Month: July 2017

Weary Republicans in Washington may be ready to move on from health care, but conservatives across the United States are warning the GOP-led Congress not to abandon its pledge to repeal the Obama-era health law – or risk a political nightmare in next year’s elections.

 

The Senate’s failure this past week to pass repeal legislation has outraged the Republican base and triggered a new wave of fear. The stunning collapse has exposed a party so paralyzed by ideological division that it could not deliver on its top campaign pledge.

 

After devoting months to the debate and seven years to promising to kill the Affordable Care Act, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican-Kentucky, simply said: “It’s time to move on.”

 

But that’s simply not an option for a conservative base energized by its opposition to the health law. Local party leaders, activists and political operatives are predicting payback for Republicans lawmakers if they don’t revive the fight.

 

“This is an epic fail for Republicans,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans For Prosperity, the political arm of the conservative Koch Brothers’ network. “Their failure to keep their promise will hurt them. It will.”

 

To the American Conservative Union, the three Republican senators who blocked the stripped-down repeal bill that failed in the wee hours Friday are “sellouts.” A Trump-sanctioned super political action committee did not rule out running ads against uncooperative Republicans, which it did recently against Sen. Dean Heller, Republican-Nevada.

 

There are limited options for directly punishing the renegade senators – John McCain of Arizona, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine. None of the three is up for re-election next fall. McCain, whose dramatic “no” vote killed the bill, is serving his last term in office, has brain cancer and is hardly moved by electoral threats.

​Failing the ‘moral test’

Still, broad disillusionment among conservative voters could have an impact beyond just a few senators. Primary election challenges or a low turnout could mean trouble for all Republicans. Democrats need to flip 24 seats to take control of the House of Representatives, a shift that would dramatically re-shape the last two years of Trump’s first term.

 

“If you look at competitive districts, swing districts, or districts where Republicans could face primary challenges, this is something that will be a potent electoral issue,” Republican pollster Chris Wilson said of his party’s health care failure. “I don’t think this is something voters are going to forget.”

 

One such challenger has emerged. Conservative activist Shak Hill, a former Air Force pilot, plans to run against second-term GOP Rep. Barbara Comstock in a competitive northern Virginia district.

 

Hill told The Associated Press that Comstock, who voted against a GOP House health care repeal bill in May, “has failed the moral test of her time in Congress.”

 

The leaders of other groups, such as Women Vote Trump, have begun to court primary challengers to punish those members of Congress deemed insufficiently committed to President Donald Trump’s agenda.

 

“I expect that we will get involved in primaries,” said the group’s co-founder, Amy Kremer. “You cannot continue to elect the same people over and over again and expect different results.”

 

On Capitol Hill, some Republicans insist their health care overhaul could be saved in the short term. Yet party leaders – backed by outside groups – are signaling that they would probably move on to taxes. Republicans hoped the issue would bring some party unity, even as realists in Washington view the a tax overhaul – something that hasn’t happened in more than 30 years – as one of the most complex legislative projects possible.

‘You can’t have everything’

The Trump administration has become engulfed in internal drama over personnel and personalities. Trump on Friday ousted his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, replacing him with Home Security Secretary John Kelly. The president did not appear to share conservatives’ outrage about the Senate’s vote, but repeated his promises to remake the health system.

 

“You can’t have everything,” Trump said, adding: “We’ll get it done. We’re going to get it.”

 

Around the country, Republican voters continue to support efforts to repeal former President Barack Obama’s health law, even if there is little agreement on an alternative.

 

A CNN poll released last week found that 83 percent of Republicans favor some form of repeal, while only 11 percent of Republicans want the party to abandon the repeal effort. Among all adults, 52 percent of voters favor some sort of repeal, with 34 percent favored repeal only if replacement could be enacted at the same time.

 

“The political pressure on something like this is real,” said GOP strategist Mike Shields. “I don’t think this is over.”

 

Like others Republican operatives, Shields said the party’s ability to enact the rest of Trump’s agenda – taxes, infrastructure and the border wall – could help “mitigate how upset people will be” about health care.

“If this is part of a general trend,” he said of the GOP’s governing struggles, “I think that can be pretty disastrous for 2018.”

 

Being held to account

Republicans will be held responsible for any negative economic fallout from the current health system’s failure, said Paul Shumaker, a North Carolina Republican pollster and senior adviser to Sen. Richard Burr, Republican-North Carolina.

 

As early as October, voters are likely to see increased costs as insurance companies notify people about their new rates. By next October, it will be too late to unlink Republicans from the problem, Shumaker said.

 

For now at least, many Trump supporters blame the Republican Party’s problems on its leaders in Congress.

 

“They certainly didn’t have their house in order,” said Larry Wood of Waynesboro, Virginia, who voted for Trump only after supporting Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the 2016 GOP primary. The 69-year-old retired homebuilder says the failure falls at the feet of Congress.

 

Trump seems content to let the current system collapse.

 

“As I said from the beginning, let ObamaCare implode, then deal. Watch!” he said in a tweet.
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Silicon Valley is the tech industry’s epicenter, but what is the epicenter of Silicon Valley?

It might just be Coupa Café in downtown Palo Alto, Calif.

For the tech community, this café is a meeting place of the who’s who of Silicon Valley, where the likes of the late Steve Jobs of Apple, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin have all been spotted. Up-and-coming startup founders are able to buy their lattes with the digital currency Bitcoin before their pitch sessions with leading industry venture capitalists.

The café is so well known among techies that a cup with the Coupa logo was featured as a prop in the 2010 film The Social Network.

“I remember seeing Mark Zuckerberg sitting here and having meetings and people coming up,” said Eric Sokol, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University.

While Silicon Valley is famous for companies such as Facebook, Twitter and other billion-dollar empires built in cyberspace, some folks in the valley still believe real-world human connections can make a difference.

Making connections

Just from frequenting the café, Sokol says, he became an adviser to a health care related startup and a new venture capitalist fund. Both came about when other patrons at the café overheard conversations he was having, he said.

That’s the kind of “crazy nest of connections” that can occur at Coupa, he said.

The Venezuelan-born Jean Paul Coupal founded the café with his mother and sister in 2004 with the hopes of bringing a bit of his homeland to Silicon Valley — Venezuelan coffee, crepes and Venezuelan arepas. The family puts its touch on all aspects of the business — Coupal’s sister and mother personally painted each of the eight cafés.

While the beautifully decorated walls and rich cuisine may be what initially attracted the tech community, the café’s tech focus has kept it in the vanguard of this café-saturated region.

In 2013, Coupa Cafe began accepting Bitcoins, a digital payment system, allowing customers to pay for their lattes and arepas with the currency.

“We want to be part of the technology,” Coupal said.

The pre-office

And there’s another perk: The café allows patrons to stay all day, which makes it attractive for entrepreneurs who are in the pre-office-space stage.

“A lot of the startups in the area come and they like to work at Coupa, coding all day,” Coupal said. “We’ve seen a lot of products that got developed at Coupa.”

With Stanford and other colleges nearby, the possibility of a life-changing chance encounter is not lost on local students interested in tech.

“I am currently teaching myself JavaScript here at Coupa right now,” said Katie Kennedy, a local community college student. “If someone happened to look over my shoulder and saw what I was doing, I would definitely not say no to any help.”

Now, there are eight Coupa Cafe locations. This one, the original on Ramona Street, is in a building from the 1930s.

“The food’s good, the coffee’s good,” Sokol said. “I wish I had stock, but I don’t in Coupa. And I don’t know, it just has the right atmosphere, the right mix of people. It’s got an energy about it, I guess.”

Cafe Coupa shows that being at the right place at the right time can change a café’s fate as much as a techie’s life.
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The Illinois Department of Natural Resources is reintroducing a living fossil into its waterways. The alligator gar is a fish so old, it’s thought to have evolved during the Early Cretaceous period, more than a 100 million years ago.

Alligator gar are the second largest freshwater fish in North America. Illinois fisheries biologist Randy Sauer says they disappeared from the state’s waterways in the 1990s, although they continued to thrive in southern U.S. rivers.

“We want to restore the ecosystem because it is important to have top predators to balance the species below them in order to keep check on some more abundant species,” he said.

Beyond that, alligator gar make for great big game fishing. The diamond-scaled animals, which breathe both air and water, can grow up to 2.7 meters and weigh more than 136 kilograms. In fact, Sauer says, their large size is what did them in originally in the state.

“It was pretty much extirpated out of its range because of misconceptions about it eating sport fish,” he said. “People would target it and put bounties on it.”

Everything is on the menu

The alligator gar is an opportunistic feeder, meaning it will eat whatever it encounters — from an occasional turtle or small duck to invasive species such as Asian and silver carp. Sauer hopes the re-introduction program will help the state’s efforts to control the carp.

Because gar can live up to 60 years, this program is going to take decades to fully expand.

“The (female) alligator gar does not sexually mature until 11 years, and the male not till 6 or 7 years,” Sauer said, “so at the outset of this project we’re probably going to stock more heavily than 10 or 20 years down the road when hopefully these fish will find each other and start doing the job on their own.”

To date, 7,000 alligator gar fingerlings have been fitted with tiny transponder tags so that they can be tracked and then released into Illinois waterways. As it rains and floods, biologists expect some of the fish to follow the rivers all the way down to join other populations in Louisiana and Texas.
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President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans suffered a major political setback Friday when the Senate rejected a partial repeal of Obamacare, one of the president’s key campaign pledges. The key vote against the plan was delivered by Republican Senator John McCain, who has clashed with Trump before. VOA National correspondent Jim Malone has more from Washington.
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Securing petrochemical plants and keeping chemicals out of the hands of terrorists were the topics of discussion at a recent Chemical Sector Security Summit in Houston, Texas. Security experts say the countries that are producing chemicals are shifting and that is one of many reasons developed and developing nations need to share best security practices. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports from Houston, a petrochemical hub in the United States.
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China has condemned North Korea’s latest launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile, joining criticism by the United States and South Korea.

China’s foreign ministry said in a statement Saturday that the launch “defied” U.N. Security Council resolutions and “the common wish of the international community.”

US, South Korea missiles

U.S. and South Korean forces fired missiles into South Korean territorial waters in direct response to North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile launch Friday.

A statement from the Eighth United States Army said the joint, live-fire exercise used the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) and the Republic of Korea Hyunmoo Missile II. The weapons can be quickly deployed and provide deep-strike precision capability under all weather conditions, according to the military.

A defense official told VOA the exercise began around 5:30 pm EDT.

A White House statement released shortly afterward called the North’s missile test a “reckless and dangerous action” which will further isolate the country.

The statement added that “the United States will take all necessary steps to ensure the security of the American homeland and protect our allies in the region.”

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said North Korea’s latest launch was “in blatant violation of multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions.” The top U.S. diplomat added, “As the principal economic enablers of North Korea’s nuclear weapon and ballistic missile development program, China and Russia bear unique and special responsibility for this growing threat to regional and global stability.”

​Two ICBM’s tested in July

North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile launch was the second such launch in just a few weeks. The latest launch flew higher and longer than the first ICBM Pyongyang launched July 4.

Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis said North Korea launched the missile from Mupyong-ni arms plant in the country’s north.

Defense officials in Washington and Seoul, as well as private analysts, said the missile was in the air for 40 to 45 minutes, reaching a peak altitude of 3,000 kilometers and traveling some 1,000 kilometers laterally before splashing down about 160 kilometers west of Japan’s second-largest island of Hokkaido.

Japan said the missile fell into its exclusive economic zone.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe termed Friday’s launch a “serious and real threat” to his country’s security.

​Reassurances for South Korea

After Friday’s unusual late-night launch, Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral Harry Harris, the head of U.S. Pacific Command, called the Republic of Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, General Lee Sun Jin to discuss military response options and reaffirm their “ironclad commitment” to the U.S.-Republic of Korea alliance, according to the U.S. Chairman’s office.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in said the launch by the North “clearly violates U.N. Security Council Resolution and it is a grave threat to international peace and security.”

Moon added that “once again we urge North Korea to awaken from a vain illusion such as developing a nuclear program and missiles and instead choose a new path for a dialogue.”

How to respond

While the type of missile tested is yet unconfirmed, the preliminary data is “fully consistent with a Hwasong-14 tested with a larger second stage that is powered by a high-thrust engine,” according to Michael Elleman, senior fellow for missile defense at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“If flown on a flatter trajectory, this missile could reach as far as 9,000 to 10,000 km,” (easily putting Seattle or San Francisco on the U.S. West Coast into range), according to Elleman, whose comments were published on the 38 North website of the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

“The most worrying aspect is that the U.S. administration will not take this launch seriously due to preoccupation and in-fighting, giving North Korea more time to develop its program and more cause for US allies South Korea and Japan to lose confidence that the U.S. will come to their aid,” Melissa Hanham, a senior research associate with the James Martin Center of Nonproliferation Studies of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told VOA.

“With no sign the Kim regime is prepared to back down, we must pursue a comprehensive approach that includes rigorous enforcement of sanctions, strengthening regional alliances, and expanded deployment of missile defense systems to confront this serious threat,” said a statement from Senator Bob Corker who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee. “Additional measures to enhance our efforts against North Korea are currently being considered.”

The French foreign ministry, in a statement, called for fellow members of the United Nations Security Council, in response to the launch, to swiftly impose “strong and additional sanctions” against North Korea.

State Department Correspondent Nike Ching and Northeast Asia Bureau Chief Brian Padden in Seoul contributed to this report.
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The United States imposed sanctions Friday on six subsidiaries of a company key to Iran’s ballistic missile program, citing continued “provocative actions” like Tehran’s launch of a rocket capable of putting a satellite into orbit.

Iranian state television reported Thursday that Iran had successfully tested a rocket that can deliver satellites into orbit, an action the United States and others say breaches a U.N. Security Council resolution because of its potential use in ballistic missile development.

A joint statement Friday from the United States, France, Germany and Britain said the launch was inconsistent with a U.N. Security Council resolution calling on Iran not to conduct such tests.

​Six firms sanctioned

The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed sanctions on six Iranian firms owned or controlled by the Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group. The move enables the U.S. government to block any company property under its jurisdiction and prevents U.S. citizens from doing business with the firms.

“These sanctions … underscore the United States’ deep concerns with Iran’s continued development and testing of ballistic missiles and other provocative behavior,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said in a statement.

“The U.S. government will continue to aggressively counter Iran’s ballistic missile-related activity, whether it be a provocative space launch … or likely support to Yemeni Houthi missile attacks on Saudi Arabia such as occurred this past weekend,” Mnuchin said.

The six Shahid Hemmat units targeted by the U.S. sanctions manufacture missile components, missile airframes, liquid-propellant ballistic missile engines, liquid propellant, guidance and control systems. They also do missile-related research and maintenance.

US: Iran violates UN resolutions

The Treasury move was announced just hours after the U.S. Senate voted almost unanimously to impose new sanctions on Iran, Russia and North Korea.

The sanctions in the bill, which the White House says President Donald Trump will sign, also target Iran’s missile development programs as well as human rights abuses.

The State Department charged Thursday that Iran’s test of the satellite launch vehicle was a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions as well as the spirit of the multinational Iran nuclear deal, under which Tehran agreed to curb its nuclear programs in exchange for a lifting of some economic sanctions.

Washington’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said the Trump administration would continue to impose consequences on Iran until it complied fully with U.N. resolutions.

“The issue with Iran always comes back to mistrust. Iran’s widespread support for terrorists tells us we can’t trust them. Iran’s breaking its obligation on missile testing tells us we can’t trust them. Yesterday’s launch proves that yet again,” she said in a statement.

The Trump administration certified Iran as being in compliance with the nuclear deal last week, even though Trump has called the agreement negotiated by his Democratic predecessor “the worst deal ever.”

Trump issued a veiled threat against Iran earlier this week, warning Tehran to adhere to the terms of the nuclear accord or face “big, big problems.” He said in a speech in Ohio that the deal had “emboldened” Iran and added “that won’t take place much longer.”
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The White House says President Donald Trump approves of Congress’ new sanctions against Russia and he intends to sign the bill.

In a statement Friday, the press secretary said the president has reviewed the final version of the bill that outlines additional sanctions against a wide range of Russia industries. The bill also gives Congress the ability to block the president from lifting the Russia sanctions.

The Trump administration had opposed the sanctions aimed at punishing Russia for interfering in last year’s U.S. presidential election. The White House argued that it needed flexibility in trying to improve relations between the two countries. But after months of investigations into contacts between Russian officials and members of President Trump’s campaign team, there was broad bipartisan support in both houses of Congress for more stringent measures.

Russia responds with sanctions

Russia responded earlier Friday to the sanctions with new measures targeting U.S. missions in the country. Moscow said Washington must reduce the number of diplomatic and technical staff working in U.S. missions in Russia to 455 by Sept. 1. That’s same number of Russian diplomats and technical staff Moscow said are working in the United States. It is unclear how many Americans that would affect, possibly hundreds.

In addition to the reduction in U.S. diplomatic personnel, Russia also said it would block the U.S. embassy in Russia from accessing its warehouses in Moscow and a vacation compound in Serebryany Bor.

“We also reserve the right to take other measures according to the principle of reciprocity, which may affect the interests of the United States,” the ministry said.

​Putin approves decision

President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the Russian leader had personally approved Friday’s Foreign Ministry decision.

“The form in which the sanctions bill emerged from the Senate had greater significance,” Peskov said.

The Russian retaliation was celebrated in Moscow as a long overdue response to actions from the previous U.S. administration.

In December 2016, former President Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats and seized Russian embassy compounds in Maryland and New York as punishment for Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential elections.

At the time, Putin chose not to respond, a move many saw as a gesture of goodwill to the incoming Trump administration, which had expressed a desire for improved relations with Moscow.

Yet Friday’s move reflected growing Russian frustration that the Trump White House, besieged by multiple investigations into its ties to Russia during the campaign, had not delivered on its campaign promises.

“We did everything in our power to save relations from disaster, but the Americans did just the opposite,” wrote Konstantin Kosachev in a post to Facebook. Kosachev, a Russia politician, went on to call the retaliation “long overdue.”

Sergey Markov, a political analyst close to the Kremlin, also cheered the Kremlin’s decision as inevitable, writing on Facebook that “hope that the President of the United States could change relations with Russia for the better are over.”

The bill U.S. senators approved Thursday also imposes new sanctions on Iran and North Korea. For Russia, the measures are designed to affect a wide range of Russian industries, hitting the country squarely in the pocketbook.

The European Union has expressed concern about the new sanctions, saying they could have an impact on the European energy sector.

Praise on Capitol Hill

Daniel Fried, an Obama-era official who coordinated the administration’s sanctions policy, told VOA he didn’t think the move by Congress to block Trump from altering sanctions would affect a bilateral settlement, but rather was meant to stop Trump from lifting the sanctions “for no good reason.”

“I think if there were a settlement and if this were generally acceptable to all the parties, including Ukraine, I think that Congress would not stand in the way of the administration lifting the Ukraine-related sanctions,” he said.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers are already praising the group effort to pass the bill quickly. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., said in a statement: “I am pleased the Senate has acted overwhelmingly to give the administration much-needed economic and political leverage to address threats from Iran, Russia, and North Korea. This bipartisan bill is about keeping America safe, and I urge the president to sign it into law.”

Senator Mark Warner, D-Va., vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a member of the Senate Banking Committee said, “This bill passed with overwhelming majorities in both the Senate and the House, sending a strong message to Vladimir Putin that attacks on our democracy will not be tolerated. President Trump should sign this bill as soon as it hits his desk. Otherwise, he risks encouraging Russia’s interference in future elections.”

VOA’s Charles Maynes, Michael Bowman and Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.
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