Chinese police said Saturday they released an employee at the British Consulate in Hong Kong as the city’s pro-democracy protesters took to the streets again, this time to call for the removal of “smart lampposts” that raised fears of stepped-up surveillance.

Public security authorities in Shenzhen, the mainland city bordering Hong Kong, said Simon Cheng Man-kit was released as scheduled after 15 days of administrative detention. 

The detention of the locally hired consulate employee stoked tensions in semi-autonomous Hong Kong, which has been rocked by months of antigovernment protests, including one to oppose new smart lampposts that activists fear could contain cameras and facial recognition software.

Cheng was detained for violating mainland Chinese law and “confessed to his illegal acts,” the public security bureau in Luohu, Shenzhen, said on its Weibo microblog account, without providing further details. 

The Chinese government has said that Cheng, who went missing after traveling by train to mainland China for a business trip, was held for violating public order regulations in Shenzhen. 

A spokeswoman at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London confirmed his release. 

The Global Times, a Communist Party-owned nationalistic tabloid, said Thursday he was detained for “soliciting prostitutes.” China often uses public order charges against political targets and has sometimes used the accusation of soliciting prostitution. 

Surveillance fears

Protesters flooded the streets to demand the removal of smart lampposts in a Kowloon district over fears they could contain high-tech cameras and facial recognition software used for surveillance by Chinese authorities. Carrying umbrellas in the sweltering heat, they filled a main road in the Kwun Tong district and chanted slogans calling for the government to answer the movement’s demands.

“Hong Kong people’s private information is already being extradited to China. We have to be very concerned,” said march organizer Ventus Lau.

Some protesters set up makeshift barricades on a road outside a police station, facing off with police in riot gear.

Hong Kong’s government-owned subway system operator, MTR Corp., shut down stations and suspended train service near the protest route, after attacks by Chinese state media accusing it of helping protesters flee in previous protests. 

MTR said Friday that it may close stations near protests under high risk or emergency situations. The company has until now kept stations open and trains running even when there have been chaotic skirmishes between protesters and police.

Lau said MTR was working with the government to “suppress freedom of expression.” 

…

Kim Dong-hyun and Han Sang-mi contributed to this report, which originated with VOA’s Korean Service.

WASHINGTON — Seoul’s decision to end a military intelligence pact with Tokyo could have far-reaching consequences that could put its own security at risk, reducing its ability to defend against potential North Korean aggression, experts say.

Seoul announced Thursday it would terminate an intelligence-sharing agreement with Tokyo, attributing the move to Japan’s decision to remove South Korea from its “white list” of favored trading partners earlier this month. 

Japan’s decision “brought about fundamental changes to the environment for security cooperation between the two countries,” Kim You-geun, deputy director of South Korean National Security Council, said Thursday.

Trade feud, historical animosity

Seoul and Tokyo have been escalating a trade feud since early July. The disagreement is rooted in historical animosity stemming from Japanese companies’ use of South Korean forced labor during its colonial rule on the peninsula and during World War II.

The termination announcement came a day before a deadline Saturday of a 90-day notice period for one side to tell the other if it intends to cancel the arrangement. The deal automatically renews annually if no notice is given.

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Eastburn, in an email sent to VOA Thursday, urged the two U.S. allies to work together, emphasizing, “Intel sharing is key to developing our common defense policy and strategy.”

What is GSOMIA?

Under the bilateral accord, known as the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), signed in 2016, South Korea and Japan agreed to exchange sensitive military information to respond more efficiently to potential threats posed by North Korea, China and Russia. Washington has separate intelligence-sharing deals with both countries. 

David Maxwell, a former U.S. Special Forces colonel and current fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said South Korea would suffer “the worst” from its decision to terminate the agreement that would impede the trilateral cooperation in the region.

The end of the agreement, according to Maxwell, means the three countries will be hampered in their ability to have open three-way talks on detecting early warning signs of North Korea’s missile launches, countering its weapons proliferation, and conducting operations against its sanctions evasion.

Although information can be shared using the U.S. as an intermediary, the flow will be slow or severed if South Korea or Japan asks the U.S. not to share its information with the other, Maxwell added.

“This plays into Kim Jong Un’s (and Chinese and Russian) hands to disrupt U.S. alliance,” he said.

While testing missiles this month, North Korea called on South Korea to abandon its intelligence pact, signed with Japan under the conservative government of Park Geun-hye, who preceded current South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

“It is rather abnormal that the agreement of betraying the country signed by Park Geun-hye … still exists without being abrogated,” said North Korea’s propaganda outlet, Uriminzokkiri. 

Dangerous consequences

Terminating the pact could have dangerous consequences if a crisis erupted on the Korean Peninsula, said Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the Rand Corp. An example would be if American troops would need to be brought from the U.S. and routed through Japanese air force bases, requiring three-way communications through a confidential network.

“That’s all going to be coordinated very closely,” Bennett said. “It’s not going to be coordinated by open radio calls … that would tell North Korea what to hit next. So we need to have the GSOMIA to be able to coordinate in a classified manner in terms of the deployment of U.S. forces. And that’s what the South Korean government is risking by saying it won’t renew the GSOMIA.”

Bennett, citing a South Korean military white paper, said the U.S. would need to bring about 690,000 troops to South Korea during a conflict with North Korea. The estimated number is more than the 28,000 American soldiers stationed in South Korea.

South Korea has about 17 airfield bases that can be used to bring in troops from the U.S. during wartime, Bennett said, but they are “not an adequate [number of] airfield structures to deploy forces rapidly.”

South Korea has 20 airfields, but among them, Gimpo and Incheon are within North Korean artillery range and thus cannot be used to land U.S. forces, Bennett said, adding that another airfield on Jeju Island would not be suitable either if the troops needed to fight on the peninsula.

“Are we going to have arrangements with Japan to help us use Japan’s bases and infrastructure to bring those forces to Korea?” Bennett asked. “Because if we don’t, that’s going to significantly slow the ability of U.S. forces to get to Korea and could put Korea at a disadvantage for a period of time.”

Seoul decided to scrap the intelligence-sharing agreement despite these risks, Bennett said, because it believes it will “be able to peacefully coexist with North Korea.” He added South Korea “doesn’t have other places where it’s got a lot of leverage on the Japanese” as a way to retaliate against Tokyo in their trade dispute.

…

For years, dozens of scammers from Nigeria and other countries swindled millions of dollars from U.S. businesses and individuals, funneling the stolen money through accounts provided by two fellow Nigerian “brokers” based in Los Angeles.

In the burgeoning underworld of online fraud, Nigerian nationals Velentine Iro and Chukwudi Christogunus Igbokwe were well-known operators who went by a raft of pseudonyms, including “Iro Enterprises” and “Chris Kudon.”

Between 2014 and 2018, Iro and Igbokwe, working with nearly 80 other international swindlers, facilitated a series of schemes that resulted in the theft of at least $6 million and the attempted theft of $40 million more from victims in more than 10 countries, according to a 252-count federal indictment unsealed Thursday.

The scammers victimized individuals and small and large businesses. In targeting businesses, they used a tactic called “business email compromise,” also known as CEO fraud. Under that scheme, a fraudster gains access to a company’s computer system and then, posing as a company executive, tricks an employee into making an unauthorized wire transfer into a bank account the fraudster controls.

The victims

The indictment documents several corporate victims.

In 2014, a San Diego clothing distributor wired nearly $46,000 into a bank account controlled by one of the scammers, believing it was paying a Chinese vendor for an order of men’s shirts.

In 2016, an unidentified Texas company was tricked into wiring $187,000 into a fraudulent account. The company thought it was making a payment for an oil extraction equipment order.

The conspiracy also targeted the elderly and victims of so-called romance scams.

For example, in 2016 a Japanese woman, identified in court documents as F.K., lost more than $200,000 during a 10-month romance scam with a fraudster who impersonated a U.S. Army captain stationed in Syria.

In 2017, an 86-year-old man with dementia and Alzheimer’s wired nearly $12,000 to a bank account controlled by one of the fraudsters.

The Justice Department unsealed the indictment after the arrest of 14 people, including Iro and Igbokwe, early Thursday. Three others were already in custody. Six defendants remain at large in the United States, while authorities are working with partners in nine other countries to arrest 57 others, most of whom are believed to be in Nigeria.

Nigerian statement

In a statement, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, the Nigerian in Diaspora Commission Chief, urged “those accused in Nigeria to voluntarily turn themselves in to American authorities to clear their names.” She added that Nigeria should extradite the defendants “if relevant international treaties between the two governments are invoked.”

Citing a Justice Department policy, a department spokeswoman declined to say whether the U.S. has made an extradition request. Since 2014, Nigeria has extradited three people wanted in the United States.

While the sheer number of defendants named in the indictment is extraordinary in an online fraud case, the investigation also shed light on the evolving tactics and growing sophistication of scammers. Once targeting mostly individuals, they are increasingly victimizing businesses.

“They were very inclusive as to the fraud they were perpetrating and laundering money for,” said Alma Angotti, a managing director at the consulting firm Navigant in London who advises government and corporate clients on anti-money laundering strategy.

Pervasive

Online fraud has become increasingly pervasive in recent years. In its annual Internet Crime Report in April, the FBI said online theft, fraud and exploitation were responsible for $2.7 billion in financial losses in 2018, up from $1.4 billion in 2017. Meanwhile, romance scams cost Americans $143 million last year, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

The Nigerian fraudsters targeted victims around the world, some of whom lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. At least 16 companies were among the victims.

Iro and Igbokwe, the men at the heart of the scam, hail from the Nigerian city of Owerri, according to a criminal complaint filed in the case.

Many fraudsters knew them from Owerri. Others were directed to them through middlemen.

“I am known all over the world,” Iro once bragged to a fellow Nigerian con artist, according to the complaint. “Even people I never meet before call me and give me better business.”

For swindlers seeking a temporary haven for stolen funds, Iro and his partner allegedly provided a valuable service.

“They would collect bank account information … field requests for bank account information from co-conspirators all over the world, and then send out bank account information to multiple coconspirators,” according to the complaint.

Using a network of “money exchangers,” they then helped the fraudsters funnel the money out of the country.

The men took a cut of 20% to 50% of each transaction. It was a lucrative business.

In 2017, according to the indictment, Iro and Igbokwe sent at least $5 million to the Nigerian accounts of the fraudsters, family members and themselves, according to the complaint.

Evidence seized by the FBI indicates the two men were using the stolen funds to build large houses in Nigeria.

…

China and Russia believe they can behave as they want and have impunity to crush dissent because Western states are at odds with themselves and have lost confidence in their ability to shape the world around them, warn analysts. 

“There is a danger that we in the West are becoming bystanders to the great events swirling around the globe. Our inability to articulate a clear response that generates a change in behavior means a sense of impunity dominates,” argued Rafaello Pantucci, director of international security studies at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute.

Writing in Britain’s The Times newspaper, Pantucci said, “Our responses to the current protests going on in Hong Kong and Moscow are the clearest articulations of this problem. Beijing and Moscow have largely behaved as they would like.”

Western diplomats and analysts fear this week’s three-day G-7 summit in the French resort town of Biarritz will demonstrate again the lack of unity among Western leaders over a series of issues, including climate change, relations with Russia, rising nationalism, and the trade war between the United States and China, whose fallout is hurting Europe far more than America. The G-7 comprises the world’s largest advanced democracies. 

In order to try to reduce a display of disunity, the summit host, French President Emmanuel Macron, is lobbying for the gathering not to issue a joint communique for the first time in the G-7’s history. He hopes to avoid a repeat of last year when U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew his endorsement of the joint statement 10 minutes after it was released. Macron wants instead to replace the communique by delivering as G-7 chairman a summary of the main discussions.

Divisions feared

Whether that papers over disputes remains in doubt. Some analysts say the summit risks becoming explosive. 

“There is huge scope for the Western world to look more divided by the end of the meeting than it did at the beginning,” said William Hague, a former British foreign secretary. He says the G-7 leaders are “desperately short of ideas around which they can coalesce,” ones they need in order “to address the main threats that will overcome them unless they look far enough ahead now.”

On the eve of the meeting, Macron set out an ambitious plan to challenge fellow leaders to rethink their approach to global leadership. He will urge them to rescue democracy from nationalist populists, to temper capitalism, to lessen social inequality and to boost biodiversity, and to re-embrace multilateralism — all of which risks strong pushback from Trump. 

The U.S. leader is skeptical of multilateralism and frustrated with the lack of European support for his “maximum pressure” aggressive stance toward Iran. He is also pressing the Europeans to back his trade confrontation with China, arguing that short-term pain is necessary in order to “take on” Beijing, otherwise the West, in the long term, will be the losers.

Blaming China, Russia

Some Western commentators blame Trump and other nationalist populists for Western disunity, but others see the fraying of Western-shaped global leadership as a consequence of a deeper, historical malaise amid the rise of an aggressive China, which uses commerce as a tool of statecraft and diplomacy, and an assertive Russia that increasingly voices disdain for the West and is eager to develop a partnership with China.

Asked whether he would welcome Moscow being readmitted to the G-7, Russian President Vladmir Putin scoffed at the idea, saying, “The G-7 doesn’t exist. How can I come back to an organization that doesn’t exist?” Putin said he prefers the G-20 format because it includes countries like India and China. The G-20 refers to the group of 20 major economies.

Investing heavily in the West and the developing world, Beijing isn’t shy about demanding a political quid pro quo and the Hong Kong protests have placed the Europeans, especially the British, in a dilemma. Should they champion the rights and freedoms the people of Hong Kong enshrined in a joint declaration signed with Beijing before the British handed the territory back to the Chinese in 1997, or muffle their complaints about Chinese heavy-handedness in order to ingratiate themselves with Beijing and reap commercial benefits? 

That dilemma is only going to become sharper as anti-government protests in Hong Kong continue, risking Chinese military intervention in the former British colony. Beijing has made it clear, with thinly-disguised threats, that British criticism needs to be tempered, otherwise London, which is desperate to boost its trade with China post-Brexit, will lose out financially.

Hague argues that the G-7 “should be restating the case for freedom.” He says that the end of the Cold War “has deprived democratic nations of their automatic unity, and the global financial crisis has rocked their self-confidence.” 

The financial shock came amid a longer-term trend: the hollowing out of the West’s industrial base with manufacturing shifting eastward, prompting the anger of the working classes in the West, who resent losing out on the benefits of globalism, making them question the whole basis of multilateralism. 

According to Antonio Barroso, an analyst with the geostrategic risk consulting group Teneo, “We have passed from a world that was certainly much more multilateral than the one that we have now.”

…

President Donald Trump’s campaign is rallying and training a corps of female defenders, mindful that Trump’s shaky standing with women could sink his hopes of re-election next year.

Female surrogates and supporters fanned out across important battlegrounds Thursday in a high-profile push to make the president’s case on the economy and to train campaign volunteers. Organizers said they believe female backers are often uncomfortable acknowledging they support Trump.

“We want to empower women with other women to be able to share the message of success of this president, to share their success under this president,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Erin Perrine, who will be leading one of the events in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The move is a recognition of the president’s persistent deficit with women. Over the course of his presidency and across public opinion polls, women have been consistently less supportive of Trump than men. Suburban women in particular rejected Republicans in the 2018 midterm by margins that set off alarms for the party and the president.

 The most recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found just 30% of women approve of the way the president is doing his job, compared to 42% of men. Notably, there was no gap between Republican men and women — 80% of both groups said they approved of his job performance in the August poll.

Much of the campaign’s appeal to women has so far focused on highlighting economic gains since Trump’s election in 2016, a message that is especially vulnerable to a slowdown. That includes frequently pointing to the jobless rate for women, which fell to 3.4% in April — the lowest since 1953, even though it has since crept up to 3.7%.

“You are the cavalry here,” Trump campaign senior adviser Katrina Pierson told a crowd of supporters at a voter registration training event in Troy, Michigan, a Detroit suburb viewed as key contested territory in this swing state. “There is no president in our lifetime that has done more to advance the interests of women than President Donald J. Trump.”

Similar events were scheduled in 13 battleground states, including Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Ohio. The events, led by surrogates including counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, will try to train attendees to be volunteers and what the campaign describes as “ambassadors” for the re-election effort.

Among the women in attendance in Troy was Cara McAlister, a sales representative from the nearby suburb of Bloomfield Township. She said that she always votes but that it was not until Trump’s 2016 candidacy that she was inspired to get more involved politically, becoming a GOP precinct delegate and canvassing door to door for him.

She said she has friends who were afraid to reveal their support for Trump because they worried about backlash. So she invites them to meetings like Thursday’s gathering.

“They really enjoy being in an atmosphere where they feel free to express their support for the president,” said McAlister, who was wearing a white “Make America Great Again” cap and blue Trump-Pence shirt and who described herself as “middle age.” “They tend to want to go to another event.”

AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 115,000 midterm voters nationwide, found that 40% of women voted for Republicans in last year’s congressional elections, compared to 50% of men. In suburban areas in particular, 38% of women and 49% of men voted for Republicans.

Trump has turned off higher-income, college educated and younger women “because of how he speaks, how he tweets,” said Republican pollster Frank Luntz, while retaining the support of older women and women with lower incomes and without college degrees.

That contrast is evident in Iowa, a state Trump won by more than 9 percentage points in 2016, but one that has historically been seen as a potential swing state.

Some Republican women here, like Des Moines resident Pat Inglis, have become more fervent Trump supporters over the course of his first term.

“He’s helped this country more than anybody else in the last 20 years,” the 70-year-old retiree said. She added that Democratic attacks against the president, and the leftward tilt of the Democratic Party, have made her all the more enthusiastic to support Trump.

Others, like Mary Miner, a lifelong Republican and small-business owner from rural Iowa, were driven away from the GOP by Trump.

“Trump is horrible,” the 61-year-old said. “I’m astonished anyone could support him. If my party is going to support that, I’m done with `em. I’m a Democrat and that’s it.”

Miner switched parties in 2017 and will be caucusing for Elizabeth Warren next year.

At the same time, said Luntz, recent focus groups show that women have dug in on their views, suggesting there are fewer women open to being persuaded.

“What’s happened is it’s become more pronounced where those who don’t like him are overtly hostile and those who do like him will stand up for him aggressively,” Luntz said. “They are even more outspoken than men. They are even more dismissive. It’s spoken with attitude and with venom. And I think it’s because they take it personally.”

As a result, he said, the election is likely to come down to a very narrow demographic — married professional mothers with teenage kids, he says — who credit Trump for a booming economy but are turned off by his style.

“They like what he’s done, but they don’t like how he’s done it,” he said. “Do you want to focus on the ingredients, or do you want to focus on the casserole?”

…

The U.S. government’s final management plan for lands in and around a Utah national monument that President Donald Trump downsized doesn’t include many new protections for the cliffs, canyons, waterfalls and arches found there, but it does include a few more safeguards than were in a proposal issued last year. 
 
The Bureau of Land Management’s plan for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southwestern Utah codifies that the lands cut out of the monument will be open to mineral extraction such as oil, gas and coal as expected, according to a plan summary the agency provided to The Associated Press. 
 
The agency chose an option that doesn’t add any areas of critical environmental concern, increases lands open to cattle grazing and could raise the potential for “adverse effects” on lands and resources in the monument, the document shows. 
 
At the same time, the agency tweaked the plan from last year to call for new recreation management plans to address impacts on several highly visited areas, opens fewer acres to ATVs and nixes a plan that would have allowed people to collect some non-dinosaur fossils in certain areas inside the monument. 

The agency also determined that no land will be sold from the 1,345 square miles (3,488 square kilometers) cut from the monument. Last year, Interior Department leaders rescinded a plan to sell 2.5 square miles (6.5 square kilometers) of that land after it was included in the draft management proposal and drew backlash from environmentalists. 

Conservation and paleontology groups have vehemently opposed the downsizing of the monument and have lawsuits pending challenging the move. 

‘Not a free-for-all’
 
Harry Barber, the acting manager at Grand Staircase, said in an interview with the AP that the plan reflects changes made after considering input from the public, an assessment that enough protections are in place already, and the voices of all different groups who use the lands. 

 
“There are people who graze livestock, people that like to hunt, people that like to hike, people that like to trail run,” said Barber, who has worked at the monument since it was created. “We’re trying to be fair.”

He pushed back against the notion that the lands now outside the monument will be left abandoned, saying the lands are still subject to rules and polices like all federally managed land. 
 
Interest in oil, gas and coal has been limited so far and no project has been approved, Barber said. The lands are home to a major coal reserve but there’s little market demand. 
 
“It’s not a free-for-all,” Barber said. “That seems to be what I hear a lot, people feeling like now anybody can go out and do anything they want to do on these lands. But, they need to realize that we still have our rules and policies.”  

‘Destroying this place’
 
But to Steve Bloch, legal director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance conservation group, it’s unforgivable to cut the monument in half and downgrade the excluded lands into what he calls “garden variety public lands.” 
 
“Grand Staircase-Escalante is one of the nation’s public land crown jewels and from the outset the Trump administration was hell-bent on destroying this place,” Bloch said. 
 
To Bloch’s organization and other conservation groups that have lawsuits pending challenging the Trump administration’s decision to shrink Grand Staircase and Bears Ears National Monument, also in Utah, spending time on the plans is a waste of taxpayer resources. They think the government should have waited to see how the courts rule. 
 
President Bill Clinton created the monument in 1996 using the Antiquities Act, which sets guidelines calling for the “smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”

In 2017, Trump shrunk the monument from nearly 3,000 square miles (7,770 square kilometers) to 1,569 square miles (4,064 square kilometers) after a review of 27 national monuments by then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Trump downsized the Bears Ears National Monument, created by President Barack Obama in 2016, by about 85%. 
 
Trump said scaling back the two monuments reversed federal overreach and earned cheers from Republican leaders in Utah who lobbied him to undo protections by Democratic presidents that they considered overly broad. 
 
Conservation groups have called Trump’s decision the largest elimination of protected land in American history and believe they will prevail in their legal challenge. 
 
Past presidents have trimmed national monuments 18 times, but there’s never been a court ruling on whether the Antiquities Act also lets them reduce one.

David Polly, a paleontologist at Indiana University and past president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, said he’s relieved no fossil collection will be allowed inside the monument but worries that allowing people to take non-dinosaur fossils in many areas of the lands cut could lead to problems. The fossils in the area are rare because it’s an ancient river bed and not an ocean bed and some items like petrified wood can be hard to distinguish from a dinosaur bone. 
 
“It may be accidentally encouraging people to end up breaking the rules,” Polly said. 

…

The State Department says it will assess its programming and redirect all funding on foreign aid, after U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned plans to cut $4 billion in spending on the grounds that it was wasteful and unnecessary.

“As part of this discussion, we agreed to continue to assess our programming and redirect all funding that does not directly support our priorities,” said a State Department spokesperson on Friday.

“This effort will ensure every foreign assistance program funded by U.S. taxpayers is both effective and supports our foreign policy priorities,” added the spokesperson.  

One of the programs under assessment is U.S. foreign assistance to the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The State Department said those nations are not taking concrete actions to reduce the number of illegal migrants coming to the U.S. border. 

Trump had considered cutting the spending on grounds that it was wasteful and unnecessary, but retreated when it became apparent that some key lawmakers were opposed.

The Trump Administration officials briefly suspended State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development spending, eyeing a budget process known as “rescission” to cut up to $4.3 billion in spending already authorized and appropriated by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

“The president has been clear that there is waste and abuse in our foreign assistance, and we need to be wise about where U.S. money is going,” a senior White House official told VOA. “Which is why he asked his administration to look into options to doing just that.”

But after both Republican and Democratic lawmakers objected to the White House effort to freeze the foreign aid already approved by Congress, the Trump administration gave in.

“It’s clear that there are many (in Congress) who aren’t willing to join in curbing wasteful spending,” the White House aide said.

Some of Trump’s top budget cutters wanted him to trim the foreign aid as a show of fiscal restraint after Trump recently signed a two-year, $2.7 trillion spending plan.

But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who oversees the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, said that withholding the money would have violated “the good faith” of reaching agreement on the long-term budget. 

Two Republicans, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Congressman Hal Rogers, said freezing the foreign aid spending would hurt “significant” national security and counterterrorism efforts while also complicating spending negotiations between the White House and Congress in the future.

Trump had expressed some ambivalence over the funding.

“We give billions and billions of dollars to countries that don’t like us — don’t like us even a little bit,” the president told reporters last weekend. “And I’ve been cutting that. And we just put a package of about $4 billion additional dollars in. And in some cases, you know, in some cases, I could see it both ways. In some cases, these are countries that we should not be giving to.”

Former USAID officials had denounced the White House’s plan to cut U.S. foreign assistance, which is a tool to advance U.S. interests. 

In a tweet, former USAID Administrator Gayle Smith said the plan to “rescind billions in development funding is as ineffective as it is shameless.”

She added that the development funding “isn’t just charity,” but a way to foster U.S. values, foreign policy, national security and economic interests.

A quick thread on why OMB’s plan to rescind billions in development funding is as ineffective as it is shameless.

For years, Republicans & Dems have agreed development isn’t just charity, it’s a tool to advance US values, foreign policy, nat security & economic interests. 1/15

— Gayle Smith (@GayleSmith) August 20, 2019

…

Across the country, teachers and school districts alike are grappling with the latest political and economic realities of educator pay. 
 
The dynamics have been complicated by both the recent national teacher protest movement that’s emboldened the workforce to demand higher salaries and better conditions, and the steadily brewing shortage of educators that’s forced many school districts to confront the money issue with more urgency.

The National Education Association’s latest salary data estimates that the average public school teacher in the U.S. saw a 2% pay raise over the past two years since the national Red4Ed protest movement spread across the U.S.

At the same time, the number of teacher vacancies have exceeded 100,000 jobs in the past four years, said Elaine Weiss of the Economic Policy Institute. 

…

Thirty-eight former students of an Orthodox Jewish school in New York City operated by Yeshiva University sued Thursday over claims they were molested by two prominent rabbis in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

The suit, filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, alleges that the university failed to protect students at Yeshiva University High School for Boys and promoted one of the rabbis to principal even after receiving abuse reports.  

A Yeshiva University spokesperson declined to comment, citing a school policy against speaking publicly about litigation.

The lawsuit is one of hundreds that have been filed over child sexual abuse allegations since last week, when New York state opened a one-year window for suits previously barred by the state’s statute of limitations.

During a news conference Thursday, three of the alleged victims, flanked by their lawyers, spoke about disturbing behavior they say went on for decades.

“I didn’t even understand at the time that this was sexual abuse; I just knew that this guy was putting his hands all over me,” said Barry Singer, 61, speaking of one of the rabbis he said kept reaching into the boy’s pants, even in school hallways.

The Associated Press doesn’t typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual abuse unless they choose to be named.

Accused rabbis

One of the accused rabbis, George Finkelstein, targeted children of Holocaust survivors, according to the lawsuit, telling them they would increase their parents’ suffering if they spoke about the abuse. The other, Rabbi Macy Gordon, who taught Jewish studies, allegedly sodomized boys in a “vicious and sadistic” manner using objects, the lawsuit says. Gordon died in 2017 in Israel. Both he and Finkelstein have denied the allegations in the past.

Finkelstein was promoted from the school’s assistant principal to principal even after some of the boys’ parents reported the alleged abuse to school officials, the plaintiffs said. Gordon eventually moved to Israel, where he worked at Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue. Calls to the synagogue rang unanswered Thursday.

Thirty-four of the plaintiffs attempted to sue Yeshiva University for sexual abuse and facilitating sexual abuse in 2013 but the case went nowhere because it was barred by the statute of limitations at the time. On Thursday, one of their attorneys, Kevin Mulhearn, called the plaintiffs “trailblazers.” 

Alleged victim

David Bressler, 51, said the abuse he suffered while a student in the early ’80s led him to abandon his religion that now rekindles memories of the abuse. He has no contact with his parents and other relatives who are observant Jews. When he married his Jewish wife a decade ago, he made her promise not to raise their children in the Jewish faith.

He said he still doesn’t tuck in his shirt, a habit he started in high school to make it more difficult for his abuser to put his hand down his pants. Bressler once punched Finkelstein while he says the rabbi was sexually “wrestling” with him.   

Now there are days he can’t bear being on a crowded subway because “I can’t stand being touched by people.”

“So you don’t even realize what the long-term impact is,” said Bressler, a father of two.

Yeshiva University, which calls itself “the world’s premier Jewish institution for higher learning,” has trained both secular and religious leaders for the past century. With four campuses in Manhattan, the university operates the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law and other schools that attract a mix of Jewish and non-Jewish students.

The high school, also known as the Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy, has taught boys since 1916. It’s considered the first academic Jewish high school in the U.S. and the first to offer both Jewish and secular studies. 

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Walmart plans to reopen the El Paso store where 22 people were killed in a shooting earlier this month, the retail giant said Thursday, but the entire interior of the building will first be rebuilt.

The renovated store will include an on-site memorial honoring the victims of the shooting, many of whom were Latino, and recognizing the “binational relationship between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez” just across the border in Mexico, Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove said. The project is expected to take three to four months. 
 
Nearly all of the 400 employees at the El Paso store have been reassigned to other nearby locations, Hargrove said, and the Arkansas-based company believes reopening the store is “an important step in healing from this tragedy.”

“Nothing will erase the pain of Aug. 3 and we’re hopeful that reopening the store will be another testament to the strength and resiliency that has characterized the El Paso community in the wake of this tragedy,” Hargrove said.

Flowers, crosses and handwritten messages now adorn a makeshift memorial outside one of the store’s entrances. Hundreds of residents have visited in the wake of the shooting, where social workers hand out bottled water and offer counseling services.

“If we close it, they win,” said Laura Lopez, 59, who brought her gardening gloves from home to help clear dead flowers from the memorial site Thursday. “Life goes on and you’ve got to go on.”

Many shoppers from Ciudad Juarez went there because it is the closest Walmart to the four border bridges that connect to El Paso. Eight of the people killed in the shooting were Mexican citizens. The vast majority had Hispanic names.

Authorities took more than 10 days to finish processing evidence before returning control of the property to Walmart. It was less time than officials initially anticipated given the scope of the carnage, plus the size of the crime scene where police said up to 3,000 shoppers had gathered. The FBI has returned most of the 230 vehicles that had been in limbo behind crime scene tape for days after the attack. 
 
“It was very meticulous work and certainly not rushed, but working around the clock with our counterparts in the FBI, investigators were able to complete the task sooner than initially anticipated,” El Paso Police Department spokesman Enrique Carrillo.

Confession

Police said the suspected gunman, Patrick Crusius, confessed to targeting Mexicans in the attack. They’ve also said that the suspected shooter is the likely author of an anti-Latino screed published online shortly before the shooting. It criticized race-mixing and called Hispanics “invaders.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott met Thursday in Austin with officials from tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter to discuss ways of combating extremism. Abbott hasn’t proposed any new major gun-control measures but called for a crackdown on internet sites used by violent extremists in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

Police are still preparing their investigation for the local prosecutor, Jaime Esparza, who has said he will seek the death penalty. The Department of Justice has said it will bring federal capital murder charges, and is investigating the shooting as domestic terrorism. 

Suicide watch

Crusius has been on a suicide watch in an El Paso jail since Aug. 7, according to El Paso County Sheriff’s office spokeswoman Chris Acosta. Crusius has been separated from other inmates, Acosta said Wednesday.

In the days after the shooting, Hargrove said the company was reviewing security protocols. Walmart launched computer-based active shooter training in 2015 and has since increased frequency of its instruction and added a virtual reality component.

The El Paso City Council has been researching the possibility of requiring armed security guards for large stores, and of requiring certain additional security features at store entrances.

“People are not picking on Walmart in particular but, they used to have off-duty officers hired there all the time. And then for some reason, it went away,” police chief Greg Allen told city council members in an Aug. 8 briefing.

A police spokesman declined to elaborate on the chief’s comments and referred questions to Walmart.

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YouTube says it disabled more than 200 videos this week that appeared to be part of a coordinated effort to spread misinformation about the ongoing protests in Hong Kong.

The video removals come just days after Twitter said it had suspended more than 200,000 accounts it linked to a Chinese government influence campaign against the protests. Facebook also said it had suspended accounts and removed pages after being notified by Twitter.

Google, which owns YouTube, did not explicitly implicate the Chinese government but said the videos were related to the similar disclosures from Facebook and Twitter.

Social media companies have faced criticism about the spread of misinformation on their sites and have taken action to combat the spread in recent months.
 

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The Pentagon has identified the two service members killed in action Wednesday in Afghanistan.

Master Sergeant Luis F. DeLeon-Figueroa of Chicopee, Massachusetts, and Master Sergeant Jose J. Gonzalez of LaPuente, California, were killed during what is being described as an active combat situation.

But officials have not said which enemy the troops were fighting.

An official with the Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan told VOA an investigation is ongoing.

The Trump administration and the Taliban have been negotiating to find a way out of the United States’ longest war.

Trump shared details of the meeting with reporters early this week, suggesting a U.S. troop drawdown plan is still in the works.

“We’re having very good discussions [with the Taliban]. We will see what happens. We’ve really got it down to probably 13,000 people [troops] and we’ll be bringing it down a little bit more and then we will decide whether or not we will be staying longer or not,” he said.

Trump stressed that the U.S. plans to leave behind a “very significant intelligence” force for operations against Islamic State and al-Qaida. He says Afghanistan remains “a breeding ground” for terrorists.
 

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