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An international landmine watchdog says new uses of the weapon are “extremely rare” but that fighting in Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine and Yemen has led to a second consecutive year of high casualties.

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines said in an annual report Thursday there were 8,605 casualties, including 2,089 deaths, from mines in 2016. That includes improvised explosive devices and unexploded ordnance that are triggered like mines.

Of those casualties, 78 percent were civilians, and the total included the most child casualties ever recorded. They took place in 52 countries.

“A few intense conflicts, where utter disregard for civilian safety persists, have resulted in very high numbers of mine casualties for the second year in a row,” said Loren Persi, casualties and victim assistance editor of Landmine Monitor. “This shows the need for all countries to join the Mine Ban Treaty and for increased levels of assistance to mine victims.”

​1999 international treaty

Under a 1999 international treaty, countries agree to not use or produce antipersonnel mines, to destroy their existing stockpiles, provide assistance to mine victims and clear their territory of mines within 10 years of joining the pact.

On Wednesday, the ICBL welcomed Sri Lanka as the 163rd country to be fully bound by the treaty and said it hopes others in the region will join as well.

Thursday’s report said Myanmar and Syria had the only government forces that actively planted mines during the past year. Neither is a party to the mine ban treaty.

The report cites 61 states and areas contaminated with mines as of November, and while 33 of those are a part of the treaty, only Chile, Mauritania, Peru and the Democratic Republic of Congo are on track to meet their deadline for clearing territory of mines.

Algeria and Mozambique completed their clearing operations during 2017. Worldwide, the report says a total of 170 square kilometers was cleared during 2016, and the vast majority of that work took place in Afghanistan, Croatia, Iraq and Cambodia.

Much work yet to be done

Still, large areas of mine contamination are believed to exist in a number of countries. Those include Afghanistan, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Chad, Croatia, Iraq, Thailand and Turkey.

International efforts linked to the treaty also extend to assisting victims, educating people about the risks of mines, destroying stockpiles and monitoring mine use. The report says monetary contributions rose sharply in 2016 to $480 million to support that work.
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Nebraska’s main anti-pipeline group is trying to rally opposition to the TransCanada Corp’s Keystone XL project’s recently approved route through the state, tracking down landowners it says were not given a voice in the regulatory process.

If it succeeds, Bold Nebraska could throw up new roadblocks to the controversial project to move Canadian oil to U.S. refineries, backed by U.S. President Donald Trump, by pressing regulators to revisit TransCanada’s application, or by suing if they refuse.

The Nebraska Public Service Commission issued an approval for Keystone XL to pass through the state in late November, removing the last big regulatory obstacle for the long-delayed project. But the commission’s approval was not for the route TransCanada had singled out in its application, but for an alternative that shifts it closer to an existing pipeline right-of-way that affects scores of new landowners.

Bold Nebraska 

Jane Kleeb, the head of Bold Nebraska, which has been fighting the pipeline for years, held the first of a series of meetings with these new landowners Wednesday.

“We hope to begin the education process with landowners so they understand this is a lifetime easement for a one-time payment,” she told Reuters. “We aim to engage at least 20 percent of the new landowners in the legal landowner group.” 

About 75 landowners and other citizens crammed the meeting in the community center in the small college town of Seward to meet with Kleeb and other pipeline opponents.

Lee Gloystein said he was not happy upon learning that the approved route would go thought his family’s farm. “It’s been in our family since the 1800s,” he said. “And we don’t want it to be disturbed or the water to be disturbed.”

Bold Nebraska already has about 100 landowners who live along the pipeline’s original proposed route signed up against Keystone XL. They include a number of ranchers and farmers worried that spills could pollute their land and the massive Ogallala Aquifer, a source of drinking water and irrigation for a large swath of the central United States.

Jim Carlson, a landowner whose Holt County farm is on the original Keystone XL route, told those at Wednesday’s meeting that he initially was happy the route would cross his land because he could profit from selling TransCanada an easement. But he said he changed his mind after studying the potential environmental harm from a spill. “Be careful what you wish for,” he said.

​Controversial pipeline

The project has been a lightning rod of controversy since it was proposed a decade ago, with environmentalists making it a symbol of their broader fight against fossil fuels and global warming.

TransCanada says the pipeline would be good for the economy and could be run safely. The company said it had about 90 percent support among landowners for the proposed route, but had not yet negotiated support along the approved route.

TransCanada would need to use eminent domain law to gain access to land for which it could not reach an agreement.

Demonstrating opposition along the approved route could add heft to anti-pipeline efforts. Lawyers for opponents of the line argued at a hearing Tuesday that Nebraska regulators had no authority to approve the “alternative” path, and was only allowed to rule on the proposed route.

TransCanada seeks to head off challenges

TransCanada, meanwhile, requested that the public service commission allow it to amend its application retroactively to head off legal challenges. The commission is considering TransCanada’s request.

Trump handed TransCanada a federal permit for the 1,180-mile (1,899-km) pipeline in March, reversing a decision by former President Barack Obama in 2015 to block it on environmental grounds.
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A minority rights group has released a new report on the world’s minorities and indigenous peoples and says stronger rights protection, not walls and travel bans, are “the only effective and sustainable response” to the millions of people displaced around the world.

London-based Minority Rights Group International says that as the world’s leaders prepare to sign global compacts on refugees and migration next year, the rights of the displaced will be subjugated by “the rush by most states to emphasize border control,” said Carl Soderbergh, director of policy and communications. In a news release, Soderbergh said those most likely to get lost in the shuffle will be minorities and indigenous peoples.

The report is focused on the discrimination the group says is often behind displacement, when minorities and indigenous peoples are among those most likely to be driven from their homes during violent conflict or extremist leadership.

Listing examples, the report notes that in Myanmar, an estimated 600,000 Rohingya Muslims were forced to flee the country in 2017 because of a military crackdown on their ethnic group, and their exclusion from a 35-year-old list of state-defined ethnicities. United Nations officials have described the crackdown as “ethnic cleansing.”

In Iraq, the Kurdish Yazidis have been targeted for violence and displacement, the report says, as well as the Muslim minority in the Central African Republic.

The report goes on to say that climate change and land rights violations have driven indigenous populations off their lands in Colombia, and mining and industrial developments in India are affecting 60 million people, most of them tribal people or Dalits, a caste once considered “untouchable.”

The report says the status of displaced people as minority or indigenous may affect the level of consideration they get from aid officials, as well as the degree of welcome they receive from host communities.

Soderbergh said governments must urgently address racism and discrimination as not just a root cause of displacement, but also a contributing factor of exploitation during transit and a barrier to integration upon arrival in a new community.

“Simply put,” Soderbergh said, “less restrictions, more protections.”
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China has welcomed an offer by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to hold talks with North Korea without pre-conditions. The offer comes amid heightened tensions on the peninsula and as South Korean President Moon Jae-in begins a four-day state visit to China.

Speaking at a regular press briefing Wednesday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Beijing welcomes all efforts to ease tensions and promote dialogue.

“China has already proposed “double suspension” proposal and we hope that the United States and North Korea can meet each other halfway and take meaningful steps on dialogue and contact,” Lu said.

China’s “double suspension” or “freeze for freeze” proposal is that North Korea halt all ballistic missile and nuclear tests and that the United States and South Korea halt all military exercises.

During a speech at the Atlantic Council-Korea Foundation Forum on Tuesday, Tillerson called on China to continue to ramp up pressure on Pyongyang. He also said that there has to be a “period of quiet” for talks to begin, “or it’s going to be very difficult to have productive discussions.”

“We’re ready to talk anytime North Korea would like to talk. And we’re ready to have the first meeting without precondition,” Tillerson said.

Former U.S. officials told VOA on Tuesday that the offer from Tillerson was unusually candid amid increasing threats from North Korea’s nuclear and missile proliferation. However, it is not clear whether the White House is fully behind the proposal. President Donald Trump has previously told Tillerson that he was wasting his time pursuing dialogue with North Korea.

In China, analysts said the statement from Tillerson ahead of President Moon’s visit will be welcomed by both Beijing and Seoul.

“There’s a lot of room for both China and South Korea to collaborate on addressing the nuclear crisis in North Korea. In this regard, Chairman Xi (Jinping) will definitely work with President Moon to build on their consensus and strengthen efforts” for peace talks with the North Korea,” said Lu Chao, a Korea scholar at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences.

President Moon’s visit to China will focus heavily on North Korea and finding ways to re-start dialogue. On Thursday, Moon will meet with Xi, the third meeting between the two leaders since he was elected earlier this year.

He will also meet with South Korean residents in China and attend a business forum. A large entourage of top executives from South Korean companies will be traveling with Moon on his visit.

Moon came to office at a time when relations between South Korea and China had hit a historic low. China angrily opposed Seoul’s deployment of a U.S. based missile defense system, launching tough economic sanctions against South Korea that impacted tourism and trade between the two countries.

In late October, however, the two sides agreed to put their relationship back on track, but some believe the relationship has yet to fully thaw.China is likely to bring up the issue during the visit as well.

When the two countries agreed to put their relationship back on track, South Korea offered up three “no’s” to ease Beijing’s security concerns. Those three commitments were to not make any additional deployments of THAAD, not participate in a regional missile defense network, and to not join an alliance with Japan and the United States.

Moon’s visit to China comes at a time of heightened tension on the Korean peninsula. Pyongyang recently tested what is believed to be its largest and most powerful ballistic missile, an ICBM experts estimate is capable of reaching as far as the east coast of the United States.

In China, there have been increased signs that authorities are making preparations for the possibility of conflict on the peninsula.

Last week, a state-run newspaper in China’s northeastern city of Jilin, not far from the border with North Korea, published a page of common sense advice about how to survive a nuclear attack.

There have also been reports that refugee camps are being built along China’s border with North Korea. Something Tillerson appeared to confirm in his remarks Tuesday.

“China is taking steps to prepare for such an eventuality. I think it is something that they can manage. I don’t think the threat is as significant as perhaps others view it. I don’t want to be dismissive of it, but it’s not an unmanageable situation,” he said. “And they already are taking preparatory actions for such an event.”

Nike Ching in Washington and Joyce Huang contributed to this report.

 
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A top counterterrorism official in Bangladesh said Wednesday the man accused of detonating a pipe bomb in a New York City subway tunnel does not appear to have any known links to militant groups.

Monirul Islam said investigators have interviewed the Akayed Ullah’s wife and her parents as part of their probe.

The 27-year-old Ullah is due to make his first court appearance Wednesday, a day after U.S. federal prosecutors announced terrorism charges against him. Authorities say the Bangladeshi immigrant’s attack was inspired by the Islamic State group.

The charges against him include bombing a public place and using a weapon of mass destruction, each of which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. 

Ullah was also accused of providing material support to Islamic State, destruction of property by means of an explosive and using a destructive device in furtherance of a crime of violence, according to a criminal complaint disclosed on Tuesday. These charges carry sentences of five to 30 years each. 

Joon Kim, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced the charges at a press conference in New York.

“Yesterday morning, as thousands came into New York City through Port Authority, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, one man came with a hate-filled heart and an evil purpose,” Kim said. “In the middle of rush hour, as everyday New Yorkers hurried to their jobs, to their schools, ready to start the work week and get going with their busy lives, one man came to kill, to maim and to destroy,” he said.

The attack took place in a tunnel that connects the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the Times Square subway stations. Surveillance footage shows the attacker walking among the rush-hour crowd, and then smoke filling the area as the device goes off. The man is then seen laying on the ground as people rush away from the scene.

Kim said Ullah picked his target and timed his attack in order to “maximize human casualties.”

The bomb, however, did not fully explode, leaving Ullah injured and three others slightly hurt. 

Ullah remained hospitalized on Tuesday, and Kim said the charges would be formally presented to Ullah at his hospital bedside.

In an interview with investigators at the hospital, Ullah admitted to building the bomb and carrying out the attack in the name of the Islamic State terrorist organization.

“I did it for the Islamic State,” Ullah told interrogators, according to the complaint.

Ullah also told authorities he detonated the bomb “in part because of the United States government’s policies in, among other places, the Middle East.”

Ullah immigrated to the United States in 2011 and is a legal permanent resident. From 2012 to 2015, he worked as a taxi driver. 

Mohammad Toha, Ullah’s uncle, told VOA’s Bangla Service that a relative had sponsored Ullah’s family to immigrate to the United States.

With no known ties to a foreign terrorist organization, Ullah appears to have acted on his own. William Sweeney, the assistant FBI director for the New York field office, told reporters Ullah had not registered on the bureau’s radar for suspicious activity. 

The complaint details Ullah’s self-radicalization in recent years. It says Ullah became radicalized as he began watching Islamic State propaganda videos online as far back as 2014. One video exhorted Islamic State sympathizers to carry out terror attacks in their homelands if they couldn’t join the caliphate in Syria and Iraq. 

About a year ago, according to the complaint, Ullah began researching how to build homemade bombs.

Two to three weeks ago, Ullah started collecting bomb-making materials — wires, metal screws, plastic zip ties and a Christmas tree light bulb. He built the crude device at his apartment in New York City’s Brooklyn borough a week before the attack.

On Monday morning, as he headed to the Port Authority station with the device strapped to his body, Ullah posted on his Facebook page, “Trump, you failed to protect your nation.”

The bungled attack came less than two months after Sayfullo Saipov, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, drove a truck into pedestrians in lower Manhattan, killing eight people and injuring 12 others. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in New York since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Saipov was charged with eight counts of first degree murder in aid of racketeering; 12 counts of attempted murder; and one count of providing material support for terrorism.

Albert Fox Cahn, legal director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in New York, issued a statement on behalf of Ullah’s family. In it, the family said they were “heartbroken by the violence that was targeted at our city today, and by the allegations being made against a member of our family.” 

President Donald Trump said Monday’s attack shows the need for Congress to pass immigration reforms “to protect the American people.”
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Rex Tillerson, dogged by media speculation about how long he will last as U.S. secretary of state, tried on Tuesday to ease skepticism among staff about his leadership and planned State Department reorganization.

Tillerson has alienated some staff by relying on a narrow group of aides while nudging out some of the department’s most senior foreign service officials, and for making erroneous statements about the top echelon of U.S. diplomats during a recent appearance.

During a town hall meeting at the State Department, the chief U.S. diplomat laid out steps such as merging agency email lists, allowing more telecommuting for employees and partially easing a hiring freeze as part of his effort to win over workers unhappy about previously announced plans to reduce staff and to carry out the White House’s proposed 30 percent budget cuts.

Tillerson did not break new ground in his speech on policy challenges such as the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, Syria’s civil war and Russia’s occupation of Crimea.

Among the organizational steps he laid out were moving to cloud-based systems for email and collaboration; integrating the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development email address lists; and ending a hiring freeze on “eligible family members” of employees.

Many State Department officials have been frustrated by the hiring freeze on such family members because this means their spouses are often unable to work at U.S. embassies. The State Department said its wider hiring freeze would remain for now.

Tillerson also announced plans to allow workers abroad who are evacuated for medical reasons to telecommute; to streamline the process of obtaining security clearances, including allowing interns to work with “interim” clearances; and to simplify the department’s computer system interfaces.

Tillerson aides have said they need to make a stronger case about the reorganization.

While the initiatives that he announced drew some applause, five of six State Department officials interviewed about his remarks said they did not think the town hall would do much to ease skepticism about Tillerson or his reorganization plans.

“It’s too little too late,” said one official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

President Donald Trump has undercut Tillerson on issues such as North Korea, where the president said the secretary of state was wasting his time pursuing diplomacy.

Tillerson’s inaccurate statements about the title and ages of some the State Department’s recently retired top officials have rankled some of his staff and suggested that his grasp of the agency’s inner workings is limited.

“It’s one of many things that show that the administration as a whole doesn’t fundamentally understand what diplomacy can do and how it works,” Richard Boucher, a former assistant secretary for South and Central Asia, said on Monday.
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Honduras has been on edge since its Nov. 26 presidential election, as yet undecided. On Sunday, thousands of supporters of opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla marched in Tegucigalpa, the capital city. They want the international community’s attention – and its sustained pressure for a fairly decided outcome – as incumbent President Juan Orlando Hernandez’s narrow lead is being challenged.
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A new survey in the U.S. shows that nearly six in 10 Americans believe that the level of government corruption has risen in the year since President Donald Trump was elected.

Transparency International, a Berlin-based anti-corruption group, said its poll of a thousand people in October and November showed that while Trump was elected on a vow to make government work better “for those who feel their interests have been neglected by political elites,” the opposite has happened.

“Rather than feeling better about progress in the fight against corruption over the past year,” the group said, “a clear majority of people in America now say that things have become worse.”

Transparency International said 44 percent of Americans believe that Trump and White House officials are corrupt, up from 36 percent recorded in a similar survey in early 2016 at the start of former president Barack Obama’s last year in office. It said nearly seven out of 10 of those surveyed believe the government is failing to fight corruption, up from half in 2016.

​Issue widespread

The survey said 38 percent of Americans believe members of Congress are corrupt and 33 percent say government officials are. The poll said 32 percent think business executives are corrupt, 23 percent of local government officials and 22 percent of religious leaders. Judges and magistrates fared the best, with 16 percent of Americans believing they are corrupt.

The survey showed that close to a third of African-Americans believe police are corrupt, compared to a fifth of those polled overall. Slightly more than half said they feared retaliation for reporting what they believe to be wrongdoing, up from slightly less than a third in 2016.

Transparency International said its survey showed “people are now more critical of government efforts to fight corruption. From just over half in 2016, nearly seven in 10 people in the United States now say that the government is doing a bad job at combating corruption within its own institutions. This is despite widespread commitments to clean up government.”

Those surveyed said that while public protests and speaking out on social can be effective in fighting corruption, the best way is to vote out of office politicians they believe to be corrupt.

 
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This may or may not come as a surprise: Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2017 is “feminism.”

Yes, it’s been a big year or two or 100 for the word. In 2017, look-ups for feminism increased 70 percent over 2016 on Merriam-Webster.com and spiked several times after key events, lexicographer Peter Sokolowski, the company’s editor at large, told The Associated Press ahead of Tuesday’s annual word reveal.

There was the Women’s March on Washington in January, along with sister demonstrations around the globe. And heading into the year was Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and references linking her to white-clad suffragettes, along with her loss to President Donald Trump, who once boasted about grabbing women.  

The “Me Too” movement rose out of Harvey Weinstein’s dust, and other “silence breakers” brought down rich and famous men of media, politics and the entertainment worlds.

Feminism has been in Merriam-Webster’s annual Top 10 for the last few years, including sharing word-of-the-year honors with other “isms” in 2015. Socialism, fascism, racism, communism, capitalism and terrorism rounded out the bunch. Surreal was the word of the year last year.

“The word feminism was being use in a kind of general way,” Sokolowski said by phone from the company’s headquarters in Springfield, Massachusetts. “The feminism of this big protest, but it was also used in a kind of specific way: What does it mean to be a feminist in 2017? Those kinds of questions are the kinds of things, I think, that send people to the dictionary.”

Feminism’s roots are in the Latin for “woman” and the word “female,” which dates to 14th century English. Sokolowski had to look no further than his company’s founder, Noah Webster, for the first dictionary reference, in 1841, which isn’t all that old in the history of English.

“It was a very new word at that time,” Sokolowski said. “His definition is not the definition that you and I would understand today. His definition was, ‘The qualities of females,’ so basically feminism to Noah Webster meant femaleness. We do see evidence that the word was used in the 19th century in a medical sense, for the physical characteristics of a developing teenager, before it was used as a political term, if you will.”

Webster added the word in revisions to his “An American Dictionary of the English Language.” They were his last. He died in 1843. He also added the word terrorism that year.

“We had no idea he was the original dictionary source of feminism. We don’t have a lot of evidence of what he was looking at,” Sokolowski said.

Today, Merriam-Webster defines feminism as the “theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes” and “organized activities on behalf of women’s rights and interests.”

Another spike for the word feminism in 2017 occurred in February, after Kellyanne Conway spoke at the Conservative Political Action Committee.

“It’s difficult for me to call myself a feminist in the classic sense because it seems to be very anti-male and it certainly seems to be very pro-abortion. I’m neither anti-male or pro-abortion,” she said. “There’s an individual feminism, if you will, that you make your own choices…. I look at myself as a product of my choices, not a victim of my circumstances. And to me, that’s what conservative feminism is all about.”

She was applauded, and she sent many people to their dictionaries, Sokolowski said. The company would not release actual look-up numbers.

Other events that drew interest to the word feminism was the popular Hulu series, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and the blockbuster movie, “Wonder Woman,” directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins, Sokolowski said.

Merriam-Webster had nine runners-up, in no particular order:

Complicit, competitor Dictionary.com’s word of the year.
Recuse, in reference to Jeff Sessions and the Russia investigation.
Empathy, which hung high all year.
Dotard, used by Kim Jong-un to describe Trump.
Syzygy , the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies, such as the sun, moon and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse.
Gyro, which can be pronounced three different ways, a phenom celebrated in a Jimmy Fallon sketch on “The Tonight Show.”
Federalism, which Lindsey Graham referred to in discussing the future of the Affordable Care Act.
Hurricane, which Sokolowski suspects is because people are confused about wind speed.
Gaffe, such as what happened at the Academy Awards when the wrong best picture winner was announced. That was a go-to word for the media, Sokolowski said.
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In their third meeting in a month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hosted his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Ankara. The talks primarily focused on Syria, but Putin’s visit coincides with U.S.-Turkish relations, reeling from a crisis sparked by U.S. President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“Regarding Jerusalem, I have observed that we share common opinions with Mr. Putin, and we’ve come to an agreement that we will sustain our decisiveness in this matter,” Erdogan said in a joint press statement with Putin, referring to the Russian president as his “dear friend.”

“The resolution by the U.S. to move the American embassy to Jerusalem is far from helping the settlement of the situation in the Middle East,” Putin said. “It is destabilizing the already complicated situation in the region, which is difficult as it is today.”

In a move that will add to Washington’s unease over Ankara’s warming relationship with Moscow, the Turkish president announced that a controversial purchase of a Russian missile system should be finalized this week. NATO strongly opposes the sale, claiming it is incompatible with its systems.

Putin’s visit is just the latest move in what some analysts call a careful and well-played strategy by Russia of building influence and sowing discord amongst its rivals. Before meeting Erdogan, Putin met with another U.S. ally, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, in Cairo. Prior to the meeting with Putin, Erdogan ratcheted up his rhetoric over Trump’s Jerusalem move.

“With their decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the United States has become a partner in the bloodshed,” Erdogan said. 

Throughout the year, Turkish-Russian relations have blossomed as U.S.-Turkish ties have plummeted. The latest meeting between Putin and Erdogan is the eighth this year. The two leaders are increasingly cooperating over Syria. Monday’s talks focused on the planned Syrian National Congress on National Dialogue, an event Moscow hopes will bring together the Syrian government and the opposition. Putin said the Congress would address the adoption of a constitution, the parameters of a future Syrian statehood, and the organization of elections under the control of the United Nations.

Even though Moscow and Ankara back opposing sides in the Syrian civil war, analysts say that with the war approaching an endgame, both sides have something to gain in cooperation.

Putin has successfully exploited Ankara’s anger and mistrust over Washington’s backing of the YPG Syrian Kurdish militia in its war against the Islamic State. Ankara calls the YPG terrorists, claiming they are linked to a Kurdish insurgency in Turkey.

But Moscow, too, has been backing the YPG and its political wing, the PYD. Putin is pressing for the YPG to be included in meetings to end the cvil war, which Ankara bitterly opposes. Last week, images appeared of Russian and YPG forces openly collaborating in a military operation against the Islamic State.

“We’ve seen Ankara critical of the photo of Russian military representatives and the YPG,” said analyst Sinan Ulgen, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe in Brussels. “But this cannot be compared to the policy of the U.S., which is providing heavy weapons to the YPG.” 

Turkish-Russian relations could be further boosted by Putin’s announcement of the partial withdrawal of Russian forces from Syria. 

“Ankara would look at this as an opportunity to expand its influence across the border,” said Ulgen. 

Turkish forces remain massed on the border of the YPG-controlled Syrian Afrin enclave.

“As things stand, Afrin remains under Russian protection. But if indeed Russia were to pull back its troops, this would certainly give more room to Turkey to contemplate military action against Afrin,” Ulgen predicted.

Putin may be wary of abandoning the Syrian Kurdish militia, which Moscow has been developing ties with over several years. Analysts point out that the powerful militia could be useful in helping protect Moscow’s interests in the region from other potential regional rivals, including Turkey and Iran, especially as it winds down much of its military presence in Syria. But such a move would likely test Moscow’s currently successful balancing act —managing its conflicting policies in Syria.
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Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Monday he is making a second emergency move to keep the government from going above the debt limit while awaiting congressional action to raise the threshold.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Mnuchin said he will not be able to fully invest in a large civil service retirement and disability fund. Skipped investments will be restored once the debt limit has been raised, he said.

In September, Congress agreed to suspend the debt limit, allowing the government to borrow as much as it needed. But that suspension ended Friday.

The government said the debt subject to limit stood at $20.46 trillion on Friday. Mnuchin has said he will employ various “extraordinary measures” to buy time until Congress raises the limit.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in a recent report that Mnuchin has enough maneuvering room to stay under the limit until late March or early April.

If Congress has not acted before Mnuchin has exhausted his bookkeeping maneuvers, the government would be unable to borrow the money it needs to meet its day-to-day obligations, including sending out Social Security and other benefit checks and making interest payments on the national debt.

In August 2011, a standoff between Congress and the Obama administration over raising the borrowing limit came down to the wire and prompted the Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency to impose the first-ever downgrade of the government’s credit rating.

Raising the debt limit is a separate issue from the need for Congress to pass a spending bill to cover government operations. A failure to pass a spending bill triggers a partial government shutdown but does not carry the potential catastrophic market disruptions that a failure to raise the debt limit poses.

In his new letter, Mnuchin said, “I respectfully urge Congress to protect the full faith and credit of the United States by acting to increase the statutory debt limit as soon as possible.”
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