U.S. prosecutors argued on Monday that an Illinois man who kidnapped, raped and murdered a Chinese graduate student two years ago should be executed, telling a jury that his crime was one of “calculated” cruelty.The federal jury in Peoria, Illinois, that found Brendt Christensen, 29, guilty last month of the abduction and murder of Yingying Zhang, a 26-year-old student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is now hearing the penalty phase of the trial.”This was not an ordinary crime,” James Nelson, a prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice’s capital case division, told the jury. “It was cold, cruel and calculated.”Christensen’s lawyers have asked the jury to spare his life, saying he had long struggled with substance abuse and mental illness and had a family history of both.FILE – Ronggao Zhang, left, and Lifeng Ye, display a photo of themselves with their missing daughter, Yingying Zhang, in Urbana, Ill., Nov. 1, 2017.”No one who grew up with Brendt would have ever guessed that this is how his life would end up,” Julie Brain, one of his lawyers, told the jury. “This was a man secretly struggling with mental health his whole life.”She showed the jury photographs of Christensen in his youth dressed in his Boy Scouts uniform and his football uniform.The jury is being asked to decide between the death penalty and life in prison without the possibility of parole. Federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty under U.S. kidnapping laws.Appeal to TrumpZhang was reported missing on June 9, 2017, two months after coming from southeastern China to study photosynthesis and crop production at the university. Her remains have never been found, but prosecutors said her DNA was matched to blood later found in three spots inside Christensen’s bedroom.The case has been closely watched by China’s media and government as well as by Chinese students in the United States. Zhang’s relatives publicly appealed to President Donald Trump for additional resources to help find her two months after she vanished.Details of the crimeInvestigators were led to Christensen through surveillance video footage captured in Urbana, 130 miles (210 km) south of Chicago, that showed Zhang getting into a black car that later was traced to Christensen.Prosecutors said Christensen, a one-time master’s student at the university, took Zhang to his apartment, where she fought for her life as he bludgeoned her with a baseball bat, raped her and stabbed her in the neck before cutting off her head.Earlier in the trial in U.S. District Court in Peoria, prosecutors characterized Christensen as having a fascination with serial killers, including Ted Bundy, who murdered dozens of women during the 1970s and was put to death in 1989.Details of the crime, including Zhang’s decapitation, were revealed by Christensen himself in conversations with his then-girlfriend secretly recorded for FBI agents investigating the case before his arrest, according to trial testimony.
 
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The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, has condemned the conditions of detention in which refugees and migrants are being held on the southern border of the United States.Bachelet calls conditions in the camps appalling for both adult and child refugees and migrants, but especially for children. Her spokeswoman, Ravina Shamdasani, told VOA that the high commissioner, as a former pediatrician, and as a mother, grandmother, and former head of state, feels personally stricken by the plight of the children.FILE – U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet attends a meeting in Mexico City, Mexico, April 8, 2019.”She is deeply shocked from all these perspectives at the way that children are forced to sleep on the floor in overcrowded facilities, without access to adequate health care or food, separated from their families in many circumstances, under very poor sanitation conditions,” Shamdasani said of Bachelet. “And these are conditions that have been documented by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General itself.”  Shamdasani said the U.N. rights office is concerned about the U.S. government’s management policy, which seems to be based on detecting, detaining and deporting irregular migrants.”This is particularly egregious when in the case of children who, in many cases, are separated from their families, being held in horrid detention conditions,” Shamdasani said. “The many different U.N. human rights bodies have found that the detention of migrant children may constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, which is, of course, prohibited by international law.”  Children should never be held in immigration detention or separated from their families, Shamdasani said. adding that doing so may cause irreparable harm to the child’s development and well-being.Countering the reportsKevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, maintained on Sunday that reports of unsanitary conditions and inadequate food and water are unsubstantiated. In a recent television interview, he said steps are being taken to improve the detention centers. FILE – U.S. Border Patrol agents keep watch on a large group of migrants who they say were attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, in El Paso, Texas, May 29, 2019.Some members of the U.S. Congress are also calling for the improved treatment of migrants being held in U.S. custody.Migrant arrests by the U.S. Border Patrol this year have hit the highest level since 2007. In May alone, agents detained nearly 133,000 refugees and migrants, including more than 11,500 unaccompanied children.Shamdasani told VOA that migration is a very complex issue, adding that the U.S., Mexico and Central American countries have to work together to address the root causes compelling migrants to leave their homes.  In addition, she said, such action needs to be done in a way that puts the human rights of the migrants front and center of any policies that are adopted.
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The first Democratic presidential debate for the 2020 elections brought a decades-old civil rights issue back into the public spotlight: whether to bus children to racially integrate schools.One of the most defining moments of the debate came when U.S. Senator Kamala Harris challenged former Vice President Joe Biden’s record for not supporting the type of busing that she experienced as a black schoolgirl in California.The exchange garnered headlines and brought the topic of busing, which had been a national issue in the 1970s but had largely fallen out of the public conversation, back into the spotlight.Democratic presidential hopeful US Senator for California Kamala Harris speaks to the press in the Spin Room after the second Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign.What is busing?Busing was a tool that many U.S. communities used to overcome racial segregation in public schools.Following the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, legal racial segregation in schools was outlawed across the United States. However, because of demographic trends and housing policies, many U.S. neighborhoods remained segregated, and as a result schools were effectively segregated because students attended schools in neighborhoods where they lived. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, courts ruled that local jurisdictions were not doing enough to promote desegregation in schools and began mandating busing to address the problem. Federal agencies oversaw and enforced busing efforts, including collecting data about the race of students and withholding money from noncompliant schools.Who was bused?Both black students took buses to majority-white schools and white students to majority-black schools in court-ordered busing.However, Brett Gadsden, the author of a book about desegregation efforts in Delaware, “Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism,” said, “African American students disproportionally shouldered the burden” of efforts to desegregate schools.Gadsden, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, said black students were forced to travel longer distances and for many more years than white students.In this Sept. 26, 1957, file photo, members of the 101st Airborne Division take up positions outside Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., after President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered them into the city to enforce integration at the school.Why was it controversial?Busing proved to be intensely controversial nationwide. Supporters argued busing was necessary to integrate schools and to give black and white students equal access to resources and opportunities.Critics argued that busing was dangerous and costly, and many parents did not want their children to have to travel great distances to get to school. While much of the opposition to busing came from whites, the black community was also divided about its merits. Gadsden said black critics cited the burden their children had to shoulder in terms of distance traveled and time spent on buses. They also complained that historically black schools were closed, and black administrators and teachers lost their jobs as a result of busing policies, while similar demands were not made of white schools, Gadsden said. In Boston, anti-busing protests turned violent in 1974, with demonstrators throwing bricks and bottles at school buses.Political analyst Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia said in a Twitter post following the Democratic debate that busing was so unpopular in the 1970s that Democrats running for office often had a choice to “be a profile in courage and lose, or oppose busing in whole or in part & win to fight another day on stronger ground.”Biden’s stanceDuring the 1970s when Biden was a freshman U.S. senator representing Delaware, he worked with conservative senators to oppose federally mandated busing. In a 1975 interview with a Delaware newspaper that was first resurfaced by The Washington Post, Biden said, “I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’”During the Democratic debate, Biden defended his position against mandated busing in the 1970s, arguing that he did not oppose voluntary busing by communities, only federal mandates. “I did not oppose busing in America; what I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education,” he said.Democratic presidential hopeful former US Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. speaks during the second Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign.Harris responded by saying the federal government needed to be able to step in and mandate busing in some areas because “there was a failure of states to integrate public schools in America.”Schools todayWhile some communities still champion voluntary busing measures, most busing efforts ended by the turn of the century. Local and national court rulings in the 1990s said many communities had succeeded in improving the integration of their schools and allowed busing programs to end. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA said in a May report  to mark the 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, that segregation in schools is again on the rise and has been growing “unchecked” for nearly three decades, “placing the promise of Brown at grave risk.”The report said white students, on average, attend a school in which 69% of the students are white, Latino students attend schools in which 55% of the students are Latino, and black students attend schools with a combined black and Latino enrollment averaging 67%. Gadsden agreed there is “a lot of segregation in schools now” but said there is little political will to go back to the era of busing. “Federal courts now are not particularly sympathetic to challenges to school segregation,” he said, also noting there is no great appetite in the U.S. Congress to introduce measures to advance school desegregation.  After the debate, Harris told reporters that “busing is a tool among many that should be considered.” however, when pressed on whether she supported federally mandated busing today, she said she would not unless society became as opposed to integration as it was in the 1970s.Some critics say Harris’ position on busing today is not that much different from Biden’s.
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Dozens of prominent Afghan citizens are meeting with Taliban representatives in Qatar’s capital Doha on Monday for a second day of a conference seeking to end the 18-year war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, also in Doha, U.S. and Taliban negotiators are conducting a seventh round of talks with the U.S. looking to conclude its involvement in Afghanistan’s civil war. VOA’S Zlatica Hoke reports.
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Nearly one in every four Americans say they never plan to retire.An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey released Sunday found 23% of Americans have no plans to stop working.Another 23% say they expect to have to work well beyond their 65th birthday.  Financial instability is the major reason for Americans to delay retirement, the poll found.”The average retirement age that we see in the data has gone up a little bit, but it hasn’t gone up that much,” says Anqi Chen, assistant director of savings research at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. “So people have to live in retirement much longer, and they may not have enough assets to support themselves in retirement.”When asked how comfortable they feel about retirement, just 14% of those under age 50 and 29% of those over age 50 felt “extremely or very prepared,” for retirement. About another 4 in 10 older adults say they do feel somewhat prepared, while just about one-third feel unprepared. By comparison, 56% of younger adults say they don’t feel prepared for retirement.About 25% of those who had already retired said they didn’t feel prepared to stop working, according to the poll. Just 38% of fully retired individuals said they “felt very or extremely prepared.”U.S. government data shows about 1 in 5 people age 65 and older were working or searching for a job in June, the AP reports. 
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Many senior living communities in America are encouraging residents to socialize more with young people, something experts say will benefit both generations. Faiza Elmasry visited one of these senior living facilities where high school students serve and interact with residents. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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