World News Roundup

INTERNATIONALARAB TIMES, TUESDAY, JULY 11, 2017

10

Cyber

Proposal criticized

Trump ‘backtracks’ oncyber unit with RussiaWASHINGTON, July 10, (RTRS): US President Don-ald Trump on Sunday backtracked on his push for a cyber security unit with Russia, tweeting that he did not think it could happen, hours after his proposal was harshly criticized by Republicans who said Moscow could not be trusted.

Trump said on Twitter early on Sunday that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed on Friday

forming “an impenetrable Cy-ber Security unit” to address is-sues like the risk of cyber med-dling in elections.

The idea appeared to be a political non-starter. It was im-mediately scorned by several of Trump’s fellow Republicans, who questioned why the United States would work with Russia after Moscow’s alleged med-dling in the 2016 US election.

“It’s not the dumbest idea I have ever heard but it’s pretty

close,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told NBC’s “Meet the Press” program.

Ash Carter, who was US defense secretary until the end of former Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration in January, told CNN fl atly: “This is like the guy who robbed your house proposing a working group on burglary.”

SoughtTrump’s advisers, including Secretary of State Rex

Tillerson and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, had recently sought to explain Trump’s cyber push.

Mnuchin said on Saturday that Trump and Putin had agreed to create “a cyber unit to make sure that there was absolutely no interference whatsoever, that they would work on cyber security together.”

But Trump returned to Twitter on Sunday to play down the idea, which arose at his talks with Putin at a summit of the Group of 20 nations in Hamburg, Ger-many. “The fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesn’t mean I think it can happen. It can’t,” Trump said on Twitter.

He then noted that an agreement with Russia for a ceasefi re in Syria “can & did” happen.

Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona ac-knowledged Trump’s desire to move forward with Rus-sia, but added: “There has to be a price to pay.”

“There has been no penalty,” McCain, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” program according to a CBS transcript. “Vladimir Putin ... got away with literally trying to change the outcome ... of our election.”

Trump argued for a rapprochement with Moscow in his campaign but has been unable to deliver because his administration has been dogged by investigations into the allegations of Russian interference in the election and ties with his campaign.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the matter, including whether there may have been any col-lusion on the part of Trump campaign offi cials, as are congressional committees including both the House of Representatives and Senate intelligence panels.

Trump

The remains of mobile homes destroyed by wildfi re sit at a trailer park in Boston Flats, British Columbia on July 9. (Inset): Randy Thorne (left), his wife Angie Thorne (second left), their daughter Kelsey Thorne, and grand-daughter Nevaeh Porter, 8, comfort one another as they view the remains of their home that was destroyed by a wildfi re on the Ashcroft First Nation, near Ashcroft, British Columbia. (AP)

Wildfi res in western US endanger lives, propertyThousands of residents in the western US and Canada have fl ed their homes as wildfi res barreled across the baking land-scape, destroying property.

Two major wildfi res in California have forced nearly 8,000 people out of their homes.

About 4,000 people evacuated and an-other 7,400 were told to prepare to leave their homes as fi re swept through grassy

foothills in the Sierra Nevada, about 60 miles north of Sacramento, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protec-tion said Sunday.

The fi re has burned nearly 4 square miles (11 sq. kilometers), injured four fi refi ghters and destroyed at least 10 structures, but that number is expected to rise, fi re spokeswoman Mary Ann Al-drich said.

The area burning was southeast of Oroville, where spillways in the nation’s tallest dam began crumbling from heavy rains this winter and led to temporary evacuation orders for 200,000 residents downstream.

Meanwhile, fi refi ghters have been able to build containment lines around about half the wildfi re that forced the evacuation of hundreds of people near Breckenridge,

Colorado. The fi re has not spread since it broke out Wednesday and was still less than a square mile (about one-third square kilometer) Sunday.

In rural Arizona, fi re offi cials say three homes were among 10 buildings that were burned. The wildfi re there has led to the evacuation of the entire town of Dud-leyville, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) southeast of Phoenix.

Firefi ghters were contending with more than 200 wildfi res burning in British Co-lumbia that had destroyed dozens of buildings, including several homes and two airport hangars.

The three biggest fi res, which have grown in size to range from 9 to 19 square miles (23 to 49 square kilom-eters), had forced thousands of people to fl ee. (AP)

US homeownership rate seen stabilizing

Black homeowners ‘struggle’SAN FRANCISCO, July 10, (AP): Yul Dorn and his wife raised their son and daughter in a three-bedroom home crammed with family photos, one they bought in a historically African-Amer-ican neighborhood in San Francisco more than two decades ago.

Today, the couple is living in a motel after they were evicted last year, having lost a foreclosure battle. A second home they inherited is also in default.

The Dorns expect to join the growing ranks of African-Americans who do not own their homes, a rate that was nearly 30 percentage points higher than that of whites in 2016, according to a new report.

“The person who bought the house, we lost all of our memories,” said Dorn, a pastor and case manager with the city health department. “He put the furniture out on the street, and it was just devas-tating to my family.”

The nation’s homeownership rate appears to be stabilizing as people re-bound from the 2007 recession that left millions unemployed and home values underwater, according to the report by Harvard University’s Joint Center for

Housing Studies. But it found African-Americans aren’t sharing in the recov-ery, even as whites, Asian-Americans and Latinos slowly see gains in home-buying. The center said the disparity be-tween whites and blacks is at its highest in 70-plus years of data.

Experts say reasons for the lower homeownership rate range from his-toric underemployment and low wages to a recession-related foreclosure crisis that hit black communities particularly hard. In 2004, the pinnacle of US home-ownership, three-quarters of whites and nearly half of blacks owned homes, ac-cording to the Harvard study.

By 2016, the African-American homeowner rate had fallen to 42.2 per-cent and lagged 29.7 percentage points behind whites, nearly a percentage point higher than in 2015.

Now, a lack of affordable housing and stricter lending are making it harder for fi rst-time buyers to obtain what tra-ditionally has been considered an essen-tial part of the American dream and a way to build wealth.

“It has always been historically and systemically harder for blacks, and we

were seeing there a little bit of progress, and now we’re back at square one,” said Alanna McCargo, co-director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a think-tank focused on inner-city issues that published a similar report. An AP analysis of US Census Bureau statistics shows some pockets of the Midwest and California had the lowest homeownership rates for Afri-can-Americans, while some areas of the South had the highest.

Low inventory adds to the problem, said Jeffrey Hicks, incoming president of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, which was founded in 1947 to promote fair housing opportuni-ties for minorities. The Atlanta area has only about 30,000 properties for sale through real estate agents, compared with approximately 100,000 about 13 years ago, he said. African-Americans snapped up homes at the peak of the housing bubble, lured by generous lend-ing and a glut of affordable properties, housing experts say. Lenders also tar-geted minorities, pushing riskier sub-prime loans even when applicants quali-fi ed for lower-interest loans.

Housing

This 2014 photo provided by a family friend of Jaquin Thomas shows him at age 14 in New Orleans. Thomas was arrested in July 2016, at age 15, and accused of murder and eventu-ally sent to the New Orleans jail to await trial. He killed himself on Oct 17,

2016. (AP)

Michelle Shriver

Michelle to honor Shriver: ESPN has chosen Michelle Obama to help posthu-mously honor Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

The former fi rst lady is presenting the Arthur Ashe Courage Award to Shriver’s son, Timothy Shriver, during ABC’s broad-cast of the ESPYS awards in Los Angeles Wednesday night.

Timothy Shriver chairs the Special Olym-pics, a sporting event his mother founded in the late 1960s to help empower people with intellectual disabilities. Mrs Obama says in a statement that Eunice Shriver’s work to promote their inclusion and acceptance was inspiring and changed the lives of countless young athletes.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver died in 2009. Her sister, Rosemary, was intellectually disabled. (AP)

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UPS drivers remembered: Three San Francisco UPS drivers who were killed by a co-worker last month were remembered Sunday for their kindness and dedication to their jobs.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports about 300 people attended the memorial at City Hall for Wayne Chan, Mike Lefi ti and Benson Louie.

On June 14, UPS driver Jimmy Lam fatally shot the men and wounded two other

America

Amtrak workers continue ongoing infrastructure renewal work on the tracks be-neath Penn Station on July 9 in New York. A massive two-month repair project was launched Monday at the country’s busiest train station. The summer’s ac-celerated repair work, prompted by two derailments this spring, will close some of the station’s 21 tracks and require a roughly 20 percent reduction in the num-

ber of commuter trains coming in from New Jersey and Long Island. (AP)

co-workers during a meeting before the day’s deliveries. He then killed himself in front of police.

Retired UPS employee Michael Campino said Chan and Louie were always willing to help him translate when he dealt with Chinese-speaking customers. Lefi ti was

remembered for his gregarious personality (AP)

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Soldier charged with murder: A US Army soldier was charged Monday with murder in the fatal shooting of a New York

State Police trooper who was responding to a domestic dispute.

The suspect, identifi ed as Justin Walters, 32, surrendered without incident after the trooper and Walters’ wife were killed Sun-day night at a home in the town of Theresa, near the Canadian border, New York State Police Superintendent George P. Beach II said.

Trooper Joel Davis, 36, responded to a call of shots fi red shortly after 8 pm. He was approaching the home when he was shot, Beach said. Walters’ wife, 27-year-old Nichole Walters, also was found dead at the scene.

State police said Walters is an active duty US Army infantryman who is stationed at nearby Fort Drum, home of the 10th Mountain Division. Information on Walters’ military service wasn’t available. (AP)

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Illegal gold used in scheme: A man who considered himself the Pablo Escobar of gold smuggling and two other former work-ers at a Miami-area refi nery imported more than $1 billion in illegally mined gold from South America in a vast money-laundering scheme from 2013 to 2016, US prosecutors say.

In a criminal complaint, the US said that the three ex-employees of NTR Metals Miami and accomplices from several South American countries coordinated the purchase of illegally mined gold originating from Peruvian mines controlled by drug traffi ck-ers. (AP)