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As President Donald Trump prepares for a 10-day trip to Asia, his first to the region since taking office, one of the region’s leaders brought to Washington last week insights that potentially represent sentiments held not just by his government.

Lee Hsien Loong — eldest son of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding prime minister, and a successor to the position his father held for decades — told audiences in the U.S. capital that the emerging geostrategic landscape of the Asia Pacific depends not only on internal dynamics, but also on U.S. intention and action.

At a White House ceremony, Lee told Trump that Singapore, “like many other countries,” watches U.S.-China relations “very closely.”

Trump leaves for the region Nov. 3.

​Presence and preparedness

Lee, Singapore’s prime minister since 2004, alluded to the geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China while speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington think tank.

He stressed the importance of the U.S. to maintain a strategic presence where such presence is called for.

“If you’re not there, everybody else in the world will look around and say, ‘I want to be friends with both the U.S. and the Chinese, and the Chinese are ready, I’ll start with them,’” he told the audience.

Lee, who is fluent in English, Mandarin Chinese and Malay, three of Singapore’s four official languages, visits Washington often, and also makes periodic trips to Beijing, including one just last month. 

Lee said Chinese officials perceive the current U.S. administration as demonstrating gong-li-zhu-yi, a term that may be best translated as placing an overriding premium on profitability. While the phrase sounds slightly derogatory, it may also indicate that Chinese officials see Trump as wanting to see results, not just empty talk.

‘Westerners can be inscrutable, too’

In another observation he shared, Lee said the Chinese don’t quite know what to make of Trump or of U.S. foreign policy under the current administration.

“They’re not quite sure how to figure you out, they’re looking for a way to understand you,” Lee said of his counterparts in Beijing. “If you find them inscrutable, you must realize Westerners can be inscrutable, too!”

Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) drew worldwide attention with the 19th Party Congress.

During the weeklong event, which marked the end of Xi’s first five-year term, the CCP agreed not only to give Xi a second term, but to add his political “thoughts” to its constitution, putting him on par with the country’s founder Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, who set China on a path for economic reform.

Western media covered the event in depth. President Trump even took note of Xi’s “extraordinary elevation” (via a tweet).

Xi seeks to extend influence to 2050

“The era he [Xi] envisages extends to not just the next five, or even 10, years, [encompassing] two terms, but extending to 2050, and taking China to 100 years after the revolution,” Prime Minister Lee said, referring to the time that will have lapsed from 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party officially defeated the Kuomintang (KMT) Party in a drawn-out civil war.

Xi’s illuminations, together with those of his predecessors, now bear the historical responsibility of ensuring China’s enrichment and empowerment for decades, if not centuries, to come, if all goes according to the party’s plan. 

How China’s Xi will wield his newly sanctioned power at home and abroad is being watched closely from a variety of vantage points, not the least of which being Taiwan.

In November 2015, Singapore hosted a meeting between leaders of China and Taiwan. Asked if his country may once again facilitate such a dialogue, Lee said, “We have a very limited role.” He described Singapore’s hosting of the 2015 meeting between Xi and Taiwan’s then-President Ma Ying-jeou: “Our job was to provide the room and tea cups, that’s it!”

Given the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Taiwan’s current ruling party and their equally intransigent counterparts on the mainland, Lee said his opinion was: “The best you can hope for is a standoff.”

​‘In politics, no party remains in power forever’

During Lee’s discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, one audience member, who had praised Lee’s knowledge of details, asked, “You stated that ‘in politics, no party remains in power forever,’ does that apply to Singapore?”

“I’m sure it does. I don’t know when it will happen, but I will not want to make it happen sooner than it needs to,” he quickly said, before shifting his gaze and attention to the next questioner.

Lee, 65, has been at the head of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) and has been prime minister since 2004. His late father, Lee Kuan Yew, co-founded PAP in 1954 and was prime minister of the Southeast Asian nation-state from 1965 to 1990 and remained a powerful figure until a few years before he passed away, in 2015.
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Taiwan’s president began a weeklong journey Saturday, and China is not happy about it.

Tsai Ing-wen’s trip has her visiting three Pacific Island allies — Tuvalu, the Solomon Islands and the Marshall Islands — via Honolulu and the U.S. territory of Guam.

China claims sovereignty over democratic, self-ruled Taiwan and believes Tsai is seeking formal independence from China.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Washington should not allow Tsai to stop in the U.S. to” avoid sending any erroneous messages to the Taiwan independence force…”

Tsai has said she wants to maintain peace with China, but will defend Taiwan’s democracy and security.

The U.S. State Department said last week that Tsai’s transitions through U.S. locations would be “private and unofficial.”

China has claimed sovereignty over the island since 1949, when Mao Zedong’s Communist forces won the Chinese civil war and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan.
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The Education Department is considering only partially forgiving federal loans for students defrauded by for-profit colleges, The Associated Press has learned, abandoning the Obama administration’s policy of fully erasing that debt.

Under President Barack Obama, tens of thousands of students deceived by now-defunct for-profit schools had more than $550 million in such loans canceled completely.

But President Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, is working on a plan that could grant such students only partial relief, according to department officials who were not authorized to publicly comment on the issue and spoke on condition of anonymity. The department may look at the average earnings of students in similar programs and schools to determine how much debt to wipe away.

Hints of new approach

If DeVos goes ahead, the change could leave many students scrambling after expecting full loan forgiveness, based on the previous administration’s track record. It was not immediately clear how many students might be affected.

A department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

But the Trump team has given hints of a new approach.

In August, the department extended its contract with a staffing agency to speed up the processing of a backlog of loan forgiveness claims. In the procurement notice, the department said that “policy changes may necessitate certain claims already processed be revisited to assess other attributes.” The department would not further clarify the meaning of that notice.

Advocates: unjustified, unfair

DeVos’ review prompted an outcry from student loan advocates, who said the idea of giving defrauded students only partial loan relief was unjustified and unfair because many of their classmates had already gotten full loan cancellation. Critics say the Trump administration, which has ties to the for-profit sector, is looking out for industry interests.

Earlier this year, Trump paid $25 million to settle charges his Trump University misled students.

“Anything other than full cancellation is not a valid outcome,” said Eileen Connor, a litigator at Harvard University’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which has represented hundreds of defrauded students of the now-shuttered Corinthian Colleges. “The nature of the wrong that was done to them, the harm is even bigger than the loans that they have.”

“Even more importantly, it is completely unfair that a happenstance of timing is going to mean that one student who’s been defrauded is going to have full cancellation and the next is not,” Connor said.

1990s regulation

A federal regulation known as borrower defense allows students at for-profit colleges and other vocational programs to have their loans forgiven if it is determined that the students were defrauded by the schools. That rule dates to the early 1990s. But it was little used until the demise of Corinthian and ITT for-profit chains in recent years caused tens of thousands of students to request that the government cancel their loans.

In the last few months of the Obama administration, the Education Department updated the rule to add protections for students, shift more financial responsibility onto the schools and prevent schools from having students sign away their right to sue a school.

That change was set to take effect in July, but DeVos has frozen it and is working on a new version. She argued that the Obama regulation was too broad and could cancel the loans of some students without a sound basis.

65,000 claims waiting

DeVos has come under criticism for delaying consideration of more than 65,000 applications for loan forgiveness under the borrower defense rule. The agency hasn’t approved a single claim since DeVos took office in February.

Jennifer Wang, an expert with the Institute of College Access and Success, said the Obama administration was providing full loan cancellations to students.

“It would be totally different from what was happening under the last administration,” Wang said. “It’s not equitable; it’s not fair for students. If she provides partial relief, it’s that she only cares what’s fair for schools and not students.”

Abby Shafroth, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said the agency could be faced with lawsuits, especially from Corinthian students, whose classmates had received full forgiveness.
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A U.S. federal grand jury has approved the first charges in an investigation of Russian influence on U.S. elections, according to several major news outlets.

The grand jury’s action, resulting from the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller, was first reported by CNN on Friday evening. It quoted sources as saying anyone who was charged could be taken into custody as soon as Monday. The exact charges were unclear.

Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and NBC News subsequently issued similar reports. All the reports were attributed to unnamed sources.

President Donald Trump on Saturday visited his Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. He sent three tweets but they did not refer to the reports.

On Friday evening, the president did post a social media message linking to a New York Post story headlined: How Team Hillary played the press for fools on Russia.

White House officials have not commented on the president’s activities Saturday, but he was seen by VOA News exiting the north portico of the residence, clad in slacks, a windbreaker, what appeared to be white golf shoes and a baseball cap before entering a black vehicle for the 40-minute ride in the presidential motorcade to his private club along the Potomac River.

CNN said lawyers working on Mueller’s team were seen entering the federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., on Friday, where the grand jury meets to hear testimony.

Mueller has kept a tight lid on information about the probe, and a spokesman for Mueller’s office declined requests for comment on the media reports about the indictment.

Working since May

Mueller was appointed special counsel in May, shortly after the firing of then-FBI Director James Comey, to look into allegations that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Russia to win the election. He is also examining the possibility that the president may have tried to interfere with the Russia investigation.

The probe also is examining possible financial ties between Russian businesses and members of the Trump campaign, and foreign lobbying conducted by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

In addition to Mueller’s probe, three congressional committees are conducting their own investigations into possible Russian influence on the election.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday told reporters it was “a pretty big waste” for the news media to investigate connections between Trump associates and Russia. Her comment was made in response to a question about Trump’s tweeting earlier in the day that it was “commonly agreed” there had been no collusion between his presidential campaign and Russia.

“It is now commonly agreed, after many months of COSTLY looking, that there was NO collusion between Russia and Trump. Was collusion with HC!” the president tweeted.

HC is a reference to Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Democratic nominee whom Trump defeated in last November’s presidential election.

VOA’s Marissa Melton contributed to this report.
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A U.S. service member was killed and six others wounded in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan’s Logar province late Friday.

NATO’s Resolute Support Mission office said the crash was “not the result of enemy action.”

“We have full accountability of all personnel and the crash site has been secured,” according to a press release circulated Saturday.

General John Nicholson, commander of the RS forces, expressed his “heartfelt sympathies” to the families of victims.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of our comrade,” he said in a statement.

Earlier, the Taliban had claimed responsibility for downing the helicopter. The insurgent group often makes claims that later turn out to be false.  

The U.S. military said it is investigating the circumstances of the crash and will release more information when it is appropriate.
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The U.S. defense secretary says the U.S. will never accept a nuclear-armed North Korea.

Jim Mattis said Saturday in Seoul that the North’s aggressive nuclear and missile development programs are undermining the isolated nation’s security instead of securing it.

Mattis warned the North that its military is no match for the military might of the U.S. and South Korea alliance.

“Make no mistake,” Mattis said, “any attack on the United States or our allies will be defeated and any use of nuclear weapons by the North will be met with a massive military response that is effective and overwhelming.”

The secretary said once again as he as said all week on his Asian trip that diplomacy is the preferred way of dealing with North Korea.

Mattis and General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, held annual consultations with South Korean defense officials Saturday, marking the first time the Security Consultative Meeting has been held since the inauguration of South Korea President Moon Jae-in and U.S. President Donald Trump.

On Friday, Mattis met with President Moon and spoke to U.S. and South Korean troops at the Panmunjom “truce village” where South Korea meets North Korea.

The secretary’s Asian trip has included stops in Thailand and the Philippines.
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A federal grand jury in Washington on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, CNN reported, citing sources briefed on the matter.

The charges are sealed under orders from a federal judge, CNN said. Plans were prepared Friday for anyone charged to be taken into custody as soon as Monday, CNN reported, citing the unnamed sources. It is unclear what the charges are, CNN said.

 
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Botulism pills. Conspiracy theories. What the government might have known and still won’t say about Lee Harvey Oswald.

The release of thousands of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy hasn’t settled the best-known, real-life whodunit in American history. But the record offered riveting details of the way intelligence services operated at the time and are striving to keep some particulars a secret even now.

“The Kennedy records really are an emblem of the fight of secrecy against transparency,” said Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the private National Security Archive research group in Washington.  “The ‘secureaucrats’ managed to withhold key documents and keep this long saga of secrecy going.”

The 2,800 records released on Thursday night include some that had dribbled out over the years but are getting renewed attention from being in this big batch.

Some highlights:

HOOVER, WORRIED

Just a few hours after Lee Harvey Oswald was killed in Dallas, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dictated a memo saying the government needed to issue something “so we can convince the public” that Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy.

The memo was in the latest trove of Kennedy assassination files released late Thursday. The FBI director composed the memo on Nov. 24, 1963 — two days after Kennedy was killed and just hours after nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station.

Hoover said that the FBI had an agent at the hospital in hopes of getting a confession from Oswald, but Oswald died before that could happen. Hoover said he and a deputy were concerned about “having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.”

Hoover laments how Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, was considering appointing a presidential commission to investigate the assassination. Hoover said he suggested that the FBI give an investigative report to the attorney general complete with photographs, laboratory work and other evidence. That report, he thought, could be given to Johnson and he could decide whether to make it public.

“I felt this was better because there are several aspects which would complicate our foreign relations,” Hoover wrote. He said Oswald wrote a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, which the FBI intercepted, read and resealed. Hoover said the letter had been addressed to the Soviet Embassy official “in charge of assassinations and similar activities on the part of the Soviet government. To have that drawn into a public hearing would muddy the waters internationally,” Hoover wrote.

Besides, Hoover said, the letter was unrelated proof that Oswald committed the murder.

LBJ’s THEORY

Everyone has their theories, including even President Lyndon B. Johnson. According to one document released on Thursday, Johnson believed Kennedy was behind the assassination of the South Vietnamese president weeks before his death and that Kennedy’s murder was payback, the newly released documents say.

U.S. Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms said in a 1975 deposition that Johnson “used to go around saying that the reason (Kennedy) was assassinated was that he had assassinated President (Ngo Dinh) Diem and this was just justice.”

“Where he got this idea from I don’t know,” U.S. Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms said in a 1975 deposition.

Diem and his brother were killed on Nov. 2, 1963 after a coup by South Vietnamese generals.

This isn’t the first time Johnson’s theory has been aired. He was also quoted in Max Holland’s book, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes, as saying that Kenney died because of “divine retribution.”

“He murdered Diem and then he got it himself,” Johnson reportedly said.

Kennedy’s position on Diem’s assassination is still debated, said Ken Hughes, a historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

A month before Diem’s assassination, the south Vietnamese generals planning the coup told the CIA that they would overthrow the government if they could be assured that American aid would continue and Kennedy told them it would, Hughes said.

But a dispute remains over whether Kennedy insisted that Diem go unharmed or whether the president left it up to the South Vietnamese generals to decide what to do, said Hughes, who is writing a book on the subject.

One of the files that could shed light on that question is a CIA report on the U.S. government’s involvement in the Diem coup. The record was supposed to be released Thursday but was among the hundreds that Trump blocked from becoming public.

CASTRO, THE CIA AND A MOBSTER’S MISTRESS

A 1975 document described the CIA’s $150,000 offer to have Cuban leader Fidel Castro assassinated — but the mob insisted on taking the job for free.

The underworld murder-for-hire contract was detailed in a summary of a May 1962 CIA briefing for then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. By then, the Kennedy White House had launched its unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and several assassination attempts against Castro had failed.

At least two efforts to kill Castro were made with CIA-supplied lethal pills and organized crime-made muscle in early 1961, according to the document. The CIA’s mob contacts included John Rosselli, a top lieutenant to Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, who weren’t told but guessed the CIA was behind the offer. The pair, later victims of mob hits, said they want no part of any payment — but still, $11,000 in payments were made for expenses.

The mobsters came to the attention of the CIA a year earlier when Giancana asked a CIA intermediary to arrange for putting a listening device in the Las Vegas room of an entertainer he suspected of having an affair with Giancana’s mistress. The task was handed off to a private investigator named Arthur Balletti, who put the listening device in a phone in the hotel room. “The CIA reportedly did not know of the specific proposed wiretap.”

Told later about “everything,” Kennedy was “unhappy, because at that time he felt he was making a very strong drive to try to get after the Mafia.

“So his comment was to us that if we were going to get involved with the Mafia, in the future at any time, to ‘make sure you see me first.’”

The document was made public in 1997 and contained in an Associated Press report at that time.

STRANGE CALL

A British newspaper received an anonymous phone call about “big news” in the United States 25 minutes before President John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963, one file says.

A batch of 2,800 declassified documents includes a Nov. 26, 1963 memo from the CIA to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover about a call received by the Cambridge News on Nov. 22, the day Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas.

The memo from deputy CIA director James Angleton says the caller said “the Cambridge News reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news, and then hung up.” Anna Savva, a current Cambridge News reporter, said Friday there’s no record of the call. “We have nobody here who knows the name of the person who took the call,” she said.

The memo was released by the U.S. National Archives in July.

The phone call to the Cambridge News was first reported decades ago by Kennedy conspiracy theorist Michael Eddowes. In the 1980s, Eddowes, a British lawyer, claimed to have a CIA document mentioning the call. Eddowes, who died in 1992, wrote a book alleging that Kennedy’s assassin was not Lee Harvey Oswald but a Soviet impostor who took his identity. As a result of his efforts, the killer’s body was exhumed in 1981. An autopsy confirmed that it was Oswald.

 
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The Trump administration Friday proposed new health insurance regulations that could affect basic benefits required by the Affordable Care Act, but not for a couple of years.

Loosening “Obamacare” benefit requirements was a major sticking point for congressional Republicans in thus-far fruitless efforts to repeal the law.

The complex new plan from the administration would give states a potential path to easing some requirements.

Starting in 2019, states could select from coverage levels in another state, which could be less generous. Ten broad categories of services required by the health law would still have to be covered, but the fine print could change.

Plan issued late Friday

Issued late in the day, the 365-page plan also proposes other changes to the inner workings of the health insurance markets created under the Obama-era law. The marketplaces offer subsidized private plans to people who don’t have access to job-based coverage. The changes proposed by the Trump administration cover areas from consumers’ eligibility for subsidies to how insurers are reimbursed.

It could take days for consumer groups, insurers, benefits experts and others to assess the potential impact of the proposal. Among the biggest uncertainties is whether the proposed changes would appeal to state officials, who generally try to protect standards established on their home turf.

The basic benefits that could be affected include:

Outpatient, inpatient and emergency care
Prescription drugs and labs
Preventive care
Pregnancy, maternity and newborn care
Mental health and substance abuse
Rehabilitation
Children’s services, including vision and dental

While those categories are established by law and can’t be changed in a regulation, the fine print can make a big difference. For example, insurers can cover certain drugs, but not others, for a given medical condition. Expensive treatments for complicated chronic illnesses can be subject to limits on the number of visits the plan will cover.

The Trump administration’s proposal also called for changes to small-business health insurance markets created by the ACA.
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As the best-of-seven 2017 World Series shifts from Los Angeles to Houston at one game apiece, diehard fans of the hurricane-devastated city can sense a first-ever baseball championship within their grasp. Houstonians admit that a series victory — if only a momentary distraction — would lift the city’s spirits. Ramon Taylor reports from Minute Maid Park, home of the Astros.
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U.S. public health advocates welcomed President Donald Trump’s decision to declare the U.S. opioid epidemic a national public health emergency, but say the crisis needs additional funds to be addressed. The 90-day order enables states to use federal emergency funds to fight the crisis, but, although it can be extended, it does not provide a long-term budget. Also, as VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports, there are fears that emergency resources may be depleted by the cost of natural and other disasters.
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