The governor of Puerto Rico, the U.S. territory that was devastated by a hurricane a month ago, called Sunday for the immediate cancellation of a contract to restore electrical power to the Caribbean island as questions grow about the small company that was awarded the work.

Governor Ricardo Rossello said the board of the island’s power company should rescind the $300 million pact with Whitefish Energy Holdings, an upstart repair company in Montana, a western U.S. state, even though just days ago he defended the contract. The island awarded the contract without a normal public bidding process that would have allowed other companies to compete for the work.

He said the contract with Whitefish Energy had become a distraction after critics in the electric power industry, Congress and the Federal Emergency Management Agency raised questions.

Rossello said that at least $8 million has been paid to Whitefish so far, but “there cannot be any kind of distraction that alters the commitment to restore electrical power as soon as possible in Puerto Rico.”

He asked that power crews from New York and Florida be dispatched to help restore power.

Some Democratic lawmakers in Washington questioned what influence the administration of President Donald Trump might have played in the awarding of the contract. Whitefish is based in the Montana town of the same name, which also is the hometown of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.

Democratic Congressman Raul Grijalva of Arizona said, “Congress needs to understand why the Whitefish contract was awarded and whether other, more cost-effective options were available.” Some critics of the deal with the for-profit company say the island should have opted to use a mutual-aid network of public utilities that usually are called on for massive repair work after natural disasters.

The Department of Homeland Security says its has started an investigation of the awarding of the contract and will look for any “inappropriate relationships.”

The Associated Press obtained Whitefish’s contract, which called for payments of $20,277 an hour for a heavy lift Chinook helicopter, $650 an hour for a large crane truck, $322 an hour for a foreman of a power line crew, $319 an hour for a journeyman lineman and $286 an hour for a mechanic. Each worker also gets a daily allowance of $80 for food, $332 for a hotel room and $1,000 for each flight to or from the U.S. mainland.

Whitefish, which had just two employees when it won the contract, but since hired more than 300, had started work on restoring electrical power to the island, where only about 30 percent of the island’s 3.7 million residents have had power since Hurricane Maria ravaged the territory and decimated its electrical grid system.

Rossello has said he hopes the island will have most of its power grid back in operation by the end of the year, but if bidding is opened for the repairs that could push back restoration of power.
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The Education Department is considering only partially forgiving federal loans for students defrauded by for-profit colleges, The Associated Press has learned, abandoning the Obama administration’s policy of fully erasing that debt.

Under President Barack Obama, tens of thousands of students deceived by now-defunct for-profit schools had more than $550 million in such loans canceled completely.

But President Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, is working on a plan that could grant such students only partial relief, according to department officials who were not authorized to publicly comment on the issue and spoke on condition of anonymity. The department may look at the average earnings of students in similar programs and schools to determine how much debt to wipe away.

Hints of new approach

If DeVos goes ahead, the change could leave many students scrambling after expecting full loan forgiveness, based on the previous administration’s track record. It was not immediately clear how many students might be affected.

A department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

But the Trump team has given hints of a new approach.

In August, the department extended its contract with a staffing agency to speed up the processing of a backlog of loan forgiveness claims. In the procurement notice, the department said that “policy changes may necessitate certain claims already processed be revisited to assess other attributes.” The department would not further clarify the meaning of that notice.

Advocates: unjustified, unfair

DeVos’ review prompted an outcry from student loan advocates, who said the idea of giving defrauded students only partial loan relief was unjustified and unfair because many of their classmates had already gotten full loan cancellation. Critics say the Trump administration, which has ties to the for-profit sector, is looking out for industry interests.

Earlier this year, Trump paid $25 million to settle charges his Trump University misled students.

“Anything other than full cancellation is not a valid outcome,” said Eileen Connor, a litigator at Harvard University’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which has represented hundreds of defrauded students of the now-shuttered Corinthian Colleges. “The nature of the wrong that was done to them, the harm is even bigger than the loans that they have.”

“Even more importantly, it is completely unfair that a happenstance of timing is going to mean that one student who’s been defrauded is going to have full cancellation and the next is not,” Connor said.

1990s regulation

A federal regulation known as borrower defense allows students at for-profit colleges and other vocational programs to have their loans forgiven if it is determined that the students were defrauded by the schools. That rule dates to the early 1990s. But it was little used until the demise of Corinthian and ITT for-profit chains in recent years caused tens of thousands of students to request that the government cancel their loans.

In the last few months of the Obama administration, the Education Department updated the rule to add protections for students, shift more financial responsibility onto the schools and prevent schools from having students sign away their right to sue a school.

That change was set to take effect in July, but DeVos has frozen it and is working on a new version. She argued that the Obama regulation was too broad and could cancel the loans of some students without a sound basis.

65,000 claims waiting

DeVos has come under criticism for delaying consideration of more than 65,000 applications for loan forgiveness under the borrower defense rule. The agency hasn’t approved a single claim since DeVos took office in February.

Jennifer Wang, an expert with the Institute of College Access and Success, said the Obama administration was providing full loan cancellations to students.

“It would be totally different from what was happening under the last administration,” Wang said. “It’s not equitable; it’s not fair for students. If she provides partial relief, it’s that she only cares what’s fair for schools and not students.”

Abby Shafroth, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said the agency could be faced with lawsuits, especially from Corinthian students, whose classmates had received full forgiveness.
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Sonoma County officials said Saturday that it would take at least months and most likely years to fully recover from devastating wildfires that ripped through Northern California this month, destroying at least 8,900 structures and killing 42 people.

“We don’t control these things, and it makes you realize how small you are in the world when something like this happens,” Sheriff Rob Giordano said during a memorial ceremony honoring those who died. “I don’t think we understand the level at which it is going to impact lives, and the community will be different.”

The memorial service came nearly three weeks after the fires erupted October 8. Overall, they forced about 100,000 people to evacuate.

U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and five members of Congress attended the service in Santa Rosa, one of the hardest-hit cities, as part of a day of touring the devastated areas and meeting with elected officials.

“I can’t think of anything that surpasses the opportunity to be with all of you today,” Pelosi said before presenting a flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol to commemorate the fire victims.

Pelosi was joined by U.S. Representative Mike Thompson, who represents the city of Santa Rosa, and Representatives Jared Huffman, Anna Eshoo, Zoe Lofgren and Mark DeSaulnier.

Red tape

The group toured a destroyed health center and met with county and federal officials to ask how Congress could help. Local officials urged them to cut red tape that makes it harder to get temporary housing and other needed resources for people who lost their homes.

Officials have estimated that losses will top $1 billion, but they haven’t provided a hard number.

Cleanup could last into early 2018, preventing many homeowners from rebuilding until then, state officials said this week.

The wildfires rank as the deadliest series of fires in California history.

President Donald Trump approved Governor Jerry Brown’s requests for federal disaster relief. California’s Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris are backing legislation to get federal money out the door quicker to help with firefighting.

Harris, Feinstein and Brown visited the fire zone two weeks ago.
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Washington has given a list of 75 Afghan militants to Islamabad in its bid to increase pressure on Pakistan to act against terror groups operating from that country.

“The Haqqani network is on the top of the list, but none of the militants are Pakistanis,” Pakistan Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif told lawmakers on Wednesday, referring to the list.

The list is part of a series of efforts by Washington to move toward the implementation of its new South Asia strategy, announced by President Donald Trump in August, in which countries were put on notice not to tolerate within their borders militant safe havens, which terror groups use to disrupt regional security.

The list of militants was reportedly handed over to Pakistani civil and military leaders by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who, on a trip to the Middle East and South Asia, visited Islamabad on Tuesday to urge Pakistan to deny safe havens to militant groups.

Tillerson on Pakistan

Tillerson told reporters at a news conference in Geneva, the last stop of his five-day, six-nation trip, that he’d conveyed a very clear message to Pakistan.

“Here’s what we need for Pakistan to do. We are asking you to do this; we are not demanding anything. You are a sovereign country. You’ll decide what you want to do, but understand this is what we think is necessary,” Tillerson said. “And if you don’t want to do that, don’t feel you can do it, we’ll adjust our tactics and our strategies to achieve the same objective a different way.”

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif, however, said many of the Taliban leaders whose names were on the list were now operating as “shadow governors” in neighboring Afghanistan, or were no longer alive.

Kabul and Washington have not yet commented on Asif’s remarks. U.S. and Afghan officials have in the past indicated that Afghan Taliban members were enjoying safe havens in Pakistan.

The Haqqani network, a U.S.-designated terrorist group that has been blamed for numerous deadly attacks inside Afghanistan against the U.S.-led NATO forces and the Afghan government, is reportedly based in Miram Shah, a town in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in northern Pakistan.

Concrete steps

While Tillerson’s recent move was significant — it was one of the first concrete indications that the Trump administration is taking a tougher line on Pakistan to get it to crack down more robustly on terror — the real significance will depend on how Pakistan complies, analysts said.

“There is good reason to believe that Pakistan will act on this request to an extent. It will want to convince Washington that it is ready to cooperate,” Michael Kugelman, a Pakistan analyst at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, told VOA.

“That said, there is also good reason to believe that this list contains some terrorists that Pakistan won’t want to go after, particularly high-value Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network leaders that serve as useful assets to the Pakistani security establishment,” Kugelman added.

The significance of Tillerson’s gesture also depends on how the U.S. will respond if Pakistan does not deliver, he said.

“Would the U.S. try to go after these terrorists with drone strikes? Or might it even send commandos into Pakistan to apprehend them?” Kugelman said.

Tillerson, however, said the U.S. cares more about Pakistan’s actions than the country’s rhetoric.

“We put our expectations forward in no uncertain terms. We’re going to chart our course consistent with what Pakistan not just says they do, but what they actually do,” Tillerson said, adding that he had “frank and candid” discussions with leaders in Pakistan.

Peace talks

Following his meeting with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and other senior Afghan government officials at Bagram Air Base, close to Kabul, Tillerson said the U.S. would be in Afghanistan for as long as it took and that the Taliban would not achieve a military victory.

“And there are, we believe, moderate voices among the Taliban, voices that do not want to continue to fight forever,” Tillerson said in Afghanistan. “There’s a place for them in the government if they are ready to come, renouncing terrorism, renouncing violence and being committed to a stable, prosperous Afghanistan.”

Pakistan is viewed by many as an influential facilitator in the Afghan peace process.

Following Tillerson’s departure from Pakistan, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad issued a statement highlighting U.S. expectations from Pakistan to help end the violence in Afghanistan.

“The secretary reiterated President Trump’s message that Pakistan must increase its efforts to eradicate militants and terrorists operating within the country,” the statement read. “To address those concerns, the secretary outlined the United States’ new South Asia Strategy and the vital role that Pakistan can play in working with the United States and others to facilitate a peace process in Afghanistan.”

Pakistan’s Asif, however, said his country’s influence on the Afghan Taliban had lately diminished and that the group had found “new sponsors” in the region, a suggestion that the insurgent group has established ties to Iran and Russia.
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