YCLOAK

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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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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The White House’s decision this week to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), carries enormous repercussions for the nearly 800,000 beneficiaries: The undocumented young people who were brought to the United States as children.

But the cost, which is difficult to quantify for a workforce faced with the real possibility of losing their job and forced to leave the country, is evident to employers, who largely view both the moral and economic implications of ending the program as intertwined.

“Losing [the economic contributions of DACA recipients] is a direct cost,” said Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of Partnership for New York City, which represents the city’s business leadership. She said the state’s DACA workforce contributes several billion dollars a year to the local economy.

WATCH: DACA Repeal to Cost U.S. Businesses, Economy Billions

“It’s also a signal to the rest of the world that somehow America is no longer a place that is embracing talent and hard work and the energy of immigrants,” Wylde told VOA. “That message has a ripple effect in terms of hurting recruitment efforts by our major companies, because they need talent — multilingual talent — from all over the world.”

Employers bear the brunt

To date, more than 400 U.S. entrepreneur and business leaders have signed an open letter that calls on U.S. President Donald Trump and Congress to preserve DACA and provide a permanent solution that ensures recipients’ ability to continue working legally in the country without risk of deportation.

“Our economy would lose $460.3 billion from the national GDP and $24.6 billion in Social Security and Medicare tax contributions,” the letter reads, referencing research conducted by the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress, over a 10-year period.

The conservative-leaning CATO Institute places that figure at $280 billion.

​Lose-lose

Following the announcement of DACA’s repeal, the White House suggested unemployed American workers might somehow benefit, based solely on the age of the workforce.

“There are over 4 million unemployed Americans in the same age group as those that are DACA recipients,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters.

“Over 950,000 of those are African-Americans in the same age group; over 870,000 unemployed Hispanics in the same age group. Those are large groups of people that are unemployed that could possibly have those jobs,” Sanders said.

But economists and immigration analysts find fault with Sanders’ argument: The native-born unemployed population is not a perfect substitute for the DACA workforce, and the displacement of one worker for another does not increase productivity.

Under the repeal of DACA, CATO estimated employers would incur $6.3 billion in turnover costs, a figure that includes the recruiting, hiring and training of 720,000 new employees in often highly skilled positions. Thirty-six percent of DACA recipients 25 and older hold a bachelor’s or advanced degree.

Many DACA recipients “are highly educated and working in positions such as health care and education, where they are more highly paid and therefore more productive,” said David Bier, immigration policy analyst at CATO Institute. “[Those are] the industries where you’re going to see a greater impact as a result of this forced turnover caused by the DACA repeal.”

“Contracting the labor force, kicking people out of the country, will not create jobs. It will just shrink the overall size of the economy,” Bier said.

Over the long term, Wylde said, failing to find a permanent solution for DACA workers would inhibit U.S. businesses’ ability to compete.

“We want to be at the forefront of the attraction and support of our talent,” she said. “We don’t want to be deporting them.”
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The White House’s decision to repeal DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, carries enormous repercussions for the nearly 800,000 beneficiaries who arrived in the U.S. as children. Over the next two years, more than 700,000 employed recipients will find themselves without a job. And for their employers, laying off a qualified workforce carries not only moral implications, but billions in lost revenue and an overall reduction in U.S. economic growth. VOA’s Ramon Taylor reports.
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Two back-to-back storms will have a significant impact on U.S. growth and productivity, according to economists tracking the impact of Hurricanes Harvey in Texas, and Irma — expected to make landfall in Florida this weekend. Despite the potential catastrophic loss in lives and capital, economists who spoke with VOA say the damage to the U.S. economy is likely to be short-lived. Mil Arcega has more.
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China’s producer price inflation accelerated more than expected to a four-month high in August, fueled by strong gains in raw materials prices and pointing to strong, sustained growth for both factory profits and the economy.

The producer price index (PPI) rose 6.3 percent in August from a year earlier, from 5.5 percent in July, the National Bureau of Statistics said Saturday.

Analysts polled by Reuters had expected the August producer price inflation rate would edge up to 5.6 percent, its first pickup in six months.

Strong industrial profits

China’s industrial firms have been posting their strongest profits in years thanks to a government-led construction boom that has fueled demand and prices for everything from cement to steel.

The country’s strong appetite for resources such as iron ore has helped fuel a reflationary pulse in the manufacturing sector worldwide.

But analysts continue to maintain that factory-gate prices will lose steam eventually as the government continues to clamp down on riskier types of financing, which is slowly pushing consumer and corporate borrowing costs higher.

China’s commodities futures markets have rallied hard this year and continued to surge through in August. Strong restocking demand and government pledges to shut inefficient and highly polluting mines and plants have underscored concerns over tight supply heading into winter.

Steel industry expands

Activity in China’s steel industry expanded in August at the fastest pace since April 2016, reflecting high levels of production and low inventory.

With the industrial sector in high gear, China’s economy grew by a faster-than-expected 6.9 percent in the first half of this year, turbo-charged by heavy government spending and massive bank lending last year.

That momentum plus strong August readings so far should allow Beijing to easily meet or beat its full-year growth target of 6.5 percent.

Indeed, relatively steady growth through the rest of the year would see the world’s second-largest economy accelerate for the first time in seven years. Last’s years pace of 6.7 percent was the slowest in 26 years.

China’s consumer inflation rate also rose more than expected to a seven-month high of 1.8 percent in August, the bureau said, the first time it has accelerated in three months.

The consumer price index (CPI) had been expected to rise 1.6 percent on-year compared with an increase of 1.4 percent in July.

Food prices, the biggest component of the consumer price index (CPI), fell 0.2 percent from a year earlier.

Nonfood price inflation quickened to 2.3 percent in August from 2 percent in July. Analysts had expected the CPI to rise 1.6 percent from 1.4 percent in July but remain well within the central bank’s comfort zone.
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Aid groups have criticized efforts by European leaders to stem the flow of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, arguing Europe’s economy needs more workers. One nongovernmental organization in Italy has been trying to fill the gap by training African migrants to work as beekeepers and then pairing them with local honey producers in need of employees. Ricci Shryock reports for VOA from Alessandria, Italy.
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As women pound the pavements of Abidjan selling their wares, direct manic traffic in blue police uniforms and host popular television shows, it’s hard to believe Ivory Coast has one of the world’s widest gender gaps.

With stark inequalities in school, as well as in access to healthcare and jobs, the United Nations ranks French-speaking West Africa’s largest economy 155 out of 159 countries when it comes to gender equity.

“Ivorian women get by because we have strength,” said Animata Touré, before trying to cajole passersby into buying her fruit in the city’s business district Plateau.

“[Life] is a bit hard,” she acknowledged.

The 46-year-old has scraped by as a hawker all her life, shelving her dream of opening a small restaurant as unrealistic.

“Who is going to give me the means to do that?”

Ivorian women earn on average half as much as men, the World Bank says, largely because they are less educated, spend several hours a day cooking and caring for children, and lack access to finance, equipment and commercial networks.

Supporting would-be female entrepreneurs, like Touré, could generate at least $6 billion, or a third of the country’s current revenues, the Bank says.

“We have huge potential here,” said Ahmed Diomande, an official in the trade ministry, describing the World Bank’s latest data as an “alarm bell.”

“The challenge is convincing men that they have a vested interest in gender parity,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at a women’s rights conference in Abidjan.

The government is working to reduce the gender gap by using a $9 million loan from Morocco to fund small- and medium-sized businesses run by women entrepreneurs, he said.

It is also backing a private-sector initiative to lift women out of the informal sector by training them as grocery store managers in more than a dozen shops in Abidjan.

As Ivory Coast’s vast, informal economy is largely run by women, authorities and business leaders are keen to help them make the leap to better-paying, regulated businesses with training and access to credit.

“Economic power is in women’s hands,” said Salimata Porquet, a former politician who fought successfully for gender equality at work to be included in Ivory Coast’s 2016 constitution.

Books for Boys

Ivory Coast needs to get more girls into school and provide them with role models across the board, from business to politics, activists say, as reducing gender inequality has proven key to the success of many emerging nations.

Discrimination starts young in Ivory Coast, where only 33 percent of women are literate compared to 53 percent of men – a gap that has widened since the early 1980s, the bank says.

Unlike most African nations, Ivory Coast does not have an equal number of boys and girls in primary school.

Many poor parents educate their boys, rather than girls, as they believe the sons will get better jobs and provide for them.

Girls, meanwhile, often become married mothers in their teens.

“The more we see women… in a field that we like, the more we have young girls trying to follow that path,” said Tchonté Silué, 23, a female blogger who runs a children’s library in Abidjan to encourage youngsters to read.

She tries to inspire Ivorian girls by sharing her story as a young woman who earned a master’s degree in the United States.

Activists say women also need to support each other as they advance in business and politics.

“If we’re able to share our experiences, that can inspire each woman to do her part,” said Marie-Thérèse Boua N’Guessan, who runs a publication about women’s leadership.
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