China said Monday it is sending an envoy to the United States this week for talks aimed at cooling a trade dispute that threatens to upend markets from soybeans to steel, and welcomed comments by President Donald Trump hinting at a possible easing of sanctions on embattled Chinese telecoms firm ZTE.

The foreign ministry said Vice Premier Liu He will visit the U.S. from Tuesday to Saturday for consultations with U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

Ministry spokesman Lu Kang also said China appreciated tweets by Trump saying he would help ZTE Corp. get “back into business” because too many jobs in China are at stake after the U.S. government cut off access to ZTE’s American suppliers.

“We think highly of the U.S. statement regarding ZTE’s case. We are currently in close communication over details of the implementation,” Lu told reporters at a daily news briefing.

Referring to Liu’s visit, Lu said China was willing to work with the U.S. to “strive for positive and constructive outcomes from the next round of economic and trade discussions.”

Partially state-owned ZTE makes cellphones, network switching equipment and other telecommunications equipment. Last month, the U.S. Commerce Department banned it from buying U.S. technology or components for seven years after it misled regulators by failing to discipline employees involved in illegal exports and instead paid them bonuses.

Liu’s trip to Washington follows a visit by Mnuchin and other U.S. officials to Beijing earlier this month, where they conveyed a demand that China slash its trade surplus with the U.S. by $200 billion by the end of 2020.

An intensifying rivalry over advanced technology has also fueled demands by Washington that China give up policies that favor domestic companies. Beijing considers such programs as fundamental to its state-driven economic model and vital for its future growth.

America’s trade deficit with China amounted last year to $337 billion in goods and services.

The intensifying trade dispute has rattled financial markets for weeks. In March, the Trump administration slapped tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. China counterpunched with tariffs on a range of U.S. products, including bourbon and blue jeans.

An even higher-stakes fight looms over American allegations that China steals technology and forces U.S. companies to hand over trade secrets in exchange for access to the Chinese market. The United States is considering imposing tariffs on up to $150 billion of Chinese products, and Beijing has countered with proposed tariffs on $50 billion in American goods, including soybeans and small aircraft.
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U.S. first lady Melania Trump stepped into the limelight this month as she launched her official platform to address major issues facing children today. Since becoming the first lady, Mrs. Trump has kept a relatively low profile amid the turmoil and controversies surrounding the Trump White House, but experts say Mrs. Trump, who enjoys a higher approval rating than her husband, may be ready to take on a more public role. VOA White House Correspondent Peggy Chang has more from the White House.
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White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told staffers Friday that an aide’s recent comment about Sen. John McCain was inappropriate but shouldn’t have been leaked to the media.

Sanders told communications’ staffers in a private meeting that it was inappropriate for aide Kelly Sadler to dismiss McCain’s opinion during a recent closed-door meeting because, Sadler said, “he’s dying anyway.”

Sanders said the leak was selfish and distracted from the president’s agenda and “everything we’re trying to accomplish for the American people,” according to a person familiar with the meeting who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the private meeting. She noted that it garnered attention following the president’s welcoming home of three Americans detained in North Korea and an upcoming summit with Kim Jong Un in Singapore.

During the meeting, White House director of strategic communications Mercedes Schlapp defended Sadler, saying the private comments shouldn’t have been leaked to the media, the person said.

Sanders declined to condemn Sadler’s comments during a White House briefing on Friday, saying she wouldn’t “validate a leak out of an internal staff meeting.”

McCain, the 81-year-old Arizona GOP senator, was diagnosed in July with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. He left Washington in December and underwent surgery last month for an infection.

Sadler is a special assistant to the president. She has declined to respond to requests for comment on her McCain remark.
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President Donald Trump is urging the Senate to get its work done on funding before the August break “or NOT GO HOME.”

The president tweeted Saturday that “Wall and Border Security should be included.” He also said that he was “waiting for approval of almost 300 nominations, worst in history.”

Trump blamed Democrats for “doing everything possible to obstruct.”

The president’s push for speedy action on spending measures and nominations followed a recent letter from a group of Senate Republicans pressing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to cancel the August recess later this year. That effort was led by Senator David Perdue of Georgia.

The Senate Republicans said that spending more time on their pending work was particularly critical with Congress facing what they called “historic obstruction” by Democrats.
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House Speaker Paul Ryan said Saturday that he thought President Donald Trump would be an asset to GOP candidates this fall in states like Wisconsin that he narrowly won, even as he warned fellow Republicans that a “blue wave” could wipe out advancements made during his presidency.

Ryan addressed about 600 people at the Wisconsin Republican convention, his final one after 20 years in office. The state’s entire GOP congressional delegation, along with Governor Scott Walker, honored Ryan, who received a standing ovation and chant from the audience of “Thank you, Paul!”

Ryan told delegates he was surprised on election night in 2016 when it became clear Trump was going to win Wisconsin — the first Republican to carry the state since 1984. Trump won by less than 1 percentage point.

Ryan told reporters later he didn’t think controversies surrounding Trump were resonating with voters in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

“The president is strong in these states,” Ryan said. “He’s an asset. … Whether I’m running around southern Wisconsin or America, nobody is talking about Stormy Daniels. Nobody is talking about Russia. They’re talking about their lives and their problems. They’re talking about their communities, they’re talking about jobs, they’re talking about the economy, they’re talking about national security.”

​’Ton’ of accomplishments

Ryan defended his and the Republican record in Congress, including the tax overhaul law he championed, saying “we have gotten a ton of things done.”

But he, like other Republicans speaking at the convention before him, warned it could all be quickly be undone.

“The blue wave, as they say it, they want to take it all away,” Ryan cautioned.

He also reminisced about his career, telling reporters after his convention speech, “I never thought I’d be here in the first place. I wanted to be an economist.”

Walker presented Ryan with a personalized Green Bay Packers jersey with a number “1” on the back. That is the number of Ryan’s southeastern Wisconsin congressional district.

Ryan has not endorsed anyone in the race to replace him, saying he didn’t know if he would. Candidates have until June 1 to file.
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John McCain is not signing off quietly.

As in so much of the senator’s extraordinary life, the rebellious Republican is facing this challenging chapter — battling brain cancer — in his own rule-breaking way, stirring up old fights and starting new ones. Rarely has the sickbed been so lively.

McCain is promoting a new book, delivering a counterpunch of ideals contrary to President Donald Trump’s running of the White House. McCain’s long-distance rejection of CIA director nominee Gina Haspel’s history with torture goaded former Vice President Dick Cheney into a fresh debate over waterboarding and other now-banned interrogation techniques. On Friday, friends rallied to defend McCain against a White House official’s cruel joke that his positions don’t matter because “he’s dying anyway.”

If this is Washington’s long goodbye to a sometimes favorite son, it’s also a reemergence of old resentments and political fault lines that continue to split the nation.

Perhaps no one should have expected anything less from the 81-year-old senator, who can be crotchety and cantankerous but is also seen by many, both in and out of politics, as an American hero, flaws and all.

Former Vice President Joe Biden said Friday as McCain “fights for his life, he deserves better — so much better.”

Our children learn from our example,'' Biden said.The lingering question is: Whose example will it be? I am certain it will be John’s.”

Said House Speaker Paul Ryan, “His legacy is so long that John McCain is a hero to us all.”

McCain was diagnosed in July with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. He left Washington in December and few expect him to return. Up-and-down reports of his health shift every few days.

A steady stream of visitors have stopped by the McCain family ranch in Arizona — including Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, on Friday.

Close friend and political ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., visited McCain this week, and the two watched an old movie and talked about McCain’s imprint on politics.

Graham said he told McCain he will leave behind a long list of Republicans — and Democrats — he has mentored, Graham included.

Your legacy is the people you affected,'' Graham said he told his friend.John McCain’s going to have a hell of a legacy.”

Not everyone, though, is so keen to listen to McCain these days.

Most Republican senators are not heeding his advice to reject Haspel, who was chief of base of a detention site where terror suspects were waterboarded. McCain lived through years of captivity during the Vietnam War.

Trump has suggested reviving the now-banned brutal interrogation techniques. And Cheney, who was an architect of the post-Sept. 11, 2001, strategy, said he would keep the program active and ready for deployment, and doesn’t think it amounted to torture.

“People want to go back and try to rewrite history, but if it were my call, I’d do it again,” Cheney told Fox Business.

One retired Air Force general, Tom McInerney, called McCain “songbird John” on the same station this week for allegedly providing information to the North Vietnamese while he was a prisoner of war. McCain has said he gave inaccurate information after being tortured. Fox said McInerney would not be invited back on its business or news channels.

Still, one of McCain’s longtime sparring partners, Sen. Rand Paul R-Ky., re-affirmed his opposition to Haspel on Friday.

In explaining his opposition, Paul said, “We shouldn’t reward somebody who participated in torture, really still has trouble saying and articulating that it’s an immoral thing.”

Just a few years ago, McCain called Paul and fellow Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, “wacko birds” for their filibuster blocking then-CIA nominee John Brennan. McCain later apologized.

After McCain’s recent hospitalization for an intestinal infection, Graham said he was worried about his old friend’s health. But after seeing him this week, he decided McCain will “be with us for a while.”

The two weren’t quite yet saying their goodbyes. In fact, “there’s not talk of funerals, there’s talk of the future,” Graham said.

They watched a classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance'' -- with McCain narrating along the way in words that cannot be repeated -- and talked about McCain's book, which Graham says couldn't have come at a better time.I told him it should be required reading,” he said.

It’s a story about the country, and “even though we make our share of mistakes, we’re always trying to make it a more perfect union,” Graham said.
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National Security Advisor John Bolton said “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” of North Korea is what is needed to bring peace to the Korean Peninsula. And Iran will “face a very difficult choice” in trying to keep its nuclear deal going with the rest of the signatories as the U.S. reimposes sanctions.
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Investigators found evidence of a “malicious intrusion” into a Tennessee county’s elections website from a computer in Ukraine during a concerted cyberattack, which most likely caused the site to crash just as it was reporting vote totals in this month’s primary.

The firm, hired by Knox County to analyze the so-called denial-of-service cyberattack, said Friday that “a suspiciously large number of foreign countries” accessed the site as votes were being reported on May 1.

That intense activity was among the likely causes of the crash, according to the report by Sword & Shield Enterprise Security.

County officials said no voting data were affected, but the site was down for an hour after the polls closed, causing confusion before technicians fixed the problem. 

The vulnerability identified by Sword & Shield has been fixed and additional safeguards are now in place, said David Ball, the county’s deputy director of information technology.

The election results, to be officially certified this month, left Glenn Jacobs, also known as the pro wrestler Kane, ahead by 17 votes in the Republican primary for Knox County’s mayor.

Origin unknowable

Investigators said it’s impossible to prove just where the denial-of-service attack originated from, since the county can’t store all the “packet data” needed to identify the source.

“The effect was clearly a loss of service, but it is unclear, with the information provided, if the outage was an intended event or a side effect of the events,” the report said.

Ball said “the bottom line is that there was a proven malicious attack from a foreign source occurring simultaneously with an apparent deliberate DOS attack. Nothing was held back from Sword and Shield, and their assessment was well-aligned with our initial assessment on election night.”

Knox County uses Hart InterCivic’s eSlate electronic voting machines, which do not create a paper record of the votes. Ball said Hart’s equipment “is not networked in any way.”

Joyce McCants, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Knoxville, said Knox County has not reached out to the FBI in relation to the website crash.

Election security experts have raised concerns that foreign state actors could use such attacks to erode public confidence in the democratic process. Projects like Defend Digital Democracy at Harvard University have been urging elections officials across the country to prepare for exactly such scenarios.

Richard Moran, the county’s information and technology senior director, has said that while heavy traffic came from overseas servers, it doesn’t mean that the attacker was in a foreign country.

Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University, notes that the internet is a “messy place” with a lot of background traffic, and it would be difficult to find its origin because attackers are very good at hiding their location.

“What attackers will do is, they’ll break into other computers and then launch their attacks from there,” he said.

The report said the website received requests for access from about 100 countries, from all over the world.
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A top U.S. State Department official resigned this week after President Donald Trump announced the United States is withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, according to a report in the journal Foreign Policy.

The report says 38-year-old nuclear proliferation expert Richard Johnson resigned his position as acting assistant coordinator in the State Department’s Office of Iran Nuclear Implementation, which had been involved in talks with Britain, France, Germany and other nations to salvage the deal that rewarded Iran for giving up much of its nuclear activities in trade for relief from economic sanctions.

Trump announced Wednesday that the U.S. would no longer be part of that deal. Johnson’s farewell party was held that night, according to Foreign Policy.

Johnson did not make a statement to the journal for its report, but Foreign Policy reports that his farewell email to colleagues and staff praised the deal, calling it an “extraordinary achievement” and saying it has “clearly been successful in preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

Johnson’s departure highlights the Trump administration’s loss of high-level career diplomats at the State Department and across the breadth of the federal government. The report notes that the office Johnson headed has gone from a full-time staff of seven to none since Trump’s inauguration.

That development was due in part to former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s decision to close the department’s office in charge of coordinating sanctions and move some experts to administrative roles.

Several former government employees contacted for the story, including former U.S. Treasury official Brian O’Toole, told Foreign Policy that they are dismayed at Johnson’s departure. O’Toole called the nonproliferation expert “exactly the kind of person we want to keep in government.”

O’Toole added, “You can’t be powerful without good people in government.”

Contacted for comment on the story, the State Department said in a statement that it does not comment on matters involving individual employees. But it added: “As directed by the President, we will continue to work with nations around the world to create a new coalition to counter Iran’s nuclear and proliferation threats, as well as its support for terrorism, militancy, and asymmetric weapons like ballistic missiles.”
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White House chief of staff John Kelly said President Donald Trump is “somewhat embarrassed” by the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Kelly told National Public Radio in an interview that aired Friday the probe “may not be a cloud” over the White House, but it gets discussed.

Said Kelly: “When world leaders come in, it’s kind of like, you know, Bibi Netanyahu is here … who’s under investigation himself, and it’s like, you know, you walk in, and you know, the first couple of minutes of every conversation might revolve around that kind of thing.”

Kelly also spoke about the Trump administration’s efforts to fight illegal immigration. He said most people coming into the country illegally “are not bad people,” but said they won’t assimilate easily.

“They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm,” Kelly said. “They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. … They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills.”

While Kelly’s role in the administration appears to have diminished of late, he told NPR that he has a close relationship with Trump and said he has never considered leaving the White House.

“There’s times of great frustration, mostly because of the stories I read about myself or others that I think the world of, which is just about everybody who works at the complex, and wonder whether it’s worth it to be subjected to that,” he said.

He also said he wished he had been in his role sooner: “I think in some cases in terms of staffing or serving the president that first six months was pretty chaotic and there were people some people hired that maybe shouldn’t have.”
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Young undocumented immigrants seeking permanent status in the United States received an unexpected boost Thursday on Capitol Hill as a small group of House Republicans mounted a last-minute effort to bring up an immigration vote in Congress.

The group of eight Republicans — some freed from political considerations by upcoming retirements and others facing tough re-elections races — defied their own party leadership, quickly persuading 10 more Republicans to sign on to a petition that would force debate on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

With all 193 Democrats expected to sign on, Republicans will have to persuade just seven more members of their own party to join the petition to trigger a vote on several immigration bills on the House floor.

But Republican leadership said the effort would be wasted if the end result is a presidential veto.

“I think it’s important for us to come up with a solution that the president can support,” House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters Thursday. These types of petitions are rare and seen as a threat to leadership’s ability to direct legislative action.

“It’s better to use the legislative process,” Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told reporters Wednesday.

But that argument appears to be losing sway with House members who see an opportunity for legislative action in a mid-term election year. The growing group of House Republicans are joining Democratic colleagues who have long criticized Ryan for not bringing immigration bills up for a vote.

“This is about making sure we’re not consolidating power in the White House,” said Representative Mia Love, a Republican from Utah and one of the first lawmakers to sign petition.

The immigration issue had all but died after an effort to pass a DACA fix collapsed in the U.S. Senate earlier this year.

The program has been the focus of fierce negotiations on Capitol Hill since last September, when President Donald Trump announced he was ending the 2012 Obama-era program and called for a legislative fix.

The DACA program has shielded from deportation about 800,000 undocumented people who were brought to the United States illegally as children, mainly from Mexico and Central America. The U.S. Supreme Court gave DACA recipients a reprieve this spring when it declined to hear an appeal of several lower court rulings to maintain the program.

“The pressure point went away after the Supreme Court didn’t act — and I was happy that it gave more time to DACA recipients, but it took the pressure off here,” Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, a Republican from Florida, told VOA.

 “This is a way to bring it back. So this is very unique opportunity,” he said.

The lawmakers are pressing for a vote on a range of Republican, Democratic and bipartisan solutions to the status of DACA recipients, in addition to addressing concerns about border security and visa programs.

If the petition succeeds, the earliest the House could enter into debate on the bills would be in mid-June.

Under the rules of the so-called “Queen of the Hill” process, the bill with the most votes would be sent to the Senate.

“We believe that there’s going to be opportunities for members of all the different caucuses on the left and the right to vote on the bills they think are important — but the important thing is to have a full debate here,” said Representative Jeff Denham, a Republican from California who is leading the effort.

Several states have filed lawsuits against the DACA program. Those cases are expected to work their way up to the U.S. Supreme Court this summer. 
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A long line of people, winding past a chain-link fence and a turnstile, distinguishes the boundary separating San Luis, in the U.S. state of Arizona, and San Luis Río Colorado in Sonora, Mexico. Otherwise, it would just appear to be desert.

At the U.S. port of entry, temporary farm workers leave their families and queue up daily before dawn to catch a bus to the fields, just outside town. Residents from Arizona join them.

On one nearby date palm farm, men and women wear handkerchiefs to protect themselves from the fine desert sand and temperatures that reach 41 degrees Celsius; but, Mexican farmworker Juán González voices few complaints. The work is steady for 11 months of the year, he says, and the border is calm.“There aren’t many problems,” González said. “There’s crime, but not like in other large cities.”

While others describe a sense of tranquility on either side of the border, there is an underlying tension, too. Drug trafficking is of particular concern, but not everyone wants to talk about it.

​It’s complicated

A mix of workers on temporary visas, permanent residents, and U.S. citizens with Mexican family members, residents of San Luis, Arizona, say it’s normal to have a foot on both sides of the border.

Among the Latino-majority population, residents quietly acknowledge that the deployment of the Arizona National Guard to the area — to assist the U.S. Border Patrol in monitoring illegal activity — isn’t the worst idea but has a caveat: “if it’s for narco-trafficking and trafficking of persons.”

“It’s good to end that because it’s dangerous for anyone here along the border,” said Candelario Vizcarra, a San Luis farmworker who lives in Mexico.

“They don’t go and attack nobody,” added Greg, a U.S. citizen who works in sales. “It’s just to protect the borders, and I agree.”

Others with business ties in San Luis agreed with Greg, who didn’t want to share his last name with VOA. But they were careful not to voice their opinions out of concern they might appear to be anti-immigrant.

María Herrera, a minimum-wage farmworker, mother, and permanent resident in Arizona, agrees that drug trafficking is a problem and that it is affecting the town’s children, some as young as 12.

“They don’t have work, there is no work, there’s nothing,” Herrera said. “And their best option a lot of times is to go the easy route: rob, use drugs, or act as drug mules (carry drugs) across the border.”

Creating more well-paying jobs would be her suggestion. Absent that, Herrera is skeptical of the National Guard troops’ presence. She worries about the effect of a militarized border on the undocumented.

“Like all Latinos, we worry about what happens to other families like our own, because one way or another, many are family or relatives of some friend of ours that we have in common.

“In the worst cases, they’ll deport the father,” Herrera continued, “and the mother and kids remain here — protected by whom?”​

Common ground

In Calexico, California, 127 kilometers northwest of San Luis, across subtropical desert, a section of 9-meter bollard-style replacement fence towers over the palms and brush to its south. Border Patrol sector supervisor Jorge Rivera says he is grateful for the upgrade because of another issue: the safety of his agents.

“Criminal organizations come over and they attack us with rocks; they throw any type of object toward us to avoid us apprehending any type of illegal activity,” Rivera told VOA.

In fiscal 2017, the U.S. Border Patrol in the El Centro Sector of southern California reported 21 assaults against agents and seized more than 200 kilos of cocaine, 690 kilos of methamphetamine and 70,000 grams of heroin.

But unlike San Luis, some residents concerned about illegal immigration in El Centro bring up a line of reasoning more in tune with pro-Trump areas of the country, including the narrative that those crossing the border illegally are an economic burden on society.

“They are leeching our system, and I pay so much (in) taxes every month,” said Steve Andrade, who runs a security management company. “It … (makes me angry) that all my money goes to those people. … I get nothing out of it!”

Ironically, Andrade admits to once being homeless and an undocumented immigrant himself, crossing multiple times from Mexicali until he successfully evaded the U.S. Border Patrol and settled in California in the early 1980s.

He maintains the Mexican border town was different then.

“In my time, there was nothing, no opportunities … to even survive Mexicali,” Andrade said. “There were no shelters to help you or anything.”

Andrade makes his stance on the wall clear — “go for it!” — but others who claim illegal immigration is a danger have other ideas.

Bill DuBois, an El Centro-area resident and owner of a local firearms store, holds firm that “if one illegal crosser gets across, the border is not secure.” But unlike Andrade, the lifelong Californian doesn’t subscribe to the idea of a wall.

“The only way to solve the problem of illegal immigration is to make things better in the other people’s home countries,” DuBois said.
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