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The brother of an American man being held in Moscow on suspicion of spying is raising the possibility that his sibling is being used as a pawn in a potential exchange for a Russian woman behind bars in the U.S.

Paul Whelan’s brother told The Associated Press that he can’t help but question if the events are connected.

“You look at what’s going on and you wonder if this is just a large game of pieces being moved around,” David Whelan told the AP via Skype from Newmarket, Ontario. “You start to wonder if all of these things are connected. But at the same time, they could just be arbitrary events.”

Asked about the matter by reporters at the White House on Sunday, President Donald Trump said: “We’re looking into that.”

Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine who also holds Canadian, British and Irish citizenship, was detained in Moscow in late December. His arrest has led to speculation that Russia could be using him to bargain for a Russian woman who has pleaded guilty to acting as a foreign agent in the U.S.

But Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Saturday that discussing a possible swap involving Whelan and Maria Butina would be premature because Whelan hasn’t been formally charged, according to Russian news agencies.

“As to the possibility of exchanges of one sort of another, it’s impossible and incorrect to consider the question now when an official charge hasn’t even been presented,” Ryabkov was quoted as saying by state news agency RIA-Novosti.

“Charges will be presented in the near future,” he said, according to the Interfax agency.

Some Russian news reports earlier cited unnamed sources as saying Whelan had been indicted on espionage charges that carry a possible prison sentence of 20 years.

Russian officials haven’t given details of Whelan’s suspected activities and he was initially identified only as an American. His concurrent Canadian, British and Irish citizenships became known on Friday.

U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr. visited Whelan on Wednesday in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, a 130-year-old facility noted for strict conditions. Britain, Canada and Ireland have applied for consular access to him.

Whelan, 48, was discharged from the Marines for bad conduct. He works as the global security director for a U.S. automobile parts manufacturer and lives in Michigan. His family has said he was in Moscow to attend a wedding.

His brother, David, told the AP that Whelan loves to travel and likes to “interact with the people in the places that he goes,” but that Whelan would be too “conspicuous” to be selected as a spy.

David Whelan said his family had had no direct contact with Paul and had received no details about the alleged espionage charges from either the Russian or U.S. governments.

“He likes to go places and Russia happens to be a place where he knows people and when he’s there, he does go and visit,” David Whelan said.

Paul Whelan established an account on VKontakte, a social media service similar to Facebook that is popular among Russians, which showed he had scores of contacts in Russia. Many attended universities affiliated with the military, civil aviation or technical studies. Many share his interest in sports and firearms.

Also Saturday, the Foreign Ministry said it was seeking information about a Russian who was arrested Dec. 29 in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific. The ministry said Dmitry Makarenko was sent to Florida after his arrest and it wants consular access to him.

The Saipan Tribune reported that Makarenko was indicted in 2017 in Florida for the alleged illegal shipment of military goods to Russia.

Konstantin Kosachev, head of the international affairs committee of the upper house of the Russian parliament, said Makarenko’s arrest was “the latest attack on a citizen of Russia outside the framework of international law,” Interfax reported.

 
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A trash collection device deployed to corral plastic litter floating in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii has broken apart and will be hauled back to dry land for repairs.

Boyan Slat, who launched the Pacific Ocean cleanup project, told NBC News last week that the 600-meter (2,000-foot) long floating boom will be towed 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) to Hawaii.

If it can’t be repaired there, it will be loaded on a barge and returned to its home port of Alameda, California.

The boom broke apart under constant wind and waves in the Pacific.

Slat said he’s disappointed, but not discouraged and pledged that operations would resume as soon as possible.

“This is an entirely new category of machine that is out there in extremely challenging conditions,” the 24-year-old Dutch inventor said. “We always took into account that we might have to take it back and forth a few times. So it’s really not a significant departure from the original plan.”

Previously Slat said the boom was moving slower than the plastic, allowing the trash to float away.

A ship towed the U-shaped barrier in September from San Francisco to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an island of trash twice the size of Texas. It had been in place since the end of October.

The plastic barrier with a tapered 3-meter-deep (10-foot-deep) screen is intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in the patch while allowing marine life to safely swim beneath it.

Slat has said he hopes one day to deploy 60 of the devices to skim plastic debris off the surface of the ocean.

 
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The U.S government is partially closed for a third week with no end in sight as President Donald Trump resolutely demands funding for wall construction along the U.S.-Mexico border and Democratic lawmakers continue to rule it out. VOA’s Michael Bowman has this report.
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White House officials and congressional aides will meet again Sunday to continue discussions about how to end the partial government shutdown that has affected hundreds of thousands of federal workers and caused delays and inconvenience for Americans.

The shutdown has entered its third week.

The crux of the discussions is border security. President Donald Trump is adamant that he wants $5.6 billion to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico to block undocumented migrants trying to enter the U.S.

Congressional Democrats have vowed not to give the U.S. leader any money for the wall. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called the wall “immoral.”

Trump tweeted late Saturday that he is going to Camp David Sunday to discuss border security and other topics with senior staff.

About the same time he tweeted this photo:

U.S. congressional leaders and White House officials held talks Saturday in Washington in an effort to end the partial shutdown. Discussions ended a few hours later without any progress.

Senior White House adviser, and Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen were involved in the meeting Saturday, with Nielsen briefing those in attendance on border security. Democrats asked DHS for written details about the agency’s budget needs, which the White House said it would provide.

Vice President Mike Pence, who also participated in Saturday’s meeting, described the discussions as “productive” in a tweet.

Trump, however, tweeted shortly after Pence, saying, “Not much headway made today. Second meeting set for tomorrow. After so many decades, must finally and permanently fix the problems on the Southern Border!”

Pelosi said in a statement released Saturday, “The senseless uncertainty and chaos of the Trump Shutdown must end, now.”

Her statement said Democrats would “begin passing individual appropriations bills to re-open all government agencies, starting with the appropriations bill that covers the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service. This action is necessary so that the American people can receive their tax refunds on schedule.”

Trump has threatened to bypass Congress and declare a national emergency in order to get the wall built.

About 800,000 federal workers have been furloughed or are working without pay. This is the fourth-longest government shutdown — partial or full — in the past 40 years. The president has said he is willing to continue the shutdown “for years” until there is funding for the wall that he promised Mexico would pay for during his successful presidential campaign.

The shutdown has affected government services around the country and if it continues there could be dire consequences. Money for the food stamp program, which helps millions of low-income Americans buy food, will expire in March.

Federal income tax refunds and tax return processing will also be delayed.

Transportation Security Administration agents who screen travelers at the nation’s airports have begun calling in sick in apparent protest at being required to work without pay.

Federal courts will run out of money Jan. 11, according to the administrative office of the U.S. courts. That could delay trials. The shutdown has already resulted in the suspension of issuing marriage licenses in Washington.

The Smithsonian museums in Washington, including the National Zoo, are closed.

Late Thursday, the Democrat-controlled House passed legislation to reopen the federal government and fund the Department of Homeland Security until early February. The measure did not include the $5.6 billion the president has demanded for the border wall.

The Senate passed an identical bill last month, while Republicans still controlled both chambers of Congress.

However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week he would not put any legislation to a vote in the Senate unless Trump supported it. He called the House plan to end the shutdown “political theater.”

Democrats have said they will only discuss border security once the government is reopened.

Trump, who was not part of the negotiations, spent Saturday morning tweeting about the partial shutdown and border wall.

He also tweeted, without evidence, “I don’t care that most of the workers not getting paid are Democrats.”

Trump said, again without evidence, the 800,000 federal workers affected by the shutdown want him to “keep going” for border security.

When asked Friday about how unpaid workers are expected to manage without a financial safety net, the president replied: “The safety net is going to be having a strong border because we’re going to be safe.”
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Andrew Pollack, the father of a teenage girl who was killed in a school shooting in Florida last year, was appointed to the state Education Board by outgoing Gov. Rick Scott.

Scott appointed Pollack to the board Friday. Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was one of 17 people killed at a Parkland, Florida, high school, Feb. 14, 2018, still needs to be confirmed to the seat by the state Senate.

Pollack, 52, who became a school safety activist after the shooting, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel, “What I hope to accomplish is accountability at a local level, to hold school boards accountable and superintendents accountable.”

The governor, who will be stepping down from his post next week, was elected in November to the U.S. Senate. He had said during the campaign he would serve out his term as governor, which ends Jan. 9.

Nikolas Cruz, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, has been charged with killing 17 people. Police say he used a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle. The mass shooting caused a larger debate nationwide regarding gun control measures, and also led to a local investigation.

​Safety commission report

Pollack’s appointment to the Education Board came days after a report released by a special safety commission in Parkland that recommended arming teachers to secure schools.

The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission released more than 400 pages covering details of the shooting, identifying security problems and making recommendations.

Among the recommendations was the expansion of a program that allows teachers and staff members to carry concealed firearms to defend students in the event of an active shooter. The state teachers union and PTA have voiced their opposition to the plan.

“School districts and charter schools should permit the most expansive use of the Guardian Program under existing law to allow personnel — who volunteer, are properly selected, thoroughly screened and extensively trained — to carry concealed firearms on campuses for self-protection and the protection of other staff and students,” the report read.

While several states, including Texas, Missouri, Arkansas and Ohio, allow teachers to carry weapons, several others began to consider doing so after the Parkland shooting.

Members of the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers union, “overwhelmingly reject” plans to arm them in school.

Arming teachers

The current Guardian Program, signed into law by Scott shortly after the shooting last year, currently only allows administrators or non-teaching staff to receive firearm training.

In April 2018, the Broward County School Board voted against adopting the program, which would have given Broward County Schools more than $67 million to train and arm teachers, according to the Eagle Eye, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s newspaper.

This week’s report also recommended a full internal investigation of the Broward County Sheriff’s office, which first responded to the shooting, to “address all of the actions or inactions of personnel on Feb. 14, 2018.”

The committee, which includes sheriffs, state politicians, and parents of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas victims, among others, first met in April 2018, setting January 2019 as its deadline to submit a preliminary report. During the second half of 2018, the commission held monthly meetings interviewing witnesses and reviewing “a massive amount of evidence,” according to the report. 
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Harold Brown, who as defense secretary in the Carter administration championed cutting-edge fighting technology during a tenure that included the failed rescue of hostages in Iran, has died at age 91.

Brown died Friday, said the Rand Corp., the California-based think tank at which Brown served as a trustee for more than 35 years. His sister, Leila Brennet, said he died at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, California.

Brown was a nuclear physicist who led the Pentagon to modernize its defense systems with weapons that included precision-guided cruise missiles, stealth aircraft, advanced satellite surveillance and improved communications and intelligence systems. He successfully campaigned to increase the Pentagon budget during his term, despite skepticism inside the White House and from Democrats in Congress.

Turbulent times, tight budgets

That turbulent period included the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis. An effort in April 1980 to rescue the hostages failed when one of the helicopters on the mission struck a tanker aircraft in eastern Iran and crashed, killing eight U.S. servicemen.

“I considered the failed rescue attempt my greatest regret and most painful lesson learned,” Brown wrote in his book “Star Spangled Security.”

Brown faced numerous obstacles when he took the job as Pentagon chief, including pressure to reduce the defense budget both from within the administration and from influential congressional Democrats.

“When I became secretary of defense in 1977, the military services, most of all the army, were disrupted badly by the Vietnam War. There was general agreement that the Soviet Union outclassed the West in conventional military capability, especially in ground forces in Europe,” he wrote later.

Wary of the growing Soviet threat, Brown sought to withstand the pressure to cut defense and, gradually, managed to increase spending.

“The constant Cold War competition raged hot during the Carter administration and preoccupied me throughout the four years,” Brown wrote. He noted later that “the Defense Department budget in real terms was 10 to 12 percent more when we left than when we came in,” which he said was not an easy accomplishment.

Modern weapons of war

And he cited the technological advances in defense systems, especially weapons systems such as precision-guided cruise missiles, stealth aircraft and advanced satellite surveillance.

“Some of these came to visible fruition 10 years later during Desert Storm, which reversed Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait,” he wrote. “The Carter administration initiated and developed these programs, the Reagan administration paid for their acquisition in many cases, and the George H.W. Bush administration employed them.”

Brown later maintained that his extensive work with the Soviets on the arms race was not wasted.

“We also reached a specific strategic arms control agreement with the Soviet Union,” he wrote. “Though never formally ratified, the agreement was adhered to by both parties and limited Soviet threats that our other conventional and nuclear weapons programs were designed to counter.”

The acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, said in a statement Saturday that Brown’s “steady leadership piloted our nation through a consequential segment of the Cold War. His focus on deterrence through a strong nuclear triad facilitated long-term peace and stability in the United States and Europe.” Shanahan praised Brown for his “devoted leadership and lifetime of service.”

Early background

Brown was born in New York City on Sept. 19, 1927, attended public schools and went to Columbia University on an accelerated wartime schedule, receiving an undergraduate degree in physics in 1945 “when I was not quite 18,” then going to graduate school at Columbia, receiving a doctorate in physics.

Not long after graduation, he moved to California and went to work on projects that related to the development of plutonium. He then went to work at a nuclear weapons lab. He worked his way up to director of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore in 1960.

In 1961, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara invited him to be director of defense research and engineering in the Kennedy administration. In 1965 he became secretary of the Air Force during the Johnson administration and, as he described it later, “served in that role through some of the most difficult and divisive parts of the Vietnam War.”

After the 1968 election put a Republican, Richard Nixon, back in the White House, Brown accepted the position of president at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena serving until he went back into government work and was a delegate to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in the 1970s.

Carter nominated Brown to be defense secretary in 1977. He was quickly confirmed and served throughout Carter’s term. During the 1980 campaign Brown actively defended the Carter administration’s policies, speaking frequently on national issues in public.

After leaving the Pentagon, he remained in Washington, joining the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies as a visiting professor and later the university’s Foreign Policy Institute as chairman. He remained active in matters of national security, including service on the Defense Policy Board, which meets quarterly to offer perspectives to the current secretary of defense. He served as a consultant to many corporations, often serving as a member of the board of directors.

Honors and peace

Carter awarded Brown the Presidential Medal of Freedom. President Bill Clinton gave him the Energy Department’s Enrico Fermi Award for achievement in science and technology.

At a farewell address from his job as defense secretary, Brown said: “Most satisfying of all is that for four years our nation remained at peace despite the world tensions and turmoil that constantly pose challenges to our interest and peace.”
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U.S. Senate and House leaders are to continue negotiations with the White House late Saturday morning in an effort to end the partial government shutdown.

Democrats have said flat out that there will be no funding in any deal to end the shutdown for a wall that President Donald Trump wants to construct at the U.S. border with Mexico.

Trump said Friday he is willing to drag out negotiations “for months or even years” until he gets the $5.6  billion he says is needed to start building the wall.

He also threatened Friday to bypass Congress and declare a national emergency in order to get the wall built.   

Trump said the hundreds of thousands of federal workers affected by the shutdown want him to “keep going” for border security.  It was not immediately clear if he had actually talked to any of the 800,000 workers affected by the shutdown.  

When asked about how workers are expected to manage without a financial safety net, the president replied: “The safety net is going to be having a strong border because we’re going to be safe.”

Trump said Friday he had a “very productive” meeting with congressional leaders to resolve the partial shutdown that was triggered by disagreement over $5.6 billion in funding to build the wall.

But Democratic congressional leaders characterized the White House meeting differently.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who assumed leadership of the newly sworn in House Democratic majority Thursday, called the almost two-hour-long meeting “contentious.” She continued her oft-repeated assertion that agreement on the wall’s funding “cannot be resolved until we open up the government.”

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer told reporters the president threatened to keep the government closed for “a very long period of time . . .”   

Despite comments from the Democratic lawmakers that little progress was made, Trump said, “we’re on the same path” to reopen the government. He touted the benefits of “a solid steel or concrete structure” along the border.

The House passed a bill Thursday to reopen shuttered federal government agencies. The measure did not, however, include the $5.6 billion the president has demanded to build a wall at the U.S. border with Mexico.

“We’re not doing a wall,” Pelosi vowed on Thursday. She suggested that the money could better be used for border security technology and hiring more border agents.

However, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called the House plan to end the shutdown “political theater.”

The Senate, however, passed an identical bill last month, while Republicans still controlled both chambers of Congress.

On Friday, the Pentagon said it had received a request from DHS for additional help securing the U.S. southern border.

A defense official told VOA the Pentagon is now reviewing the DHS formal request, which calls for “additional capabilities at the border.” The official would not elaborate on what specific capabilities DHS requested from the Defense Department on Friday.

DHS is among the government agencies left unfunded due to the shutdown, but Congress has funded the Defense Department through September 30, 2019.

VOA’s Carla Babb contributed to this report.
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For the past 50 years, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington has been telling America’s story with images of people who helped shape the history and culture of the United States.

Telling America’s story

Each November, the Gallery selects a number of portraits to add to its collection. This year, it added 28 more pictures in an effort to tell a more diverse and complete story of American society.

While the display features well-known personalities such as former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, it also sheds light on some lesser-known “hidden figures.”

Ann Shumard, senior curator of photographs at the Gallery, said this year’s selections represent a wide range of fields in a variety of formats, “ranging from paintings to prints to photographs to sculpture. It’s really quite a wonderful panoply of objects.”

Among the portraits is astronomer Edwin Hubble.  

“He was really one of the premier astronomers in the 20th century,” Shumard said. “And in the image, you see him looking through the eyepiece of a state-of-the-art telescope from 1949.  It was being used to survey the northern sky into a complete photographic survey of the sky.” The Hubble Space Telescope was named to honor him.

There’s a photo of beloved children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, best known for his book “Where the Wild Things Are,” first issued in 1963.

“From an early age, he enjoyed reading and drawing, and that really translated ultimately into a career for him,” Shumard said.

African American presence

The exhibit also features portraits of some of the most prominent African-American figures in recent history, such as media executive Oprah Winfrey.

“She’s really a much broader influence than simply through her media work,” Shumard pointed out. “She’s of course an actress, having appeared in ‘The Color Purple’ and ‘Beloved.’ She has the magazine, and her book club did so much to foster interest in reading on the part of her viewers.”

Theater director and producer Ellen Stewart, who founded an experimental theater company, is another inductee.

“Stewart was working as a freelance theatrical costume designer when she realized how difficult it was for fledgling playwrights to find performance spaces in New York City. So, she founded a non-commercial performance space in a basement in the East Village that became known as the La MaMa Experimental Theater,” Shumard explained.

“It has inspired similar kinds of theatrical venues all over the world,” she said, “and really fostered the careers of many significant actors and playwrights.”

In 1945, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and classical pianist George Walker was the first black artist to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra, when segregation often blocked opportunities for African Americans, Shumard said. “So, he turned to teaching and composing, and developed into one of the foremost contemporary classical composers.”

“He scored all of his compositions by hand,” Shumard said. “In the diptych, we see two images of him — one framed by his piano in his home, and the other using his hands as he is scoring his Symphonia No. 5, which will have its world premiere next year.”

Other subjects in the exhibit include author and political activist Helen Keller, who was the first deaf and blind person to earn a bachelor’s degree, actress Phylicia Rashad and American businessman Julius Fleischmann.

Latin American influence

There are also many Latino figures in the exhibit, said Taína Caragol, curator of painting and sculpture and Latino art and history at the Gallery.

“We have a wonderful color photograph by Alexis Rodriguez-Duarte and Tico Torres of salsa queen Celia Cruz,” she said. “We have two wonderful portraits by Harry Gamboa Jr. of Rodolfo Acuña, the father of Chicano Studies, and musician Louie Pérez of Los Lobos.”

There are also two portraits by Freddy Rodriguez of former New York Yankee Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez, and David “Big Papi” Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox.  Each is in what Caragol describes as the “silhouette technique.”

Diverse collection

Shumard said she hopes people will see figures that are familiar to them, such as Winfrey, “but also figures that they may not know much about, and be intrigued to learn more about that individual’s biography and contribution.”

“I think as you look at the works in the show, you can see how many different fields of endeavor are represented, whether it’s the fine arts, sports, science. There’s just a wonderful range, and I think it speaks to the diversity of achievement in the United States.”

These new acquisitions join more than 23,000 works in the Portrait Gallery’s collection and will be on view through November 2019.
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For the past 50 years, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington has been telling America’s story with images of people who helped shape the history and culture of the United States. It recently added 28 pictures in an effort to tell a more diverse and more complete story of U.S. society. The display features well-known people like baseball player Alex Rodriguez and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy — and sheds light on some “hidden figures.” VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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On Thursday, the first Muslim women to serve in Congress, Democrats Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan were sworn into office, as inspired young Muslim Americans and refugees watched closely.

In the evening, a group of young Muslim men and women from Minnesota, Ohio and the Washington metropolitan area, were buzzing about the news as they gathered at an event in McLean, Virginia to celebrate Omar’s journey from Somali refugee to U.S. congresswoman.

At the event, Omar told the celebrating crowd the story of her arrival in the United States from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya 23 years ago.

Suud Olat, 28, a Somali-American, journalist and a refugee advocate, came to the U.S. five years ago as a refugee, escaping hopelessness and poverty in the same camps in Kenya where Omar spent four years before coming to America.

“In Trump era, when anti-immigrant and Muslim rhetoric is high, to witness Ilhan Omar who shares the same values and background with me, sitting in the Capitol Hill and celebrate with her was an amazing moment and inspirational for me,” he said.

Kowthar Yabarow, a 24-year-old of Somali heritage who chose to wear the hijab, sees the news of Omar as a reflection of her faith, community and belonging.

“Although my parents came from Somalia to this country, I was born and raised here as a Muslim girl and to see a hijabi Muslim woman like me in Congress is a big reflection,” she said.

Omer Arain, a 23-year-old Pakistani American, said, “It is very reassuring for young Muslim Americans like me that they can be in such positions of power.”

Parents’ pride

Ibrahim Ismail is a father of four. Like Omar, he came to the United States as a refugee in 1996 after fleeing the conflict in Somalia. His oldest daughter is now in a training school for new Virginia police recruits. He said the news about the two Muslim congresswomen meant something special for him.

“It is an inspiration and special for me that I can show, finally, to my daughter that, there is a Muslim woman like Ilhan Omar, an immigrant and a woman of color, a Somali, who is able to stand up for Muslim values, share them with the American public through a strong voice in the Congress,” he said.

“I am so proud to see people with my value like Omar and Tlaib being leaders in this country and I am happy that my daughter will grow up in an era where to have Muslim leaders in the U.S. politics is not news but a normal,” said Tahira Khanana, a 38-year-old mother of three with the Cincinnati chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

At Omar’s celebration, she focused on other issues. She noted that her celebration comes at a time the federal government remains partially shut down, and her homeland, Somalia, is still affected by Trump-imposed limits on immigration.

“I came from a country under our president’s immigration ban. If this was happening 23 years ago, I would not represent all of you in Congress today,” she said struggling to hide her tears.

She said one of her first tasks as a representative in Congress is to fight to end the shutdown.

“I came to Washington when our federal government remains shut down over “a silly border wall. I have to join the fight to reopen it,” she said.
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