“All participants have full consensus that achieving sustainable, thorough, and a dignified peace, which is a demand of the Afghan people, is only possible via inclusive Afghan negotiations,” read the statement.

The conference is being hailed as a historic first for including members of the Afghan government, albeit in their personal capacity. Previously, the Taliban have been reluctant to engage directly with any government representatives, calling the Kabul administration “illegal” and a “puppet” of the Americans.

“There were cabinet ministers in the room in the past two days,” said Lotfullah Najafizada, a delegate and head of one of Afghanistan’s biggest TV news channels Tolo News, adding that in his opinion the pattern would be repeated in future dialogue. 

It was also the first intra-Afghan dialogue hosted formally by two governments—Qatar and Germany.  A previous conference in Moscow was organized by a government-linked NGO. 

The two sides agreed to the need to reduce civilian casualties in Afghanistan by listing targets that should be off-limits for attacks by either side including “schools, hospitals, madrassas, markets, water dams, and residential areas.”

The statement also called for ensuring women’s rights in “political, social, economic, educational, and cultural affairs, within the framework of Islamic values.”

The two sides asked for the “unconditional release of elderly, disabled, and sick inmates” by both Taliban and the Afghan government.

The two-day conference comes at a time when a team of Americans, led by Zalmay Khalilzad, the Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, is simultaneously negotiating an end to the conflict with the Taliban. 

His intermittent presence at the venue, interacting with the delegates and media in the hallways and meeting rooms of Sheraton Doha, indicated the importance the U.S. government associated with the event which the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called “a long time coming.” 

All eyes now turn to the negotiation he resumed Tuesday with the Taliban, also in Doha, which both sides claim is going well. “We progressed a lot in the last week and we hope that the few items left, we can finalize them also,” said Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, who is leading negotiations with the Americans. His comments reinforced Khalilzad’s Tweet calling the last week “the most productive session to date.”

The last 6 days of talks have been the most productive session to date. We made substantive progress on ALL 4 parts of a peace agreement: counter-terrorism assurances, troop withdrawal, participation in intra-Afghan dialogue & negotiations, and permanent & comprehensive ceasefire

— U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad (@US4AfghanPeace) July 6, 2019

Still, in public at least, the two sides continue to define progress differently. Stanikzai said Monday his team was negotiating with the Americans on two issues, a time-table for the withdrawal of foreign troops and how to prevent Afghan soil from being used for terrorism. Khalilzad on the other hand, insisted the two sides had made progress on four issues, including a cease-fire in Afghanistan, and making Afghan government a part of peace negotiations.  

Several delegates said the wording of the joint statement indicated Taliban flexibility on the issue of direct negotiations with the government, which has been a stumbling block so far. 

And while most delegates from both sides exuded optimism about the outcome, they acknowledged there was a long way to go. 

“Let’s not forget, we’re in the beginning of the process. It requires formal negotiations,” Najafizada said.

Top U.S. officials say Iran should not test America’s patience, as the Islamic Republic creates nuclear material in quantities and purity above limits set in the 2015 international nuclear deal. The reaction came as the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors verified that Iran breached the limit set in the nuclear deal aimed at restraining Tehran’s nuclear weapons development. VOA’s Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports from Washington.

The $6 billion loan package for Pakistan approved by the International Monetary Fund last week will require “very ambitious” fiscal measures and sustained commitment for the bailout to succeed, IMF officials said on Monday.

The three-year agreement approved by the IMF board last week, Pakistan’s 13th bailout since the late 1980s, has seen a sharp drop in the value of the rupee currency after the central bank agreed to a “flexible, market-determined exchange rate.”

It also foresees structural economic reforms and a widening of the tax base to boost tax revenues that are currently estimated to account for less than 13% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 4-5 percentage points.

With slowing growth, a budget deficit which has climbed to more than 7% of GDP and currency reserves of less than $8 billion, or enough to cover 1.7 months of imports, Pakistan has teetered on the edge of a debt and balance of payments crisis.

Ernesto Ramirez Rigo, the Fund’s mission chief for Pakistan said the program targets were tough but Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government, which came to power last year vowing not to turn to the IMF, was committed.

“We certainly think that debt sustainability under the program will be assured,” he told a conference call with reporters, adding that it would require “very ambitious” fiscal consolidation, mainly through improved revenue collection.

Pakistan has a notoriously narrow tax base, with less than 1% of its 208 million population filing income tax returns, a vast informal economy and several key sectors of the official economy largely exempt from tax.

The IMF loan and the associated package of reforms that goes with it will unlock another $38 billion in loans from other international partners but commitment by Pakistani authorities in pushing through reform was essential, Ramirez Rigo said.

“Consistency and sustained implementation is key,” he said.

The 2020 budget, passed last month, approved tax measures worth some 1.7% of GDP to help cut the deficit and Pakistan has promised a multiyear effort to overhaul its tax and budget system to put its public finances on a firmer footing.

A central part of the program will involve cleaning up accumulated debts in the power and gas sectors and in loss-making state enterprises including Pakistan International Airlines, Pakistan Steel Mills, and Pakistan Railways.

Losses built up in the power sector now amount to the equivalent of 4% of GDP, posing a serious fiscal risk, while losses in the big three state enterprises amount to 2% of GDP, the IMF said in a report on the package.

The tough conditions of the package, which has already seen interest rates hiked by 150 basis points and which will see a raft of tax loopholes closed, has already drawn resentment among households facing inflation running at around 9%.

Ramirez Rigo said there was a risk that the difficulties of implementing some of the policies in the package were “more complicated than we have assumed” and that there would be problems in building consensus behind the reforms.

He also said any sharp rise in oil prices could unbalance the reform drive given Pakistan’s heavy dependence on imported energy.

Mexico’s newly created National Guard has detained U.S.-bound migrants and the government should make public the rules governing their power to curb immigration, the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) said on Monday.

The National Guard is a security force created by Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to bring down record homicide rates. But now it has been tasked with patrolling the border to placate U.S. President Donald Trump, who threatened to slap tariffs on Mexican goods unless the country did more to stem the flow of Central American migrants heading to the United States.

“Publishing the protocols and coordination rules under which the National Guard operates in support of immigration authorities, particularly regarding the procedures for detaining persons with an illegal immigration status, is desirable,” CNDH President Luis Raul Gonzalez said in a speech. “If such protocols and rules don’t exist, establishing and publishing them is an urgent matter.”

The Mexican government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the speech.

While some 21,000 National Guard troops, nearly a third of their total ranks, have been deployed to Mexico’s northern and southern borders on immigration duties, their rules of engagement are still unclear.

Facing accusations the troops had been heavy-handed in their efforts to deter migrants from crossing the northern border, Lopez Obrador said on June 25 that the National Guard does not have orders to detain migrants.

The guardsmen themselves say they do not detain migrants but are there to advise them not to enter the United States.

Still, Reuters witnessed at least three adults and four children being detained as they tried to cross into the United States after Obrador made his statement.

Last week, Brigadier-General Vicente Antonio Hernandez, who heads the National Guard’s operations in Mexico’s southern states, said 20,000 migrants had been rescued since May 17.

Human rights groups say the migrants have been detained and some have been deported.

“There is a huge distance between what you hear from Lopez Obrador every morning and what is happening on the ground with respect to this issue. He’s not being very truthful, not being very honest with Mexican people regarding the reality of the deployment of these soldiers,” Fernando Garcia, founding director of the Border Network for Human Rights, told Reuters.

Democrats in the U.S. Congress on Monday said they were using a court case to demand documents from President Donald Trump’s businesses in hopes of proving that they violated anti-corruption provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

A group of more than 200 Democratic Party lawmakers said in a statement that as part of lawsuit in federal court they had issued 37 subpoenas the Trump Organization and other entities, seeking information about foreign government payments accepted by properties in his real estate empire.

The subpoenas also seek information about trademarks granted to Trump businesses by foreign governments.

“Our goal is simple and straightforward – stopping President Trump from putting a ‘For Sale’ sign in Russian on the door to the Oval Office,” said Richard Blumenthal, a senator from Connecticut and the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Blumenthal added that the politicians were seeking “a targeted set of documents” to ensure Trump “can no longer shirk his constitutional responsibility.”

The U.S. Department of Justice, which is representing Trump in the court case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move had been expected in light of recent rulings by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington in favor of the Democratic Party lawmakers.

Trump, a wealthy real estate developer, maintains ownership of his businesses but has ceded day-to-day control to his sons.

Critics have said that is not a sufficient safeguard.

In 2017, Democrats filed a lawsuit alleging Trump was illegally profiting from his businesses in various ways, including by collecting payments from foreign government officials who stay at his properties and accepting trademark registrations around the world for his company’s products.

A similar case brought the Maryland and the District of Columbia attorneys general is also making its way through the courts. 

The litigation represents the first time in U.S. history courts have interpreted the so-called “Emoluments Clauses” of the Constitution, which bans U.S. officials from accepting gifts or payments from foreign and state governments without congressional consent.

On June 25 Sullivan rejected a request by Trump administration lawyers to halt the case and let them file an expedited appeal of key preliminary rulings he issued against the president.

On Monday the Justice Department urged an appeals court to put the litigation on hold, saying it was based on “novel and flawed constitutional premises” and allows “intrusive discovery into the President’s personal financial affairs.”

The radical and painful restructuring of Germany’s Deutsche Bank, which is cutting 18,000 jobs, is the end of a long, failed attempt to compete with the global investment banking giants that left it overextended.

The bank plan unveiled Sunday aims to go “back to our roots” by refocusing on traditional strengths like serving corporate customers and wealthy individuals and cutting down on its stock-trading business and fixed-income investments.

Investors gave a wary response Monday, however, pushing shares down 5% at 6.82 euros ($7.68) in Frankfurt.

CEO Christian Sewing said the job cuts have already begun and will last until 2022, though he wouldn’t give a geographical breakdown.

Deutsche Bank had nearly 91,500 employees at the end of March, about 41,600 of them in Germany. Many of its investment banking activities are carried out in New York and London.

“This is a rebuilding which, in a way, also takes us back to our roots,” Sewing said in a message to staff.

Failed expansion

Analysts say the overhaul is the bank’s long-needed reckoning with the failure of its expansion plan.

Deutsche Bank’s move into investment banking dates back to 1989, when it took over Morgan Grenfell, and the 1999 takeover of Bankers Trust. The division helped drive strong profits in the 2000s and was part of an ambition to become one of the global banking giants, like JPMorgan or HSBC.

But the expansion, and the global financial crisis around 2008, also helped generate its subsequent problems.

Deutsche Bank wrestled for years with high costs, weak profits, and a low share price. It also paid billions in fines and settlements related to behavior before and after the global financial crisis. 
 
Analysts expect Deutsche Bank’s departure to be a net benefit for the U.S.-based investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase. Competition between the big Wall Street firms for business has been intense for years, and has only gotten worse in recent years as fewer companies are using traditional financial services to go public or issue debt. 
 
The end of Deutsche Bank’s commodity and bond trading operations will also be a boon for the banks, as trading will likely move to the banks which already specialize in it, like Citigroup, Goldman and JPMorgan.

‘Spread too thin’

The bad headlines continued this year when two U.S. congressional committees subpoenaed Deutsche Bank documents as part their investigations into President Donald Trump and his company. Deutsche Bank was one of the few banks willing to lend to Trump after a series of corporate bankruptcies and defaults starting in the early 1990s.

The Frankfurt-based bank went three straight years without an annual profit before earning 341 million euros for 2018. Sewing took over last year, promising faster restructuring after predecessor John Cryan was perceived to have moved too slowly.

“We tried to compete in nearly every area of the banking market at the same time,” Sewing told investors Monday. “We simply spread ourselves too thin.” 
 
Earlier this year, the bank entered talks to merge with German rival Commerzbank, which had also been ailing since the global financial crisis. But the talks failed in April amid concerns that a merger would be too complicated and costly.

That left open the question of what strategy Deutsche Bank could pursue to make its business leaner and more profitable.

Previous shake-up attempts have been “too little, too late,” said Neil Wilson, an analyst for Markets.com in London.

‘Right medicine’

“Now it’s the right medicine, it just should have been taken a few years ago,” Wilson said. He added that some questions remain about how the bank aims to grow revenues once it has restructured, and that seems reflected in the investors’ sell-off of the shares Monday.

Philip Augar, a British-based banking expert and former equities broker, told the BBC that Deutsche Bank was embarking on a spectacular reversal of the strategy that began with the 1999 Bankers Trust acquisition.

“Their ambition was to challenge the Wall Street giants. And for about decade, it looked as though they’d pulled it off,” he said, with the bank “a serious player on Wall Street and in the City” in the 2000s.

But things went wrong in the financial crisis as Deutsche Bank cut slowly and modestly while others “retreated radically and drastically, and more or less, instantly,” he added.

“They’ve been limping along for the last few years and I suppose this day had to come,” he said.

Police investigators summoned former Kyrgyz president Almazbek Atambayev for questioning on Monday, setting the stage for a stand-off between him and his successor, incumbent Sooronbai Jeenbekov, in the volatile Central Asian nation.

Jeenbekov, who came to power in 2017 with Atambayev’s support and used to be his close ally, sidelined his predecessor last year by reshuffling senior security officials and wresting control over the ruling party out of Atambayev’s hands.

An escalation of the conflict between the two could be of concern to Russia which has a military air base in the former Soviet republic and counts it among its closest political allies. Atambayev dismissed the summons as illegal.

Kyrgyzstan’s parliament voted last month to strip Atambayev of immunity normally enjoyed by former heads of state.

On Monday, the investigative unit of the interior ministry summoned Atambayev to its headquarters for questioning on Tuesday morning as a witness, without saying what the summons was linked to.

He has not yet been charged with any crimes, but some of his allies have been charged with corruption and abuse of office and parliament, and state prosecutors have said they could investigate similar allegations against Atambayev.

Atambayev, 62, who has taken part in two violent revolts which overthrew his predecessors in 2005 and 2010, said he would ignore the summons.

“I am not even going to touch and read these papers, the government must first start following the law,” he said in a video posted online.

“I am not going to play along in this circus.”

Since the parliament moved to strip him of immunity, Atambayev has mostly stayed in his home village just outside the capital, Bishkek, surrounded by up to a few hundred supporters some of whom carried firearms in front of reporters.

The U.N. says over 460,000 suspected cholera cases have been recorded in war-battered Yemen so far this year — a sharp rise from the 380,000 cases for all of 2018.

U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq says 705 suspected cholera deaths have been recorded since January — a dramatic increase from the 75 deaths in the same period last year.

Haq says the spread of cholera has been accelerated by recent flash flooding, poor maintenance of waste management systems and lack of access to clean water.

The U.N. and its partners are operating nearly 1,200 cholera treatment facilities across Yemen, but Haq says “funding remains an urgent issue.”

The U.N.’s $4.2 billion humanitarian appeal to help over 20 million Yemenis this year is only 32 percent funded.

Eleven years after letting Jeffrey Epstein off lightly with a once-secret deal, federal prosecutors took another run at putting the billionaire financier behind bars on sex charges, accusing him Monday of abusing dozens of underage girls as young as 14.

Epstein, arrested over the weekend, was expected to make his first court appearance on the charges in the afternoon in New York City. Prosecutors were likely to argue he is a flight risk and should remain in jail instead of being released on bail to await trial.

Epstein, a 66-year-old hedge fund manager who once hobnobbed with some of the world’s most powerful people, was charged in an indictment unsealed Monday with sex trafficking and conspiracy. The charges carry up to life in prison.

He was accused of paying underage girls hundreds of dollars in cash for massages and then molesting them at his homes in Florida and New York.

Epstein “intentionally sought out minors and knew that many of his victims were in fact under the age of 18,” prosecutors said. He also paid some of his victims to “recruit additional girls to be similarly abused by Epstein.”

“In this way, Epstein created a vast network of underage victims for him to sexually exploit in locations including New York and Palm Beach,” prosecutors said.

Epstein’s lawyer did not respond to repeated messages seeking comment.

Epstein, whose friends have included President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton and Britain’s Prince Andrew, was arrested Saturday at an airport in New Jersey, just outside New York City, after his private jet touched down from France. He was being held at the federal lockup in Manhattan.

Former federal prosecutor David Weinstein said there was almost no chance Epstein would be allowed out on bail.

“The guy is a millionaire or a billionaire. He has unrestrained assets,” he said. “If they let him out on a bond, he may take off, go to a jurisdiction where they don’t have extradition, and they may never get him back.”

Epstein’s arrest came amid increased (hash)MeToo-era scrutiny of the 2008 non-prosecution deal that allowed Epstein to plead guilty to lesser state charges while maintaining a jet-set lifestyle that includes homes in Paris and the U.S. Virgin Islands and a Bentley.

Under the deal _ overseen by Alexander Acosta, who was the U.S. attorney in Miami at the time and is now Trump’s labor secretary _ Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges of soliciting and procuring a person under age 18 for prostitution. He avoided a possible life sentence and served 13 months in jail.

The deal also required that he reach financial settlements with dozens of his victims and register as a sex offender.

Acosta has defended the agreement as appropriate, though the White House said in February that it was looking into his handling of the case.

The deal, examined in detail in a series of stories in The Miami Herald, is being challenged in federal court in Florida. A federal judge ruled earlier this year that Epstein’s victims should have been consulted under the law about the agreement, and he is now weighing whether to invalidate it.

Federal prosecutors recently filed court papers in the Florida case contending Epstein’s deal, known as an NPA, must stand.

“The past cannot be undone; the government committed itself to the NPA, and the parties have not disputed that Epstein complied with its provisions,” prosecutors wrote in the filing.

It was not immediately clear whether that case and the new charges involved the same victims, since nearly all have remained anonymous.

Epstein’s guilty plea involved only state crimes, while the current case involves federal law. As a result, his constitutional protection against double jeopardy does not apply.

According to court records in Florida, authorities say at least 40 underage girls were brought into Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion for what turned into sexual encounters after female fixers looked for suitable girls locally and in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world.

 

Before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin knew they would be the first to walk on the moon, they took crash courses in geology at the Grand Canyon and a nearby impact crater that is the most well-preserved on Earth.

Northern Arizona has had deep ties to the Apollo missions: Every moon-walking astronaut trained here, and a crater on the moon was even named in honor of the city of Flagstaff.

“It’s a really interesting and unique part of our history, and it’s really cool to think that this relatively small town in northern Arizona played such a big role in the Apollo missions,” said Benjamin Carver, a public lands historian at Northern Arizona University.

Today, astronaut candidates still train in and around Flagstaff, which is among many cities celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing on July 20, 1969.  

They walk in the same volcanic cinder fields where the U.S. Geological Survey intentionally blasted hundreds of craters from the ground to replicate the lunar surface, testing rovers and geology tools.

Scientists used early photos of the moon taken from orbit and re-created the Sea of Tranquility with “remarkable accuracy” before Apollo 11 landed there in 1969, the Geological Survey said.

Astronauts studied moon mapping at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff where Pluto was discovered and peered at their eventual destination through telescopes at various northern Arizona sites.

The region’s role in moon missions is credited to former Geological Survey scientist Gene Shoemaker, who moved the agency’s astrogeology branch to Flagstaff in 1963. It wasn’t long before Shoemaker guided Armstrong and Aldrin on hikes at Meteor Crater as he pushed to ensure NASA would include geology in lunar exploration.

A story passed down by geologists at the crater says Aldrin ripped his spacesuit on jagged limestone rocks that are part of the aptly named “tear-pants formation,” forcing a redesign, head tour guide Jeff Beal said.

Armstrong and Aldrin also hiked the Grand Canyon. A historical photo shows Armstrong carrying a rock hammer, a hand lens and a backpack for rock samples.

Harrison “Jack” Schmitt was the only Apollo astronaut who didn’t train at the national park. The geologist left Flagstaff to become an astronaut, and while his comrades were learning geology, he was learning to be a pilot.

In another historical photo, Apollo astronauts Jim Irwin and David Scott ride around in Grover, a prototype of the lunar rover made in Flagstaff from spare parts and now on display at the Astrogeology Science Center.

The eventual lunar rover used in three Apollo missions famously got a broken fender on a 1972 mission to the moon. Astronauts cobbled together a quick fix that included a map produced by geologists in Flagstaff.

In yet another historical photo, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean stand in the volcanic cinder field bordered by ponderosa pine trees holding a tool carrier. Bean would later say: “I now love geology, thanks to these early experiences in Flagstaff,” local historian Kevin Schindler co-wrote in a book on space training in northern Arizona.

Lauren Edgar, a research geologist at the Astrogeology Science Center, is working with the 2017 class of astronaut candidates who will be in Flagstaff later this year for field training.

“It will be pretty inspiring for them. It’s inspiring for us being involved in this, but knowing you’re walking in the boot steps of these previous astronauts here in Flagstaff and, hopefully, some day on another body,” she said.

Flagstaff is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing with tours, exhibits, talks and moon-themed food and art.

Charlie Duke, the youngest astronaut on the moon, is returning to Flagstaff in September as the keynote speaker at an annual science festival. He and Jason Young, who were on Apollo 17, named a moon crater “Flag Crater.”

Retired Flagstaff geologist Gerald Schaber plans to celebrate the lunar legacy wearing the same turquoise bolo tie that distinguished Shoemaker’s Arizona crew from others who worked on moon missions. Schaber was at Mission Control in Houston in 1969, monitoring black-and-white images while bent over a map trying to gauge the distance between Armstrong and Aldrin using cutouts of the men.  

“I was just trying to do the best I could with the primitive tracking ability we had in those days,” he said from his home in Flagstaff where he has a signed photograph of a hill on the moon that Apollo 15 astronauts referred to “Schaber Hill.”

Of the three crater fields created in northern Arizona for astronaut training in the late 1960s, only one has a sign acknowledging its importance in the moon missions. Visitors can walk through gaps in a barbed-wire fence and feel their feet sink into the volcanic cinders, although not as deep as the astronauts’ feet on the moon.

The craters don’t come into view without being close up, some as darkened, shallow depressions and others as giant welts in the ground partially lost to the weather.

Arizona has approved a nomination to list several of the training sites on the National Register of Historic Places to better preserve them, but federal approval is still needed.

Mexico will extend a reforestation program to Honduras and increase funding to $100 million to create jobs in Central America and stem migration.

Mexico had already announced a $30 million tree-planting program for El Salvador.

Mexico’s foreign relations secretary says Honduras’ president is expected to finalize details in a visit to Mexico next month.

Marcelo Ebrard says creating jobs does more to stop the flow of migrants than any enforcement measures.

It is unclear whether Guatemala will also benefit from the program. A similar plan to plant fruit and lumber trees is already being implemented in southern Mexico.

Ebrard said Monday that 327 Central American migrants awaiting US asylum hearings have found jobs in northern Mexico, and that companies had offered a total of 3,700 positions.

 

 

The International Criminal Court found former Congolese rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda guilty Monday of all 18 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

Ntaganda had denied being a killer and a war criminal when he spoke at his trial in The Hague Thursday. 

In a speech to judges of the ICC, Ntaganda acknowledged being described as “The Terminator” but said, “That is not me.”

Ntaganda insisted he was a soldier, not a criminal  He said, “I have never attacked civilians…I have always protected them.”  

The comments pose a sharp contrast to the image painted by ICC prosecutors, who say Ntaganda commanded a rebel group, the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), that killed, raped and exploited people in Congo’s eastern Ituri province in 2002 and 2003.

A lawyer for victims told the court that girls as young as 12 were forced to serve as so-called wives to senior rebel commanders.

The 18 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, included charges of murder, sexual slavery, enlistment of child soldiers and forcible transfer of population.  

The attacks by the UPC allegedly targeted specific ethnic groups such as the Lendu, Bira, and Nande. One alleged co-conspirator was Thomas Lubanga, who was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2012 after the ICC convicted him of conscripting child soldiers.

Ntaganda remained at large for seven years after his indictment was issued in 2006, irritating judicial officials with occasional appearances in public.  

He co-founded the Congolese rebel group M23 in early 2012.  In a surprise move, however, he surrendered at the U.S. embassy in Kigali, Rwanda, in March of 2013.  Experts say he may have turned himself in because fighting within M23 caused him to fear for his life.

Prosecutors called dozens of witnesses to testify against him, including a number of former child soldiers.

Conservative Greek opposition leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis rode to a landslide victory over leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in Sunday’s parliamentary elections and is set to take office in Athens Monday.

With more than 90 percent of votes counted, Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party had  39.8% of the vote, while Tsipras’s Syriza party had 31.6%.  

Tsipras, 44, rejected as the Greek leader after four years, conceded defeat and called Mitsotakis, 51, to congratulate him on his victory.

“I asked for a strong mandate to change Greece. You offered it generously,” Mitsotakis said in his victory speech. “From today, a difficult but beautiful fight begins…. Greeks deserve better and the time has come for us to prove it,” he said.

Mitsotakis, a graduate of Harvard in the U.S., will have a 158-seat majority in the 300-member Greek parliament.

He is the son of a former prime minister, Konstantinos Mitsotakis, brother of a former foreign minister, Theodora “Dora” Bakoyanni, and uncle to a newly elected mayor of Athens. 

Mitsotakis has pledged to create “better” jobs through foreign investment, tax cuts and removing obstacles for businesses.

Tsipras had called the election three months earlier than scheduled after his Syriza party suffered a severe defeat in European Union and local elections in May and early June.  

Greece is just beginning to recover from a massive financial crisis that included soaring unemployment and steep poverty levels. The country was forced to accept billions of dollars in financial bailouts from the International Monetary Fund, other eurozone countries and the European Central Bank that required deep spending cuts and other reforms.

More than one million Syrian refugees call Lebanon home, but the Lebanese government says it is time for them to leave. Officials deployed the army to accompany bulldozers as they began demolishing homes in refugee camps.  Arash Arabasadi has more.