Obama banishing Vietnam War vestige by lifting arms embargo
Obama banishing Vietnam War vestige by lifting arms embargo
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Eager to banish lingering shadows of the Vietnam War, President Barack Obama lifted the U.S. embargo on selling arms to America’s former enemy Monday and made the case for a more trusting and prosperous relationship going forward. Activists said the president was being too quick to gloss over serious human rights abuses in his push to establish warmer ties.
After spending his first day in Vietnam shuttling among meetings with different government leaders, Obama will spend the next two days speaking directly to the Vietnamese people and meeting with civil society groups and young entrepreneurs. It’s all part of his effort to “upgrade” the U.S. relationship with an emerging economic power in Southeast Asia and a nation that the U.S. also hopes can serve as a counterweight to Chinese aggression in the region.
Tracing the arc of the U.S.-Vietnamese relationship through cooperation, conflict, “painful separation” and a long reconciliation, Obama marveled during a news conference with the Vietnamese president that “if you consider where we have been and where we are now, the transformation in the relations between our two countries is remarkable.”
President Tran Dai Quang said later at a lavish state luncheon that he was grateful for the American people’s efforts to put an end to “an unhappy chapter in the two countries’ history,” referring to the 1965-1975 U.S. war with Vietnam’s communists, who now run the country.
The conflict killed 57,000 American military personnel and as many as 2 million Vietnamese military and civilians.
VA Secretary McDonald compares health-care lines to Disney
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans criticized Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald Monday after he compared wait times to receive VA health care to the hours people wait for rides at Disney theme parks.
McDonald told reporters that the VA should not use wait times as a measure of success because Disney doesn’t either.
“When you got to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or what’s important? What’s important is, what’s your satisfaction with the experience?” McDonald said during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast on Monday. “And what I would like to move to, eventually, is that kind of measure.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan called McDonald’s comments “flippant” and said they show “just how seriously the Obama administration’s VA is taking life or death problems” at the agency.
“This is not make-believe, Mr. Secretary. Veterans have died waiting in those lines,” Ryan said on Twitter.
Multiple blasts in Syria government strongholds kill 80
BEIRUT (AP) — A series of coordinated explosions including suicide bombings rocked two normally quiet coastal government strongholds in Syria Monday, killing more than 80 people and wounding 200 others, state media and opposition activists said. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attacks.
The morning blasts in pro-government cities of Tartus and Jableh were the first of their kind targeting civilians in those areas in the course of Syria’s civil war, now in its sixth year. The targets included bus stations, a gas station and a hospital, marking a sharp escalation in the conflict as world powers struggle to restart peace talks in Geneva.
Several rounds of talks were held in the Swiss city earlier this year, although there was no breakthrough and the talks never really took off.
Russia, which is heavily invested in the Syrian war on behalf of President Bashar Assad’s government, keeps a naval base in Tartus and an air base in Latakia province, about five kilometers (three miles) north of Jableh. Insurgents fighting to topple Assad maintain a presence in rural Latakia.
Syria’s SANA news agency reported that four explosions struck Jableh. The attacks included a suicide bombing at the emergency entrance of the Jableh national hospital, state media said.
In swing state suburbs, white women are skeptical of Trump
WESTERVILLE, Ohio (AP) — For Donald Trump to win the White House in November, he’ll need the votes of women like Elizabeth Andrus.
Yet Andrus, a registered Republican from Delaware, Ohio, sees “buffoonery” in the presumptive Republican nominee and says “I am not on the Trump train.” With all the trouble in the world, she went on, “you just don’t want Donald Trump as president.”
Her negative impression of Trump was shared by most of the dozens of white, suburban women from politically important states who were interviewed by The Associated Press this spring. Their views are reflected in opinion polls, such as a recent AP-GfK survey that found 70 percent of women have unfavorable opinions of Trump.
Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign sees that staggering figure as a tantalizing general election opening.
While white voters continue to abandon the Democratic Party, small gains with white women could help put likely nominee Clinton over the top if the November election is close. Democrats believe these women could open up opportunities for Clinton in North Carolina, where President Barack Obama struggled with white voters in his narrow loss in the state 2012, and even in Georgia, a Republican stronghold that Democrats hope to make competitive.