VOA Connect Episode 105 – A formerly homeless man turned-pizza- mogul discusses the importance of giving back, a body-positive yoga instructor shows that yoga isn’t just for the slim, and a group of US military veterans reflect on service and war.

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Japanese environment minister Shinjiro Koizumi, who has said he will take paternity leave in a rare move for a Japanese man, announced on Friday the birth of his first child: a boy.
Koizumi, son of charismatic former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi and seen as a future leader himself, said on Wednesday he was planning to take two weeks of leave over three months, in an effort to become a role model for Japan’s working fathers.
But some lawmakers have criticized his interest in taking parental leave, saying he should prioritize his public duties.
The telegenic Koizumi, popularly known as Shinjiro to distinguish him from his father, grabbed headlines in the summer of 2019 with news he was marrying Christel Takigawa, a French-Japanese television personality, and that they were expecting a child. Soon after, he was named environment minister.
Koizumi told reporters he had come straight from the hospital and had been by his wife’s side for the birth. “As a father I’m really happy that a healthy boy was safely born,” a tired but happy Koizumi told a news conference. “Both of them are doing well, that’s the most important thing.”
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been trying to encourage more men to take paternity leave, and for businesses to allow a better work-life balance, as part of his “Womenomics” program of bolstering women’s employment.
While Japan’s parental leave policies are among the world’s most generous, providing men and women with partially paid leave of up to a year, or longer if there is no public child care, just 6% of eligible fathers take child care leave, and most of them for less than a week, according to government data.
‘Follow his example’
Koizumi acknowledged that he had heard comments both for and against his decision.
“I’ll keep a priority on policy and on managing anything unexpected that comes up, while also carving out time for child care,” he said.
The reaction on the streets of central Tokyo was supportive. “I think it’s a wonderful thing,” said Hitoshi Aoki, a 35-year-old company employee. “It is a very new and good thing for someone who has authority to take initiative with his action.”
Kotaro Suzuki, a 22-year-old university student, said: “I hope my boss would say ‘OK’ when I request to take (paternity leave). I wish our society becomes like that.”
Cabinet ministers also lauded Koizumi’s decision, with Economy Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura – a father of three daughters – hoping it would have a positive social impact. “I hope he can take as much time as possible. It’ll be really good if many more men follow his example and take time
off.”
Koizumi seemed to still be adjusting to his new role. “I don’t really feel like a father yet, but that should come soon. I want to be a father like my dad was,” he was quoted by NHK television as saying.
Shinjiro’s father divorced his mother when she was pregnant with their third son and never remarried. He told the couple when they announced their marriage that everybody “should try matrimony once.”
 

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South Korea pushed back firmly Friday on comments by U.S. Ambassador Harry Harris, who called on Seoul to consult with Washington about the South’s attempt to resume individual tourism to North Korea.  
Harris said Thursday that South Korea should run the plan through a joint working group to “avoid a misunderstanding later that could trigger sanctions.”
An official with South Korea’s presidential office called those remarks “very inappropriate,” while stressing Seoul continues to coordinate with Washington.
“The issue of [inter-Korean] cooperation is a matter for our government to decide,” the official said.  

FILE – Retired Adm. Harry Harris, currently the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, attends a ceremony at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Dec. 7, 2019.South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles relations with the North, refused to directly respond to Harris’ comments, but a spokesperson said the country’s policy regarding North Korea “falls under our sovereignty.”
U.S.-South Korea relations have already been strained by U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand that Seoul pay substantially more of the cost of the U.S. military presence here.  
The current military cost-sharing deal expired at the end of the year. A sixth round of talks ended this week without a breakthrough and U.S. officials have warned “residual funds” being used to cover the gap are running out.
The issue has created unusual friction in a nearly 70-year-old alliance that both sides regularly portray as “ironclad.”
Inter-Korean ties
Despite a stalemate in U.S.-North Korea nuclear talks and the consequent retention of sanctions that have prevented implementation of most aspects of inter-Korean agreements, the administration of South Korean President Moon Jae-in has said it is looking for ways to independently improve inter-Korean ties. North Korea has rejected the efforts.
Harris said he thinks Moon’s “continued optimism is encouraging,” adding that it is not Washington’s job to approve South Korea’s decisions.
“I think his optimism creates hope, and that’s a positive thing,” Harris said Thursday. “But with regard to acting on that optimism, I have said that things should be done in consultation with the United States.”
Sanctions are just some of the hurdles that South Korea’s plans for tourism must clear. Another obstacle is North Korea.
“Even if South Korea did attempt to restart tours, North Korea won’t accept the proposal right now,” said Park Won-gon, an international relations professor at South Korea’s Handong Global University. “This effort is one-sided for the time being.”
North Korea last year ruled out any further dialogue with the South, accusing Seoul of prioritizing its relationship with Washington over Pyongyang.
 

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High on the wall of a German church where Martin Luther once preached, an ugly remnant of centuries of anti-Semitism is now at the center of a court battle.
    
The so-called “Judensau,” or “Jew pig,” sculpture on the Town Church in Wittenberg dates back to around 1300. It is perhaps the best-known of more than 20 such relics from the Middle Ages, in various forms and varying states of repair, that still adorn churches across Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
    
Located about 4 meters (13 feet) above the ground on a corner of the church, it depicts people identifiable by their headwear as Jews suckling on the teats of a sow, while a rabbi lifts the animal’s tail. In 1570, after the Protestant Reformation, an inscription referring to an anti-Jewish tract by Luther was added.
    
Judaism considers pigs impure, and no one disputes that the sculpture is deliberately offensive. But there is strong disagreement about what consequences that should have and what to do with the relief.
    
A court in the eastern city of Naumburg will consider on Tuesday a Jewish man’s bid to make the parish take it down.
    
It’s the second round in the legal dispute, which comes at a time of mounting concern about anti-Semitism in modern Germany. In May, a court ruled against plaintiff Michael Duellmann, who wants the relief put in the nearby Luther House museum.
    
Judges in Dessau rejected arguments that he has a right to have the sculpture removed because it formally constitutes slander and the parish is legally responsible for that. Duellmann appealed.
    
The relief “is a terrible falsification of Judaism, a defamation of and insult to the Jewish people,” Duellmann says, arguing that it has “a terrible effect up to this day.”
    
Duellmann, a former student of Protestant theology who converted to Judaism in the 1970s, became involved in the issue in 2017, the year Germany marked the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. He says he joined vigils in Wittenberg against the sculpture and was asked if he would be prepared to sue when it became clear that the church wasn’t prepared to take it down.
‘Culture of remembrance’
    
Luther is said to have nailed his 95 theses to the door of another church in Wittenberg in defiance of Roman Catholic authorities in 1517, starting the German Reformation. He also is known for anti-Jewish invective, from which Germany’s Lutheran church has distanced itself.
    
Luther preached at the Town Church, now a regular stop for tourists visiting Wittenberg.
 
When the church was renovated in the early 1980s, the parish decided to leave the sandstone sculpture in place, and it was also restored. In 1988, a memorial was built on the ground underneath it, referring to the persecution of Jews and the killing of 6 million in the Nazi Holocaust.
    
In addition, a cedar tree was planted nearby to signify peace, and a sign gives information on the sculpture in German and English.
    
Pastor Johannes Block says the church is “in the same boat” as the plaintiff and also considers the sculpture unacceptably insulting. The parish, he says, “also is not happy about this difficult inheritance.”
    
However, he argues that the sculpture “no longer speaks for itself as a solitary piece,” but is embedded in a “culture of remembrance” thanks to the memorial. “We don’t want to hide or abolish history, but take the path of reconciliation with and through history,” he says.
   
 “The majority of the Town Church parish doesn’t want this to become a museum piece, but to warn and ask people to remember history on the building, with the original,” Block says.
    
Duellmann isn’t impressed. “The ‘Jew pig’ is not weakened” by the memorial, he says. “It continues to have a terrible anti-Semitic effect in the church and in society.”
World Heritage site
There are mixed opinions in the church, too. Last year, the regional Lutheran bishop, Friedrich Kramer, said he favors taking down the sculpture from the church wall and exhibiting it in public at the site with an explanation. He doesn’t favor putting it in a museum. He praised the 1988 memorial but said it has weaknesses, including a failure to address Luther’s anti-Semitism.
    
If judges do order the sculpture removed, that may not be the end of the story. Block says the church would ask authorities to assess whether it is possible to remove it from a building that is under a preservation order, and more talks with the court would probably follow.
    
The church is a UNESCO World Heritage site, a status that it gained in 1996.
    
Plaintiff Duellmann has little sympathy with the church’s preservation order dilemma. He contends that authorities deliberately failed to mention the offending sculpture at the time of the application in order not to endanger it.
    
Whatever the outcome, Block says he regrets that the case went to court.
   
 ‘We are not advocates and initiators” of the sculpture, he says. “We are heirs and are trying to deal very conscientiously with this inheritance.”

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Ukraine has asked the FBI in the United States for help  investigating a suspected cyberattack by Russian military hackers on Burisma, an energy company caught up in the impeachment of U.S. President Donald Trump.
The Ukrainian interior ministry on Thursday also announced an investigation into the possible illegal surveillance of Marie Yovanovitch, formerly the American ambassador to Kiev, following the release of text messages this week by the U.S. Congress as part of the impeachment case.
The FBI said it had visited the home and business of Robert Hyde, a Republican congressional candidate in Connecticut who sent the text messages to Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, that suggested Hyde had Yovanovitch under surveillance. The FBI declined to give further details.
Hyde was not immediately available for comment but on Twitter he has said he has never been to Kiev and that he made up the story about keeping watch on Yovanovitch to fool Parnas.
The FBI declined to comment on Ukraine’s request for help after California-based cybersecurity company Area 1 Security on Monday identified the hacking of Burisma Holdings and linked it to Russia’s Main Directorate of Military Intelligence, or GRU.
Burisma was at the center of attempts by Trump in July to persuade Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential contender, and his son, Hunter, who used to have a seat on the Ukrainian company’s board.
There has been no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens, who reject Trump’s allegations of corruption.
Trump’s efforts have led to him being impeached on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The president, who denies wrongdoing, faces a trial in the U.S. Senate next week.
The same hacking group, known as “Fancy Bear” or “APT28” by cybersecurity researchers, breached the Democratic National Committee in 2016 in what U.S. investigators described as part of an operation to disrupt that year’s election.
Russia’s defense ministry did not respond to a request for comment about Area 1 Security’s assertions.
“It is noted that the hacking attack was probably committed by the Russian special services,” Ukrainian interior ministry official Artem Minyailo said at a briefing.
Minyailo said Ukraine had asked the FBI and Area 1 Security for assistance regarding information that hackers stole personal employee data and emails from executives at Burisma and other companies. These other companies included the media production company of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, he said.
“The national police has initiated the creation of a joint  international investigation team, to which FBI representatives have already been invited by the ministry,” Minyailo said.
Yovanovitch surveillance probe
It was not clear what data the hackers wanted to steal, Area 1 said. Breaching Burisma could yield communications from, to or about Hunter Biden, who served as a director between 2014 and 2019.
A source close to Burisma told Reuters earlier this week the company’s website had been subject to multiple break-in attempts over the past six months but did not provide further details.
Ukrainian officials said they were also probing allegations that Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, was subject to illegal surveillance before Trump fired her in May.
U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN on Thursday he had sent a letter to the State Department seeking an immediate briefing.
A former senior security official with the U.S. State Department told Reuters he did not regard the Hyde text messages as constituting an actual threat to Yovanovitch.
“I would have trouble going to a U.S. Attorney and saying, ‘I want an arrest warrant for this person or I want to open an investigation,’” said the former senior security official, who spoke on condition that he not be identified.
“I might send somebody to talk with them and say, you know, ‘You have any intent to harm her?’ and if he says no and there’s no other evidence to the contrary … that’s probably as far as I would go.”

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A week ago, koalas at an Australian wildlife park were in the path of raging bushfires. On Friday, they were soaking wet and being carried to safety from flash floods.
Months of drought that have contributed to Australia’s catastrophic bushfire season have this week given way to huge downpours in some of the blaze-ravaged areas.
At the Australian Reptile Park on the nation’s east coast near Sydney, heavy rains on Friday morning sent torrents of water through its bushland setting.
Images released by the park showed soaking wet koalas clinging to gum trees, and a zoo keeper carrying two of the marsupials to safety through rushing waters.
Water levels in the lagoon for the park’s alligators also rose up close to the top of the fence.
A zoo keeper is seen leaning over the fence and trying to push an alligator back down with a broom as it stretches up in an apparent bid to escape.
“This is incredible, just last week, we were having daily meetings to discuss the imminent threat of bushfires,” park director Tim Faulkner said.
“Today, we’ve had the whole team out there, drenched, acting fast to secure the safety of our animals and defend the park from the onslaught of water.
“We haven’t seen flooding like this at the park for over 15 years.”
The bushfires, which began in September, have claimed 28 lives and are estimated to have killed more than a billion animals across eastern and southern Australia.
The wet weather this week has given exhausted firefighters a huge boost, helping to reduce or contain some blazes.
But dozens of fires remain out of control, and authorities have warned the crisis could worsen again with Australia only half way through its summer.
“The contrast between the current bushfire crisis and this sudden flooding is striking,” Faulkner said.
“But we are well-aware that a huge part of Australia is still burning, and millions of animals are still under threat.”

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With billboards, banners, fanfare and flags, the government of Myanmar is welcoming Xi Jinping, president of the People’s Republic of China, for a two-day state visit beginning Friday that is expected to mark the 70th anniversary of China-Myanmar relations with agreements for infrastructure projects key to Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative.
As with any long-term connection, there have been ups, downs and detours.
This will mark Xi’s first visit to Myanmar since 2009 before Xi became president and party chief,” Murray Hiebert, senior associate, South Asia Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., told VOA. “After that visit, Myanmar launched reforms, including freeing political prisoners, creating more independence for the media, opening up the economy, deepening relations with the U.S., and cancelling work on the Myitsone Dam which was a big priority for china. Since 2017, Myanmar has again had a falling out with the U.S. because of the expulsion of nearly a million Rohingya Muslim refugees. This [visit] provides an opening for China to build deeper ties with Myanmar again.”
Yun Sun, co-director of the East Asia Program and director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, told VOA, that Xi’s visit is “uniquely high-level,” pointing to last week’s official media briefing conducted by Chinese vice foreign minister Luo Zhaohui.
With the visit Xi “is consolidating his kingdom,” Priscilla Clapp, the chief of mission and permanent charge d’ affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Burma from 1999-2002 told VOA. “Myanmar represents to China the far western province. … I think it is China’s ambition to control Myanmar through economic and other means.”
Clapp continued, “I think China is making a determined effort to harness all of Southeast Asia to the Chinese sphere of influence so it’s not just Myanmar. … Myanmar’s a gateway not only to the Indian Ocean but other parts of southeast Asia.”
The close post-World War II association of the two nations, which share a long border, began when Myanmar, then known as Burma, was the first non-Communist country to recognize the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The two nations established diplomatic relations a year later.
China defends Myanmar 
Today, as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, China has defended Myanmar since it began a military campaign against the Rohingya in 2011. A United Nations fact-finding mission described the campaign as “the gravest crimes under international law,” and called for Myanmar’s senior military officials to face investigation and prosecution for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. This week, Amnesty International’s Regional Director, Nicholas Bequelin, said “China must stop using its position in the U.N. Security Council to shield Myanmar’s senior generals from accountability. This has only emboldened the military’s relentless campaign of human rights violations and war crimes against ethnic minorities across the country.”
Despite international outcry about treatment of the Rohingya, China stepped up its investments in Myanmar, filling a void left by those departing in part because of the human rights issues. China is the second biggest investor in Myanmar, after Singapore, according to the World Bank. Myanmar’s exports to China, its largest trading partner, were worth $5.5 billion in 2018, while imports were worth $6.2 billion.
“We have seen that China has achieved a great success in exploring and following a path suitable for its economic development since the reform and opening up,” Pe Myint, the Union Minister for Information told Reuters. “For Myanmar, we are happy for China, as it’s like our relative and friend that has achieved success. It’s worth our learning.”
And it is those investments that will be in the spotlight during Xi’s visit. Last Friday China’s Luo told reporters in Beijing the purpose of the visit was to strengthen relations and cooperation on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)  and “materialize” the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), a series of projects connecting China with the Indian Ocean. Launched in 2013 by then Chinese president Xi Jinping, BRI includes hundreds of infrastructure projects financed and constructed in part or in whole by Chinese entities that are envisioned as connecting almost all of Asia and Africa.
Belt and Road
In Myanmar, the CMEC is a Belt and Road component.
“If you look at the design of the CMEC, … you can see that it’s designed by China to harness all of the basic infrastructure of Myanmar to Chinese infrastructure, and effectively create another western province beyond Yunnan,” said Clapp.
It is also an area notable for long-running conflicts between the Myanmar military and ethnic armed groups, which are widely believed to receive their weaponry from Chinese sources even as Beijing plays a role in negotiating peace. China is “playing a big role in the peace process but they’re playing both sides of it,” said Clapp. “I think that China’s interest in the long term is keeping some instability on the border so you have a firewall, as it were, between developing democracy in Myanmar, and the lack of democracy in China.”
Xi’s visit comes after Myanmar pulled away from China in 2011 over public opposition to the Myitsone Dam, a $3.6 billion hydropower project. It remains a heated topic, with more than 50 civil society organizations calling on Xi to scratch the project in Kachin State in an open letter issued on Wednesday. Nau Kai Tu Kaung, a Kachin environmentalist told VOA’s Burmese Service that Chinese companies are also involved in destructive environmental endeavors such as rare earth mining.“
[The dam] is highly unpopular,” said Clapp. “It would erupt as a political issue in Myanmar” if the project were revived. She pointed out that the dam’s original design sent more than 90% of the generated electricity to China. “But there were no plans for a transmission line, even into China,” she added. “So it didn’t make sense.”
To succeed today “you have to completely redesign it, and … it has to feed in to the grid in Myanmar, it has to serve the electrical needs of Myanmar, not China. Yunnan doesn’t need the electricity now.”
Xi is scheduled to meet Myanmar’s de factor leader Aung San Suu Kyi and army chief Min Aung Hlaing in the capital Naypyitaw, as well with the heads of an array of political parties. Chinese Ambassador to Myanmar Chen Hai said dozens of agreements will be signed during Xi’s visit.
Clapp said that while the countries may sign memoranda of understanding “those are not final agreements. Even the CMEC, the China Myanmar Economic Corridor is an MOU so it’s aspirational.”
The talks are also expected to touch on a project that involves a deep-sea port in Rakhine state that would give China access to the Indian Ocean. The port project was scaled back in 2018 over fears of a debt-trap, a move critics believe China uses “to gain influence by bankrupting its partners and bending them to its will.”
Clapp said none of the massive infrastructure projects is going to happen quickly. The projects cannot become final until environmental, social and economic assessments are completed, and a business plan completed for each project. Financing for the projects is unclear because “the Myanmar government is not going to take any sovereign debt” and any financing by “big Chinese companies and their partners” will take a long time to put together, especially for large projects. 
“I think the most that we’re going to see in the near term is small projects; for example, there are several economic zones along the border that are already under development. The problem with those is that they’re largely unregulated, and they’re going to erupt at some point because they’re bringing in a lot of Chinese migration into Myanmar, [which is] going to cause a big problem with the Myanmar population. In the Karen State, in places where these economic zones are already underway, it’s going to start causing social problems. And this is something that China, Beijing needs to think about over the long terms because it could really destroy the relationship between the two countries if they’re not careful.”
Liyuan Lu is with VOA’s Mandarin Service and Kyaw Zan Tha is with VOA’s Burmese Service. 

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2020 marks the beginning of a promising decade for Africa, according to African experts and global policymakers who gathered this week for the release of the Brookings Institution’s annual publication on Africa. VOA correspondent Mariama Diallo reports on some of the six key priorities, including climate change, regional integration, and the need to develop the energy and private sectors.

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Ukrainian authorities say they have opened an investigation into whether Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Kyiv, was illegally spied on before U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly recalled her from her post last year. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the State Department have not replied to repeated requests for comment on the alleged surveillance and potential physical threats to the 33-year career diplomat. VOA’s Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports from the State Department.

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The Pentagon is rejecting accusations that military leadership “incentivized lying” to portray a more optimistic picture of U.S. efforts in the nearly two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.
“The idea that there was some … effort to hide the truth or the reality on the ground just doesn’t hold water,” chief Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman told reporters Thursday.
“This idea that there were somehow misstatements or lies, I don’t think that really gels,” he added.
Hoffman’s response took aim at comments by U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko, who testified Wednesday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

FILE – John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 10, 2014.“We have incentivized lying to Congress,” Sopko told lawmakers. “The whole incentive is to show success and to ignore the failure. And when there’s too much failure, classify it or don’t report it.”
Lawmakers created the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, in 2008 and it has been producing quarterly reports on U.S. reconstruction efforts ever since.
Many of the reports have been critical of U.S. efforts, criticism that gained momentum following the release late last year of the Afghanistan Papers — a collection of previously undisclosed SIGAR interviews and notes obtained by The Washington Post.
Hoffman said Thursday that much of the material Sopko cited had been shared willingly, with the understanding it would be shared with Congress.
He also made no apology for how defense officials shared information with the public outside the SIGAR process.
“We have people who are working incredibly hard on incredibly difficult projects, and when they’re asked to take on a difficult task, they look for ways to make it happen,” he said. “If our people are being too forward leaning and trying to be optimistic about what we think we can accomplish, and to be honest and open with the Congress, we’ll continue to do that.”

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Maria Campos sits in the backseat of a car with her grandchildren, her eyes welling with tears as the immigration center comes into view.
The seven-hour drive from North Carolina to the Stewart Detention Center in a remote corner of southwest Georgia has become all too familiar. One of her sons was held here before being deported back to Mexico last year, leaving behind his wife and children, who accompany Campos now. Campos fears her other son will meet the same fate after being detained when police were called on his friend.
“I said, ‘Don’t tell me this,’” she recalls saying to the jail officer when she learned her son had be sent to Stewart. “I can’t think. I can’t talk. I can do nothing. My mind stays blank.”

Maria Campos, 52, approaches the Stewart Detention Center with her grandkids to visit her son, in Lumpkin, Ga., Nov. 10, 2019.The razor-wire-ringed detention center stands beige and gray in the green outskirts of tiny Lumpkin, where detained immigrants outnumber residents. Those immigrants are caught in a larger system of immigration courts that are facing unprecedented turmoil from crushing caseloads and shifting policies.
Lumpkin has few available resources — only three immigration lawyers work here full time. There are no hotels, and many businesses in the downtown are shuttered. In the vacuum, a small network has sprung up to help the immigrants, offering them legal advice, places for relatives to stay and even gas cards for the families.
Campos doesn’t have money to pay for a lawyer, so her son is representing himself. Campos, her daughter-in-law and two grandchildren stayed at El Refugio, a house run by volunteers who help with food and gas.
She feels helpless when she visits her son at the detention center, which private company CoreCivic operates for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“This place is a horrible place because not all the lawyers want to go there and fight for our family members,” Campos said.

Attorney Matt Boles, 27, with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative, heads to immigration court at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga., Nov. 15, 2019.Marty Rosenbluth, one of two immigration attorneys who live in Lumpkin, knows how critical it is to have an attorney physically present for detainees.
“There’s so much that happens in the court that, you know, body language, eye contact, all these other intangibles that you just lose if you were telephonic,” Rosenbluth said. “But most important, I think it makes the biggest difference to the clients themselves.”
He recently bought a home in town with spare bedrooms to encourage attorneys to attend hearings in person.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative, or SIFI, also has stepped in to help. Two staff attorneys work in Lumpkin full time, and volunteer lawyers come for a week at a time.
The organization’s phone number is distributed in the Stewart immigration court, and attorney Erin Argueta estimates they get about 100 new calls a month.

A detainee waits for a visit from family who must communicate through a phone at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga., Nov. 15, 2019.It’s difficult for detained immigrants to see or even speak to lawyers who live far away, they have no access to email or fax, and the phones sometimes don’t work or are expensive, Argueta said. Communications are done by mail, which slows the process of collecting documentation, filling out forms in English, and getting documents translated and notarized.
“It’s really hard for people at Stewart to carry on day-to-day life, never mind meaningfully prepare their case and gather evidence,” Argueta said.
Visitors to the immigration court pass through two sliding gates set into chain-link fencing topped by loops of razor wire, the first gate closing behind them before the second opens.
“I think that walking into that environment reinforces the desire to give hope to people and get them free to be with their families,” said SIFI attorney Matt Boles, who lives full time in Lumpkin.
When detainees are released, it’s often in the evening. If they aren’t fortunate enough to have family waiting for them, they’re driven 30 minutes away to Columbus and left at one of two bus stations.
“There is no set time of release, so it’s difficult to formulate plans,” said Rita Ellis, founding member and chief financial officer of Paz Amigos, a volunteer organization that springs into action when bus station staff notify them that a new group of detainees has arrived.

Guo Chen of China walks to catch a ride to a local bus station after being released on bond from the remote Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, Nov. 6, 2019.The organization helps between 40 and 50 men a month, picking them up, feeding them and often putting them up in a hotel or a spare bedroom at a volunteer’s home. Donations of snacks, clothes and backpacks are handed out and phone calls are made to family members to arrange their travel.
“I think it’s a great gap filler to help the men transition from detention to being free, and there’s that scary moment when they’re left in limbo and they’re unsure of where they are and how to get home to their family and friends,” Ellis said. “We provide that service to make sure they get where they’re going safely and with a little kindness.”
Campos, meanwhile, is still waiting for resolution for her son, who has lived in the U.S. since the mid-1990s.
“My first son, my heart was broken because he’s not here,” she said. “I don’t want the same for the second one.”
 

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FBI agents on Thursday arrested a former Canadian Armed Forces reservist and two other men who have been linked to a violent white supremacist group and were believed to be heading to a pro-gun rally next week in Virginia’s capital. 
The three men are members of The Base and were arrested on federal charges in a criminal complaint unsealed in Maryland, according to a Justice Department news release. 
Tuesday’s complaint charged Canadian national Patrik Jordan Mathews, 27, and Brian Mark Lemley Jr., 33, of Elkton, Maryland, with transporting a firearm and ammunition with intent to commit a felony. William Garfield Bilbrough IV, 19, of Denton, Maryland, was charged with transporting and harboring aliens. 
The three men were believed to be planning to attend the pro-gun rally planned for Monday in Richmond, according to a law enforcement official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss an active investigation. 
Mathews and Lemley were arrested in Delaware and Bilbrough was arrested in Maryland, according to Marcia Murphy, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland. 
All three men were scheduled to make their initial court appearances Thursday afternoon in Greenbelt, Maryland. 
Search since September
U.S. and Canadian authorities had been searching for Mathews since his truck was found in September near the border between the two countries. He was last seen by family members in Beausejour, northeast of Winnipeg, on August 24, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Canadian military’s intelligence unit was investigating Mathews for “possible racist extremist activities” for several months, according to the Canadian Department of National Defence. 
Lemley also is charged with transporting a machine gun and “disposing of a firearm and ammunition to an alien unlawfully present in the United States.” 
The Anti-Defamation League said members of The Base and other white supremacist groups have frequently posted online messages advocating for “accelerationism,” a term “white supremacists have assigned to their desire to hasten the collapse of society as we know it.”  
“The term is widely used by those on the fringes of the movement, who employ it openly and enthusiastically on mainstream platforms, as well as in the shadows of private, encrypted chat rooms,” the ADL says. 

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Virginia on Wednesday moved to the brink of becoming the crucial 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in what was seen as a momentous victory for the women’s rights movement even though it is far from certain the measure will ever be added to the U.S. Constitution.
The state House and Senate approved the proposed amendment with bipartisan support, well over a generation after Congress sent the ERA to the states for ratification in 1972. Each chamber now must pass the other’s resolution, but final passage is considered all but certain.
Amendments to the Constitution must be ratified by three-quarters of the states, or 38. But whether this one will go on to become the 28th Amendment may have to be decided in court because the deadline set by Congress for ratification of the ERA ran out in 1982 and because five states that approved it in the 1970s have since rescinded their support.
Still, the twin votes carried symbolic weight and showed how much once-solidly conservative Virginia, a place that defeated the ERA time and again, has changed.
Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy, a sponsor of the House ERA measure, told her colleagues they were taking “the vote of a lifetime.”
“One hundred and sixty million women and girls across this country are waiting and will forever be changed by what happens in this body here today,” she said.

FILE – In this Jan. 8, 2020, file photo, Equal Rights Amendment supporters demonstrate outside Virginia State Capitol in Richmond, Va.ERA supporters had lined up hours in advance to get seats in the gallery. Among those who crowded in was Donna Granski, 73, who wore a purple, white and yellow sash covered in ERA buttons, some from her “antique” collection. Granksi said she was shocked when she moved to Virginia in the late ’70s and learned it hadn’t ratified the ERA. She had been pushing for it ever since.
“We feel like we are marching up to the peak of the mountain,” she said.
ERA advocates say it would enshrine equality for women in the Constitution, offering stronger protections in sex discrimination cases. They also argue the ERA would give Congress firmer ground to pass anti-discrimination laws.
Opponents warn it would erode commonsense protections for women, such as workplace accommodations during pregnancy. They also worry it could be used by abortion-rights supporters to quash abortion restrictions on the grounds they discriminate against women.
Virginia has undergone seismic political shifts in recent years because of increasing diversity and the growing activism and political power of women. Democrats retook control of the legislature in November’s elections and made passing the ERA a top priority after Republicans blocked it for years.
The ERA had passed the Virginia Senate in previous years with bipartisan support but had never before made it to the House for a floor vote.
It passed there on a 59-41 vote presided over by Del. Eileen Filler-Corn, the first female House speaker in the chamber’s 400-year history. Spectators in the gallery erupted in the cheers as she announced the outcome. The Senate then passed it 28-12.
Republican Del. Margaret Ransone, who voted against the ERA, emphasized the missed deadline and said: “I wish I could say that this dedication and hard work has not all been for nothing.”
Last week, the U.S. Justice Department issued a legal memo contending that because the deadline has expired, it is too late for states to ratify the ERA now. The only option now for ERA supporters is to try to begin the ratification process all over again in Congress, according to the memo.
The National Archives, which certifies the ratification of constitutional amendments, said it will abide by that opinion  “unless otherwise directed by a final court order.”
At least two lawsuits have already been filed, one  of them brought last month by Alabama, Louisiana and South Dakota to block the amendment and another  filed last week to clear a path for its adoption. In the meantime, congressional Democrats are working to pass a measure removing the deadline.
Among those disagreeing with the Justice Department opinion is Erwin Chemerinsky, a prominent constitutional law scholar and dean of the Berkeley School of Law. He said Congress can set a deadline and change one, too.
Douglas Johnson, senior policy adviser with the anti-abortion group National Right to Life, endorsed the Justice Department position and said that if the ERA were to be reintroduced, abortion opponents would probably seek to revise it to specify it could not be used to overturn state restrictions on abortion.
There is precedent for Congress to impose deadlines on the ratification process. But no deadline was set in the case of the 27th Amendment, which is aimed at restricting members of Congress from raising their own pay. It was ratified in 1992, or 203 years after it was submitted to Congress in 1789.
Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority and former president of the National Organization for Women, said it was “tragic” that a generation of women missed out on the protections the ERA would have offered.
But Smeal, who was a leader in the push for the ERA in the ’70s and ’80s, said the long fight has prompted women to run for political office, where they have increasingly made gains across the country.
“Every time they make us fight more, we get stronger,” she said.
 
 
  

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U.S. President Donald Trump violated the country’s spending law last year when he temporarily withheld $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine while at the same pressing Kyiv to launch investigations to benefit himself politically, a government watchdog agency concluded Thursday in a decision that is at the heart of the impeachment case against the U.S. leader.
Trump released the assistance that Ukraine wanted to help fight pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country in September after a 55-day delay without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy opening an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, one of Trump’s top 2020 Democratic challengers, and his son Hunter Biden’s lucrative work for a Ukrainian natural gas company.
But after an investigation,
Clerk of the House Cheryl Johnson, left, and House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving pass through Statuary Hall at the Capitol to deliver the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to Senate, Jan. 15, 2020.But some Democrats quickly latched on to the GAO report as more evidence supporting Trump’s alleged abuse of power.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, told CNN, “This will definitely be part of the trial. It establishes that the president violated U.S. law. The president abused his power by this illegal action.”
Senate trial
Seven lawmakers from the House of Representatives, called managers of the case against Trump, formally presented the articles of impeachment at mid-day presentation in the Capitol. House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff read the charges against the country’s 45th president in what is only the third Senate impeachment trial in the two and a half centuries of U.S. history.
Later, Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court will be sworn in to preside over Trump’s trial, and he in turn will swear in all 100 members of the Senate to act as jurors to decide Trump’s fate.
With the preliminaries out of the war, the impeachment trial is expected to start in earnest next Tuesday.
White House officials are predicting a short trial of no more than two weeks and Trump’s quick acquittal. But the proceeding could extend much longer if Democrats can persuade at least four Republican senators to vote with them to call new witnesses who did not testify during the weeks of investigations carried out by the Democrat-controlled House.
Witnesses

FILE – White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney talks with US President Donald after his meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at Winfield House, Dec. 3, 2019, in London.Democrats want to question former national security adviser John Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney about their knowledge of Trump’s actions pressing Ukraine for the Biden investigations, while some Republican lawmakers say that if that happens they want to subpoena either or both of the Bidens, as well as the still-unidentified government whistleblower who first disclosed Trump’s July 25 overture to Zelenskiy to “do us a favor” by investigating the Bidens.
Trump’s release of a rough transcript of his conversation with the Ukrainian leader showed that the basic facts of the whistleblower’s complaint against Trump — that he was seeking an investigation of a political rival — proved to be accurate, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.
As the impeachment drama has unfolded in Washington, Trump has almost daily ridiculed the Democrats’ efforts targeting him, calling the investigation unfair and a hoax. But as the House lawmakers prosecuting the case against him at the U.S. Capitol arrived in the Senate, Trump was silent on Twitter about the case.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the final step Thursday after the reading of the allegations against Trump and the swearing in of the senators as jurors will be to notify the White House and “summon the president to answer the articles and send his counsel.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., center, flanked by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., left, and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., speaks during a news conference, Jan. 15, 2020.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi signed the articles of impeachment at a ceremony Wednesday, moving the process forward after delaying for about a month as House Democrats tried to get Senate leaders to agree to allow testimony from new witnesses during the trial.
McConnell has resisted calling witnesses, saying that decision would come later in the trial.
As Pelosi announced the impeachment managers at a morning news conference, Trump tweeted the impeachment was “another Con job by the Do Nothing Democrats.”
White House ready
A senior administration official told reporters the White House is ready for the trial “because the facts overwhelmingly show that the president did nothing wrong.”

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White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said Trump “looks forward to having the due process rights in the Senate that Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats denied to him, and expects to be fully exonerated.”
This is the third time in the country’s 244-year history a U.S. president has been impeached and targeted for removal from office.
Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 were both impeached by the House but acquitted in Senate trials. A fourth president, Richard Nixon, resigned in 1974 in the face of certain impeachment in the Watergate political corruption scandal.