For the first time, most of the United States’ 2.1 million federal workers will be eligible to get twelve weeks of paid family leave following the birth or adoption of a child. The new benefit – under the annual National Defense Authorization Act – goes into effect on Oct. 1. Dozens of other countries around the world already offer paid family leave to civil workers. Now advocates are pressing for the law to extend to workers across the U.S. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo has more.

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Opening arguments in the impeachment trial of U.S. President Donald Trump begin this week in the Republican-controlled Senate. Democrats from the House of Representatives will present their case against the president with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presiding.    VOA’s Arash Arabasadi goes to work.

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World leaders have agreed to provide no further military support to warring parties in Libya and to sanction those who violate the arms embargo. But there was no commitment to withdraw existing military support. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo represented the United States at the summit Germany’s capital Berlin on Sunday to take part in another effort towards peace in a divided country, where General Khalifa Haftar challenges the United Nations-backed government in Tripoli. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.

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Germany is bringing together the key players in Libya’s long-running civil war in a bid to curb foreign military meddling, solidify a cease-fire and help relaunch a political process to determine the North African nation’s future.

 Chancellor Angela Merkel invited leaders from 12 countries as well as the United Nations, the European Union, the African Union and the Arab League to Sunday’s summit at the chancellery in Berlin. Germany’s months-long diplomatic drive seeks to bolster efforts to stop the fighting in Libya by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and his envoy for Libya, Ghassan Salame.
    
Among those expected are Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Other countries invited are the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Algeria, China and the Republic of Congo.
    
Also invited are Libya’s two main rival leaders: Prime Minister Fayez Sarraj and Gen. Khalifa Hifter. Both will attend, according to German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.
    
The chances of the summit producing any real progress are unclear, however. While getting the players to the table is an achievement, recent stepped-up outside support may have emboldened both sides not to compromise.
    
Since the 2011 ouster and killing of Libya’s longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, the country has sunk further into chaos and turmoil. Libya is divided into rival administrations, each with the backing of different nations: the U.N.-recognized government based in Tripoli, headed by Sarraj, and one based in the country’s east, supported by Hifter’s forces.
    
Hifter’s forces have been on the offensive since April, laying siege to Tripoli in an effort to capture the capital and battling militias aligned with the government. Hifter’s forces are backed by Egypt, Russia and the United Arab Emirates, while the Tripoli government has turned to Turkey for troops and weapons.
    
A truce brokered earlier this month by Russia and Turkey marked the first break in fighting in months.
    
Germany’s priority is to try to get the outside players that have interests in the conflict on the same page, stem the flow of weapons to Libya and ensure that the cease-fire sticks — creating space for U.N.-led efforts to re-establish a political process in Libya.
    
“At the Libya conference, we must see above all that the arms embargo is once again complied with — it has been agreed in principle at U.N. level but unfortunately not kept to,” Merkel said.
    
Germany is also keen to prevent Libyan fighting from further destabilizing the region, potentially setting off new waves of migrants seeking safety in Europe across the Mediterranean Sea.
    
Maas traveled to Libya to meet Hifter on Thursday. He said the general pledged to respect the cease-fire, even though he had left Moscow days before without signing a draft document setting out details of the truce. Sarraj did sign the document.
    
On Friday, however, powerful tribal groups loyal to Hifter seized several large oil export terminals along Libya’s eastern coast as well as southern oil fields in another challenge to the Tripoli government, which collects revenue from oil production. The National Oil Corporation said the move threatens to throttle much of the country’s oil production.
    
U.N. envoy Salame earlier this month demanded an end to all foreign interference in Libya, saying that a military solution is impossible and governments and mercenaries helping rival forces are hindering a political solution.
    
Despite the arms embargo against Libya, he said, weapons are being sold and given to Libyans, and “probably thousands” of mercenaries have been sent into the country, creating a “bleak” situation for millions of civilians.
    
German officials have been careful to keep expectations of Sunday’s summit in check.
    
“The conference is important, but it is a beginning, the start of a process,” spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer said.

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Amid a spike in violent extremism around the world, a communications researcher is experimenting with a novel idea: whether people can be “inoculated” against hate with a little exposure to extremist propaganda, in the same manner vaccines enable human bodies to fight disease.

The idea is based on something called attitudinal inoculation, a technique that aims to build people’s resistance to negative influences by exposing them to weaker forms of those influences.  Developed in the 1960s, the method has been used to help teenagers resist peer pressure to start smoking.  

In 2018, Kurt Braddock, a communications professor at Penn State University, conducted a study to see whether attitudinal inoculation could be used against extremism.  The results, published in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence in November, look promising. 

Data showed a ‘very cool story’

The data came back showing a very, very cool story about how inoculation works in this context,” Braddock said in an interview.“

I found that if you inoculate people against extreme right-wing propaganda or extreme left-wing propaganda, they tend to argue against that propaganda more than if you don’t inoculate them,” Braddock said.  “They tend to feel more anger towards the source of the propaganda than those you don’t inoculate. And they tend to think that the extremist groups that produce the propaganda are less credible than if you didn’t inoculate them.”

Two-step method

As with other attitudinal inoculation studies, Braddock’s experiment on 357 participants — randomly selected from a survey website — entailed two steps.    

The first involved warning them that the propaganda material they were about to encounter had been very effective in changing the views of people such as the participants. “

That makes them think that maybe their beliefs and attitudes aren’t as secure as they think they are and if they encounter this propaganda it might change their minds,” Braddock said.  

Counter arguments

Then they were given counter arguments.  For example, they were told that exhortations to violence could be refuted by arguing that “protest is fine but violence doesn’t solve the issue,” Braddock said.

Once “inoculated,” the participants (except for a small control group) were invited to read propaganda material produced by two extremist groups — the now-defunct left-wing Weather Underground and the neo-Nazi group National Alliance — and asked to register their reaction.

The response exceeded Braddock’s expectations: those who had been inoculated were more likely than the control group to reject both groups. “

The differences were significant,” Braddock said.

Caveats to findings

As significant as they were, the findings came with caveats. One reviewer noted that the study used propaganda from a group that is no longer around. Another questioned the reliability of such experiments, noting that exposure to propaganda is just one risk factor for radicalization.  A more important question is whether the lab-tested method has real-world application.    

Braddock acknowledges the limitations.  To test out his idea in the real world, he said he plans to conduct follow-up studies on young people who are actively targeted by extremist propaganda.

‘Real-world testing’

That’s the next step,” he said.  “I’m really curious to see what shakes out in real world samples.”  

Jesse Morton, an-ex jihadi who runs a support organization for former extremists, said the study has some potential use. Social media companies and educational institutions could potentially use it to develop preventive tools, Morton said.”

There’s a lot of push on [social media companies]  to do something about the right-wing extremist threat in general, but I think schools and universities are those that are most set up for benefiting from it,” Morton said.

Google pilot program

Under pressure to clamp down on violent content, social media companies have rolled out a variety of anti-extremism tools in recent years.  In 2017, Google launched the “ReDirect Method,” a pilot program that prompted viewers searching for extremist videos on YouTube to watch more positive content.  

In some ways, Morton said, the Redirect Method is similar to the anti-hate vaccine Braddock is testing.  “

We can’t just think about prevention and isolation,” Morton said.  “We have to think about the realm of prevention in countering violent extremism, as if it is directly connected to every facet of the radicalization process.”

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Heavy snow and poor visibility hampered the search Sunday for four South Koreans and three Nepalis caught in an avalanche in the popular Annapurna region of the Himalayas, officials said.

Relatives of the missing Koreans have arrived in Kathmandu alongside several officials sent by Seoul to help with the emergency rescue efforts, Ang Dorjee Sherpa of the Korean Alpine Federation told AFP.

The missing group was near the Annapurna base camp around 3,230 meters (10,600 feet) above sea level when the avalanche struck after heavy snowfall on Friday.

“Search and rescue efforts are underway but weather and snow in the area has made it difficult to make much progress,” Mira Acharya from Nepal’s tourism department told AFP.

Helicopters were sent out on Saturday to rescue about 200 people stranded around Annapurna and other nearby mountains after the incident.

Photos from the area shared on social media showed guesthouses along the trekking route blanketed in a thick layer of white.

Six of the missing were part of the same expedition, while one Nepali porter was escorting a different group.

The four foreigners were part of an 11-member team of South Korean nationals. Others from the team were safe.

Education officials in Seoul said they were part of a team of volunteer teachers working with children in Nepal.

Two more South Koreans were due to arrive in Nepal on Sunday to help with the search, the country’s foreign ministry said.

Sherpa said it had snowed heavily around Annapurna in recent days, making the trek risky.

“The weather and snow got worse and, feeling it was becoming dangerous and difficult, they decided to turn. As they were heading back the avalanche hit,” Sherpa told AFP on Saturday.

Annapurna is an avalanche-prone and technically difficult mountain range with a higher death rate than Everest, the world’s highest peak.

Thousands of trekkers visit the route every year for its stunning views of the Himalayas.

A snowstorm killed about 40 people on the circuit in 2014, in one of the biggest trekking tragedies to hit Nepal.

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Cameroon teachers are protesting what they say is growing violence against them by both students and their parents, and the teachers are urging the government to protect them and reinstate corporal punishment. The teachers say the absence of corporal punishment is encouraging abuse of teachers. This week, several attacks on teaching staffs were reported, including one in which a teenage student fatally stabbed his teacher, in the capital.

Students shout Saturday at a government-run school in Obala, a town on the outskirts of Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, protesting the principal’s decision to destroy all mobile phones and knives seized from children Friday at the school.  One of their senior discipline masters, Narcisse Ateba, says the students use mobile phones to access social media platforms that promote violence, and they also use sharp objects such as knives to attack their peers and teachers.

Cameroon Teachers Protest Escalating Violence in Separatist Areas

As students in Cameroon began their annual exams Monday, hundreds of their teachers in English-speaking regions were on the streets protesting. The teachers are demanding better security after three teachers and a student were abducted, adding to scores captured, killed, or whose property was torched during a two-year separatist conflict.Teachers dressed in dark clothes and holding signs demanding better security walk down a street in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s northwest region.

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He says that some parents and students will want to harass or beat him up, but he has nonetheless decided to publicly destroy the 15 mobile phones found and seized by teachers from students Friday because it is illegal to use them in classrooms. He says he will not allow students to come to school with razor blades, box-cutters and knives.

The destruction of the mobile phones and the peaceful marches to administrative offices and palaces are part of protests by teachers at Obala against what they say are increasing acts of violence against them.

This week, a 16-year-old student at the public school Nkolbisson in a neighborhood in Yaounde is accused of using a knife to stab his mathematics teacher who died of excessive bleeding as he was being rushed to a hospital. The school said the student insisted on using his mobile phone in class against the teacher’s instruction. The student was arrested and detained by police, and will be answering to charges, including premeditated killing.

Another teacher this week was battered by students in Douala for questioning why they were late to school, and yet another teacher in Douala was beaten by a parent and fell into a coma. The parent was said to be angry with the teacher’s decision to use corporal punishment on his son as punishment for making noise in class. In another incident, a student used a machete to chop off another student’s finger in Obala after a fight during a soccer match.

Elvis Yisinyuy, an official with the Cameroon Teachers Trade Union in Yaounde, says attacks by students on teachers intensified in 2015 when Cameroon prohibited teachers from beating or severely punishing students.

“When a minister says that teachers are not supposed to administer corporal punishment to students, the student will now see that he [the minister] has the right to bring disorder because there is nothing the teacher can do in class,” said Yisinyuy. “The minister should revisit the text and permit teachers to administer corporal punishment with caution.”

Cameroon Teachers Celebrate Teachers Day Amid Growing Challenges

October 5 is World Teachers Day, set aside to mobilize support and to ensure that the needs of future generations will be met by teachers. Some teachers, who work with Central African refugees in camps in eastern Cameroon or on the border with Central African Republic (C.A.R.), face especially difficult challenges.

Emmanuel Mbiydzenyuy asks students to be quiet and follow English language classes here at the government school in Dhahong in eastern Cameroon. Eighty of the 110 students in one class are…

Yusinyuy said the high wave of drug consumption by students and the inability of teachers to use corporal punishment because they have been prohibited from doing so is also responsible for the wave of attacks.

Nalova Lyonga, Cameroon minister of secondary education, says corporal punishment can not be tolerated because it is an abuse on the rights of students who are mostly children.

“What I have told the teachers is that they themselves have to make a distinction between a disciplinary case and a case which becomes a criminal case, and they should be able to report to the special police at the disposal of the schools,” said Lyonga.

Lyonga said Cameroon students are exposed to other cultures of the world because of the increasing use of mobile phones, and they gain access to social media platforms that promote violence, while neglecting the peace and unity that Cameroon traditionally preaches.

Carol Kayum, president of Reference Citizens, a non-governmental organization that promotes citizenship education, has been visiting schools in Yaounde to educate both teachers and students against violence. She says Cameroon should uphold it’s culture of non-violence to prevent the growing number of assaults on other students and teachers.

“Our cultures are rich. Parents should transmit them to children, and also there should be communication between schools and parents so that we know what our children are doing in school, and we also tell the school authorities what the children do at home,” said Kayum. “School authorities and parents should control the use of drugs.

Kayum said many people now join the teaching profession because they lack jobs, and not for the love of teaching, and as such, they are not loved by students.

The students also have complained they are harassed by some teachers whom they accuse of behaving poorly or not teaching well.

The Cameroon Ministry of Secondary Education has recorded 40 violent attacks by students on their peers, 22 attacks on teachers and 15 attacks by parents on teachers within the past  month. 

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The United Nations envoy to Libya said on Saturday he hoped but “could not predict” whether eastern oil ports shut ahead of a pending Berlin summit aimed at reaching a truce in Libya would be reopened soon.

Ghassan Salame said the Berlin summit scheduled for Sunday would likely discuss the closures to avoid them dragging on for weeks or months like previous seizures of facilities.

“If the thing is not solved between today and tomorrow I expect the issue to be raised, yes,” Salame told Reuters in Berlin, where Germany and the UN are expected to push for an
extended truce.

Oil export terminals across eastern and central Libya were shut on Friday by tribesmen allied to commander Khalifa Haftar, whose Libya National Army (LNA) based in the east has been locked in a nine-month war with government forces over control of the capital, Tripoli.

Diplomats see the closures as a power play by the LNA aimed at choking off oil revenue to the internationally recognized Tripoli government.

The National Oil Corp (NOC) on Saturday declared force majeure on oil exports from the eastern ports of Brega, Ras Lanuf, Hariga, Zueitina and Es Sider, saying the closures would result in the loss of 800,000 barrels (bpd) day in oil output.

Production in Libya, which was plunged into chaos with the toppling of longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, was estimated at 1.3 million bpd last week.

Salame said he hoped Haftar would be willing to consider extending a truce which has largely held for a week despite the two sides failing to sign a deal at talks in Moscow mediated by Russia and Turkey on Monday.

Haftar is expected to attend the summit opposite Tripoli-based Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj.

The war over Tripoli is backed by foreign powers with the LNA supported by the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and most recently Russian mercenaries, and Turkey sending troops and fighters from Syria’s civil war to help al-Serraj.

“I can confirm the arrival of fighters from Syria,” Salame said, putting estimates at 1,000 to 2,000.

There have been a series of failed conferences and negotiations to stabilize Libya.

Salame said he had started the process of a new intra-Libyan dialog between the rival parliaments in Tripoli and the east, an approach that has failed since 2017.

“What is different now is that we have war…in 2017 there was no pressure, but now you have thousands of people who have been killed,” he said.

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A major gun rights rally is scheduled for Monday in the capital of the U.S. southeastern state of Virginia.

Thousands of pro-gun activists, included armed militia members, are expected to gather in Richmond at a time when Democrats have full control of the state legislature for the first time in a generation.

Democratic lawmakers have made passing tougher gun control laws a central campaign theme.

FBI Arrests 3 White Supremacists Ahead of Pro-gun Rally 

Two are charged with transporting a firearm and ammunition with intent to commit a felony; the third is charged with transporting and harboring aliens

The Virginia Senate approved legislation late Thursday requiring background checks on all firearm sales and limiting handgun purchases to one a month. The senate also passed a bill to restore local government right to ban weapons from public buildings and other venues.

Neo-Nazi, militia and other gun-rights groups have promised to gather enmasse on the capital for Monday’s rally, which is organized annually by the Virginia Citizens Defense League.

The planned demonstration harkens back to a violent white supremacist rally in nearby Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, when one woman was killed and more than 30 other people injured as a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters.

Amid threats of violence and a possible heavy turnout, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, declared a temporary state of emergency Wednesday that bans all weapons from Richmond’s Capitol Square during Monday’s rally to prevent “armed militia groups (from) storming our capitol.”

Gun-rights groups, which contend the constitution guarantees their right to own any firearm, asked the Virginia Supreme Court rule the temporary ban unconstitutional, but the court upheld the ban on Friday.

Northam said authorities have received credible threats of violence, including the deployment of weaponized drones over Capitol Square.

Extremist groups have also inundated social media and the internet with threatening messages and hints of violence.

The FBI arrested three alleged members of a white supremacist group on gun charges Thursday, partly due to concern that they planned to incite violence at the rally.

Both houses of the Virginia legislature are expected to approve even more restrictive gun control laws, including a ban on assault rifles and “red flag” laws aimed at taking guns from people who are considered risk to communities.

U.S. President Donald Trump had words of support late Friday for gun rights supporters in Virginia, tweeting, “That’s what happens when you vote for Democrats, they will take your guns away.”

Supporters of tighter gun control laws say they would help reduce the number of people killed by guns each year.

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The British government has announced plans for special events on the night of Jan. 31 when the country officially leaves the European Union but the country’s treasury chief has admitted that some U.K. business sectors will suffer as a result.

Sajid Javid told the Financial Times in an interview Saturday that Britain’s regulations will not be aligned with the EU in the future and that those changes may hurt some businesses. Currently the EU is Britain’s largest trading partner.

“There will not be alignment, we will not be a rule-taker, we will not be in the single market and we will not be in the customs union — and we will do this by the end of the year,” he said, referring to a deadline at the end of 2020 for conclusion of what are expected to be contentious trade talks with the then-27 member EU.

Britain will officially leave the EU bloc on the night of Jan. 31, even though it will keep following EU rules for an 11-month transition period. It will be the first nation ever to leave the bloc. The British government plans to mark the occasion with a series of upbeat events.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to make a speech to the nation that night after holding a rare cabinet session in the north of England to emphasize his government’s plan to spread opportunity to that economically beleaguered region.

The government also plans to mark Brexit by projecting a clock onto the prime minister’s official residence at 10 Downing Street in London that will count down until 11 p.m., when the break takes place.

The entire government neighborhood of Whitehall is to be illuminated for the occasion as part of a light show, with Union flags flown on all the poles in Parliament Square. The government will also create a commemorative coin that will enter circulation that day.

But Johnson’s Conservative government is no longer actively pushing a plan to have the familiar chimes of the Big Ben clock tower at Parliament sound at 11 p.m. despite a private fundraising push in support of activating the chimes, which are under repair.

Britain voted in a 2016 referendum to become the first nation to leave the 28-nation EU, but the process has moved more slowly than expected. A stalemate last year kept a withdrawal bill from passing, leading to a rare December election that gave Johnson’s pro-Brexit Conservative Party a strong majority in Parliament.

The Brexit divorce bill quickly passed when the new Parliament convened. A transition period will last until the end of 2020 as negotiators try to forge a trade arrangement between Britain and the remaining EU nations.

Johnson, who is also seeking a trade deal with the United States, has ruled out seeking an extension of the deadline for the EU talks.

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The Pentagon is placing new restrictions on all international military students at American bases in response to a December shooting by a Saudi trainee that killed three sailors in Florida.

Garry Reid, director of defense intelligence at the Pentagon, said the restrictions would include limits to students’ ability to possess and use firearms, along with control measures limiting their access to military installations and U.S. government facilities.

Act of terrorism

Earlier this week, the Department of Justice called the December 6 attack at Naval Air Station Pensacola an act of terrorism.    

Twenty-one Saudi trainees were returned to Saudi Arabia after an investigation found they had either jihadist sentiments on social media pages or contact with child pornography. Officials did not accuse any of them of having advance knowledge of the shooting or helping the gunman.

Updated software will help

Senior defense officials say the U.S. military will more closely control foreign trainees’ access to facilities on military bases by using a software application known as the Defense Bio-metric Identification System, which could code foreign students’ access credentials to prohibit their entry into buildings not used for their training.

Trainees will now be continuously monitored while enrolled in U.S.-based training programs, according to a defense official.

“When these procedures are in place, the military departments will be authorized to fully resume the training that has been suspended since the attack at Pensacola,” Reid said.  That suspension has applied to about 850 Saudi trainees.

Updated policies for current and new students

The new policies will be applicable to all current student populations in addition to new students.

In the last 20 years, more than a million students have gone through the United States’ International Military Students program.

There were no “serious security incidents” until the December 6 shooting in Pensacola, according to defense officials. During that attack, Saudi Air Force officer Mohammed Alshamrani, 21,  killed three U.S. sailors and injured eight other people.

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For just the third time in U.S. history, senators will sit in judgment of a U.S. president and decide if there is enough evidence to remove him from office. Members of Congress are held to account for their decisions by a free press asking tough questions about their actions. But as VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson reports from Capitol Hill, new rules for Trump’s impeachment trial may change that process.

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