Your afternoon chocolate bar may be fueling climate change, destroying protected forests and threatening elephants, chimpanzees and hippos in West Africa, research suggests. Well-known brands, such as Mars and Nestle, are buying through global traders cocoa that is grown illegally in dwindling national parks and reserves in Ivory Coast and Ghana, environmental group Mighty Earth…
read moreU.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said on Thursday that the United States was seeking to add a five-year sunset provision to the North American Free Trade Agreement to provide a regular, “systematic re-examination” of the trade pact. Ross told a forum hosted by Politico that both he and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer had agreed…
read moreInformal mining in Brazil is seen by many as a scourge polluting the Amazon rainforest, poisoning indigenous tribes and robbing the nation of its wealth. For others it is a way of life. Brazilian garimpos, or wildcat mines, are operated by small crews of men, often caked in red-brown mud and working with rudimentary pans,…
read moreU.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday he did not make a deal with the House and Senate Democratic leaders regarding the undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children and were protected from deportation by an Obama-era program Trump canceled last week. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer had…
read moreVietnamese police have widened their investigation into alleged graft and mismanagement connected with the state-owned oil and gas giant PetroVietnam that caused $69 million in losses. Three PetroVietnam subsidiaries are being investigated for alleged abuse of power in appropriating $5.3 million, the Ministry of Public Security said in a statement late Wednesday. The case…
read moreAn environmental group is highlighting discrepancies in Cambodian government data on exports of silica sand to Taiwan, in what the group’s founder suggests may be a case of tax avoidance and economic fraud. Exports of another type of sand to Singapore were investigated after the same group exposed similar discrepancies in trade figures with that…
read moreA new analysis by the Harvard Business School outlines why U.S. voters are so frustrated with their political leaders — there is a lack of genuine competition between Republicans and Democrats to deliver actual results on major policies such as education, health care, taxes and infrastructure. The two major U.S. political parties have distorted the rules…
read moreU.S. human rights groups are suing the federal government over warrantless searches of phones and computers at the U.S. border. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced Wednesday that they have filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of 10 American citizens and one U.S. permanent resident…
read morePresident Donald Trump has blocked the acquisition of a U.S. computer chip manufacturer by a Chinese company, calling it a threat to national security. The Chinese-owned Canyon Bridge Fund has sought to take over Oregon-based Lattice Semiconductor Corp. The U.S. Treasury Department, acting under Trump’s orders, said Wednesday it is prohibiting the deal. It says…
read moreThe top Democrat on the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee said Wednesday that representatives of Facebook and Twitter should appear before the panel to discuss Russian activity during the 2016 election campaign. “We do, I think, need the representatives of social media companies to come before our committee either in open or closed session,”…
read moreAs Congress looks into ways to fix the immigration system, often with the goal of safeguarding job opportunities for U.S. workers, at least one immigration organization argues that current federal regulations fail to protect foreign visa holders from job misrepresentation, recruitment fees, exploitation, fraud and discrimination. Four women who came to the U.S. on temporary…
read moreTanzania’s government has been cracking down on irregularities in the mining sector, most recently confiscating diamonds worth $15 million from British company Petra Diamonds, accusing it of devaluing exports. And in July, the government demanded gold miner Acacia pay $190 billion in what it asserted were unpaid taxes, saying the company had underreported its exports.…
read moreAmazon.com Inc. is preparing to open a 1 million square-foot warehouse near Mexico City, sources familiar with the project said, part of an effort to boost its presence in Mexico’s nascent e-commerce industry. The new warehouse is slated to be built in the Tepotzotlan municipality about 25 miles (40 km) north of the Mexican capital,…
read moreApple Inc’s highly anticipated iPhone X features a slew of innovations but delayed availability could hurt holiday-quarter sales. The much-hyped event on Tuesday unveiled three new phones, an advanced watch that can take calls and a new Apple TV, but die-hard fans will not be able to get their hands on the iPhone X until…
read moreU.S. President Donald Trump is spurring Congress to move quickly to overhaul the country’s complex tax code, but has yet to produce a plan. Trump, in a pair of Twitter comments Wednesday, took on the role of White House cheerleader for tax changes, telling lawmakers that with the devastation caused by hurricanes Harvey and Irma,…
read moreThe U.S. Congress has approved a joint resolution urging President Donald Trump to speak out against hate groups that support racism, extremism, anti-Semitism and white supremacy. The House of Representatives passed the resolution Tuesday, a day after the Senate gave its approval. The measure now goes to Trump, who was criticized for his response to…
read morePresident Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is facing new scrutiny over a June 2015 trip to the Middle East that he didn’t report as part of his security clearance background check. Two Democratic lawmakers say in a letter released Wednesday that business associates of Flynn confirmed he went on the trip.…
read moreLess than a year after her election loss, former U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton published a book in which she seeks to explain to her supporters what led to the outcome they did not anticipate. Clinton’s fans lined up in New York Tuesday to grab a signed copy of her book, titled What Happened. VOA’s…
read moreThe vice chairman of the controversial government commission President Donald Trump has charged with investigating alleged vote fraud in last year’s U.S. elections said Tuesday there is a “high possibility” the panel will complete its work without making any recommendations. Kris Kobach, a Republican who is the secretary of state in the Midwestern state of…
read moreU.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Tuesday cast doubt on President Donald Trump’s goal of cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, even as the president moved to inject new urgency into a sluggish effort in Congress to lower taxes. “Ideally, he’d like to get it down to 15 percent. I don’t know if…
read moreSome of the ads Russians bought on Facebook last year promoted events during the U.S. presidential campaign, Facebook said Tuesday, indicating that alleged meddling ahead of the 2016 election went beyond social media. Facebook said in a statement that its takedown of what the company last week called Russian-affiliated pages included shutting down “several promoted…
read moreThe U.S. Congress was wrestling with health care again Tuesday, as lawmakers from both parties considered some approaches beyond simply repealing and replacing Obamacare. The widened health care discussion appeared unlikely to yield dramatic changes soon, but marked a shift from the long-running Republican effort to gut 2010’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as…
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