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Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari is slated to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington Monday.

The two leaders are expected to discuss the threat of terrorism and economic growth in Africa’s most populous country of almost 200 million people.

Nigeria has been plagued by extremist group Boko Haram, which launched an insurgency nine years ago with the aim of creating an Islamic State. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, and hundreds of school girls kidnapped, as the group gained notoriety and spread to neighboring countries, posing one of the most severe threats to West Africa’s Sahel region in recent years.

Last year, the Trump administration approved a $600 million sale of high-technology attack planes and equipment to support Nigerian military operations against Boko Haram and IS terrorists and to monitor drugs, weapons and human trafficking.

The deal was stalled under the Obama administration amid concerns of human rights violations in the West African country.

As Buhari faces re-election, he is expected to lobby the United States for further military support to fulfill his campaign promise of eradicating Boko Haram.

In addition to seeking greater security collaboration, Buhari and Trump also will “discuss ways to enhance the strategic partnership between the two countries and to advance shared priorities, such as promoting economic growth,” Nigerian presidential spokesman Femi Adesina said in a statement.

Buhari, along with South African president Jacob Zuma, was among the first African leaders that Trump spoke with on the phone upon taking office.

But relations between the two countries have faced challenges over the past year. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was fired just hours after his visit to Nigeria on the highest-level U.S. visit to Africa since Trump took office.

In January, Nigeria joined a list of outraged African countries demanding an explanation from the U.S. ambassador from Trump’s reported vulgar comments referring to African countries.

In December, Nigeria was among a group of United Nations countries who condemned Trump’s controversial decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
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A mystery is brewing at the White House about what happened to the oak tree President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron planted there last week.

The sapling was a gift from Macron on the occasion of his state visit.

News photographers snapped away Monday as Trump and Macron shoveled dirt onto the tree during a ceremonial planting on the South Lawn. By the end of the week, the tree was gone from the lawn. A pale patch of grass was left in its place.

The White House hasn’t offered an explanation.

The oak sprouted at a World War I battle site that became part of U.S. Marine Corps legend.

About 2,000 U.S. troops died in the June 1918 Battle of Belleau Wood, fighting a German offensive.

 
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U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made clear Sunday that President Donald Trump plans to abrogate the Iran nuclear deal next month unless it is “fixed” to the U.S. liking.

Pompeo, in the Middle East on his first overseas trip as the top U.S. diplomat, said, “President Trump’s been pretty clear, this deal is very flawed. He’s directed the administration to try and fix it and if we can’t fix it he’s going to withdraw from the deal. It’s pretty straightforward.”

Speaking in Israel, he said that “unlike the past administration, President Trump has a comprehensive Iran strategy that is designed to counter the full array of threats emanating from Tehran.”

En route from Saudi Arabia to Israel, Pompeo told reporters that he had briefed Riyadh’s leaders on U.S. talks with European officials on efforts to end Iranian missile tests and combat Tehran’s military involvement in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere in the Mideast. He said the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have a “common challenge in Iran,” but that “there’s still some work to do” in crafting any changes to the 2015 nuclear deal or in creating a new pact.

For its part, Iran has said it has no intention of altering the deal it agreed to with Germany, France, Britain, China, Russia and the U.S. in any way or agreeing to a new nuclear pact.

Trump faces a May 12 deadline whether to reimpose economic sanctions against Iran, pulling the U.S. out of the deal agreed to by former U.S. President Barack Obama. Trump stands alone among the six signatories to the accord in threatening to abrogate it.

In Tel Aviv, Pompeo, after meeting with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said the U.S. remains “deeply concerned about Iran’s dangerous escalation of threats towards Israel and the region.”

Earlier, in Riyadh, the new secretary of state said, “Iran destabilizes this entire region. It supports proxy militias and terrorist groups. It is an arms dealer to the Houthi rebels in Yemen. It supports the murderous Assad regime [in Syria] as well.”

Pompeo stressed the need for unity among Persian Gulf allies of the U.S. to show support for new sanctions against Iran unless new restrictions are imposed on Iran’s nuclear program.

In Saudi Arabia, Pompeo’s senior policy adviser, Brian Hook, who is accompanying Pompeo, called on European allies and other countries to impose sanctions on Iran to weaken its missile program.

“We are urging nations around the world to sanction any individuals and entities associated with Iran’s missile program, and it has also been a big part of discussions with Europeans,” Hook told reporters in Riyadh.

The three-day trip also includes a stop in Jordan.

In Brussels on Friday, Pompeo said he had discussed the nuclear deal with his NATO counterparts.

Pompeo is said to be more “hawkish” on the Iranian government than his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, who wanted the U.S. to stay in the Iran nuclear agreement.

Tillerson was abruptly fired by Trump last month, just hours after returning from a trip to Africa. Trump said he and Pompeo are much more “on the same wavelength” on Iran and other issues.

 
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President Donald Trump took aim at familiar political targets and added a few fresh ones during a campaign-style rally Saturday night in an Upper Midwest state that gave him a surprising victory in the 2016 election.

Trump has been urging voters to support Republicans for Congress as a way of advancing his agenda. In his rally in Washington Township, he repeatedly pointed to Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan as one of the Democrats who needed to be voted out.

After saying Stabenow was standing in the way of protecting U.S. borders and had voted against tax cuts, Trump said: “And you people just keep putting her back again and again and again. It’s your fault.”

​‘I know things about Tester’

Earlier Saturday, Trump tweeted criticism of Democratic Senator Jon Tester of Montana over his role in the failed nomination of White House doctor Ronny Jackson to run the Department of Veterans Affairs, calling for Tester to resign or at least not be re-elected this fall.

In his rally remarks, Trump railed against the allegations Tester aired against Jackson and suggested that he could take a similar tack against the senator.

“I know things about Tester that I could say, too. And if I said ’em, he’d never be elected again,” Trump said without elaborating.

As he has at similar events, Trump promoted top agenda items that energize grass-roots conservatives: appointing conservative judges, building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, ending “sanctuary cities” and protecting tax cuts approved by the Republican-led Congress. He also took credit for the warming relations between North and South Korea, telling his audience “we’ll see how it goes.”

Friendly territory

Trump chose a friendly venue for his rally, which not coincidentally came the same night as the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He skipped the dinner last year, too, and attending a rally in which he took time to attack the news media and assure his audience, as he did in Washington Township, about 40 miles north of Detroit, that he’d rather be with them.

Ahead of the rally Trump said in a fundraising pitch that he had come up with something better than being stuck in a room “with a bunch of fake news liberals who hate me.” He said he would rather spend the evening “with my favorite deplorables.”

During the 2016 campaign, Clinton drew laughs when she told supporters at a private fundraiser that half of Trump supporters could be lumped into a “basket of deplorables,” denouncing them as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.”

Clinton later did a partial rollback, said she had been “grossly generalistic” and regretted saying the label fit “half” of Trump’s supporters. But she didn’t back down from the general sentiment.

Trump soon had the video running in his campaign ads, and his supporters wore the “deplorable” label as a badge of honor.

White, blue-collar voters

Macomb County, the site of Trump’s rally, is among the predominantly white counties known as a base for “Reagan Democrats,” blue-collar voters who abandoned the Democratic Party for Ronald Reagan, but who can be intriguingly movable.

Democrat Barack Obama won the county twice in his White House runs, then Trump carried it by more than 11 percentage points.
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Arizona teachers’ walkout over pay and education funding appears headed into a second week as major school districts say schools will remain closed Monday.

The unprecedented statewide job action began Thursday and continued Friday, resulting in closures of schools that educate the vast majority of the state’s 1.1 million public school students.

Recent teacher protests in Arizona and Colorado have followed similar job actions in West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma. 

Arizona districts whose websites on Saturday displayed notices saying schools will be closed included several in Phoenix and its suburbs and others in cities across the state, including Tucson, Flagstaff and Sierra Vista.

Republican Governor Doug Ducey and GOP legislative leaders said Friday that they had reached a budget agreement to boost teacher pay by 20 percent by 2020.

“This plan benefits our children’s education across the state, and we are working through the weekend to introduce a budget early next week and pass it shortly thereafter,” Ducey said in the statement with Senate President Steve Yarbrough and Speaker J.D. Mesnard.

Concerns remain

Leaders of teacher groups said Saturday that the announced agreement at this point was only a press release and that their other concerns remained unaddressed.

“We have no bill. We have no deal. The devil is in the details,” Joe Thomas, Arizona Education Association president, and Noah Karvelis, Arizona Educators United organizer, said in a joint statement.

Custodian Jaime Cordona vacuums an empty second-grade classroom at San Marcos Elementary School, April 26, 2018, in Chandler, Ariz. Teachers in Arizona and Colorado walked out over low salaries, keeping hundreds of thousands of students out of school.

Walkout organizers from the start haven’t said how long the protest would last, and some parents knew of the possibility of demonstrations continuing.

Physician’s assistant Brooke Morrow, 37, was able to take time off from work Thursday and took her 9-year-old daughter to an indoor trampoline park in Phoenix. But things will get trickier if schools remain closed Monday, she said.

My husband will have to find some flexibility. We’ll use Grandma. We’ll use neighbors,” Morrow said.

The Sierra Vista Unified School District in southeastern Arizona said its schools “will reopen when administration can verify we have sufficient supervision in our schools for safe operations, or when the state walkout has been concluded.”

“We realize our closures are causing inconveniences for our parents and community. We thank you for your patience as we work through this time,” the district’s notice added.

Scottsdale Unified in suburban Phoenix said its schools would remain closed Monday but reopen Tuesday. Teachers not planning to return Tuesday will need to use leave time.

“This is an historic moment in Arizona and we will continue to support educators who have united to demand better for our children. We are hearing from teachers and other staff who wish to return to work and from families who are anxious to know when students can return to school,” acting Superintendent Amy Fuller said in a statement.
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Law enforcement authorities in the United States, European Union and Canada this week began a joint cybercampaign against Islamic State online communication channels that will “severely disrupt” the group’s propaganda machine, the EU’s law enforcement agency Europol said.

The multinational action, led by Belgian federal prosecutors, was launched  Wednesday and Thursday and targeted IS media outlets, including Amaq news, al-Bayan radio, Halumu and Nashir news.

IS’s Amaq news agency is believed to be a major propaganda outlet for the terror group. The group relies on the outlet to spread propaganda in several languages, including English and French. Amaq has broadcast claims of responsibility for deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels, Berlin and Barcelona.

“With this groundbreaking operation we have punched a big hole in the capability of IS to spread propaganda online and radicalize young people in Europe,” Rob Wainwright, the head of Europol, said in a statement released Friday.

“I applaud the determined and innovative work by Europol and its partners to target a major part of the international terrorist threat prevalent in Europe today,” he added.

Earlier efforts

This is not the first time Western countries joined forces to crack down on IS propaganda capabilities. A coordinated effort in August 2016 hit Amaq’s mobile application and web infrastructure. Another multinational operation led by Spanish Guardia Civil in June 2017 against the outlet helped authorities identify radicalized individuals in over 100 countries around the world.

Europol claimed the two-day effort this week led to the seizure of digital evidence by law enforcement authorities and compromised IS broadcast capabilities and materials.

Europol authorities said the data retrieved as a result of the crackdown would be used to identify the administrators behind IS media outlets.

In a separate statement, Belgian police said the operation also aimed to seize and shut down computer servers used to spread terror propaganda in Europe.

Over the years, IS has weaponized the internet to radicalize, recuit and inspire acts of terrorism in the West and around the world.

The group’s ability to produce and distribute new propaganda has been significantly diminished since it lost nearly 98 percent of the territory it once held in Iraq and Syria, and social media giants Facebook, Google and Twitter increased their efforts to remove radical content from the internet. 

VOA Turkish service’s Arzu Cakir contributed to this report from Paris. 
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Texas’ voter ID law that was twice blocked because of findings of discrimination can stay in effect for the 2018 elections, a U.S. appeals court ruled Friday.

It was the second major ruling over voting rights in the U.S. this week after an Arkansas judge on Thursday blocked that state’s voter ID measure as unconstitutional.

But in a 2-1 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, the Texas law that critics have slammed as one of the toughest voter ID measures in the nation was seen as a suitable replacement for the original 2011 law that a federal judge had likened to a “poll tax” on minority voters.

​ID or affidavit

The biggest change to the Texas law, which accepts handgun licenses as sufficient identification to vote, but not college student IDs, is that voters without any acceptable photo ID can still cast a ballot so long as they sign an affidavit. Opponents and a federal judge in Texas balked at the revisions, saying criminal penalties tied to lying on the affidavit could have a chilling effect on voters.

U.S. Circuit Jones Edith Jones said the lower court went too far.

“The district court relied too heavily on evidence of Texas’s state-sponsored discrimination from a bygone era,” Jones wrote in her majority opinion.

The revisions to Texas’ law were also supported by the U.S. Justice Department, a move that amounted to a complete reversal for the federal government, which under former President Barack Obama had joined minority rights groups in suing over the law. But two months after Donald Trump took office, the Justice Department abandoned the argument that Texas passed voter ID rules with discrimination in mind and said the changes should satisfy the courts.

Opponents bristled at the ruling but didn’t immediately indicate their next step.

“We continue to firmly believe that the Texas photo ID law is one of the most discriminatory and restrictive measures of its kind,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Washington-based Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the groups involved in the lawsuit.

Bush-appointed judge objected — twice

Texas first passed the voter ID law in 2011, the same year the GOP-controlled Legislature adopted voting maps that were also struck down as discriminatory. Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton said Friday’s ruling “removes any burden on voters who cannot obtain a photo ID.”

The law was twice shot down by U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos — an appointee of then-President George W. Bush — who ruled that the strict requirements disadvantaged minorities and effectively dampened the electoral power of Texas’ surging Hispanic population. She also disapproved of the modified version, which makes knowingly lying on the affidavit to vote a misdemeanor.

Democrats said that provision could keep people home on Election Day over fears of incorrectly filling out a form. Republicans call those concerns unfounded but have also supported aggressive action against voter fraud, which is rare. Earlier this year, a Texas woman was sentenced to five years in prison for voting in the 2016 presidential election when she was ineligible because she was on probation.

ID required in 34 states

Thirty-four states have laws requiring or requesting that voters show some form of identification at the polls, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Arkansas’ newly blocked law would have required officials to provide photo identification to voters free of charge if they didn’t have any other photo ID. It also would have let voters without ID to cast provisional ballots by signing affidavits.

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Alice Gray, however, ruled there was no guarantee those provisional ballots would be counted and that they would face greater scrutiny.
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Thousands of years of sediment carried by the Mississippi River created 25,000 square kilometers of land, marsh and wetlands along Louisiana’s coast. But engineering projects stopped the flow of sediment and rising seas thanks to climate change have made the Mississippi Delta the fastest-disappearing land on earth. Louisiana State University researchers created the river system in miniature to try to stop the erosion and rebuild the delta. Faith Lapidus narrates this report from Deborah Block.
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A new approach for detecting food poisoning is being used to investigate the recent outbreak of E.coli bacteria in romaine lettuce grown in the U.S. state of Arizona. The tainted produce has sickened at least 84 people in 19 states. The new method, used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, relies on genetic sequencing. And as Faiza Elmasry tells us, it has the potential to revolutionize the detection of food poisoning outbreaks. VOA’s Faith Lapidus narrates.
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She had traveled to Alabama all the way from California to be here for this moment.

She had managed to stay dry in a torrential downpour that would have forced many others away. Had somehow beat the odds, got in line early, and secured one of the sold-out opening day tickets for access to The Legacy Museum.

So it was a surprise to Isoke Femi that the hardest thing for her to manage were the words to describe what she had just witnessed.

“My experience in there… is so painful,” she said exiting the exhibit.

Site of slave warehouse

Built on the site of a slave warehouse in downtown Montgomery, once the epicenter of the slave trade in the United States, in a town that at one time was the capital of the Confederacy, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is filled with visual exhibits that serve as a catalyst for understanding what many blacks in the United States have historically endured.

“Five-thousand blacks were lynched between 1880 and 1940,” said civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was an early supporter of the museum and the nearby National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a new memorial that sits on a grassy, six-acre hill overlooking Montgomery.

It is the first memorial and museum of its kind in the United States, tackling subjects such as racial terrorism and lynching.

Founded by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization working in marginalized and impoverished communities, the group hopes the Memorial and The Legacy Museum will help change the national narrative about race.

“We must face the truth of our origins,” Jackson told VOA in an exclusive interview immediately following his own trip through the museum in its opening hours. “We are a post-genocidal, post-slavery, post-Jim Crow society.”

​Facing the past

But not a post-racial society, says Mark Potok, former senior fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center, who spent much of his career tracking hate groups in the United States.

“It is white people in this country, and in the South in particular, who are so averse to facing the past squarely,” he said.

Potok says racism and bigotry, particularly in Alabama, which now hosts this museum and memorial, are not yet consigned to the history books.

“It’s worth remembering that 15 years ago, a very short time ago, the majority of white people in Alabama voted to keep segregated schools in the state constitution,” Potok said.

Jackson says it’s not just Alabama.

“And even today … 200 attempts to get federal anti-lynching legislation has not passed,” he said.

Speaking to the impact of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, he hopes “this will give us a deeper narrative … and we will seek to become better. At the end of the day, we must educate and enlighten us. Not make us get behind more barriers.”

Change at the ballot box

The biggest barrier in Jackson’s mind today is the one keeping people from the ballot box.

“There are 4 million blacks in the South unregistered to vote,” he said.

Mark Potok agrees with Jackson, and believes the best way to bridge the racial divide in the United States is to vote.

“You know, it’s not beating up white supremacists on the streets of Charlottesville,” he said. “It is really changing the people who represent us.”

Isoke Femi, still reeling from her walk through the images and displays that deal with powerful and uncomfortable truths long avoided, sees hope in the crowds around her.

“The love it took to do this, the commitment, the courage, and the fact that everybody is here that it’s not just something that black people are coming to. Everybody is here. And even if they can’t find the words … they want the healing of America.”

In that healing, Jesse Jackson hopes there is also a lesson.

“We must learn to live together,” he said. “And that is one of the great challenges of our past.”
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North Korea’s main underground nuclear test site may be damaged and portions of it unusable, but analysts say that does not mean Pyongyang can no longer carry out nuclear tests at the facility or elsewhere.

Late last week, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un pledged to halt nuclear and missile tests and to close its Punggye-ri facility. The site has been used for all six of the isolated country’s nuclear tests.

In recent years, the stability of Mount Mantap at the site has increasingly been a concern because of the possibility of radiation leakage. And now news has surfaced regarding two new studies by Chinese seismologists that confirm those concerns.

Study: Test site collapse

According to media reports, scientists in China have found that following North Korea’s latest nuclear test last year, a cavity inside Mount Mantap collapsed. One study said the breakdown of the mountain created a chimney that could allow radioactivity from the blast zone to rise into the air.

A report in the Wall Street Journal this week said the study also warned that any further testing at the site with a similar yield could cause an environmental catastrophe.

Another study that was published this month by several other Chinese scientists came to the same conclusion about the collapse of a cavity at the facility but did not say whether the site was still usable, the Wall Street Journal added.

North Korean analysts say that even if the collapse of parts of the facility happened and if Mount Mantap is unusable, there are other mountains nearby and other tunnels.

Many tunnels

Joseph Bermudez, a North Korean expert with 38North, said the northern entrance at the Punggye-ri facility leads to a series of tunnels that branch off, which is how they have been able to host so many tests at the site.

“Obviously the tunnel that was used for each of the tests is no longer viable but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t another branch that the North Koreans could use,” Bermudez said.

At the site, there are three other entrances. One to the east that was apparently used for North Korea’s first test, another to the south that has not been used and then a portal to the west, he added.

Bermudez said that until last week there was excavation activity at the west portal and right before Kim’s announcement that the facility would be shut down all of the carts were pulled out and lined up in a neat row for satellite surveillance to pick up.

“This is a clear indication that they’re telling us, “Hey, look, we are stopped,’” he said. “As far as we can tell, North Korea’s Punggye-ri facility is ready and capable of conducting another nuclear test anytime Kim Jong Un decides to do so.”

Other mountains

James M. Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that even if North Korea cannot use Mount Mantap there are other mountains in the vicinity or elsewhere.

“The decision not to test is a political decision, it is not, I think one forced on North Korea for technical reasons,” Acton said. “This is neither a technically enforced decision nor is it a permanent decision. It would not be difficult to reverse.”

Some have suggested North Korea had little choice but to halt its tests because of mounting pressure from international sanctions and the geological structure of the test site.

Kim’s announcement late last week to close the site, stop tests and focus on opening up the economy is a welcome shift, said professor Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. But also one that should be approached carefully as the pledges do not amount to much.

“He (Kim) has not put much on the table, he has not said the existing nuclear stock or the longer range nuclear missiles that the North Koreans have are open to negotiations,” Tsang said.

Tsang said that Kim’s pledge to halt tests could be related to the condition of the facility, but also because the North does not have any plans to carry out tests for now, especially with U.S. intelligence agencies and others closely watching the facility.
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