Month: March 2018

Former vice president Joe Biden regrets saying he’d “beat the hell” out of President Donald Trump if they were in high school for how he treats women.

In a “Pod Save America” interview released Wednesday, the Democrat said “I shouldn’t have said what I said.”

At a University of Miami rally against sexual assault last week, Biden cited lewd comments that Republican candidate Trump made in a 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape about grabbing women without their permission.

The 75-year-old made similar comments in the closing days of the 2016 campaign.

Trump tweeted: “Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy.”

Biden said he should not have brought it up again. He said “I don’t want to get down in the mosh pit with this guy.”
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On a freezing January night, Bailey Henke, 18, of Grand Forks, N.D. died in yet another tragic case of opioid overdose in America. Authorities later traced the pill he swallowed to a fentanyl factory in China – one the world’s top sources of the illegal drug. VOA traveled to America’s Heartland to see how Henke’s family, friends and the community are grappling with the deadly fallout from the Chinese drug supply chain.
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Armed security officers are becoming more prevalent at America’s schools, according to a federal study released Thursday amid a heated debate over whether teachers and other school officials should carry guns.

Armed officers were present at least once a week in 43 percent of all public schools during the 2015-16 school year, compared with 31 percent of schools a decade before, according to data from a survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Last month’s mass shooting at a Florida high school put renewed focus on the role of armed school security guards, after a video showed that a sheriff’s deputy at the school approached but did not enter the building where the attack was taking place.

The study came out a day after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos kicked off a federal school safety panel. DeVos has said that schools should have the option to arm teachers. She’s being criticized by teachers’ unions for not including educators, students and experts in the panel, which consists only of her and three other Cabinet secretaries.

The percentage of schools with a security guard, a school resource officer or other sworn law enforcement officer on campus at least once a week has gone up from 42 percent in 2005-06 to 57 percent a decade later. While security at schools of all grade levels increased, the shift is clearer among elementary schools, where the share with security staff has gone from 26 percent to 45 percent in the same time period.

“There has been an increase in security staff in school over the last 10 years and it’s more pronounced at the primary school level,” said Lauren Musu-Gillette, lead author of the report.

Experts, however, are divided on whether putting such officers on school campuses will make the schools safer or frighten children and lead to more arrests.

“There needs to be at least one in every school in the country,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. “Every school could benefit from one.”

School resource officers are sworn law enforcement personnel who have been trained to work in schools. Their duties include controlling outside traffic, patrolling the school, maintaining discipline, identifying problems and mentoring at-risk students, teaching law-related classes and serving as liaisons between schools and police. The school security study released Thursday includes school resource officers, other sworn law enforcement and additional security staff.

Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Council, agrees, saying that trained officers carrying weapons can help prevent a shooting inside the school and deter a possible shooter from entering.

“It sends the signal that the school is being watched and that the care and supervision of children is an important priority,” Stephens said.

Others have questions.

A 2013 congressional report found that the available research “draws conflicting conclusions about whether SRO programs are effective at reducing school violence.”

“Also, the research does not address whether SRO programs deter school shootings, one of the key reasons for renewed congressional interest in these programs,” the study said.

Critics of putting weapons in schools point to the sheriff’s deputy in Parkland who stayed outside the school when 17 people were being killed. The officer, Deputy Scot Peterson, says he thought the shots were being fired from outside the school.

Ron Astor, an education professor at University of Southern California who specializes in school behavior, says that putting weapons in schools will make them akin to prisons, intimidate children and hurt their studies. Instead, he says, research has shown that violence, bullying and the use of drugs and guns is reduced in warm, caring environments focused on providing support to students.

“With a lot of guns, it doesn’t create a sense of safety with the children and the teachers. It could trigger post-traumatic stress disorder. It triggers nonattendance,” Astor said.

“We don’t want to live in neighborhoods where there are thousands of police officers or the military. Who likes to live in those neighborhoods?” he said. “We like to live in neighborhoods where we know each other, where people have good relationships with each other, where they are out on the streets, talking to each other.”
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North Korean defectors are voicing concern the repression and long-standing human rights violations allegedly committed by the leadership in Pyongyang will be forgotten during the nuclear summits expected to be held soon.

North and South Korea agreed Thursday to hold the inter-Korean summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in on April 27.

The announcement was made during a high-level planning session on the northern side of the border in the Panmunjom truce village, where the armistice to end the Korean War was signed. This will be the third meeting of the leaders from the communist North and the democratic South. The last one was in 2007.

U.S. President Donald Trump also agreed to meet with Kim sometime in May. The meeting would be the first U.S.-North Korea summit.

Ending North Korea’s threatening nuclear and missile programs will a main focus of both summits.

Human rights

Kim this week confirmed his commitment to engage in denuclearization talks during his surprise visit to Beijing, where he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. What likely won’t be on the agenda is the widespread repression the authoritarian state tries to keep hidden from the world.

In Seoul, human rights activists recently staged a small demonstration in front of the presidential Blue House to demand the inter-Korean summit in late April also address the atrocities committed by the authoritarian government in Pyongyang.

“The third summit on denuclearization that will decide the destiny of this Korean Peninsula, cannot be done while disregarding the human rights of North Koreans,” said Kim Tae-Hoon with the group Lawyers for Human Rights and Unification of Korea.

The United Nations in 2014 documented a network of secret political prisons in North Korea and cases of state-sanctioned torture, rape and murder. Efforts in the U.N. Security Council to refer the leadership in Pyongyang to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity have stalled as China, North Korea’s closest ally, would likely veto the measure.

The inhumane treatment and death earlier this year of American student Otto Warmbier was a shocking reminder of the brutal nature of the Kim government.

Warmbier was arrested in early 2016 for tearing down a poster while visiting Pyongyang with a tour group. A few months into serving a 15-year sentence of hard labor, he fell into a coma and was kept for nearly a year in prison without proper care. He died in June 2017 soon after being released in a comatose state.

In North Korea, trying to access information from the outside world is a crime, and anyone caught trying to escape across the border is arrested and sent to prison, or worse.

In November security cameras in the demilitarized zone recorded the North Korean military shooting one of its own soldiers, as he defected across the heavily guarded border with the South.

​Engagement policy

Advocates for reforming North Korea through policies of engagement do not dispute the dire conditions in the North. But Moon Chung-in, a special adviser to South Korean President Moon Jae-in for national security affairs, argues that focusing now on North Korean rights violations would undermine the chances of getting a nuclear deal.

“If you put human rights and democracy issues together with the nuclear issues, then North Korea will regard this as a hostile act by the United States and they will never make concessions on the nuclear issue,” said Moon at a conference in March organized by The National Committee on North Korea in Washington.

It is an argument that frustrates many defectors and human rights advocates.

“I think it is heartbreaking since it is disregarding the pain of the North Koreans,” said Lee Han-byeol, a North Korean defector and activist with the Improving North Korean Human Rights Center.

Jung Kwang-il, who was among a group of North Korean defectors that met earlier this year with Trump in the White House, was initially encouraged by the attention the president paid to the ongoing atrocities in North Korea.

“He said that he was aware that North Korean human rights are in bad condition, but he did not know it was this bad,” said Jung, who spent three years in a North Korean prison for contacting a South Korean, and is now a human rights activist with a group called No Chain.

But with no follow-up coming from the White House, Jung now worries the United States also seems willing to put aside human rights to get a nuclear deal.

Hyung Jin Kim and Lee Yoon-jee in Seoul contributed to this report.
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The world could see its first city with a population of 100 million by the end of this century. That is the conclusion of new research into the speed of urbanization in many fast-growing countries in Africa and Asia, which suggests even small cities could balloon into huge metropolises in the coming decades.

By the end of the century, the world’s population is forecast to reach up to 14 billion. Eighty percent of those people will be living in cities, according to new research from the Ontario Institute of Technology. 

“We are now seeing the urbanization wave headed through China, it is toward the latter part of its urbanization. And now it is headed for India, and then we will see it culminate in the big cities of sub-Saharan Africa,” co-author and professor Daniel Hoornweg told VOA via Skype.

That could mean the first 100-million population city, and the top candidate is Lagos, Nigeria.

WATCH: Africa Could See World’s First 100 Million City by Century’s End

Africa and cities

Today its population is 20 million, not the largest, as that accolade belongs to Tokyo with about 38 million people, but one of the fastest growing. In two generations, Lagos has grown a hundredfold. By 2100 it is projected to be home to more people than the state of California.

“Lagos, Dar Es Salaam, Kinshasa: These are the cities that are looking at four- to five-fold increases in population. By the end of the century, the lion’s share of large cities, the top 20 if you will, most of those will be in Africa,” Hoornweg said.

Lagos sprawls across 1,000 square kilometers, an urban jungle of skyscrapers, shanty towns and everything in between. Its population grows by 900 people per day.

The poorest residents, often migrant communities, live in slums by the lagoon. Amnesty International has warned of ruthless forced evictions to make way for new developments, which have left more than 30,000 people homeless and 11 dead.

Oladipupo Aiveomiye lives in the Ilaje-Bariga shantytown.

“The threat of being evicted, the threat of being chased away overnight has gripped people to the extent that they cannot even work or operate in this area,” he said.

Young continent

Across Africa the median age is younger than 20 and the fertility rate is 4.4 births per woman. Even small cities are forecast to balloon in size. Niamey in Niger could grow from less than 1 million today to 46 million by the end of the century; Blantyre in Malawi from 1 million to 40 million.

Asia, too, will witness huge urban growth, with Kabul in Afghanistan projected to hit 50 million people.

Hoornweg says despite the associated problems of slums, poor sanitation and pollution, increasing urbanization can be a good thing.

“Cities, by their nature, because of a more compact lifestyle, can provide a quality of life higher than anywhere else with less energy per unit of GDP,” he said. “So, cities actually provide a really important opportunity. We will not get to global sustainability without big cities.”

Many cities in the West are predicted to plateau or decline in size. By the end of the century, only 14 of the biggest 100 are forecast to be in North America or Europe.
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Fifty years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader’s shocking murder on April 4, 1968, marked one of the most significant moments in U.S. history.

The city’s role in the civil rights movement and King’s death has long made it a destination for anyone interested in King’s legacy. Museums, churches and even iconic Beale Street tell the story of King’s final days here.

Thousands of people are expected to make the pilgrimage to Memphis for the 50th anniversary. Several events honoring King’s work and commemorating the sanitation workers strike that brought him to Memphis have already taken place. More are scheduled in early April, including marches, speeches and conferences.

The Associated Press takes a look at places to visit with connections to King in Memphis and other U.S. cities, along with some events.

National Civil Rights Museum

The National Civil Rights Museum in the South Main area of downtown Memphis is the center for all things related to King in the city. The museum, built at the site of the Lorraine Motel, opened in 1991, then underwent a $28 million renovation and reopened in 2014 with many new interactive exhibits.

From the street, visitors approaching the museum see a striking sight: a wreath on the balcony where King was shot. Inside, exhibits tell the story of the civil rights movement, including detailed scenes of the desegregation of a lunch counter and sanitation workers marching in Memphis. The workers were seeking higher pay and better working conditions after two of them were killed by a malfunctioning garbage truck.

Visitors end their museum tour back at the assassination site, looking into the preserved interior of room 306, where King was staying, and looking out, from inside the building, onto the balcony where he was shot.

The museum plans several anniversary events, including on April 4, a day of remembrance and the opening of an exhibit of more than 150 photographs looking back at the 50 years since King’s death.

Clayborn Temple

With its tall tower and multi-colored stained glass windows, this 19th century church was the headquarters for the sanitation workers strike. Men and women regularly gathered at the temple for meetings, rallies and before marching to City Hall.

Led by King, supporters of the sanitation workers assembled at the temple before embarking on his first march in Memphis, on March 28, 1968. That march turned violent: Police and protesters clashed, and several storefront windows on Beale Street were smashed. Marchers ran to the temple, seeking sanctuary. Police beat protesters outside the building, and threw tear gas inside.

The temple eventually fell into disrepair and closed, sitting empty for 25 years. In 2016, a group called Clayborn Reborn announced it was renovating the church. Work is underway and a memorial honoring the sanitation workers is under construction. The stately building sits across from the modern FedExForum, home of the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies.

Mason Temple

The night before he was killed, King made a stirring speech at this church, located near the Lorraine Motel. In his “I’ve Been To the Mountaintop” speech, King gave an impassioned account of his life experiences and seemed to foretell his death when he said: “I’ve seen the Promised Land … I may not get there with you.”

Built in the 1940s, the gray church looks plain and boxy from the outside. But inside reveals a cavernous nave, with pews surrounding an elevated pulpit. Colorful flags are placed throughout the church. It’s easy to imagine people standing in the balcony during King’s speech, which was delivered on a stormy night, with thunder booming and winds shaking the building.

The Mason Temple is scheduled to host a “Mountaintop Speech Commemoration” event on April 3 with King’s children, Bernice King and Martin Luther King III, and Andrew Young, a confidant of King’s and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

The temple is also the finishing point for an April 4 march that could attract as many as 100,000 people. The rapper Common and other performers will kick off the march with a rally at the union hall where the sanitation workers organized in 1968.

Elsewhere

In Washington, D.C., the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is inscribed with words from King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, which he delivered at the Lincoln Memorial.

In Montgomery, Alabama, the Dexter Parsonage Museum is located in the house where he lived while serving as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and while leading the bus boycott that started with Rosa Parks’ arrest.

In Atlanta, Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park includes a visitor center with a civil rights museum, King’s boyhood home and Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King served as co-pastor with his father. At the nearby King Center, an outdoor memorial offers reflecting pools, eternal flame and the crypts where King and his wife Coretta were interred.

Georgia Tourism has launched a “Footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Trail” with these and other sites, including the First African Baptist Church in Dublin, where King gave his first speech as a teenager.

A somber event

While Memphis hotels are mostly filled up for the anniversary of King’s death, it’s a much more somber event than what the city typically promotes, said Kevin Kane, president and CEO of the Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau.

“The eyes of the world will be on Memphis,” Kane said.

 
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British Prime Minister Theresa May has praised the “very strong response” by the United States, which ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats after Moscow was blamed for a nerve agent attack against a former Russian spy in Britain.

A Downing street statement says May spoke to President Donald Trump by phone, telling him that Britain welcomes the U.S. response to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the British town of Salisbury earlier this month.

The White House said “both leaders agreed on the importance of dismantling Russia’s spy networks in the United Kingdom and the United States to curtail Russian clandestine activities and prevent future chemical weapons attacks on either country’s soil.”

More than 20 other nations have joined the U.S. in ordering the expulsions of Russian diplomats. May said she welcomes “the breadth of international action in response to Russia’s reckless and brazen behavior.”

Russia has denied any involvement in the attack.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow would respond to the U.S.-led moves within a week. He described the expulsion of his countries’ diplomats from Western countries as “boorish anti-Russian behavior” and said colossal blackmail “is now, unfortunately, the main tool of Washington on the international arena.”

Russia’s Ambassador to Australia Grigory Logvinov added Wednesday that if Western countries continue actions against Russia, then the world would be “deeply in a Cold War situation.”

VOA’s Jeff Seldin and Steve Herman contributed to this report.
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