Roughly one year ago, Denise Wallace, executive co-director of the Miss Minnesota USA pageant, received a phone call from 19-year-old Halima Aden asking if she could compete in the contest wearing her hijab.

“Her photo popped up and I remember distinctly going, ‘Wow, she is beautiful,'” Wallace said.

The Somali-American teen made headlines as the first hijab-and burkini-sporting contestant in the history of the pageant.

The bold move catapulted her career to new heights involving many “firsts,” including being the first hijabi signed by a major modeling agency.

“I wear the hijab everyday,” Aden, who was in New York for Fashion Week, told Reuters.

The hijab – one of the most visible signs of Islamic culture – is going mainstream, with advertisers, media giants and fashion firms promoting images of the traditional headscarf in ever more ways.

Nike announced it is using its prowess in the sports and leisure market to launch a breathable mesh hijab in spring 2018, becoming the first major sports apparel maker to offer a traditional Islamic head scarf designed for competition.

Teen apparel maker American Eagle Outfitters created a denim hijab with Aden as its main model. The youthful headscarf sold out in less than a week online.

Allure magazine’s editor-in-chief, Michelle Lee, is also in the mix, describing Aden as a “normal American teenage girl” on the front cover of the magazine’s July issue.

“She is someone who is so amazingly representative of who we are as America, as a melting pot it totally made sense for us,” Lee said.

Aden, born in Kakuma, a United Nations refugee camp in Kenya, came to the United States at age 7 with her family, initially settling in St. Louis.

She fondly recalled her time at the refugee camp saying, “Different people, different refugees from all over Africa came together in Kakuma. Yet we still found a common ground.”

In America, she was an A-student and homecoming queen. Now, her ultimate goal is to become a role model for American Muslim youth.

“I am doing me and I have no reason to think that other people are against me,” Aden said. “So I just guess I’m oblivious.”

Aden said she is content being a champion for diversity in the modeling industry, but in the future she hopes to return to Kakuma to work with refugee children.
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Protesters in Haiti damaged commercial buildings in the capital city and set cars on fire Tuesday, angered by government tax hikes that come at a time when foreign aid is declining.

The Port-au-Prince protest, called by former presidential candidate Jean-Charles Moise, took many by surprise and represents the biggest outcry against the administration of President Jovenel Moise since he took office earlier this year.

“The revolution has just started. Jovenel Moise will have to retract his taxes or he will have to leave immediately,” said Jacques Menard, a 31-year-old protester. “And this is a warning because the next phase can be very violent.”

Protesters took to the streets in separate groups in several districts in the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince, erecting flaming barricades, blocking traffic, and confronting riot police, who fired tear gas and warning shots in the air.

Several people were arrested, the police said, but there were no reports of deaths or serious injuries.

Lawmakers last weekend approved an unpopular budget that raises taxes on products including cigarettes, alcohol and passports.

At the same time, foreign aid to Haiti is slowing. The country is one of the poorest in the Americas and suffered a devastating earthquake in 2010 and the worst of Hurricane Matthew last year.

“If Jovenel Moise is intelligent, he should refrain from publishing the budget, otherwise he will have to face a series of street demonstrations that will further complicate the situation,” Jean-Charles Moise said on local radio.

Government officials were not immediately available for comment, but Economy and Finance Minister Jude Alix Patrick Salomon defended the budget over the weekend.

“There are people who are blaming many things on the budget that are not true,” Salomon told reporters shortly after the spending plan was approved. “There are people manipulating the public opinion.”
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U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Tuesday cast doubt on President Donald Trump’s goal of cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, even as the president moved to inject new urgency into a sluggish effort in Congress to lower taxes.

“Ideally, he’d like to get it down to 15 percent. I don’t know if we’ll be able to achieve that given the budget issues, but we’re going to get this down to a very competitive level,” Mnuchin told a conference in New York hosted by CNBC.

The administration is cranking up a publicity campaign to build public support for the Republican president’s tax goals, and Trump was due to meet with three Democratic senators Tuesday to discuss taxes.

But neither the administration nor the Republicans who control Congress have agreed on a detailed plan for overhauling the tax code, which was one of Trump’s main campaign promises in 2016, despite months of discussions.

A major concern is not adding to the federal budget deficit.

It would balloon if tax rates were cut too deeply without providing offsetting federal spending reductions and closure of tax loopholes, both politically difficult tasks.

Mnuchin declined to say what business tax rate is achievable. He said he was “incredibly hopeful” a tax plan can be enacted this year, adding it could be retroactive to January.

Asked whether Trump would hold out for a 15 percent corporate tax rate, compared to the current 35 percent, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “The president is prepared to push for as low of a rate as we can get. We’re going to continue to push for that and work for Congress to make sure we get the best deal possible.”

Republican Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House of Representatives, said last week that “the numbers are hard” to make Trump’s 15 percent corporate tax rate target work. Ryan set his own goal at around 22.5 percent.

Trump’s legislative affairs director, Marc Short, said at a Christian Science Monitor event that “there’s probably compromise” necessary to get a deal, but “we think that what’s best for the American people is a 15 percent corporate rate right now.”

‘No new debt’

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, one of the three Democrats due to dine with Trump on Tuesday, said he is prepared to work with the president on taxes so long as it does not add new debt to the national balance sheet.

“No new debt, anything that shows me it’s going to add debt to our nation. I’ve got 10 grandchildren. I’m not going to do that to them,” Manchin said.

Financial markets rallied after Trump’s election victory last November in anticipation of rapid tax cuts, especially for corporations, but those expectations have faded.

“The likelihood of passing sweeping corporate reform has diminished,” Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at BMO Wealth Management, said in a research note.

Republican lawmakers have said that Trump’s legislative deal with Democrats last week to help hurricane victims and keep the government running for another three months could complicate the tax effort, especially in terms of a corporate tax cut.

Democrats, who generally oppose tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, will have negotiating clout in Congress in early December to resist tax changes they oppose, also potentially including a corporate rate cut.

Trump may visit as many as 13 states to sell his planned tax cuts to voters in the coming weeks, the White House said. He plans to visit more states he won in last November’s election that also have a Democratic senator, similar to recent trips to Missouri and North Dakota, as well as states with strong Republican support, an aide said.

The White House said the six senators who will meet with Trump over dinner include Democrats Manchin, Joe Donnelly and Heidi Heitkamp, along with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch and fellow panel Republicans Patrick Toomey and John Thune.

The U.S. Senate begins tax overhaul hearings this week.

Mnuchin and White House chief economic adviser Gary Cohn were set to meet on Tuesday with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and members of the Senate Budget Committee on Capitol Hill to discuss tax plans.

Republican Senator John Kennedy, a budget committee member, told Reuters he wants tax plans “with specificity” and expressed frustration at the slow pace of the tax debate.

“No more platitudes. Let’s see some meat on the bone,” Kennedy said. “You don’t always get what you want. I think there’s a song that says that. But you need to get what you need and that’s where we are. And I’m tired of screwing around. … The American people are tired of screwing around.”
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Lawmakers from 19 states are trying to develop a plan in Arizona this week for carrying out a growing, but unlikely, national effort to amend the Constitution to require a balanced U.S. budget, a long-held goal of conservatives who believe out-of-control spending is harming the nation.

The plan is to add an amendment to the Constitution through a convention — a longshot effort that has never been successfully done. All 27 amendments that have been adopted were proposed by Congress.

A balanced budget amendment is a core goal of conservative Republicans who have gained control of an increasing number of state Legislatures in recent years, now holding both chambers in 32 states. Backers include groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity.

The effort also comes against the backdrop of deep turmoil in Washington over debt spending. Top congressional Democrats last week cut a deal with President Donald Trump to increase the federal debt limit, avoiding for now a fight that commonly causes divisions and threats of a government shutdown.

The goal of amendment backers is to eliminate the federal deficit and drive down the national debt, which is approaching $20 trillion. The current federal budget includes spending of about $4 trillion and has a shortfall of nearly $700 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Congress debated a balanced budget amendment in the early and mid-1990s, but it did not pass.

The lawmakers meeting this week are discussing a process that requires several steps. Thirty-four states must vote to adopt the amendment and convene a convention, but it still must be ratified by three-quarters of the states. Now, 27 states have active requests to convene a convention, all controlled by Republicans.

Arizona is hosting 75 delegates this week, all Republicans. Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend said efforts to invite Democratic states have not been successful. Proposed rules say delegates must be approved by both chambers of their state Legislature “so that they can legitimately vote and represent their state,” Townsend said.

Arguments against

Opponents of the amendment argue that a convention could go dangerously off-track and move into wholesale rewrites of other areas of the Constitution, such as gun rights, an abortion ban and term limits. They also say a balanced budget amendment could threaten the economy.

“By requiring a balanced budget every year, no matter the state of the economy, such an amendment would risk tipping weak economies into recession and making recessions longer and deeper, causing very large job losses,” according to a policy paper by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

That’s because lawmakers would be forced to cut spending during recessions, removing a key way the federal government can boost economic activity.

Townsend said the three-quarters requirement to ratify the amendment limits the chances of a “runaway convention” where delegates could do a wholesale rewrite of the Constitution.

“Whatever we do when we close down and adjourn, our final product has to be viable. It’s not binding yet, and the states have to ratify it — that’s 38 of them,” she said.

Even some conservatives worry about a constitutional convention.

U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican, routinely blocked legislation authorizing a convention during the four years he led the state Senate. He wrote a book in 2015, The Con of the Con Con, laying out his concerns about a convention.

Biggs wrote that if people believe the Constitution is fallible, “how do you know that the remedy you rely on, Article V, is not flawed as well?”
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Syria’s government signed a contract with an Iranian company on Tuesday to import five gas-fired power plants to the war-battered city of Aleppo, in an early sign of the major role Tehran is expected to play in Syria’s reconstruction.

The deal, reported by Syria’s state news agency SANA, is part of a broader understanding reached by Damascus and Tehran promising Iranian companies contracts to restore electrical infrastructure in Syria, Electricity Minister Zuhair Kharboutli said during a visit to Tehran.

The Aleppo contract was awarded to the Iranian firm Mabna and is valued at around 130 million euros, according to a Kharboutli statement carried Sunday by SANA.

Kharboutli also signed memorandums with Iranian Energy Minister Sattar Mahmoudi promising to import five plants to provide 540 megawatts of electricity to the coastal Latakia province, as well as to build wind and solar plants, and to restore plants in Deir el-Zour and Homs.

Iran has been an indispensable ally to President Bashar Assad, organizing militias from Lebanon to Afghanistan to fight for alongside his forces and sending its own Revolutionary Guard Corps to Syria to manage battles. Assad has been battling an uprising against his family’s 47-year dynasty since 2011.

Electricity generation plunges

The fighting has come at a tremendous cost to the nation’s infrastructure. Electricity generation dropped by more than half from 2010 to 2014, according to the latest figures available from the OECD’s International Energy Agency monitoring group.

Syrian troops retook eastern Aleppo at the end of last year with the help of Russian air raids and Iran-backed militias after years of heavy fighting. In the weeks after the fighting ended, electricity was cut off across the entire city, even in government-held neighborhoods, but residents say power has since been restored in some areas.

Most of the city’s power plants were in eastern Aleppo, which was captured by rebels in 2012 and suffered catastrophic destruction during the government’s drive to recapture it.

Assad’s government awarded a concession to Iran to operate a new cellular network for Syria in January. Other concessions signed to Iran include thousands of hectares of land for farming and oil and gas terminals, and the operation of a phosphate mine in central Syria, according to Iran’s official IRNA news agency.
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Eiffel Tower employees planned a walkout, angry carnival workers snarled traffic around Paris’ Arc de Triomphe, and Paris police girded for potential violence as unions and others hold nationwide protests Tuesday against changes to labor laws they fear corrode job security.

The protests are the first big public display of discontent with President Emmanuel Macron’s presidency, which kicked off in May amid enthusiasm over his promises of reviving up the French economy but is now foundering amid anger over the labor decrees and other domestic troubles.

The prominent CGT union is leading Tuesday’s protests, calling for strikes and organizing some 180 demonstrations against last labor decrees unveiled last month by Macron’s government.

At the Eiffel Tower, CGT union representative Denis Vavassori told The Associated Press that workers plan a walkout Tuesday afternoon, but it is unclear so far whether the monument will be forced to close or will stay partially open for tourists.

Horn-tooting funfair workers held a separate protest movement Tuesday against legal changes they say favor big corporations and could wipe out their centuries-old industry.

Dozens of big rigs drove at a snail’s pace around the Arc de Triomphe, causing rush-hour traffic snarls as protesters danced and waved flags on a flat-bed truck with a severed plastic head from a funfair ride.

The workers said they timed their protest to coincide with Tuesday’s broader labor demonstrations, since both movements are about workers fearing their jobs are at threat.

Bumper car worker Sam Frechon said, “everybody likes funfairs. Everybody has been to a funfair one time in his life … Funfair is France.”

Meanwhile, thousands of union activists marched Tuesday morning in the Mediterranean city of Marseille, in Le Havre on the English Channel and other cities.

An afternoon march is planned in Paris, where police announced extra deployments. While union marches are usually peaceful, troublemakers on the margins often clash with police. A broad movement against similar labor reforms last year saw several weeks of scattered violence.

The protests come amid anger at a comment last week by Macron suggesting that opponents of labor reform are “lazy.” Government spokesman Christophe Castaner said on RTL radio Tuesday that Macron didn’t mean workers themselves but politicians who failed to update French labor rules for a globalized age.

Macron’s labor decrees — which reduce the power of unions and give companies more authority to fire workers and influence workplace rules — are the first step in what he hopes are deep economic changes. The decrees are to be finalized this month.

Critics say they dismantle hard-fought worker protections and accuse the government of being undemocratic for using a special method to push the decrees through parliament.

Companies argue that existing rules prevent them from hiring and contribute to France’s high unemployment rate, currently around 10 percent.

Some unions refused to join the protests, preferring to negotiate with the government over upcoming changes to unemployment and retirement rules instead of taking their grievances to the street.

Macron himself chose Tuesday to go to the French Caribbean to bring aid and meet with victims of Hurricane Irma.
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While U.S. stock indexes continue to see record breaking gains and U.S. employment numbers are encouraging, American farmers continue to struggle with high costs for fertilizer and seed at a time when demand and prices for their products are low. As VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports, the economic hardship has a ripple effect beyond the farmers’ fields.
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The former chairman of the world’s largest meatpacker, whose testimony implicated Brazil’s president in corruption, turned himself in to police Sunday after the country’s Supreme Court ordered his arrest.

Joesley Batista has avoided prosecution under a plea bargain deal in which he described how meatpacking giant JBS had bribed dozens of politicians, including President Michel Temer.

Earlier this year, Temer was charged with corruption for allegedly orchestrating a scheme in which he would get payouts totaling millions of dollars for helping JBS resolve a business issue.

Temer denies wrongdoing, and Congress voted in August that he would not stand trial on the charge while in office.

But Brazil’s sprawling probe into the massive trade in bribes and kickbacks for favors between companies and politicians, known as Operation Car Wash, continues to churn out new allegations on almost a daily basis. Just this week the country’s chief prosecutor, Rodrigo Janot, filed charges against three former presidents and several other powerful politicians, accusing them of forming criminal organizations to pilfer from public coffers, and authorities detained a former Cabinet minister and close ally of Temer after $16 million in cash was found in an apartment linked to him.

Janot also has said he plans to file more charges against Temer. To do so, he’ll need to act in the coming days since his terms ends on Sept. 18.

But the specter that Batista and others withheld information could cast a pall over the Car Wash investigation, which has relied heavily on plea bargain deals, a fairly new innovation here. Many in Brazil are uneasy with the agreements, in general, and the deals JBS executives got provoked specific outrage from those who thought they were too lenient.

Janot said last week that he is investigating whether Batista and other cooperating witnesses omitted some information from their testimony and he has threatened to revoke the deals if they didn’t tell the whole truth.

The revelation came after Janot’s office received audio of a conversation between Batista and Ricardo Saud, an executive at J&F Investimentos, the holding company that controls JBS. The men apparently did not know they were being recorded, and Janot said it contained vague references to potentially illicit activity not previously disclosed, including the possibility of wrongdoing in his own office and at the Supreme Court.

He was careful to add that any information they have given — like the allegations against Temer — was still valid.

In his decision, Justice Edson Fachin said there was sufficient indication that Batista and Saud had withheld information from prosecutors when formalizing their plea bargains. Fachin ordered both men be detained. The decision was made Friday but was only made public by the court on Sunday.

Guilherme Barros of the public relations firm GBR that represents J&F said Batista and Saud have turned themselves in to Federal Police in the city. A statement e-mailed by GBR said that both Batista and Saud deny that they lied or omitted information in their deals and that they are fulfilling the terms of the agreement.
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