Americans love ice cream so much that in 1984, President Ronald Reagan designated July as National Ice Cream Month and the third Sunday of the month as National Ice Cream Day. VOA’s Karina Bafradzhian traveled to Savannah, Georgia, to try ice cream at a legendary parlor that has been making the cool treat for almost a century. 

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The Trump administration’s new asylum rule survived an initial court challenge Wednesday, keeping in place a directive that disqualifies a significant proportion of mostly Central American asylum-seekers who reach the U.S.-Mexico border.

U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly denied requests to block the rule while a pending court case goes forward, saying, “It’s in the greater public interest to allow the administration to carry out its immigration policy.” 

Announced earlier this month, the new rule bars asylum for migrants who reach the U.S. southern border without having applied for and been denied asylum in any country they passed through on their way to the United States.

The case was brought by two immigrant rights organizations: the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and RAICES, or Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. Both organizations argued the asylum rule would harm migrants fleeing dangerous situations.

Kelly, who serves on the U.S. District Court in the nation’s capital, voiced doubts that plaintiffs could demonstrate the administration exceeded its authority by issuing the asylum rule. 

The White House’s legal victory could be short-lived, as a federal judge in San Francisco was to consider a separate challenge filed by the American Civil Liberties Union later in the day.

“We’ve filed suit to stop the Trump administration from reversing our country’s legal and moral commitment to protect people fleeing danger,” the ACLU tweeted.

Trump administration officials have said the new rule is meant to ease the strain on the U.S. asylum system. 

In a recent statement, U.S. Attorney General William Barr noted a “dramatic increase in the number of aliens” arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, adding that “[o]nly a small minority of these individuals” qualify for asylum. 

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The Gulf of Guinea is a hot spot for illegal activities, which affect global trade and security. This week a conference in Ghana’s capital, Accra, seeks solutions to overcome issues that plague the region. Experts say collaboration will be the focus of a seaborne law enforcement effort.

On board the USNS Carson City, which is visiting Sekondi, in Ghana’s Western Region, Admiral James Foggo thanked the American crew, telling personnel how important its role is in building partnerships and bringing security to the Gulf of Guinea – a coastal region of West and Central Africa.

The ship arrived for a port visit Sunday as part of the U.S. Navy’s effort to support African navies in anti-piracy, small boat maintenance and marine law enforcement. Personnel from Spanish, Portuguese and Italian forces are also part of the collaborative mission.

Alongside naval leaders from other nations, Foggo toured U.S., Ghanaian and Nigerian vessels at the port of Sekondi.

“Our interest in the Gulf of Guinea is helping our African partners and friends legitimize and control the sea lines of communication that lead to the ports of Africa. Ninety percent of their commerce travels by those sea lines of communication. There is a lot of activity that is legal, probably more legal than illegal. We want to stop the illegal activity, it takes away from their tax base, their profitability and detracts from their economy,” Foggo said.

But for success to endure, Foggo said there is a need for more emphasis on arresting, charging and prosecuting those committing illegal activities in the Gulf.

“There has got to be some kind of deterrence or punishment applied in order to keep people from doing this in the future, otherwise if they go into a detention facility or jail and they get out, they just go back and do it again,” he said.

Foggo is the commander of U.S. Allied Joint Force Command Naples, U.S. Naval Forces Europe, and U.S. Naval Forces Africa.  

The Accra conference is focused on tackling threats from illegal fishing, piracy, kidnappings for ransom, illegal oil bunkering and drug trafficking in the Gulf of Guinea.

Commander Veronica Arhin, a spokesperson for Ghana’s Navy, says the goal of the meeting is to get as many experts and navies together to address security in the Gulf of Guinea.  

”Collaboration between the navies in the Gulf of Guinea is extremely important because crimes or insecurity is transnational, it can move from one country to another, so there is a need for us to have that collaboration, such that if a ship has a problem in another country’s waters or there is a piracy attack and the pirates move to another country, there could be that communication. And the navies around the various countries could come together to fight such crimes,” said Arhin.

Those ideas are endorsed by Ahmed Tabsoba, who grew up in Ghana and is now an American citizen in the U.S. Navy.

Tabsoba has been stationed in Naples where the U.S. works with its 28 NATO allies. He was back in his home country, traveling with Admiral Foggo.

“We live in a world that you cannot predict what is going to happen next, so it’s really good to always build this relation[ship] and make sure we are there to help if something happens,” Tabsoba said.

The two-day International Maritime Defense Exhibition and Conference ending Thursday brings together 25 countries represented by speakers and exhibitors who hope to find ways to collaborate on solutions to the region’s challenges.
 

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The acting head of the Homeland Security Department is complimenting what he says is cooperation with Guatemala to tighten immigration security.

Kevin McAleenan’s statement comes a day after President Donald Trump railed against Guatemala and threatened retribution against the Central American nation over immigration.
 
McAleenan says the collaboration is “already yielding significant results” and he mentions a joint operation in Guatemala that broke up a human smuggling ring in May.
 
McAleenan tells counterparts from Honduras, El Salvador and Panama, and the Costa Rican ambassador that he wants similar cooperation.
 
Trump tweeted that he may impose tariffs and tax remittance money, and he alleged that Guatemala refused to sign an asylum deal with the U.S. even though the country’s government didn’t say it had agreed to the arrangement.

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One year after a catastrophic dam collapse in southern Laos killed dozens of people and displaced thousands, rights groups are demanding that multinational companies behind the $1 billion project do more for the hundreds of families still living in cramped shelters on meager rations.

On the night of July 23, 2018, an auxiliary — or saddle — dam of the Xe Pian-Xe Namnoy hydropower project collapsed, sending a wall of water crashing through more than a dozen villages. More than 7,000 people in Laos and thousands more in neighboring Cambodia were forced from their homes.

Homes and farms were wiped out. In the aftermath, one survivor told VOA that the water hit his village “like a tsunami.”

The Lao government put the final death toll at 49, with another 22 missing, although rights groups say the official tally may be a “gross underestimation.”

Some 5,000 displaced villagers are still living in temporary camps in Laos in sweltering, tightly packed tin shacks, surviving on irregular allowances and thin rations from the government. Some have been given plows and seeds, but no new land on which to use them, while much of the old farmland remains buried under silt and debris.

The joint venture behind the dam, the Xe Pian-Xe Namnoy Power Company, or PNPC, has reportedly started offering victims compensation, according to Maureen Harris, Southeast Asia program director for International Rivers, a non-profit organization. She spoke Tuesday in Bangkok at the release of a new report, “Reckless Endangerment: Assessing Responsibility for the Xe Pian-Xe Namnoy Dam Collapse.”

“But the communities report for the most part that these offers of compensation are too low; they don’t properly account for the real value of what’s been lost in terms of the property, but also the lost livelihoods as a result of losing that property,” Harris said.

While some victims are refusing the offers, others have relented. The government says it will be four or five years before a permanent resettlement site is ready.

Accountability

Rights groups say the many companies building and backing the dam, which is slated for completion later this year, are bound by international law to do more for the victims, and that their governments should compel them to follow through.

To date, none of the companies has been held accountable for the collapse, despite mounting evidence that the lead developer and builder, South Korea’s SK Engineering & Construction, compromised safety for profit.

An independent investigation commissioned by the Lao government ruled out force majeure — an unforeseen “act of God.” Authorities have yet to release the investigation report but said the expert panel decided that a poor foundation was “the major cause” of the collapse.

A Stanford University scientist, who parsed data from the dam, concluded that the reservoir the saddle dam was holding back had been built over a sinkhole, causing the dam to sink and crack and finally fail when the rising waters mounted the top. A company document leaked by a Korean lawmaker also showed that all five saddle dams were several meters lower than intended by the original design plan and made of different material, saving millions of dollars.

“So there is growing evidence basically from different quarters that suggests that the lead developer … may have caused the collapse by their actions and inactions,” Harris said.

Of the other PNPC partners, the rights groups also place much of the burden on Thailand’s Ratchaburi Electricity Generating Holding, the project’s construction supervisor responsible for overseeing SK Engineering’s work.

SK Engineering has rejected the independent investigation’s findings and denied responsibility. The company has said it followed industry standards, but failed to offer an alternate explanation for the collapse.

SK Engineering did not reply to a request for comment from VOA.

A public relations officer for Ratchaburi declined to answer any questions and referred all inquiries to PNPC. A project manager for PNPC also declined to comment.

Lao government officials could not be reached.

Insurance policy

Citing an industry source, rights groups say the project took out a massive insurance policy that includes roughly $50 million in liability coverage that the affected families could tap into, some of it from U.S. insurance company AIG.

“There is a pot of insurance money here for exactly this kind of situation, and the affected people should have the capacity to claim against this insurance to remediate them for the losses,” said Craig Bradshaw, Southeast Asia legal coordinator for Inclusive Development International, which co-authored the report.

Harris and Bradshaw said their groups were in talks with lawyers on the potential for filing legal claims, most likely in South Korea, but possibly in Thailand as well.

Rights groups are urging the companies to halt construction until those affected are made whole again. Without a full and public accounting of exactly what went wrong, they say, locals are also left to wonder if the other four saddle dams holding back the reservoir face the same risks as the one that collapsed.

Premrudee Daorung, a coordinator with the Laos Dam Investment Monitor, a grass-roots group set up in the wake of the collapse, said the group hoped the fallout would also convince the government to reconsider its ambitious — critics would say overly so — hydropower plans. 

“One of our first proposals, or the hope, was that Laos might be able to make use of the Xe Pian-Xe Namnoy case in order to turn the direction of the plan to become ‘the battery of Asia,’ to review that plan,” she said.

But with 27 more dams in the works and hundreds more still on the drawing board, she worried, those hopes appear dashed.

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Venezuela’s National Assembly approved a law returning the OPEC nation to a regional defense treaty on Tuesday, but opposition leader Juan Guaido sought to tamp down supporters’ hopes it could lead to President Nicolas Maduro’s imminent downfall.

Opposition hardliners had been pressuring Guaido to join the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, signed in Rio de Janeiro in 1947, as a precursor to requesting a foreign military intervention to oust Maduro, a socialist who has overseen an economic collapse and is accused of human rights violations.

“The TIAR is not magic, it is not a button that we press and then tomorrow everything is resolved,” Guaido told a rally of supporters in Caracas, using the treaty’s Spanish initials. “In itself it is not the solution – it obliges us to take to the streets with greater force to exercise our majority.”

The treaty states that an attack on one of the members – which include most large Western Hemisphere countries including the United States, Brazil and Colombia – should be considered an attack on all. Venezuela and other leftist Latin American countries left the alliance between 2012 and 2013.

Venezuela plunged into a deep power struggle in January when Guaido invoked the constitution to declare a rival presidency, arguing Maduro’s May 2018 re-election was illegitimate. He has been recognized as the rightful leader by most Western countries, including the United States.

Maduro, who calls Guaido a U.S. puppet seeking to oust him in a coup, remains in control of government functions six months into Guaido’s campaign. The economy and public services have continued to deteriorate in that time, and on Monday much of the country went dark in the biggest blackout since March.

That has led some Maduro opponents, such as former Caracas mayor Antonio Ledezma, to push Guaido to request foreign military intervention to oust Maduro.

U.S. officials have said a military option is “on the table” for Venezuela, but has so far focused on economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure to choke off cash flow to Maduro and try to convince top military officials to get behind Guaido.

Latin American and European countries are pushing a diplomatic solution to Venezuela’s political and economic crisis, and many have criticized the possible use of force.

Norway’s government is currently mediating negotiations between the government and the opposition in Barbados.

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President Donald Trump on Tuesday told young people a number of falsehoods he’s been relating to adults for months and took a misleading swipe at the female Democratic lawmakers he’s trying to turn into foils.

A sampling of his remarks at a Turning Point USA gathering of conservative youth:

Trump, on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York: “She called our country and our people garbage. She said garbage. That’s worse than deplorable. Remember deplorable?”

The facts: Ocasio-Cortez did not label people “garbage.” She did use that term, somewhat indirectly, to describe the state of the country.

Arguing for a liberal agenda at a South by Southwest event in March, she said the U.S. shouldn’t settle for centrist policies because they would produce only marginal improvement — “10% better” than the “garbage” of where the country is now.

Trump has been assailing Ocasio-Cortez and three other liberal Democratic women of color in the House for more than a week, ever since he posted tweets saying they should “go back” to their countries, though all are U.S. citizens and all but one was born in the U.S.

Voter fraud

Trump: “And when they’re saying all of this stuff, and then those illegals get out and vote — because they vote anyway. Don’t kid yourself, those numbers in California and numerous other states, they’re rigged.  You got people voting that shouldn’t be voting. They vote many times, not just twice, not just three times. They vote — it’s like a circle. They come back, they put a new hat on. They come back, they put a new shirt. And in many cases, they don’t even do that.  You know what’s going on. It’s a rigged deal.”

The facts: Trump has produced no evidence of widespread voting fraud by people in the country illegally or by any group of people. 
 
He tried, but the commission he appointed on voting fraud collapsed from infighting and from the refusal of states to cooperate when tapped for reams of personal voter data, like names, partial Social Security numbers and voting histories. Studies have found only isolated cases of voter fraud in recent U.S. elections and no evidence that election results were affected. Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt found 31 cases of impersonation fraud, for example, in about 1 billion votes cast in elections from 2000 to 2014. 
 
Trump has falsely claimed that 1 million fraudulent votes were cast in California and cited a Texas state government report that suggested 58,000 people in the country illegally may have cast a ballot at least once since 1996. But state elections officials subsequently acknowledged serious problems with the report, as tens of thousands on the list were actually U.S. citizens.

U.S. economy

Trump: “We have the best economy in history.”

The facts: No matter how often he repeats this claim, the economy is nowhere near the best in the country’s history.

In fact, in the late 1990s, growth topped 4% for four straight years, a level it has not reached on an annual basis under Trump. Growth reached 7.2% in 1984. The economy grew 2.9% in 2018 — the same pace it reached in 2015 under President Barack Obama — and simply hasn’t hit historically high growth rates.

The economy is now in its 121st month of growth, making it the longest expansion in history. Most of that took place under Obama.

Unemployment rate

Trump: “The best employment numbers in history.”

The facts: They are not the best ever.

The 3.7% unemployment rate in the latest report is not a record low. It’s near the lowest level in 50 years, when it was 3.5%. The U.S. also had lower rates than now in the early 1950s. And during three years of World War II, the annual rate was under 2%.

Employment numbers

Trump: “The most people working, almost 160 million, in the history of our country.”

The facts: Yes, but that’s only because of population growth.

A more relevant measure is the proportion of Americans with jobs, and that is still far below record highs.

According to Labor Department data, 60.6% of people in the United States 16 years and older were working in June. That’s below the all-time high of 64.7% in April 2000, though higher than the 59.9% when Trump was inaugurated in January 2017.

Veterans Choice

Trump, on his efforts to help veterans: “I got Choice.” 
 
The facts: He is not the president who “got” the Veterans Choice program, which gives veterans the option to see private doctors outside the Department of Veterans Affairs medical system at government expense. 
 
Obama got it. Congress approved the program in 2014, and Obama signed it into law. Trump expanded it.

NATO

Trump: “We’re paying close to 100% on NATO.”

The facts: The U.S. is not “paying close to 100%” of the price of protecting Europe.

NATO has a shared budget to which each member makes contributions based on the size of its economy. The United States, with the biggest economy, pays the biggest share, about 22%.

Four European members — Germany, France, Britain and Italy — combined pay nearly 44% of the total. The money, about $3 billion, runs NATO’s headquarters and covers certain other civilian and military costs.

Defending Europe involves far more than that fund. The primary cost of doing so would come from each member country’s military budget, as the alliance operates under a mutual defense treaty.

The U.S. is the largest military spender, but others in the alliance have armed forces, too. The notion that almost all costs would fall to the U.S. is false. In fact, NATO’s Article 5, calling for allies to act if one is attacked, has only been invoked once, and it was on behalf of the U.S., after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

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Opening up another legal front against the Democrats investigating him, President Donald Trump on Tuesday sued the House Ways and Means Committee and New York state officials to prevent his state tax returns from being turned over to the congressional committee.
 
The lawsuit seeks an injunction to block the application of a new New York state law that could allow the Democratic-controlled House and Ways Means Committee to obtain the returns. The lawsuit, filed in Washington, comes amid a furious White House attempt to prevent the president’s tax returns to wind up in Democratic hands.
 
“We have filed a lawsuit today in our ongoing efforts to end presidential harassment,” said Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s lawyers. “The targeting of the president by the House Ways and Means Committee, the New York Attorney General, and a New York tax official violates article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. The harassment tactics lack a legitimate legislative purpose. The actions taken by the House and New York officials are nothing more than political retribution.”
 
The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, said the act “will shine a light on the president’s finances and finally offer transparency to millions of Americans yearning to know the truth.”
 
“President Trump has spent his career hiding behind lawsuits,” James said in a statement, “but, as New York’s chief law enforcement officer, I can assure him that no one is above the law — not even the president of the United States.”
 
Trump’s tax returns have been a source of mystery — and contention — ever since the celebrity businessman broke with tradition and did not release his returns during his 2016 presidential campaign.
 
The House Ways and Means Committee sued the Treasury Department and IRS officials this month in an attempt to enforce a law that allows its chairman to obtain any taxpayer’s returns. Its chairman, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., hasn’t indicated whether he would use the New York law, focusing instead on the federal lawsuit.
 
The lawsuit echoes what has become the White House consistent argument: that the committee’s pursuit of the president’s tax returns, as well as most of the Democrats’ investigative efforts, lack a legitimate legislative purpose and thus is outside Congress’s authority.
 
The suit also argues that the committee can’t have a legislative purpose in getting state records because its jurisdiction is limited to federal taxes. However, New York officials have argued that the state returns would contain much of the same information found on the president’s federal returns.
 
Trump has cited repeated IRS audits as a reason not to disclose his returns, but he isn’t legally prevented from releasing returns while under audit.
 
“Ultimately, this issue was litigated in the 2016 election,” the lawsuit said. “Voters heard the criticisms from Secretary (Hillary) Clinton, and they elected President Trump anyway. Democrats in Congress and across the country, however, have only become more eager to disclose the president’s tax returns for political gain.”
 
Democrats have argued that they need to review the returns in their search for potential conflicts of interest or corruption.
 
The administration and the Trump’s business have repeatedly tried to stall Democrats’ investigations by filing lawsuits and not cooperating. The White House has blocked several current and former officials from testifying, has refused to comply with document requests and the president has considered invoking executive privilege to stifle a series of probes.

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Four Chinese nationals and a Chinese company were indicted Tuesday for conspiring to evade sanctions on North Korea, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

“Through the use of more than 20 front companies, the defendants are alleged to have sought to obscure illicit financial dealings on behalf of sanctioned North Korean entities that were involved in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” said Assistant Attorney General John Demers in a statement.

The indictment charges Ma Xiaohong and her company, Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development, as well as Zhou Jianshu, Hong Jinhua and Luo Chuanxu with conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and to defraud the United States, along with conspiracy to launder monetary instruments. 

The indictment alleges that Ma, alongside Zhou, Hong and Luo “established front companies in offshore jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands, the Seychelles, Hong Kong, Wales, England, and Anguilla, and opened Chinese bank accounts held in the names of the front companies at banks in China that maintained correspondent accounts in the United States,” in order to engage in financial activity with North Korea, according to the release.

The defendants are each facing decades in prison if found guilty.

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Russian activists confirmed Tuesday that a woman found dead of stab wounds in Saint Petersburg earlier this week was a well-known human rights activist who had been threatened over her work for LGBT rights and opposition causes.

Yelena Grigoryeva, 41, was active with Russia’s Alliance of Heterosexuals and LGBTQ for Equality and other activist causes, according to the Russian LGBT Network.

“An activist of democratic, anti-war and LGBT movements Yelena Grigoryeva was brutally murdered near her house,” opposition campaigner Dinar Idrisov wrote on Facebook. He said she had recently reported threats of violence to the police, but they took no action.

Friends and fellow activists said Grigoryeva’s name was listed on a Russian website that identified LGBT activists and called for vigilante action against them.

Saint Petersburg online newspaper Fontanka said Grigoryeva was found with knife injuries to her back and face and had apparently been strangled. A 40-year-old male suspect from the region of Bashkortostan has been arrested, it reported.

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Most Americans think that tanking levels of distrust in the government and in other people are hindering efforts to solve pervasive, persistent issues, ranging from immigration and racism to healthcare, taxes and voting rights. Pew Research Center released results for the poll on Monday. It was conducted from November to December 2018 and included over 10,000 adults.

“Many people no longer think the federal government can actually be a force for good or change in their lives,” Pew quoted one survey participant as saying. “This kind of apathy and disengagement will lead to an even worse and less representative government.”

Nearly 70% of Americans say the federal government purposely withholds information that it could safely release, and a further 64% say that when elected officials speak, it’s hard to tell what’s true and what isn’t.

Public confidence in government, which dipped in the 60s and 70s, made a recovery in the 80s and early 2000s, according to an April Pew poll. Now, at 17%, the American populace’s trust in government is near historic lows.

And a large majority of people think this distrust is justified, with 75% answering that the government shouldn’t have more public confidence than it does.

Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents were more likely to pin the blame for distrust on corruption and poor government performance, while their Democrat and Democrat-leaning counterparts were more likely to point at U.S. President Donald Trump’s performance.

Confidence in other people has dropped too, but most prominently when politics come into the mix. While majorities trust others to “do the right thing,” such as in following the law, this changes when it comes to accepting election results, voting in informed ways, reconsidering views upon learning new information and a host of other situations.

Trust in others differed based on race, age, income and education, with older, richer and more educated participants holding higher levels of personal trust. White people had high levels of trust for others 27% of the time, more than double the share of black and Hispanic respondents.

“Americans who might feel disadvantaged are less likely to express generalized trust in other people,” Pew noted.

Strikingly, Republicans and Democrats held similar levels of personal trust in others, but had markedly different views regarding the government, with Republicans expressing more general confidence.

Why does public trust in government matter? Besides being the basis of any government that proclaims its power is drawn from the people, 64% of Americans say low trust in government is hampering responses to the country’s biggest problems. Exactly 70% think the same for distrust in other people. Solutions to persistent, divisive issues, like immigration, healthcare, taxes, voting rights and gerrymandering, were suffering, survey respondents said.

However, fully 84% of participants thought low confidence in the federal government could be remedied. In open comments, participants suggested solutions, including tamping down political partisanship and minimizing sensationalist he-said-she-said media coverage.

“Trust is the glue that binds humans together. Without it, we cooperate with one another less, and variables in our overall quality of life are affected,” wrote one 38-year-old man.

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