BOORSEE

WASHINGTON — The U.S. State Department said Saturday that the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) — the world’s leading HIV initiative — was covered by a waiver for life-saving humanitarian assistance during a 90-day pause in foreign aid.

Just hours after taking office on Jan. 20, President Donald Trump ordered the pause so foreign aid contributions could be reviewed to see if they align with his “America First” foreign policy. The U.S. is the world’s largest aid donor.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially issued a waiver for emergency food aid and then Tuesday for life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and subsistence help. However, the lack of detail in Trump’s order and the ensuing waivers has left aid groups confused as to whether their work can continue.

So, Saturday the State Department’s Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy issued a memo, seen by Reuters, clarifying that PEPFAR was covered by the Jan. 28 memo and spelling out what activities were allowed.

These include life-saving HIV care and treatment services, including testing and counseling, prevention and treatment of infections including tuberculosis (TB), laboratory services, and procurement and supply chain for commodities/medicines. It also allows prevention of mother-to-child transmission services.

“Any other activities not specifically mentioned in this guidance may not be resumed without express approval,” it said.

More than 20 million people living with HIV, who represent two-thirds of all people living with the disease receiving treatment globally, are directly supported by PEPFAR.

Under Trump’s foreign aid pause, all payments by U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) stopped Tuesday — for the first time since the fiscal year began on Oct. 1 — and have not resumed, according to U.S. Treasury data. On Monday USAID paid out $8 million and last week a total of $545 million.

The Trump administration is also moving to strip a slimmed-down USAID of its independence and put it under State Department control, two sources familiar with the discussions said Friday, in what would be a significant overhaul of how Washington allocates U.S. foreign aid. 
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As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to travel to Washington to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump, Hamas frees three more Israeli hostages — including a dual U.S. citizen — and Israel frees dozens of Palestinian prisoners. The next phase of the Gaza ceasefire is expected to be on the agenda when the leaders meet on Tuesday. Linda Gradstein reports for VOA from Jerusalem.
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ANCHORAGE, ALASKA — The Alaska Gold Rush town of Nome faced a bleak winter. It was hundreds of miles from anywhere, cut off by the frozen sea and unrelenting blizzards, and under siege from a contagious disease known as the “strangling angel” for the way it suffocated children. 

Now, 100 years later, Nome is remembering its saviors — the sled dogs and mushers who raced for more than five days through hypothermia, frostbite, gale-force winds and blinding whiteouts to deliver lifesaving serum and free the community from the grip of diphtheria. 

Among the events celebrating the centennial of the 1925 “Great Race of Mercy” are lectures, a dog-food drive and a reenactment of the final leg of the relay, all organized by the Nome Kennel Club. 

Alaskans honor ‘heroic effort’ 

“There’s a lot of fluff around celebrations like this, but we wanted to remember the mushers and their dogs who have been at the center of this heroic effort and … spotlight mushing as a still-viable thing for the state of Alaska,” said Diana Haecker, a kennel club board member and co-owner of Alaska’s oldest newspaper, The Nome Nugget. 

“People just dropped whatever they were doing,” she said. “These mushers got their teams ready and went, even though it was really cold and challenging conditions on the trail.” 

Other communities are also marking the anniversary — including the village of Nenana, where the relay began, and Cleveland, Ohio, where the serum run’s most famous participant, a husky mix named Balto, is stuffed and displayed at a museum. 

Jonathan Hayes, a Maine resident who has been working to preserve the genetic line of sled dogs driven on the run by famed musher Leonhard Seppala, is recreating the trip. Hayes left Nenana on Monday with 16 Seppala Siberian sled dogs, registered descendants of Seppala’s team. 

A race to save lives

Diphtheria is an airborne disease that causes a thick, suffocating film on the back of the throat; it was once a leading cause of death for children. The antitoxin used to treat it was developed in 1890, and a vaccine in 1923; it is now exceedingly rare in the U.S. 

Nome, western Alaska’s largest community, had about 1,400 residents a century ago. Its most recent supply ship had arrived the previous fall, before the Bering Sea froze, without any doses of the antitoxin. Those the local doctor, Curtis Welch, had were outdated, but he wasn’t worried. He hadn’t seen a case of diphtheria in the 18 years he had practiced in the area. 

Within months, that changed. In a telegram, Welch pleaded with the U.S. Public Health Service to send serum: “An epidemic of diphtheria is almost inevitable here.” 

The first death was a 3-year-old boy on January 20, 1925, followed the next day by a 7-year-old girl. By the end of the month, there were more than 20 confirmed cases. The city was placed under quarantine. 

West Coast hospitals had antitoxin doses, but it would take time to get them to Seattle, Washington, and then onto a ship for Seward, Alaska, an ice-free port south of Anchorage, Alaska. In the meantime, enough for 30 people was found at an Anchorage hospital. 

It still had to get to Nome. Airplanes with open-air cockpits were ruled out as unsuited for the weather. There were no roads or trains that reached Nome. 

Instead, officials shipped the serum by rail to Nenana in interior Alaska, some 1,086 kilometers (675 miles) from Nome via the frozen Yukon River and mail trails. 

Thanks to Alaska’s new telegraph lines and the spread of radio, the nation followed along, captivated, as 20 mushers — many of them Alaska Natives — with more than 150 dogs relayed the serum to Nome. They battled deep snow, whiteouts so severe they couldn’t see the dogs in front of them, and life-threatening temperatures that plunged at times to minus minus 51 degrees Celsius (60 degrees Fahrenheit).

The antitoxin was transported in glass vials covered with padded quilts. Not a single vial broke. 

Seppala, a Norwegian settler, left from Nome to meet the supply near the halfway point and begin the journey back. His team, led by his dog Togo, traveled more than 320 kilometers (250 miles) of the relay, including a treacherous stretch across frozen Norton Sound. 

After about 5 1/2 days, the serum reached its destination on February 2, 1925. A banner front-page headline in the San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed “Dogs victors over blizzard in battle to succor stricken Nome.” 

The official record listed five deaths and 29 illnesses. It’s likely the toll was higher; Alaska Natives were not accurately tracked. 

Balto gains fame 

Seppala and Togo missed the limelight that went to his assistant, Gunnar Kaasen, who drove the dog team led by Balto into Nome. Balto was another of Seppala’s dogs, but was used to only haul freight after he was deemed too slow to be on a competitive team.

Balto was immortalized in movies and with statues in New York’s Central Park and one in Anchorage intended as a tribute to all sled dogs. He received a bone-shaped key to the city of Los Angeles, where legendary movie actress Mary Pickford placed a wreath around his neck. 

But he and several team members were eventually sold and kept in squalid conditions at a dime museum in Los Angeles. After learning of their plight, an Ohio businessman spearheaded an effort to raise money to bring them to Cleveland, a city in Ohio. After dying in 1933, Balto was mounted and placed on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. 

Iditarod pays homage to run 

Today, the most famous mushing event in the world is the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, which is not based on the serum run but on the Iditarod Trail, a supply route from Seward to Nome. Iditarod organizers are nevertheless marking the serum run’s centennial with a series of articles on its website and by selling replicas of the medallions each serum run musher received a century ago, race spokesperson Shannon Noonan said in an email. This year’s Iditarod starts March 1. 

“The Serum Run demonstrated the critical role sled dogs played in the survival and communication of remote Alaskan communities, while the Iditarod has evolved into a celebration of that tradition and Alaska’s pioneering spirit,” Noonan said. 
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WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials are moving to fire at least some of the FBI agents engaged in investigations involving President Donald Trump, two people familiar with the plans said Friday.

It was not clear how many agents might be affected, though scores of investigators were involved in various inquiries touching Trump. Officials acting at the direction of the administration have been working to identify individual employees who participated in politically sensitive investigations for possible termination, said the people who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

A third person familiar with the situation said U.S. attorneys were instructed on a call this week to provide the names of prosecutors and agents who had any involvement in the hundreds of cases against the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It was not made clear on the call why the names were needed, said the person, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

Any mass firings would be a major blow to the historic independence from the White House of the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency and would reflect Trump’s persistent resolve to bend the law enforcement and intelligence community to his will. It would be part of a startling pattern of retribution waged on federal government employees, following the forced ousters of a group of senior FBI executives earlier this week as well as a mass firing by the Justice Department of prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team who investigated Trump.

The FBI Agents Association said the planned firings are “outrageous actions” that “are fundamentally at odds with the law enforcement objectives outlined by President Trump and his support for FBI agents.”

“Dismissing potentially hundreds of agents would severely weaken the bureau’s ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the bureau and its new leadership for failure,” the association said in a statement.

It was not immediately clear what recourse any fired agent might take, but the bureau has a well-defined process for terminations and any abrupt action that bypasses the protocol could presumably open the door to a legal challenge.

When pressed during his confirmation hearing Thursday, Trump’s pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, said he was not aware of any plans to terminate or otherwise punish FBI employees who were involved in the Trump investigations. Patel said if he was confirmed he would follow the FBI’s internal review processes for taking action against employees.

Asked by Democratic Senator Cory Booker whether he would reverse any decisions before his confirmation that didn’t follow that standard process, Patel said, “I don’t know what’s going on right now over there, but I’m committed to you, Senator, and your colleagues, that I will honor the due process of the FBI.”

Before he was nominated for the director’s position, Patel had remarked on at least one podcast appearance about the existence of what he called anti-Trump “conspirators” in the government and news media.

Trump has for years expressed fury at the FBI and Justice Department over investigations that shadowed his presidency, including an inquiry into ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign, and continued over the last four years. He fired one FBI director, James Comey, amid the Russia investigation and then said he would fire his second, Christopher Wray. Wray later resigned before Trump took office Jan. 20.

Asked at the White House on Friday if he had anything to do with the scrutiny of the agents, he said: “No, but we have some very bad people over there. It was weaponized at a level that nobody’s never seen before. They came after a lot of people — like me — but they came after a lot of people.”

He added, “If they fired some people over there, that’s a good thing, because they were very bad.”

The FBI and Smith’s team investigated Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Both of those cases resulted in indictments that were withdrawn after Trump’s November presidential win because of long-standing Justice Department policy prohibiting the federal prosecution of a sitting president.

The Justice Department also brought charges against more than 1,500 Trump supporters in connection with the Capitol riot, though Trump on his first day in office granted clemency to all of them — including the ones convicted of violent crimes — through pardons, sentence commutations and dismissals of indictments.

This week, the Justice Department fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on Smith investigations, and a group of senior FBI executives — including several executive assistant directors and leaders of big-city field offices — were told to either resign or retire or be fired Monday.

Spokespeople for the FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment.

The firings would be done over the will of acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, who has indicated that he objects to the idea, the people said.
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WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump will put in place 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico and 10% tariffs on goods from China effective on Saturday, the White House said on Friday, but it provided no word on whether there would be any exemptions to the measures that could result in swift price increases to U.S. consumers.

Trump, a Republican, had been threatening the tariffs to ensure greater cooperation from the countries on stopping illegal immigration and the smuggling of chemicals used for fentanyl, but he also has pledged to use tariffs to boost domestic manufacturing.

“Starting tomorrow, those tariffs will be in place,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. “These are promises made and promises kept by the president.”

Trump had said he was weighing issuing an exemption for Canadian and Mexican oil imports, but Leavitt said she had no information to share on the president’s decision on any potential carveouts.

The United States imported almost 4.6 million barrels of oil daily from Canada in October and 563,000 barrels from Mexico, according to the Energy Information Administration. U.S. daily production during that month averaged nearly 13.5 million barrels a day.

He has previously stated that a 10% tariff on Chinese imports would be on top of other import taxes charged on products from the country.
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WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is set to embark on his first official trip as the nation’s top diplomat on Saturday, with planned visits to Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic from Saturday to Thursday.

Officials and experts say the visit is partly aimed at countering China’s growing influence in the region. The trip comes as President Donald Trump pushes to regain control of the Panama Canal, and as Washington intensifies efforts to curb illegal migration.

“Secretary Rubio’s engagements with senior officials and business leaders will promote regional cooperation on our core, shared interests: Stopping illegal and large-scale migration, fighting the scourge of transnational criminal organizations and drug traffickers, countering China, and deepening economic partnerships to enhance prosperity in our hemisphere,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement on Friday.

Trump has asserted that China controls the Panama Canal, a crucial trade route linking the Atlantic and Pacific. But Panama has denied the claim, insisting that it manages the canal impartially for all maritime traffic.

On Thursday, Rubio warned that China could potentially block access to the canal in the event of a conflict.

“If the government in China in a conflict tells them to shut down the Panama Canal, they will have to. And in fact, I have zero doubt that they have contingency planning to do so. That is a direct threat,” Rubio said during an interview with SiriusXM Radio.

In Panama City, Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino ruled out any discussion of control over the canal with Rubio.

“I cannot negotiate and much less open a process of negotiation on the canal,” he told reporters on Thursday. “That is sealed. The canal belongs to Panama.”

Some analysts caution that China has been employing economic and noneconomic tactics across the Western Hemisphere to expand its influence, prompting national security concerns.

“You might think that you are just getting more Chinese investment in your country, but pretty soon you are kind of being coerced or coaxed into signing at the Belt and Road Initiative, or you’re being coaxed into signing another deal that gives elements of your telecoms,” said Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, during an online discussion Thursday.

The Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, is a massive infrastructure project launched by China in 2013 under President Xi Jinping, aiming to connect multiple continents through land and maritime routes. The United States has cautioned that the BRI “is fueled by China’s mission to manipulate and undermine the global rules-based trading system for its own benefit.”

China’s foreign direct investment, or FDI, in Latin America and the Caribbean has grown significantly, Berg said, citing approximately $160 billion in Chinese FDI over the past 15 years.

“From the lens of national security, a lot of China’s commercial endeavors are fundamentally military ambitions that they’re prepositioning into Latin America,” said Joseph Humire, executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society, or SFS, a national security think tank.

“China’s been in Panama for more than 20 years, but China really got politically active in Panama after 2017,” when Panama signed the BRI and shifted its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China, said Humire on Thursday.  He said that Panama’s economy has declined in recent years.

All the nations on Rubio’s itinerary maintain diplomatic ties with Cuba and Venezuela.

Given the strained U.S. relations with these countries and their restrictions on accepting deportees, Rubio may use his trip to advocate for “third-country” agreements, allowing other nations to receive people deported by the U.S. Additionally, he could work on facilitating increased repatriation flights for migrants.
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