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The U.S. declared Tuesday that religious freedom is “under assault” across the globe.

“The state of religious freedom is dire,” said Sam Brownback, the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, as he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo released the agency’s annual report concluding that many countries throughout the world crack down on religious adherents and punish them harshly for their beliefs.

Even as the U.S. works toward a June 12 summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, the State Department report singled out the reclusive communist nation for abuses against believers.

“The government continued to deal harshly with those who engaged in almost any religious practices through executions, torture, beatings, and arrests,” the report said. “An estimated 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners, some imprisoned for religious reasons, were believed to be held in the political prison camp system in remote areas under horrific conditions.”

Brownback said, “What we know is we got a gulag system operating in North Korea, and it’s been a terrible situation for many, many years. You can go on satellite — open source satellite — and see some of these camps and their situation. You have people that have gotten out and written about the situation in North Korea. We know it is very difficult and desperate, and particularly for people of faith, and that’s why North Korea has remained a country of particular concern for us.”

The report also condemned abuse of religious believers in China, Iran, Russia and other countries.

The State Department said Beijing “continued to exercise control over religion and restrict the activities and personal freedom of religious adherents when the government perceived these as threatening” the state or the ruling communist party. The report estimated that “hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims have been forcibly sent to re-education centers, and extensive and invasive security and surveillance practices have been instituted.”

Brownback said, “You know, that was a concept you thought was gone decades ago and (is) being experienced in growing amounts. The report cites a number of very, very troubling concerns and a decline in religious freedom” in China.”

In Iran, the report said the government continues to deal harshly with religious minorities, including executing or imprisoning those convicted of waging “war on God.”

The State Department said that in Russia, “Authorities continued to detain and fine members of minority religious groups and minority religious organizations for alleged extremism. In one case, there were reports that authorities tortured an individual in a pretrial detention facility. Authorities convicted and fined several individuals for ‘public speech offensive to religious believers.’”

In releasing the report, Pompeo said, “Advancing liberty and religious freedom advances America’s interests. Where fundamental freedoms of religion, expression, press and peaceful assembly are under attack, we find conflict, instability and terrorism. On the other hand, governments and societies that champion these freedoms are more secure, stable and peaceful. So, for all of the reasons, protecting and promoting global respect for religious freedom is a priority for the Trump administration.”

Pompeo said the State Department is convening a ministerial meeting July 25-26 to promote religious freedom, inviting foreign diplomats from “like-minded governments, as well as representatives of international organizations, religious community, and civil society to reaffirm our commitment to religious freedom as a universal human right.”

He said the gathering “will not be just a discussion group, it will be about action. We look forward to identifying concrete ways to push back against persecution and ensure greater respect for religious freedom for all.”

Brownback said, “The problems are great, but the opportunity for change is, too.”

 
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Hurricane Maria claimed more than 4,600 lives in Puerto Rico last year, more than 70 times higher than the U.S. government’s official death toll of 64, according to a study published Tuesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

The findings, based on a survey of thousands of Puerto Rican residents conducted by researchers from Harvard University and elsewhere, show the fatalities occurred between September 20 and December 31, 2017.

The U.S. government’s emergency response to the storm had been criticized and President Donald Trump, was faulted when much of the U.S. territory remained without power for months.

The researchers said their latest estimates may be too low and “underscore the inattention of the U.S. government to the frail infrastructure of Puerto Rico.”

Maria inflicted about $90 billion in damage to Puerto Rico, which was already grappling with an anemic economy. Researchers have said Maria was the third costliest tropical cyclone to strike the U.S. since 1900.

More than 8 months after the storm, the territory has been slow to recover. Residents continue to suffer from a lack of water, an unstable power grid and a dearth of essential services, forcing many residents to leave.

While the new study puts the death toll at 4,645, it says there is a 95-percent chance the actual number could be as low as 793 and as high as 8,498. Earlier independent studies have estimated the death toll at about 1,000.

The results of the latest study were based on randomly conducted in-person surveys of 3,299 of an estimated 1.1 million Puerto Rican households earlier this year, including homes in remote areas.

To ensure unbiased results, residents were not paid for their responses and were told their answers would not result in any additional government assistance.

Researchers said they could not compare their findings with the latest government tally because their request for access to the numbers was denied.

The Puerto Rican government stopped publicly disclosing its hurricane death figures in December.
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The World Trade Organization is being slowly strangled to death, a retiring trade judge whose replacement has been blocked by the United States said in his farewell speech, delivering a thinly-veiled rebuke to the Donald Trump administration.

Ricardo Ramirez-Hernandez served two terms as a judge on the WTO’s Appellate Body, which acts as the final court for trade disputes between countries. Since his departure last year, the United States has been blocking the process to replace him and other judges, throwing the WTO into crisis.

“This institution does not deserve to die through asphyxiation,” Ramirez-Hernandez said. “You have an obligation to decide whether you want to kill it or keep it alive.”

In a speech introducing Ramirez-Hernandez, WTO Deputy Director-General Karl Brauner said there was “no movement in sight” to unblocking appointments.

“This is frightening,” he said, adding that it was an illusion to believe the WTO could manage without its appeals judges. It remained to be seen if the WTO was an achievement of civilization or only a temporary experiment, he added.

Founded in 1995

The Geneva-based World Trade Organization, founded in 1995, is the final arbiter for trade disputes between its 164 member economies and the main global forum for discussing trade.

Its appellate body normally has seven members, but because of the Trump administration’s veto on new hires, only four of the posts are now filled. One judge is due for reappointment in September and two are due to leave next year.

Three judges are needed to hear any case, which means the court will cease to function altogether next year unless Trump lifts his refusal to fill vacancies.

‘Unfair’ treatment

Trump and his trade advisers take a tough and unorthodox line on what they see as “unfair” treatment by the trade body.

Ramirez-Hernandez did not point fingers directly at any particular country for the crisis, saying all WTO members were responsible for dealing with problems.

“It seems to me that the crisis we now face could have been avoided if it had been addressed face-on, as it began to escalate,” he said.
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The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is urging engagement with Venezuela’s socialist government after he traveled to the South American nation to bring home a Utah man jailed for two years without a trial.

Joshua Holt is scheduled to return to Salt Lake City on Monday night after receiving medical care and visiting President Donald Trump in Washington. He was released over the weekend following secret, backchannel negotiations between members of the U.S. Congress and Venezuelan officials. 

Corker meets with Maduro

Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee traveled to Caracas on Friday to seal the deal with President Nicolas Maduro that would bring Holt home. 

Corker stressed in an interview Monday with The Associated Press that “nothing was asked, and nothing was given” in exchange for Holt’s freedom. But he said the 26-year-old’s release as a goodwill gesture by Maduro shows what can be achieved through dialogue with the United States’ adversaries. 

“In my conversations privately, I could not be more strident in my criticisms of the way the Venezuela government has handled itself. I’ve seen in Venezuela people lined up outside grocery stores just to buy toilet paper,” Corker said.

But he contrasted the hardliner approach toward Venezuela favored by many in Washington with the Trump administration’s willingness to talk with North Korea’s leader.

“If we are engaging with Kim Jong Un, who executes his relatives with high-power artillery at close range, then it would seem to me that engaging with Venezuela, while keeping on all the pressure that we have, would also make some sense,” said the retiring Corker, who has feuded in the past with the Trump.

Jailed since June 2016

Holt was arrested in June 2016 on weapons charges that he and his family say were bogus. 

Holt had a tearful reunion with his parents in Washington on Saturday but has yet to see his three siblings, who are organizing a big homecoming for Holt and his wife, Thamara Caleno, for Monday night. The couple has been receiving medical treatment in Washington from a team with experience helping people return from captivity.

Corker previously traveled to Venezuela in 2015 only to be snubbed by Maduro. He said he was received more warmly this time thanks to the dogged mediation efforts of his staffer Caleb McCarry, who has known Maduro for 15 years. He also thinks the Venezuelan president is feeling “somewhat confident” after he was re-elected a little over a week ago, and may now be looking to reconcile with his critics by freeing political prisoners and modernizing the fast-collapsing socialist economy.

The Trump administration considered the election a “sham” after several of Maduro’s top opponents were barred from running. It said Holt’s release will have no change on U.S. policy. 

Don’t discount dialogue

Corker said he’s not sure where U.S.-Venezuelan relations are heading and declined to comment on bipartisan legislation before his committee that aims to further isolate Venezuela’s government. He said it’s important for the U.S. to continue to speak out against the “many, many bad things” the Maduro government has done. 

Still, he thinks dialogue should never be discarded.

“I’m no softy on Venezuela. I’m not some person who thinks we ought to change our posture as far as punishing them for all the things that have occurred,” he said. “But at the same time, I know we engage with some of our most difficult adversaries and certainly was more than glad to engage on behalf of getting Americans home.”
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President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe plan to hold face-to-face discussions before a planned summit between Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un.

“We agreed to meet before the U.S.-North Korea summit,” Abe told reporters in Tokyo following his Monday telephone call with Trump. 

In the call, Trump and Abe also “affirmed the shared imperative of achieving the complete and permanent dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and ballistic missile programs,” according to a White House statement.  

Both Trump and Abe are set to attend the Group of Seven economic summit June 8-9 in Canada, but the two may meet at the White House prior to that, according to officials in Washington and Tokyo. 

The two leaders spoke Monday as American officials were in North Korea and Singapore to discuss arrangements for the prospective talks.

The phone conversation took place before Trump went to Arlington National Cemetery for a Memorial Day ceremony. There, the president made no reference to the situation on the Korean peninsula in his 22-minute scripted remarks.

Nearly 34,000 Americans died as a result of hostile action in the three-year war on the peninsula. Hostilities ceased in 1953 with an armistice but no peace treaty has ever been signed.

It is unclear when or where Trump and Abe will meet before the anticipated Singapore summit, which the U.S. president has said in recent days is likely to occur on June 12 after he declared last Thursday that the summit would not be held on that day.

Both Trump and Abe are set to attend the Group of Seven economic summit June 8-9 in Canada.

U.S. and North Korean officials met again Monday at the Korean demilitarized zone.

Sung Kim, the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines and former envoy to South Korea, is leading the U.S. delegation at the preparation talks.Reports say the meetings are expected to last until Tuesday. 

Meanwhile, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin and others from theadministration took a flight Sunday to Singapore. 

“They traveled to Singapore to focus on logistics preparations,” a White House official confirmed to VOA News on Monday.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in could also be going to Singapore next month for a three-way summit with his U.S. and North Korean counterparts next month, a government official in Seoul said on Monday.

After a surprise meeting Saturday between Kim and Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president said the North Korean leader is still committed to the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula. 

The U.S. has called for “complete, verifiable and irreversible” dismantling of the Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal. North Korea has rejected unilateral disarmament and called for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula without defining what that entails.

For Kim “denuclearization can’t be a one-sided event that he’s giving some stuff up and not getting some comparable U.S. action,” according to Bruce Bennett senior defense analyst at the Rand Corporation research group.

There could be division under Kim within North Korea’s hierarchy about the diplomatic approach to the Americans, according to Bennet.

“Kim Jong Un has been anxious for a long time, and his father before him, to meet with the U.S. president and develop the appearance for internal political purposes that he’s the peer of the American president.The nuclear weapons give him the feeling that he should be able to do that now,” Bennett tells VOA. 

Senator Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on CBS News said Sunday he is “not very optimistic” that Kim will agree to abandon his atomic arsenal. “These nuclear weapons are something he’s psychologically attached to.They are what gives him his prestige and importance.”

WATCH: Trump Holds Washington in Suspense Over North Korean Summit​

A former U.S. director of national intelligence, James Clapper, also on CBS, expressed concern Pyongyang may demand the removal or scaling back of American troops in South Korea in exchange for denuclearization.

The North Koreans, after expressing initial enthusiasm about diplomacy with the United States, earlier this month did not show up for a preparatory meeting in Singapore, threatened to use nuclear force, and referred to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence as a “political dummy.”

Pence had remarked that North Korea could wind up like Libya – a country mired in chaos since it gave up its nuclear ambitions and saw its longtime dictator killed years later by U.S.-backed rebels. 

But North Korean state media subsequently reported on Kim’s “fixed will” that a summit with Trump should go ahead.

During Moon and Kim’s second border meeting Saturday the two leaders exchanged views on how to prepare for the North’s possible summit with Trump. 

“It was like an ordinary encounter between friends,” Moon told reporters.“What’s uncertain for Kim is not his intention to denuclearize, but the U.S. stance in hostile relations with North Korea and whether the U.S. can really secure and guarantee his regime.”

VOA’s Ira Mellman contributed to this report.
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British Prime Minister Theresa May will urge U.S. President Donald Trump to avoid protesters in central London during his UK visit in July and instead meet her at her country residence, the Sun newspaper reported on Sunday.

The details of the plan will be given to the White House by Kim Darroch, British ambassador to the United States, the report said.

There are two proposals that will be made to the White House by Darroch upon May’s approval – one for a Downing Street visit or one based at Chequers, a 16th-century manor house 60 km (40 miles) northwest of London – the report said, citing a source, who added it would be made clear that May prefers the meeting take place at Chequers.

Trump will also be asked to have tea with Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle, a royal residence west of London and not at Buckingham Palace, according to the report.

Darroch will suggest to the White House that Trump does not visit Britain’s houses of parliament, the Sun reported.

May’s office was not immediately available for comment. Trump will travel to Britain in July for a working visit with May, after months of back-and-forth over when the U.S. president would visit what traditionally has been the United States’ closest ally.

Many Britons have vowed to stage protests if Trump visits, with several politicians having previously voiced their opposition to Trump being granted a state visit.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan said earlier in the year Trump was not welcome in London because of what he called Trump’s “divisive agenda”.

Trump cancelled a trip to London to open a new embassy earlier in the year. May was the first international leader to visit Trump in Washington after his inauguration last year.

 
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Leaders of a tribal executive board in Montana are asking U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke for help battling meth addiction in their community.

The Billings Gazette reports that Zinke met with the executive board of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes on Sunday.

Fort Peck Tribal Chairman Floyd Azure told Zinke that law enforcement for the county and the tribe cannot keep up with the issues meth addiction has caused. For example, he blamed meth addiction in families for most of the children entering foster care.

Some board members suggested that a drug treatment center on the reservation would help.

Zinke says the Interior Department has focused on treatment of drug addiction for mothers and grandmothers, hoping it will have a broad impact on families and the community.

 
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People living along the Gulf Coast of northern Florida to the Mississippi-Alabama border are preparing for Alberto – the first named storm of the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season.

As of Sunday afternoon, Alberto was still a subtropical storm, with top sustained winds of 85 kilometers per hour – strong enough to cause “life-threatening surf and rip-current conditions,” forecasters say.

They also warn Alberto could dump as much as 63 centimeters of rain on parts of Cuba and 30 centimeters on the Florida Panhandle and Alabama. Isolated tornadoes are also possible.

Forecasters predict Alberto will weaken after it makes landfall and moves inland into the Tennessee Valley.

The Atlantic hurricane season traditionally lasts from June 1 until the end of November.

Experts predict 10 to 16 named storms this year with up to nine developing into hurricanes, including as many as four major hurricanes.

Last year was an exceptionally busy hurricane season, with Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria devastating Puerto Rico, Houston, Texas, and the Florida Gulf Coast.

 
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High-ranking military officials from the U.S., France and Germany have taken part in Memorial Day ceremonies at an American cemetery in northern France to mark the centennial of the battle of Belleau Wood, a turning point in World War I and a key moment in Marine Corps history.

The ceremony at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in the village of Belleau on Sunday included speeches by military officials, including Gen. Robert Neller, commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, prayers, wreath laying, reading of poems and the national anthems of the three countries.

A crowd of more than 5,000 attended the event celebrating the fierce and deadly monthlong battle considered as the first major engagement of U.S. troops in the war, especially Marines whose bravery helped the Allied Forces win in Belleau.

 
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A flood of lawsuits over LGBT rights is making its way through courts and will continue, no matter the outcome in the Supreme Court’s highly anticipated decision in the case of a Colorado baker who would not create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

Courts are engaged in two broad types of cases on this issue, weighing whether sex discrimination laws apply to LGBT people and also whether businesses can assert religious objections to avoid complying with anti-discrimination measures in serving customers, hiring and firing employees, providing health care and placing children with foster or adoptive parents.

The outcome of baker Jack Phillips’ fight at the Supreme Court could indicate how willing the justices are to carve out exceptions to anti-discrimination laws; that’s something the court has refused to do in the areas of race and sex.

The result was hard to predict based on arguments in December. But however the justices rule, it won’t be their last word on the topic.

Boost from Trump

Religious conservatives have gotten a big boost from the Trump administration, which has taken a more restrictive view of LGBT rights and intervened on their side in several cases, including Phillips’.

“There is a constellation of hugely significant cases that are likely to be heard by the court in the near future and those are going to significantly shape the legal landscape going forward,” said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Several legal disputes are pending over wedding services, similar to the Phillips case. Video producers, graphic artists and florists are among business owners who say they oppose same-sex marriage on religious grounds and don’t want to participate in same-sex weddings. They live in the 21 states that have anti-discrimination laws that specifically include gay and lesbian people.

In California and Texas, courts are dealing with lawsuits over the refusal of hospitals, citing religious beliefs, to perform hysterectomies on people transitioning from female to male. In Michigan, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the state’s practice of allowing faith-based child placement agencies to reject same-sex couples.

Stark differences

Advocates of both sides see the essence of these cases in starkly different terms.

“What the religious right is asking for is a new rule specific to same-sex couples that would not only affect same-sex couples but also carve a hole in nondiscrimination laws that could affect all communities,” said Camilla Taylor, director of constitutional litigation at Lambda Legal, which supports civil rights for LGBT people.

Jim Campbell of the Christian public interest law firm Alliance Defending Freedom said the cases will determine whether “people like Jack Phillips who believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman, that they too have a legitimate place in public life. Or does he have to hide or ignore those beliefs when he’s participating in the public square?” ADF represents Phillips at the Supreme Court.

Civil rights complaints

The other category of cases concerns protections for LGBT people under civil rights law. One case expected to reach the court this summer involves a Michigan funeral home that fired an employee who disclosed that she was transitioning from male to female and dressed as a woman.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the firing constituted sex discrimination under federal civil rights law. That court is one of several that have applied anti-sex discrimination provisions to transgender people, but the Supreme Court has yet to take up a case.

The funeral home argues in part that Congress was not thinking about transgender people when it included sex discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A trial judge had ruled for the funeral home, saying it was entitled to a religious exemption from the civil rights law.

“Congress has not weighed in to say sex includes gender identity. We should certainly make sure that’s a conscious choice of Congress and not just the overexpansion of the law by courts,” Campbell said. ADF also represents the funeral home.

In just the past week, two federal courts ruled in favor of transgender students who want to use school facilities that correspond to their sexual identity. Those cases turn on whether the prohibition on sex discrimination in education applies to transgender people. Appeals in both cases are possible.

In the past 13 months, federal appeals courts in Chicago and New York also have ruled that gay and lesbian employees are entitled to protection from discrimination under Title VII. Those courts overruled earlier decisions. Title VII does not specifically mention sexual orientation, but the courts said it was covered under the ban on sex bias.

Trump changes course

The Obama administration had supported treating LGBT discrimination claims as sex discrimination, but the Trump administration has changed course. In the New York case, for instance, the Trump administration filed a legal brief arguing that Title VII was not intended to provide protections to gay workers. It also withdrew Obama-era guidance to educators to treat claims of transgender students as sex discrimination.

There is no appeal pending or expected on the sexual orientation issue, and there is no guarantee that the court will take up the funeral home’s appeal over transgender discrimination.

Changes on the court

The trend in the lower courts has been in favor of extending civil rights protections to LGBT employees and students. Their prospects at the Supreme Court may be harder to discern, not least because it’s unclear whether the court’s composition will change soon.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, 81, has been the subject of retirement speculation, though he has not indicated he is planning to retire. When Justice Stephen Breyer turns 80 in August, he will join Kennedy and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 85, as octogenarians on the bench.

If President Donald Trump were to replace any of those justices, the court probably would be much less receptive to LGBT rights. Even the landmark gay marriage ruling in 2015 that Kennedy wrote was a 5-4 decision.

“We’re very concerned about the composition of the federal bench. Under the Trump administration, we’ve seen a number of federal nominees who have been ideologues, who have taken positions about the very right to exist of LGBT people that is simply inconsistent with fitness to serve as a federal judge,” Taylor of Lambda Legal said.

The ADF’s Campbell said even with the current justices, he holds out some hope that the court would not extend anti-discrimination protections. 

“Justice Kennedy has undoubtedly been the person who has decided the major LGBT cases, but to my knowledge he hasn’t weighed in some of these other issues,” he said.
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Twenty-six-year-old Joshua Holt had been a prisoner in Venezuela since the summer of 2016, but on Saturday he told U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House that he was “overwhelmed with gratitude” for those who had worked for his release. 

Trump said Holt had been “incredibly brave.”

Holt and his Venezuelan wife, Thamara Candelo, arrived in the U.S. Saturday accompanied by Senator Bob Corker, who helped negotiate their release.

Holt, a former Mormon missionary, had traveled to Venezuela in June 2016 to marry Candelo. Police arrested the couple after finding an assault rifle and grenades during a raid on a housing complex where the couple lived. The couple has denied the charge of concealing weapons. 

Senator Orrin Hatch, who represents Holt’s home state of Utah posted on Twitter:

Hatch also thanked Corker, the U.S. Senate foreign relations committee chairman, who met with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro Friday in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, to secure the couple’s release.

The White House press secretary’s office released a statement late Saturday, saying Holt’s release “does not change United States policy.” It said, “The Maduro regime must call free, fair, and transparent elections, consistent with its constitution. The election process that occurred on May 20 was illegitimate.” The statement called for “new elections and the democratic process,” the release of all political prisoners and the acceptance of “desperately needed international humanitarian aid for Venezuela’s dying citizens.”

“Very glad that Josh Holt is now back home with his family — where he has always belonged,” U.S. Vice President Mike Pence wrote in a tweet. “Sanctions continue until democracy returns to Venezuela.”

Maduro won a second six-year term in office May 20 in an election that the U.S. and other countries have described as a “sham” after several rivals were prohibited from running. 

After his victory, Maduro expelled the two most senior U.S. diplomats for allegedly conspiring to sabotage the election by pushing opposition parties to boycott the election.

Despite the expulsion of the American diplomats, the Venezuelan government has been seeking ways to avoid the threat of harsh U.S. oil sanctions that could further cripple the country’s ailing economy. 

A spokesman for Maduro described the release of the couple as a “gesture” aimed at improving diplomatic relations with the United States.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement Saturday, “U.S. policy toward Venezuela remains unchanged. The United States stands steadfast in support of the Venezuelan people and their efforts to return to democracy.”
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