President Donald Trump is asking whether three American college basketball players will thank him for helping secure their release from custody in China after being accused of shoplifting.

In a tweet Wednesday, Trump said the players “were headed for 10 years in jail!”

Trump asked his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to personally intervene in the case when the two leaders met during his visit to Beijing last week.

The players, LiAngelo Ball, Cody Riley and Jalen Hill, were questioned for allegedly stealing sunglasses from a Louis Vuitton store in Hangzhou. They were released on bail last week, but had been told to remain in Hangzhou until the legal process was completed.

The players returned home Tuesday.

 
…

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said on Tuesday that he believes NAFTA negotiations will produce “some sort” of a deal for President Donald Trump to evaluate but repeated his warnings that the United States will walk away from the trade pact if key problems are unresolved.

Ross, speaking before the start of a fifth round of talks this week to modernize the North American Free Trade Agreement, said Mexico and Canada would suffer far more than the United States if the pact is dissolved.

“I would certainly prefer them to come to their senses and make a sensible deal,” Ross told a Wall Street Journal CEO forum.

“In any negotiation if you have one party that is not in fact prepared to walk away over whatever are the threshold issues, that party is going to lose,” Ross added.

Trump has relentlessly criticized NAFTA for draining U.S. manufacturing jobs to Mexico, calling it “the worst trade deal ever made” and threatening to scrap it unless it can be improved to reduce U.S. trade deficits with Mexico and Canada.

Ross said Trump’s “general point of view is that no deal is better than a terrible deal,” but added that he does not know how Trump will evaluate a deal resulting from negotiations.

“Some sort of a draft will land on his desk. So it will be a binary decision in that sense,” Ross said.

At negotiations resuming in Mexico City on Thursday, Mexico and Canada are expected to respond to tough demands from the United States such as a five-year sunset clause that would effectively trigger frequent renegotiations as well as a controversial U.S.-specific content rule for automotive products and far higher regional automotive content.

Ross gave no indication that U.S. negotiators would soften their stance on these topics, which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce counts among “poison pill” demands that could sink the talks.

Asked whether the content demands that 85 percent of a car’s value be produced within the region and 50 percent in the United States would simply drive auto and parts production to Asia, as industry executives have warned Ross said: “We don’t think so.

We believe there will be a different thing because of all the other changes that we’re making.”

He said Republican tax reform efforts including lower rates and immediate expensing of capital expenditure costs and regulatory changes would lower the cost of doing business and keep the United States attractive for automotive investment.

Trump has wanted a five-year sunset clause for trade agreements since he began campaigning for president Ross said, to ensure that they deliver promised benefits.

“The reason we want it is that the tragic truth is that forecasts that were made when trade agreements were entered into, never have been achieved, at least in the case of the U.S.”
…

The first room in the former warehouse, now a detention center, is a waiting area where visitors check in and wait to see whether they will be allowed to visit a detainee.

Security screening is similar to that at an airport checkpoint. Visitors must show identification and leave belongings in a locker. No phones. No pictures. No recording of any kind.

“This one is actually nice. She is helpful,” a local volunteer who regularly visits detainees tells me about the security official standing behind the window. Above the window: “United We Stand.”

On a dead end road in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the Elizabeth Detention Center is an immigration jail that holds about 285 people. Privately owned, it is run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the fifth-largest corrections company in the United States.

The center is in an industrial area surrounded by parking lots, a railroad, a freight station and the New Jersey Turnpike — a geographic location that works as an invisible wall.

Current U.S. policy is to detain those who ask for asylum once they reach a U.S. port of entry regardless of whether they have a valid visa. The Elizabeth Detention Center is a 15-minute drive from Newark Liberty International Airport, one of the busiest entry points to the U.S. for international arrivals.

A name and a number

It is late afternoon at the end of October; about 30 people are waiting to see friends or loved ones inside the Elizabeth facility. All the blue plastic chairs are taken, and there is a check-in line. Some wait outside. Church groups, mothers and children, and other people visiting loved ones wait their turn. Also, volunteers from local nonprofit groups visit detainees every week.

I have been given the name and alien number of a detainee by First Friends, an immigrant advocacy group. It’s all the information I need to be admitted as a volunteer visitor. The goal of the visitation program, according to First Friends organizers, is to give immigrants a moment of support and friendship.

I am asked to show identification. My Maryland driver’s license is met with a skeptical look by the officer. She double-checks front and back, but I get the green light to enter. Like all visitors, I must go through a metal detector, take my shoes and jacket off, and leave my pen and notebook behind. I then step inside a large metal jail door that closes with a clank before another slides open on the other side.

“I never get used to this sound,” another visitor tells me.

Once the gates of an immigration detention center close on asylum seekers, they may not open again for months. As of September, immigration officials say, there were more than 38,000 immigrants detained nationwide in 203 facilities. Detainees leave a detention center once their cases have been gone through the immigration process, which could mean authorization for them to live in the United States or deportation.

The visitation area is filled with round tables and chairs. Detainees must sit facing officers who are posted on the right side of the room. In the back, on a single row of chairs, immigrants wait for their visitors.

Under a Statue of Liberty mural, I sit at a round table and face Faras Khan from Pakistan, who is in the midst of deportation proceedings. His girlfriend is also visiting. As a corrections officer watches from the side of the room, Khan talks about his case, how he feels he is an American because he has not lived in Pakistan since he was a 1-year-old.

Visa overstayed

Khan’s father sought asylum after overstaying a nonimmigrant visa, claiming he had been persecuted in Pakistan. At the time, Khan, still a child, was listed as a derivative beneficiary. His father’s asylum was denied, and he was deported to Pakistan.

But Khan, now in his late 20s and diagnosed as bipolar, is fighting to stay. He was taken into custody after a meeting with immigration officials and has been detained for more than six months.

A 2016 Human Rights First report shows that clients held at New Jersey facilities, who were represented by Human Rights First pro bono attorneys, were detained for an average of eight months.

After detention

Edafe Okporo was held at Elizabeth for five months. He was taken there after his flight landed at Newark, and he requested asylum.

“I was told by immigration that they don’t have housing for immigrants, arriving alien, so I was told I was going to be taken to a jail,” Okporo said.

Okporo is from Nigeria, where he was working as an LGBTQ rights and public health activist in a country that does not recognize gay rights and criminalizes gay activity. In October 2016, he won an award from a New York human rights organization that published a photo of him and exposed his work.

“The community was calling for my execution, so I had to flee. I had a U.S. visa, and that was the only travel document I had to travel with,” Okporo said.

Okporo said his time in detention put him in a deep depression.

The rooms in Elizabeth, he said, are not private. Though there is a “privacy wall” inside showers and toilets, a person can still see what others are doing.

“I got alone. Lonely. … I’ve never been in that kind of isolation before. You are instructed on what to do and what not to do. And they are giving you food to eat, whether you like it or not, you just do it,” he said.

Anxiously waiting

Not knowing the outcome of his case also added to his anxiety.

“If I lose, I would be returning to my country. If I win, I would be released. Where I would be released? I was depressed because my family … I do not have communications because my family do not accept me because of my sexual orientation,” he said.

Okporo said that besides the volunteer visitation program, he found a way out in books and meditation.

“I love reading. I increased my passion for reading by always going to the library and picking up books to read,” he said. “Even [though] my body was incarcerated, my body was free because I was able to go through a day-to-day activity of how to meditate and get a grip of my mind.”

Okporo was granted asylum.

The American Friends Service Committee, which represents immigrants held in New Jersey detention facilities pro bono, reports that between February 2015 and September 2016 it represented 80 asylum seekers. Of those, 40 received asylum. All remained in detention while their claims were adjudicated.

Okporo will be eligible to apply for legal permanent resident status in one year. But he has already begun his new life in America. With First Friends’ help, he has gotten three jobs.

“I produced a cookbook,” he said proudly, “which featured 40 refugees from different countries around the world.”
…

An array of surveys of voter approval ratings for U.S. President Donald Trump continue to be mired in the 30 percent range, but he contended Tuesday that an outlier poll with a higher mark proves the others are wrong.

The latest survey by Quinnipiac University showed American voters disapprove of Trump’s nearly 10-month White House tenure by a 58-to-35 percent margin, with 40 percent saying he is fit to serve as president and 57 percent he is not.

Other recent surveys showed similar results, with Gallup on Tuesday giving Trump a 57-38 disapproval rating. Last week, Reuters/Ipsos pegged his negative standing at 60-35, while The Washington Post-ABC News survey in early October showed a negative reading of 59-37, which it said was the lowest in seven decades at this point in the four-year terms of U.S. presidents.

However, Trump, in a Twitter comment, cited Monday’s result from the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports, which showed him at a 53-46 negative standing and attacked mainstream national news outlets for citing the polls with his approval ratings in the 30-percent range.

“One of the most accurate polls last time around,” Trump said of Rasmussen. “But #FakeNews likes to say we’re in the 30’s. They are wrong. Some people think numbers could be in the 50’s. Together, WE will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

By Tuesday, the Rasmussen polling edged down for Trump, with a 54-44 negative reading.

Quinnipiac pollster Tim Malloy said, “President Donald Trump returns from his big Asia trip to find numbers frozen in the negative. Ominously, there is creeping slippage in (Trump’s political) base.”

Quinnipiac said that American voters by a 58-to-37-percent margin think that Trump is not honest, by 59-38 that he does not have good leadership skills, by 59-39 that he does not care about average Americans, by 65-30 that he is not level-headed and by 62-34 that he does not share their values.

On the plus side, Quinnipiac said by a 58-39 margin, voters think Trump is a strong person and by 55-41 that he is intelligent.
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A proposal by the U.S. Senate to change the way shares in startup companies are taxed incited panic and dread in Silicon Valley on Monday, with startup founders and investors warning of nothing less than the demise of their industry should the proposal become law.

The provision in the Senate’s tax reform plan, which appeared to catch the industry by surprise, involves the treatment of employee stock options. These options give the holder the right to purchase shares in the future at a set price and can be very valuable if a company does well and the share price increases.

Options are often a major portion of the compensation for startup employees and founders, who take lower salaries in anticipation of a big payout if their startup takes off. Options typically vest over a four-year period.

Senate Republicans have now proposed taxing those stock options as they vest and before startup employees have the opportunity to cash them in, resulting in annual tax bills that could easily climb into the tens of thousands of dollars, say startup founders and venture capitalists.

“If there were a single piece of legislation to adversely affect startups, it would be this,” said Venky Ganesan, managing director at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. “Everyone is freaked out.”

Justin Field, vice president of government affairs at the National Venture Capital Association, said that the Senate’s proposed tax change would be “crippling” to the startup industry.

How far the provision gets remains to be seen. The National Venture Capital Association was successful in getting a similar proposal removed from the House tax bill, although it “didn’t fully appreciate” the Senate’s intention to add the tax provision, Field said.

The association also helped to steer lawmakers away from a proposal discussed late last year to tax venture capitalists’ profits on investments at a higher rate.

Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a member of the Senate Committee on Finance, has filed an amendment to repeal the provision in the tax bill, according to his spokesman.

A new proposal

Under current tax code, employees are taxed only when they exercise their options. Options are exercised when the price they were granted at–known as the strike price–is lower than the share price, and some shares can then be sold to pay the taxes.

But the Senate proposal would require startup employees to pay regular income tax on the value gain of their stock options even before they are exercised. These options are illiquid assets, and cannot be spent or saved.

“What this would mean is every month, when your equity compensation vests a little bit, you will owe taxes on it even though you can’t do anything with that equity compensation,” Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures, wrote on his blog Monday.

For instance, if a startup employee receives stock options at a dollar per share, and the shares increase in value by $1 every year during the four-year vesting period, the employee would have to pay income tax on $1 per share after the first year, pay again on the $1 increase in value after the second year, and so on.

When that employee owns hundreds of thousands and even millions of shares, that is a hefty bill to pay. And there is always the risk the startup will eventually fail.

“This reform will force the average employee to pay taxes on that bet well before they even know if it’s a winning ticket,” said Amanda Kahlow, founder and executive chairman of marketing data startup 6sense.

For startup founders in particular, such a tax bill could be ruinous.

“It would mean that I would have to sell the company,” said Shoaib Makani, founder and chief executive of long-haul trucking startup KeepTruckin. “I have zero net worth aside from the common stock I hold in the company. It would be impossible. I would be in default.”

Some executives in the startup industry, however, have pushed for companies to move toward bigger salaries so employees are not so dependent on options to buy a house or pay for other large expenses. And when startups suffer valuation cuts, employees can end up with worthless options.

The Senate’s proposal came as a revenue-generating measure to help offset tax breaks in the bill. A spokesman for Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican and chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, did not respond to requests for comment and other Republicans on the committee were not immediately available.

A spokeswoman for Senator Ron Wyden, the committee’s ranking member and a Democrat, said he was aware of concerns that the provision would limit startups’ ability to attract talent.
…

Attorney General Jeff Sessions returns to Capitol Hill this week amid growing evidence of contacts between Russians and associates of President Donald Trump, bracing for an onslaught of lawmaker questions about how much he knew of that outreach during last year’s White House campaign.

The appearance before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday follows a guilty plea from one Trump campaign aide who served on a foreign policy council that Sessions chaired, as well as statements from another adviser who said he’d advised the then-GOP Alabama senator about an upcoming trip to Russia.

Those details complicate Sessions’ effort to downplay knowledge of the campaign’s foreign contacts, and Democratic lawmakers who already contended the attorney general had not been forthcoming with them have signaled that questions about the new revelations are likely to dominate what could otherwise have been a routine oversight hearing.

“These facts appear to contradict your sworn testimony on several occasions,” Democrats from the committee said in a letter to Sessions last week.

Republicans, for their part, are likely to press Sessions on their demands for investigations into the Clinton Foundation and an Obama-era purchase of American uranium mines by a Russian-backed company.

In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said Sessions had directed “senior federal prosecutors” to “evaluate certain issues” raised in letters sent by Republican lawmakers, and to determine whether investigations – or the possible appointment of a special counsel – were warranted. 

Sessions, an early Trump backer who led a foreign policy advisory council during the campaign, has been shadowed for months by questions about his own communications with Russians and by contacts of others in the Trump orbit. That issue has been at the forefront of each of his congressional hearings even as Sessions has labored to promote the Justice Department’s work and priorities, and Tuesday’s appearance is unlikely to be an exception.

Earlier in the year

At his January confirmation hearing, Sessions told Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., that “I did not have communications” with the Russians during the campaign and said he was “unaware” of contacts between others in the campaign and Russia. Yet he recused himself in March from overseeing the Justice Department’s investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin after acknowledging two previously undisclosed encounters with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

He struck a similar note before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, when he denied knowledge of communications between Russians and Trump campaign officials.

“I did not and I’m not aware of anyone else that did, and I don’t believe it happened,” Sessions said under questioning, again from Franken.

But that narrative has been challenged by a pair of recent events, most notably a guilty plea from George Papadopoulos, who last month admitted in court to lying to the FBI about his own foreign contacts. He was part of a foreign policy council that Sessions chaired, and the two are among the men in a March 2016 photograph that Trump posted on social media. Charging documents in that case indicate that Papadopoulos told the council “that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump” and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

One of the attendees at that meeting, J.D. Gordon, recalled that Sessions quickly “shut him down and said, ‘We’re not going to do that.”’

Gordon has also said that Papadopoulos went around him and Sessions and that they did not know he had continued to try to arrange such a meeting.

Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee advised Sessions in a letter last week that they intended to press him on what they said were “inconsistencies” between the attorney general’s past statements and the new revelations.

“If, as recent reports suggest, you rejected Mr. Papadopoulos’s suggestion that President Trump meet with Vladimir Putin at that March 31 meeting – a fact you appear to have remembered only after Mr. Papadopoulos’s account was made public – it seems likely that you were ‘aware’ of communications between the Russian government and surrogates of the Trump campaign,” the letter states.

Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores declined to comment Monday.

Adding to the questions for Sessions was the release by the House Intelligence Committee last week of a transcript of a private interview with Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to the campaign who acknowledged that he had contact with a high-level Russian official while on a trip to Russia last year.

Page told the panel he had informed some members of the Trump campaign about the trip, including Sessions. He said he mentioned in passing to Sessions that he was preparing to visit Russia and Sessions “had no reaction whatsoever.”
…

North Korea warned Monday that the unprecedented deployment of three U.S. aircraft carrier groups “taking up a strike posture” around the Korean peninsula is making it impossible to predict when nuclear war will break out.

North Korea’s U.N. ambassador, Ja Song Nam, said in a letter to Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres that the joint military exercises with South Korea are creating “the worst ever situation prevailing in and around the Korean peninsula.”

Along with the three carrier groups, he said, the U.S. has reactivated round-the-clock sorties with nuclear-capable B-52 strategic bombers “which existed during the Cold War times.”

He also said the U.S. is maintaining “a surprise strike posture with frequent flights of B-1B and B-2 formations to the airspace of South Korea.”

“The large-scale nuclear war exercises and blackmails, which the U.S. staged for a whole year without a break in collaboration with its followers to stifle our republic, make one conclude that the option we have taken was the right one and we should go along the way to the last,” Ja said.

He didn’t elaborate on what “the last” might be, but North Korea has launched ballistic missiles that have the potential to strike the U.S. mainland, and it recently conducted its largest-ever underground nuclear explosion. It has also threatened to explode another nuclear bomb above the Pacific Ocean.

The four-day joint naval exercises by the U.S. and South Korea, which began Saturday in waters off the South’s eastern coast, were described by military officials as a clear warning to North Korea. They involve the carrier battle groups of the USS Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt and Nimitz, which include 11 U.S. Aegis ships that can track missiles, and seven South Korean naval vessels.

Seoul’s military said in a statement that the exercises aim to enhance the combined U.S. and South Korean operational and aerial strike capabilities and to display “strong will and firm military readiness to defeat any provocation by North Korea with dominant force in the event of crisis.”

According to the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet, it is the first time since a 2007 exercise near Guam that three U.S. carrier strike groups have operated together in the western Pacific.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis insisted on Monday that the carrier maneuvers are not extraordinary.

“There’s no big message” intended for North Korea or anyone else, he told reporters in an impromptu exchange in a Pentagon hallway. “This is what we normally do with allies.”

Reminded that it had been 10 years since the last three-carrier exercise, Mattis noted that the Navy has a limited number of carriers and can’t often put three in the same place.

“It’s just a normal operation,” he said.

The military drills come amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to Asia, which has been dominated by discussions over the North Korean nuclear threat.

Ja accused the U.N. Security Council in Monday’s letter of repeatedly “turning a blind eye to the nuclear war exercises of the United States, who is hell bent on bringing a catastrophic disaster to humanity.” He said the exercises raise serious concern about “the double standard” of the U.N.’s most powerful body.

He also referenced Trump’s September speech to the U.N. General Assembly in which the president said that if the U.S. is “forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

Trump tweeted soon after making the speech that Korea’s leadership “won’t be around much longer” if it continued its provocations, a declaration that led the North’s foreign minister to assert that Trump had “declared war on our country.”

Ja said Monday the U.S. “is now running amok for war exercises by introducing nuclear war equipment in and around the Korean peninsula, thereby proving that the U.S. itself is the major offender of the escalation of tension and undermining of the peace.”’

Ja asked Guterres to circulate the letter to the Security Council and the General Assembly, and also asked him to use his power under Article 99 of the U.N. Charter to bring to the Security Council’s attention “the danger being posed by the U.S. nuclear war exercises which are clearly threats to international peace and security.”
…

Former Vice President Joe Biden says he wouldn’t have agreed to replace Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee under any circumstances.

Biden tells NBC’s “Today” show he had decided not to run last year, and says, “I would have never done that.”

He was asked about former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile’s book, which says she considered replacing Clinton with Biden because of health concerns. Biden says, “I wouldn’t have taken” Clinton’s place as the party’s standard-bearer.

Biden says he was for Clinton, but that he worried about her prospects. He says not long before the election, “It hit me like a ton of bricks, there was no discussion of Issues” in her campaign.

Biden also said once again that he hasn’t decided about running in 2020.

 
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Former Vice President Joe Biden said he is uncertain about a run for president in 2020, but indicated he’s looking for fresh blood to lead the Democratic Party back to the White House.

“I’ve done it a long time,” said Biden, who previously ran for president in 1988 and 2008, “and I’m just not sure it’s the appropriate thing for me to do.”

His comments came in an interview with Snapchat’s “Good Luck America” set to be released Tuesday morning, in one of Biden’s first on-camera interviews since leaving office in January. The Associated Press was provided with an exclusive preview of the interview.

Biden suggested that if “no one steps up,” he’d be open to giving it another try. 

“I’m not doing anything to run,” he said. “I’m not taking names, I’m not raising money, I’m not talking to anybody, but something’s got to happen.”

Democratic roster

Biden has launched a handful of outside political and policy organizations since leaving the Obama administration, including the Biden Foundation, formed to advocate for his domestic priorities.

The roster of Democrats considering a White House run has swelled well into the double-digits, with potential candidates emboldened by President Donald Trump’s historically low poll numbers.

Biden was interviewed alongside Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican, at the University of Delaware last month.

“We’re both hoping that both our parties generate some real energetic people who have the depth and the capacity to do it,” Biden said of the pair.

Biden, 74, considered a run for the Oval Office in 2016, but decided against it, later citing the trauma of his son Beau’s death to cancer in May 2015 for keeping him from the race. The painful subject forms the story of his new memoir, Promise Me, Dad, set for release this week. Biden is launching a month-long tour to promote the book’s publication. He’s become a vocal critic of Trump’s administration in public appearances in recent months.

“We gotta turn this ship around,” Biden said of the country. “And I’d much prefer to be helping someone turn it around than being the guy trying to turn it around.”

Right decision in 2016

In an interview with Oprah Winfrey released Sunday, Biden said he regrets not being in the White House, but not his decision to stay on the sidelines last year. 

“I don’t regret the decision I made because it’s the right decision for my family,” he said.

Kasich, who has been an outspoken opponent of Trump’s since he challenged him for the Republican nomination in 2016, declined to address his own 2020 plans. “You hold the pen and the Lord will write the sentence,” he said.
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Allegations of sexual misconduct against a Republican Senate candidate have thrown the party into chaos at a critical time – as Republicans make a major push to overhaul America’s tax code and as President Donald Trump concludes a marathon Asia trip. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports, many Republican lawmakers are denouncing or distancing themselves from firebrand Christian conservative Roy Moore, who, until last week, had been heavily favored to win next month’s special election for a Senate seat in Republican-leaning Alabama.
…

The chairman of the House’s tax-writing committee said Sunday that he’s confident that chamber won’t go along with the Senate’s proposal to eliminate the deduction for property taxes, setting up a major flashpoint as Republicans in the House and Senate aim to put a tax cut bill on President Donald Trump’s desk before Christmas.

The GOP is moving urgently to push forward on the first rewrite of the U.S. tax code in three decades, but key differences promise to complicate the effort.

Among the biggest differences in the two bills that have emerged: the House bill allows homeowners to deduct up to $10,000 in property taxes while the Senate proposal unveiled by GOP leaders last week eliminates the entire deduction.

The deduction is particularly important to residents in states with high property values or tax rates, such as New Jersey, Illinois, California and New York. Congressman Kevin Brady, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said he worked with lawmakers in those states to ensure the House bill “delivers this relief,” and he was committed to ensuring it stays in the final package.

“It’s important to make sure that people keep more of what they learn, even in these high-tax states,” Brady, R-Texas, said during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”

Both the House and Senate bill would eliminate deductions for state and local income taxes and sales taxes paid. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Republicans should fully restore what is referred to as the SALT deduction, or millions of middle-class families would end up paying higher federal income taxes, not less.

“The House’s so-called ‘compromise’ would be saying to the middle class we’ll only chop off four of your fingers instead of all five,” Schumer said in a statement.

 
…

The arrival of more than than 130,000 Puerto Ricans in Florida since Hurricane Maria has some officials anticipating a political shakeup in a battleground state dominated by the Republican party.

Both parties are actively courting new arrivals to Florida, which President Donald Trump won last year by 112,000 votes out of 9.6 million cast.

Many Puerto Ricans have expressed outrage over Trump’s handling of the storm but have applauded efforts by Republican Gov. Rick Scott to welcome them.

As U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans can vote in federal elections when they move to the mainland. Newcomers must register as voters by next July 30 to vote in primaries ahead of the 2018 general election of a new governor to replace term-limited Scott and choose Florida’s congressional delegation.

Javier Gonzalez has joined a human tide of more than 130,000 U.S. citizens arriving in Florida since Hurricane Maria wrecked Puerto Rico, grateful for a place to start over but resenting how their island has been treated since the disaster.

More than a million Puerto Ricans — about 5 percent of Florida’s population — already call the state home, and given the outrage many feel over President Donald Trump’s handling of the storm, political observers say this voting bloc could loosen the Republican Party’s hold on this battleground state.

Gonzalez, 38, saw the storm destroy the restaurant he opened with his father five years ago. Without power or reliable water, he became violently ill from food poisoning for three weeks. Finally, he packed his bags, determined to make his future in Miami instead.

“There is resentment, and we feel abandoned compared to Texas and Florida,” Gonzalez said. “We were desperate for help.”

Like any Puerto Rican, Gonzalez can vote in all elections now that he’s moved to the mainland. He doesn’t plan to register for any party, but he follows the news and understands their platforms. He’s aware of Trump’s tweets.

“It’s not right that we’ve fought from World War I, to Vietnam and Afghanistan and that the first thing the president says is: ‘You have a large debt, big problems and have cost us millions,'” Gonzalez added.

Puerto Ricans are not the gift to the Republican Party that the anti-Castro Cuban diaspora has been historically. They’ve tended to favor Democrats, given their support for public education and social services. Around 70 percent of Florida’s non-Cuban Latinos voted for Hillary Clinton.

Both parties are courting the new arrivals to Florida, which Trump won last year by just 112,000 votes out of 9.6 million cast.

“There is an intent to grab those who are coming,” said Rep. Robert Asencio, a Democrat of Puerto Rican descent who represents Miami in the Florida House and leads the Miami-Dade Committee for Hurricane Maria Relief.

“A lot of my colleagues say they are not politicizing this, but there is an effort to bring people either to the Democratic or the Republican side,” Asencio said.

Newcomers must register by next July 30 to vote in 2018 for a new governor to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Rick Scott and choose Florida’s congressional delegation, now 11 Democrats and 16 Republicans. Democratic U.S. Senator Bill Nelson also defends his seat next year, and Scott, who has been applauded for helping evacuees, is expected to challenge him in what could be a close race.

Scott set up three disaster relief centers to help arrivals with driver’s licenses, job searches, and disaster aid applications. Scott also asked education officials to waive public school enrollment rules for evacuated islanders, and to give college-bound evacuees the same tuition breaks state residents get.

Asencio calls Scott’s actions “damage control,” given the multimillionaire governor’s close relationship with Trump, who offended Puerto Ricans by tweeting they wanted “everything to be done for them” rather than taking responsibility for their own recovery. They also resent Trump’s rating of his own disaster response as a “10 out of 10,” blaming his administration for delays that exposed their families to illness and misery.

The island still faces a lengthy and painful recovery after the storm took down the entire electrical grid, leaving hospitals in the dark and closing schools for several weeks. Initial projections that 95 percent of the people will have power restored by year’s end now look optimistic.

Maria’s evacuees are following waves of people frustrated by Puerto Rico’s unemployment and debt crisis who settled in Central Florida, shifting from New York, the favored destination of previous generations. Of the more than 140,000 islanders estimated to have left since the storm, more than 130,000 went to Florida, where Puerto Ricans may soon displace Cubans as the largest Latino group.

State Rep. Rene Plasencia, a Republican from Orlando, predicts that Scott’s warm welcome will leave a bigger impression on the newcomers than any Trump tweets.

“For whatever people think of the president, you have to take into consideration the actions of Governor Scott,” said Plasencia, whose mother and wife are from Puerto Rico. “People aren’t making decisions out of a sequence of tweets… It makes good news, but it doesn’t make political shifts.”

Billionaires Charles and David Koch also are involved, funding the Libre Initiative, which welcomed hundreds of evacuees on the first cruise ship to arrive from San Juan.

Cesar Grajales, who lobbies for Libre, says they’re helping evacuees learn English and connect with community and business leaders.

Democrats hope Colombian-American Annette Taddeo’s recent underdog state Senate victory against a well-funded Republican in South Florida shows her anti-Trump message will keep resonating.

“It is a strong indication that voters are paying attention, and they are angry,” said Cristobal Alex, president of the Latino Victory Project. “We wouldn’t have the devastation and abandonment of Puerto Rico without Donald Trump. People will look at that.”

On the island, Puerto Rico’s lack of statehood means they can’t vote in general presidential elections, and can only send a non-voting representative to Congress. On the mainland, they’ll have more power.

“I know for a fact that we are well educated and we are going to come here to work,” Gonzalez said. “And yes, we are going to make a voice. We are going to make a bigger voice than before.”

 
…

Two former CIA employees are accusing the Trump administration’s choice for CIA chief watchdog of being less than candid when he told Congress he didn’t know about any active whistleblower complaints against him.

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Christopher Sharpley, the current acting inspector general who’s in line for the permanent job, about complaints that he and other managers participated in retaliation against CIA workers who alerted congressional committees and other authorities about alleged misconduct.

“I’m unaware of any open investigations on me, the details of any complaints about me,” Sharpley testified at his confirmation hearing last month.

He said he might not know because there is a process providing confidentiality to anyone who wants to file a complaint against government officials, who often are individually named in cases against management.

“No action or conclusions of wrongdoing have been made about my career or anything that I’ve done,” Sharpley added.

The committee is still considering Sharpley’s nomination.

​Senators skeptical

Sens. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Ron Wyden say they find it hard to believe Sharpley didn’t know about the complaints when he testified. They said one of the open cases is being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog.

They say the inspector general’s office, which is looking into the CIA matter to avoid a conflict of interest, asked Sharpley in January for documents. The office asked to interview Sharpley on Oct. 12. Sharpley’s office said he wouldn’t be available until after Oct. 17, the day he testified to senators.

“How is it possible that he could have been unaware of any open investigations against him at the time he testified?” Grassley, R-Iowa, and Wyden, D-Ore., asked in a letter they wrote to Senate intelligence committee leaders.

​Committee vote delayed

GOP Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, had planned a vote on Sharpley’s nomination last month. It has been delayed while the committee holds discussions about the whistleblower cases, according to someone familiar with the matter. The person wasn’t authorized to discuss the issue and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani defended Sharpley’s five-year tenure at the agency as deputy and then acting inspector general. He said Sharpley has 36 years of investigative and law enforcement experience and created two inspectors general offices from scratch within the federal government.

“Whether there are any complaints or investigations regarding Mr. Sharpley is not something we could confirm or comment on,” Trapani said. “What we can say is that Mr. Sharpley has had a sterling five-year career at CIA and there have never been any findings of wrongdoing or misconduct of any sort by Mr. Sharpley during his tenure here.”

Testimony challenged

Documents provided to the AP by attorneys representing two former CIA employees challenge Sharpley’s testimony.

They point to discord over several years within the CIA’s inspector general’s office, an independent unit created in 1989 to oversee the spy agency. It’s charged with stopping waste, fraud and mismanagement and promoting accountability through audits, inspections, investigations and reviews of CIA programs and operations — overt and covert.

John Tye, executive director of Whistleblower Aid, who is representing two of the complainants alleging retaliation by Sharpley and other senior managers, said some discord in the office stemmed from a case several years ago involving kickbacks from contractors.

The Justice Department announced in 2013 that three CIA contractors had agreed to pay the United States $3 million to settle allegations that they provided meals, entertainment, gifts and tickets to sporting events to CIA employees and outside consultants to help get business steered their way.

The criminal case fell apart after intelligence employees discovered that evidence in the case was being fabricated and witness statements were being altered. These employees secretly went around Sharpley and then CIA Inspector General David Buckley and contacted the U.S. attorney’s office. Tye said that after learning about the falsified evidence, a guilty plea in the case, which had been accepted by a judge, was voided at the request of the U.S. attorney.

Afterward, leaders at the CIA inspector’s office asked auditors across town at the Federal Housing Finance Agency to look into their in-house matter. It’s unclear why that agency — a place where Sharpley previously worked — was chosen to handle the matter. Results of that investigation haven’t been revealed.

In an Oct. 30 letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tye said that during the FHFA probe, Sharpley improperly “interrupted witness interviews, walking in special designated conference rooms to learn the names of the whistleblowers within his staff” who reported evidence tampering to outside oversight bodies. Tye said no one within the CIA inspector general’s office was prosecuted or disciplined for evidence tampering.

“Sharpley successfully identified some, but not all, of the whistleblowers,” Tye said. He said retaliation involved forcing administrative leave, security clearance decisions and other harassment.

Complainants’ stories

One complainant is Jonathan Kaplan, 59, a former special agent and investigator in the CIA’s inspector general’s office who spent 33 years at the agency. He claims that before he went to talk to staff at the House Intelligence Committee about the contactors case, he queried a computer in his office to refresh his memory on the details.

He later received a formal letter of warning for searching the computer system. That ultimately prevented him from renewing his security clearance, effectively ending his government career. He contacted an inspector general overseeing all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies and received a letter earlier this year acknowledging that office was handling the case.

A second complainant is Andrew Bakaj, 35, who worked in the CIA inspector general’s office as a special agent from 2012 to 2015. He was instrumental indeveloping agency regulations governing whistleblower reprisal investigations.

When some of his colleagues came to him to allege misconduct in the office, he referred them to the same inspector general Kaplan went to. It was an office Bakaj and his colleagues had been told not to cooperate with.

He, too, searched on the office computer on a matter he was questioned about and had worked on as part of an investigation conducted by the inspector general that oversees all U.S. intelligence agencies. Two weeks later, superiors summoned him and put him on paid leave that lasted 15 months. He then resigned.
…

Lowell, a Massachusetts mill town whose minorities nearly makeup a majority of its residents, has a history of all-white governing bodies. But in a citywide election this week, driven by a debate over the high school’s fate, voters elected two Cambodian-Americans, putting one on the City Council and the other on the School Committee.

The two victories in the city, which has the second-largest Cambodian-American community in the U.S. after Long Beach, California, came as voters nationwide elected a diverse group of candidates that included refugees, immigrants and members of the LGBT community, as well as racial and ethnic minorities. 

The electoral wins also came during a time of rising xenophobia and white supremacy in the country.

In Lowell, residents also made history Tuesday by electing the first minority to the School Committee, as the school board is called. Cambodian-American Dominik Hok Lay came in fourth in the vote for six open seats.

Vesna Nuon, a Cambodian-born candidate, garnered the most votes — 6,518 out of 90,756 — cast for the nine open Lowell City Council seats. Nuon previously served on the council for one term, 2011-2012.

‘We are one city’

“I think it is a historical day in the city,” said Rodney Elliott, an incumbent who was re-elected. He credited his victory, in part, to allies in the Cambodian community. “We have a Cambodian city councilor and we have a Cambodian School Committee person. It is good for the city.

“I think it is a strong message that we are one city, and that we are starting to come together and understand and work together,” Elliott said.

About 49.2 percent of Lowell’s population, which totals a little more than 110,000, form the minority bloc, of which Asian-Americans are the largest group. Since 1999, only four minority candidates have been elected to the City Council.

Tuesday’s success is important for the city’s almost majority.

In May, several minority citizens filed a lawsuit alleging the city’s at-large, or “winner-take-all,” voting system dilutes the minority vote and discriminates against candidates from minority communities.

On Oct. 17, at the first public hearing on Huot v. City of Lowell in U.S. District Court, Judge William Young denied the city’s motion to dismiss. This means Lowell may find itself headed to trial against some of its minority residents, unless the council decides to opt for a change from within.

Nuon, 50, came to the U.S. in 1982 as a Cambodian refugee. He said the victory is for Lowell residents, especially the Cambodian community, who he says have trusted in his leadership vision in the city.

“This success is not just for me, but for Cambodian community and Lowell residents as a whole,” Nuon said. “Now it is time to work together for a better Lowell.”

A single-issue election?

Although this was an election when minorities were expected to obtain representation on the two city panels, the future of Lowell High School, whether to build a new school in a new location or renovate the current downtown school, emerged as the largest issue that drew voters to the polls.

The high school issue was pervasive in all races. Of the 18 City Council candidates, 10 supported the estimated $350 million renovation, while eight wanted to spend an estimated $334 million to build a new school nearer to the outlying playing fields.

In June, the City Council voted 5-4 to relocate the high school to Cawley Stadium in Belvidere, a predominantly white and well-to-do enclave. Sixty percent of those who voted in the election Tuesday, which included a measure on the high school, came from Belvidere, according to an analysis in the local newspaper the Lowell Sun.

Sokhary Chau, a Cambodian-born American candidate, lost his bid for the City Council.

A first-time candidate who favored relocating the high school, Chau said he was disappointed with the results, saying the election was dominated by Belvidere voters, although he was proud of the two Cambodian winners, Nuon and Lay.

“This is democracy,” said incumbent Elliott, who supported the campaign to relocate the high school. People were “organized and they voted. It is good to go out and vote. It is good to exercise freedom of speech. It is all good.”

Another incumbent who was re-elected on Tuesday agrees.

Councilor William Samaras, a former mayor, told the local newspaper that the ballot-box battle over the high school’s future “wasn’t a neighborhood issue. It was a citywide issue and the results show it.”

Or as Nuon put it, “The people have spoken.”
…

His party suddenly and bitingly divided, Alabama Republican Roy Moore emphatically rejected increasing pressure to abandon his Senate bid on Friday as fears grew among GOP leaders that a once-safe Senate seat was in jeopardy just a month before a special election.

Moore, an outspoken Christian conservative and former state Supreme Court judge, attacked a Washington Post report that he had sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl and pursued three other teenagers decades earlier as “completely false and misleading.”

In an interview with conservative radio host Sean Hannity, he did not wholly rule out dating teenage girls when he was in his early 30s.

Asked if that would have been usual for him, Moore said, “Not generally, no.” He added: “I don’t remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother.” As for the encounter with 14-year-old Leigh Corfman, as described by Corfman in Thursday’s Post article, he said, “It never happened.”

Supporters stand with Moore

The story has produced a wave of concern among anxious GOP officials in Washington but little more than a collective shrug from many Republicans in Alabama, which holds a special election on Dec. 12 to fill the seat previously held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“Humphrey Bogart started dating Lauren Bacall when she was a teenager,” said state Auditor Jim Ziegler, referring to the then-19-year-old actress.

“I’ll always vote for him,” said 28-year-old Erica Richard, of Altoona, Alabama, adding that she wouldn’t change her mind even if the allegations of sexual misconduct are proven true. “He’s a good man. I love him and his family, and they are all good people.”

Paul Reynolds, Alabama’s Republican National Committeeman, called it “a firestorm designed to shipwreck a campaign in Alabama. I think it’s sinister.”

Despite such support, experienced Republican operatives believe the Alabama Senate seat, held by the GOP for the last 20 years, is now at risk.

They fear the controversy could exacerbate the party’s broader Trump-era challenge in appealing to college-educated suburban voters — the same group that fueled a big Democratic victory in the Virginia governor’s race this week.

Those familiar with recent polling of the Alabama race suggest it was always going to be close despite the state’s strong Republican leanings — largely because of Moore’s controversial past.

National GOP leaders want Moore out

In the immediate aftermath of the Post report Thursday, a wave of national Republican leaders called for Moore to drop out of the race if the allegations are true. They included the White House, the head of the House Freedom Caucus Mark Meadows, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

It got worse Friday.

The Senate GOP’s campaign arm formally ended its fundraising agreement with Moore.

The GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney condemned his colleagues’ caveat — only if the allegations are true.

“Innocent until proven guilty is for criminal convictions, not elections. I believe Leigh Corfman,” he said of the Alabama woman who said Moore molested her when she was 14. “Her account is too serious to ignore. Moore is unfit for office and should step aside.”

Facing a tough re-election, Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., likened Moore to Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, former Rep. Anthony Weiner and former Fox News executive Roger Ailes, all men accused of sexual misconduct.

“The defense from some of his supporters is beyond disgusting,” Comstock wrote. “Moore should not serve in the U.S. Senate.”

Yet there is no sign he is going away quietly. And the Alabama secretary of state’s office reported that it’s too late to remove his name from the ballot.

The Republican Party’s options, including the possibility of a write-in campaign, “are all being researched,” said Steven Law, who leads the pro-Republican Senate Leadership Fund.

Stands his ground

Those who think Moore should be replaced have little hope of that happening.

“I don’t think anyone expects Roy Moore to drop out of this race,” Law said. “I think he enjoys being an object of intense controversy. The fact that this has happened may make him even more committed.”

Moore was twice removed from his state Supreme Court position, once for disobeying a federal court order to remove a 5,200-pound granite Ten Commandments monument from the lobby of the state judicial building, and later for urging state probate judges to defy the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage.

He also previously said homosexuality should be illegal, and last week he refused to back off comments that Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., should not be allowed to serve in Congress because he’s a Muslim.

Virtually the entire Republican establishment — including President Donald Trump — opposed Moore’s primary bid in September.

Democrats make their move … quietly

Democrats, meanwhile, were quietly stepping up their mobilization efforts in Alabama, though being careful not to publicly ignite partisan backlash by attempting to capitalize on the troubling allegations.

Democratic candidate Doug Jones stood to capitalize in places where Moore had shown weakness in past statewide elections. Some Republicans conceded that Moore would likely suffer in the state’s reliably, mainstream-Republican suburbs.

In Shelby and Baldwin counties — suburban Birmingham and Mobile — Moore ran more than a dozen percentage points behind Romney in his 2012 bid for the Alabama Supreme Court.

“It’s a bad situation,” said Henry Barbour, a Republican National Committeeman from neighboring Mississippi. “Do people find it believable? If they do, he will lose.”

 
…

United States President Donald Trump on Friday wished a happy birthday to the Marine Corps, honoring its 242nd year in existence.

“On behalf of an entire nation, Happy 242nd Birthday to the men and women of the United States Marines!” Trump wrote on Twitter, in a post accompanied by several pictures of him posing with Marines.

Saturday will mark the first Veterans Day of Trump’s administration, and he spent Friday in Danang, Vietnam, where he met with American veterans who served in the Vietnam War.

“Our veterans are a national treasure, and I thank them all for their service, sacrifice and patriotism,” Trump said, noting that he signed a proclamation to honor veterans of the war.

Trump said he had met a few of the veterans and called them “tough, smart cookies” before inviting them to speak. Several of them praised Trump, including Max Morgan, who thanked Trump for his support of the military.

“Mr. President, from my heart, thank you for your support of the military, and it’s an honor to be here as one of seven Vietnam veterans representing the 58,000 heroes who never made it home,” Morgan said.

Trump is in Vietnam as part of his 12-day trip through Asia. Later, he will attend an international economic summit.
…

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Friday that the U.S. opposes action that would threaten the stability of Lebanon, and he warned other countries against using Lebanon “as a venue for proxy conflicts.”

In a statement, Tillerson said, “There is no legitimate place or role in Lebanon for any foreign forces, militias or armed elements other than the legitimate security forces of the Lebanese state.”

Tillerson also called Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri a “strong partner of the United States.”

“The United States urges all parties both within Lebanon and outside to respect the integrity and independence of Lebanon’s legitimate national institutions, including the government of Lebanon and the Lebanese armed forces,” he said.

Earlier Friday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah accused Saudi Arabia of detaining Hariri and asking Israel to launch strikes against Lebanon.

“The most dangerous thing is inciting Israel to strike Lebanon,” Nasrallah said. “I’m talking about information that Saudi Arabia has asked Israel to strike Lebanon.”

While he said he saw war with Israel as unlikely, Nasrallah said it was clear “Saudi Arabia and Saudi officials have declared war on Lebanon.”

Nasrallah said he was certain Hariri, who resigned last week in an address from Saudi Arabia, was “forced” to make the announcement and called the resignation unconstitutional because it was “made under duress.”

Tillerson said Friday that there was “no indication” Hariri had been detained by the Saudis against his will or that he resigned under duress.

Tillerson added Hariri “needs to go back to Lebanon” to make the resignation official “so that the government of Lebanon can function properly.”

Government officials in Beirut have said they believe Hariri is being held in Saudi Arabia, amid a deepening crisis pushing Lebanon onto the front lines of a power struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Saudi Arabia supported Hariri and his allies during years of political conflict in Lebanon with Iran-backed Hezbollah.

In his resignation speech televised from Saudi Arabia, Hariri denounced Iran and Hezbollah for sowing friction in Arab states and said he feared assassination. His father, a former prime minister, was killed in a 2005 bombing.
…

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is considering a hiring surge that would more than double the agency’s size in the coming six years to nearly 46,000 employees, surpassing previously published estimates, according to a government contracting-related document released this week.

In a “Request for Information” Wednesday seeking input from the private sector about staffing services to support such an increase, ICE stated it could hire as many as 25,700 staff members by 2023, beginning in early 2018. The agency currently employs about 20,000 people and has a well-documented struggle with finding and keeping new hires.

The higher figure surpasses the 10,000 new immigration enforcement agents and deportation officers President Donald Trump called for in a January executive order; it also goes above the “more than 6,500 technical and operational support staff” the agency anticipated requiring.

Asked about the potential hiring surge, an ICE spokesperson twice referred to the agency’s Frequently Asked Questions site, specifically a section stating that in addition to hiring the 10,000 agents and officers, the agency would add “additional operational and mission support and legal staff necessary to hire and support their activities.”

The agency declined further comment.

Hiring challenges ahead

A Request for Information (RFI) is an initial step in the government contracting process to gauge the capabilities, interest and estimates of possible vendors, who in this case would be providing human resources support in “recruiting, examining, selecting and placing employees” at ICE.

The document lays out an estimated pace, saying its current estimated hiring need is 2,500 beginning March 2018; 7,000 hires each year from 2019 to 2021; and 2,200 hires in 2022.

An RFI does not guarantee a proposal and bidding process will follow; the document is careful to state that staffing services “may be needed.”

But if ICE follows through with an aggressive hiring plan, it will likely need outside help in the hiring process.

A report by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general in July estimated that in order to add 10,000 immigration agents and deportation officers to the current level of around 6,000, the agency would need to vet about a half-million applicants.

​Vacancies

ICE has also had difficulties in keeping up with vacancies from losing 795 employees annually through attrition; DHS has the most understaffed human resource services among larger federal agencies, according to a July DHS Inspector General’s report.

ICE will need about 200 more people who work in human resources to keep up with the hiring process for so many new employees. 

Another report from the Inspector General, issued this month, said the agency, along with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “face significant challenges in identifying, recruiting, hiring and fielding the number of law enforcement officers mandated in the January 2017 Executive Orders.” 

Trump mandated CBP hire an additional 5,000 border officers in the same executive order as the ICE increase. There is no Request for Information announced for a CBP hiring surge.

But in the November report, the Inspector General noted neither agency “could provide complete data to support the operational need or deployment strategies for the additional 15,000 agents and officers they were directed to hire,” calling into question the need for what Trump ordered.

The degree to which the hiring is carried out will depend on funding allocated by Congress, and also by presidential politics — Trump’s term ends in January 2021, in the middle of the anticipated increase to ICE’s ranks.
…

Executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter last week met with Congress to answer questions about Russian efforts to use the platforms to spread disinformation during and after the 2016 US presidential election. VOA’s Bill Gallo looks at the extent of the Russian campaign, and what US lawmakers want to do about it.
…

The U.S. Congress moved to pressure the Burmese military into ending the crisis facing the Rohingya, in a bipartisan effort that proposes a range of options aimed at ending the violence against the Muslim minority. The bill would impose new sanctions, cutting off U.S. cooperation with the military while funding economic assistance. VOA’s congressional reporter Katherine Gypson sat down with the co-sponsors of the bill to learn more.
…

Disguised Russian agents on Twitter rushed to deflect scandalous news about Donald Trump just before last year’s presidential election while straining to refocus criticism on the mainstream media and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, according to an Associated Press analysis of since-deleted accounts.

Tweets by Russia-backed accounts such as “America_1st_” and “BatonRougeVoice” on Oct. 7, 2016, actively pivoted away from news of an audio recording in which Trump made crude comments about groping women, and instead touted damaging emails hacked from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta.

Since early this year, the extent of Russian intrusion to help Trump and hurt Clinton in the election has been the subject of both congressional scrutiny and a criminal investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. In particular, those investigations are looking into the possibility of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

AP’s analysis illuminates the obvious strategy behind the Russian cyber meddling: swiftly react, distort and distract attention from any negative Trump news.

The AP examined 36,210 tweets from Aug. 31, 2015, to Nov. 10, 2016, posted by 382 of the Russian accounts that Twitter shared with congressional investigators last week. Twitter deactivated the accounts, deleting the tweets and making them inaccessible on the internet. But a limited selection of the accounts’ Twitter activity was retrieved by matching account handles against an archive obtained by AP.

“MSM [the mainstream media] is at it again with Billy Bush recording … What about telling Americans how Hillary defended a rapist and later laughed at his victim?” tweeted the America_1st_ account, which had 25,045 followers at its peak, according to metadata in the archive. The tweet went out the afternoon of Oct. 7, just hours after The Washington Post broke the story about Trump’s comments to Bush, then host of Access Hollywood, about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women, saying, “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”

Within an hour of the Post’s story, WikiLeaks unleashed its own bombshell about hacked email from Podesta’s account, a release the Russian accounts had been foreshadowing for days.

“WikiLeaks’ [founder Julian] Assange signals release of documents before U.S. election,” tweeted both “SpecialAffair” and “ScreamyMonkey” within a second of each other on Oct. 4. “SpecialAffair,” an account describing itself as a “Political junkie in action,” had 11,255 followers at the time. “ScreamyMonkey,” self-described as a “First frontier.News aggregator,” had 13,224. Both accounts were created within three days of each other in late December 2014.

Twitter handed over the handles of 2,752 accounts it identified as coming from Russia’s Internet Research Agency to congressional investigators ahead of the social media giant’s Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 appearances on Capitol Hill. It said 9 percent of the tweets were election-related but didn’t make the tweets themselves public.

That makes the archive the AP obtained the most comprehensive historical picture so far of Russian activity on Twitter in the crucial run-up to the Nov. 8, 2016, vote. Twitter policy requires developers who archive its material to delete tweets from suspended accounts as soon as reasonably possible, unless doing so would violate the law or Twitter grants an exception. It’s possible the existence of the deleted tweets in the archive obtained by the AP runs afoul of those rules.

Earlier activity

The Russian accounts didn’t just spring into action at the last minute. They were similarly active at earlier points in the campaign.

When Trump reversed himself on a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace on Sept. 17, declaring abruptly that Obama “was born in the United States, period,” several Russian accounts chimed in to echo Trump’s subsequent false claim that it was Clinton who had started the birther controversy.

Others continued to push birther narratives. The Russian account TEN_GOP, which many mistook for the official account of the Tennessee Republican Party, linked to a video that claimed that Obama “admits he was born in Kenya.” But the Russian accounts weren’t in lockstep. The handle “hyddrox” retweeted a post by the anti-Trump billionaire Mark Cuban that the “MSM [mainstream media] is being suckered into chasing birther stories.”

On Sept. 15, Clinton returned to the campaign trail following a bout with pneumonia that caused her to stumble at a 9/11 memorial service.

The Russian account “Pamela_Moore13” noted that her intro music was “I Feel Good” by James Brown — then observed that “James Brown died of pneumonia,” a line that was repeated at least 11 times by Russian accounts, including by “Jenn_Abrams,” which had 59,868 followers at the time.

According to several obituaries, Brown died of congestive heart failure related to pneumonia.

Racial discord also figured prominently in the tweets, just as it did with many of the ads Russian trolls had purchased on Facebook in the months leading up to and following the election. One Russian account, “Blacks4DTrump,” tweeted a Trump quote on Sept. 16 in which he declared “it is the Democratic party that is the party of slavery, the party of Jim Crow & the party of opposition.”

TEN_GOP, meanwhile, asked followers to “SPREAD the msg of black pastor explaining why African-Americans should vote Donald Trump!”
…

When Wilmot Collins knocked on doors across Helena, Montana, residents wanted to know what he would do to address homelessness, affordable housing and other municipal issues.

“They didn’t once ask me if you think a black person can win a race in this town,” the Liberian immigrant told The Associated Press a day after his election.

Fifty years to the date after the nation’s first black mayor was elected to lead a large American city, voters in more than a half-dozen large and small cities chose black candidates as mayors Tuesday. Most of the mayors are Democrats, but some of the races were nonpartisan. Political experts say the results could have national political consequences as the Democratic Party looks to build its bench with a more diverse pool of candidates and the mayors seize opportunities to bring about change at the local level in an era of gridlock in Washington under President Donald Trump.

Vi Lyles was elected mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, becoming the first black woman to run North Carolina’s largest city. City Councilman Melvin Carter was elected the first black mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota. Voters in Cleveland and in Flint, Michigan, re-elected black mayoral incumbents. The result in Ohio came 50 years after Carl Stokes made history in Cleveland in becoming the nation’s first big-city black mayor.

Stephanie Mash Sykes, executive director of the nonpartisan African American Mayors Association, said there are about 30 black mayors of U.S. cities with more than 100,000 residents. The 2010 Census lists more than 200 cities and regional areas that size.

Those 30 black mayors include Randall Woodfin, who defeated black incumbent William Bell last month in Birmingham, Alabama. New Orleans will be on that list as two black women are in the runoff for mayor. Atlanta City Councilwomen Keisha Lance Bottoms, who’s black, and Mary Norwood, who’s white, are headed to a runoff for Atlanta mayor.

Not all black candidates found success. Tito Jackson, a black city councilor in Boston, was defeated Tuesday by incumbent Mayor Marty Walsh, who’s white. And in Detroit, Coleman Young II, the son of the city’s first black mayor, lost to incumbent Mayor Mike Duggan, who first was elected in 2013 as Detroit’s first white mayor since 1973.

“We’ll win some. We’ll lose some,” Sykes said, but “voters are looking for a leader that’s effective in developing innovative solutions for jobs, access to affordable housing.”

The victories could translate to national politics, according to Paul Watanabe, political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

“For most of these mayors from the Democrat party, they may provide an answer to the question: Is there any new leadership on the Democratic side?” Watanabe said. “Perhaps one might look to governors or to mayors, particularly, for candidates of color who might be new or fresh on the scene.”

To some political observers, Tuesday’s general elections also were a referendum on the divisive politics and policies emanating from Washington, where Republicans control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Helena voters shut all that down, said Collins, a psychology instructor at Helena College who left West Africa as a refugee about two dozen years ago.

“The people of Helena told (Washington) that they are an accepting community,” said Collins, who will become the city’s first black mayor since the 1800s. “We want diversity.”

Sykes, who didn’t have a historical record showing if the number of black mayors was the most ever, said the candidates elected Tuesday have an opportunity to play a large-than-usual role in setting the agenda with Washington leaders struggling to get much done.

“We don’t see much of anything to impact local communities, particularly communities of color,” she said. “These mayors are the hopes and opportunities to create solutions on the ground.”

Tuesday’s elections also saw Ravi Bhalla, a Sikh, win the mayor’s race in Hoboken, New Jersey.

In Flint, Karen Weaver fended off a recall effort and beat a number of challengers to complete the last two years of her term.

The recall focused on Weaver’s decision to hire a trash hauler that became connected to a federal corruption investigation. It didn’t refer to Flint’s lead-tainted water crisis.

The city was under state control when it switched from Detroit’s water system to the Flint River in 2014 to save money. But the river water wasn’t properly treated, causing lead from pipes to leach into drinking water.

Weaver made the water problems a focus of her successful 2015 mayoral campaign and said she believes her win Tuesday gives a voice to an urban agenda.
…

President Donald Trump struck a markedly softer tone on touchy subjects like North Korea and trade with President Xi Jinping of China Thursday, and highlighted his “incredibly warm” feeling toward his counterpart.

During joint statements after talks in Beijing, Trump expressed optimism the U.S. and China will resolve the North Korea nuclear crisis. “I do believe there’s a solution to that, as you do,” Trump said.

Trump said he has “great respect” for Xi’s leadership on trade and noted the U.S. must change its policy. Trump blamed his predecessors in Washington for the trade deficit with China.

“It’s too bad that past administrations allowed it go get so far out of kilter,” Trump added. “But we’ll make it fair, and it will be tremendous for both of us.”

Trump concluded remarks by touting his “great chemistry” with Xi.

The Chinese leader said Beijing’s relationship with Washington “now stands at a new starting point” and vowed to “enhance communication and cooperation on the nuclear issues on the Korean Peninsula” and other issues.

“For China and the United States, cooperation is the only viable choice, and win-win cooperation can take us to a better future,” said the Chinese president.

Trump administration officials said during the closed talks, Trump pressed Xi on the North Korea nuclear issue. According to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Trump told Xi, “You’re a strong man, I’m sure you can solve this for me.”

Speaking in Beijing, Tillerson noted “there is no disagreement on North Korea” between the United States and China. The diplomat pointed out the Chinese have been clear and unequivocal over two days of talks that they will not accept a North Korea with nuclear weapons.

“There’s no space between both of our objectives,” said Tillerson. “We have our own views of the tactics, the timing and how far to go with pressure and that’s what we spend a lot of time exchanging views on.”

Tillerson also said the two men also had frank exchanges on human rights and maritime disputes in the South China Sea.

Later, Trump and Xi spoke to a meeting of business leaders. Trump said, “I thank President Xi for his recent efforts to restrict trade with North Korea and cut off banking ties. China can fix this problem easily and quickly.”

Bilateral trade

The shift in Trump’s rhetoric on trade was especially notable because the U.S. leader has long complained about the trade imbalance between China and the United States.

After the talks, Secretary Tillerson said, “The things that have been achieved thus far are pretty small” despite long hours of trade talks between the U.S. and China, adding the U.S. concerns about the pace of progress was communicated to Chinese officials Thursday.

For the first 10 months of the year, China’s trade surplus with the U.S. was $223 billion, according to recent data released by China’s General Administration of Customs.

Trump said the U.S. trade deficit with China is “shockingly hundreds of billions of dollars” annually.

President Xi said there is a wider and prosperous future for U.S.-China cooperation on trade, adding that $250 billion worth of business deals were signed during President Trump’s visit to China and that, “Chinese investment in the United States is rising rapidly.”

But the roughly 15 agreements unveiled in Beijing are mostly non-binding memorandums of understanding, and according to Bloomberg News, “could take years to materialize — if they do at all.”

Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is pessimistic that such deals will do much to address the real hindrances to trade relations with China.

“The president likes deals, and he likes big numbers, but we’re not going to change something he doesn’t like, like the trade deficit, without changing Chinese trade practices,” Scissors said. “China has to have a different approach to trade in the world than it does.”

Scissors said that more than the deficit, it is what is behind the numbers, such as the fact that Chinese state-owned enterprises never go out of business.

“Which means American goods and services can’t ever win in the China market,” he said.

In his joint statement, Xi said, “there needs to be in-depth discussions on the trade imbalance” with the United States, among other issues.

The Chinese leaders predicted “there will be a wider and prosperous future for cooperation on trade,” specifically mentioning the oil and gas sector, beer, agricultural products, education and service contracts. He also invited more American companies to participate in China’s One Belt One Road initiative, an effort to create the world’s largest platform for economic cooperation, inspired by the ancient Silk Road trading network.

The United States and China, respectively, have the world’s largest economies and most powerful militaries.

The two leaders walked side by side on a red carpet at a welcoming ceremony early Thursday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The U.S. and Chinese national anthems were played by a military band, and ceremonial cannon fire from Tiananmen Square saluted Trump. An exuberant crowd of school children waved U.S. and Chinese flags.

Business deals

​The Trump administration is showcasing several business deals signed during the China trip, including a deal for China’s biggest online retailer to buy $1.2 billion of American beef and pork.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has said such business deals “are a good example” of how the United States “can productively build up our bilateral trade.”

Trump also met Thursday with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, whose position is similar to that of a prime minister.

Trump and his wife, Melania, were received with great pageantry on their arrival to China. The Trumps also were treated to a private visit to the Forbidden City, China’s ancient imperial palace. They also viewed an outdoor opera featuring costumes, music and martial arts.

The U.S. president arrived in Beijing a day after delivering a speech in Seoul, South Korea, in which he called on other nations to unite and “isolate the brutal regime of North Korea.”

Trump is on a 12-day, five-nation tour of Asia that will take him to Danang,Vietnam, on Friday, where he will speak at a meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC).

Bill Ide, Marissa Melton contributed to this report.
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Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that Janet Yellen has not said yet whether she plans to remain on the Federal Reserve board when her term as chair ends in February, but the administration is moving ahead with filling other vacancies.

There are three vacancies on the seven-member Fed board and there could be a fourth if Yellen decides to leave. Her term as a board member does not end until 2024.

In an interview on Bloomberg TV, Mnuchin said he had breakfast with Yellen on Wednesday from which he came away with the impression that she had not made a decision about her future at the Fed.

Last week, President Donald Trump announced he would nominate Fed board member Jerome Powell as the next Fed chairman, bypassing Yellen.

If Yellen did stay on the board, she would be only the second former chair to do so. Marriner Eccles, whose name is on the Fed’s headquarters in Washington, remained on the board for three years after he was not nominated for another term as chair by Harry Truman in 1948.

Mnuchin said the goal was to fill the vacancies quickly, but the administration did not necessarily see a need to pick someone with a PhD in economics for the vice chair position even though Powell will be the first person to lead the Fed without a degree in economics in nearly four decades.

“I think our priority is that we are going to fill these positions quickly. Our focus was on the chair,” Mnuchin said. “Now that we have resolved that issue, we are already looking at people for these positions. So I am comfortable we will have the jobs filled.”

Before Trump’s announcement last week, Yellen had declined to say what she might do if she was not tapped for a second term.

“I have said that I intend to serve out my term as chair, and that I’m really not going to comment on my intentions beyond that,” she told reporters in September.
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