YCLOAK

Scandal-hit Brazilian construction company Odebrecht said on Sunday it has sold its 33 percent stake in a massive subway project in Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires, but vowed to keep working in the country.

Odebrecht is involved in a sprawling corruption saga and has already paid $3.5 billion in settlements in the United States, Brazil and Switzerland, embroiling politicians across Latin America.

“Present for 30 continuous years, Odebrecht plans to continue contributing to the development of Argentina in an ethical, integral and transparent manner,” the construction company said in a statement emailed to Reuters.

In July the Argentine justice system banned Odebrecht from bidding on new projects in the country a period of one year.
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated India’s biggest dam on Sunday, ignoring warnings from environment groups that hundreds of thousands of people will lose their livelihoods.

The controversial Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river in the country’s western state of Gujarat that will provide power and water to three big states was dedicated to the people of India by Narendra Modi.

The project has been beset by controversies since the laying of the foundation stone by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1961. The construction of the project began in 1987.

The dam is the second biggest dam in the world after the Grand Coulee Dam in the United States.

Ahead of the inauguration Modi said in a tweet, “This project will benefit lakhs of farmers and help fulfil people’s aspirations.” (1 lakh = 100,000)

The dam is expected to provide water to 9,000 villages and the power generated from the dam would be shared among three states — Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), led by social activist Medha Patkar, has been protesting against the project, raising several environmental concerns.

Construction on the dam had been suspended in 1996 following a stay by the Supreme Court which allowed work to resume, four years later, but with conditions.

Patkar and her supporters started the protest against the inauguration of the dam on Saturday and the opening of its gates which would raise the level of water and risk displacing several villages.

“Today is a very sad day for India, and for one of our biggest peoples’ movements and struggle — the Narmada Bacchao Andolan,” Ravi Chellam, executive director at Greenpeace India said in a statement.

“The Sardar Sarovar Project… signals ruin not development for tens of thousands of unsuspecting, hapless and poor farmers,” Chellam added.
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Just a stone’s throw across a narrow waterway from the world’s largest gambling hub Macau, a former oyster farming island is being transformed into China’s newest tourism haven.

Dubbed by some as China’s answer to Florida’s Orlando — a global tourist magnet with its cluster of major theme parks — Hengqin has seen property prices more than double over the past two years.

While still a dusty mass of construction sites, Hengqin now draws millions annually to its anchor attraction, the “Chimelong Ocean Kingdom” theme park, with a slew of hotel, malls and sprawling residential developments being built nearby.

Spanish soccer club, Real Madrid, announced last week they would open an interactive virtual reality complex in Hengqin, in partnership with Hong Kong-listed developer, Lai Sun Group .

The 12,000-square-meter venue, set to open in 2021, will include virtual reality entertainment and a museum showcasing the club’s history.

​Oysters to Orlando of China

The transformation of Hengqin, which is three times as large as Macau, is part of Beijing’s efforts to bolster links between Hong Kong, Macau and nine cities in the Pearl River Delta region, or so-called “Greater Bay Area,” modeled after other dynamic global bay areas such as Tokyo and San Francisco.

“Hengqin will be the Orlando of China. Macau is Las Vegas (and) Hong Kong is New York,” said Larry Leung, an executive with Lai Sun that is helping build the Real Madrid complex at its “Novotown” project in Hengqin. “Within an hour you can have them all.”

Novotown’s entertainment mix will also feature China’s first Lionsgate movie world with theme rides from blockbuster films such as the Hunger Games and Twilight, as well as a National Geographic educational center. High-end hotel chains and luxury yacht makers are building more hotels and a marina on Hengqin.

​Expanding Macau

Chinese officials see Hengqin helping Macau diversify away from casinos to a more wholesome tourism industry. More than 80 percent of Macau’s public revenues come from the gambling sector.

Businesses in Macau have been encouraged to invest in Hengqin with the government providing cheaper rent and tax subsidies. Galaxy Entertainment, Shun Tak and Macau Legend have also earmarked developments for Hengqin.

Realtors expect property prices to keep rising once a sea bridge linking Hong Kong, and a high-speed rail station are completed.

Hoffman Ma, deputy chairman of Success Universe Group, which operates the Ponte 16 casino in Macau, said Hengqin could take some convention and exhibition business away from the former Portuguese colony.

“It doesn’t make sense for Macau to do that, due to a consistent labor shortage,” he said.

Big population, more theme parks

Wang Lian, from Wuhan in central China, brought his daughter to watch whale sharks and polar bears at Chimelong Ocean Kingdom recently.

Industry reports show 8.5 million people visited China’s top theme park last year, more than Hong Kong Disneyland’s 6.1 million, and almost a third of the 28 million people who visited Macau last year.

“China’s population is so big they need something like this nearby … its (Hengqin’s) economic ties will also help Macau develop,” Wang said.
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When Hurricane Irma hit the Florida Coast, the Islamic Circle of North America arranged shelter. After it passed, they provided relief. Its volunteers — made up of immigrant and nonimmigrant, Muslim and non-Muslims — has opened minds and hearts wherever they go, to their shared desire to give back to the country.
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When Hurricane Irma battered the Florida Coast, volunteers of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) arranged shelter.

After it passed, they provided relief — from flood-damaged homes in Naples to uprooted tree trunk clearings in Cooper City, Florida.

Abdulrauf Khan, a Pakistani immigrant and assistant executive director at ICNA Relief USA — a network of disaster relief and social services — has been through all of it. Anytime a natural calamity strikes, he’s present.

Khan describes his motives as two-fold: a desire to assist his neighbors, while empowering his three children.

“I have a son who is 18 years old,” he begins to recount a vivid memory. “He asked me five years ago, ‘Dad, what have you done for this country?’”

It’s a simple question that would provide clarity to Khan’s mission.

“We have to work and we have to make sure our children feel that ownership of the country,” he said. “We have to give back.”

‘A basic part of the religion’

From Hurricanes Harvey to Irma, there are many Texans who embrace the work of Muslim relief volunteers, and select others who are hesitant to grant their trust, based solely on religion. But regardless of their reception, ICNA answers the call to assist, and changes some minds in the process.

“Charity is a big part of Islam, and giving back to the community is a big part of Islam,” says Aqsa Cheema, administrative coordinator for ICNA Relief South Florida.

Cheema, 22, a generation Pakistani-American who assisted with Irma relief, says she has been in the habit of giving back since she was a kid, attending mosque.

“You go along with it, and you get the chance to distribute food and do things that can benefit the community,” she says. “That’s just a basic part of the religion.”

Open hearts, open arms

Earlier in the week, as Irma’s ruthless winds pounded the state indiscriminately, ICNA facilitated shelter for Floridians — any and all Floridians —  in a Boca Raton-based Islamic Center.

Some of their guests said they had never met a Muslim.

“It was their first experience coming to an Islamic Center,” Khan said. “They felt like, ‘this is what we feel like when we go to church, when we go to synagogue’” — welcome, and at home.

Cheema, who is studying to be a social worker, describes her work as enriching, but never complete.

“That lack of true fulfillment is what keeps me going,” she says.

“I accept the fact that I can’t help everyone, but maybe if I help one person, and someone sees me helping that person, they will be like, ‘Hey, you know what? It felt nice to bring a smile on a person’s face. I can help them too.’”
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Think of it as motorbike banking.

For Vietnamese who live far from a retail bank branch, VietinBank scrambles scooters so its officers can meet clients where they live, tablet in hand.

There’s also the strategy of DongA Bank, which decks out a van with four ATMs and parks it near factories to reach laborers.

All across Vietnam, people are heeding the government’s call for “financial inclusion,” the global buzzword for bringing banks to the masses, and all the better if it can be digital. Hanoi has staked out some national targets for the year 2020, including an ambitious reduction in the share of transactions based on cash, down to a whopping 10 percent.

That goes hand in hand with other targets, like increasing the number of point-of-sales (POS) devices to 300,000, and getting 70 percent of utility payments done electronically.

But most seem to think those will be a tough goal to meet and that cash, the Vietnamese dong, will stay king.

“Cash will not disappear in Vietnam soon,” State Bank of Vietnam payment director Le Anh Dung conceded, even as he’s promoting a cashless society.

But nevertheless, the communist country is seeing a very visible sea change in the digitization of the economy.

Take utilities. To pay for water or power, Vietnamese used to have only the cash option, which meant either stopping in at the post office, or waiting for a collector to ring the doorbell. But now convenience stores from 7-Eleven to Circle K have mushroomed around cities, and with them comes an explosion of POS devices that accept utility payments.

Downsides to branchless banking

But the push toward more sophisticated finance is not all smooth sailing. Customers worry their bank accounts can be hacked, in the same way that thieves can purloin Vietnamese dong stashed in the mattress. Programs that let workers borrow against their salaries to buy phones or fridges risk breeding a culture of debt and consumerism. And citizens have been slow to adopt branchless banking tools like e-wallets Moca, MoMo, and Payoo, which are Vietnam’s answer to PayPal.

“At the moment, the mobile wallet has really taken off — in terms of institutions,” but not so much in terms of customer use, said Kalidas Ghose, CEO of the consumer finance company FE Credit, speaking last week at the Seamless e-commerce conference in Ho Chi Minh City.

At the conference, Dung praised the innovations of global brands like Alibaba’s use of QR codes, Amazon’s one-click pay option, and Uber’s “invisible” transactions, meaning users don’t have to lift a finger and the app charges them instantly after each ride. What the three have in common is to make it close to effortless for customers to hand over their money.

Uber, though, also provides a counter-example of a foreign business adapting to the indigenous reliance on cash in Vietnam. This is one of the few countries where the San Francisco-based company allows riders to pay with hard currency.

Google, similarly, allows people in a number of places, including Vietnam, to make purchases in Google Play through their phone credits.

These are a workaround to keep customers who don’t have debit cards, and they demonstrate the transition that societies undergo on the road to cashless economies.

For Vietnam the transition has been multifaceted.

Vietnam’s financial evolution

About a decade ago, most businesses paid their employees in physical dong. Then policymakers and bankers campaigned to turn that process into direct deposits.

“We encountered huge challenges because everybody wanted salary in cash and thought it was a hassle to use the card,” DongA Bank deputy CEO Nguyen An said. But the bank collaborated with employers and union leaders to change people’s minds.

Then came online retail. Vietnam’s e-commerce market was worth $400,000 in 2015 but will grow to $7.5 billion in 2025, according to a report from Google and Temasek, the Singapore sovereign wealth fund.

Officials are happy to see more people move to the Internet, but they’re not quite as digital as hoped: 89 percent of Vietnam’s online shoppers use cash on delivery, said Dung, who wants more buyers to pay with plastic or wire transfers.

Next in the Southeast Asian country’s financial evolution are plans to digitize public services,so that Vietnamese can pay electronically for hospitals, traffic tolls, schools, and other fees.

After that, locals predict further use of blockchain, the virtual ledger system behind bitcoin. Nicole Nguyen, head of marketing at Infinity Blockchain Labs, expects Vietnam will find applications for agriculture, the internet of things, and financial technology.

“We think that these are the three areas where blockchain can thrive in the next few years,” she said.

For now, mobile banks will continue to roam the cities of Vietnam, searching for customers.

 
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Jim McIngvale was standing in the parking lot of Gallery Furniture, greeting drivers and directing cars as they trickled in one sunny afternoon.

It had been a week and a half since his local furniture store chain opened the doors to its showrooms and offered shelter to hundreds of Houstonians during Hurricane Harvey.

Everyone had since relocated to other shelters, but McIngvale and his employees remained in disaster-relief mode as a long line of men, women and children snaked across the parking lot. On this day, drinking water, cleaning supplies, toiletries, clothing and free pizza were being handed out.

“My parents taught me that the essence of living is giving,” McIngvale said. “That’s who I am, that’s what we do.”

The local businessman and philanthropist is a longtime fixture in the Houston community, and he received national media attention along with an outpouring of public support for his latest efforts.

What about the bottom line?

How businesses respond in times of disaster can either enhance or undermine their public image. But does it affect their bottom line?

McIngvale didn’t seem concerned.

“After this hurricane, we took the people in and we said, ‘to hell with profit, let’s take care of the people,’” McIngvale said. “Profit takes care of itself. If you take care of the people, the people will take care of you.”

“When businesses make public stands and they make public commitments to do good things, consumers take notice,” said Utpal Dholakia, a professor of marketing at Rice University.

According to Dholakia, doing well and doing good don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Businesses are a part of the community in which they operate, and as a result, community members can be seen as stakeholders. Businesses thrive when communities support them and vice versa.

“The company tries to do something good for the community and it actually helps them sell more and also make more money,” Dholakia said.

Employee Juan Rea has worked at Gallery Furniture for more than 30 years and has seen firsthand how McIngvale’s responses over the years have resulted in community members giving back to the business.

Hurricane Harvey evacuees slept on the store’s sofas and mattresses, and later were offered discounts of 20 percent to 40 percent off the same furniture, according to Rea.

“He helps the people and he makes money also,” Rea said.

Or taking advantage

Meanwhile, taking advantage of trying times for the sake of a buck can result in a public relations nightmare.

A local Best Buy electronics store decided to price a case of water at an exorbitant $42.96. After a customer snapped a photo and posted it on Twitter, the resulting public outrage prompted a public apology from company officials.

Why different responses?

In emergency scenarios, why do company responses vary so widely? Dholakia said that can be attributed to differences in management thinking and companies’ corporate cultures.

“Some managers have a very detailed plan of action in place about how to react when something like a hurricane or a similar natural disaster happens. So they’re able to execute their plan of action right away,” Dholakia said. “Other companies react in a slower way because they’re not prepared.”

McIngvale clearly was ready.

“Get prepared, get some sleep,” he told his employees before the hurricane. Rea worked seven consecutive days to aid evacuees, and after a day off, he was ready to keep going.

While it’s hard to quantify how a company’s bottom line benefits from good deeds, Dholakia said giving back can only help boost a brand’s standing in the eyes of its customers.

“It creates a positive knowledge association for the brand, which then feeds into the rest of the things that the customers know about the brand,” Dholakia said.

With so many advertisers vying for our dollars online and offline, good deeds become a way to rise above the noise.

“It is harder and harder to gain consumer attention in this fragmented media landscape,” Dholakia said. “Suddenly, you do something positive for the community and everyone is talking about it.”
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During natural disasters, why do some companies open their doors to the community while others take advantage of its members? Tina Trinh explores the reasons why businesses react the way they do and the cost to their public image.
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One of China’s biggest bitcoin exchanges says it will end trading after news reports that regulators have ordered all Chinese exchanges to close caused the price of the digital currency to plunge.

BTC China said on its website it will “stop all trading business” Sept. 30. The exchange said it was acting in the spirit of a central bank ban last week on initial coin offerings but gave no indication it received a direct order to close.

The central bank has not responded to questions about the currency’s future in China.

There was no immediate word from other Chinese bitcoin exchanges about their plans.

Bitcoin’s value tumbled 15 percent Thursday to about $3,300. The famously volatile currency has shed about a third of its value since Sept. 1 but is up from about $600 a year ago.

Bitcoin surged in popularity in China last year as its price rose. Trading dwindled after regulators tightened controls and warned the currency might be linked to fraud.

Bitcoin is created and exchanged without the involvement of banks or governments. Transactions allow anonymity, which has made bitcoin popular with people who want to conceal their activity. Bitcoin can be converted to cash when deposited into accounts at prices set in online trading.

A Chinese business news magazine, Caixin, said at one point up to 90 percent of global trading took place in China.
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Radio Free Asia has joined the ranks of media outlets shuttered under the now almost blanket smothering of an independent press in Cambodia, as U.S. and European diplomatic efforts have failed, so far, to halt the county’s descent into authoritarianism ahead of elections next year.

The closure of the U.S.-funded outlet, due to what it called intimidation, represents another escalation in opposition to Washington by Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Conciliatory overtones made in a news conference Tuesday by U.S. Ambassador William Heidt have failed to halt the government’s campaign to paint Washington as the masterminds of a vast conspiracy involving all major opponents of the government.

“These are extraordinary allegations. The business of diplomacy is normally carried out with careful and respectful language, the kind of language I’m going to use today. Difficult messages are delivered privately first. Friendly nations seek ways to bridge differences,” he told reporters.

Two days later, the government mouthpiece Fresh News posted an article declaring the United States “should take a helicopter to transport its citizens from Cambodia, as it did in April 1975.”

Having spent billions of dollars promoting a stable, nominally democratic Cambodia, the United States and the European Union now have only a beleaguered opposition to show for it. The party’s leader, Kem Sokha, was arrested this month in connection with Washington’s alleged grand plan.

“Basically, after tens of billions of dollars invested in Cambodia, we’re back where we were 25 years ago … the more things changed, the more they actually stayed the same,” said Sophal Ear, author of Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy.

China’s deep pockets are often cited as an unstoppable force whittling away Western leverage in Cambodia, and Beijing has offered public support for Cambodia’s arrest of Sokha.

Returning from China on Wednesday, Hun Sen praised Beijing as “a strong backer who continues to help Cambodia in all circumstance, which no foreign [countries] can break.”

But Cambodia’s economic entanglements are far more complicated than mere aid contributions, and as tension with Western powers intensifies, drastic measures that would be considered unthinkable under normal circumstances could come into play.

Access to markets

Aid to Cambodia is measured in millions of dollars, but export markets are measured in the billions.

The United States is its biggest individual country export market at $3.5 billion, or 22 percent of the total, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), an online resource for economic data. China accounts for just 4.4 percent.

Cambodia also benefits handsomely from preferential access to European markets, with its exports there rising from just above $595 million in 2006 to about $5.25 billion in 2016 — under a scheme that has both labor and human rights clauses. In comparison, Cambodia has an enormous trade deficit with China of around $3 billion, OEC data show.

The EU has withdrawn a country’s access to these markets three times: from Sri Lanka in 2010 for human rights violations carried out during that country’s civil war, from Myanmar in 1997 for forced labor and from Belarus in 2007 for failing to respect the basic rights of trade unions.

“What could trigger such a procedure is a serious and systematic violation of one of the listed fundamental human rights or labor rights conventions,” an EU spokesperson told VOA.

So while it is true that Chinese foreign investment in and aid to Cambodia increased dramatically — in 2015 its foreign direct investment eclipsed all other countries combined at around $1 billion — the assertion that the West’s relationships with Phnom Penh are rendered meaningless as a result is not the full picture.

“The last thing Hun Sen would want would be to provoke the U.S., whether the Congress, White House or U.S. trade representative, to raise Cambodia’s market access to the United States. Unrest by textile workers would destabilize the Hun Sen regime and provide grist for the opposition mill,” said Carl Thayer, an emeritus professor at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

There are more than 700,000 registered garment workers in Cambodia in an industry heavily reliant on Western markets.

Bigger fish to fry

Some are interpreting new U.S. visa restrictions on Cambodians as a punitive measure. But other than that and the usual statements expressing concern and urging transparency, the response in the West has been muted, especially in Washington.

“I can only surmise that the State Department is in disarray with the new Trump administration, a new secretary of state with little experience in diplomacy, vacancies at the senior level, and impending budget cuts,” Thayer said.

“There has been no response by the Trump administration to Hun Sen’s cancellation of military exercises with the U.S. earlier this year. Since Trump’s Afghanistan speech, in which he nixed nation-building and democracy promotion, who at State will take any initiative against Hun Sen?” Thayer asked.

Trump has also abandoned U.S. participation in one of the State Department’s sharpest diplomatic tools in Asia, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.

Meanwhile, higher priorities are bountiful, even in Asia.

“Whether we like it or not, Cambodia is not one of the so-called hot spots of global politics. The international community’s focus is on countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan or Myanmar,” said Barbara Lochbihler, vice chair for the European Parliament’s Human Rights Committee.
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Your afternoon chocolate bar may be fueling climate change, destroying protected forests and threatening elephants, chimpanzees and hippos in West Africa, research suggests.

Well-known brands, such as Mars and Nestle, are buying through global traders cocoa that is grown illegally in dwindling national parks and reserves in Ivory Coast and Ghana, environmental group Mighty Earth said.

“Every consumer of chocolate is a part of either the problem or the solution,” Etelle Higonnet, campaign director at Mighty Earth, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“You can choose to buy ethical chocolate. Or you’re voting with your dollar for deforestation.”

Mars and Nestle told the Thomson Reuters Foundation they are working to tackle deforestation.

“We take a responsible approach to sourcing cocoa and have committed to source 100 percent certified sustainable cocoa by 2020,” Mars said in an email.

Both companies have committed to join the Cocoa and Forests Initiative, a major effort to end deforestation in the global cocoa supply chain, launched in March.

“We will be working to ensure human rights are given a high priority alongside the environmental aims of this initiative,” Nestle said in emailed comments.

Conversion to plantations

Almost one-third of 23 protected natural areas in Ivory Coast that researchers visited in 2015 had been almost entirely converted to illegal cocoa plantations, the report said.

Researchers said the practice is so widespread that villages of tens of thousands of people, along with churches and schools, have sprung up in national parks to support the cocoa economy.

Ivory Coast, Francophone West Africa’s biggest economy, is the world’s top cocoa grower.

While the bulk of its 1 million cocoa farmers ply their trade legally, Washington-based Mighty Earth estimates about a third of cocoa is grown illegally in protected areas.

Deforestation for cocoa happens in sight of authorities and chocolate traders are aware of it, they said.

Loss of natural forests is problematic because they act as a home for the region’s wildlife and a key weapon against climate change, absorbing carbon dioxide — a major driver of climate change — as they grow.

Available land for new cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast ran out long ago, so farmers have moved into parks and reserves, taking advantage of a decade of political crisis that ended in 2011.

Ivory Coast’s now has about 2.5 million hectares (6 million acres) of natural forest, a fifth of what it had at independence in 1960, according to European Union figures. Most of the losses have been caused by expanding agriculture.

The government has struggled to evict farmers from forest reserves amid accusations in 2013 of human rights abuses by security forces.

Details of the Cocoa and Forests Initiative, which is initially focusing on Ivory Coast and Ghana, will be announced by November’s global climate talks in Bonn.
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More than 50 local and national charities have raised more than $350 million in the nearly three weeks since Hurricane Harvey struck the Texas Gulf Coast, and the disparate groups are trying to decide on priorities while some storm victims still await help.

Distrust of large charities such as the American Red Cross has driven many donors to smaller, local organizations. For instance, Houston Texans football star J.J. Watt has raised more than $30 million for his foundation, an effort he started by posting appeals on social media.

One donor to Watt’s effort, Helen Vasquez, stood outside the Texans’ stadium and said she had seen a Facebook post listing the salaries of executives at top national charities. She gave Watt $20 instead.

“It’s all going to the people itself and not to the corporations, not the higher-ups in the corporations,” Vasquez said.

But most of the money raised for Harvey has gone to the Red Cross, which has raised a least $211 million. The rest went to other organizations, including 40 groups listed by Charity Navigator, as well as dozens of other groups and individual families raising money on do-it-yourself sites such as GoFundMe.

More than $50 million has poured into the local fund set up by Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, the county’s chief administrative official.

Turner and Emmett openly urge donors to give to the local fund and not the Red Cross, saying doing so will ensure the best use of the money.

Emmett has blamed the Red Cross for problems that arose with setting up and running the emergency shelters used by tens of thousands of people who were flooded out of their homes.

The Greater Houston Community Foundation, which the men have asked to administer the fund, is creating a 12-member board and a grant committee to set priorities and distribute donations starting in the next several weeks. The foundation is working with the United Way and dozens of other charities, but so far not with the Red Cross or with Watt, who did not respond to questions sent through a spokesman for the Texans.

David Brady, CEO of the Red Cross of the Texas Gulf Coast, said his group would be “happy to be a part of all conversations” and that the Red Cross would review how it could improve its shelter operations in the future.

“We can’t take the criticisms personally,” he said.

The foundation’s CEO, Stephen Maislin, said it will pay the costs of running the Harvey relief fund on its own, including the credit card fees banks charge for donations.

The charities are still weighing the best ways to use the money and setting up systems to monitor where the money goes. Veterans of other major disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, say coordination between groups is critical to make the most out of every dollar.

Reese May, national director of recovery for the home rebuilding group SBP, said local leaders need to bridge the gaps between the dozens of groups by setting clear goals.

“When there is aggressive leadership, when there are aggressive goals that are publicly set, it plants the flag,” May said. “It gives neighbors the opportunity to connect with one another, saying, ‘Absolutely, we’re going to make it back from this.'”

Among the most critical needs is figuring out housing for thousands of people who are still living in emergency shelters, many of whom are not eligible for federal assistance. Others lost everything in their homes, and some people are living in gutted homes flooded by sewage because they have nowhere else to go.

The people involved in fundraising say they must move quickly and coordinate with each other.

“I’m praying we can stretch it,” said Anna Babin, head of the United Way of Greater Houston, which is already issuing grants to people needing help with rent and lost vehicles and cleaning out flooded homes. “But this is so significant.”

As the Texans played their first game of the season Sunday, around 1,900 evacuees were inside the NRG Center, the convention center across the street from the stadium. Thousands of NFL fans were tailgating in nearby parking lots, and smoke from sausages and chicken on the grill rose in the air.

Estella Martin and several other people said they wanted answers from the groups raising money on their behalf.

“They got enough to put every one of the people that are still here in a home or an apartment and help them out until they get up on their feet,” Martin said. “Instead, they’ve got us here.”
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The Northland area of Columbus, Ohio was booming in the 1960s and 70s. About 65 square kilometers, the area was a shopping and dining destination. Its centerpiece was the Northland Mall on Morse Road.

“You couldn’t get a parking space at the mall at Christmas time,” Dave Cooper, president of the Northland Area Business Association, told Columbusalive.com.

In the early 2000s, the area fell on hard times. Retailers began to desert the mall – Columbus’s oldest – for newer shopping centers and in 2002, Northland Mall closed, ushering the whole Morse Road corridor into a period of increasing crime and vacant storefronts.

The city of Columbus went into action, creating special commissions and offering tax incentives. But when help arrived, it came from an unexpected quarter.

As the old mall was closing, immigrants and refugees were opening up small shops and restaurants along Morse Road. A group of Somali refugees opened Global Mall just five blocks away, offering new space opportunities for startup entrepreneurs. Part shopping center, part community gathering place, Global Mall today hosts all sorts of businesses.

And Global was just the beginning of what has become a corridor of immigrant and refugee businesses along Morse Road.

“Some refugees or some immigrants have great business skills. So they got into the business without help of the government … and they flourished,” says Somali business owner Ahmed O. Haji.  

Saraga Grocery

“I bought ramen noodles and extra hot peppers. I like the fact that there is a big variety from all different places around the world,” says Ron Kosa, a customer at the Saraga International Grocery, which is located in a former Toys R Us building on Morse Road.

Korean immigrant John Sung opened the 5,000 square-meter grocery four years ago.

“We have products from five continents, Africa, Asia, South America, Europe all over the world basically,” Sung says, adding that his 80 employees are similarly from all over the world.

In addition to selling groceries, Saraga provides space for individual merchants, hosting a halal butcher, a Mexican bakery and a Nepali food stand among others.

Jubba Value Center Mall

About two kilometers away from Saraga grocery is Jubba Value Center Mall where Somali refugees and immigrants have small shops and help each other bring in new customers. Columbus has the second largest Somali community in the U.S. after Minneapolis, MN.

“Morse Road is a very strategic location,” says Haji who started the Jubba Travel agency nine years ago. “It’s one of the highest revenue generated ZIP codes in Columbus.  It’s a great location. Morse has very diverse ethnic people that live in this area.”

The influx of refugees and immigrants kept the population of the Northland area from declining in the first years of the new millennium.

From 2007 to 2012, immigrant entrepreneurship rose citywide by 41.5%.  Native born entrepreneurship declined by 1.2 percent during the same time period.

“Based on a recent study, we could account for over 900 businesses that were opened specifically by the refugee community,” said Guadalupe Velasquez, Assistant Director of the Department of Neighborhoods for the city of Columbus. “And they then in turn employ over 23,000 individuals.”

The total contribution of refugees to the city’s economy is $1.6 billion, Velasquez added.

Travel Agency

 “I did not have an incentive move or any advice from the city,” says Haji about opening his travel agency.

“What drove me to start the business was the need for my immigrant people predominantly Somali people who are going back home. And the means of transportation is an airline. So I thought that was a lucrative business to get into.”

Since the president’s executive order limiting travel from six countries, including Somalia, took effect in June, Haji says his business has declined dramatically. But he will keep at it.

“The city is very welcoming. Columbus, I’ve been here for almost 21 years now, and I am not going to go anywhere else.”
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The two recent hurricanes that hit the United States raised inflation and puzzled analysts tracking job losses in Texas and Florida. Experts say the impact on the huge economy is “limited.”

Thursday’s report from the Labor Department says overall unemployment claims declined 14,000 over the past week, after jumping by tens of thousands the previous week in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

Nationwide, 284,000 Americans signed up for unemployment assistance last week, a figure experts say is low enough to show a generally healthy job market.

Experts caution that the jobs data is likely to be “volatile” for a while, as the storms that put many people out of work also closed the government offices where jobless people file claims. PNC Bank chief economist Gus Faucher says claims from Hurricane Irma are likely to “jump” upward in Florida in coming weeks; but, Faucher says despite the storms, the nationwide labor market is “strong.”  Florida is about one-twentieth of the U.S. economy, and the Florida Keys, ravaged by Irma, are just a tiny fraction of the state’s economy.

Gasoline prices have risen and may continue to increase after Hurricane Harvey’s floods and winds damaged and closed oil industry facilities, including nearly one-quarter of U.S. refineries. The lower stocks of gasoline forced buyers to pay higher prices. Refineries are gradually making repairs and resuming operations.

Those higher prices for fuel and a boost in rent costs showed up in the newest assessment of inflation, which showed the Consumer Price Index gaining 1.9 percent over the past year. Inflation and other economic data will be closely examined by top officials of the U.S. central bank as they gather next week to decide whether to reduce efforts to stimulate the economy.

IHS Markit analyst James Bohnaker says Federal Reserve leaders should be “encouraged” by “healthy” gains in prices. He says the Fed may start cutting back stimulus efforts by reducing a massive bond-buying program next week. Bohnaker and other experts say the Fed will probably not ease the other stimulus effort – very low interest rates – until December. 
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A large influx of immigrants and refugees certainly helps boost the population of a region. But they can also have social and economic impacts. The northern part of Columbus, Ohio – an abandoned wasteland in the early 2000s – has been revitalized thanks to the new Americans. VOA’s June Soh takes you to the Morse road corridor where the city’s true entrepreneurial heart is.
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Illicit evasion and a thriving black market continue to mitigate the impact of sanctions intended to deprive North Korea of billions of dollars in revenue and needed components for its nuclear program.

The latest round of United Nations sanctions imposed on North Korea this week for conducting its sixth nuclear test, and the restrictions put in place in August for repeated ballistic missile launches, including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) tests, could potentially have significant impact.

Potential impact

The North Korean gross domestic product (GDP) in 2016 was $28.50 billion, according to the Bank of Korea in Seoul. The August sanctions would cut the GDP by $3 billion by banning coal, iron, lead and seafood export industries. 

The newest restrictions could cost another $800 million by banning textile exports. And reductions in oil and gas imports and limits on worker permits would also cut off needed fuel and funds for North Korea’s weapons programs.

“If fully enforced I think that the amount of hard currency that North Korea would lose would be enough to certainly concern that leadership, because they don’t have very much hard currency and this will cause significant problems for them,” said David Straub, a North Korea analyst with the Sejong Institute.

A significant reduction in hard currency revenue would make it difficult for the military to purchase weapons components and sow discord between leader Kim Jong Un and the elite in the country, whose loyalty is bought to a degree with imported luxury goods.

Evasion tactics

However few expect these measures to be vigorously enforced as the Kim Jong Un government has become adept over the years in evading sanctions, and North Korea’s trading partners, especially China and Russia, have been complicit in permitting illicit transactions to continue despite official support for sanctions.

“Both countries have gotten away for far too long and have faced too few consequences for turning a blind eye to the sanctions busting business activities of their citizens and those of North Korea,” said David Albright, a nuclear proliferation analyst with the Institute for Science and International Security, at a U.S. Congressional hearing Wednesday.

To get around sanctions and avoid detection, ships suspected of illicitly transporting North Korean coal have reportedly switched off their satellite GPS navigation devices when in Korean waters. The U.S. sought U.N. authorization to interdict ships suspected of smuggling banned items, but this measure was dropped to gain Chinese and Russian sanctions support.

North Korea also uses trusted agents and third party companies located in other countries to facilitate prohibited trade.

Anthony Ruggiero, a former U.S. Treasury Department official who is now an analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, described how North Korea and Russia tried to cover up a clandestine oil deal.

“A U.S bank would not process this transaction between sanctioned parties. To avoid this scrutiny the front companies were created in Singapore to obscure the nature of the transaction, allowing almost $7 million in payments for this transfer,” said Ruggiero during his congressional testimony.

According to Bruce Klingner, a former CIA analyst who is now senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, North Korea’s trading system consists of 5,000 companies that are centralized in China and run by a limited number of trusted individuals.

“Although the shell companies can be swiftly changed, the individuals responsible for establishing and managing them have remained often for years,” Klingner told the congressional hearing.

Lax enforcement

While there are reports of Russian smugglers exporting oil and other sanctioned goods to North Korea, 90 percent of all North Korean trade goes through China.

The Chinese say they are implementing sanctions along the border, but they have not been forthcoming in issuing clear restrictions to trading companies, or in reporting how required inspections of all goods crossing the North Korean border are being implemented.

“In recent months at least the Chinese have not even been putting the statistics for oil exports to North Korea in their official records. So we really do need for China to be much more transparent,” said Straub with the Sejong Institute.

This week China reportedly stopped some of its major state-owned banks from providing financial services to new North Korean clients, in what could be a sign of increased sanctions enforcement to prevent any U.S. retaliation.

But sanctions advocates say that ultimately compelling full compliance from China, Russia, and other countries that undermine U.N. sanctions, will require the U.S. to levy secondary sanctions. The administration of President Donald Trump has indicated it will consider secondary sanctions if the U.N. sanctions are not fully implemented.

Banning Chinese companies, and other entities from third party countries that do business with North Korea, from the U.S. financial system could cause real economic pain for all involved, but may be the only way make sanctions effective.
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President Donald Trump has blocked the acquisition of a U.S. computer chip manufacturer by a Chinese company, calling it a threat to national security.

The Chinese-owned Canyon Bridge Fund has sought to take over Oregon-based Lattice Semiconductor Corp.

The U.S. Treasury Department, acting under Trump’s orders, said Wednesday it is prohibiting the deal. It says the president determined that it would put national security at risk and that negotiations would not reduce that risk.

“The national security risk posed by the transaction relates to, among other things, the potential transfer of intellectual property to the foreign acquirer…the importance of semiconductor supply chain integrity to the U.S. government, and the use of Lattice products by the U.S. government.”

Trump acted after both Lattice and Canyon Bridge lobbied the administration hard to allow the deal to go thorough.

China has not yet reacted to the Treasury’s announcement. Trump has vowed to crack down on what he says are unfair Chinese trade practices, including alleged intellectual property theft.

The administration’s perception that China is failing to put enough pressure on North Korea to end its nuclear program has also put a strain in ties between Washington and Beijing.
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As Congress looks into ways to fix the immigration system, often with the goal of safeguarding job opportunities for U.S. workers, at least one immigration organization argues that current federal regulations fail to protect foreign visa holders from job misrepresentation, recruitment fees, exploitation, fraud and discrimination.

Four women who came to the U.S. on temporary visas were part of a panel discussion Tuesday in Washington to raise awareness of a system they said often treats human beings like commodities.

“In the workplace, there were about 80 of us, women, and we had a hard time,” Adareli Hernandez, a former H-2B worker, said in Spanish during a discussion hosted by the Center for Migrant Rights (CDM), a Mexico-based organization with an office in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hernandez, who is from Hidalgo, Mexico, looked for two years before she was finally able to get a H-2B seasonal non-farm work visa to work at a chocolate packing factory in Louisiana.

Inequality in workplace

While men who worked at the factory earned higher wages by carrying and stacking boxes, women were relegated to packing chocolates on assembly lines with no time off for illness.

“We weren’t able to make complaints, because if we did make complaints, we were threatened by the manager. … We were told we didn’t have a right to file complaints, because we didn’t have rights here in the United States,” she said.

But after four seasons as an H-2B visa worker, Hernandez fought for better labor conditions along with 70 colleagues. She said though work conditions improved, the company decided not to rehire her or co-workers.

Hernandez’s testimony is one of the 34 detailed worker stories featured in a CDM report, Engendering Exploitation: Gender Inequality in U.S. Labor Migration Programs.

Though the report focuses on women migrant workers, CDM policy recommendations say, “All temporary labor migration programs should be subjected to the same rules and protection so that unscrupulous employers and recruiters do not use the patchwork of visa regulations to evade liability.”

According to the Economic Policy Institute, about 1.4 million people are recruited to work in the U.S. each year through temporary work visas, including H-1B (specialty occupations), H-2B, J-1 (exchange visitor program) and TN (Canadians and Mexicans in certain occupations under the North American Free Trade Agreement).

The visas may vary, but immigration and labor organizations report that recruited foreign workers face common patterns of abuses.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security cracked down on abuse within the H-2B system, hoping to prevent the exploitation of workers and to ensure U.S. workers’ awareness of available jobs.

Rosa’s story

A licensed veterinarian, who asked to be called only Rosa for fear of retaliation, submitted a statement that was read during CDM’s discussion. Rosa was unable to join the panel because the U.S. government rejected her application for a tourist visa.

“Although the U.S. government had no problem offering me a TN work visa at the employer’s request, it won’t allow me to visit the country as a tourist. Anyway, that’s not going to stop me from sharing my story,” Rosa’s statement said.

Rosa is a former TN visa worker who was hired for an animal scientist position in Wisconsin. She was “thrilled” for the opportunity to work at a place where she would put in practice the skills she acquired as a recent graduate from a top Mexican university.

TN visas were created within NAFTA to allow U.S. employers to hire Canadian and Mexican workers for specialized jobs.

“I was deceived by my employer. They promised me a salary that they failed to pay, a contract they didn’t respect,” Rosa’s statement said.

“The supervisors would yell at us constantly and tell us that our visa was only good for obeying orders. I cleaned animal troughs, unloaded them from trucks. As the only woman, they would also give me jobs they considered ‘women’s work,’ cleaning the bathroom or the kitchen,” she said.

Protecting American workers

Rachel Micah-Jones, CDM’s executive director, said there is a need to ensure workers have basic protections, including the right to understand a contract before entering into an agreement with a U.S. company.

Immigration hard-liners agree about the need to protect visa workers, but they also express concern about the welfare of American workers.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, said though she agrees these visa programs “can be beneficial to certain employees for legitimate purposes,” there is a “big problem” with employers abusing the system as a way to bring in “workers who can be paid less, and who end up replacing American and legal immigrant workers.”

“The solution is not necessarily to end the program, but to reform it and for the government agencies that are responsible for these programs to do a better job of oversight to make sure that they are not abused,” Vaughan told VOA.

Vaughan was scheduled to speak about guest worker visa programs at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that had been scheduled for Wednesday. The hearing was postponed because government officials were focused on hurricane response and recovery efforts after two storms struck in Texas and Florida.
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Pittsburgh, once a dynamo of heavy industry, will soon become home to the United States’ largest urban farm, part of what advocates say is a trend to transform former manufacturing cities into green gardens.

The Hilltop Urban Farm will open in 2019, consisting of 23 acres (9 hectares) of farmland where low-income housing once stood, two miles (three kilometers) from the city center, designers say.

On top of farmland where winter peas and other fresh produce will be grown by local residents and sold in the community, the farm will feature a fruit orchard, a youth farm and skills-building program. Hillside land will eventually have trails.

The farm is believed to be by far the largest nationwide to be located in an urban area, said Aaron Sukenik, who heads the Hilltop Alliance that is coordinating the initiative.

“The land was just kind of sitting there, fenced and looking very post-apocalyptic,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

After Pittsburgh boomed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a center of coal production, steel and manufacturing, it was hit by industrial decline in the 1950s, its population cut by half over the next half century.

Reinventing itself, the metropolis has since regained much of its economic vigor with the health care industry replacing manufacturing as the city’s powerhouse.

But while “all the areas that you can see from downtown really have turned around,” several neighborhoods on the city’s outer ring have yet to see a similar resurgence, said Sukenik.

“It’s those neighborhoods that are the focus of our work,” he said.

Open to local residents, the farm will help bring fresh food to surrounding areas that often lack such options, he said. Pittsburgh has the largest percentage of people residing in communities with “low-supermarket access” for cities of 250,000 to 500,000 people, according to a 2012 report by the U.S. Treasury Department.

And local advocates say much of Pittsburgh’s south side, where the farm will be located, is particularly underserved by supermarkets and other retailers of fresh food.

Rust Belt

The Hilltop Urban Farm embodies a trend in cities across America’s Rust Belt from Detroit to Cleveland and Buffalo where manufacturing has died out, said Heather Mikulas, a farm and food business educator for Penn State Extension, an applied research arm of  Pennsylvania State University.

“You just have blight, just so much blight in Rust Belt cities,” she said.

“So you see the long-standing residents of neighborhoods who are used to trying to find their place in the world looking at this blight and just saying, ‘We can do something different, we can do something better,’ ” said Mikulas, who co-authored a report on the feasibility of the Hilltop Urban Farm project in 2014.

What were once often “guerrilla” operations have morphed into projects working hand in hand with municipal authorities to secure land rights and rezone areas to allow for agriculture, Mikulas said.

A common concern with urban farms is their reliance on grants that eventually dry out, said Stan Ernst, a professor of agribusiness development at Penn State.

The $9.9 million Hilltop Urban Farm is funded by foundations, primarily the Henry L. Hillman Foundation.

“Look for ways that you can operate enough like a business that you can hopefully provide a level of sustainability there,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

No comprehensive national study has yet measured the extent of urban farming in the United States, said Michael Hamm, a professor of sustainable agriculture at Michigan State University.

Globally, city dwellers are farming an area the size of the European Union, a 2014 study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters found.
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Leaders of Cameroon’s indigenous forest peoples say their survival is at risk if they are further deprived of access to the lands that are the source of their livelihoods.

Speaking in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, indigenous representatives said they had experienced increasingly serious violations of their land rights by palm oil and other agro-industries, mining firms and timber concessions, as well as the process of creating protected areas on their ancestral lands.

“This disturbing situation foreshadows a future where we, as indigenous peoples, will no longer have land,” said Hélène Aye Mondo, president of Gbabandi, an organization of more than 50 indigenous Baka and Bagyeli communities. “If we continue to lose our lands and forests, the very survival of our cultures and peoples is at risk.”

At the meeting on Tuesday, forest community leaders signed a joint declaration calling for recognition and respect of their customary land rights, timed to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, of which Cameroon is a signatory.

Denied access to forest

The U.N. declaration says governments must consult indigenous peoples to gain their consent before approving any decisions that affect how their land and resources are used, and they are entitled to redress for any such activities.

Suzanne Ndjele, a member of the Baka ethnic group from the village of Assoumindelé in south Cameroon, said in a written testimony handed out to journalists that her community no longer has access to the forest they depend on for food and medicine.

Ndjele used to work in the forest, hunting and gathering food and other resources with women from her community. But for the past four years she has not been able to enter it.

“Eco-guards came and told us ‘nobody can go into the forest anymore.’ If we continued to enter the forest we were threatened. I went in and was beaten,” she said.

Not enough land

The forest in question was incorporated into the Ngoyla-Mintom Reserve, created in 2014. Access to parts of the forest was restricted and local people were instead given “community forests,” smaller parcels of land which they say are not enough.

The community forest for Assoumindelé is located 10 km (6.2 miles) away from the village, which inhabitants say is not practical for their everyday activities.

Lydie Essissima, an official with Cameroon’s social affairs ministry who attended the meeting, said the government was aware of the problem, and stands by its commitments made in the 2007 U.N. declaration. Cameroon was one of 144 countries that voted in favor of its adoption in 2007.

 
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Gambia is negotiating deals with three private companies to crack down on rampant illegal fishing in its territorial waters, a senior official with the fisheries ministry told Reuters.

Made possible by poor monitoring capacity and, in some cases, corrupt local officials, illegal fishing costs West Africa’s coastal nations about $2.3 billion a year, according to a recent study.

Regional coast guards regularly seize Chinese fishing boats for fishing illegally. An investigation published by marine conservation group Oceana this week found that European vessels had also broken European Union law in West Africa.

“Fighting illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing requires continuous monitoring and surveillance of our waters, and we don’t have the resources to do that,” Bamba Banja, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Fisheries and Water Resources, said late Tuesday.

A former ruler of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, fled the country earlier this year amid accusations of widespread corruption. President Adama Barrow is now seeking to bring order to a sector neglected by the old regime.

Despite its narrow coastline, Gambia possesses particularly rich waters, caused by the merging of fresh water from the Gambia River with the Atlantic Ocean.

Banja said the government was in talks with Dutch shipbuilding group Damen and two other companies, from the United States and South Africa, to provide monitoring and surveillance of Gambia’s exclusive economic zone.

“The South African and Dutch companies will provide patrol boats while the American company is for aerial surveillance to complement the patrol boats,” he said.

A spokesman for the Damen Group said it would not comment on negotiations.

Banja said the names of the two other companies would be announced following talks to complete the deal next month.

Operations are expected to begin in January.

He added Gambia was also seeking to reactivate a fishing agreement with the EU, which would probably include support for local monitoring. An existing access agreement is considered dormant because its requirements are not being met. That means EU member states cannot authorize their vessels to fish there.

Oceana’s researchers nevertheless found that vessels from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece illegally spent nearly 32,000 hours in Gambian waters from April 2012 to August 2015.

Banja said the vessels also appeared to be violating a prohibition on industrial fishing enacted under Jammeh. While the ban did little to curb illegal activity, it was only lifted in March.
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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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