Talks to update the North American Free Trade Agreement appeared to be in danger of grinding toward a stalemate amid complaints of U.S. negotiators’ inflexibility, people familiar with the process said on Sunday.

The United States, Canada and Mexico are holding the fifth of seven planned rounds of talks to modernize NAFTA, which U.S. President Donald Trump blames for job losses and big trade deficits for his country.

Time is running short to reach a deal before the March 2018 start of Mexico’s presidential elections, and lack of progress in the current round could put the schedule at risk.

“The talks are really not going anywhere,” Jerry Dias, president of Unifor, the largest Canadian private-sector union, told reporters after meeting with Canada’s chief negotiator on Sunday. “As long as the United States is taking the position they are, this is a colossal waste of time,” said Dias, who is advising the government and regularly meets the Canadian team.

Hanging over the negotiations is the very real threat that Trump could make good on a threat to scrap NAFTA.

Canada and Mexico object to a number of demands the U.S. side unveiled during the fourth round last month, including for a five-year sunset clause that would force frequent renegotiation of the trade pact, far more stringent automotive content rules and radical changes to dispute settlement mechanisms.

Calls for greater US flexibility

“Our internal view as of this morning is that if any progress is to be made, the United States needs to show some flexibility and a willingness to do a deal,” said a Canadian source with knowledge of the talks.

“We are seeing no signs of flexibility now,” added the source, who requested anonymity given the sensitivity of the situation. However, a NAFTA country official familiar with the talks said Canada had not yet submitted any counterproposals to the U.S. demands.

Dias said the United States was showing some signs of flexibility over its sunset clause proposal after Mexican officials floated a plan for a “rigorous evaluation” of the trade pact, but without an automatic expiration.

U.S. negotiating objectives that were updated on Friday appeared to accommodate the Mexican proposal, saying the revised NAFTA should “provide a mechanism for ensuring that the Parties assess the benefits of the Agreement on a periodic basis.”

Canada and Mexico are also unhappy about U.S. demands that half the content of North American-built autos come from the United States, coupled with a much higher 85 percent North American content threshold. Officials are due to discuss the issue from Sunday through the end of the fifth round on Tuesday, Flavio Volpe, president of the Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, said there was little chance of making substantial progress on autos in Mexico City, as the U.S. demands were still not fully understood.

“I don’t expect a heavy negotiation here,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the talks.
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The latest group of U.S. Rhodes scholars includes 10 African-Americans, the most ever in a single Rhodes class, a transgender man and four students from colleges that had never had received the honor before.

The Rhodes Trust on Sunday announced the 32 men and women chosen from a group of 866 applicants who were endorsed by 299 colleges and universities for post-graduate studies at Oxford University in England.

The scholarships cover all expenses for two or three years of study starting next October. In some cases, the scholarships may allow funding for four years.

Also selected was an international group of scholars representing 64 different countries. About 100 scholars will be selected worldwide this year.

The scholarships are worth about $68,000 per year, according to the Rhodes Trust.

The first class of American Rhodes Scholars entered Oxford in 1904.

 
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Police in Okinawa are investigating a fatal traffic accident, involving an elderly man and a U.S. Marine.

Police say a 61-year-old man died when his vehicle and the serviceman’s truck collided.

Kazuhiko Miyagi of the Okinawa police confirmed that the Marine’s breath test had an alcohol level three times the legal limit.

The Marines have expressed their “sincere condolences” to the victim’s family and have promised to cooperate with the investigation.

The names of the two drivers have not been released.

The U.S. has a number of military bases in Japan with tens of thousands of U.S. troops. Many of the troops are stationed on Okinawa, where there has been longstanding opposition to their presence.

The U.S. military is in Japan as part of a joint security treaty.
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LaToya Cantrell, a City Council member who first gained a political following as she worked to help her hard-hit neighborhood recover from Hurricane Katrina, won a historic election Saturday that made her the first woman mayor of New Orleans.

The Democrat will succeed term-limited fellow Democrat Mitch Landrieu as the city celebrates its 300th anniversary next year. 

“Almost 300 years, my friends. And New Orleans, we’re still making history,” Cantrell told a cheering crowd in her victory speech.

Immigrant wins council seat

Voters also made history in a New Orleans City Council race. 

Cyndi Nguyen defeated incumbent James Gray in an eastern New Orleans district. An immigrant who fled Vietnam with her family when she was 5 in 1975, Nguyen is the organizer of a nonprofit and will be the first Vietnamese-American to serve on the council.

Mayor’s race

In the mayor’s race, Cantrell was the leader in most polls before the runoff election, she never trailed as votes were counted.

Her opponent, former municipal Judge Desiree Charbonnet, conceded the race and congratulated Cantrell late Saturday. Later, complete returns showed Cantrell with 60 percent of the vote. 

The two women led a field of 18 candidates in an October general election to win runoff spots. 

Landrieu earned credit for accelerating the recovery from Hurricane Katrina in an administration cited for reduced blight, improvements in the celebrated tourism economy and economic development that included last week’s announcement that a digital services company is bringing 2,000 new jobs to the city. 

But Cantrell will face lingering problems. Crime is one. Another is dysfunction at the agency overseeing the city’s drinking water system and storm drainage — a problem that became evident during serious flash flooding in August. 

About 32 percent of the city’s voters took part in last month’s election. It was unclear whether turnout would surpass that on Saturday.

Cantrell faced questions about her use of a city credit card. Charbonnet had to fight back against critics who cast her as an insider who would steer city work to cronies.

Katrina a theme

Katrina was a theme in the backstory of both candidates. Cantrell moved to the city from California. Her work as a neighborhood activist in the aftermath of Katrina in the hard-hit Broadmoor neighborhood helped her win a seat on council in 2012. 

Charbonnet, from a well-known political family in New Orleans, was the city’s elected recorder of mortgages before she was a judge. In the campaign she made a point of saying hers was the first city office to re-open after Katrina, providing critical property records to the displaced.

Former state civil court Judge Michael Bagneris, who finished third in last month’s race, endorsed Cantrell, as did Troy Henry, a businessman who also ran for the post last month. 

University of New Orleans political science professor Edward Chervenak said the endorsements appeared to help Cantrell overcome revelations that she had used her city-issued credit card for thousands of dollars in purchases without clear indications that they were for public purposes. The money was eventually reimbursed, but questions lingered about whether she had improperly used city money for personal or campaign expenditures. 
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The Palestinians threatened Saturday to suspend all communication with the United States if the Trump administration follows through with plans to close their diplomatic office in Washington.

The potential rupture in relations threatens to undermine President Donald Trump’s bid for Mideast peace, a mission he has handed his senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the U.S. decision was “very unfortunate and unacceptable,” and he accused Washington of bowing to pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “at a time when we are trying to cooperate to achieve the ultimate deal.”

In a video statement on social media, Erekat said: “We will put on hold all our communications with this American administration.”

There was no immediate reaction from the Trump administration. Netanyahu’s office said the closure was “a matter of U.S. law.”

U.S. officials had insisted before Erekat’s statement that the move wasn’t aimed at increasing leverage over the Palestinians, but merely the unavoidable consequence of U.S. law.

The administration announced late Friday that the Palestinians had run afoul of a legal provision that says the Palestine Liberation Organization cannot operate a Washington office if the Palestinians try to get the International Criminal Court to prosecute Israelis for crimes against Palestinians.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson determined that the Palestinians crossed that line in September, when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on the court to investigate and prosecute Israelis, according to State Department officials. They weren’t authorized to publicly discuss the situation and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Leave, or just close building?

It wasn’t clear when the office would close or whether the Palestinians would have to clear out of the building entirely or just close it to the public.

Under the law, Trump now has 90 days to consider whether the Palestinians are in “direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel.” If Trump determines they are, then the mission can reopen, officials said.

PLO official Hanan Ashrawi said the U.S. was “disqualifying itself as a peace broker in the region” by refusing to extend a waiver from the law.

“Conditioning the renewal of the waiver on the Palestinians’ sticking to ‘direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel’ is actually superfluous since negotiations are nonexistent, and the current U.S. administration has yet to present any kind of peace initiative,” she said in a statement.

The U.S. said it wasn’t cutting off relations with the Palestinians and remained focused on a comprehensive peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. One of the U.S. officials said in an email that “this measure should in no way be seen as a signal that the U.S. is backing off those efforts.”

The Palestinians quickly dismissed that argument, with Foreign Minister Riad Malki telling Palestine Radio that the Palestinian leadership “will not accept any extortion or pressure.” Erekat contended the move was the result of “the pressure being exerted on this administration by the Netanyahu government.”

In response, the Israeli prime minister’s office said, “We respect the decision and look forward to continuing to work with the U.S. to advance peace and security in the region.”

The Israelis and Palestinians are not engaged in active, direct negotiations. But Trump’s team, led by Kushner, is working to broker a deal aimed at settling the intractable conflict.

Palestinians skeptical

The Palestinians, publicly supportive of the U.S. effort, are nonetheless skeptical because Trump’s close ties to Israel suggest whatever deal he proposes might be unfavorable to them. The threat of losing their office in the American capital could become one more pressure point as the Trump administration tries to persuade the Palestinians to come to the table.

The PLO is the group that formally represents all Palestinians. Although the U.S. does not recognize Palestinian statehood, the PLO maintains a “general delegation” office in Washington that facilitates Palestinian officials’ interactions with the U.S. government.

The United States allowed the PLO to open a mission in Washington in 1994. That required President Bill Clinton to waive a law that said the Palestinians couldn’t have an office. In 2011, under the Obama administration, the U.S. started letting the Palestinians fly their flag over the office, an upgrade to the status of their mission that the Palestinians hailed as historic.

Israel opposes any Palestinian membership in U.N.-related organizations until a peace deal has been reached.

The Trump administration has not disclosed details about its effort to achieve an agreement that ostensibly would grant the Palestinians an independent state in exchange for an end to its conflict with the Israelis. Kushner and other top Trump aides have been shuttling to the region to meet with Palestinians, Israelis and officials from Arab nations.

The requirement about the mission closing stems from a little-noticed provision in U.S. law that says the U.S. cannot allow the Palestinians to have a Washington office if they back the international court’s move to investigate or prosecute Israeli nationals for alleged crimes against Palestinians.

Abbas said at the United Nations in September that the Palestinians had “called on the International Criminal Court to open an investigation and to prosecute Israeli officials for their involvement in settlement activities and aggressions against our people.”

The U.S. president can let the Palestinians keep the office despite the violation, only if certifying to Congress “that the Palestinians have entered into direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel.” The provision doesn’t explicitly define what would constitute direct or meaningful negotiations.
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Turkish prosecutors launched an investigation Saturday of two U.S. prosecutors involved in putting a Turkish-Iranian businessman on trial for allegedly violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, according to Turkey’s official news agency.

The Istanbul prosecutor’s office said it was investigating Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Bharara’s successor, acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim.

A statement from the Istanbul prosecutor’s office said the sources of the documents and wiretaps being used as evidence in the U.S. case against gold trader Reza Zarrab were unknown and violated international and domestic laws.

Turkey’s official Anadolu Agency published the statement Saturday. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment.

Zarrab, 34, has been charged in the U.S. with allegedly evading sanctions on Iran. An executive of Turkey’s state-owned bank, Halkbank, also faces charges and is due to appear in court in New York on November 27.

Former Turkish Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan is also among the nine defendants indicted in the case.

Bharara denies Gulen link

Turkish officials allege the case is politically motivated. They have accused Bharara, the former U.S. attorney, of links to a Pennsylvania-based Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen, whom the Turkish government blames for a failed July 2016 military coup.

Bharara has vehemently rejected the allegation. Gulen denies involvement in the coup attempt.

The U.S. case was built on work initially performed by Turkish investigators who targeted Zarrab in 2013 in a sweeping corruption scandal that allegedly led to Turkish government officials.

Turkish prosecutors and police involved in the investigation were removed from duty, and charges that resulted from their probe were later dropped.

Since the July 2016 coup attempt, Turkey has arrested more than 50,000 people and fired over 100,000 state workers for alleged links to Gulen’s network.
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Editor’s note: November is Native American Heritage Month. First proclaimed by President George H. W. Bush in 1990, it is an opportunity to acknowledge the histories and cultures of Native people across the U.S., highlighting the challenges they have faced, their sacrifices and their contributions.

“Native Americans have influenced every stage of America’s development,” noted President Donald Trump in his October 31, 2017 proclamation. “They helped early European settlers survive and thrive in a new land. They contributed democratic ideas to our constitutional framers. And, for more than 200 years, they have bravely answered the call to defend our Nation, serving with distinction in every branch of the United States Armed Forces.”

This month, VOA will highlight prominent Native Americans and their role in U.S. history, culture and society.

Sitting Bull was born around 1831, a member of the Hunkpapa band of Lakota. The location of his birth is disputed. Most historians say he was born in what is today South Dakota. His descendants cite Montana as his birthplace.

Mentored by his uncle, a healer and spiritual leader, the boy killed his first buffalo at age ten and at 14, distinguished himself during a raid on the Lakota’s traditional enemy, the Crow. He earned the warrior name Thathanka Iyotake, translated as “Sitting Bison Bull.”

Sitting Bull was accepted into at least two warrior societies, the Midnight Strong Heart and Kit Fox, brotherhoods whose members were bound by principles of bravery, generosity and morality. He would also become a wichasha wakan, a spiritual leader whose visions would help guide his people.

By the end of the 1840s, the U.S., then just 25 states, extended only as far the continent’s midpoint. The Plains, considered inhospitable, were designated as “Indian Territory.” But everything changed in 1849, when gold was discovered in California, and President Polk decided it was America’s “manifest destiny” to push U.S. boundaries all the way west to the Pacific Ocean.

In 1862, the government passed the Homestead Act, handing out free 65-hectare (160-acre) lots in the West, setting off an unprecedented land rush. It also authorized the first transcontinental railroad.Wave after wave of miners, railroad workers and settlers began crossing the Plains, looking to the U.S. Army to protect them from attacks by the region’s tribes, and the 1860s saw often brutal warfare by both sides. 

Refused to submit

Sitting Bull first encountered the American Army in 1863, when the military mounted a broad campaign against the Lakota in retaliation for a Dakota massacre in Minnesota. He went on to lead the Lakota in many attacks on U.S. military forts, rejecting government efforts to negotiate or contain him.

Sitting Bull refused to join other Lakota bands, the Yanktonai Dakota and Arapaho Nation in signing an 1868 treaty negotiated at Fort Laramie, Wyoming. The treaty guaranteed the Lakota “absolute and undisturbed use of the Great Sioux Reservation,” including the Black Hills, sacred to Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other tribes. It held only until the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, in 1874. The government then confiscated the Hills and ordered tribes back to the reservation. Sitting Bull resisted, setting up camp along the Little Big Horn River in Montana.

In early June of 1876, Sitting Bull held a Sun Dance, a prayer ceremony in which he pierced his arms in an act of sacrifice and danced to exhaustion. During the ritual, he is said to have had a vision of a military defeat of many soldiers.

That same month, General George A. Custer, a former Civil War hero, led a surprise attack on Sitting Bull’s camp. The Lakota, said to be inspired by Sitting Bull’s vision, fought fiercely. Within hours, Custer and more than 200 soldiers were dead, news that shocked Americans and caused the Army to redouble efforts to contain the tribes.

In video below, Sitting Bull’s great grandson Ernie LaPointe talks about his ancestor and the Battle of Little Big Horn.

Sitting Bull and his followers fled to Canada, but scarce food resources led him to finally surrender to the U.S. Authorities sent him to the Standing Rock Agency in North Dakota, where he lived as a prisoner, refusing to renounce his traditions and spiritual beliefs. This created tension among those Lakota who had embraced assimilation into Christian culture and likely led to his death.

Ghost Dance

The late 1880s saw the birth of a spiritual movement which promised that if Natives lived a good life and performed a ceremonial Ghost Dance, their former way of life would be returned to them.The prophecy spread across the Plains, where it was adapted by the Lakota, now living in harsh conditions on the reservation, dependent on inadequate government rations. 

The government viewed the dance as an act of sedition and tried in vain to stop it. Sitting Bull, say his descendants, merely tolerated the prophecy, which was to his eyes a preferable alternative to Christianization

​On December 16th, 1890, tribal police, acting on the government’s behalf, entered Sitting Bull’s cabin to arrest him. He was shot and killed in the melee that followed. On the 29th of December, the Army launched an attack on about 300 Lakota men, women and children camped at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation, killing most of them and burying them in a mass grave.

Today, Sitting Bull’s descendants still pray for their ancestor, whom they revere as a visionary acting not only on behalf of his contemporaries but future generations of Lakota. And every December 29, Lakota gather at Wounded Knee to remember their ancestors and celebrate their resilience.

 
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Pro-trade Republicans in the U.S. Congress are growing worried that U.S. President Donald Trump may try to quit the NAFTA free trade deal entirely rather than negotiate a compromise that preserves its core benefits.

As a fifth round of talks to modernize the North American Free Trade Agreement kicked off in Mexico on Friday, several Republicans interviewed by Reuters expressed concerns that tough U.S. demands, including a five-year sunset clause and a U.S.-specific content rule, will sink the talks and lead to the deal’s collapse.

Business groups have warned of dire economic consequences, including millions of jobs lost as Mexican and Canadian tariffs snap back to their early 1990s levels.

“I think the administration is playing a pretty dangerous game with this sunset provision,” said Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from eastern Pennsylvania.

He said putting NAFTA under threat of extinction every five years would make it difficult for companies in his district, ranging from chocolate giant Hershey Co to small family owned manufacturing firms, to invest in supply chains and manage global operations.

Hershey operates candy plants in Monterrey and Guadalajara, Mexico.

Lawmakers’ letter

Nearly 75 House of Representatives members signed a letter this week opposing U.S. proposals on automotive rules of origin, which would require 50 percent U.S. content in NAFTA-built vehicles and 85 percent regional content.

They warned that this would “eliminate the competitive advantages” that NAFTA brings to U.S. automakers or lead to a collapse of the trade pact.

Representative Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican who has long been a supporter of free trade deals, said he disagreed with the Trump approach of “trying to beat someone” in the NAFTA talks. Texas is the largest U.S. exporting state with nearly half of its $231 billion in exports last year headed to Mexico and Canada, according to Commerce Department data.

“We need to offer Mexico a fair deal. If we want them to take our cattle, we need to take their avocados,” Sessions said.

Still, congressional apprehension about Trump’s stance is far from unanimous. The signers were largely Republicans, with no Democrats from auto-intensive states such as Michigan and Ohio signing.

Democratic support

Some pro-labor Democrats have actually expressed support for U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s tough approach.

“Some of those demands are in tune,” said Representative Bill Pascrell of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means trade subcommittee.

“We don’t want to blow it up, Republicans don’t want to blow it up. But we want substantial changes in the labor, the environmental, the currency, on how you come to an agreement when there’s a dispute, and on problems of origin.”

Farm state Republicans are especially concerned that a collapse of NAFTA would lead to the loss of crucial export markets in Mexico and Canada for corn, beef and other products.

Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa said Lighthizer in a recent meeting agreed that a withdrawal from NAFTA would be hard on U.S. agriculture, which has largely benefited from the trade pact.

U.S. agricultural exports to Canada and Mexico quintupled to about $41 billion in 2016 from about $9 billion in 1993, the year before NAFTA went into effect, according to U.S. Commerce Department data.

Grassley said, however, that Lighthizer’s approach was “taking everybody to the brink on these talks.”

Other Republicans are taking a wait-and-see approach to the talks.

Representative Frank Lucas of Oklahoma said he was willing to give Trump “the benefit of the doubt” on NAFTA talks, adding that farmers and ranchers in his rural district were strong Trump supporters in the 2016 election.

“The president’s a practical fellow. When push comes to shove, he understands the base,” Lucas said.
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U.S. President Donald Trump says he is putting on hold a decision to allow imports of big game trophies until he can “review all conservation facts.”

Trump tweeted Friday that he will review the issue with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. He said the policy has been “under study for years.”

The abrupt change in policy follows an announcement Thursday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which said it will allow the importation of body parts from elephants shot for sport in Zimbabwe and Zambia.

The agency concluded that encouraging wealthy big-game hunters to kill the threatened species would help raise money for conservation programs.

Both animal rights groups and environmental groups criticized the decision, saying it could deplete at-risk elephant populations.

The top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce, was also critical of the move Friday, because of concerns about African wildlife and also the current political upheaval in Zimbabwe. 

“The administration should withdraw this decision until Zimbabwe stabilizes,’’ he said in a statement.

The Great Elephant Census reported last year that Zambia had just more than 21,000 elephants last year, while 82,000 elephants roam in Zimbabwe. Overall elephant populations have declined by 30 percent in 18 African countries between 2007 and 2014, with slightly more than 350,000 still alive in the wild.

African elephants have been listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
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