In Bethlehem, the town where Christians believe Jesus was born, a hotel designed by famed graffiti artist Banksy offers a different kind of Christmas. The Walled Off Hotel abuts the separation wall which Israel has built on its border with the Palestinian West Bank, and has now become a canvas for protest against the Israeli occupation. The hotel boasts that each room offers “the worst view in the world”. Linda Gradstein reports from Bethlehem.
Day: December 20, 2019
VOA Connect Episode 101 – An army of volunteers delivers meals to the needy, artists create with wood and chocolate, and Washington lights up with the spirit of the holidays.
Mother Dear’s Community Center was founded in 1957 by the late Rev. Annie Woodridge. Her descendants continue her legacy of giving back to the community, preparing and distributing hundreds of meals to seniors and people in need during the holidays.
Reporter/Camera: Gabrielle Weiss
The art of making chocolate: People in America features the story of Juliana Desmond, a chocolate artist in Tucson, Arizona. She tells us how a trip to Mexico helped her find her passion and how she’s helping it thrive in her homeland.
Executive Producer: Marsha James, Camera: Kaveh Rezai, Adapted by: Zdenko Novacki
U.S. President Donald Trump said he would sign a bill into law Friday that creates a space force and gives federal workers 12 weeks of paid parental leave.
The Republican-controlled Senate approved the $738 billion defense policy bill on Tuesday after the Democratic-led House approved the measure last week.
The measure funds the creation of Trump’s proposed space force as the sixth branch of the U.S. military in exchange for funding the Democrats’ parental leave proposal for federal employees.
The space force will be the first new branch of the U.S. military in more than 60 years, and two million federal workers will have 12 weeks of parental leave for the first time in American history.
In northern Ethiopia, tens of thousands of mostly Eritrean refugees are getting connected to families back home, partly thanks to last year’s peace deal between Addis Ababa and Asmara, but also to clean energy.
A Spanish alliance that includes three power companies is linking refugee camps in Shire, near the border with Eritrea, to the country’s energy grid, which largely relies on hydropower. The next step is equipping refugee households with solar energy.
“It’s a catalyst,” said Javier Mazorra, partnership coordinator for the group, Alianza Shire. “You need energy for health, you need energy for education, you need energy for protection, especially for women.”
Humanitarians hope what is happening in Shire will someday become the new normal, amounting to a game changer for refugees, 90% of whom have limited access to electricity, according to the United Nations. Indeed, energy access counted among key issues addressed this week at a global refugee forum in Geneva, with Africa considered a top priority.
“The current situation in Africa is pretty poor, pathetic,” said Andrew Harper, climate action special adviser for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which co-hosted the meeting.
Often refugees have a single energy solution, “which is going to surrounding forests, woodland, and cutting it down,” Harper said.
Greening Africa’s energy
The refugee agency has launched a four-year strategy to transition to clean energy in all of its camps, although Harper offered no fixed deadline or price tag for doing so. A UNHCR-sponsored report out this week also found renewable energy to be a cost-effective and reliable energy source for refugees.
For Africa in particular, the stakes are high — inside and outside refugee settings. Along with Asia, it has among the world’s highest rates of reliance on charcoal and firewood. Adding in charcoal exports, that has translated into massive deforestation in parts of the continent.
Firewood- and charcoal-based energy also carry myriad other problems, posing health risks from smoky fires and security threats for women collecting charcoal, and heightening tensions between refugees and host communities who also rely on the fast-thinning trees.
Many of these problems can be seen in East Africa, home to some of the continent’s largest refugee communities.
“There are some energy solutions,” said Kathleen Callaghy, senior humanitarian program associate for Clean Cooking Alliance, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. “But the funding, the political will and the capacity of organizations in the humanitarian community is not enough to sustain or expand these projects over time.”
In drought-prone Ethiopia, the government launched a massive reforestation initiative that saw more than 350 million trees planted countrywide in a single day.
Unsustainable energy practices persist for the nearly 1 million refugees Ethiopia hosts, said Fisseha Meseret Kindie, humanitarian assistance director at the country’s aid agency.
“The energy challenge is one of the prominent challenges we have,” he said, adding host communities are facing the fallout.
Convincing private sector
Transitioning to green energy in Africa will mean tapping a private sector that may be wary of investing in refugees and a continent deemed risky.
“Quite honestly, there’s very little in it for them right now,” Callagh, of the Clean Cooking Alliance, said, suggesting alliances with humanitarian agencies as the way forward.
But for Mazorra, of Alianza Shire, the payback is more than financial.
“There are a lot of incentives,” he said, including learning to operate in risky settings. “When you are struggling with really poor resource situations, innovation is key. And there are some innovations that could go back to Spain.”
Harper, of UNHCR, believes there’s another, broader case to be made.
“We’re basically saying the market for energy in Africa is not just 6, 7 million refugees,” he said. “It’s 1.2 billion people. We’ve got to look at it as much more part of the rural electrification process across the continent.”
President Donald Trump held a triumphant White House meeting Thursday to show off a Democratic congressman defecting to his Republican party, portraying the switch as proof that his impeachment is “a hoax.”
Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey was one of a handful of Democrats who bucked the party line and opposed Trump’s impeachment Wednesday on two counts.
Trump brought Van Drew to the Oval Office, seating him in one of the armchairs typically used for visiting foreign leaders, and told reporters “Jeff will now be joining the Republican party.”
“It’s a big deal,” Trump said. “I can say I am endorsing him.”
Van Drew told Trump: “You have my undying support, always.”
Trump, clasping Van Drew’s hand, returned the pledge, saying: “Same way.”
For Trump, this stage-managed presentation of a political scalp underlined his Republican party’s total loyalty during impeachment.
Democrats were able to pass the two articles — abuse of office and obstruction of Congress — thanks to a healthy majority in the lower house.
But while Republicans were unanimous in voting against, the Democrats saw two of their members break with the party line on the first article and three on the second. Another member of the party sat out the vote.
Trump will now become only the third president in U.S. history to face a trial in the Senate, where his Republicans have the majority.
Trump once again branded the entire procedure a “hoax” and said, “I don’t feel like I am being impeached.”
Americans, he said, will still reelect him in 2020, in large part because “We have the greatest economy in the history of our country. We’ve never done so well.”
Democrats say that testimony from senior government officials and diplomats proves that Trump used a hold-up of foreign aid to Ukraine to try and force the country into opening an unnecessary, politically damaging corruption probe against one of his main 2020 challengers, Joe Biden.
He then attempted to block officials from testifying before Congress or sharing documentation on the matter.
The U.S. House of Representatives’ vote to impeach President Donald Trump broke along party lines Wednesday, reflecting the American public’s deep divide over the president.
National polls showed public opinion remained evenly split on the president’s impeachment, moving little since the process began. According to a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, 48% of those surveyed approved of the impeachment process, whereas an equal percentage opposed it. Those figures mirrored the president’s approval ratings, which also have fluctuated little since his first days in office.
For some of the president’s biggest critics and supporters, impeachment brought an opportunity to publicly state their views outside the Capitol during the vote.
“I think it’s a hoax, I think it’s a travesty, I think it’s damaging our democracy, I think it’s hurting our country. I think it’s really an invalid impeachment,” said Mark Kampf, a Trump supporter who came from Nevada to denounce what he considered a politically motivated process.
Paki Wieland, however, joined the rally to call for the removal of Trump: “This president has broken so many laws and we need to hold him accountable. And to state to him and to the world that no one is above the law.” She also expressed concern that Republican partisanship was undermining the country’s democratic system of government.
“I was here for the Nixon impeachment. Members of his party were much less partisan than members of the Republican Party are today,” Wieland said.
Analyst Elaine Kamarck with the Brookings Institution in Washington said Americans have been divided politically for years, but Trump has tried to exploit those divisions for political gain.
“Donald Trump has intensified the polarization. Throughout his presidency, he has played to his base. He has played to simply the supporters that he already has,” Kamarck said.
Facts vs. opinions
While public opinion shifted as evidence was uncovered in previous impeachment efforts, the testimony and evidence did little to shift opinions this time. That was in part because many Americans disagreed on the evidence itself.
“There have been no facts. It’s only hearsay and innuendo,” Kampf, the Trump supporter, said.
Adam from Maryland, dressed in an American flag shirt, shared the same view and said the process had only reinforced his trust in the president.
“The only thing I am convinced about is when Trump released the transcript and proved the whistleblower completely wrong,” he said.
And how people read the White House summary of the president’s phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy appeared to reflect their view of impeachment itself.
Supporters saw the president exonerated by the summary of the call, in which Trump asked for a “favor”: an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. Critics saw it as a straightforward example of the president using his office for personal political gain.
Kory Holmes from Maine said the Ukraine episode was the latest example of behavior that disqualifies the president from serving as the nation’s leader.
Holmes said the testimonies and the documents released had provided sufficient proof that the president’s actions amounted to a pattern of misconduct that stretched back to the 2016 election.
“This man constantly lies, breaks the law, violates every constitutional thing there is. He cheated with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin to steal the first election and he’s trying to cheat for the second one,” he said.
Views on impeachment
Trump is expected to survive a trial in the Republican-controlled Senate, where lawmakers would decide whether to remove him from office.
The process will only help cement support for the president, said Adam, who added that impeachment was another example of what he called an anti-Trump agenda the Democrats have followed since the president’s election.
For their part, pro-impeachment voters did not seem disheartened by the expected results in the Senate trial. They said the process was about much more.
Holmes, of Maine, said impeachment was a victory for the laws and the Constitution of the United States.
“They [lawmakers] have got to do the job. They swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. The man broke the law. This has nothing to do with the election — this is the law,” he said.
Analyst Kamarck said she saw a deepened polarization among American voters because of the impeachment. She said Trump used the process to further corrode people’s trust in the government. But she also said she thought impeachment reinforced the constitutional guarantees and protections for the American democratic system.
“The most important reason to do this, even though he will not most likely be removed from office, the most important reason to do this is to preserve what we call in the United States the separation of powers. Had they not done this, what they would have done is ceded an enormous amount of power to the president of the United States, and that is a precedent that they simply could not make,” Kamarck said.
The process has energized the political base of each party. Analysts, such as Kamarck, said they expected to see the highest voter turnout in U.S. history for the 2020 elections.