Officials: US NAFTA Autos Negotiator Called From Mexico for Consultations

The U.S. negotiator for regional content requirements in autos flew back to Washington from a NAFTA round in Mexico on Monday to talk with car companies, officials said, in a development some hoped would lead to progress on the contentious issue.

Three Mexican, Canadian and U.S. trade officials said the negotiator, Jason Bernstein, had been called back, with two of the officials saying he was there to meet U.S. automakers. Another said he would also meet U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, and was due back later in the week.

The change in plans disrupted a schedule for talks early in the week about a proposal by the administration of U.S.

President Donald Trump to make automakers source more from the region and the United States, a major sticking point the industry warns would disrupt supply chains and raise costs.

Mexican negotiators have said the auto content issue must be resolved in large part between the White House and the Big Three Detroit automakers that dominate the industry.

“What I’ve heard is that he’s back in Washington because apparently they are meeting with the Detroit three. If that’s the case, that’s really positive,” said Flavio Volpe, president of the Toronto-based Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association.

 

“The timing is awkward. But if USTR is finally talking to those companies it’s something that we’ve been asking for for months,” Volpe said, referring to the United States Trade Representative (USTR).

U.S. trade officials and a Mexican auto industry official in Mexico City said they also believed the fact Bernstein had been called to Washington was a positive development for the talks to renegotiate the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.

A seventh round of talks began on Sunday with the three sides aiming to finish reworking less contentious chapters while also meeting to discuss the trickiest subjects blocking progress to rework the pact that underpins $1.2 trillion in annual trade.

“We’re hopeful to make quite a bit if progress this round. So we’ll see how it goes,” said Steve Verheul, Canada’s chief

negotiator as he arrived at the negotiations on Monday.

Two auto lobbyists in the United States, who spoke on background, said they did not believe there was a joint meeting scheduled with the Detroit auto companies but individual consultations might happen.

Mexico’s government is concerned that a lack of progress on the automotive content issue could hurt the wider renegotiation, a former official still familiar with the process said.

Seeking to break the deadlock, the Mexican government has said it would put forward a proposal on rules of origin during the current round of talks, but a Mexican official said on Monday no new ideas had been presented so far.

The renegotiation began last year at the behest of Trump who said the agreement must be overhauled to better favor American interests or Washington would quit the accord. The latest round has been clouded by renewed tension between Mexico and Trump over his planned border wall.

Mexico has consistently rejected paying for the wall, and its government had hoped to arrange a meeting between President Enrique Pena Nieto and Trump in the next few weeks. However, a senior U.S. official said over the weekend that plan had been postponed after a phone call between the two soured over the wall earlier this month.

Mexico’s government has not commented officially on the derailment of the Trump-Pena Nieto meeting, but Juan Pablo 

Castanon, head of the powerful CCE business lobby, was less reticent as he took stock of the unfolding NAFTA negotiations in Mexico City.

“Obviously, the cancellation of the Mexican president’s trip to the United States is an important element in the negotiations: it’s politics that can help us resolve the technical issues we’re moving forward on,” Castanon said.

Castanon said several chapters are close to being finished, including measures on e-commerce, telecommunications and sanitary standards for agricultural products. Others close to the talks believe the energy chapter could also be concluded.

Officials do not anticipate major breakthroughs on other intractable issues such as agriculture and dispute resolution mechanisms in the Mexico City round, due to run until March 5.

There was little sign of compromise on any issues early on, with a senior Canadian agriculture official pushing back against U.S. demands to dismantle Canadian protections for the dairy and poultry sectors known as supply management.

“When it comes to supply management, we believe there can be no concession,” said Jeff Leal, the minister of agriculture, food and rural affairs for the province of Ontario. 

‘Migrate or Die’: Venezuelans Flood into Colombia Despite Crackdown

The desert wind whipping their faces, hundreds of Venezuelan migrants lugging heavy suitcases and overstuffed backpacks trudge along the road to the Colombian border town of Maicao beneath the blazing sun.

The broken line snakes back 8 miles (13 km) to the border crossing at Paraguachon, where more than a hundred Venezuelans wait in the heat outside the migration office.

Money changers sit at tables stacked with wads of Venezuelan currency, made nearly worthless by hyperinflation under President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government.

The remote outpost on the arid La Guajira peninsula on Colombia’s Caribbean coast marks a frontline in Latin America’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The Venezuelans arrive hungry, thirsty and tired, often unsure where they will spend the night, but relieved to have escaped the calamitous situation in their homeland.

They are among more than half a million Venezuelans who have fled to Colombia, many illegally, hoping to escape grinding poverty, rising violence and shortages of food and medicine in their once-prosperous, oil exporting nation.

“It’s migrate and give it a try or die of hunger there. Those are the only two options,” said Yeraldine Murillo, 27, who left her six-year-old son behind in the Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, some 56 miles (90 km) across the border.

“There, people eat from the trash. Here, people are happy just to eat,” said Murillo, who hopes to find work in Colombia’s capital Bogota and send for her son.

The exodus from Venezuela – on a scale echoing the departure of Myanmar’s Rohingya people to Bangladesh – is stirring alarm in Colombia. A weary migration official said as many as 2,000 Venezuelans enter Colombia legally through Paraguachon each day, up from around 1,200 late last year.

Under pressure from overcrowded frontier towns such as Maicao, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced a tightening of border controls this month, deploying 3,000 additional security personnel.

But the measures are unlikely to stem the flow of illegal migrants pouring across the 1,379-mile (2,219 km) frontier.

At Paraguachon, where a lack of effective border controls has long allowed smuggling to thrive, officials estimate 4,000 people cross illegally daily.

“We left houses, cars. We left everything: money in the bank,” said former electronics salesman Rudy Ferrer, 51, who sleeps outside a warehouse in Maicao. He estimates there are 1,000 Venezuelans sleeping on the town’s streets every night.

‘The Maduro diet’

Some 3 million Venezuelans – or a tenth of the population – have left Venezuela since late leader Hugo Chavez started his Socialist revolution in 1999.

Despite four months of violent anti-government protests last year, Chavez’s hand-picked successor Maduro is expected to win a fresh six-year term at elections on April 22. The opposition, whose most popular leaders have been banned from running, is boycotting the vote.

Mechanic Luis Arellano and his children were among the lucky ones who found beds at a shelter in Maicao run by the Catholic diocese with help from the U.N. refugee agency. The 58-year-old said his children’s tears of hunger drove him to flee Venezuela.

“It was 8 p.m. and they were asking for lunch and dinner and I had nothing to give them,” he said, spooning rice into his 7-year-old daughter’s mouth.

“This isn’t the size they should be,” Arellano said, raising his children’s spindly arms.

Migrants told Reuters they were paying up to 400,000 bolivars for a kilo of rice in Venezuela. The official monthly minimum wage is 248,510 bolivares – around $8 at the official exchange rate, or $1.09 on the black market.

Food shortages, which many migrants jokingly refer to as the “Maduro diet”, have left people noticeably thinner than in photos taken years earlier for their identification cards.

The shelter – where bunk beds line the walls of the bedrooms – provides food and shelter for three days and, for those joining family already in Colombia, a bus ticket onwards.

It will soon have capacity for 140 people a night – a fraction of the daily arrivals.

Colombia is letting the migrants access public health care and send their children to state schools. Santos is asking for international help to foot the bill, which the government has said runs to tens of millions of dollars.

‘No work’ for Venezuelans

At another shelter in the border city of Cucuta, some 250 miles (400 km) to the south, people regularly spend the night on cardboard outside, hoping places will free up.

The largest city along the frontier, Cucuta has borne the brunt of the arriving migrants. About 30,000 people cross the pedestrian bridge that connects the city with Venezuela on daily entry passes to shop for food.

Conditions are desperate for migrants like Jose Molina, a 48-year-old butcher unable to find work after leaving his wife and son in Venezuela’s northern Carabobo state four months ago.

“I feel so depressed,” said Molina, his face puffed and tired after sleeping outside a church. “I got sick from eating rotten potatoes but I was hungry so I had to eat them.”

Molina is so hopeless he has considered returning home.

“My wife says everything’s getting worse and it’s best to wait,” he said. “I don’t want to be a burden to them. They don’t have enough to eat themselves.”

While many feel a duty to welcome the migrants, in part because Venezuela accepted Colombian refugees during that country’s long civil war, others fear losing jobs to Venezuelans being paid under the table.

After locals held a small anti-Venezuelan protest last month, police evicted 200 migrants who were living on a sports field, deporting many of them.

Migrants are verbally abused by some Colombians who refuse them work when they hear their accents, said Flavio Gouguella, 28, from Carabobo.

“Are you a Veneco? Then no work,” he said, using a derogatory term for Venezuelans.

In Maicao, locals also worry about an increase in crime and support police efforts to clear parks and sidewalks.

They already have to cope with smuggled subsidized Venezuelan goods damaging local commerce, and have grown tired of job-seekers and lending their bathrooms to migrants.

Spooked by police raids, migrants in Maicao have abandoned the parks and bus stations where they had makeshift camps, opting to sleep outside shuttered shops. Female migrants who spoke to Reuters said they were often solicited for sex.

Despairing of finding work, some entrepreneurial migrants turn the nearly-worthless bolivar currency into crafts, weaving handbags from the bills and selling them in Maicao’s park.

“This was made from 80,000 bolivars,” said 23-year-old Anthony Morillo, holding up a square purse featuring bills with the face of South America’s 19th century liberation hero Simon Bolivar. “It’s not worth half a bag of rice.”

Stalinism Resurgent in Russia as Critics Warn Against Whitewashing Soviet History

Decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is fierce debate over the legacy of one of its most brutal dictators.

Josef Stalin, who ruled from the 1930s until his death in 1953, is held responsible for the deaths of millions of his countrymen. Yet, an opinion poll last year crowned him as the country’s most outstanding historical figure.

Russia’s recent decision to ban the satirical British film “The Death of Stalin” appears to have fueled divisions over the legacy of the dictator.

The Gulag State Museum in Moscow attempts to convey the scale of the atrocities carried out under Stalin’s rule, alongside the individual tragedies. Anyone deemed “an enemy of the people” — from petty criminals to political prisoners — could be condemned to years of forced labor in concentration camps known as gulags, which were established across the Soviet Union.

“Twenty million people came through the concentration camps. Over a million were shot, and 6 million were deported or re-settled by force,” said museum director Roman Romanov.

Watch Henry Ridgwell’s report:

Stalin is lionized by many Russians for leading the Soviet Union to victory over Nazi Germany. His reign of terror led to the deaths of millions of his countrymen.”This was no natural disaster. This is a well-planned crime by the state against the people. And now, people do not want to accept such an idea, because people do not like thinking this way about their country, about their government, Nikita Petrov, vice chairman of the human rights group Memorial, told VOA in a recent interview. 

“Every year, resentment against studying this subject [of Stalin’s atrocities] increases, because it hinders the glorification of the Soviet period of history.”

From the dozens of monuments to memorial plaques that are springing up in towns and cities across Russia, critics say Stalin nostalgia is permeating everyday life.In St. Petersburg, young Russian political blogger Victor Loginov organized the funding for a privately run bus emblazoned with a portrait of a smiling Stalin. It has not been universally welcomed — the bus has been vandalized several times, and the portrait painted over.

Loginov denies he’s glorifying Soviet history.

 “While Stalinism was undoubtedly and endlessly cruel, without this repression, and this shocking number of victims, there would have been no transformation of this country’s civilization — its transformation from an agricultural to an industrial nation, from economically backward to developed,” he said.

Romanov said younger generations are not taught the reality of Stalin’s rule.

“There are people still alive who came through the concentration camps, and I felt there is such gap between us. With all the programs we pursue in the museum, we try to make a sort of ‘small bridge’ between the generations.”

Deep divisions remain. During a recent debate on Stalin’s legacy aired on Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda radio, two prominent journalists began brawling after one accused his opponent of “spitting on the graves” of Soviet World War II soldiers.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has in the past called Stalin a “complex figure.” The president opened a monument last October to the victims of Stalin-era repression, warning that “this terrible past must not be erased from Russia’s national memory.”

Meanwhile, critics accuse him of cynicism and claim political freedom is once again under attack in modern Russia.

Stalinism Resurgent in Russia as Critics Warn Against Whitewashing History

Russia’s recent decision to ban the satirical film The Death of Stalin has fueled a fierce debate in the country over the legacy of Josef Stalin, who ruled from 1929 until his death in 1953. As Henry Ridgwell reports, some in Russia argue Stalin’s crimes against humanity should be weighed against his achievements for the former Soviet Union.

Iconic Gondola of Venice Could Disappear in the Future

The iconic and romantic symbol of Venice, Italy – the gondola – ferries tourists along the city’s scenic waterways. But for how long? The traditional workmanship that have made these gondola’s so unique is in danger of disappearing. But as VOA’s Deborah Block reports, a workshop in the “city of water” has made it its mission to create and preserve gondolas for future generations.

Microsoft, Justice Department in Showdown Over Foreign-stored Data

The U.S. Justice Department and Microsoft will face off against each other Tuesday when the Supreme Court hears arguments on whether tech companies’ desire to protect user data is at odds with the government’s interest in pursuing criminals who use the internet.

The case, known as United States v. Microsoft Corp., has global implications and could potentially trigger an international backlash, subjecting Americans’ data to seizure by foreign governments, legal and digital rights experts warn.

“The case is important for privacy, it’s important for security, it’s important for the future of the internet,” said Jennifer Daskal, a professor at American University Washington College of Law.

At issue is whether a U.S.-based email provider can be forced, under the 1986 Stored Communications Act, to turn over communications stored outside the United States.

Email records

Federal prosecutors believed it could when they went to Microsoft in 2013 with a court warrant, demanding that the tech giant turn over the email records of a suspect in a drug-trafficking investigation. But there was a problem.

Although Microsoft kept the account’s metadata such as address books on servers in the U.S., the contents of the user’s emails were stored at a data hub in Ireland — one of over 100 such data centers the company operates in more than 40 countries.

U.S.-based internet providers typically cooperate with government requests for foreign-stored data.

But in 1993, Microsoft, under fire along with other tech companies for their role in a secret government surveillance program exposed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, drew a line.

The company handed over the metadata to prosecutors but refused to disclose the actual emails, arguing that the data was beyond the warrant’s reach because it was stored overseas. That set off a legal battle that eventually led the Supreme Court to take up the case last year.

The case has galvanized international attention.

The governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom have both filed briefs in the case as have the European Commission and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy (SRP).

The central dispute is whether a warrant issued under the Stored Communications Act can be applied outside the United States.The government says it has long relied on the law to obtain electronic communications regardless of their location and that it needs the authority to secure such data for criminal investigations.

Microsoft argues that the Stored Communications Act does not have extraterritorial application. It says that the laws of the country where the data is stored — in this case, Ireland — not the laws of the United States, govern its disclosure.

Digital rights advocates and some transnational legal experts have weighed in on the side of Microsoft, arguing that a decision in favor of the government could encourage foreign governments to seize Americans’ private communications. 

“You can bet many other governments in the world will come knocking on the doors of providers in the United States,” said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based organization that has filed a brief in support of Microsoft.

European governments are already pushing back.

Belgium recently ordered U.S. providers to destroy data that the providers store in the United States, Nojeim said. Austen Parrish, dean of the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University, noted that past attempts by the U.S. government “to extraterritorially seize documents or information from foreign countries (have) led to protests (and) blocking statutes.”

“It upsets a lot of countries because they view it not only as a violation of international law but as a violation of their own sovereignty,” Parrish said. On both counts, there is an assumption that the laws passed by Congress are designed for Americans and that they don’t violate international law, he added.

“In this case, the best result is to read the 1986 Stored Communications Act as only applying to communications within the United States,” Parrish said.

Ways to obtain data

Proponents of Microsoft acknowledge the U.S. government’s interest in foreign-stored data and point to other ways U.S. law enforcement agencies can obtain the data.One is the so-called Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, an international agreement that allows for the exchange of evidence in criminal investigations.

Another is a bilateral cross-border data sharing agreement. The U.S. and U.K. recently negotiated such an agreement, and Congress is working to clear the way for its approval.

Regardless of how the court rules, the issue could become moot if Congress passes a recently proposed bill called the CLOUD Act. The bill would enable the U.S. government to obtain user data from email providers regardless of its location but would allow providers to decline a request if it violated the host country’s laws.

Daskal, the professor at American University, said the bill “strikes the right balance.”

But critics say it can be used by foreign governments to gather data from U.S. providers for intelligence purposes.

Both the Justice Department and Microsoft have endorsed the proposed legislation.

Short of congressional action, the court should try to strike a balance between the U.S. government’s need for data in criminal investigations and foreign governments’ need to protect the privacy of citizens, Daskal said.

“My hope is that if the court rules in favor of the government, that it does so in a way that reminds the lower courts of the importance of issuing warrants in a way that also respects conflicting rules in foreign governments as well,” she said.

Cuban Cigar Sales Hit Record as China Demand Surges

A surge in sales of Cuba’s legendary cigars in China helped manufacturer Habanos S.A.’s global revenue rise 12 percent to hit a record of around $500 million last year, the company said on Monday at the start of Cuba’s annual cigar festival.

Habanos S.A., a 50-50 joint venture between the Cuban state and Britain’s Imperial Brands Plc, said sales in China, its third export market after Spain and France, jumped 33 percent in value in 2017.

“Without doubt, there is potential for China to become the biggest market at a global level,” Habanos Vice President of Development Jose María Lopez told Reuters after the company’s annual news conference, while puffing on a smoke.

The Cuban monopoly cigar company’s hand-rolled cigars, which include brands such as Cohiba, Montecristo and Partagas, are considered by many as the best in the world, and the festival attracts wealthy tobacco aficionados and retailers from all over for a week of extravagant parties and tours of plantations and factories.

Lopez said that growth in global sales of Cuban cigars last year outpaced the luxury goods market, which expanded 5 percent, according to consultancy Bain & Co. He put sales growth down to several good tobacco harvests and new products.

The Habanos executive said the outlook was also positive, given solid demand and “excellent” climatic conditions.

Hurricane Irma, which wrought havoc throughout much of Cuba last year, left the western, prime tobacco-growing state of Pinar del Rio mostly unscathed.

Cigars are one of the top exports for the Cuban economy, which is otherwise struggling with decreasing aid from key ally Venezuela, a cash crunch and a push back against market reforms.

However, the Caribbean island cannot sell its signature export to the biggest market worldwide for cigars, the United States, due to the decades-old U.S. trade embargo.

Improved U.S.-Cuba relations under former U.S. President Barack Obama stoked a boom in international travel to Cuba and boosted cigar sales on the island, with American visitors able to take home as many cigars as they wanted.

Lopez said U.S. President Donald Trump’s more hostile policy toward Cuba, including tighter restrictions on U.S. travel, did not appear to have impacted sales so far. Domestic revenue rose around 15 percent last year.

“We trust that despite Trump’s measures the Cuban market will continue to grow in 2018,” he said.

Cigars have been Cuba’s signature product ever since Christopher Columbus saw natives smoking rolled up tobacco leaves when he first sailed to the Caribbean island in 1492.

Late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro was often seen puffing on his favored kind, the long and thin ‘lancero’ until he quit in 1985.

Likely Centrist Brazil Presidential Contender Says He Would Sell Petrobras

The governor of Sao Paulo and likely centrist presidential candidate Geraldo Alckmin said on Monday that he would privatize Brazil’s state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA if he wins the elections in October.

Alckmin, who has single digit support in opinion polls, said during a television interview with Band TV that he favored private ownership of Petrobras, as Brazil’s biggest company is known, as long as the sale was conducted within a strict regulatory framework.

Once a taboo issue in Brazilian politics because of national sovereignty concerns, the privatization of Petrobras is set to become a campaign issue this year as Brazil struggles to bring an unsustainable budget deficit under control.

Brazil’s left fiercely rejects the sale of Petrobras, but the leftist leader leading early opinion polls, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, will likely be barred from running because of a corruption conviction and there are no obvious politicians who can fill his shoes.

It is not clear where the far right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently second in opinion polls, stands on relinquishing state control of Petrobras.

But his economic policy advisor Paulo Guedes told Valor newspaper in an interview published on Monday that he favored selling all state companies to raise 700 billion reais that would help pay off one fifth of Brazil’s public debt.

Greece Enters Final Round of Reform Talks With Creditors

Greece entered a last round of reform talks with creditors Monday, just five months before the country’s massive rescue program ends — and with the government and central bank publicly disagreeing on how to finance the nation after the bailout.

 

Government officials said the talks with representatives of Greece’s European partners and the International Monetary Fund in Athens would cover privatizations and energy.

 

But the negotiations were upstaged by a continued spat between Greece’s central bank governor, Yannis Stournaras, and the government over financing policies after the bailout runs out in August. The country will then have to raise money from international investors in bond markets — at a much higher rate than bailout creditors charge.

 

Stournaras repeated his argument that the government should consider setting up a precautionary credit line from the bailout rescuers that would secure the country — and its banks — cheap funding if needed, particularly as the country’s bonds are still rated well below investment grade. The finance ministry countered that this would create market jitters as to Greece’s ability to finance itself.

 

“Regardless of intentions, (Stournaras’) position … creates objective doubts regarding the prospects of the Greek economy, increases uncertainty and impedes Greece’s smooth exit from the bailout,” said Franciscos Koutentakis, the ministry’s general secretary for fiscal policy.

 

Greece signed the first of its three multi-billion euro bailouts in 2010, after it admitted its budget deficit was much higher than initially reported and investors stopped buying Greek bonds.

 

To secure the funds that kept it solvent, the country has slashed spending and public sector incomes, hiked taxes and extensively reformed its economy.

 

But the measures worsened a recession that wiped out more than a quarter of the economy and sent unemployment spiraling up by 16 percentage points between 2008 and 2016. The third bailout runs out in August.

 

Over the past eight months, the country has raised money from bond markets on three occasions through issues that were amply oversubscribed but offered high interest rates to attract investors.

 

Stournaras argued Monday that the possibility of an official credit line, to be used if needed, “should not be dramatized” as it would lower borrowing costs and “offer security as to state and bank access to financing after the end of the bailout.”

 

He also warned that the economy would remain under supervision from its European creditors until 75 percent of its debts have been repaid. Presenting the Bank of Greece’s annual report for 2017, Stournaras said economic growth is expected to accelerate to 2.4 percent this year, mostly on the wings of higher tourism receipts and exports.

Also Monday, some 2,000 municipal employees marched through central Athens to protest planned changes in school policy that unions say would threaten jobs in municipally-run kindergartens. Minor scuffles with police broke out outside parliament, but no arrests or injuries were reported.

Poland Considers Educating Refugee Children Apart from Public Schools

Poland could start educating children of refugees at the centers where they live rather than in public schools under a plan the government says will help all students but a newspaper said it would create educational ghettos.

Children who live in refugee centers attend local public schools but under the plan announced on the interior ministry’s website local governments could decide whether to maintain the status quo or send teachers to conduct classes in refugee centers.

The plan is consistent with policies outlined by the nationalist ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), which has refused to accept a quota of refugees relocated from other European Union countries despite pressure from Brussels.

The party ran its 2015 election campaign partly on its opposition to accepting refugees from Muslim countries and at the time PiS head Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who has no formal role in government, said refugees could spread disease and parasites.

There are 1,450 people in Polish refugee centers and 890 are children, according to the spokesman for the Office for Foreigners, Jakub Dudziak. Most people applying for international protection in Poland are from the Russian republic of Chechnya, he said. Islam is the republic’s main religion.

“Some foreign children do not learn despite attending school because they have educational gaps compared to their Polish peer and so struggle to catch up with school material,” said the proposal.

“These factors may have a negative and demotivating effect not only on foreign children, who are reluctant to go to school, but also on Polish children,” it said.

Critics say PiS has stoked popular hostility towards foreigners for electoral reasons ahead of local elections this year and a general election next year. The ruling party has 40 percent support, according to opinion polls.

The migrant issue is just one of several over which Poland is at odds with the European Union.

The government this month introduced a bill imposing jail terms of up to three years for anyone who says Poland was complicit in Nazi crimes. The government says the bill protects national honor but it has angered Israel and the United States.

Polish newspaper Dziennik Gazeta Prawna called the school plan an “Educational ghetto for refugees” and quoted a leading educator Krystyna Starczewska who said the idea was horrific.

The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights told Reuters in an email: “Separation of both groups can make integration difficult.”

The ministry said in a statement the proposal would be amended. Its aim: “is not to exclude the children of foreigners … but only to provide support during the preparatory phase of education before children enter school.”

The Dziennik Gazeta Prawna headline is “absurd and unfair”, it said.

Merkel’s Party Backs Coalition Deal to Form new Government

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party has voted in favor of a deal to form a new coalition government with the center-left Social Democrats.

Delegates at a convention in Berlin voted overwhelmingly Monday in favor of the agreement despite criticism from some conservatives in the party.

Disquiet among the Christian Democratic Union’s members has been growing following a weak election result last September that forced Merkel into complicated coalition negotiations with smaller parties.

The agreement still requires approval from the Social Democrats. The result of a postal ballot of that party’s membership will be announced March 4.

 

Turkish President Heads to Africa in bid to Extend Regional Influence

On Monday,Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan starts a five-day visit to northern and West Africa. The tour is the latest effort by Turkey to project its influence across the continent and enhance its global presence. Observers are voicing concerns that the Turkish leader, with his emphasis on Islamist themes, could be stoking regional rivalries and even tensions.

Erdogan is scheduled to visit Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal and Mali in his tour of the region.  Since  2005,  as then-prime minister, Erdogan has made developing deepening ties with Africa a priority, according to Emre Caliskan a Turkey, Africa analyst at Oxford University.

“Since he became prime minister he has been in Africa 24 times. Since 2009, when he became president, he has been in Africa 12 times. There are several ambitions: economy, being a global leader, and the use of Islam,” said Caliskan.

Earlier this month, Istanbul hosted African ministers for a week of meetings. Such gatherings are a regular occurrence and are part of Ankara’s efforts to court African leaders.  Turkey has tripled the number of embassies across the continent in less than a decade. Despite such investments, the economic returns have been disappointing and that has led to Ankara to shift its priorities, says Africa expert professor Mehmet Arda of the Istanbul think tank Edam.

“When you look at the Turkish trade with Africa its  basically the same as ten years ago. So, it’s more a way of projecting itself as a power in the world,” said Arda. “Moreover, Turkey puts itself as the friend of the countries that are left behind, the destitute and all that. I think from the point of view it fits with that the model (of) projecting on the world stage.”

President Erdogan has in recent visits to Africa increasingly inserted Islamic themes in his speeches, which have sometimes been colored with anti-Western rhetoric and focused on the West’s colonial past, even though the Turkish Ottoman empire once also extended to Africa.   Analyst Caliskan says courting Africa Muslims offers Ankara potential important diplomatic gains, as well as risks.

“50 percent of African countries come from the Muslim background and this gives leverage to Turkey in the eyes of Europe in the eyes of the West and in the eyes of Africa. But there is a rivalry between different Islamic groups,” said Caliskan. “These countries are Iran ,Saudi Arabia and Egypt – historically these countries are very influential in the region among the Islamic communities. Now Turkey is a latecomer, but a newcomer and strong comer and Turkey wants to be more influential.”

Last September, Turkey opened its largest overseas military base in Somalia. The opening of the base has been interpreted as a signal that Ankara is sending to the region of its growing aspirations. The Turkish navy is rapidly expanding with even plans for the construction of an aircraft carrier. Ankara’s agreement with Khartoum to redevelop the Sudanese Suakin Island that was once the Ottoman empire’s main naval base, has sent alarm bells ringing in Cairo, which is concerned about increasing Turkish military encroachment. Ankara insists its development plans on the island are non-military.

But analyst Caliskan says such denials will do little to defuse tensions given the level of mistrust between Erdogan and Egypt’s President, Abdel Fattah el Sissi.

“Turkey has a difficult relationship with Sisi regime and they are both trying to influence on the areas that actually historically Egypt had been powerful,” said Caliskan. “So actually it is a direct challenge to Egyptian hegemony in the region. If Turkey would be moving to the region more then [there] will be more rivalry with the Egyptian government as well.”

Analysts warn the rivalry in the Middle East is already spilling into Africa, a process that is likely to continue with Turkey’s growing commitment to the continent in its bid to become a global player.

Hong Kong Catholics Condemn China-Vatican Deal

At a recent all-night prayer vigil, nearly 100 Roman Catholics gathered in a church ground floor chapel to pray the rosary in Cantonese for their fellow worshippers in mainland China.

 

On their minds as they recited the prayer: a possible deal between the Holy See and China’s communist leaders that is worrying many Catholics.

Lucia Kwok, a care worker stepped out of the chapel and spoke of her dismay over the recent news. Pope Francis, she said, was making deals with the government in China. “We don’t trust the PRC because they are dishonest. They lie, they do bad things and never keep their promises,” Kwok said. “China is not worth our trust.”

 

Many Catholics in Hong Kong are confused and upset with the Vatican’s recent steps to resume relations with the Chinese government even as Beijing has continued to silence critics.

In the nearly seven decades since its establishment, the People’s Republic of China has not had formal diplomatic relations with the Holy See, a condition rooted in the Vatican’s tradition of appointing its bishops worldwide — a practice the mainland Chinese leadership has historically viewed as interference in its internal affairs.

Patriotic Catholic Association

China’s Catholics have been allowed to practice their religion under a government-supervised entity known as the Patriotic Catholic Association in which the government officially names bishops. Some — but not all — of those bishops have been quietly approved by the Vatican as well.

The Holy See has considered sacraments administered in the patriotic church valid, but the existence of the entity and the government’s tight control of it has for decades has prompted many observant Catholics to practice their faith in a parallel, “underground” Catholic church, whose members see themselves as true followers of the church in Rome. The underground church is declared illegal and its members have been routinely subjected to arrest and ruthless persecution.

Critics say an agreement between the Holy See and the Chinese government would allow the Vatican to operate more openly in China, but grant greater control to Beijing over the church’s decisions.

 

Zen expresses frustration

At the prayer gathering in Hong Kong, Kwok’s frustration was echoed by Cardinal Joseph Zen, the retired bishop of Hong Kong and a longtime critic of Beijing, who prayed quietly with the group. In recent weeks he has termed any agreement between the Vatican and Beijing that would allow China control over the church as “evil.”

News reports have said the agreement would legitimize the government-appointed bishops and force those in the underground church to retire. The reports say the pope in Rome would have a final say over the approval of bishops, but Zen has voiced concern that Beijing would only name bishops loyal to the communist leadership.

“It’s something important for the whole church, this attitude of fidelity and disrespect for our faith. The faith and the discipline. It’s a very serious matter to disregard centuries of doctrine,” Zen said. “They want everybody to come into the open and obey the government. They never say how they would deal with bishops in the underground. It’s obvious what they are going to do… They will not only eliminate bishops, but in some dioceses have no bishop, but some kind of [government] delegate.”

 

The Vatican has asked Catholics for time to work out details. Pope Francis, speaking to reporters in early December, said: “It’s mostly political dialogue for the Chinese Church… which must go step by step delicately,” he said. “Patience is needed.”

 

Changing political landscape 

Several Catholics in Hong Kong have said the move can be seen as an appeasement, coming at a fraught moment when China has grown more authoritarian under President Xi Jinping.

 

On Sunday, China’s ruling party announced it would end presidential term limits, an extraordinary move by a government that sought to avoid the dangerous one-man control exerted by former leader Mao Zedong. The move will, in effect, allow Xi to serve for life. During his five years in office, Xi’s policies have attacked economic corruption as well as curtailed the work of human rights attorneys, labor organizers, investigative journalists and bloggers.

 

In December, the Vatican asked two bishops in the underground church in China to relinquish their roles to men approved by the government. Vatican envoys asked Bishop Zhuang Jianjian of Shantou to step down and cede control to Huang Bingzhang, an excommunicated bishop and a member of China’s acquiescent legislature, the National People’s Congress, according to asianews.it.

Guo Xijin, another underground bishop in Fujian province, was asked to serve as an assistant to Zhan Silu, another government appointed bishop. Previously, the Vatican had said that both men had been elevated illegally by the government.

 

Opponents see it as an unusual intrusion, even violation, of the church’s authority. They are also concerned about signs that the government has restricted religious practice, such as orders that followers not bring children to worship.

 

News of the Vatican’s negotiations prompted several professors to start a petition against any agreement that would cede control to Beijing. More than 2,000 people have signed.

 

“We think the Catholic Church has appeal [for] the Chinese people exactly because it has refused to compromise with the Chinese authority,” said Joseph Cheng Yu-shek, a retired political science professor in Hong Kong, and one of the petitions organizers. “The first Christians of China were the very, very poor peasants in the cultural revolution days. My argument is if the Vatican makes a compromise with Beijing, the Catholic church loses that moral and spiritual appeal. And it doesn’t benefit the church.”

EU Prepares New Myanmar Sanctions Over Rohingya Crackdown

European Union foreign ministers have tasked the EU’s top diplomat with drawing up a list of sanctions to slap on senior Myanmar military officers over rights abuses against the Rohingya minority.

 

The ministers on Monday also ordered EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini to propose ways to toughen an EU embargo blocking the provision of arms and equipment that could be used for internal repression.

 

They said the measures are needed “in light of the disproportionate use of force and widespread and systematic grave human rights violations committed by the military and security forces.”

 

About 700,000 Rohingya have fled towns and villages in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state since August to escape a military crackdown.

 

Negotiations for their return are underway but many fear their safety and well-being are not guaranteed.

 

Rare Snow Fall in Rome, Schools Closed and Transport Limited

Romans woke-up Monday morning to see the city and its famous monuments covered in snow for the first time in six years, as icy winds blow from Siberia across Europe.

With its mild Mediterranean climate, the capital of Italy rarely sees snow, and when it does, even a few centimeters almost paralyze public transportation and force the closure of schools.

Italy’s civil protection agency has sent in the army to clear snow-clogged streets and called on volunteer corps to help commuters stranded at train stations.

Only one runway was operating at Rome’s main airport, Fiumicino, and the second airport, Ciampino, was closed overnight to allow workers to clear a runway for possible fights on Monday.

Elsewhere in northern and central Italy, the storm also caused disruption of public transportation and authorities ordered schools closed and many private ones followed suit.

Meanwhile, temperatures in Moscow have dropped to this winter’s low despite the approaching spring.

Earlier this month, Moscow had been hit by a record snowfall that closed streets all over the city.

 

The Meteorological Office said that in the Russian capital the temperature dropped to nearly minus 20 degrees Celsius overnight, the coldest night this winter.

 

Meteorologists are forecasting unusually low temperatures for early March.

Cryptocurrency Newcomers Cope With Wild Swings

After researching digital currencies for work last year, personal finance writer J.R.

Duren hopped on his own crypto-rollercoaster.

Duren bought $5 worth of litecoin in November, and eventually purchased $400 more, mostly with his credit card. In just a few months, he experienced a rally, a crash and a recovery, with the adrenaline highs and lows that come along.

“At first, I was freaking out,” Duren said about watching his portfolio plunge 40 percent at one point. “The precipitous drop came as a shock.”

The 39-year-old Floridian is part of the new class of crypto-investors who do not necessarily think bitcoin will replace the U.S. dollar, or that blockchain will revolutionize modern finance or that dentists should have their own currency.

Dubbed by longtime crypto-investors as “the noobs” — online lingo for “newbies” — they are ordinary investors hopping onto the latest trend, often with little understanding of how cryptocurrencies work or why they exist.

“There has been a big shift in the type of investors we have seen in crypto over the past year,” said Angela Walch, a fellow at the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies. “It’s shifted from a small group of techies to average Joes. I overhear conversations about cryptocurrencies everywhere, in coffee shops and airports.”

Walch and other experts cited parallels to the late-1990s, when retail investors jumped into stocks like Pets.com, a short-lived online seller of pet supplies, only to watch their wealth evaporate when the dot-com bubble burst.

Bitcoin is the best-known virtual currency but there are now more than 1,500 to choose from, according to market data website CoinMarketCap, ranging from popular coins like ether and ripple to obscure coins like dentacoin, the one intended for dentists.

Exactly how many “noobs” bought into the craze last year is unclear because each transaction is pseudonymous, meaning it is linked to a unique digital address, and few exchanges collect or share detailed information about their users.

A variety of consumer-friendly websites have made investing much easier, and online forums are now filled with posts from ordinary retail investors who were rarely spotted on the cryptocurrency pages of social news hub Reddit before.

Reuters interviewed eight people who recently made their first foray into digital currency investing. Many were motivated by a fear of missing out on profits during what seemed like a never-ending rally last year.

One bitcoin was worth almost $20,000 in December, up around 1,900 percent from the start of 2017. As of Friday afternoon it was worth about $10,000 after having fallen as much as 70 percent from its peak. Other coins made even bigger gains and experienced equally dizzying drops over that time frame.

“There was that two-month period last year where all the virtual currencies kept going and up and I had a couple of friends that had invested and they had made five-figure returns,” said Michael Brown, a research analyst in New Jersey, who said he bought around $1,000 worth of ether in December.

“I got swept by the media frenzy,” he said. “You never hear stories of people losing money.”

In the weeks after Brown invested, his holdings soared as much as 75 percent and tumbled as much as 59 percent.

Buy and ‘Hodl’

Investors who got into bitcoin before its 2013 crash like to refer to themselves as “OGs,” short for “original gangsters.”

They tend to shrug off the recent downturn, arguing that cryptocurrencies will be worth much more in the future.

“As crashes go, this is one of the biggest,” said Xavier Levenfiche, who first invested in cryptocurrencies in 2011.

“But, in the grand scheme of things, it’s a hiccup on the road to greatness.”

Spooked by the sudden fall but not willing to book a loss, many investors are embracing a mantra known as “HODL.” The term stems from a misspelled post on an online forum during the cryptocurrency crash in 2013, when a user wrote he was “hodling” his bitcoin, instead of “holding.”

Mike Gnitecki, for instance, bought one bitcoin at around $18,000 in December and was sitting on a 43 percent decline as of Friday, waiting for a recovery.

“I view it as having been a fun side investment similar to a gamble,” said Gnitecki, a paramedic from Texas. “Clearly I lost some money on this particular gamble.”

Duren, the personal finance writer, is also holding onto his litecoin for now, though he regrets having spent $33 on credit card and exchange fees for a $405 investment.

Some retail investors who went big into cryptocurrencies for the first time during the rally last year remain positive.

Didi Taihuttu announced in October that he and his family had sold everything they owned — including their business, home, cars and toys — to move to a “digital nomad” camp in Thailand.

In an interview, Taihuttu said he has no regrets. The crypto-day-trader’s portfolio is in the black, and he predicts one bitcoin will be worth between $30,000 and $50,000 by year-end.

His backup plan is to write a book and perhaps make a movie about his family’s experience.

“We are not it in it to become bitcoin millionaires,” Taihuttu said.

Blast Destroys Shop in Leicester, England

An explosion in Leicester, England, destroyed a store and house, which British police declared a “major incident.”

Pictures of the blast showed flames shooting up from the rubble where the two-story building once stood, while neighbors frantically tried to get close to the site to help.

Police and rescuers have closed down the street and evacuated several nearby buildings. They are urging people to stay away, saying it is unclear if anyone was in the store.

The cause of the blast is unknown. Leicester is about 177 kilometers north of London.

Catalan Separatists Protest Visit of Spanish King to Barcelona

Flash protests for and against secession from Spain marked Spanish King Felipe’s visit to Barcelona to inaugurate an international exhibit of cell phone producers.  It was his first trip to the Catalan capital since an October regional vote for independence.

Separatists poured onto streets, plazas and balconies Sunday banging pots in what has become a ritual act of defiance since Spain’s central government imposed direct rule in November, dissolving the regional government.

A swelling crowd of protestors surrounded the city’s Baroque Music Palace as the King arrived for the inaugural dinner, forming a symbolic yellow ribbon around the building to highlight the detention of leaders.

But flag waving supporters of unity with Spain also held rallies in the city center to welcome the king, leading to street clashes with separatists indicating the extent to which Catalonia’s society is divided. At least two arrests had been reported by Sunday evening.

Tensions have grown in recent days, after Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy suggested using direct rule provisions to reintroduce Spanish as the main language in Catalan schools.

 

Catalan teachers’ unions have threatened strikes and mass protests to block the measures.  “It would be a pedagogic disaster if Madrid tried to control our educational system through a kind of inquisition”the head of the Catalan Teachers’ Union, Ramon Fonts, told VOA.

Echoes of Franco

Separatists have equated efforts to impose central control on education to the dictatorship of Francisco Franco of a half a century ago that banned speaking Catalan.  But proponents of the measures say post-Franco governments have devolved too much power to regional authorities, which have used the local language to promote separatism and advance their own political interests.

“It’s about allowing parents the right to decide in which language they want their children to be educated” said Raquel Cavisner,spokesperson of Convivencia Civica, a Catalan organization promoting unity with Spain. She says that Catalan language “immersion” in schools is a “discriminatory system” that puts children from Spanish speaking families at a disadvantage.

Current Catalan legislation fixes the portion of class time in which teaching can be conducted in Spanish at 25 percent.  Such basic courses as mathematics are taught in Catalan, as is Spanish history.  “Spanish is generally taught as a foreign language”a Barcelona school teacher said.

While secessionists continue to control the regional parliament, following emergency elections last December, polls consistently show Catalan opinion to be about evenly split. Pro-independence parties received 47 percent of the vote,but the largest vote getter of all seven parties competing in the elections was a unionist center right group, Ciudadanos, which proposes Spanish as main language.

Mixed responses

Resistance to the imposition of Catalan was manifested by hospital workers last week in the Balearic Islands, which would be encompassed in a projected Catalan state.  They protested against legislation requiring Catalan for jobs in the health service.  “You cure with medicine not with language” chanted about 3,000 nurses and doctors.

But thousands of Catalan independence supporters filled a theater in Barcelona Sunday to hear their exiled leader Carles Puigdemont say via video from Belgium that King Felipe would only be welcomed in the Republic of Catalonia if he “apologized” for opposing independence.

Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau and the president of the Catalan parliament Roger Torrent snubbed Felipe, by boycotting the inauguration of the Mobile World Congress, despite earlier assurances to international sponsors they would not to allow politics to interfere with the event.

Radical Committees for the Defense of the Republic associated with the “anti-capitalist” Catalan Unity Party, scuffled with police as they tried to block access to the convention hall, following a video address by their exiled leader Ana Gabriel.

Secessionist spokesmen blame the exile and jailing of their leaders for their inability to form a government since winning elections two months ago. Marcel Mauri of the pro independence Omnium Cultural says their united opposition to Madrid’s moves to take control of education could influence pro-independence parties to resolve their differences and announce a government in the next few days.

Thousands Commemorate Murdered Russian Opposition Leader Ahead of Elections

A month ahead of presidential elections, thousands of Russians rallied in the capital city of Moscow Sunday in honor of Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered on this day three years ago.

In a rare sanctioned opposition gathering in Russia’s capital, many carried flags, portraits of Nemtsov, placards and flowers in frigid temperatures as low as minus 14 degrees Celsius.

Moscow police, who are often accused of underestimating opposition crowd sizes, said that 4,500 people attended the rally. Pro-opposition monitors said the figure was over 7,000.

Former presidential candidate Alexey Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner who has been blocked from participating in the elections over legal problems widely seen as manufactured to keep him out of the race, was reported to have been in attendance.

Nemtsov, one of Russian president Putin’s most vocal critics, was shot in the back late at night while walking across a bridge just meters from the Kremlin in 2015. He was working on a report examining Russia’s role in the conflict in Ukraine at the time of his death.

Last year, a Russian court sentenced Saur Dadayev to 20 years in prison and four accomplices between 11 and 19 years. Dadayev initially pleaded guilty, but later recanted, saying he was tortured into the confession.

While the verdicts were welcomed by supporters of Nemtsov, the investigation and trial were condemned for failing to uncover the masterminds of the killing or addressing the motive, which is widely believed to be political.

VOA Interview: Sam Nunn says ‘Carrots and Sticks’ Needed with N. Korea

Concerned about a “war by blunder,” Sam Nunn, the former U.S. senator from Georgia who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee, says he favors “tightening the screws in sanctions” on North Korea, but the U.S. needs to communicate with the country at the same time. In an interview with VOA Contributor Greta Van Susteren, Nunn favors modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal, as set forth by the Trump Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review. But Nunn, co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, questions the need for developing more low-yield nuclear weapons. Interview was conducted February 20, 2018.

Van Susteren: Senator nice to see you, sir.

Nunn: Good to see you, Greta.

Van Susteren: Senator I want to go back to the Nuclear Threat Initiative and how you began, got involved in this, but I want to go back to 1991 what happened with the fall of the Soviet Union, when the Soviet Union was falling, tell me what you did?

Nunn: Well I was chair of the Armed Services Committee, and Senator Luger was a big player on the [Senate] Foreign Relations Committee and I’m in Budapest, Hungary at a conference with Soviet Union representatives, European representatives. Gorbachev gets taken captive. For three days we wait to see what happens. He gets released, one of our Russian friends who had been at the conference calls me, says: “Come to Moscow, big things are happening.” I went to Moscow, I stayed about four days. I visited with Gorbechev. I watched the debate about the break-up of the Soviet Union. I visited with the “new military leaders” who were loyal to [Boris] Yeltsin and I said to myself on the way back: “This place is coming apart and it’s coming apart with thousands of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons materials and we’ve got to do something about it.” That led to the introduction of what became the Nunn-Luger bill. It passed in late 1991 after a very rough start but three or four months later the House and the Senate went along with it and it became known as Cooperative Threat Reduction, helping the former Soviet Union, not just Russia but the other countries that had nuclear weapons and there were four of them — not just Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan and they were very big arsenals and we helped all of them over the next ten, fifteen years to try to secure their nuclear weapons and materials. Try to prevent catastrophic terrorism and also to try to give some meaningful role in life to people who weren’t being paid very well — the scientists — that knew how to make a nuclear weapon — that did not know how to support their families.

Van Susteren: Since that point when the Soviet Union fell and the legislature was passed to help contain or help secure nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, has the threat increased or receded?

Nunn: I think the threat of a deliberate all-out war with a major party like Russia — deliberate, I’ll put the emphasis on that  — has receded. I think the chances of a war by blunder, or a war because of cyber interference with command and control; a war because the United States and Russia escalate in some region like the Middle East or Ukraine; I think that kind of danger has gone up. And certainly the danger of catastrophic terrorism because the know how — the ability to make a crude nuclear weapon, not necessarily one that could be put up on a missile and fly through space but a crude nuclear weapon that could be put in the back of a truck or in a ship in a port, I think those dangers have gone up. So — deliberate war in my view, has receded, but war by blunder has increased in terms of risk and danger.

Van Susteren: After 9-11 the 9-11 commission said that al-Qaida wanted to get their hands on a nuclear weapon. Obviously the know-how is, as you said, out there. The materials are out there, materials that are insecure in many nations and you’ve got the added part that terrorists  often times suicide bombers don’t have that survival instinct. Does that increase your worry, does that make you feel that there is more of a danger or am I being an alarmist?

Nunn: I think there is more of a danger. The basic fundamental thing we have to all understand, in Russia and the United States is Russia and the United States — we have together 90 percent of the nuclear materials. When we’re at each other’s throats, so to speak — when we’re in the Middle East or Ukraine or over the elections, where there is cyber interference here, all of those things make the world inherently more dangerous. The United States and Russia have the huge nuclear arsenals and have a huge responsibility. Unless we’re working together the world gets more dangerous. And then you overlay cyber, you overlay terrorism, you overlay the fact that we’ve got four new countries with nuclear weapons and nine nuclear weapons states now. All of those things in my view have driven up the risk and the danger.

Van Susteren: Do we need as many nuclear weapons as we have? Does the United States have a huge arsenal — far more than we need?

Nunn: The key of survivability — the key is reliability and the key is safe and secure. So as long as we have nuclear weapons we have to have them safe, secure, reliable and in my view — as many as possible for survival, meaning they can take a first attack and still be able to retaliate. That’s what deterrence is. That’s what stability means. So the answer is we can reduce nuclear weapons but we have to do it in concert with what’s going on in Russia and what’s going on in China, so we need to work together. And I’ve said a number of times that if you look at all those dangers, particularly catastrophic terrorism and cyber and so forth, the world is in a race between cooperation and catastrophe and right now, cooperation is not running very fast.

Van Susteren: Modernization. I hear that used all the time. Do we need to modernize our nuclear weapon arsenal or is what we have sufficient?

Nunn: No, I think we need to modernize the arsenal and we need to modernize the infrastructure because you’ve got to have safe, secure and reliable weapons as long as they exist. Schultz, George Schultz, Henry Kissinger and Bill Perry and I all believe we need to reduce the amounts* of nuclear weapons, also make a contribution to having them not proliferate — not spread to other nations and ultimately — we would all like to see a world without nuclear weapons but as long as there are nuclear weapons, America has to have a modern, safe and secure infrastructure and delivery system as well as the weapons themselves.

Van Susteren: Trump administration released in early February the Nuclear Posture Review and this is the first one since the Obama Administration released one in early 2010. Do you know how it’s changed at all or what the difference is between the two?

Nunn: Well, the good news is, as you remember, President Trump during the campaign said two or three times that it would probably be ok for Japan and South Korea and Saudi Arabia to have nuclear weapons — well — those of us in this business — so to speak — were horrified at that because the policy of the United States under every president since World War II has been not to have nuclear weapons proliferate to new countries. It just makes all the dangers greater. But the good news is that in this Nuclear Posture Review it is very clear that United States policy has not changed in that regard. We’re still against proliferation and we still are signed up for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is enormously important. It’s sort of the pillar of stability in arms control. The other good news is the Administration has said they are not going to test. The bad news is that they are not in favor of ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty but at least we’re not going to test. So there are some good developments in here, in the Nuclear Posture Review and there are some things that I think raise very big questions and concerns.

Van Susteren: One of the things that I was reading about was low yield nuclear weapons. And, do we need those? Doesn’t that start sort of an arms race of other nations wanting low-yield nuclear weapons?

Nunn: Well, you don’t want to make nuclear weapons usable. The head of our strategic air command — I’ll call it strategic strike command — that’s old school — Striker Command now — General Hayden — said within the last year in testimony that all nuclear weapons are strategic. There is no such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. If someone uses a nuclear weapon, the world has changed and the response will probably be strategic. So — I subscribe to that theory and I think a lot of conversation about usability of nuclear weapons — whether it comes from the Russian side, where they have a sort of a worse vocabulary and “escalate to deescalate” I don’t think there’s any such thing as escalating nuclear weapons to deescalate. General Hayden made it clear that he didn’t think that either, so, this is something that really ought to be debated. We’ve always had lower yield nuclear weapons but the terminology in this nuclear posture review seems to indicate that the United States believes to counter Russia’s “escalate to deescalate” we need to have more usable nuclear weapons and new nuclear weapons. So I think that raises serious questions and I think the burden [of proof] is on those who think we need new weapons for that purpose.

Nunn: And particularly, the concern I have is reference to having a small nuclear weapon on a missile on a submarine. These submarines are our most survivable part of the Triad. If we shoot a small nuclear weapon off a submarine, how in the world is Russia or any other country going to know that it’s not the real biggest nuclear weapon we have. And what would we do if everybody goes to that concept? Do we start having small weapons being shot off submarines with that capacity? I think this is a really dangerous move and I think there are serious questions about to be raised on it. Now, on the other hand, there’s also discussion about a cruise missile, a sea launched cruise missile, to counter the Russian violation of INF, which is of grave concern. And I think that one has room for real discussion. But to take one of our, we call them ‘boomers,’ Trident submarines and put a small warhead on it, and act like the other countries would know it’s a small warhead when it’s being fired, to me raises serious questions. The other factor here would be, do we reveal the location of the submarine?

Van Susteren: When we shoot one off, don’t they know where the location…

Nunn: The trajectory would show where it is

Van Susteren: Would show where it is at that point.

Nunn: I would be shocked if they didn’t lay down as many nuclear warheads as they could in that region, even though the sub would move out because they would fire on the sea. But I think this raises some very big stability concerns and I’m hoping Congress will ask these hard questions because this is serious stuff.

Van Susteren: The way, as a non sophisticated person in nuclear technology, the way I see these low yield nuclear weapons is sort of mini nukes, and I don’t quite understand why we need mini-nukes. I guess it’s because if the Russians lob a mini-nuke, low-yield someplace, we want to respond likewise and not use one of the big nukes and take out, something catastrophic. On the other hand, it creates a whole new arms race maybe to me because other countries would want them as well. Secondly, why don’t conventional weapons, why wouldn’t they serve the purpose, can’t conventional weapons answer a low-yield?

Nunn: Yes, I think all of those are relevant questions and good questions. We also already have low-yield. We’ve had low-yield for a long time. We’ve had a weapon you could carry that is this big that we had, ADMs that you put in holes in the ground and fill the gap. So we’ve had them a long time. He real danger is the psychology and when we start advertising as the United States as a country that’s the strongest military in the world that we need a whole new weapons system and we are thinking about having a weapons that is more usable, now those who are for it will argue that they don’t believe you’ll use a big one. Well, I don’t know whether that’s accurate or not. My view, the US and Russia, if we both start talking about usability and you project that on the other seven nuclear powers in the world or nuclear weapons states, I think the world becomes very very dangerous.

Van Susteren: What’s the situation between the United States and Russia, how much notice do we have of each other using these weapons, because I know you’ve been outspoken about that.

Nunn: Well, the United States and Russia have never had much decision time for the leaders. If there was some kind of warning, the President of the United States and the president of Russia don’t have much decision time. You can debate whether its two minutes or five minutes or seven minutes, but the point is we should both be working to increase decision time.

Van Susteren: And especially since there have been mistakes?

Nunn: Absolutely. False warning and as I mentioned before, cyber-attacks, someone simulates and attack, you’ve got a false warning or it interferes with cyber, non-nation states might interfere with cyber command and control. And so I think the lack of decision time is fundamental and it would be my view the worlds would be a lot safer if we, the United States president and the Russian president and hopefully the other nuclear weapons states will say to their military commanders ‘go off and get in a room with each other and come back and give us more decision time. If we have five minutes now, give us 10 minutes before we have to either use them or lose them and when we get to 10 minutes, go to 20 and then 20 to an hour, to a day to a week and then nuclear weapons become less relevant and guess what? If they become less relevant, then we can begin and decrease the numbers of nuclear weapons. But if we make nuclear weapons more and more relevant, and that’s the big question in this posture review, are we making them more relevant or are we making them, for instance, there’s an implication in the nuclear posture review that’s just come out, that we might respond to a non-nuclear attack with nuclear weapons if it’s a cyberattack, a major cyberattack. Well, this raises questions about attribution. Do we really know where it came from and then we have to ask the question: if the other eight countries do the same thing, now we’ve got nuclear weapons around the world responding to a major cyberattack, how do we know it’s not third parties, how do we know who it is? So we don’t want to go down that route unless we ask some very serious questions and in my view, have discussions with the other nuclear weapons states. Communications in this era is very important because all nuclear weapons states have grave dangers facing them and if we don’t have some rules of the road in the cyber world, if we don’t have rules of the road on decision time, then I really fear for the future of our children and grandchildren.

Van Susteren: It seems more perilous to me listening to you than back in 1991 when you were securing the military weapons the Soviet Union had, when you interject the dangers of cyberterrorism, I mean the world’s gotten profoundly dangerous that way.

Nunn: I think it has, but that was a period of, maximum danger because you had an empire coming apart with thousands of nuclear weapons, tons of chemical weapons and they had scientists and technicians that didn’t know how to feed their families, but they had this knowledge and possession of the weapons, so that was a danger of terrorism, of the weapons leaking. The long pole in the tent for any terrorist who wants to blow up a crude weapon, a nuclear weapon, is getting the nuclear materials. And at that stage, nuclear material was much looser and less protected than they are now. The good news is that we are the world is doing a much better job of protecting nuclear materials. We’ve got a long way to go but progress has been made on that front under both Republican and Democratic presidents.

Van Susteren: Alright, we’ve had situations like AQ Khan in Pakistan essentially being the Walmart of nuclear technology and peddling that to different places, but North Korea is getting it from someplace. Where is North Korea getting its nuclear material?

Nunn: Well, I would assume that would come from multiple sources. Perhaps back in the old days, China, perhaps Russia, perhaps Pakistan, you know the arms bazaar that came out of Khan in Pakistan, so various sources I’m sure/ But North Korea is a ticking time bomb. And the danger in North Korea is not only North Korea itself, but what happens in terms of the temptation of South Korea or Japan or other countries in the region having their own nuclear weapons and that’s the nightmare. The more nuclear countries you have, the greater the danger.

Van Susteren: It seems that we’ve had 70 years with the Russia and US having nuclear weapons, give or take, and we’ve had no nuclear incidents, with some near misses in that there’s been a false alarm but nothing happened. North Korea, we don’t have that track record and we have a threatening president of North Korea who’s tested nuclear weapon, he’s tested an ICBM, and we don’t have that relationship that we had, that you had back then with the Soviet Union.

Nunn: We did talk to the Soviet Union during the days of great tension, we always had communications with them.

Van Susteren: So what about this with North Korea?

Nunn: I think we need carrots and sticks with North Korea. I’m in favor of tightening the screws on sanctions but also think we need to communicate with North Korea. We don’t want nor should any country want a war by blunder. We can’t have that. It’s a mistake because the atmosphere is so poisoned, and the rhetoric on both sides, which has calmed down recently, because perhaps of the Olympics, makes everything more dangerous it makes mistakes more likely by people out there manning the radar systems that are basically controlling the weapons. So there, the rhetoric is important. Even if you don’t agree, I think talking is essential, if for nothing else, to make sure we don’t misinterpret each other and get into a war nobody wants.

Van Susteren: It sure feels dangerous.

Nunn: It is.

Van Susteren: Senator, nice to see you. We miss you in the US Senate.

Nunn: Good to be with you. Thanks.

Pope Calls Violence in Syria ‘Inhuman,’ Backs UN Cease-Fire

Pope Francis is denouncing the “inhuman” violence in Syria and is backing a U.N. Security Council-demanded cease-fire so food and medicine can reach desperate Syrians and the sick and wounded can be evacuated.

Francis led thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square in praying Sunday for an “immediate” end to hostilities.

 

He said: “The month of February has been one of the most violent in seven years of conflict: hundreds, thousands of civilian victims, children, women and the elderly, hospitals have been hit, people can’t get food. All this is inhuman.”

He insisted: “You can’t fight evil with evil.”

On Saturday, the U.N. Security Council unanimously approved a resolution demanding a 30-day cease-fire across Syria to deliver humanitarian aid to millions and evacuate the critically ill and wounded.

NASA Builds Atomic Clock for Deep-Space Navigation

Only days after the spectacular liftoff of what is currently the heaviest space rocket, the privately built Falcon Heavy, NASA announced the next launch will carry a specially built atomic clock. The new device, much smaller and sturdier than earth-bound atomic clocks, will help future astronauts navigate in deep space. VOA’s George Putic reports.