Chris Hedges's Blog, page 214

U.N. Chief Warns Paris Climate Goals Still Not Enough

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates—U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres took his global message urging immediate climate action to officials gathered in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, where production of hydrocarbons remains a key driver of the economy.

Guterres is calling on governments to stop building new coal plants by 2020, cut greenhouse emissions by 45% over the next decade and overhauling fossil fuel-driven economies with new technologies like solar and wind. The world, he said, “is facing a grave climate emergency.”

In remarks at a summit in Abu Dhabi, he painted a grim picture of how rapidly climate change is advancing, saying it is outpacing efforts to address it.

He lauded the Paris climate accord, but said even if its promises are fully met, the world still faces what he described as a catastrophic three-degree temperature rise by the end of the century.

Arctic permafrost is melting decades earlier than even worst-case scenarios, he said, threatening to unlock vast amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas.

“It is plain to me that we have no time to lose,” Guterres said. “Sadly, it is not yet plain to all the decision makers that run our world.”

He spoke at the opulent Emirates Palace, where Abu Dhabi was hosting a preparatory meeting for the U.N. Climate Action Summit in September. Guterres was expected to later take a helicopter ride to view Abu Dhabi’s Noor solar power plant.

When asked, U.N. representatives said the lavish Abu Dhabi summit and his planned helicopter ride would be carbon neutral, meaning their effects would be balanced by efforts like planting trees and sequestering emissions. The UN says carbon dioxide emissions account for around 80% of global warming.

Guterres was in Abu Dhabi fresh off meetings with The Group of 20 leaders in Osaka, Japan. There, he appealed directly to heads of state of the world’s main emitters to step up their efforts. The countries of the G20 represent 80% of world emissions of greenhouse gases, he said.

At the G20 meeting, 19 countries expressed their commitment to the Paris agreement, with the only the United States dissenting.

In 2017, President Donald Trump pledged to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement as soon as 2020, arguing it disadvantages American workers and taxpayers. Trump has also moved steadily to dismantle Obama administration efforts to rein in coal, oil and gas emissions. His position has been that these efforts also hurt the U.S. economy.

The secretary-general’s special envoy for the climate summit, Ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba, told The Associated Press it was disappointing that the U.S. has pulled out from the accord. However, he said there are many examples of efforts at the local and state level in the United States to combat climate change.

“I think it is very important to have all countries committing to this cause… even more when we are talking about the country of the importance and the size – not only in terms of the economy but also the emissions – of the United States,” he said.

Guterres is urging business leaders and politicians to come to the Climate Action Summit later this year with their plans ready to nearly halve greenhouse emissions by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

He suggested taxing major carbon-emitting industries and polluters, ending the subsidization of oil and gas, and halting the building of all new coal plants by next year.

“We are in a battle for our lives,” he said. “But it is a battle we can win.”

Trump Steps Into North Korea With Kim at Historic DMZ Meeting

PANMUNJOM, Korea—With wide grins and a historic handshake, President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un met at the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone on Sunday and agreed to revive talks on the pariah nation’s nuclear program. Trump, pressing his bid for a legacy-defining deal, became the first sitting American leader to step into North Korea.

What was intended to be an impromptu exchange of pleasantries turned into a 50-minute meeting, another historic first in the yearlong rapprochement between the two technically warring nations. It marked a return to face-to-face contact between the leaders after talks broke down during a summit in Vietnam in February. Significant doubts remain, though, about the future of the negotiations and the North’s willingness to give up its stockpile of nuclear weapons.

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The border encounter was a made-for television moment. The men strode toward one another from opposite sides of the Joint Security Area and shook hands over the raised patch of concrete at the Military Demarcation Line as cameras clicked and photographers jostled to capture the scene.

After asking if Kim wanted him to cross, Trump took 10 steps into the North with Kim at his side, then escorted Kim back to the South for talks at Freedom House, where they agreed to revive the stalled negotiations.

The spectacle marked the latest milestone in two years of roller-coaster diplomacy between the two nations. Personal taunts of “Little Rocket Man” (by Trump) and “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” (by Kim) and threats to destroy one other have given way to on-again, off-again talks, professions of love and flowery letters.

“I was proud to step over the line,” Trump told Kim as they met in on the South Korean side of the truce village of Panmunjom. “It is a great day for the world.”

Kim hailed the moment, saying of Trump, “I believe this is an expression of his willingness to eliminate all the unfortunate past and open a new future.” Kim added that he was “surprised” when Trump issued an unorthodox meeting invitation by tweet on Saturday.

As he left South Korea on his flight to Washington, Trump tweeted that he had “a wonderful meeting” with Kim. “Stood on the soil of North Korea, an important statement for all, and a great honor!”

Trump had predicted the two would greet one another for about “two minutes,” but they ended up spending more than an hour together. The president was joined in the Freedom House conversation with Kim by his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, both senior White House advisers.

Substantive talks between the countries had largely broken down after the last Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi, which ended early when the leaders hit an impasse.

The North has balked at Trump’s insistence that it give up its weapons before it sees relief from crushing international sanctions. The U.S. has said the North must submit to “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” before sanctions are lifted.

As he announced the resumptions of talks, Trump told reporters “we’re not looking for speed. We’re looking to get it right.”

He added that economic sanctions on the North would remain. But he seemed to move off the administration’s previous rejection of scaling back sanctions in return for piecemeal North Korean concessions, saying, “At some point during the negotiation things can happen.”

Peering into North Korea from atop Observation Post Ouellette, Trump told reporters before he greeted Kim that there had been “tremendous” improvement since his first meeting with the North’s leader in Singapore last year.

Trump claimed the situation used to be marked by “tremendous danger” but “after our first summit, all of the danger went away.”

But the North has yet to provide an accounting of its nuclear stockpile, let alone begin the process of dismantling its arsenal.

The latest meeting, with the U.S. president coming to Kim, represented a striking acknowledgment by Trump of the authoritarian Kim’s legitimacy over a nation with an abysmal human rights record. Kim is suspected of having ordered the killing of his half brother through a plot using a nerve agent at a Malaysian airport in 2017. Meantime, the United Nations said in May that about 10 million people in North Korea are suffering from “severe food shortages” after the North had one of the worst harvests in a decade.

Trump told reporters he invited the North Korean leader to the United States, and potentially even to the White House.

“I would invite him right now,” Trump said, standing next to Kim. Speaking through a translator, Kim responded that it would be an “honor” to invite Trump to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang “at the right time.”

Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to meet with the leader of the isolated nation last year when they signed an agreement in Singapore to bring the North toward denuclearization.

In the midst of the DMZ gathering, Trump repeatedly complained that he was not receiving more praise for de-escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula through his personal diplomacy with Kim. Critics say Trump had actually inflamed tensions with his threats to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea, before embracing a diplomatic approach.

North Korea’s nuclear threat has not been contained, according to Richard Haas, president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. He tweeted Sunday that the threat of conflict has subsided only because the Trump administration has decided it can live with North Korea’s “nuclear program while it pursues the chimera of denuclearization.”

Every president since Ronald Reagan has visited the 1953 armistice line, except for George H.W. Bush, who visited when he was vice president. The show of bravado and support for South Korea, one of America’s closest military allies, has evolved over the years to include binoculars and bomber jackets.

While North Korea has not recently tested a long-range missile that could reach the U.S., last month it fired off a series of short-range missiles. Trump has brushed off the significance of those tests, even as his own national security adviser, John Bolton, has said they violated U.N. Security Council resolutions.

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.

Corporate Opportunism Has Reached a New Low

The satirical website McSweeney’s recently published a piece called “My Coming Out Story, Sponsored by Bank of America.”

Anyone who has been to an LGBTQ Pride celebration (or seen Pride-themed ads on Facebook) will immediately get it: Corporations are falling over themselves to wrap themselves in rainbows, because they see Pride as a corporate branding opportunity.

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Let me be clear: The greatest struggle of my life is not a corporate branding opportunity.

A lifetime of feeling different and wrong and dating people I’m not attracted to because I think it’s the only way to live — and only getting to fully inhabit my true self starting in my late 30s after years of therapy — has nothing to do with selling toothpaste, beer, or bank accounts.

Years ago, I got a degree in marketing. In our senior capstone class, we learned that you can either change your product so it’s more in line with what people want, or you can change people’s impression of your product so that they think it is.

Slapping a rainbow on your brand constitutes the latter. I want to see more of the former.

If a corporation wants to truly support the LGBTQ community, here are the questions I want them to answer:

Are your LGBTQ employees afraid to come out at work for fear of discrimination? Do they feel they must change jobs before they can transition to the gender they identify as or come out as queer? Do they feel comfortable discussing their families with coworkers the same way straight employees do?

If an LGBTQ employee faces harassment at work, does your HR department deal with it appropriately?

Are LGBTQ employees promoted at the same rate as straight employees? Do you have LGBTQ people in management?

Do your benefits fulfill the needs of queer couples as well as straight couples?

If your insurance covers pregnancy for heterosexual couples, does it also provide for the fertility treatments, surrogacy, or adoption that a gay or lesbian couple would need to start a family?

Does your insurance cover gender affirming medical procedures and surgeries transgender employees need? Do you allow transgender employees the time off needed to get gender affirming surgeries and recover from them?

Did you provide benefits for same-sex partners before same-sex marriage was legal?

Do your political contributions support candidates who advocate LGBTQ rights?

Can your LGBTQ employees go the bathroom they feel most comfortable using when they’re at work? Do their colleagues use the proper pronouns (he/she/they) for trans or nonbinary workers, and are those workers supported when they correct colleagues who misgender them?

Do your advertisements feature LGBTQ individuals and families?

Are your products inclusive of LGBTQ people and our needs? Can a transgender or non-binary person buy your products without feeling misgendered by them? (For instance, if you make shoes, do trans women have to go to your “men’s” line to find shoes that fit?)

Are your employees trained to treat LGBTQ customers respectfully?

For example, transgender men and non-binary people who were assigned female at birth can get pregnant and give birth. And children of same-sex couples have two moms or two dads. When these families go for prenatal visits at the doctor, are they confronted with paperwork and providers who assume that only women get pregnant and all couples include a mom and a dad?

Like my high school English teachers said, corporations should “show, don’t tell.” Instead of telling us what fantastic allies they are, they need to show us. And that takes more than putting rainbows in your advertising and handing out cheap rainbow swag at our Pride celebrations.

Supreme Court’s Shock Decision Is an Indictment of Trump’s Racism

This piece first appeared on Truthout.

In a surprise decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by the four liberal members of the Supreme Court — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — halted the Trump administration’s plans, at least temporarily, to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

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The Court thought the stated motive for adding the question seemed “contrived,” and sent the case, Department of Commerce v. New York, back to the federal district court to review whether the government can come up with a legally acceptable rationale for adding the citizenship question.

After oral arguments in April, it appeared the justices were poised to allow the Trump administration to add this question to the census: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” That question would deter households with undocumented residents from responding to the census.

The Census Department estimated that 6.5 million people could be uncounted if the question was added. This is significant because the census is used to determine the number of seats each state gets in the House of Representatives, the number of Electoral College votes each state will have in the presidential elections starting in 2024, and how $900 billion in annual federal funds will be distributed to the states for health care, hospitals, schools and infrastructure for the next decade.

The plaintiffs in this case — a coalition of states, counties and cities — are claiming that the addition of the question is unconstitutional.

On May 30, the high court received newly discovered evidence of a cover-up of an illegal racist motive for adding the citizenship question. Thomas Hofeller was a Republican strategist and architect of the citizenship question strategy. After he died in 2018, Hofeller’s daughter found documents revealing that he urged the question be added to the census because it would “be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” in redistricting.

Roberts and the four liberal justices found that the reason Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross gave for adding the question to the census “seems to have been contrived.” Ross testified before Congress that the sole reason he and the Department of Justice (DOJ) sought to add the question was to better enforce the Voting Rights Act (VRA).

“[W]e share the District Court’s conviction that the decision to reinstate a citizenship question cannot be adequately explained in terms of DOJ’s request for improved citizenship data to better enforce the VRA,” Roberts wrote. “Altogether, the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the Secretary gave for his decision.”

Breyer noted in his concurrence, “[T]he consequences of mistakes in the census count, of even a few hundred thousand, are grave. Differences of a few thousand people, as between one State and another, can mean a loss or gain of a congressional seat—a matter of great consequence to a State…. And similar small differences can make a large difference to the allocation of federal funds among competing state programs.”

Trump called the Court’s decision “totally ridiculous,” tweeting that he asked his lawyers to “delay the Census, no matter how long, until the United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter.”

Although it is theoretically possible the question could still be added in time for the 2020 census, it is highly unlikely, given the July 1 printing deadline.

Last week, the Justice Department told the Court that the deadline could be extended to October 31. But The New York Times quoted experts as saying, “the printing work is so vast — more than a billion pieces of paper — and such a logistical tangle that the bureau’s ability to put off its start is measured in weeks, not months.”

A former senior bureau official told the Times, “You’d really be putting the operational plan at great risk if this stretches into mid-August. You may not have a census at all in 2020.”

Meanwhile, a different case pending before U.S. District Judge George Hazel in Maryland could block the inclusion of the citizenship question in the census. On June 25, in light of the new Hofeller evidence, a panel of the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals sent a case back to Hazel to decide if there was discriminatory intent behind the citizenship question and thus a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. One of the panel judges suggested that Hazel issue an injunction to stop the question from being included in the census until the case was resolved. This is a different issue than the one in Department of Commerce v. New York.

The opinion by Roberts and the liberal justices is significant as it confronts the Trump administration’s false justification for adding the citizenship question. As Sen. Bernie Sanders tweeted, “Trump lied about his motivations, and five justices called him on it. His proposal to add a citizenship question to the census was nothing but a racist attempt to disenfranchise communities of color.”

Abolishing Child Migrant Jails Is the Least We Can Do

What do you see when you look into the eyes of a child? Until last Monday, over 350 migrant children were jailed in filthy, unsafe conditions by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Clint, Texas. The few outsiders who were able to see these migrant children were universally appalled. Facing national outrage, CBP moved the children out, only to return 100 of the young prisoners the very next day. One who seems content jailing children is acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Mark Morgan, who President Donald Trump has just made their chief jailer by naming him acting head of Customs and Border Protection. “I’ve walked up to these individuals that are so-called minors, 17 or under, and I’ve looked at them,” Morgan told Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson last January. “I’ve looked at their eyes and I said, ‘That is a soon-to-be MS-13 gang member.'” 

Very few people have access to these children, so getting accurate information about their welfare is hard. Warren Binford, a law professor at Willamette University, was part of a legal team that exposed the conditions in Clint. She described what she saw on the “Democracy Now!” news hour:

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“When we got there … we were taken aback by the number of very young children, over a hundred. We immediately asked the guards to start to bring us the youngest children and also the children who had been there the longest. We saw that there were about a half a dozen child mothers and their infants, so we asked the guards to also bring us those children.”

They managed to interview 60 of the children. She went on: “They were sick. They were coughing. They had runny noses. They were filthy dirty. They immediately started to describe the level of hunger that they were experiencing.” Their horror deepened with each interview. “We found out that virtually no one is taking care of these children directly, that they are locked up in these cells 24 hours a day. There are open toilets in many of these cells. There’s no soap, no way to wash their hands. They’re being fed in these cells … many of them are being forced to sleep on concrete because of a shortage of beds and mats and sleeping space.” Guards handed toddlers to older children and told them to take care of them.

“After the second day of interviewing these children, we had a high-level, very urgent meeting,” Binford said. They made the unusual decision to contact the media, because, they concluded, “somebody is going to die.”

Clara Long, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, was also on the team. She told “Democracy Now!” about a quiet girl around the age of 7 or 8: “I said, ‘Who did you cross the border with?’ And she said, ‘My aunt.’ And then she just started crying so hard that she couldn’t produce words. I’m trying to calm her down, rubbing her back … she had a bracelet on with the words, in permanent marker, ‘U.S. parent’ and a phone number.”

Long continued: “There’s this sense that you’re not allowed to use your phone in the facilities, but at that point I and other members of our team just decided, ‘Screw that. We’re going to start making phone calls.’ I picked up my phone and dialed the number and connected with her father. He had no idea where she was being held.” Long says there are many children being held by CBP who have parents and other family members who are legally in the United States.

The plight of migrants and asylum-seekers was underscored when the Mexican newspaper La Jornada published a photo of a Salvadoran father and daughter drowned in the Rio Grande, her little arm still around his neck. Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez, 25, and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria were swept away by the rushing waters between Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville, Texas, after being turned back at the border when seeking legal asylum. 

Responding to a question about the photo, Trump predictably blamed the Democrats for his border catastrophe. The immigrant detention system did grow dramatically under the Obama administration, but Trump expanded it much further, with an unheard-of level of cruelty. At least six children have died while detained by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. Before last year, it had been more than a decade since a child died in the custody of U.S. immigration officials.

Last week marked the first two Democratic presidential debates. Less than an hour away from their Miami venue, in Homestead, Florida, more than 2,000 unaccompanied minors are incarcerated in a for-profit detention center run by Caliburn. Trump’s former chief of staff Gen. John Kelly sits on its board. Debating the fate of jailed migrant children is important, but the life-and-death crisis that they have been thrown into demands immediate action. Abolish all migrant child jails now.

Kamala Harris Is Everything the Establishment Wants in a Politician

California Senator Kamala Harris won the Democratic presidential debate Thursday night. It was not a close contest. She will win every debate she enters during this election cycle. If she becomes the nominee, she will win every debate with President Trump.

Night two of the debates was just as vapid and ridiculous as night one. Candidates interrupted and talked over each other a lot, questions about foreign policy were avoided like the plague to prevent NBC viewers from thinking critically about the mechanics of empire, and Eric Swalwell kept talking despite everyone in the universe desperately wanting him not to. Buttigieg and Gillibrand did alright, Bernie played the same note he’s been playing for decades, and everyone was reminded how bad Joe Biden is at talking and thinking.

Biden has been treated kindly by polls and regarded as a “frontrunner” in this race exclusively because for the last decade he hasn’t had to do anything other than be associated with Barack Obama. Now that he’s had to step out of that insulated role and interact with reality again, everyone’s seeing the same old garbage right-wing Democrat who sucks at making himself look appealing just as badly as he did in his last two presidential campaigns. By the end of the night, even Michael Bennet was slapping him around.

The full exchange between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden on Biden’s history with racial issues. pic.twitter.com/sK950pFyvf

— Axios (@axios) June 28, 2019

The moment everyone’s talking about was when Harris created a space for herself to attack Biden on his citing his collaboration with segregationists as an example of his ability to reach across the aisle and “get things done”. Harris had not been called upon to speak, and once given the go-ahead by moderator Rachel Maddow after interjecting went way beyond the 30 seconds she’d been allotted in tearing Biden apart. She skillfully took control of the stage and engineered the entire space for the confrontation by sheer dominance of personality, and Biden had no answer for it.

That’s the moment everyone’s talking about. But Harris had already been owning the debate prior to that.

The goal of a political debate is to make yourself look appealing and electable to your audience. You can do that by having a very good platform, or you can do it with charisma and oratory skills. It turns out that Kamala Harris is really, really good at doing the latter. She made frequent and effective appeals to emotion, she built to applause lines far more skillfully than anyone else on the stage, she kept her voice unwavering and without stammer, she made herself look like a leader by admonishing the other candidates to stop talking over each other, and she hit all the right progressive notes you’re supposed to hit in such a debate.

Unlike night one of the debates, night two had a clear, dominant winner. If you were a casual follower of US politics and didn’t have a favorite coming into the debate, you likely went away feeling that Harris was the best.

This wasn’t a fluke. Harris has been cultivating her debate skills for decades, first in the Howard University debate team where she is said to have “thrived”, then as a prosecutor, then as a politician, and she’ll be able to replicate the same caliber of performance in all subsequent debates. There’s more to getting elected than debate skills, but it matters, and in this area no one will be able to touch her.

Harris won the debate despite fully exposing herself for the corporate imperialist she is in the midst of that very debate. While answering a question about climate change she took the opportunity to attack Trump on foreign policy, not for his insane and dangerous hawkishness but for not being hawkish enough, on both North Korea and Russia.

“You asked what is the greatest national-security threat to the United States. It’s Donald Trump,” Harris said. “You want to talk about North Korea, a real threat in terms of its nuclear arsenal. But what does he do? He embraces Kim Jong Un, a dictator, for the sake of a photo op. Putin. You want to talk about Russia? He takes the word of the Russian president over the word of the American intelligence community when it comes to a threat to our democracy and our elections.”

Harris is everything the US empire’s unelected power establishment wants in a politician: charismatic, commanding, and completely unprincipled. In that sense she’s like Obama, only better.

Harris was one of the 2020 presidential hopefuls who came under fire at the beginning of the year when it was reported that she’d been reaching out to Wall Street executives to find out if they’d support her campaign. Executives named in the report include billionaire Blackstone CEO Jonathan Gray, 32 Advisors’ Robert Wolf, and Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly. It was reported two entire years ago that Harris was already courting top Hillary Clinton donors and organizers in the Hamptons. She hasn’t been in politics very long, but her campaign contributions as a senator have come from numerous plutocratic institutions.

In the summer of 2017, just half a year into her term as Senator, Harris met with @HillaryClinton‘s top donors in the Hamptons. I do not think they were there strategizing how to pass #MedicareForAll and free public college https://t.co/xqJFXGXqfK

— Jordan (@JordanChariton) January 10, 2019

Kamala Harris Set to Announce 2020 Run On or Around Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In 2 Years in Senate, majority of her donations have come from financial interests including Wall Street, financial industry lawyers, and real estate industry. https://t.co/0dTBVo7QlC pic.twitter.com/tMwzIehihr

— Jordan (@JordanChariton) January 10, 2019

Trump supporters like to claim that the president is fighting the establishment, citing the open revulsion that so many noxious establishment figures have for him. But the establishment doesn’t hate Trump because he opposes them; he doesn’t oppose existing power structures in any meaningful way at all. The reason the heads of those power structures despise Trump is solely because he sucks at narrative management and puts an ugly face on the ugly things that America’s permanent government is constantly doing. He’s bad at managing their assets.

Kamala Harris is the exact opposite of this. She’d be able to obliterate noncompliant nations and dead-end the left for eight years, and look good while doing it. She’s got the skills to become president, and she’ll have the establishment backing as well. Keep an eye on this one.

Barr Moves to Combat Violent Crime Plaguing Alaska Natives

WASHINGTON—Attorney General William Barr declared a law enforcement emergency in Alaska on Friday, clearing the way for the Justice Department to award more than $10 million to combat crime in rural communities.

The announcement comes a month after Barr visited the state and met with Alaska Natives, who described disproportionately high rates of violence and sexual assault in Native communities and other problems, including not having any law enforcement presence in some villages.

It is the first time that Barr has personally declared a law enforcement emergency since he assumed the top post at the Justice Department in February. The department has previously declared similar emergencies after mass shootings and to combat spikes in violent crime.

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The funding is meant to hire additional village and tribal officers and to pay for equipment and training. Additional money is also being awarded for federal prosecutors to target violent crime in rural Alaska and for tribes to pay for victims’ advocacy services.

Federal officials face unique challenges in Alaska because most of the crime plaguing the state would be prosecuted by local officials instead of the federal government, Bryan Schroder, the U.S. attorney in Alaska said. But the federal government hopes the funding can help retain law enforcement officers in some rural communities, where it can take a long time before state troopers can arrive to investigate crimes, and to build and strengthen tribal courts. Often, it can take troopers hours to reach a village given the sheer vastness of the nation’s largest state, with few roads. That can stretch into days if the weather is bad.

State authorities handle criminal investigations in more than 200 Alaska Native villages. A 2013 federal report found that at least 75 Alaska Native communities had no law enforcement presence. Tribal leaders have spoken candidly about barriers that victims face in seeking justice, saying some sexual assault victims must take boats or planes to urban areas to get a medical forensic exam.

The move drew praise from the Alaska Federation of Natives, which applauded the Justice Department for demonstrating a commitment to strengthening federal, state and tribal partnerships.

“We appreciate that U.S. Attorney General William Barr clearly understands the urgency of the public safety situation in rural Alaska,” the organization’s president, Julie Kitka, said in a statement.

U.S. Rep. Don Young, an Alaska Republican who lives in the tiny community of Fort Yukon, above the Arctic Circle, said he was glad Barr released the money.

“I’m cautioning people, though, because money just doesn’t solve the problem,” the 86-year-old Young said Friday afternoon while filing paperwork in Anchorage to seek a 25th term in the House. “There should be recognition that this problem can only be solved by support by the communities themselves.”

While the money will help, Young said, “You can’t expect it to be done just by outside influences.”

In May, Barr toured rural Alaska communities after taking part in a round-table discussion in Anchorage with Alaska Native leaders. Vivian Korthius, with the Association of Village Council Presidents, told Barr there were only six village public safety officers in her 48-village region.

Barr said his declaration allows the Justice Department to direct resources “where they are needed most and needed immediately.”

The attorney general also directed all Justice Department agencies, including the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to submit plans within 30 days about what their agencies can do to help public safety efforts in rural Alaska.

“Lives depend on it, and we are committed to seeing a change in this unacceptable, daily reality for Alaska Native people,” Barr said.

___

Associated Press writer Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.

Oregon Republicans End 9-Day Walkout as Climate Bill Fails

SALEM, Ore.—Republican lawmakers returned to the Oregon Senate on Saturday, ending an acrimonious nine-day walkout over a carbon-emissions bill that would have been the second-such legislation in the nation.

The boycott had escalated when the Democratic governor ordered the state police to find and return the rogue Republicans to the Senate so the chamber could convene, and a counter-threat by one GOP senator to violently resist any such attempt. Senate Republicans fled the state to avoid being forcibly returned by the Oregon State Police, whose jurisdiction ends at the state line.

Democrats have an 18 to 12 majority in the Senate but need at least 20 members — and therefore at least two Republicans — to vote on legislation.

Nine minority Republicans returned to the Senate on Saturday after Senate President Peter Courtney said the majority Democrats lacked the necessary 16 votes to pass the legislation aimed at countering climate change.

Sen. Sara Gelser, a Democrat from the college town of Corvallis, said the demise of the cap-and-trade bill has deeply upset many constituents.

“That’s a bill that’s been many, many years in the making. Thousands of people have weighed in on it through email, over a thousand people came to visit the Capitol during the session alone … so people were really invested in that,” Gelser told reporters Saturday. “I think there’s a lot of heartbreak, but today is one day and we’ll come back and address it. We have to. Our planet demands it.”

The House had previously passed the bill, one of the centerpieces of Oregon’s 2019 legislative session, which is scheduled to end late Sunday.

One of the Republicans absent Saturday was Sen. Brian Boquist, who had told state police when to come heavily armed and to send bachelor officers if they were going to forcibly return him to the Senate during the walkout. Senate Republican leader Herman Baertschiger Jr., on Friday refused to condemn Boquist’s words, only saying the comments were unhelpful.

The walkout by the Republicans, which began June 20, inspired protests at the Capitol by their backers and led to the building being closed one day due to security threats.

But it had zero impact on the climate change bill, Gelser said.

“It was my understanding before they left the building that we did not have 16 votes for that bill,” Gelser said. “It did not fail because of a walkout.”

The Republicans, though, painted their boycott as a triumph.

“Our mission in walking out was to kill cap and trade,” Senate Minority Leader Herman Baertschiger told reporters Friday. “And that’s what we did.”

Democrats had said the climate legislation was critical to make Oregon a leader in the fight against climate change and will ultimately create jobs and transform the economy.

The bill, if passed, would have been the second in the nation, after California, to cap and trade pollution credits among companies. It aimed to dramatically reduce greenhouse gases by 2050 by capping carbon emissions and requiring businesses to buy or trade for an ever-dwindling pool of pollution “allowances.”

With only two days before the 2019 legislative session officially ends, the Senate hurried through some of the more than 100 bills and motions that were still pending. Among the measures are ones on paid family and medical leave, campaign funding, and funding for the Oregon Food Bank and for Medicaid. Other big-ticket items are a bill aimed at addressing sexual harassment in the Capitol, money to expand affordable housing and a cigarette tax.

The Republicans wielded power disproportionate to their numbers this session. They walked out of the Senate last month to block a school funding tax package. They returned only after Gov. Kate Brown brokered a deal in which Democrats dropped legislation on gun control and children’s vaccination requirements. The Senate, with a quorum established, then passed the school funding measure.

In the House, Republicans in May forced a clerk to read aloud every word in nearly every piece of legislation, employing another stalling tactic.

“This is not how our democracy is supposed to work,” said Tara Hurst, executive director of the lobbying group Renew Oregon, which helped craft the climate proposal.

Rep. Rachel Prusak, a freshman Democrat from a Portland suburb, said she is “heartbroken over the state of our Legislature.”

Eleven Republicans participated in the walkout, with one Senate seat vacant due to the death of veteran lawmaker Jackie Winters in May, from cancer.

Denyc Boles, who had been serving in the House, was sworn in Friday to take Winters’ seat, restoring the GOP caucus to its full number of 12.

U.S., Taliban Open New Talks to End Afghanistan War

ISLAMABAD—A fresh round of talks between the U.S. and the Taliban began in Qatar on Saturday, just days after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Washington is hoping for an Afghan peace agreement before Sept. 1.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirmed to The Associated Press that negotiations had begun. Originally scheduled to begin in the morning, the two sides sat down mid-afternoon for the seventh time in a series of direct talks that began last year following the appointment of U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad.

As in previous talks between Khalilzad and the Taliban, the focus is on the withdrawal of U.S. troops and Taliban guarantees to prevent Afghanistan from again hosting militants who can stage global attacks. Both sides say they have come to an understanding on the withdrawal and the guarantees but details have yet to be worked out.

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The protracted war in Afghanistan began in 2001 to unseat the Taliban and hunt down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his followers, who carried out the 9/11 attacks in the United States while operating in Afghan territory. After nearly 18 years and billions of dollars spent, the Taliban control or contest roughly half of Afghan territory.

In the Afghan capital of Kabul last week, Pompeo said “real progress” had been made on a draft agreement with the Taliban to ensure “that Afghan soil never again becomes a safe haven for terrorists.”

Both Khalilzad and Pompeo have said that agreements with the Taliban will come hand in hand with understandings on an intra-Afghan dialogue and a permanent cease-fire. It was expected that a timetable would be among the discussion points in the Doha talks.

The Taliban’s negotiating team has been led by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who co-founded the Taliban movement with its leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, who ruled with an iron fist, imposing a strict brand of Islam. Omar died several years ago, while Baradar has been held in a Pakistani jail since 2010 until his release earlier this year.

The Taliban have refused to meet directly with President Ashraf Ghani’s government but have held several rounds of talks with a collection of Afghan personalities from Kabul, including former president Hamid Karzai, several prominent opposition leaders and government peace council members. Both those meetings were held in Moscow earlier this year.

The Taliban say they will meet with Afghan government officials but only as ordinary Afghans and not representatives of the government until an agreement with the U.S. is finalized, saying the U.S. is the final arbiter on the Taliban’s biggest issue of troop withdrawal.

Khalilzad has been in the region for several weeks meeting a legion of regional and Afghan officials, including Ghani. He has been relentless in his pursuit of an intra-Afghan dialogue after an earlier planned meeting between the government and the Taliban in Doha was scuttled when both sides disagreed on who should participate.

The Taliban have also refused a cease-fire. Taliban officials who have spoken to the AP say they won’t agree to a cease-fire until troop withdrawal is in place. That’s because returning Taliban fighters to the battlefield if the U.S. reneges on its promises could be difficult. Taliban officials spoke on condition they not be identified because they are not authorized to speak to the media.

The latest round of talks comes amid heightened expectations that followed Pompeo’s optimistic time frame for a pact to end Afghanistan’s nearly 18-year war — America’s longest-running military engagement.

Also on Saturday, Afghan authorities accused the Taliban of killing at least 25 pro-government forces in northern Baghlan province. The Taliban, who have stepped up attacks in recent months against Afghanistan’s beleaguered national security personnel, said the attacks were retaliation for earlier attacks on their fighters.

U.S., China Declare Truce in Trade War, but Tariffs Remain

OSAKA, Japan—President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping agreed to a cease-fire Saturday in their nations’ yearlong trade war, averting for now an escalation feared by financial markets, businesses and farmers.

Trump said U.S. tariffs will remain in place against Chinese imports while negotiations continue. Additional trade penalties he has threatened against billions worth of other Chinese goods will not take effect for the “time being,” he said, and the economic powers will restart stalled talks that have already gone 11 rounds.

“We’re going to work with China where we left off,” Trump said after a lengthy meeting with Xi while the leaders attended the Group of 20 summit in Osaka.

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While Trump said relations with China were “right back on track,” doubts persist about the two nations’ willingness to compromise on a long-term solution. Among the sticking points: The U.S. contends that Beijing steals technology and coerces foreign companies into handing over trade secrets; China denies it engages in such practices.

The apparent truce continues a pattern for Trump and Xi, who have professed their friendship and paused protectionist measures, only to see negotiations later break down.

The United States has imposed 25% import taxes on $250 billion in Chinese products and is threatening to target an additional $300 billion, extending the tariffs to virtually everything China ships to America.

China has countered with tariffs on $110 billion in American goods, focusing on agricultural products in a direct and painful shot at Trump supporters in the U.S. farm belt.

Some progress seemed to be made in a dispute involving the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, which the Trump administration has branded a national security threat and barred it from buying American technology. Trump said Saturday he would allow U.S. companies to sell their products to Huawei, but he was not yet willing to remove the company from a trade blacklist.

The U.S. has tried to rally other countries to block Huawei from their upcoming 5G systems.

The Trump-Xi meeting between the two leaders was the centerpiece of four days of diplomacy in Asia for Trump, whose re-election chances have been put at risk by the trade dispute that has hurt American farmers and battered global markets. Tensions rose after negotiations collapsed last month.

Trump said the talks with Xi went “probably even better than expected.”

Both men struck a cautiously optimistic tone after they posed for photographs.

“We’ve had an excellent relationship,” Trump told Xi as the meeting opened, “but we want to do something that will even it up with respect to trade.”

Xi recounted the era of “pingpong diplomacy” that helped jump-start U.S.-China relations two generations ago. Since then, he said, “one basic fact remains unchanged: China and the United States both benefit from cooperation and lose in confrontation.”

“Cooperation and dialogue are better than friction and confrontation,” he added.

The meeting with Xi was one of three that Trump held Saturday with world leaders who display authoritarian tendencies.

Trump had his first face-to-face discussion with Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman since U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that the crown prince directed the murder of Washington Post columnist and American resident Jamal Khashoggi last year.

Trump, who referred to the Saudi royal as his “friend,” has long tried to minimize the prince’s role in the murder and has been reluctant to criticize the killing of the Saudi critic at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul last year. Trump views Saudi Arabia as the lynchpin of U.S.’ Middle East strategy to counter Iran.

At a news conference after the summit, Trump said Khashoggi’s killing was “horrible,” but that Saudi Arabia had “been a terrific ally.” Trump suggested he was satisfied with steps that the kingdom was taking to prosecute some of those involved, while he claimed that “nobody so far has pointed directly a finger” at Saudi Arabia’s future king.

U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that bin Salman must have at least known of the plot.

The summit came a week after Trump pulled back from ordering a military strike on Iran for downing an American unmanned spy plane. Iran now stands on the threshold of breaching uranium enrichment thresholds set in a 2015 nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew. Trump said he would not preview his response should Iran top that limit, but said, “We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

Trump also met with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an ostensible NATO ally whom the U.S. sees as drifting dangerously toward Russia’s sphere of influence.

Trump said the two will “look at different solutions” to Turkey’s planned purchase of the Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile system. U.S. officials have threatened to halt the sale of U.S.-made F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to Turkey if the Russian purchase goes through; Erdogan has called it a done deal.

“Turkey has been a friend of ours,” Trump said. He blamed the Obama administration for not agreeing to sell U.S.-made Patriot missile batteries to Turkey, calling the situation a “mess” and “not really Erdogan’s fault.”

A day earlier, Trump met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and, with a smirk and a finger point, jokingly told him, “Don’t meddle with the election.” It was their first meeting since special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that Russia extensively interfered with the 2016 campaign.

Pressed whether he pushed the issue more seriously in private, Trump said he had raised it with Putin, adding, “You know he denies it, totally. How many times can you get someone to deny something?”

Putin told reporters that “we talked about it,” but he did not elaborate. He said he believes it’s necessary to “turn the page” in relations with the U.S., which have plunged to the lowest level since the Cold War times.

___

Associated Press writers Patrick Quinn in Bangkok and Paul Wiseman, Darlene Superville and Jill Colvin in Washington contributed to this report.