by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : Paul Manafort, US President Donald Trumps former campaign chairman, repeatedly lied to federal investigators in breach of a plea agreement he signed two months ago, Special Counsel Robert Muellers office said in a court filing.
Prosecutors working for Mueller on Monday said in the filing that Manafort’s “crimes and lies” about “a variety of subject matters” relieve them of all promises they made to him in the plea agreement, reports The New York Times.
But under the terms of the agreement, Manafort, 69, cannot withdraw his guilty plea.
Defence lawyers disagreed that Manafort had violated the deal.
In the same filing, they said that Manafort “believes he has provided truthful information”.
But given the impasse between the two sides, they asked Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the US District Court for the District of Columbia to set a sentencing date for Manafort, who has been in solitary confinement in a detention centre in Alexandria, Virginia.
Striking a plea deal with Manafort in September potentially gave prosecutors access to information that could prove useful to their investigation.
But the filing on Monday, a rare step in a plea deal, suggested that they thought Manafort was withholding details that could be pertinent to the Russia inquiry or other cases.
A jury in Northern Virginia convicted Manafort of eight counts of financial fraud in August stemming from his work as a political consultant in Ukraine. The jury deadlocked on 10 other charges.
Faced with a second trial in the District of Columbia on related charges in September, he pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts and agreed to an open-ended arrangement requiring him to answer “fully, truthfully, completely and forthrightly” questions about “any and all matters” of interest to the government.
Manafort is scheduled to be sentenced in the Virginia case on February 8, 2019, The New York Times reported.
Mueller’s investigators have charged a number of Trump’s former aides with lying to them.
Three former Trump campaign officials or advisers have pleaded guilty to misleading federal investigators: Michael T. Flynn, Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos, who reported to prison on Monday to serve his 14-day sentence.
A Dutch lawyer, Alex van der Zwaan, who had business dealings with Manafort, also pleaded guilty to lying to Mueller’s office.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : US President Donald Trump will be spending some of his Thanksgiving weekend at his Mar-a-Lago Florida resort interviewing potential candidates for positions in his administration, the media reported.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Trump was asked if he would be interviewing people this week for administration jobs, reports CNN.
“Yeah, we’ll have a few. Very happy with my Cabinet and people that work for me,” he said, adding, “I’ll probably be changing a couple, maybe a few.”
“But very little. Overall, we’re very happy,” Trump told reporters.
It was reported last week that Trump was eyeing replacements for Chief of Staff John Kelly and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
He also has yet to nominate a permanent replacement for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, with Matthew Whitaker serving in an acting capacity.
Trump did not say which positions he was talking to candidates about or who would be visiting the Florida resort.
Trump said the people who serve in his administration have gone on to be successful after leaving their positions, and pointed to former White House communications director Hope Hicks as an example.
“She’s become a very important person in the outside world,” Trump said.
In October, Hicks accepted a job at Fox as the executive vice president and chief communications officer.
“People like doing interviews here,” Trump said, referring to Mar-a-Lago as the “Southern White House”.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business Summit, Events, Social Round-up, World
Port Moresby : Trade disputes and the competition for geopolitical influence in the Pacific between China and the US took centre stage at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Papua New Guinea on Saturday, where 21 member nations were gathered with the aim of drawing up a common trade area by 2020.
While Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated his opinion that no country benefits from a trade war, US Vice President Mike Pence used his speech to warn Beijing of further sanctions if the Asian superpower does not end what he termed abusive trade practices, the BBC reported.
“History has shown that confrontation, whether in the form of a cold war, a hot war or a trade war, will produce no winners,” Xi told delegates gathered here at the summit in Port Moresby.
He advocated multilateral relations without egotistical agendas or protectionism, which he said were condemned to failure in what was interpreted as a thinly-veiled dig at the “America First” policies pursued by US President Donald Trump, who did not attend the APEC gathering.
“Attempts to erect barriers and cut close economic ties work against the laws of economics and the trends of history,” Xi said, adding that “this is a shortsighted approach and it is doomed to failure”.
Pence struck a more hawkish tone, although he prefixed his speech by saying the Trump administration admired Xi and China.
“In the President’s words, China’s taken advantage of the US for many, many years, and those days are over,” Pence said.
“As the President added, China has tremendous barriers, it has tremendous tariffs and, as we all know, their country engages in quotas, forced technology transfers, intellectual property theft and industrial subsidies on an unprecedented scale,” Pence went on.
“Such actions have actually contributed to a $375 billion trade deficit with the US last year alone,” he said.
He said Trump’s move in September to levy tariffs worth $250 billion on Chinese imports — to which China responded in kind, placing roughly $110 billion of its own tariffs against US imports — was in defence of US interests, but warned that Washington could double its tariffs if China does not adhere to commercial policies proposed by Washington.
“The US will not change course until China changes its ways,” Pence said.
He also took aim at China’s development programmes in the region, such as the Silk Road initiative that Beijing hopes will connect trade routes through Central Asia and into Europe, which Pence described as being of lower quality.
He also said that Chinese initiatives damaged the sovereignty of other nations, while US enterprises prioritized other countries’ sovereignty.
Founded in 1989, APEC accounts for 60 per cent of global GDP, more than half of global trade and constitutes a market of around 2.85 billion consumers, or roughly 40 per cent of the global population.
It aims to establish a free trade zone among the 21 member economies by 2020.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
By Arul Louis,
New York : India is the second largest international reservoir for the US higher education institutions having sent 196,271 students here in the last academic year, according to latest data.
Their numbers continued to grow, with a 5.4 per cent increase in 2017-18 over the previous academic year, according to the Open Doors report from the State Department and the Institute of International Education.
In the other direction, 4,704 students went to study in India during 2016-17, latest period for which data is available. It was an increase of 12.5 per cent from the previous year.
The report said that there was a steep fall in the number of Indian students at the post-graduate level in the US. Their numbers came down by 8.8 per cent to 95,651 in 2017-18 compared to the previous year, while the number of students in practical training programmes after graduation shot up by 32 per cent to 75,390, according to the report.
The number of undergraduate students also went up by 6.2 per cent to 23,346.
Indians made up 17.9 per cent of total of 1,094,792 international students in the US last academic year.
China sent 363,341 students, the most of any country.
In 2016-17, there were 186,267 students from India in the US, a 24.9 per cent increase over the 165,918 the previous year.
During 2016-17, there were 21,977 students in undergraduate programmes, 104,899 in graduate courses and 57,132 in practical training programmes.
The State Department said international students contributed $42 billion to the US economy and supported 450,000 jobs.
(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter @arulouis)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
People who are part of the first migrant caravan from Honduras start arriving at the border, in Tijuana, Mexico, 14 November 2018.
Washington : More than 600 undocumented immigrants were detained along the Arizona-Mexico border in the last 48 hours, according to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Most of them are groups of families or unaccompanied juveniles from Guatemala, who, totalling to 654 immigrants, voluntarily surrendered to CBP agents in different operations on Monday and Tuesday, the federal agency said on Wednesday.
However, these migrants have no connection with the caravan that, coming from Honduras, currently travels through Mexico, Efe news reported.
They entered the country illegally near the border crossing of San Luis, where, according to the federal agency, there is an “outdated” border wall infrastructure that allows migrants to cross.
CBP further said that “larger numbers have started to illegally cross shallow portions of the Colorado River near Yuma”.
The statement added that “at approximately 8.30 pm Monday night, a group of 55 Central Americans waded across the river near County 9th Street and surrendered to agents after walking around vehicle barriers. The area lacks infrastructure that would deter pedestrian entries.”
Detentions of groups of immigrants continue to be made at the Arizona-Mexico border although the administration of President Donald Trump announced last week new regulations that would prevent those who enter the country illegally from seeking political asylum.
Those who want to request this type of protection must now present themselves at the ports of entry along the border with Mexico.
Currently, in the border town of Nogales, Arizona, there are more than 60 families waiting their turn to apply for political asylum.
CBP indicated that during the current fiscal year, which began on October 1, arrests within the Yuma Sector were up over 150 per cent, compared to the same date in the previous fiscal year.
—IANS
