News Lelemuku

WASHINGTON, LELEMUKU.COM - Before the new coronavirus began spreading around the world, Serra Sowers was thinking about what she would do after high school.

The 17-year-old from Florida had planned to visit seven colleges this spring to help her decide where to continue her education.

In the United States, high school students often visit colleges and universities they might attend before they officially seek admission. But like so many things during Sowers’ final year of high school, the coronavirus pandemic has pushed the process online.

Sowershas had to depend on virtual visits, learning about schools through video meetings with college officials.

Her mother, Ebru Ural, says she worries how the pandemic might affect her daughter’s college experience itself in a few short months.

“We’re dealing with the unknown, and we’re trying to make such a huge decision. She invested the better part of the last year trying to earn acceptance to these institutions,” Ural said, but “we really don’t know what we’re buying right now.”

The pandemic has affected plans for millions of students, both in the United States and overseas. Many are making virtual visits to schools while dealing with concerns about paying for a college education in an economic downturn. They also are wondering whether college campuses will even reopen by late summer.

Boston University, for example, has already canceled all "in-person summer activities" at its main campus. And the university’s plan for dealing with the pandemic states that if health officials say it is unsafe to re-open this year, it may wait until January 2021.

Earlier this month, Harvard University’s president said Harvard is considering several possible plans of action. Yet the future is still very unclear. Oregon State University and University of Arizona officials have expressed hope their schools would re-open, but shared similar concerns about what the future holds.

In efforts to keep student enrollment numbers up, colleges are offering interactive one-on-one online meetings, using video services like Zoom. Hundreds of schools have given families more time to decide by delaying the date of their first required payment from May 1 to June 1.

In addition, the Associate Press reports that the two leading college admissions tests – the SAT and the ACT – have been cancelled. So a growing number of schools are removing admissions test requirements for students entering college.

But for all the schools’ efforts, many families say it is difficult to look forward when students are still finishing high school from home.

Opinion studies have found that large numbers of American high school seniors plan to spend at least a year working or traveling before attending college.

Studies also have shown that many Americans may decide against the first-choice school on their list of colleges because it is too costly. Others say they would feel safer attending a school closer to home.

About 3.7 million American students are expected to graduate from high school this year. Nearly70 percent expected to start college in the late summer.

Lauren Kohler of Connecticut was planning to spend her high school’s spring break visiting three universities. They are the University of South Carolina, Florida State University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Kohler visited South Carolina last year. But now the 18-year-old is depending on virtual visits and friends’ experiences to learn about Florida State. She also recently walked around an empty UMass Amherst campus.

“I’m a big believer that you can walk on a campus and say, ‘This is my school,’ or ‘This is not my school,’” said Kohler. “It really depends on the feeling and the type of people that are there.”

Grace Malloy of Oregon did get a chance to visit to Long Island University Post in New York. But her spring break visits to Nebraska Wesleyan University and the University of Northern Colorado were canceled.

Malloy also wanted to see six other schools. Now she is worried she will not know how to reduce the number of choices on her list.

“Decision-making is not my strong suit,” she said after completing her third virtual visit of the week. (VOA)

WASHINGTON, LELEMUKU.COM - U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he looks forward to debating his eventual Democratic opponent when he runs for re-election next year, but bashed the independent commission that for decades has arranged the logistics of the debates as politically aligned against him.

"The problem is that the so-called Commission on Presidential Debates is stacked with Trump Haters &Never Trumpers," the Republican president said on Twitter. "3 years ago they were forced to publicly apologize for modulating my microphone in the first debate" against the Democratic nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

As President, the debates are up to me," Trump tweeted, "and there are many options, including doing them directly &avoiding the nasty politics of this very biased Commission. I will make a decision at an appropriate time but in the meantime, the Commission on Presidential Debates is not authorized to speak for me (or R's)!"

Still, Trump said he looks "very much forward to debating whoever the lucky person is who stumbles across the finish line in the little watched Do Nothing Democrat Debates. My record is so good on the Economy and all else, including debating, that perhaps I would consider more than 3 debates."

The commission, created in 1987 by the Republican and Democratic parties to oversee the quadrennial presidential and vice presidential debates, is overseen by prominent Democrats and Republicans and other public figures. Its current three co-chairs are Frank Fahrenkopf, a former Republican national chairman; Dorothy Ridings, chief executive of the Council of Federations of charitable groups, and Kenneth Wollack, a former president of the National Democratic Institute, a non-governmental organization that promotes democracy worldwide.

The commission has already announced plans for three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate next September and October in the weeks ahead of the Nov. 3 national election, with all of them on U.S. university campuses.

The commission acknowledged that in the first 2016 Trump-Clinton debate, "there were issues regarding Donald Trump's audio that affected the sound level in the debate hall," but not on the nationally televised broadcast, which 80 million people watched, the most ever for a presidential debate. The commission did not, as Trump said, apologize for the audio problem in the debate hall.

In response to Trump's tweets Monday, the commission said, "The televised general election debates are an important part of our democratic process. Since 1988, the Commission on Presidential Debates has conducted 30 general election presidential and vice presidential debates. Our record is one of fairness, balance and non-partisanship." (VOA)

WASHINGTON, LELEMUKU.COM - U.S. lawmakers are formally accusing President Donald Trump of misconduct and obstruction, based on what they say is amonths-long effort by the president “to use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election.”

The report, released Tuesday by the House Intelligence Committee—which is controlled by opposition Democrats—is titled “The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report.”

Republican members of Congress say the Democrats uncovered no smoking guns that would merit Trump’s impeachment.

Democrats disagree. “The evidence is clear that President Trump used the power of his office to pressure Ukraine into announcing investigations into his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and a debunked conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election. These investigations were designed to benefit his 2020 presidential re-election campaign,” according to a statement released by Adam Schiff, Carolyn Maloney and Eliot Engel, who respectively chair the Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees of the House of Representatives.

“The evidence is also clear that President Trump conditioned official acts on the public announcement of these investigations: a coveted White House visit and critical U.S. military assistance Ukraine needed to fight its Russian adversary,” the statement adds.

The Democratic lawmakers also accuse the president of engaging “in categorical and unprecedented obstruction in order to cover up his misconduct.”

White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham is rejecting the report’s conclusion.

“At the end of a one-sided sham process, Chairman Schiff and the Democrats utterly failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump,” she said in a statement. “This report reflects nothing more than their frustrations. Chairman Schiff’s report reads like the ramblings of a basement blogger straining to prove something when there is evidence of nothing.”

Schiff told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference that if Congress does not punish Trump for soliciting foreign interference in a U.S. election, "we are begging for more of the same." (VOA)

LOS ANGELES - A quake with a magnitude as large as 7.1 jolted much of California, cracked buildings, set fires, broke roads and caused several injuries, authorities and residents said.

The quake, preceded by Thursday’s 6.4-magnitude temblor in the Mojave Desert, was the largest Southern California temblor in at least 20 years and was followed by a series of large and small aftershocks.

It hit at 8:19 p.m. and was centered 11 miles from Ridgecrest in the same area where the previous quake hit. But it was felt as far north as Sacramento, as far east as Las Vegas and as far south as Mexico.

Early magnitude estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey wavered between 6.9 and 7.1. It was measured at 7.1 by the European-Mediterranean Seismological Agency.

Multiple injuries, fires

The area in and around Ridgecrest, trying to recover from the previous temblor, took the brunt of damage.

Megan Person, director of communications for the Kern County Fire Department, said there were reports of multiple injuries and multiple fires, but she didn’t have details.

The county opened an emergency shelter. Meanwhile, a rockslide closed State Route 178 in Kern River Canyon, where photos from witnesses also showed that a stretch of roadway had sunk.

San Bernardino County firefighters reported cracked buildings and one minor injury.

In downtown Los Angeles, 150 miles away, offices in skyscrapers rolled and rocked for at least 30 seconds.

Gov. Gavin Newsom activated the state Office of Emergency Services operations center “to its highest level.”

“The state is coordinating mutual aid to local first responders,” he said.

Lucy Jones, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology and a former science adviser at the Geological Survey, tweeted that Thursday’s earthquake was a “foreshock” and that Friday’s quake was on the same fault system as the earlier quake.

“You know we say we have a 1 in 20 chance that an earthquake will be followed by something bigger? This is that 1 in 20 time,” she tweeted.

Firefighters around Southern California were mobilized to check for damage.

An NBA Summer League game in Las Vegas was stopped after the quake. Speakers over the court at the Thomas & Mack Center continued swaying more than 10 minutes after the quake.

In Los Angeles, the quake rattled Dodger Stadium in the fourth inning of the team’s game against the San Diego Padres.

The quake Friday night happened when Dodgers second baseman Enrique Hernandez was batting. It didn’t appear to affect him or Padres pitcher Eric Lauer.

Hours earlier, seismologists had said that quake had been followed by more than 1,700 aftershocks and that they might continue for years.

Jones said aftershocks from the new main quake could occur for three years.

Changes to alert system

Earlier Friday, Los Angeles had revealed plans to lower slightly the threshold for public alerts from its earthquake early warning app. But officials said the change was in the works before the quake, which gave scientists at the California Institute of Technology’s seismology lab 48 seconds of warning but did not trigger a public notification.

“Our goal is to alert people who might experience potentially damaging shaking, not just feel the shaking,” said Robert de Groot, a spokesman for the USGS’s ShakeAlert system, which is being developed for California, Oregon and Washington.

Construction of a network of seismic-monitoring stations for the West Coast is just over half complete, with most coverage in Southern California, San Francisco Bay Area and the Seattle-Tacoma area. Eventually, the system will send out alerts over the same system used for Amber Alerts to defined areas that are expected to be affected by a quake, de Groot said.

California is partnering with the federal government to build the statewide earthquake warning system, with the goal of turning it on by June 2021. The state has spent at least $25 million building it, including installing hundreds of seismic stations throughout the state.

This year, Newsom said the state needed $16.3 million to finish the project, which included money for stations to monitor seismic activity, plus nearly $7 million for “outreach and education.” The state Legislature approved the funding last month, and Newsom signed it into law.(VOA)

BISMARCK, LELEMUKU.COM - Native American voters face poor access to polling sites, discrimination by poll workers and unfair identification requirements, tribal leaders told members of Congress who traveled Tuesday to a reservation in North Dakota where voting rights were a key issue in last year's U.S. Senate race.

A House elections subcommittee's meeting at the Standing Rock reservation was the latest in a series of on-site visits across the country on voting-rights issues. Activists told the panel that obstacles still remain more than five decades after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which aimed to eliminate such impediments for minority voters.

“There continues to be barriers -- interpersonal and systemic -- at our polling locations in our tribal communities and for our Native voters across the state,'' said activist Prairie Rose Seminole, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa & Arikara Nation in northwestern North Dakota.

The bulk of the two-hour hearing focused on North Dakota's voter ID requirements, which have led to two federal lawsuits by tribes who allege the rules are discriminatory and suppress the American Indian vote, which leans Democrat in a Republican-dominant state.

The voter ID dispute drew national attention last fall because of a U.S. Senate race in North Dakota that was seen as critical to Republicans' chances to keep control of the Senate. Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer defeated Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, who was seeking a second term.

North Dakota requires that a voter ID include a provable street address, which Secretary of State Al Jaeger says guards against fraud. Tribes allege the moves by state GOP leaders disenfranchised members who live on reservations where street addresses are uncommon or unknown and where post office boxes are the primary addresses.

“The state knew this and they used it to suppress tribal voters,'' said Charles Walker, CEO of the Mandan, Hidatsa & Arikara Nation.

State officials have denied that. The U.S. Supreme Court in October allowed the state to continue requiring street addresses on voter IDs, though Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in a dissent that “the risk of voter confusion appears severe.''

The decision led to an intense effort by tribes and advocacy groups to get tribal members to the polls with proper ID during November's general election. It was largely successful but cost the Spirit Lake and Standing Rock tribes a combined $14,000, in part because they waived normal fees for tribal IDs.

“Fifteen dollars is milk and bread for a week for a poor family,'' said Turtle Mountain Chippewa attorney Alysia LaCounte, who broke down in tears during her testimony.

U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, an Illinois Republican, noted during the hearing that Cramer won handily despite high Native American voter turnout.

Native American Rights Fund attorney Jacqueline De Leon responded: “We don't think that outrage is a get-out-the-vote strategy, right?''

“There are voter suppression issues going on throughout Indian Country that aren't nearly getting the attention or resources that were poured into North Dakota because it just so happened that Sen. Heitkamp was running for re-election, and the Senate balance of power elevated this issue to the national stage,'' DeLeon said.

Davis replied, “So this was all a conspiracy to beat Heidi Heitkamp?''

North Dakota Republican leaders have denied that Heitkamp's surprise 2012 win influenced state voter ID law.

OJ Semans Sr., co-executive director of the Four Directions advocacy group, which has been successful in voting rights lawsuits in South Dakota and other states, implored the subcommittee to work to increase federal dollars that states can dedicate to helping Native American voters.

“The backbone of democracy is going to be given a brace, because people are going to vote,'' he said. (VOA)

MINNEAPOLIS, LELEMUKU.COM - U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, who's engaged in an intensifying feud with President Donald Trump, has raised nearly $830,000 in the first quarter for her re-election campaign, according to campaign finance reports filed this week.

The Minnesota Democrat -- a Somali American and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress -- drew many out-of-state contributions and had just over $600,000 cash on hand as of March 31.

Omar won election in November to a reliably liberal Minneapolis-area seat. Her remarks in recent months on Israel and the power of Jewish influence in Washington have drawn intense criticism and accusations of anti-Semitism, and prompted speculation that she might face a primary challenge. But no challenger has emerged, and progressives across the country have rallied to her side.

Trump told KSTP-TV during a visit to Minnesota on Monday that he has no regrets about tweeting a video Friday that attacked her for remarks she made last month that supposedly offered a flippant description of the Sept. 11 attacks and the terrorists who killed nearly 3,000 people.

“Look, she's been very disrespectful to this country,'' Trump said. “She's been very disrespectful, frankly, to Israel.... She's got a way about her that's very, very bad, I think, for our country. I think she's extremely unpatriotic and extremely disrespectful to our country.''

Neither Trump's tweet nor the video included Omar's full quote or the context. She told the Council on American-Islamic Relations on March 23 that many Muslims saw their civil liberties eroded after the Sept. 11 attacks and were tired of being treated as second-class citizens.

“CAIR was founded after 9/11, because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,'' she said. While CAIR was founded in 1994, according to its website, its membership skyrocketed after the attacks.

Omar said Sunday that it's more than a rhetorical squabble and that lives, including hers, are at stake. She spoke after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she has taken steps to ensure Omar's safety. Pelosi also urged Trump to take down the video, but it was still in his Twitter feed Tuesday. (VOA)

HOOPER, LELEMUKU.COM - Tom Geisler has experienced many ups and downs in his 43 years of farming, as weather sometimes helped and often hurt his livelihood. But he was not prepared for what Mother Nature brought this spring.

“Never had anything like this before. Not this kind of a flood,” said Geisler, who is still in a daze and trying to grasp all his losses.

In March, melting snow from a harsh winter combined with a “bomb cyclone” storm caused historic flooding in the fields and communities across the Midwest.

Geisler cultivates corn, soy beans and hay, and raises cattle on 162 hectares (400 acres) of his family’s farm near Hooper, Nebraska. The water has mostly receded, but it left a mess in his fields, and his 134-year-old farm house is unlivable.

Bad timing 

In 10 minutes, Geisler said, water filled his basement and crept into his home. During the worst of the flood, he helplessly listened as his recently born calves cried in distress.

“(They were) bawling all night. Just about made us heartbroken, but they survived. I thought they’d be gone,” Geisler remembered. “(I) couldn’t even get to my calves. It was five foot (1.5 meters) deep out there. I couldn’t even feed them. Two calves are completely gone. They floated away and two cows died."

Timing is bad since it is calving season. Geisler hopes the rest of his cattle recover from the stress of standing in icy water for long periods of time. As for his land, after it dries up, he will have to clear some areas of sand deposits before he can start planting late in the growing season this spring. He estimates the floods did $100,000 in damages to the fences around his farm.

“We lived on this place for 32 years since I’ve been married to my wife, Frances. ... My mother’s been at her place all of her life. She’s 90 years old, and she’s never seen anything like this, either.”

Extreme weather 

Geisler said in the last three years, the weather has been more wet and “extreme” and the storms are “getting intense.”

“We haven’t had a good week of weather since the first week of August of last year. It’s been raining every one or two days every week since then,” he said.

He said over the course of 40 years, farmers may have made the problem worse by switching to row crops like corn instead of grass, alfalfa and small grains such as wheat to feed cattle.

“Now, it’s almost all row crops, so a lot of the water just runs off. I think that has affected our flooding quite a bit.” Geisler explained. “Just really be nice if we all had a patch of grass to hold some water back. Too much land has been highly erodible that’s in row crops right now, I think.”

About six years ago, many farmers replaced grass with corn because of the demand for ethanol and an “excellent” export market, Geisler said.

He pointed to topsoil that had washed away from the fields. He said it takes 100 years to make an inch (2.54 cm) of topsoil, and “probably half an inch is gone. So, that’s 50 years worth of soil.”

One day at a time

Geisler said he will work on repairing the flood damage one day at a time. His younger son, a future farmer, will help.

“We’ve always been resilient, so hopefully we can come back (and) farm some more. I’m the fifth generation of farmers, so hopefully we can continue that trend. I don’t want to give up. Sometimes you feel like it, but I don’t want to." (VOAnews)

NEW YORK, LELEMUKU.COM - Is there anything firefighters could have done to control the blaze that tore through Paris' historic Notre Dame Cathedral sooner?

Experts say the combination of a structure that's more than 850 years old, built with heavy timber construction and soaring open spaces, and lacking sophisticated fire-protection systems left firefighters with devastatingly few options Monday once the flames got out of control.

"Very often when you're confronted with something like this, there's not much you can do," said Glenn Corbett, a professor of fire science at John Jay College.

Fire hoses looked overmatched — more like gardening equipment than firefighting apparatus — as flames raged across the cathedral's wooden roof and burned bright orange for hours. The fire toppled a 300-foot (91-meter) spire and launched baseball-sized embers into the air.

While the cause remains under investigation, authorities said that the cathedral's structure — including its landmark rectangular towers — has been saved.

Some of the factors that made Notre Dame a must-see for visitors to Paris — its age, sweeping size and French Gothic design featuring masonry walls and tree trunk-sized wooden beams — also made it a tinderbox and a difficult place to fight a fire, said U.S. Fire Administrator G. Keith Bryant.

With a building like that, it's nearly impossible for firefighters to attack a fire from within. Instead, they have to be more defensive "and try to control the fire from the exterior," said Bryant, a former fire chief in Oklahoma and past president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs.

"When a fire gets that well-involved it's very difficult to put enough water on it to cool it to bring it under control," Bryant said.

And while there's a lot of water right next door at the Seine River, getting it to the right place is the problem, he said: "There are just not enough resources in terms of fire apparatus, hoses to get that much water on a fire that's that large."

Because of narrower streets, which make it difficult to maneuver large ladder fire trucks, European fire departments don't tend to have as large of ladders as they do in the United States, Bryant said.

And what about President Donald Trump's armchair-firefighter suggestion that tanker jets be used to dump water from above on Notre Dame?

French authorities tweeted that doing so would've done more harm than good. The crush of water on the fire-ravaged landmark could've caused the entire structure to collapse, according to the tweet.

Other landmark houses of worship have taken steps in recent years to reduce the risk of a fire.

St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, built in 1878, installed a sprinkler-like system during recent renovations and coated its wooden roof with fire retardant. The cathedral also goes through at least four fire inspections a year.

Washington National Cathedral, built in 1912 with steel, brick and limestone construction that put it at less risk of a fast-moving fire, is installing sprinklers as part of a renovation spurred by damage from a 2011 earthquake.

That cathedral faces fire inspections every two years, but D.C. firefighters stop by more often to learn about the church's unique architecture and lingo — so they'll know where to go if there's a fire in the nave, or main area of the church — for instance.

"It's really important for us to make sure that those local firefighters are aware of our building and our kooky medieval names that we use for all the different spaces and that they know where to go," said Jim Shepherd, the cathedral's director of preservation and facilities.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the New York Archbishop who often visited the Notre Dame Cathedral while studying in Europe, saw significance in the fact that the fire broke out at the beginning of Holy Week, when Christians there and around the world prepare to celebrate Easter and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

"Just as the cross didn't have the last word, neither — for people of faith in France — will this fire have the last word," Dolan said. (AP-VOANews)

SEOUL, LELEMUKU.COM - Since emerging from his international isolation just over a year ago, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been a busy man.

Kim has met twice with U.S. President Donald Trump, three times with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, four times with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and once with Vietnamese President Nguyen Phu Trong.

One name missing from that list: Russian President Vladimir Putin. That could soon change.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed Monday that preparations for a long-rumored Kim-Putin summit are underway. The meeting could happen as soon as next week, according to South Korea’s semi-official Yonhap news agency.

Pyongyang and Moscow have clear motivations for the meeting.

Kim, whose government is being squeezed by international sanctions, is likely to push Putin for economic aid that would give him more leverage in nuclear talks with the United States.

Putin may use the meeting to boost his influence in North Korea and ensure Moscow is not sidelined in negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

Putin as spoiler? Maybe not.

Under Putin, Russia has attempted to disrupt U.S. interests around the world, in areas as diverse as Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela.

But Putin is not likely to play the role of spoiler in the North Korea-U.S. talks, in part because he doesn’t have much leverage over Pyongyang, says Andrei Lankov, a professor at Seoul’s Kookmin University.

“And in this case, Russia’s interests are not that different from that of the United States. Both sides want to preserve the status quo and want denuclearization,” Lankov says.

Russia may also be reluctant to upset South Korea, an important trading partner, whose progressive government is heavily invested in engagement with the North.

Russia has carried out a balancing act in its approach toward Korea.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian leaders decided to prioritize relations with South Korea over the North.

But since the mid-1990s, Moscow’s policy has been based on “equidistance,” or balanced relations toward both Seoul and Pyongyang, says Anthony Rinna, a North Korea-Russia relations specialist at the Sino-NK research group.

“The Kremlin is trying to reverse the post-Cold War decline of its influence in East Asia,” Rinna says. “In order to do that, Moscow needs to strengthen its ties with the DPRK.”

Though Moscow supported intensified U.S.-led international sanctions on North Korea following missile and nuclear tests in 2016 and 2017, it later called for them to be eased. Russian companies have since supplied oil to North Korea, in violation of those sanctions.

Another factor: Russia sees North Korea as a buffer against the U.S. military presence in the region, including the 28,000 U.S. troops in South Korea.

But for now, Russia’s biggest priority may be preventing a return to the provocations of 2017, when Kim and Trump regularly exchanged threats of nuclear war.

“Preserving the status quo is the major goal,” says Leonid Petrov, a Korean studies expert at the Australian National University. “That means slow-motion conflict without major shifts or changes.”

What does North Korea want?

Kim’s goals, too, are diverse. At the top of his list is economic aid to relieve the pressure of sanctions and expand his leverage in stalled talks with Trump.

At a February summit in Hanoi, Trump pushed for a “big deal” in which North Korea commits to completely giving up its nuclear weapons in exchange for the United States lifting sanctions. North Korea countered with a gradual approach, offering to dismantle a key nuclear complex in exchange for partial U.S. sanctions relief.

By meeting with Putin, Kim may be trying to show Trump that he has other options for economic help. But it’s not clear how much Russia can offer, in part because of Russia’s struggling economy and also because such help could violate sanctions.

For example, North Korea has expressed interest in buying new Russian civilian aircraft to replace its aging fleet, according to Russian state media. However, a 2017 U.N. Security Council resolution prohibits the sale of transportation vehicles to North Korea.

Besides economic aid, Kim could also ask Putin for a commitment to military assistance in the event North Korea is attacked, as well as continued diplomatic support at the United Nations, Petrov says.

“It’s a shopping list, and we don’t know what’s going to materialize,” Petrov says.

In any case, Putin will not likely offer enough to fundamentally change North Korea’s calculation for the nuclear talks, says Kim Heung-kyu, a political science professor at Seoul’s Ajou University.

“Considering its internal circumstances, Russia is not capable of focusing very much on issues in East Asia,” Kim says. “It's also not willing to have regional conflicts.” (William Gallo-VOA)

WASHINGTON, LELEMUKU.COM - Key Democratic lawmakers on Monday accused the Trump administration of "a bizarre and unlawful attempt to score political points" with a possible plan to send undocumented immigrants detained at the U.S.-Mexican border to congressional districts represented by Democrats.

Congressmen Jerrold Nadler, Elijah Cummings and Bennie Thompson, all chairmen of House of Representatives committees investigating President Donald Trump's administration, demanded documents and communications about the plan to move migrants from the border to hundreds of communities throughout the United States.

Local officials in areas across the country have declared their jurisdictions are sanctuary cities for migrants, with policies limiting how much they cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and in some cases allowing undocumented immigrants to access city services and obtain identification cards.

Federal law does not require local police to detain people based on their immigration status, and local law enforcement officials in sanctuary areas have said they would rather immigrant communities not fear interacting with police.

Some states have gone the other direction, passing anti-sanctuary laws requiring cities to work with federal immigration authorities.

Trump suggested again Monday he wants to move the immigrants detained at the border to the sanctuary cities and states after saying over the weekend he wants them "to take care of the Illegal Immigrants -- and this includes Gang Members, Drug Dealers, Human Traffickers, and Criminals of all shapes, sizes and kinds."

The Democratic lawmakers said, "It is shocking that the president and senior administration officials are even considering manipulating release decisions for purely political reasons."

The government's Department of Homeland Security has said that Congress has not appropriated any money to transport the migrants from the border to far-flung sanctuary cities, while the Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency has called the idea an "unnecessary operational burden."

But Trump, who is often at odds with Democratic lawmakers over border security funding, revived the idea in recent days, claiming that opposition Democrats who favor what he calls "open borders" ought to approve of accepting the migrants into their communities. Some local Democratic officials have said the migrants, mostly from Central America, are welcome in their cities, while other party officials have claimed that Trump has no legal right to single out specific communities for an influx of migrants.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told the U.S. cable news program Fox News Sunday, "We certainly are looking at all options as long as Democrats refuse to acknowledge the crisis at the border."

Trump, in one of several Twitter comments on border security in recent days, said, "The USA has the absolute legal right to have apprehended illegal immigrants transferred to Sanctuary Cities. We hereby demand that they be taken care of at the highest level, especially by the State of California, which is well known (for) its poor management & high taxes!"

Washington state Governor Jay Inslee told NBC's Meet The Press that his state welcomes people who are awaiting their asylum hearings.

"You can't threaten somebody with something they're not afraid of. And we are not afraid of diversity in the state of Washington," Inslee said.

He criticized what he called immigration solutions based on "trolling on the internet" and instead promoted a system to process more asylum claims, a path to citizenship for those already living in the United States who came to the country illegally, and having an overall "acceptance of refugees because we're a humane nation."

The United States now houses thousands of migrants at the border but is running out of beds and instead is releasing new arrivals into the country on their promise to appear at asylum hearings that might not occur for two years. (VOA)

PARIS, LELEMUKU.COM - The world reacted with shock, tears and prayers as it watched images of the iconic Notre Dame Cathedral burning in Paris on Monday.

French President Emmanuel Macron addressed the nation just before midnight. "I tell you solemnly tonight: We will rebuild this cathedral,” he vowed.

He said he would seek international help, including from the "greatest talents'' in the world for the task.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Spain was ready to help. He called the fire a "catastrophe for France, for Spain and for Europe.''

On the streets of Paris, hundreds gathered, some wept, as they watched the flames engulf the cathedral's spire.

Paris resident Lisa Sussman, originally from Atlanta, in the U.S. state of Georgia, said, "It’s horrible. It really is the center of Paris. I was at the apartment with my friends. It really hurts everyone’s heart — they really feel that connected to it. I feel it, too. It was really tragic to watch the spire fall."

Nearby, another Parisian resident, George Castro, said he was in shock.

"I’m a Christian, a Catholic. I think it’s really, really sad to see this happening right now. Right now, we don’t have many symbols, and this is a huge symbol for the West. It’s very, very sad," he said.

Pope Francis issued a statement late Monday expressing the Vatican’s “shock and sadness” at “the news of the terrible fire that devastated the Cathedral of Notre Dame, a symbol of Christianity in France and in the world.”

Archbishop of New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan prayed at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan for intercession. "God preserve this splendid house of prayer, and protect those battling the blaze,'' Dolan said in a statement.

The Russian Orthodox Church's secretary for inter-Christian relations Hieromonk Stefan called the fire "a tragedy for the entire Christian world and for all who appreciate the cultural significance of this temple,'' the state news agency RIA-Novosti reported.

U.S. President Donald Trump called it a "terrible, terrible fire'' that devastated "one of the great treasures of the world.'' He also had advice for the French on how to fight the fire. "Perhaps flying water tankers could be used to put it out. Must act quickly!," Trump said on Twitter.

France's Civil Security agency said that wasn't possible. "Hundreds of firemen of the Paris Fire Brigade are doing everything they can to bring the terrible #NotreDame fire under control. All means are being used, except for water-bombing aircrafts which, if used, could lead to the collapse of the entire structure of the cathedral,'' the agency tweeted in English.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama, in a tweet, called Notre Dame "one of the world’s great treasures, and we’re thinking of the people of France in your time of grief. It’s in our nature to mourn when we see history lost – but it’s also in our nature to rebuild for tomorrow, as strong as we can." He also posted an old photo of himself, his wife Michelle and their two daughters lighting candles in the cathedral.


Celebrities also poured their grief and dismay in tweets. American actress Laura Dern said she was moved to tears. “I’m weeping. Our gift of light,” she wrote. “Notre Dame on fire. My heart is breaking. My grandmother’s and mother’s heart home.”

Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote, “Standing here next to you, heartsick for Notre Dame,” (VOA)

WASHINGTON, LELEMUKU.COM - Attorney General William Barr has provided only a glimpse of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on the inquiry into Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. election, with many details expected to emerge when the document is finally released.

Barr on March 24 sent a four-page letter to lawmakers detailing Mueller's "principal conclusions" including that the 22-month probe did not establish that President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign team conspired with Russia. Barr said he found insufficient evidence in Mueller's report to conclude that Trump committed obstruction of justice, though the special counsel did not make a formal finding one way or the other on that.

The attorney general told Congress he hopes to release the nearly 400-page report this week, with portions blacked out to protect certain types of sensitive information.

Here are five things to look for when the report is issued.

Obstruction of Justice: Why No Exoneration?

Perhaps the biggest political risk for Trump is the special counsel's supporting evidence behind Mueller's assertion that while the report does not conclude the Republican president committed the crime of obstruction of justice it "also does not exonerate him" on that point.

According to Barr's March 24 letter, Mueller has presented evidence on both sides of the question without concluding whether to prosecute. Barr filled that void by asserting there was no prosecutable case. But Barr's statement in the letter that "most" of Trump's actions that had raised questions about obstruction were "the subject of public reporting" suggested that some actions were not publicly known.

Democrats in Congress do not believe Barr, a Trump appointee, should have the final say on the matter. While the prospect that the Democratic-led House of Representatives would begin the impeachment process to try to remove Trump from office appears to have receded, the House Judiciary Committee will be looking for any evidence relevant to ongoing probes into obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power by the president or others in the administration.

Barr's comment that most of what Mueller probed on obstruction has been publicly reported indicates that events like Trump's firing of James Comey as FBI director in May 2017 when the agency was heading the Russia inquiry are likely to be the focus of this section of the report.

Russian 'Information Warfare' and Campaign Contacts

The report will detail indictments by Mueller of two Kremlin-backed operations to influence the 2016 election: one against a St. Petersburg-based troll farm called the Internet Research Agency accused of waging "information warfare" over social media; and the other charging Russian intelligence officers with hacking into Democratic Party servers and pilfering emails leaked to hurt Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

With those two indictments already public and bearing no apparent link to the president, the focus may be on what Mueller concluded, if anything, about other incidents that involved contacts between Russians and people in Trump's orbit. That could include the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York in which a Russian lawyer promised "dirt" on Clinton to senior campaign officials, as well as a secret January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles investigated as a possible attempt to set up a back channel between the incoming Trump administration and the Kremlin while Democrat Barack Obama was still president.

Any analysis of such contacts could shed light on why Mueller, according to Barr's summary, "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

Manafort, Ukraine Policy and Polling Data

In the weeks before Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced in March to 7-1/2 years in prison mostly for financial crimes related to millions of dollars he was paid by pro-Russia Ukrainian politicians, Mueller's team provided hints about what their pursuit of him was really about.

Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told a judge in February that an Aug. 2, 2016 meeting between Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik, a consultant Mueller has said has ties to Russian intelligence, "went to the heart of" the special counsel's investigation.

The meeting included a discussion about a proposal to resolve the conflict in Ukraine in terms favorable to the Kremlin, an issue that has damaged Russia's relations with the West. Prosecutors also said Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with Kilimnik, although the significance of that act remains unclear.

One focus will be on what Mueller ultimately concluded about Manafort's interactions with Kilimnik and whether a failed attempt to secure cooperation from Manafort, who was found by a judge to have lied to prosecutors in breach of a plea agreement, significantly impeded the special counsel's work.

National Security Concerns

While Mueller did not find a criminal conspiracy with Russia, according to Barr, there is a chance the report will detail behavior and financial entanglements that give fodder to critics who have said Trump has shown a pattern of deference to the Kremlin.

One example of such an entanglement was the proposal to build a Trump tower in Moscow, a deal potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars that never materialized. Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal lawyer, admitted to lying to Congress about the project to provide cover because Trump on the campaign trail had denied any dealings with Russia.

In the absence of criminal charges arising from Mueller's inquiry, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff has shifted his focus to whether Trump is "compromised" by such entanglements, influencing his policy decisions and posing a risk to national security.

Some legal experts have said the counterintelligence probe Mueller inherited from Comey may prove more significant than his criminal inquiry, though it is not clear to what degree counterintelligence findings will be included in the report.

Barr also has said he planned to redact material related to intelligence-gathering sources and methods.

Middle East Influence and Other Probes

Another focus is whether Mueller will disclose anything from his inquiries into Middle Eastern efforts to influence Trump.

One mystery is what, if anything, came of the special counsel's questioning of George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman and consultant to the crown princes of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia who started cooperating with Mueller last year.

Nader attended the Seychelles meeting. He also was present at a Trump Tower meeting in August 2016, three months before the election, at which an Israeli social media specialist spoke with the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., about how his firm Psy-Group, which employed several former Israeli intelligence officers, could help the Trump campaign, according to the New York Times. Mueller's interest in Nader suggested the special counsel looked into whether additional countries sought to influence the election and whether they did so in concert with Russia.

A lawyer for Nader did not respond to a request for comment. Barr has said he will redact from the Mueller report information on "other ongoing matters," including inquiries referred to other offices in the Justice Department. That makes it unclear if any findings related to the Middle East will appear in the report. (VOA)

WASHINGTON, LELEMUKU.COM - Former Massachusetts Governor William Weld announced his candidacy Monday to challenge President Donald Trump for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination.

"In these times of great political strife, when both major parties are entrenched in their 'win at all cost' battles, the voices of the American people are being ignored and our nation is suffering," Weld said in a statement. "It is time for patriotic men and women across our great nation to stand and plant a flag."

Weld, 73, who served two terms as governor, from 1991-1997, enters as a long-shot candidate against an incumbent president who has remained popular within his party. Weld in February had said that he planned to challenge Trump.

Trump's campaign raised more than $30 million in the first quarter of 2019, it said Sunday, far outpacing the sums raised by individual Democratic candidates during that period.

The fundraising underscores the willingness of Republican donors to invest in Trump's re-election bid. (VOA)

NEW YORK, LELEMUKU.COM - Whooping cranes, common ravens and peregrine falcons are among the celebrities of the sky in the eyes of Americans, even those who've never laid eyes them.

The ruffed grouse or purple martin? They're like friends you might chat with. The wrentit and the Abert's towhee are like the neighbors you don't talk to much. As for the Hammond's flycatcher and the Brewer's sparrow, Americans don't care much about them at all.

That's the word from a new study that aimed to define "a range of relationships between people and birds" across the United States, said Justin Schuetz, one of the authors.

Results appear in a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Schuetz, a biologist and independent researcher in Bath, Maine, did the work with Alison Johnston, who's affiliated with Cornell University in Ithaca, New York

The project included studying Google searches performed from 2008 to 2017 to learn about what Americans think about 621 bird species. Researchers knew where each search came from. They also knew the natural range of each species and how often it is sighted in specific places, based on a national database.

One key question was whether the Google data revealed more interest in each species than one would expect in various locations, based on how often it is sighted in those places. Another question was how much the interest in each species was limited to its natural range, or spilled out beyond it.

So birds in the "celebrity" category are those that attracted more Google attention than one would expect from how often they're seen, and whose popularity extended outside of their natural range. They have "a reputation beyond where they live," Schuetz explained.

Next came the "friends or enemies" category, which included species that get more Google attention than expected, but mostly in the states where they live. As with the other categories, the researchers couldn't tell whether the searchers' opinions of these familiar birds were positive or negative.

Then came birds classified as "neighbors," whose few Google searches were confined to where they live. Finally there were the "strangers," birds that got little Google interest anywhere.

The research also turned up other insights into what makes a species popular. Bigger bodies, colorful plumage and regular visits to birdfeeders helped. Species that served as mascots for professional sports teams reached celebrity status, but it wasn't clear whether being a mascot encouraged popularity or the other way around.

The results also turned up some surprises. "People seem to have an inordinate fascination with owls we couldn't account for entirely in our analysis," Schuetz said.

Jeffrey Gordon, president of the American Birding Association, called the study "a fascinating framework for trying to understand how people are relating to birds."

"I hope they're able to use it to help people appreciate what's right in their own backyard," he said. "Most of us just aren't keyed in to what is literally at our doorstep."

David Ringer, chief network officer for the National Audubon Society, also found the work interesting.

"It's great to see how much we know and love some species, and it's provocative to see how much we still have to discover," he wrote in an email. "I hope that many bird `strangers' will become `friends,' and `neighbors' will turn into `celebrities."' (VOA)

CHICAGO, LELEMUKU.COM - Normally, U.S. airlines compete to sell tickets and fill seats during the peak summer travel season. But operators of the grounded Boeing 737 MAX are facing a different problem: scarce planes and booming demand.

The grounding of Boeing Co's fuel-efficient, single-aisle workhorse after two fatal crashes is biting into U.S. airlines' Northern Hemisphere spring and summer schedules, threatening to disarm them in their seasonal war for profits.

"The revenue is right in front of them. They can see it, but they can't meet it," said Mike Trevino, spokesman for Southwest Airlines Pilots Association and an aviation industry veteran.

Southwest Airlines Co, the world's largest MAX operator, and American Airlines Group Inc with 34 and 24 MAX jetliners respectively, have removed the aircraft from their flying schedules into August. United Airlines said Monday it would remove its 14 MAX jets through early July.

Southwest's decision will lead to 160 cancellations of some 4,200 daily flights between June 8 and Aug. 5, while American's removal through Aug. 19 means about 115 daily cancellations, or 1.5 percent of its summer flying schedule each day.

Low-cost carrier Southwest, which unlike its rivals only flies Boeing 737s, had estimated $150 million in lost revenue between Feb. 20 and March 31 alone due to MAX cancellations and other factors.

Airlines have said it is too soon to estimate the impact of the MAX grounding beyond the first quarter, but the extended cancellations signal that they do not expect a quick return of Boeing's fast-selling jetliner. The 737 MAX was grounded worldwide in March following a fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash just five months after a Lion Air crash in Indonesia. All on board both planes were killed.

Boeing is under pressure to deliver an upgrade on software that is under scrutiny in both crashes and convince global regulators that the plane is safe to fly again, a process expected to take at least 90 days.

Peak travel months

The timing of a prolonged grounding could not be worse for Northern Hemisphere carriers. Planes run fullest during June, July and August, when airlines earn the most revenue per available seat mile, according to U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

In a letter to employees and customers Sunday, American Airlines' top executives said they believed the MAX would be recertified "soon" but wanted to provide their customers reliability and confidence during "the busiest travel period of the year."

American was cancelling about 90 flights per day through early June, but runs more flights and has less fleet flexibility in the peak summer travel months.

"We're not denying that it's going to be a challenge for us," American spokesman Ross Feinstein said. "That is why if we have to extend cancellations based on aircraft availability we will do so as far in advance as possible."

A decline in seat capacity could mean higher last-minute summer fares, particularly for business class travelers, aviation consultants and analysts said.

United has largely avoided cancellations by servicing MAX routes with larger 777 or 787 aircraft, but the airline president, Scott Kirby, warned last week that the strategy was costing it money and could not go on forever.

"We've used spare aircraft and other creative solutions to help our customers, who had been scheduled to travel on one of our 14 MAX aircraft, get where they are going. But, it's harder to make those changes at the peak of the busy summer travel season," United said Monday.

Deliveries frozen

Overall the MAX represents just 5 percent of Southwest's total fleet and even less for American and United, but the strain on fleets increases as additional MAX deliveries remain frozen.

Southwest has 41 MAX jets pending delivery for 2019, while American has 16 and United 14. They are each working with Boeing and regulators to ensure the aircraft's safety before flying it with customers and employees.

Meanwhile, operators have added a flight or two to other aircrafts' daily schedules and deferred some nonessential maintenance work. Some airlines are also weighing extending aircraft leases and bringing back idled planes, but with unclear MAX timing, no option is clear-cut or cheap, consultants said.

United is due to publish first-quarter results on April 16, followed by Southwest on April 25 and American on April 26. (VOA)

SANTA FE, LELEMUKU.COM - he vibrant colors and hues that make up Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings soon will be on full display for color blind visitors.

The vibrant colors and hues in Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings soon will be on full display for color blind visitors.

The Santa Fe museum announced Monday it's teaming up with California-based EnChroma to expand the gallery experience through special glasses.

Starting May 3, visitors with red-green color blindness can borrow glasses to see O'Keeffe's work in the way that she intended.

One of the museum's curators, Katrina Stacy, says O'Keeffe in her later years developed visual impairment from macular degeneration and turned her attention to sculpture.

Stacy says the project with EnChroma has ties to that part of the artist's story.

EnChroma co-founder Andrew Schmeder says O'Keeffe juxtaposed colors from nature in ways that evoked emotion and seeing that relationship between colors has been challenging for people with color blindness. (VOA)

WASHINGTON, LELEMUKU.COM - Turkey's purchase of a Russian air defense missile system should not trigger U.S. sanctions because Ankara is not an adversary of Washington and remains committed to the NATO alliance, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said Monday.

Speaking at a U.S.-Turkey conference in Washington amid rising tensions between the two NATO allies over Ankara's plan to buy the Russian S-400 missile system, Akar adopted a relatively conciliatory tone and urged to resolve issues via dialogue.

"Turkey is clearly not an adversary of the United States," Akar said and added that, therefore, its procurement of the S-400 system should not be considered within the scope of U.S. sanctions designed to target America's enemies.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week that Washington had told Ankara it could face retribution for buying the S-400s under a sanctions law known as Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CATSAA).

"This procurement decision does not signify a change in Turkey's course. I'd like to reiterate strongly that there is no change in Turkey's commitment to NATO," Akar said.

The disagreement over the F-35 is the latest of a series of diplomatic disputes between the United States and Turkey including Turkish demands that the United States extradite Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, differences over Middle East policy and the war in Syria, and sanctions on Iran.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has refused to back down from Ankara's planned purchase of a Russian S-400 missile defense system that the United States has said would compromise the security of F-35 aircraft, made by Lockheed Martin.

Turkey has said it will take delivery of the S-400s in July.

In early April, the United States halted delivery of equipment related to the stealthy F-35 fighter aircraft to Turkey, marking the first concrete U.S. step to potentially blocking the delivery of the jet to the NATO ally.

Akar said Turkey was puzzled by the move and expected U.S. and other partners in the program to fulfill their obligations.

"We firmly believe that linking the S-400 to the F-35 project is unfortunate. ... We are one of the investors and partners and not just a buyer. We have invested over $1 billion ... and fulfilled all our obligations," he said.

Akar repeated Turkey's offer to hold technical talks with the United States to address "technical concerns" over the S-400 purchase.

Turkey is also assessing a renewed offer from the United States to buy Patriot missile defense systems, Akar added.

"Recently, we received the restated offer for the Patriots. This offer is now on the table, we are studying it carefully," he said. (VOA)

WASHINGTON, LELEMUKU.COM - Scientists on Monday provided the most comprehensive look to date at one of the solar system's most exotic features: prime lakeside property in the northern polar region of Saturn's moon Titan — if you like lakes made of stuff like liquid methane.

Using data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft before that mission ended in 2017 with a deliberate plunge into Saturn, the scientists found that some of frigid Titan's lakes of liquid hydrocarbons in this region are surprisingly deep while others may be shallow and seasonal.

Titan and Earth are the solar system's two places with standing bodies of liquid on the surface. Titan boasts lakes, rivers and seas of hydrocarbons: compounds of hydrogen and carbon like those that are the main components of petroleum and natural gas.

The researchers described land forms akin to mesas towering above the nearby landscape, topped with liquid lakes more than 300 feet (100 meters) deep comprised mainly of methane. The scientists suspect the lakes formed when surrounding bedrock chemically dissolved and collapsed, a process that occurs with a certain type of lake on Earth.

The scientists also described "phantom lakes" that during wintertime appeared to be wide but shallow ponds — perhaps only a few inches (cm) deep — but evaporated or drained into the surface by springtime, a process taking seven years on Titan.

The findings represented further evidence about Titan's hydrological cycle, with liquid hydrocarbons raining down from clouds, flowing across its surface and evaporating back into the sky. This is comparable to Earth's water cycle.

Because of Titan's complex chemistry and distinctive environments, scientists suspect it potentially could harbor life, in particular in its subsurface ocean of water, but possibly in the surface bodies of liquid hydrocarbons.

"Titan is a very fascinating object in the solar system, and every time we look carefully at the data we find out something new," California Institute of Technology planetary scientist Marco Mastrogiuseppe said.

Titan, with a diameter of 3,200 miles (5,150 km), is the solar system's second largest moon, behind only Jupiter's Ganymede. It is bigger than the planet Mercury.

"Titan is the most Earth-like body in the solar system. It has lakes, canyons, rivers, dune fields of organic sand particles about the same size as silica sand grains on Earth," Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory planetary scientist Shannon MacKenzie said.

The research was published in the journal Nature Astronomy. (VOA)

WASHINGTON, LELEMUKU.COM - The number of measles cases worldwide nearly quadrupled in the first three months of the year compared to last year, the World Health Organization reported Monday.

The United Nations agency, citing preliminary data, said that more than 112,000 cases of the preventable but highly contagious disease have been reported across the globe in the January-to-March period.

WHO called for better vaccination coverage against measles, which can kill or leave a child disabled for life.

Over recent months, WHO said spikes in the disease have occurred "in countries with high overall vaccination coverage, including the United States ... as well as Israel, Thailand, and Tunisia, as the disease has spread fast among clusters of unvaccinated people."

"While this data is provisional and not yet complete, it indicates a clear trend," WHO said. "Many countries are in the midst of sizeable measles outbreaks, with all regions of the world experiencing sustained rises in cases."

The agency said the reported number of cases often lags behind the number of actual cases, meaning that the number of documented cases likely does not reflect the actual severity of the measles outbreaks.

For three weeks in a row, U.S. health authorities have added dozens of new reports of measles to its yearly total, now at 555, the biggest figure in five years. Twenty of the 50 U.S. states have now reported measles cases.

More than half of the U.S. total — 285 cases — have been reported in New York City. Officials in the country's largest city last week ordered mandatory measles vaccinations to halt the outbreak that has been concentrated among ultra-Orthodox Jews in the city's Brooklyn borough.

City health department officials blamed anti-vaccine propagandists for distributing misinformation in the community. (VOA)

KANSAS CITY, LELEMUKU.COM - Russia is demanding that the U.S. release a Russian citizen who was convicted of kidnapping for moving her children from the U.S. to Russia amid a divorce.

Bogdana Alexandrovna Osipova, who is referred to by her married name of Mobley in court documents, was convicted in Kansas last month of one count of international parental kidnapping and two counts of attempting to extort money. Ospivoa, 38, faces up to 20 years in prison on each extortion count and up to three years on the kidnapping count at her May 20 sentencing hearing.

The Russian Embassy said in a tweet Friday that U.S. authorities should "stop their lawless behaviour and release the Russian citizen Bogdana Osipova, thus returning the mother to her children." Her attorney, Craig Divine, didn't immediately return a phone message. A Russian court has found that the children should remain in Russia.

U.S. prosecutors said Osipova, who has dual Russian and U.S. citizenship, left Wichita, Kansas, in April 2014 with one child from her first marriage and another child from a second marriage to Brian Mobley, an Air Force recruiter. She gave birth to a third child soon after returning to Russia. She was arrested in September 2017 after returning to the U.S. without her children to change child support arrangements.

Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov previously rejected a plea from Kansas Republican Rep. Ron Estes that the younger children — ages 6 and 4 — be reunited with their father. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a briefing that the children are living with relatives in Kaliningrad, the Wichita Eagle reported. Osipova's oldest child is 16, and her first husband isn't seeking custody of him.

Antonov told Estes that Osipova has been a victim of "discrimination and psychological pressure" in the U.S. criminal case.

"We've attempted to work with Russian authorities to find a diplomatic solution to this situation on behalf of a constituent, but clearly Russia is not interested in adhering to court rulings or acting in good faith," Estes said Friday in a tweet. "I once again call on Russia to reunite this father with his children and will work with the State Department in solving this case."

The U.S. State Department didn't immediately return an email from The Associated Press seeking comment Monday.

Weeks before Osipova left for Russia, Mobley filed for divorce and was granted joint custody. The Russian court system granted the couple a divorce in July 2014. That December, a Kansas judge also granted the couple a divorce and ordered her to return the two youngest children. The Kansas judge awarded sole custody to her ex-husband because Osipova had left the U.S. without court approval or Mobley's knowledge.

According to the U.S. criminal complaint, Mobley hasn't been able to see his children. His ex-wife in January 2015 showed up to a meeting in Poland without the children. She allowed him to talk to the children on the phone and on Skype until November 2016, when she said he needed to send money to communicate with them, the complaint said.

Zakharova said the Russian court sees the situation differently.

"Her claim to her ex-husband for alimony, which was supported by a Russian court, was qualified there as extortion," Zakharova said in the ministry's translation of a briefing. (VOA)