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El Salvador, a Central American country, wrestles with one of the region’s biggest challenges: the rise of criminal gangs like MS-13. Gangs test the government’s policies on policing, detention and crime-prevention initiatives. Different camps debate whether to invest more in strong-hand punitive approaches, social interventions or a combination. Cristina Caicedo Smit has the second of three reports about MS-13.
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A senior U.S. official will head to Taiwan for what State Department officials say is to “reaffirm long-standing U.S. policy toward and support for Taiwan.”

Alex Wong, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, is scheduled to visit Taiwan March 20-22 after meetings in Singapore.

While in Taiwan, Wong will deliver remarks at the American Chamber of Commerce’s annual Hsieh Nien Fan dinner, an opportunity for the American business community to meet with Taiwanese officials to facilitate further interaction in the year ahead.

Wong will also hold discussions with Taiwanese officials on a wide range of matters, according to the State Department.

“It makes sense that the Trump administration is willing to strengthen ties with Taiwan. No one should be surprised,” Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at Center for International and Strategic Studies, told VOA on Monday. “China’s growing political, military, and economic pressure on Taiwan is a threat to Taiwan’s security and harmful to U.S. interests.”

Wong’s visit will come just days after U.S. President Donald Trump signed the Taiwan Travel Act. The legislation encourages unrestricted two-way travel for officials from the United States and Taiwan. It is also seen as a move to facilitate direct official U.S. contacts with the self-ruled island, which were cut in 1979 when Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.

The informal relations between the United States and Taiwan are governed by the Taiwan Relations Act that was passed by Congress in April of 1979.

As part of the deal, the United States imposed unwritten rules, including prohibiting higher-level American officials from meeting with their Taiwan counterparts, and preventing top Taiwan officials from coming to Washington, D.C.

According to the Taiwan Travel Act, relations between the United States and Taiwan “have suffered from a lack of communication due to the self-imposed restrictions that the United States maintains on high-level visits with Taiwan” since the enactment of the Taiwan Relations Act.

While U.S. and Taiwan officials have already been traveling back and forth to meet, the visits were usually kept low profile to avoid diplomatic repercussion.

China reacted angrily to the bill.

Foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said on Saturday: “We urge the US side to correct its mistake, stop pursuing any official ties with Taiwan or improving its current relations with Taiwan in any substantive way.”

The Chinese Embassy issued a statement saying that certain clauses of the legislation “severely violate the one-China principle, the political foundation of the China-US relationship.”

The move is likely to weigh heavily on US-China ties, which are currently under strain after Trump announced new import tariffs on steel and aluminum.

China claims democratically-ruled Taiwan is part of its territory. China’s relationship with Taiwan took a turn for the worse since the 2016 inauguration of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who has refused to endorse Beijing’s view that the island belongs to it.
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A top White House lawyer says President Donald Trump is not considering firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller, after the president accused him of political bias in a series of tweets Sunday.

“In response to media speculation and related questions being posed to the administration, the White House yet again confirms that the president is not considering or discussing the firing of the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller,” White House Lawyer Ty Cobb said.

Trump assailed Mueller, accusing him of political bias in his investigation of Trump’s 2016 election campaign links to Russia and whether the president obstructed justice in trying to thwart the probe.

“Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added … does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!” Trump said in one of a string of Twitter remarks over the weekend recalling his defeat of Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton and his negative view of the investigations in the year and a half since then.

Trump failed to note that at least at one point Mueller was a registered Republican voter and is generally viewed in Washington as an apolitical prosecutor, whose investigation of the Trump campaign is supported by Democrats and key Republicans who voiced their support on Sunday news shows for Mueller’s handling of the probe.

On Saturday, Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd suggested that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the special counsel, “bring an end” to Mueller’s investigation, resulting in media speculation about Trump’s next move regarding the probe.

Trump also attacked two former ousted FBI officials, former director James Comey, fired by Trump last May, and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, dismissed at Trump’s urging late Friday by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, 26 hours before McCabe was set to retire and collect his full pension. Trump contended that Comey’s and McCabe’s personal written recollections of their conversations he had with them are fabricated.

Trump said he “spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me. I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?” In another tweet, Trump referred to the one-time FBI chief as “Sanctimonious James Comey” and said he made McCabe “look like a choirboy.”

Sessions dismissed McCabe after concurring with an internal Justice Department investigation that McCabe “had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions,” a news leak McCabe said Comey knew about while they served together at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The president contended “The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary” and the Democratic National Committee, “and improperly used” by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!”

On Sunday, Senator Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a key Trump supporter, told CNN that Mueller “needs to be able to do his job without interference.” Graham said that if Trump were to attempt to fire Mueller it would be “the beginning of the end of his presidency.”

Congressman Trey Gowdy, another South Carolina Republican, told Fox News, “I think the president’s lawyer does a disservice when he says that and frames the investigation that way … Russia attacked our country, let special counsel Mueller figure that out.”

Gowdy was part of the Republican majority on the House Intelligence Committee that concluded a week ago that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, but said in the television interview, “You should want Special Counsel Mueller to take all the time and have all the independence he needs to do his job.”

Trump said, “As the House Intelligence Committee has concluded, there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump Campaign. As many are now finding out, however, there was tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, Justice & State. Drain The Swamp.”

McCabe, in a statement after his firing, called his ouster “retribution,” saying, “I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of [former FBI Director] James Comey.” U.S. news accounts said he had written contemporaneous accounts of his conversations with Trump.

His firing, barely a day ahead of his 50th birthday on Sunday, could cost McCabe thousands of dollars in retirement benefits.

 
…

Just ahead of Kenya’s disputed 2017 election, video clips started spreading on social media of a slick-looking CNN broadcast asserting that President Uhuru Kenyatta had pulled far ahead in the polls. But the CNN broadcast was fake, splicing together real coverage from CNN Philippines with other footage with the network’s iconic red logo superimposed in the corner.

It happened with a BBC video, too, and with a photo purportedly of Kenyan security forces killing protesters that was actually from Tanzania, and with thousands of spurious blog posts and other false reports that flooded the popular messaging app WhatsApp, fueling further divisions and turmoil in an election that morphed into a major political crisis.

So the U.S. government is gearing up to fight fake news — not at home, where it’s the subject of heated debate following the 2016 presidential campaign, but in Kenya, where America has sought to nurture a vibrant but volatile African democracy.

“Information is, of course, power, and frankly, fake news is a real danger,” U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Robert Godec said in an interview, adding that it had eroded confidence in Kenya’s real news media. “It’s being weaponized. It’s undermining democracy in Kenya.”

Godec kicked off the awareness campaign this past week with an email to the 47,000 members of the State Department’s Young African Leaders Initiative asking them to pledge to prevent the spread of fake media by pausing to verify the source and validity before passing information along to others through social media. For a while this week, the hashtag (hash)StopReflectVerify was the No. 2 trending hashtag on Twitter in Kenya, where the U.S. Embassy pushed it to its 256,000 followers.

In addition to offering resources for discriminating between fact and fake, the campaign involves three-day training sessions for public affairs officials in Kenya’s counties, encouraging local governments to be more responsive and forthcoming so that journalists on deadline can fact-check information they hear. Though it’s starting in Kenya, the program is expected to expand, with an Africa-wide international fact-checking day and a global, virtual event on World Press Freedom Day in May anchored out of Nairobi.

The focus on fighting fake news in Kenya stands in contrast to what’s happening in the United States, where President Donald Trump uses the term to denigrate credible news outlets that publish critical coverage about him or his Republican administration. Trump has also continually downplayed the role that false information from illegitimate sources may have played in affecting the outcome of the election. Last month, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians accused of using a network of fake social media accounts and targeted political messages to stir up turmoil in the 2016 race.

The campaign also comes as the U.S. has been warning Kenya’s government about worrisome restrictions on the legitimate news media. The group Human Rights Watch has said Kenyan officials try to stop critical coverage by threatening, intimidating and harassing journalists. The United States was particularly concerned in February when Kenya shut down major broadcasters after opposition leader Raila Odinga held a mock inauguration on television.

In Kenya, the fake news problem has also raised fears about violence being stoked by false facts that often mushroom on social media before they can be stopped.

At election time, a fake but realistic-looking U.S. diplomatic cable circulated that appeared to show embassy officials predicting instability, celebratory violence, “severe unrest and a massive breakdown of law and order” if Odinga were to defeat Kenyatta in the election. The U.S. Embassy quickly tweeted its own version of the cable with the word “FAKE” slapped across it in bold red font.

Yet there are risks for the U.S. in appearing to tell people what to believe, say or not say in Kenya, a former British colony. So the embassy is taking pains to show it’s a locally driven operation, partnering with groups like AfricaCheck, a fact-checking website similar to the U.S. site Snopes.com.

“We’re not asking them to believe any particular thing,” Godec said. “We’re just saying, don’t take everything you see on your phone via WhatsApp as the truth because it may not be.”

 
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They had just finished up lunch, and set off to run a humdrum errand: a drive to the travel agency to pick up airline tickets for their annual visit to their beloved homeland Cuba.

Osvaldo Gonzalez and Alberto Arias, friends and business partners, happened to pass under a Miami bridge that Thursday afternoon, the road bustling with fellow drivers also out on the most ordinary and unthreatening of life’s tasks.

A teenager was driving her friend to the doctor’s office to pick up some medicine. A father of three was heading home from work. A woman on her way to a nail salon was stopped at a red light. Seconds – inches – would soon separate those who would live from those who wouldn’t.

Sweetwater police Detective Juan Llera was at his office a few blocks away, when he heard what he thought was a bomb exploding.

It was not a bomb; it was a bridge, a structure every American has passed under hundreds of times. But in an instant, this 950-ton span under construction at the Florida International University collapsed, and with no time to act or to flee, the cars that just so happened to be below it were pancaked under the rubble. Six people died.

“Imagine,” said Amauri Naranjo, who has known Gonzalez since before he left Cuba in the 1980s, “a longtime friendship that survives even with the sea between us, and it ends because of something like that.”

Gonzalez and Arias, who together owned a party rental and decoration business, were among the dead. Their bodies were found Saturday inside their white Chevy truck as rescuers for days painstakingly dug through the debris of the fallen pedestrian bridge at Florida International University. Hope for a miracle rescue faded as the names of the six dead became known, and those left living grappled with the senselessness, the suddenness of it.

Many others had been saved by mere seconds.

Dania Garlobo was driving to work at a nail salon when the green light changed to yellow and a man in a white Mercedes tried to make it through the light, but stomped on the brakes just as the bridge fell in front of him.

“He was almost caught underneath. I couldn’t believe it,” Garlobo said. She watched the bridge smash into the street below in what seemed like an instant.

“How is it that a strong bridge falls down like a piece of board?”

Llera had sped to the scene, arriving within minutes. In the mayhem, he found a man lying unconscious on the street and started performing CPR. He could barely feel a pulse, but someone with the medical staff from the university came by and said, “you are keeping him alive. Keep going.” And so he did, and the man was alive when they rushed him away.

Llera checked in at the hospital but could get no information. He thought the man had lived. He’d hoped they could shake hands one day.

But on Sunday morning, he studied a picture on the news of a young man in a crisp red shirt.

He has been identified by police as Navarro Brown, a 37-year-old employee with Structural Technologies VSL, listed among those killed. He had died at the hospital.

“I feel like the bad guy won this time,” the officer said as he processed the news Sunday afternoon.

The families of the dead and the injured asked for privacy as they try to make sense of their sudden, inexplicable loss.

“It’s a pretty magical thing to find your soul mate in this world,” Brandon Brownfield’s wife, Chelsea, wrote on Facebook on Sunday. “Like pieces to a jigsaw puzzle, our crazy curvy edges matched and we fit together like no one else could.”

The Brownfields had three young daughters, and the family moved to Florida several years ago for his job at Maxim Crane Works, according to a fundraising page a friend started for the family that had raised more than $50,000 in a few days. He was driving home from work when the bridge collapsed.

“I now have to find the words and the answers to tell my girls that their Daddy is not coming home,” his wife wrote on Facebook.

Investigators are still trying to figure out what caused the bridge to crumble. Cracking had been reported in the concrete span in the days before and crews were performing what’s called “post-tensioning force” on the bridge when it flattened onto the busy highway.

Inside one car there, one teenager was killed and one walked away with minor injuries – a fate decided by which seat they happened to be sitting in.

Richie Humble, a 19-year-old student, had not been feeling well earlier in the week. On Thursday, a friend, 18-year-old Alexa Duran, the nicest person he said he ever knew, gave him a ride to his doctor’s office to pick up some medication. They stopped at a red light, under the bridge.

“I heard a creak, a long creak,” Humble told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “I looked up, and in an instant, the bridge was collapsing on us completely. It was too quick to do anything about it.”

Once he realized he was alive, he also realized that he couldn’t get to his friend. As he called out for her, getting no response, a group of men outside the car started yelling at him to try crawling out of the car. They pried open the door to free him.

He sat on a curb as rescue workers checked out the cuts on his leg and slight facture in a vertebrae. He remembers asking, “What do I do?”

“Everyone has to pick up the pieces,” he said the rescuer responded. “Life doesn’t stop.”

Duran’s uncle Joe Smitha was preparing for a colonoscopy that Thursday afternoon when he heard a bridge had collapsed near her school. She was not answering her phone, but he said he was not worried. His kids sometimes didn’t answer their phones right away.

“I said, ‘What are the odds that out of the thousands of people in Miami that she would be one of six or eight people caught under the bridge at a red light?”’ Smitha said.

But then, after he awoke from anesthesia following the procedure, he learned she had been one of those six people caught under a bridge at a red light.

 
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Two U.S. Republican senators sparred Sunday over President Donald Trump’s nomination of Mike Pompeo, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, as his new secretary of state, and deputy CIA chief Gina Haspel to take over at the intelligence agency.

If confirmed, Haspel would be the first female director in the CIA’s 70-year history.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina predicted on CNN that both Pompeo and Haspel would be confirmed by the Senate. He dismissed one opponent of the nominations, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, as “an outlier” among Republican lawmakers.

Paul, also on CNN, argued against Pompeo, saying Pompeo supports U.S.-sanctioned regime change in some foreign countries. Rand said Haspel was linked to CIA torture of terrorism suspects at clandestine sites overseas.

Paul said he would “do whatever it takes” to derail the two nominations in the Senate, where Republicans hold a narrow 51-49 majority. Paul said that if need be, he would filibuster the nominations, in an attempt to block them from winning approval.

Graham described Haspel as “highly qualified,” while acknowledging her past support of “enhanced interrogation” techniques — including waterboarding, which simulates drowning — against terrorism suspects in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. The CIA no longer permits enhanced interrogation.

“I’m looking forward for her to acknowledge this policy is no longer allowed,” Graham said.

Paul said he does not think Pompeo, a former Kansas congressman before Trump named him CIA director, would be a “good fit” as the nation’s top diplomat to succeed Rex Tillerson, who was fired last week by Trump after a year on the job.

“I don’t think our policy ought to be for regime change,” Paul said.

As for Haspel, Paul said, “What America stands for is not torture. Torture is the hallmark of totalitarianism.”

Paul cited Haspel’s reported oversight of a CIA “black site” in Thailand and her subsequent role in an order to destroy video evidence of the interrogations.

“It’s just inconsistent with who we are as a people to have someone run our spy agency that has all this enormous power, who is intimately involved with torture, and from everything we’re reading, was supportive of the policy,” Paul said.

 
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U.S. President Donald Trump is assailing special counsel Robert Mueller, accusing him of political bias in his investigation of Trump’s 2016 election campaign links to Russia and whether the president obstructed justice in trying to thwart the probe.

“Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added … does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!” Trump said in one of a string of Twitter remarks over the weekend recalling his defeat of Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton and his negative view of the investigations in the the year and a half since then.

Trump ignored noting that at least at one point Mueller was a registered Republican voter and is generally viewed in Washington as an apolitical prosecutor, whose investigation of the Trump campaign is supported by Democrats and key Republicans who voiced their support on Sunday news shows for Mueller’s handling of the probe.

The U.S. leader also attacked two former ousted FBI officials, former director James Comey, fired by Trump last May, and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, dismissed at Trump’s urging late Friday by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, 26 hours before McCabe was set to retire and collect his full pension. Trump contended that Comey’s and McCabe’s personal written recollections of their conversations he had with them are fabricated.

Trump said he “spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me. I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?” In another tweet, Trump referred to the one-time FBI chief as “Sanctimonious James Comey” and said he made McCabe “look like a choirboy.”

Sessions dismissed McCabe after concurring with an internal Justice Department investigation that McCabe “had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions,” a news leak McCabe said Comey knew about while they served together at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Trump tweeted about a segment he watched on his favorite morning news show, Fox and Friends, “Wow, watch Comey lie under oath” at a Senate hearing, “when asked “have you ever been an anonymous source … or known someone else to be an anonymous source …?” He said strongly “never, no.” He lied as shown clearly …”

Trump said, “the Fake News,” Trump’s epithet for the national news media, “is beside themselves that McCabe was caught, called out and fired … How many lies? How many leaks? Comey knew it all, and much more!”

The president contended “The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary” and the Democratic National Committee, “and improperly used” by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!”

John Dowd, Trump’s personal lawyer, praised Sessions on Saturday for firing McCabe, and then suggested that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the special counsel, “bring an end” to Mueller’s investigation.

Shortly after McCabe was fired, the president praised the decision on Twitter, calling it a “great day for Democracy.”

On Sunday, Senator Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a key Trump supporter, told CNN that Mueller “needs to be able to do his job without interference.” Graham said that if Trump were to attempt to fire Mueller it would be “the beginning of the end of his presidency.”

Congressman Trey Gowdy, another South Carolina Republican, told Fox News, “I think the president’s lawyer does a disservice when he says that and frames the investigation that way … Russia attacked our country, let special counsel Mueller figure that out.”

Gowdy was part of the Republican majority on the House Intelligence Committee that concluded a week ago that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, but said in the television interview, “You should want Special Counsel Mueller to take all the time and have all the independence he needs to do his job.”

Trump said, “As the House Intelligence Committee has concluded, there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump Campaign. As many are now finding out, however, there was tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, Justice & State. Drain The Swamp.”

McCabe, in a statement after his firing, called his ouster “retribution,” saying, “I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of [former FBI Director] James Comey.” U.S. news accounts said he had written contemporaneous accounts of his conversations with Trump.

His firing, barely a day ahead of his 50th birthday on Sunday, could cost McCabe thousands of dollars in retirement benefits.

 
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Top-level congressional talks on a $1.3 trillion catchall spending bill are reaching a critical stage as negotiators confront immigration, abortion-related issues and a battle over a massive rail project that pits President Donald Trump against his most powerful Democratic adversary.

The bipartisan measure is loaded with political and policy victories for both sides. Republicans and Trump are winning a long-sought budget increase for the Pentagon while Democrats obtain funding for infrastructure, the opioid crisis and a wide swath of domestic programs.

The bill would implement last month’s big budget agreement, providing 10 percent increases for both the Pentagon and domestic agencies when compared with current levels. Coupled with last year’s tax cut measure, it heralds the return of trillion-dollar budget deficits as soon as the budget year starting in October.

​Sorting out ‘riders’

While most of the funding issues in the enormous measure have been sorted out, fights involving a number of policy “riders” — so named because they catch a ride on a difficult-to-stop spending bill — continued into the weekend. Among them are GOP-led efforts to add a plan to revive federal subsidies to help the poor cover out-of-pocket costs under President Barack Obama’s health law and to fix a glitch in the recent tax bill that subsidizes grain sales to cooperatives at the expense of for-profit grain companies.

Trump has privately threatened to veto the whole package if a $900 million payment is made on the Hudson River Gateway Project, a priority of top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York. Trump’s opposition is alarming northeastern Republicans such as Gateway supporter Peter King, R-N.Y., who lobbied Trump on the project at a St. Patrick’s luncheon in the Capitol on Thursday.

The Gateway Project would add an $11 billion rail tunnel under the Hudson River to complement deteriorating, century-old tunnels that are at risk of closing in a few years. It enjoys bipartisan support among key Appropriations panel negotiators on the omnibus measure who want to get the expensive project on track while their coffers are flush with money.

Most House Republicans voted to kill the funding in a tally last year, however, preferring to see the money spread to a greater number of districts.

“Obviously, if we’re doing a huge earmark … it’s troubling,” said Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., a leader of House conservatives. “Why would we do that? Schumer’s pet project and we pass that under a Republican-controlled Senate, House and White House?”

Schumer has kept a low profile, avoiding stoking a battle with the unpredictable Trump.

​Border wall

There’s also a continuing battle over Trump’s long-promised U.S.-Mexico border wall. While Trump traveled to California on Tuesday to inspect prototypes for the wall, what’s pending now is $1.6 billion for earlier designs involving sections in Texas that double as levees and 14 miles (23 kilometers) of replacement fencing in San Diego.

It appears Democrats may be willing to accept wall funding, but they are battling hard against Trump’s demands for big increases for immigration agents and detention beds they fear would enable wide-scale roundups of immigrants illegally living in the U.S.

Meanwhile, a White House trial balloon to trade additional years of wall funding for a temporary reprieve for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children — commonly called “Dreamers” — landed with a thud last week.

​Abortion, Planned Parenthood

Republicans are holding firm against a provision by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., designed to make sure that Planned Parenthood, intensely disliked by anti-abortion Republicans, receives a lion’s share of federal family planning grants.

But another abortion-related provision, backed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that would strengthen “conscience protection” for health care providers who refuse to provide abortions remained unresolved heading into the final round of talks, though Democrats opposing it have prevailed in the past.

Chances for an effort to attach legislation to permit states to require out-of-state online retailers to collect sales taxes appear to be fading. 

Campaign finance

And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., faces strong opposition from Democrats on a change to campaign finance laws to give party committees like the National Republican Senate Committee the freedom to work more closely with their candidates and ease limits to permit them to funnel more money to the most competitive races.

One item that appears likely to catch a ride on the must-pass measure is a package of telecommunications bills, including a measure to free up airwaves for wireless users in anticipation of new 5G technology.
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Egyptians living abroad were in the middle of three days of voting Saturday in the country’s presidential election.

Incumbent Abdel Fattah el-Sissi is expected to beat his only challenger, Moussa Mostafa Moussa, the head of al-Ghad party, who had previously endorsed el-Sissi’s candidacy.

The election, set for March 26-28 within Egypt, has drawn attention from members of the U.S. Congress as well as Egyptian expatriates. This week, Democratic Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts said he and some colleagues already had begun drafting a resolution to address their concerns about what he said was a lack of fair and free elections in Egypt.

McGovern, the co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, said that while Egypt is a close U.S. strategic partner, there is a bipartisan concern in Congress over events leading up to the election.

Intimidation, detention

“Recent developments, including the intimidation and detention of all credible opposition candidates and restrictions imposed on nongovernmental groups and the media, are undermining the legitimacy and credibility of those elections,” he said.

“We cannot and must not overlook actions and policies that reinforce authoritarian tendencies in Egypt and further weaken the rule of law,” McGovern added.

El-Sissi was elected president in 2014, after he led a military coup that ousted the first elected civilian president, Mohamed Morsi.

Concerns over abuses

This week, a group of Egyptian-Americans of different political backgrounds went to the U.S. Capitol to discuss problems they see regarding the election.

Among them was Aya Hijazi, an Egyptian-American social advocate who was imprisoned in Egypt under false charges of child abuse. She was held for nearly three years before U.S. President Donald Trump negotiated her release during el-Sissi’s visit to Washington last year. 

Hijazi said Egyptian-Americans have a moral obligation to stand with fellow Egyptians and tell Congress and the administration about the government’s efforts to suffocate political space in Egypt.

“I think President Trump thinks that [el-]Sissi makes Egypt more secure. I know that the president was really sympathetic personally to my case, but there are thousands like me who are in the same situation but no one is speaking for them,” Hijazi said.

Although an eligible voter, Hijazi will not cast her ballot at the Egyptian Embassy in Washington. She said that, from her personal experience, she knows that el-Sissi is leading a brutal crackdown on civil society.

Sahar Aziz, a professor of law at Rutgers University in New Jersey, is also boycotting the Egyptian election.

“I would feel compelled not to participate in these elections, because it would legitimate a process that has unprecedentedly not given anyone a fair opportunity to run for office,” Aziz said.

Protection for minority Copts

However, Michael Morgan, a doctor who also anchors a weekly television show on Egyptian issues, said he was inclined to vote for el-Sissi as a protector of the country’s Christian minority.

“As a Coptic Christian, I think we finally have a president that wants to make the Christians feel that they are part of the country, treated as Egyptians,” Morgan said. Christians have been targeted in several terrorist attacks in Egypt over the past few years.

Morgan acknowledged there are problems regarding human rights but said the el-Sissi government faces many challenges, including security threats from militant groups and a weak economy.

But Mokhtar Kamel, co-founder of a group called the Egyptian American Alliance, said that did not justify forcing credible candidates out of the presidential race.

“I will not be voting, because I do not think there is a voting. There is a process and I am not taking it seriously; nobody is taking it seriously,” Kamel said.

Human rights activists and political analysts say el-Sissi’s government has pressured some would-be candidates to drop out of the race, and others have been arrested and jailed.

Kamel and some other Egyptian-Americans say voters have no real choice since el-Sissi’s only rival, Moussa, previously had campaigned for a second term for the incumbent.

Term limit question

Kamel and other voters say they fear the next step after this election will be a vote in the Egyptian parliament to remove the constitutional term limit, allowing el-Sissi to become president for life.

Earlier this month, 10 influential members of the U.S. Senate sent a letter to the State Department asking for an assessment of human rights in Egypt, including the freedoms of association, peaceful assembly and expression.

The senators expressed their concern about the restrictive environment for the media, which they said would make it impossible for the Egyptian people to participate in a legitimate democratic exercise.
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Florida officials say two cars and three victims have been removed from the wreckage of a pedestrian bridge that collapsed Thursday over a busy highway, killing at least six people and flattening at least a half-dozen cars below.

At a news conference Saturday, Miami-Dade Police Department Director Juan Perez said emergency workers were “chipping away” at the piles of debris at the site of the bridge, which was still under construction when it fell.

“It’s going to be a long process,” Perez said. “We’ve been saying that from the beginning because of the amount of weight and the size of the structure that is lying on top of these vehicles.”

He said some of the wreckage was unstable, so workers were trying “anything that comes up” to chip away and get to the six other cars believed to be trapped underneath, and any victims found inside them. At least one person escaped from one of the cars trapped under the bridge.

​Survivor’s account

Authorities have not released the names of the victims. Relatives of Alexa Duran, a freshman at Florida International University, released her name themselves. A friend riding with her, who escaped, said Duran died in the driver’s seat of her car.

Officials warned that the death toll was likely to rise as emergency workers continued to try to extract the trapped vehicles. Perez said authorities might need DNA evidence, fingerprints or family photos to identify victims. One news report said some vehicles were damaged so completely that they were difficult to recognize.

The bridge, which was set to open next year, spanned eight lanes of traffic and a canal to give FIU students an easy way to cross to the community of Sweetwater, where many of them live. A student was struck by a vehicle and killed last year while walking across the highway.

On Friday, news emerged that the lead engineer on the bridge construction project left a voicemail for a state official Wednesday warning of “some cracking” in the structure. 

The Florida Department of Transportation said the voicemail was not retrieved until Friday because the state transportation official to whom the message was directed was out of the office on assignment.

​Not seen as unsafe

According to a transcript of the call, the engineer with the private contractor FIGG Bridge Group said he did not consider the cracking on the bridge a safety issue.

Denney Pate said the cracking would need repairs, “but from a safety perspective we don’t see that there’s any issue there so we’re not concerned about it from that perspective.”

Perez, the police director, acknowledged a homicide investigation was under way but described as premature reports that criminal charges were imminent.

“We’re not there yet,” he said. “We just want to get to the bottom … of what occurred so that we can bring closure to the families, bring closure to the investigation and so that this doesn’t happen again.”

“We want to express our deepest condolences to the family and loved ones of those who have been affected,” FIU President Mark Rosenberg said in a video released Friday.

In what is called Accelerated Bridge Construction, the final 950-ton section that completed the bridge was assembled at a site along the highway. It was placed on a special truck, moved and put in place in just six hours last Saturday to avoid disrupting traffic.
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