No shove, but Trump body language speaks to frosty relations
BRUSSELS — He didn’t shove anyone this time, but President Donald Trump’s body language during NATO events Wednesday suggested his relationships with key U.S. allies aren’t exactly buddy-buddy.
Trump started the day with a tense breakfast meeting with Jens Stoltenberg in which he lectured the NATO leader about member defense spending and complained about a German pipeline deal with Russia. Arms crossed over his chest, Trump gestured at Stoltenberg and repeatedly interrupted the secretary-general as he argued his case.
Trump’s aides seated around the table, including chief of staff John Kelly and the U.S. ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, looked visibly uncomfortable at points.
Their subsequent encounters at NATO headquarters were formal and less strained as they twice shook hands and chatted in front of journalists. But those moments were more perfunctory than Stoltenberg’s chattier introductions with other leaders, many of whom Stoltenberg was seeing for the first time that day after he had spent part of the morning hosting Trump.
World leader summits are largely about optics and presenting a united front to the rest of the world. But Trump barreled into his second NATO summit, as he did his first, with a litany of public complaints about alliance members’ “delinquent” defense spending, as well as a German-Russian gas pipeline deal.
New round of proposed Trump tariffs would hit US consumers
WASHINGTON — Now consumers are in the cross-hairs.
Americans could soon find themselves paying more for goods they might not have known were imported from China. It’s a potential consequence of a new round of tariffs the Trump administration is proposing to slap on Chinese imports as soon as September.
And it marks a new phase in the U.S. trade war with China. Before now, the administration had scrupulously avoided slapping tariffs on consumer goods in order to spare U.S. shoppers from direct economic pain. But late Tuesday, when the administration issued a list of 6,000 products worth $200 billion that it proposes to hit with 10 percent tariffs, it included consumer items ranging from hats and handbags to seafood, vacuum cleaners, toilet paper and burglar alarms.
The administration will hold hearings on the proposed list late next month. President Donald Trump is threatening to impose the tariffs in retaliation for duties that China slapped on $34 billion of U.S. goods on Friday. Those duties, in turn, were a response to new tariffs the United States had imposed on China.
If China were to back down, the Trump administration might hold off on the newest tariffs. But economists say Beijing is unlikely to do so.
US Navy now allows women to wear ponytails, lock hairstyles
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The Navy says it will now allow servicewomen to sport ponytails and other longer hairstyles, reversing a policy that long forbade them from letting their hair down.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson says it makes the Navy more inclusive.
Many black women had asked for changes to the female grooming standards. A female sailor announced the new policy during a Facebook Live event Tuesday with Richardson.
Lock hairstyles, or ropelike strands, are also now allowed. Wider hair buns too. And women can wear ponytails while in uniform.
At the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island Wednesday, women said they’re excited to switch from buns, which don’t fit well under helmets.
Asylum seekers bring evidence to show the dangers of home
MATAMOROS, Mexico — An MS-13 gang member left eight voicemails on Brenda Mendez’s cellphone demanding that she turn over her teenage boy. If she refused, he said, the gang would dismember both her sons.
“I’m going to send you a finger from each hand. You are going to see what the (expletive) happens to your son,” one message said. “Show up or you’re dead. We know about Little Gustavo and also about your baby boy. What the (expletive)? You want him turned into pieces too?”
The family soon fled Guatemala with hopes of getting into the United States, being careful to bring along the voicemails and a copy of the police report Mendez filed against the gang member known as El Gato.
Other migrants are doing the same. As the Trump administration puts up more legal barriers for asylum-seekers, some immigrants take steps to arrive at the border with evidence to show U.S. authorities the dangers they are trying to escape. The documents are often carried inside protective folders, and they are sometimes all that the migrants bring with them, except for the clothes on their backs.
On July 1, the Mendez family waited on the Mexican side of the international bridge to Brownsville, Texas. Even with their evidence, they seemed to face long odds after Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month removed gang and domestic violence from the conditions that qualify for asylum.
Neo-Nazi trial puts spotlight on fate of migrants in Germany
MUNICH — A German court found the main defendant guilty on Wednesday in a string of neo-Nazi killings more than a decade ago — a high-profile trial that raised fresh questions about the treatment of migrants at a time when Germany is grappling with an unprecedented influx of refugees and surging support for a far-right party bent on keeping the country white.
The Munich court sentenced Beate Zschaepe, the only known survivor of the National Socialist Underground group, to life in prison in the killings of 10 people — most of them migrants — who were gunned down between 2000 and 2007. The group’s name, often shortened to NSU, alludes to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party.
Zschaepe was also found guilty of membership in a terrorist organization, bomb attacks that injured dozens and several lesser crimes including a string of robberies. Four men were also found guilty of supporting the group in various ways and given prison terms of between 2½ and 10 years.
While the verdict was widely welcomed by victims’ families as well as anti-racism campaigners and mainstream political parties, the court’s failure to investigate the secretive wider network of people sympathetic to the National Socialist Undergound group’s cause drew criticism.
The verdict “is a first and very important step,” said Gamze Kubasik, the daughter of Mehmet Kubasik, who was shot dead by Zschaepe’s two accomplices in the western city of Dortmund on April 4, 2006. “I just hope all other supporters of the NSU are found and convicted.”
Execution blocked after company objects to use of its drug
LAS VEGAS — A Nevada judge effectively blocked the execution of a two-time killer Wednesday after a pharmaceutical company objected to the use of one of its drugs to put someone to death.
Clark County District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez disallowed the drug in a ruling that came less than nine hours before Scott Raymond Dozier, 47, was to be executed by injection with a three-chemical combination never before tried in the U.S.
State prison officials called off the 8 p.m. execution. They could appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court.
Despite the maneuvering around him, Dozier had repeatedly expressed his desire to be put to death and had stopped fighting for his life. His attorney did not immediately respond to messages for comment.
At a hearing earlier in the day, New Jersey-based Alvogen urged the judge to block the use of its sedative midazolam, saying the state illegally secured the product through “subterfuge” and intended it for unapproved purposes. The pharmaceutical company also raised fears that the drug could lead to a botched execution, citing cases that apparently went awry elsewhere around the country.