President Donald Trump spoke with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Friday to discuss the ongoing feud between Qatar and several Arab states, a conflict that some are calling the worst Gulf Arab crisis in years.

Trump and Erdogan talked by phone to discuss how to resolve the dispute “while ensuring all countries work together to stop terrorist funding and to combat extremist ideology,” the White House said in a statement.

Turkey has been a supporter of Qatar, whose ties with some of its Gulf and Arab neighbors were severed after Qatar was accused of funding terrorism and fomenting regional instability. Qatar denies the accusations. Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates cut ties with Qatar.
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President Donald Trump’s modified travel ban has been implemented with little immediate protest as immigration lawyers gathered at U.S. airports to aid travelers from six affected countries.

The U.S. activated the new rules Thursday evening, requiring visa applicants from six majority-Muslim nations to have a “bona fide” relationship with a family member or business in the U.S. to be admitted into the country.

Before the rollout, senior administration officials explained how consular officials should proceed with the visa applications for people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Anyone in transit to the U.S. with travel scheduled before July 6 will be allowed to enter. Those with travel booked after that date will be addressed “later,” according to senior administration officials.

Previously scheduled visa application appointments will not be canceled, administration officials said, but all new applicants will have to prove their bona fide relationship to a family member or business in the U.S. in addition to passing traditional screening.

Acceptable close family relationships include a parent, spouse, child, adult son or daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law or sibling who already is in the United States.

Relationships that do not meet the requirement include grandparent, grandchild, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, cousin, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, fiance or other extended family. The officials said these distinctions were based on those included in the Immigration and Naturalization Act.

First court suit

Late Thursday, the Trump administration added fiance to the acceptable list after Hawaii filed an emergency motion in federal court, asking a judge to clarify that the ban can’t be enforced against relatives, including fiances, not mentioned in the administration’s guidelines.

U.S. District Court Judge Derrick Watson ordered the Justice Department to respond by Monday and gave Hawaii until July 6 for a rebuttal.

“I think the Supreme Court actually laid it out very clearly,” New York Immigration Coalition Director of Political Engagement Murad Awawdeh told VOA. “A bona fide relationship is anyone who has a relationship with anyone in the United States or an American entity. And for the department of state to come out with such a new version of what that word actually means, it is kind of disheartening.”

He added that the Trump administration is trying to “redefine what family means.”

Awawdeh spoke Thursday at an anti-travel ban protest of about 150 people in New York’s Washington Square.

Also at the protest was Yemeni American Widad Hassan, who says that choosing between family and country is nothing new. Her sister-in-law and newborn nephew are in Yemen, while her brother is in the U.S., unable to reunite with his family.

“Do they leave to join their family in Yemen or do they stay here? So, that is pretty much how the ban has impacted us,” said Hassan, adding that the battle is a recurring one. “It is just mentally and emotionally draining, especially when you have family members who are being directly impacted by it.”

“Hey hey! Ho ho! Syrian refugees have got to go!” shouted an older white man, hoisting a black-and-white “Keep Syrians Out” poster outside a #NoMuslimBanEver Emergency Town Hall in New York.

Travel ban supporter Pauline Pujol told VOA, “I think Donald Trump is 100% correct. He is protecting the country. A president is supposed to protect the country; there is nothing racist about it. It’s about security.”

Refugee numbers

A 120-day ban on refugees and yearly cap of 50,000 total refugees coming to the United States also went into effect Thursday evening; however, any refugee who can prove a relationship to a family member in the U.S. may be allowed entry.

Senior administration officials said 49,009 refugees had been admitted to the U.S. in fiscal year 2017 as of Wednesday night, nearing the cap three-quarters of the way through the fiscal year that begins in October. But the cap is likely to be exceeded as additional refugees are accepted on the basis of family ties. Officials said about half of refugees admitted to the U.S. have family in the country.

The Supreme Court partially reinstated the president’s executive order limiting travel after it was halted by two lower courts. The high court will hold its own hearing on the legal challenges in October.

Trump says the order is necessary to protect national security, with the entry freezes meant to give the government time to strengthen vetting procedures.
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The U.S. House of Representatives took the first steps Thursday toward fulfilling two key Trump campaign promises: strengthening penalties on undocumented immigrants who return to the U.S. after being deported and cutting federal funds to so-called sanctuary cities – those that choose not to work with immigration agents. VOA’s congressional reporter Katherine Gypson looks at what that will mean for grieving families and for undocumented immigrants across the country.
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“Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski said Friday that President Donald Trump lied about their December encounter in a tweet and that his “unhealthy obsession” with their program doesn’t serve his mental health or the country well.

The two MSNBC personalities postponed a vacation in order to respond to Trump’s tweet, which drew broad condemnation a day earlier because he called Brzezinski  “crazy” and said she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when he saw them at his Florida estate.

 

“It’s been fascinating and frightening and really sad for our country,” Brzezinski said on their program.

 

“We’re OK,” said Scarborough, her co-host and fiance. “The country’s not.”

 

Trump tweeted Friday that he watched “Morning Joe” for the first time in a long time. “Bad show,” he wrote.

The hosts, who also co-bylined a column that was posted on The Washington Post’s website on Friday, said they had known Trump for more than a decade and have “fond memories” of their relationship, but that he’s changed in the past two years. They were at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida shortly before the New Year in December to encourage Trump to give them an interview.

Brzezinski, who said she’s alarmed at how the president deals with women who disagree with him, said she believed her teasing about a Post story about fake Time magazine covers with Trump’s face hanging at his golf facilities is what precipitated the latest Twitter attack.

 

“It is unbelievably alarming that this president is so easily played, he is easily played by a cable news host,” she said. “What does that say to our allies? What does that say to our enemies?”

 

They said Trump was lying about Brzezinski having a face-lift, although “she did have a little skin under her chin tweaked.”

 

Scarborough said that the National Enquirer had been working on a story about him and Brzezinski and that he was told by White House aides that if he called Trump and apologized for his show’s coverage, the story would go away. He said he refused and the story ran.

 

Trump, in his Friday tweet, directly contradicted that claim. “He called me to stop a National Enquirer article,” Trump wrote. “I said no!”

 

A recent New Yorker magazine article detailed a close relationship between Trump and David Pecker, chief executive of the Enquirer’s parent company, and how the supermarket tabloid has lauded Trump and printed damaging articles about his political opponents.

 

“Morning Joe” and Trump have had a tortured relationship. The hosts were criticized by some for being too close to Trump during the campaign and giving his candidacy an early boost, but have turned sharply against him. Brzezinski in recent weeks has wondered whether Trump was mentally ill and said the country under his presidency “does feel like a developing dictatorship.”

 

The hosts said that they’ve noticed a change in Trump’s behavior over the past few years that left them neither shocked nor insulted by the Thursday tweet.

 

“The guy who is in the White House now is not the guy we know,” Scarborough said.

 

Trump on Thursday had launched a crude Twitter attack on the brains, looks and temperament of Brzezinski, drawing bipartisan howls of outrage and leaving fellow Republicans beseeching him: Stop, please just stop.

 

Trump’s tweets revived concerns about his views of women in a city where civility already is in short supply and he is struggling for any support he can get for his proposals on health care, immigration and other controversial issues.

 

“I heard poorly rated (at)Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore),” Trump tweeted to his nearly 33 million followers Thursday morning. “Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

 

The tweets served to unite Democrats and Republicans for once in a chorus of protest that amounted to perhaps the loudest outcry since Trump took office.

 

“Obviously I don’t see that as an appropriate comment,” said Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called Trump’s tweets, “blatantly sexist.” The president, she added, “happens to disrespect women … it’s sad.”

 

In television interviews Friday, Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Trump, sent conflicting messages about whether Trump was justified in his tweet. She said he had the right to fight back when attacked by critics. But when pressed on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” she said: “I didn’t say I endorsed his attacks; I never said that. Bottom line, I endorse his ability to connect on social media with Americans.”

 

Trump’s allies cast his outburst as positive, an example of his refusal to be bullied.

 

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president was “pushing back against people who have attacked him day after day after day. Where is the outrage on that?”

 

“The American people elected a fighter; they didn’t elect somebody to sit back and do nothing,” she added.

 

On the usually friendly Fox News Channel Thursday night, hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity did not defend the president’s tweet but criticized the media reaction. “Washington melts down over Trump tweet,” read the onscreen chyron during Carlson’s show.

 

 

 

 
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The State Department has approved arms sales to Taiwan worth a total of $1.4 billion, the first such deal with the self-governing island since President Donald Trump took office, officials said Thursday.

The sale will anger China, which regards Taiwan as part of its territory. It comes at a delicate time for relations between Washington and Beijing over efforts to rein in nuclear-armed North Korea.

The sale to Taiwan comprises seven items, including technical support for early warning radar, anti-radiation missiles, torpedoes and components for SM-2 missiles, according to a U.S. official who requested anonymity to discuss the details before they were formally announced.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the Trump administration had notified Congress of its intent to approve seven proposed deals now valued at around $1.42 billion. Nauert said the approvals did not violate the Taiwan Relations Act that governs U.S. contacts with the island.

“It shows, we believe, our support for Taiwan’s ability to maintain a sufficient self-defense policy,” Nauert said. “There’s no change, I should point out, to our ‘one-China policy.”‘

Lawmakers, which are generally strongly supportive of such sales, have 30 days to object. The U.S. is legally obligated to sell weapons to Taiwan for its self-defense.

The U.S. official said the sales represented upgrades, converting existing systems from analog to digital.

The last U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, worth $1.8 billion, were announced in December 2015. They included two decommissioned U.S. Navy frigates, anti-tank missiles, amphibious assault vehicles and Stinger surface-to-air missiles, and was the first sale for four years.

China objected strongly, but it did not notably set back U.S.-China relations and military ties, which has happened after past arms sales to Taiwan.

However, relations across the Taiwan Strait have deteriorated since then, as Taiwan last year elected a leader from an independence-leaning party, Tsai Ing-wen. China has increased diplomatic pressure, cut off its contacts with the island’s government and discouraged travel there by Chinese tourists.
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Poor and southern U.S. counties will get hit hardest by global warming, according to a first-of-its-kind detailed projection of potential climate change effects at the local level.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, calculates probable economic harms and benefits for the more than 3,100 counties in the United States under different possible scenarios for worldwide emissions of heat-trapping gases. It looks at agriculture, energy costs, labor costs, coastal damage from rising seas, crime and deaths, then estimates the effect on average local income by the end of the century.

Researchers computed the possible effects of 15 types of impacts for each county across 29,000 simulations.

“The south gets hammered and the north can actually benefit,” said study lead author Solomon Hsiang, a University of California economist. “The south gets hammered primarily because it’s super-hot already. It just so happens that the south is also poorer.”

The southern part of the nation’s heartland — such as Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky and southern Illinois — also feels the heat hard, he said. Michigan, Minnesota, the far northeast, the northwest and mountainous areas benefit the most.

Counties hit hardest

The county hit hardest if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated is tiny and impoverished Union County in Florida, where median income would take a 28 percent hit. And among counties with at least 500,000 people, Polk County in central Florida would suffer the most, with damages of more than 17 percent of income.

Seven of the 10 counties with the highest percentage of projected county income losses from climate change are in Florida, along with two in Texas and one in Georgia. Half of these are among the poorest counties in the country. 

Five of the 10 counties that would benefit the most from global warming are in Michigan. The others are in Alaska, Colorado, Nevada and the mountainous region of North Carolina. Mineral County in Nevada would see a 13 percent increase in income, while Tacoma, Washington’s Pierce County would benefit by about 2 percent, the most among counties with a population of more than 500,000.

“You’re going to see this transfer of wealth from the southeast to the parts of the country that are less exposed to risk,” said study co-author Robert Kopp, a Rutgers University climate scientist. “On average both in this country and on this planet just poorer people are in hotter areas.”

The whole nation’s gross domestic product would shrink by 0.7 percent for every degree Fahrenheit temperatures go up, the study calculates, but that masks just how uneven the damage could be. On average, the poorest counties would suffer a drop of 13.1 percent of income if carbon pollution continues unabated, while the richest counties would fall 1.1 percent.

Rise in fatalities

Economists and scientists who specialize in climate and disasters praised the study as groundbreaking.

“This is the most comprehensive, the most detailed information to date,” said University of Illinois finance professor Donald Fullerton, who wasn’t part of the study. “Nobody had ever done anything like this.”

The biggest economic damage comes from an increase in deaths. In the early stages of warming, overall deaths fall because the number of deaths from extreme cold falls fast. But as the world warms further, the increase in deaths from heat rises faster and results in more deaths overall by the end of the century.

Fullerton said the one place where he felt the study could overstate costs is in these deaths because it uses the same government-generated dollar value for each life — $7.9 million per person — when most of the people who die in temperature-related deaths are older and some economists prefer valuing deaths differently by age.

The study looks at production of four different crops — soy, wheat, corn and cotton. Much of the Midwest could be hit “with the type of productivity losses we saw during the Dust Bowl,” Hsiang said.

The study also examines two types of crime data: property and violent crime. Previous studies have found a direct and strong correlation between higher temperatures and higher rates of violent crime such as assault, rape and murder, Hsiang said.

Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann called it “a fascinating and ambitious study.” But because many extreme weather factors weren’t or can’t yet be calculated, he said the study “can at best only provide a very lower limit on the extent of damages likely to result from projected climate changes.”
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