China says a government official will travel to the United States this week to lay the groundwork for the resumption of high-level trade talks next month.
State-run Xinhua news agency says deputy finance minister Liao Min will arrive in Washington Wednesday for talks with counterparts from the Trump administration to “pave the way” for the senior level negotiations, which will also take place in the U.S. capital.
The decision to hold a new round of talks was made earlier this month during a phone call between Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, Beijing’s top trade negotiator, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
The two sides last held major talks in July but there was no major breakthrough in the trade dispute between the world’s top two economies. Washington and Beijing have been engaged in a series of escalating tit-for-tat tariffs for more than a year, sparked by U.S. President Donald Trump’s initial demand for changes in China’s trade, subsidy and intellectual property practices. China says U.S. trade policies are aimed at trying to stifle its ability to compete.
The situation has cast uncertainty on financial markets and left companies scrambling to cope with the effects of the tariffs.
President Trump announced last week that he was postponing a new round of tariffs on $250 billion in Chinese goods from October 1 to October 15 “as a gesture of goodwill.” China followed up by lifting tariffs on U.S. soybeans, pork and some other farm goods
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said last week he is “cautiously optimistic” a deal can be reached to resolve the trade dispute at the coming talks, but warned that Trump stands ready to keep, or even raise, tariffs on Chinese imports.
Living conditions have improved greatly since 2000 even for the world’s poorest people, but billions remain mired in “layers of inequality.”
That is the assessment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s third annual report on progress toward U.N. Sustainable Development Goals – 17 measures that most countries have pledged to try to reach by 2030. Those efforts are falling short, says Bill Gates.
“As much progress as we’re making, a child in many countries still over 10% are dying before the age of five. And in richer countries it is less than 1%. So the idea that any place in the world is still 10%, some almost 15%, that’s outrageous, and it should galvanize us to do a better job,” Gates told VOA.
The 63-year-old Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist sat down with VOA at the foundation’s offices in advance of the report, which was released to coincide with the opening of the United Nations General Assembly.
This year’s report uses geography and gender as lenses for examining progress, particularly in terms of health and education.
It finds “an increasing concentration of high mortality and low educational attainment levels” in Africa’s Sahel region as well as in parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and northern India. People in those regions experience “multiple deprivations, including some of the highest fertility rates in the world, high levels of stunting and low vaccine coverage,” the report says.
Disadvantages fall more heavily on women than on men. Girls generally get less formal education than boys; those in sub-Saharan Africa average two fewer years of education. And even when girls obtain a good education, they’re less likely to parlay it into paid work.
“Globally, there is a 26 percentage point gap between men’s and women’s labor force participation,” according to the report.
Monitoring progress on these fronts aligns with the Gates Foundation’s commitments, which include improving global health and aiding development in low-income countries. Since its start in 2000, the foundation has spent billions on efforts such as improving vaccines and nutrition, combatting malaria and other diseases, supporting innovative toilet designs to improve sanitation, and ensuring good data collection to identify problems.
As the news site Vox has pointed out, the Gates Foundation each year outspends the World Health Organization and most individual countries on global health. It has built the world’s largest trust — $46.8 billion as of December, according to its website.
That has led to questions about whether governments have ceded too much responsibility to philanthropic organizations.
“The billions of dollars available to Gates, Rockefeller and Wellcome might be spent with benevolent intent, but they confer extensive power. A power without much accountability,” Wellcome communications director Mark Henderson wrote last week in Inside Philanthropy, announcing that the London-based health charity – second in spending after Gates – would increase its transparency.
The nation’s worst measles epidemic in 27 years could be in its final stages as a week went by with no new reported cases.
“To get to zero is tremendously encouraging,” said Jason Schwartz, a Yale University expert on vaccination policy.
The current epidemic emerged about a year ago and took off earlier this year, with most of the cases reported in Orthodox Jewish communities in and around New York City. It started with travelers who had become infected overseas but spread quickly among unvaccinated people.
In the spring, 70 or more new cases were being reported every week. Not long ago, the nation that saw that many measles cases in a whole year.
So far this year, 1,241 cases have been confirmed — a number that didn’t rise last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday. The last time the CDC reported no new measles cases was 11 months ago.
New York officials responded to the explosion of measles cases with a wave of measures, including education campaigns to counter misinformation about vaccine safety and fines for people who didn’t get vaccinated.
The epidemic has threatened the Unites States’ nearly 2-decade-old status as a nation that has eliminated measles. The status could come to an end if the disease spreads among Americans for a year or more. Other countries, including Greece and the United Kingdom, recently lost their elimination status amid a global surge in the disease.
Measles outbreaks are typically declared over when 42 days pass without a new infection. If no new cases crop up, the national outbreak would likely end on or about Sept. 30 — just before officials might have to decide on the U.S. elimination status.
The loss of elimination status in the U.S. could take the steam out of measles vaccination campaigns in other countries, said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert.
Health ministers around the world might say, “Why should we strive for elimination? We’ll just do the best we can to control measles, but we won’t go the extra several miles to get to zero,” Schaffner said.
World leaders meeting at the United Nations General Assembly, which begins Tuesday in New York, must make nuclear arms control a priority, according to a group of over 100 political, military and diplomatic figures. They have issued a statement warning that the risks of nuclear accident, misjudgment or miscalculation have not been higher since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
This Saturday, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington will break ground on a $15 million monument to Native American military veterans, after more than two decades of planning.
In 1994, Congress passed legislation calling for the museum to build the memorial, noting that Native Americans, Native Alaskans and Native Hawaiians have a “long, proud and distinguished tradition of service” in the U.S. Armed Forces, “in numbers which far exceed their representation in the population of the United States.”
The decorated hat of an American Indian veteran appears at the Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital, in Bedford, Mass., Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2007.
Logistical and funding issues, however, stalled the project. Congress did not commit funds for the memorial and ruled that it should be housed inside the NMAI.
That changed in 2013 when Congress clarified the bill, allowing NMAI to begin raising funds from private donors and gave the green light to constructing the monument on museum property.
More than 120 artists submitted design proposals. Jurors were unanimous in selecting the winning design by Harvey Pratt, a former forensic artist, member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma and a veteran himself.
Headshot photo of Cheyenne/Arapaho artist Harvey Pratt, who submitted the winning design for a new Native American Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C. Photo by and courtesy of Neil Chapman.
His design, “Warriors’ Circle of Honor,” features a three-and-a-half meter stainless steel circle, a symbol culturally and spiritually significant to tribes across the United States.
“Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle,” Lakota spiritual leader Nicholas Black Elk told his biographer, listing the sky, sun, Earth, stars and even the seasons. “The life of man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.”
But, as jurors noted in 2018, the circle is a symbol non-Native people can also relate to, making it an inclusive design.
Patriotic tradition
Today, at least 130,000 veterans identify as American Indian and Alaska Native. Some have been recognized as Purple Heart recipients, Bronze Star honorees, and been given the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest U.S. military award.
“I served in Vietnam in the Marine Corps with the 3rd Marine recon unit (Reconnaissance Battalion),” Pratt said. “I grew up with people who knew all the old ways and what we did with warriors.”
Photo taken at a reunion of Cherokees who fought for the South in the Civil War, New Orleans, 1093.
Native Americans have served in every U.S. war and conflict since the 18th century War of Independence from Britain.
More than 44,000 Native Americans served in World War II out of a total Native population of only 350,000. Today, about 31,000 Native Americans, Hawaiians and Alaskans are serving in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
Doug Good Feather, executive director of the Lakota Way Healing Center in Mead, Colorado, earlier explained these “old ways.”
“We were once warriors, and one of our rites of passage was to be accepted into warrior societies,” he said. “But we don’t have the old ways anymore. So, we go into the military to fulfill that rite of passage. In our way of life, once you have accomplished that deed, you are always a warrior and you have a responsibility for the rest of your life to be of service to the people.”
To celebrate the upcoming groundbreaking ceremony, NMAI has planned a full day of events, including tours, history lessons and a conversation with Pratt, which will be streamed live on the NMAI website.
Pratt tells VOA he’s pleased that construction will finally get underway.
“I’m happy for our veterans and families of the past, present and future,” he said.
If all goes according to plan, the memorial will open in November 2020.
Several Democratic presidential candidates on Sunday lined up to call for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the face of a new, uninvestigated, allegation of sexual impropriety when he was in college.
Kavanaugh was confirmed last October after emotional hearings in the Senate over a sexual assault allegation from his high school years. The New York Times now reports that Kavanaugh faced a separate allegation from his time at Yale University and that the FBI did not investigate the claim. The latest claim mirrors one offered during his confirmation process by Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate who claimed Kavanaugh exposed himself to her during a drunken party.
When he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, Kavanaugh denied all allegations of impropriety .
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., said after the new report that “Brett Kavanaugh lied to the U.S. Senate and most importantly to the American people.” She tweeted: “He must be impeached.”
A 2020 rival, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, tweeted that “Confirmation is not exoneration, and these newest revelations are disturbing. Like the man who appointed him, Kavanaugh should be impeached.”
Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke asserted in a tweeted, “We know he lied under oath. He should be impeached.” He accused the GOP-run Senate of forcing the FBI “to rush its investigation to save his nomination.”
Their comments followed similar ones from Julian Castro, a former U.S. housing secretary, on Saturday night. “It’s more clear than ever that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath,” he tweeted. “He should be impeached and Congress should review the failure of the Department of Justice to properly investigate the matter.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont didn’t refer to impeachment by name in a tweet Sunday, but said he would “support any appropriate constitutional mechanism” to hold Kavanaugh “accountable.”
Later Sunday, Sen. Cory Booker tweeted: “This new allegation and additional corroborating evidence adds to a long list of reasons why Brett Kavanaugh should not be a Supreme Court justice. I stand with survivors and countless other Americans in calling for impeachment proceedings to begin.”
Democrats control the House, which holds the power of impeachment. If the House took that route, a trial would take place in the Senate, where Republicans now have a majority, making it unlikely that Kavanaugh would be removed from office.
Trump, who fiercely defended Kavanaugh during his contentious confirmation process, dismissed the latest allegation as “lies.”
In a tweet Sunday, Trump said Kavanaugh “should start suing people for libel, or the Justice Department should come to his rescue.” It wasn’t immediately clear how the Justice Department could come to the justice’s defense.
Trump added that they were “False Accusations without recrimination,” and claimed his accusers were seeking to influence Kavanaugh’s opinions on the bench.
Visiting a black church bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in the civil rights era, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said Sunday the country hasn’t “relegated racism and white supremacy to the pages of history” as he framed current tensions in the context of the movement’s historic struggle for equality.
He spoke to parishioners at 16th Street Baptist Church in downtown Birmingham as they commemorated the 56th anniversary of the bombing that killed four black girls in 1963. “It’s in the wake of these before-and-after moments when the choice between good and evil is starkest,” he said.
The former vice president called out the names of the victims — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. He drew nods of affirmation as he warned that “the same poisonous ideology that lit the fuse on 16th street” has yielded more recent tragedies including in 2015 at a black church in South Carolina, in 2018 at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh and in August at an El Paso, Texas , Wal-Mart frequented by Latino immigrants.
He condemned institutional racism as the direct legacy of slavery and lamented that the nation has “never lived up to” the ideals of equality written into its founding documents. But then he added a more personal note. “Those who are white try,” Biden said, “but we can never fully understand.”
Biden praised the congregation for offering an example of “rebirth and renewal” to those communities and to a nation he said must recommit itself to “giving hate no safe harbor — demonizing no one, not the poor, the powerless, the immigrant or the ‘other.’”
Biden’s appearance in Birmingham comes at a political inflection point for the Democrats’ 2020 polling leader. He is trying to capitalize on his strength among older black voters even as some African American and other nonwhite leaders, particularly younger ones, view Biden more skeptically.
From his long time in government, as a senator and vice president, the 76-year-old Biden has deep ties in the black community. Though Biden didn’t mention President Donald Trump in his remarks, he has made withering critiques of the president’s rhetoric and policies on race and immigration a central feature of his candidacy.
Yet Biden also draws critical, even caustic appraisals from younger nonwhite activists who take issue with his record. That includes his references to working productively alongside segregationist senators in the 1970s to distrust over his lead role in a 1994 crime law that critics frame as partially responsible for mass incarceration, especially black men.
The dynamics flared up again Thursday after Biden, during a Democratic debate, offered a sometimes incoherent answer when asked how the nation should confront the legacy of slavery. At one point, Biden suggested nonwhite parents use a play a record player to help their children with verbal and cognitive development. That led to a social media firestorm and commentary that Biden takes a paternalistic view of black and brown America even as he hammers Trump for emboldening more obvious forms of racism.
Author Anand Giridharadas called Biden’s answer “appalling — and disqualifying” for “implying that black parents don’t know how to raise their own children.”
Biden gave only slightest of nods to some of those critiques Sunday.
Biden’s audience seemed to reflect his relative popularity with black voters more than the fierceness of his critics.
Parishioners wielded their cellphones when he arrived with Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, a white politician beloved in the church for his role as the lead prosecutor who secured convictions in the bombing case decades after it occurred. The congregation gave Biden a standing ovation as he concluded his 20-minute remarks.
Alvin Lewis, a 67-year-old usher at 16th Street Baptist, said the welcome doesn’t necessarily translate to votes. But as Lewis and other congregants offered their assessment of race relations in the United States under Trump, they tracked almost flawlessly the arguments Biden has used to anchor his campaign.
“Racism has reared its head in a way that’s frightening for those of us who lived through it before,” Lewis said, who said he was at home, about “20 blocks from here” when the Klan bomb went off at 10:22 a.m. on Sept. 15, 1963. “No matter what anyone says, what comes out of the president of the United States’ mouth means more than anything,” Lewis added, saying Trump “has brought out some nastier times in this country’s history.”
Antoinette Plump, a 60-year-old who took in the service alongside lifelong member Doris Coke, 92, said racism “was on the back burner” until Trump “brought out all the people who are so angry.”
Coke, who was at the church on that Sunday in 1963, said, “We’ve come a long way.” But she nodded her head as Plump denounced Trump.
Nearby sat Fay Gaines, a Birmingham resident who was in elementary school in 1963 — just a few years younger than the girls who died.
Gaines said she’s heard and read criticisms about Biden. Asked whether she’d seen his “record players” answer in the debate, she laughed and said she did. But he remains on her “short list” of preferred candidates.
“I think there may just be a generational divide,” she said of the reaction. “People who lived through all these struggles maybe can understand how to deal with the current situation a little better.”
That means, she said, recognizing a politician’s core values.
“I trust Joe Biden,” she said. “History matters. His history matters.”
Roughly 49,000 workers at General Motors plants in the U.S. plan to go on strike just before midnight Sunday, but talks between the United Auto Workers and the automaker will resume.
About 200 plant-level union leaders voted unanimously in favor of a walkout during a meeting Sunday morning in Detroit. Union leaders said the sides were still far apart on several major issues and they apparently weren’t swayed by a GM offer to make new products at or near two of the four plants it had been planning to close, according to someone briefed on the matter.
“We stood up for General Motors when they needed us most,” union Vice President Terry Dittes said in a statement, referring to union concessions that helped GM survive bankruptcy protection in 2009. “Now we are standing together in unity and solidarity for our members.”
UAW spokesman Brian Rothenberg said Sunday evening that contract talks would resume at 10 a.m. Monday, but the strike was still expected to go ahead.
GM on Friday offered to build a new all-electric pickup truck at a factory in Detroit that is slated to close next year, according someone who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because that person wasn’t authorized to disclose details of the negotiations, which hadn’t been released to the public. The automaker also offered to open an electric vehicle battery plant in Lordstown, Ohio, where it has a plant that has already stopped making cars. The new factory would be in addition to a proposal to make electric vehicles for a company called Workhorse, the person said.
It’s unclear how many workers the two plants would employ. The closures, especially of the Ohio plant, have become issues in the 2020 presidential campaign. President Donald Trump has consistently criticized the company and demanded that Lordstown be reopened.
The UAW’s Rothenberg said the company made general statements about why it is planning to strike, but he would not comment further on GM’s offer. The union said it would strike for fair wages, affordable health care, profit sharing, job security and a path to permanent employment for temporary workers.
In a statement, GM also said the offer made to the union on Saturday included more than $7 billion in U.S. factory investments and the creation of 5,400 new positions, a minority of which would be filled by existing employees. GM would not give a precise number. The investments would be made at factories in four states, two of which were not identified.
The statement also said the company offered “best in class wages and benefits,” improved profit sharing and a payment of $8,000 to each worker upon ratification. The offer included wage or lump sum increases in all four years of the deal, plus “nationally leading” health benefits.
The announcement came hours after the union let its contract with GM expire Saturday night.
If there is a strike, picketers would shut down a total of 53 GM facilities, including 33 manufacturing sites and 22 parts distribution warehouses. GM has factories in Michigan, Ohio, New York, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, Missouri, Indiana and Kansas.
On Saturday, Dittes, the union’s chief bargainer, said in a letter to GM members that after months of bargaining, both the union and GM were far apart on issues such as wages, health care, temporary employees, job security and profit-sharing. The letter to members and another one to GM were aimed at turning up the pressure on GM negotiators.
A strike would bring to a halt GM’s U.S. production, and would likely stop the company from making vehicles in Canada and Mexico as well. That would mean fewer vehicles for consumers to choose from on dealer lots, and it would make it impossible to build specially ordered cars and trucks.
The strike would be the union’s first since a two-day work stoppage at GM in 2007.
On Friday, union leaders extended contracts with Ford and Fiat Chrysler indefinitely, but the pact with General Motors was still set to expire Saturday night.
The union picked GM, which is more profitable than Ford and Fiat Chrysler, as the target company, meaning it’s the focus of bargaining and would be the first company to face a walkout.
Talks between the union and GM were tense from the start, largely because GM plans to close four U.S. factories, including the one on the Detroit border with the enclave of Hamtramck, and Lordstown. The union has promised to fight the closures.
Here are the main areas of disagreement:
— GM is making big money, $8 billion last year alone, and workers want a bigger slice. The union wants annual pay raises to guard against an economic downturn, but the company wants to pay lump sums tied to earnings. Automakers don’t want higher fixed costs.
— The union also wants new products for the four factories GM wants to close. The factory plans have irked some workers, although most of those who were laid off will get jobs at other GM factories. GM currently has too much U.S. factory capacity.
— The companies want to close the labor cost gap with workers at plants run by foreign automakers. GM pays $63 per hour in wages and benefits compared with $50 at the foreign-owned factories. GM’s gap is the largest at $13 per hour, followed by Ford at $11 and Fiat Chrysler at $5, according to figures from the Center for Automotive Research.
— Union members have great health insurance plans and workers pay about 4% of the cost. Employees at large firms nationwide pay about 34%, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The automakers would like to cut costs.
A watery grave of old sunken ships has been designated the newest national marine sanctuary in the United States. Located in Maryland about 60 kilometers south of Washington, the “ghost fleet” rises like an apparition out of the water when the tide is low. VOA’s Deborah Block takes us to this underwater park with ships going back more than one hundred years.
At two of the world’s biggest coal mines, the finances got so bad that their owner couldn’t even get toilet paper on credit.
Warehouse technician Melissa Worden divvied up what remained of the last case, giving four rolls to each mine and two to the mine supply facility where she worked.
Days later, things got worse.
Blackjewel worker Melissa Worden, poses for a photo in Gillette, Wyo., Sept. 5, 2019. When Blackjewel shut down Belle Ayr and Eagle Butte mines, July 1, 2019, people thought they would reopen. “I don’t think we’ll ever be that naive again,” she said.
Mine owner Blackjewel LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection July 1. Worden at first figured the accounts would get settled quickly and vendors of everything from copy paper to parts for house-sized dump trucks would soon be back to doing normal business with the mines.
“The consensus was: In 30 days, we’ll look back on this, and we made it through, and we’ll be up and running, and it’s a fresh start,” Worden said.
What happened instead has shaken the top coal-producing region in the United States like a charge of mining explosive. Blackjewel furloughed most of its Wyoming employees and shut down Eagle Butte and Belle Ayr mines, the first idled by hardship since coal mining in the Powder River Basin exploded in the 1970s.
It’s a big hit to the region straddling northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana, where coal has quietly supported the economies of both states for decades and fuels a shrinking number of power plants in 28 states.
Negotiations that could reopen the two Wyoming mines under new ownership — potentially previous owner Bristol, Tennessee-based Contura Energy — are stalled more than two months later. Some 600 employees remain off the job. They lost health insurance coverage in late August.
The entrance to the Blue Ayr Mine south of Gillett, Wyo., Sept. 5, 2019. The shutdowns of Blackjewel LLC’s Belle Ayr and Eagle Butte mines in Wyoming since July 1, 2019, have added more uncertainty to the Powder River Basin’s struggling coal economy.
And doubts are growing about the long-term viability of the region’s coal mines — particularly Eagle Butte and Belle Ayr, the fourth- and sixth-biggest in the U.S. by production, respectively.
“I don’t think we’ll ever be that naive again,” said Worden, 44.
Blackjewel, based in Milton, West Virginia, told its Wyoming employees this week that the mines might be up and running soon and to let the company know if they wanted their jobs back.
Worden said she felt little reassurance. On a break at a part-time electrical contracting job in North Dakota, she wondered if she should accept any offer of full-time work or hold out for her old job.
She’s not the only one questioning long-held assumptions about Powder River Basin coal mines, which produce cleaner-burning coal less expensively than mines in other parts of the U.S. and weren’t widely thought of being at risk despite a push for renewable energy to combat climate change.
But with coal in long-term decline, how the basin might eventually scale down production to a sustainable level has become a big question, said Rob Godby, director of the Center for Energy Economics and Public Policy at the University of Wyoming.
“The irony here — and it’s really a cruel irony — is everybody is focused on getting these miners back to work. But really the solution to creating a healthy industry is some mines close,” Godby said.
For now, little appears changed in Gillette, a city of 30,000 people at the heart of the basin of rolling grasslands midway between the Black Hills and snowcapped Bighorn Mountains. Tattoo shops are abundant, and big, late-model pickup trucks still cruise the main drag.
This year, however, has been especially tumultuous. Three of the Powder River Basin’s nine producers — Westmoreland Coal, Cloud Peak Energy and Blackjewel — have filed for bankruptcy since March. Two others, Arch Coal and Peabody, have announced they will merge assets in the region.
The turmoil comes as U.S. coal production is down more than 30% since peaking in 2008. Utilities are retiring aging coal-fired power plants and switching to solar, wind and cheaper and cleaner-burning natural gas to generate electricity despite President Donald Trump’s efforts to prop up the coal industry.
Blackjewel employee Rory Wallet poses for a photo in Gillette, Wyo., Sept. 5, 2019. The shutdown of Blackjewel LLC’s Belle Ayr and Eagle Butte mines in Wyoming, July 1, 2019, left Wallet unemployed, but he’s optimistic about coal’s future.
A decade ago, about half of U.S. electricity came from coal-fired power. Now it’s less than 30%, a shift that heavy equipment operator Rory Wallet saw as utilities became less willing to lock in multiyear contracts for Belle Ayr mine’s coal.
“The market’s changed,” Wallet said. “The bankruptcies all tie into that.”
Wallet, 40, followed his father, an equipment mechanic, into the Belle Ayr mine in 2008. He said the recent mine closures and loss of his $80,000-a-year job took him by surprise.
He has four children, ages 11 to 16, and his wife’s job at the Ruby Tuesday’s restaurant in Gillette is their main income while they await news about the mines.
Blackjewel said Thursday that it was working on plans to restart the mines while pursuing their sale. There were no indications in federal bankruptcy court filings in West Virginia that the mines were set to reopen, however.
“This is a fast-moving and sometimes unpredictable process, and accordingly, we do not have answers to all of your questions at this time,” the company’s statement said.
Wallet is looking for a job and using his downtime to sell “We Will Rise Again” T-shirts to benefit families of out-of-work coal miners. He’s also lobbying Wyoming lawmakers to fight harder to force Washington state to approve a port facility expansion that would allow more coal exports to Asia.
He questions the outlook from Godby of the Center for Energy Economics and Public Policy that some mines must close.
“I think, with Rob, it’s the middle- to worst-case scenario,” Wallet said. “The ports are going to be a big deal. Asia is going to be a big deal.”
Wallet pointed out that the Powder River Basin still has a century or two of recoverable coal left. And just north of Gillette, the state has invested $15 million in a facility to study how to capture climate-changing carbon dioxide from a working power plant and profitably use it in products ranging from concrete to biofuels.
Wallet is optimistic that technology could save coal. But carbon capture, if it happens at all, could arrive too late to do the coal industry much good amid global concern about climate change, Godby said.
“We will not see widespread adoption of carbon capture and storage for at least a decade,” Godby said. “That’s just the reality.”
He also doubted that exports can save the region’s coal industry. There’s no direct rail line to the Pacific Northwest from most of the basin’s mines, and the amount of coal that the proposed export terminal could handle would offset only a small fraction of the amount that production has declined, Godby said.
FILE – A dump truck hauls coal, March 28, 2017, at Contura Energy’s Eagle Butte Mine near Gillette, Wyo. President Donald Trump lifted a federal coal lease moratorium that will allow new coal leasing at the mine and others in the Powder River Basin.
Powder River Basin mines employ about 5,000 miners — 20% fewer than eight years ago. But the impact is even wider because an additional 8,000 jobs, from teachers to car mechanics, have indirect ties to the broader economy around the coal industry.
Local unemployment rose to 5.7% in July, compared with 4.1% a year earlier.
Trump got 88% of the vote in Campbell County, the heart of the basin. Locals cheered when he lifted a federal moratorium on coal leases that former President Barack Obama imposed, but Worden and Wallet disagree about whether changing environmental regulations will do much good in the long run. Wallet thinks improvement could be just around the corner.
Both say coal should continue to have a place in the economy alongside renewable energy.
“It needs to be a group effort, not green is on one side and black is on the other,” Worden said. “We don’t want this community to die.”
The Bahamian government has discontinued a tropical storm warning as Humberto moves away from the island nation struggling to recover from Hurricane Dorian.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Tropical Storm Humberto was expected to become a hurricane by Sunday night or early Monday but wouldn’t threaten land by the time it intensified to that strength.
Officials warned that the storm could still cause dangerous swells in the northwest Bahamas and along the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina later this weekend and early next week.
At 5 p.m. EDT, the storm was located about 70 miles (113 kilometers) north of Great Abaco Island. Humberto was moving 7 mph (11 kph) north-northwest with maximum sustained winds of 50 mph (80 kph).
Italy has agreed to allow rescue ship Ocean Viking to disembark 82 migrants in the southern port of Lampedusa, the SOS Mediterranee charity which runs the vessel said Saturday.
“The Ocean Viking just received instructions from the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre of Rome to proceed to Lampedusa,” SOS Mediterranee tweeted.
“An ad hoc European agreement between Italy, France, Germany, Portugal and Luxembourg has been reached to allow the landing,” said French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner, referring to the division of the migrants between the five countries.
“We now need to agree on a genuine temporary European mechanism.” Castaner added.
The Ocean Viking was on its second mission and was shuttling between Malta and Italy for nearly two weeks, seeking a port to land the migrants.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), which runs the ship jointly with SOS Mediterranee, said the group comprised 58 men, six women and 18 children.
The Ocean Viking had rescued 356 migrants on its first mission.
Italy is trying to set up an automatic system for distributing migrants rescued in the Mediterranean between European countries, diplomatic sources said recently.
Such a deal would put an end to the case-by-case negotiations over who will take in those saved during the perilous crossing from North Africa, which has seen vulnerable asylum seekers trapped in limbo at sea for lengthy periods.
France and Germany have given their green light to the new system, which could also involve Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Romania and Spain, Italy’s Repubblica and Stampa dailies said.
The International Organization for Migration reports it has repatriated 127 African and Asian migrants stranded in Libya under difficult, brutal conditions.
Tripoli’s Mitiga International airport was shut down last Sunday after being hit by missiles. For safety reasons, IOM’s chartered plane with 127 migrants aboard took off earlier this week from Misrata, about a two-hour drive east of the Libyan capital.
From there, the passengers, which included women and children, flew to Istanbul and then onwards to their home countries. Missions from 15 countries in Africa and Asia, including Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Bangladesh and Egypt were involved in the complex, risky operation.
IOM spokeswoman, Safa Msehli told VOA stranded migrants is a reference to those those who either are held in Libyan detention centers or are living freely in urban areas across the country.
“In detention centers across Libya we have close to 5,000 migrants that are still detained. In Libya alone, according to IOM Libya’s DTM (Displacement Tracking Matrix), there are over 600,000 migrants, a lot of whom – not only due to the current context of war – but a lot of whom have arrived in Libya and remain without a solution,” Msehli said.
Libya’s detention centers are notorious as places where refugees and migrants are subject to horrific forms of abuse, including torture and rape, as well as the lack of sufficient food and medical care. Migrants and refugees in urban areas are vulnerable to exploitation, trafficking and kidnapping for ransom.
Despite all the difficulties, IOM has succeeded in returning more than 7,200 stranded migrants to their countries of origin this year.
Upon their return, Msehli said the migrants receive a reintegration package that helps them resume their lives, continue their education or start a small business.
Pakistan said Saturday four of its soldiers were killed and another was injured when “terrorists” from across the Afghanistan border opened fire at two locations.
The deadliest of the shootings occurred in the remote Dir district where Pakistani troops were building a border fence when they came under attack from the other side, killing three soldiers and injuring another.
The military’s media wing said another soldier was killed when “miscreants” from the Afghan side ambushed a routine border patrol party late Friday in North Waziristan district. It added that two of the assailants were also killed in an exchange of fire.
Cross-border militant attacks are not uncommon on Pakistani troops constructing a fence along the country’s nearly 2,600 kilometer border with Afghanistan.
Islamabad began the unilateral fencing of the largely porous frontier two years ago to plug hundreds of informal crossings that were encouraging terrorist infiltration in both directions.
Military officials expect the massive border project will be in place by end of next year, addressing to a large extent mutual concerns of illegal crossings of both militants and drug traffickers.
Pakistan has complained that anti-state militants linked to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, have taken refuge in “ungoverned” Afghan border areas after fleeing Pakistani security operations and orchestrate attacks from those sanctuaries.
Earlier this week, the United States designated TTP chief Qari Wali Noor Mehsud a global terrorist for directing deadly attacks against Pakistan.
Mehsud’s whereabouts are not known but his predecessor, Mullah Fazlullah, was killed in June of 2018 along with several key TTP commanders in an American drone strike in an eastern border region of Afghanistan.
For their part, officials in Kabul allege that leaders and fighters of the Afghan Taliban use sanctuaries on Pakistani soil to direct insurgent attacks against local and international forces.
Leaders of the United Auto Workers union have extended contracts with Ford and Fiat Chrysler indefinitely, but the pact with General Motors is still set to expire Saturday night.
The move puts added pressure on bargainers for both sides as they approach the contract deadline and the union starts to prepare for a strike.
The contract extension was confirmed Friday by UAW spokesman Brian Rothenberg, who declined further comment on the talks.
The union has picked GM as the target company, meaning it is the focus of bargaining and would be the first company to face a walkout. GM’s contract with the union is scheduled to expire at 11:59 p.m. Saturday.
Picket lines posted
It’s possible that the four-year GM contract also could be extended or a deal could be reached, but it’s more likely that 49,200 UAW members could walk out of GM plants as early as Sunday because union and company demands are so far apart.
FILE – An employee inspects a Cadillac Escalade as it nears the final process of assembly at the General Motors plant in Arlington, Texas, July 14, 2015.
Picket line schedules already have been posted near the entrance to one local UAW office in Detroit.
Art Wheaton, an auto industry expert at the Worker Institute at Cornell University, expects the GM contract to be extended for a time, but he says the gulf between the sides is wide.
“GM is looking through the windshield ahead, and it looks like nothing but land mines,” he said of a possible recession, trade disputes and the expense of developing electric and autonomous vehicles. “I think there’s really going to be a big problem down the road in matching the expectations of the union and the willingness of General Motors to be able to give the membership what it wants.”
Sunday meeting
Plant-level union leaders from all over the country will be in Detroit on Sunday to talk about the next steps, and after that, the union likely will make an announcement.
But leaders are likely to face questions about an expanding federal corruption probe that snared a top official on Thursday. Vance Pearson, head of a regional office based near St. Louis, was charged with corruption in an alleged scheme to embezzle union money and spend cash on premium booze, golf clubs, cigars and swanky stays in California. It’s the same region that UAW President Gary Jones led before taking the union’s top office last year.
Jones and other union executives met privately at a hotel at Detroit Metropolitan Airport on Friday. After the meeting broke up, Jones’ driver and others physically blocked an AP reporter from trying to approach him to ask questions.
In a 40-page criminal complaint, the government alleged that over $600,000 in UAW money was spent by union officials at businesses in the Palm Beach, California, area, including at restaurants, a golf resort, cigar shop and rental properties, between 2014 and 2017.
FILE – A General Motors employee holds an American flag as colleagues gather outside the plant, March 6, 2019, in Lordstown, Ohio. The plant was idled.
The union said the government has misconstrued facts and said the allegations are not proof of wrongdoing. “Regardless, we will not let this distract us from the critical negotiations under way with GM to gain better wages and benefits,” Rothenberg said.
At UAW Local 22 in Detroit, picket line schedules for three days were posted on the lobby windows. The local represents workers at a plant that straddles the border between Detroit and the hamlet of Hamtramck.
The 24-hour schedules don’t list any date to start but a separate schedule has a group reporting to the union hall at 6 a.m. on Sunday. The factory, which makes the Chevrolet Impala and Cadillac CT6, is one of four that GM plans to close.
Here are the main areas of disagreement:
— GM is making big money, $8 billion last year alone, and workers want a bigger slice. The union wants annual pay raises to guard against an economic downturn, but the company wants to pay lump sums tied to earnings. Automakers don’t want higher fixed costs.
— The union also wants new products for four factories GM wants to close. The factory plans have irked some workers, although most those who were laid off will get jobs at other GM factories. GM currently has too much U.S. factory capacity.
— The companies want to close the labor cost gap with workers at plants run by foreign automakers. GM’s gap is the largest at $13 per hour, followed by Ford at $11 and Fiat Chrysler at $5, according to figures from the Center for Automotive Research, an industry think tank. GM pays $63 per hour in wages and benefits compared with $50 at the foreign-owned factories.
— Union members have great health insurance plans but workers pay about 4% of the cost. Employees of large firms nationwide pay about 34%, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The companies would like to cut costs.
If there is a strike, it would be the union’s first since a short one against GM in 2007.
The union may have to strike at least for a while to show workers that it got as much from the company as it could, Wheaton said. Some workers, he said, mistrust union leaders because of the corruption scandal.
Negotiators are usually tight-lipped about the talks, but a week ago, Vice President Terry Dittes wrote in a letter to local union leaders that GM has been slow to respond to union proposals. GM answered in a letter sent to factories that said it is moving as quickly as it can.
“We are working hard to understand and respond to UAW proposals and we have offered to meet as often as needed,” the letter said.
China has announced a tariff exemption on U.S.-produced pork, withdrawing duties as high as 72%, one of many tariffs Beijing imposed on American agricultural products amid a protracted trade war with Washington. As VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports from the Midwest state of Illinois, farmers feel the economic pinch even as China’s need to import pork is growing.
