Author: Théophile Niyitegeka

{Pentagon set to be major winner while state department and federal programmes in for steep reductions.}

Donald Trump will ask US Congress for drastic cuts to many federal programmes as he seeks to increase defence spending and spend more money deporting illegal immigrants.

In a plan designed to translate campaign promises into dollar and cent commitments, the Republican president proposed a 28 percent cut in state department funding.

That could be a signal for steep reductions in foreign aid and funding to UN agencies, with knock-on effects around the world.

The Pentagon will be the major winner with a nearly 10 percent boost. The US defence budget is already greater than that of the next seven nations combined.

Separately, about $4bn will be earmarked this year and next to start building a wall on the US southern border.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that Mexico will pay for that wall – which will cost at least $15bn, according to estimates by the Bernstein Research group, a consultancy firm.

Trump’s proposal covers only a fraction of the $3.8 trillion federal budget – which is dominated by health, pension and other baked-in costs.

The text will be heavily revised and enlarged on by Congress, before a full budget is released around May.

In that sense, the plan is as much a political statement as a fiscal outline: a fact not lost on the White House.

“This is a hard power budget, it is not a soft power budget,” Mick Mulvaney, White House budget chief, said.

The former Congressman said he scanned Trump’s campaign speeches for inspiration.

The budget could be a signal to Trump’s supporters that he is a “man of action” and not a “typical politician”.

Security has been a major vote winner. An Economist/YouGov poll found that 51 percent of Republicans believe the US will be safer from terrorism at the end of his term.

The budget may also be seen as a signal to the world that Trump’s US may be less engaged and will put “America first”.

Diplomats and some former defence officials have already sounded a warning that less spending on things like democracy promotion and humanitarian aid will spell more trouble, and military spending, down the road.

More than 120 retired generals and admirals recently signed a letter warning “that many of the crises our nation faces do not have military solutions alone”.

They cited Jim Mattis, now defence secretary, as once saying “if you don’t fully fund the State Department, then I need to buy more ammunition”.

‘Drastic cuts’

The Environmental Protection Agency, which helps monitor air, water and other standards, will also see significant cuts.

That is in keeping with Trump’s promise to gut regulation.

“We believe that the core functions [of the EPA] can be satisfied with this budget,” said Mulvaney.

On Wednesday, Trump travelled to Detroit, the home of the US car-manufacturing industry and announced he will freeze targets to limit future vehicle emissions.

READ MORE: Trump administration to ’empower’ US police forces

Steve Bannon, Trump’s top adviser, has promised a broader “‘deconstruction of the administrative state”.

But Trump’s plan is already facing criticism from Democratic politicians.

“It will prescribe drastic cuts in many of the programs and agencies that keep America safe, whether it’s environmental programmes, whether it is food safety, drug safety,” said John Yarmuth, Kentucky representative.

The senior member on the House of Representatives budget committee speculated that the proposal could be a negotiating position, an opening salvo in Trump’s “art of the deal”.

“If they want to negotiate with the health and safety and future of the American people, then that’s pretty cynical,” he said.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Leni Robredo urges Filipinos to ‘defy incursions on their rights’ as she denounces president’s bloody anti-drug war.}

The Philippine vice president has raised an alarm about the country’s bloody crackdown on illegal drug use, saying it can’t be solved “with bullets alone” and adding that Filipinos should “defy brazen incursions on their rights”.

Vice President Leni Robredo’s comments, some of her sharpest critiques so far of Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drug campaign, are likely to antagonise the brash-talking president.

In her speech, which will be shown at a UN-linked forum on extrajudicial killings on Thursday, she raised concerns about a lack of transparency and accountability in Duterte’s crackdown, and the mounting number of killings, which she described as “summary executions”.

Since July last year, more than 7,000 people have been killed, Robredo said in the video.

“We are now looking at some very grim statistics,” she added.

INTERACTIVE: Who’s liable for the mounting death toll?

Robredo, who belongs to the opposition Liberal Party, said she had received several complaints from residents who had been rounded up by police, and told they had no rights to demand search warrants as they were living illegally on land they didn’t own.

She said Filipinos should demand greater transparency in the publicly funded campaign and ask “why no one is being held accountable”, citing what she said were hundreds of complaints filed with the Commission on Human Rights, which recommended that the Department of Justice file criminal complaints.

National police spokesman Senior Superintendent Dionardo Carlos said the allegations, if true, violated police policy and should have been reported to authorities so they could investigate.

“If these are happening, or have happened, our request is for specifics because these are not sanctioned,” Carlos said.

Robredo said she publicly asked Duterte “to direct the nation towards respect for rule of law, instead of blatant disregard for it”.

“We ask him to uphold basic human rights enshrined in our constitution, instead of encouraging its abuse. We also ask the Filipino people to defy brazen incursions on their rights,” she added.

Duterte and his national police chief have said they do not condone extrajudicial killings, but have repeatedly threatened drug suspects with death in public speeches.

Last month, rights group Amnesty International accused police of behaving like the criminal underworld they are supposed to be suppressing, systematically targeting the poor and defenceless, recruiting paid killers, stealing from the people they kill, and fabricating official incident reports.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Suicide bomber targets main judicial building in the capital’s centre, with a second blast reported in the Rabweh area.}

Two suicide bombings hit the Syrian capital of Damascus on Wednesday, killing dozens as the country’s war entered its seventh year.

A suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest in the capital’s main judicial building early in the afternoon, killing at least 31 people and wounding 102 others, Syria’s state news agency SANA reported.

A second attacker detonated himself at a restaurant in the Rabweh area of Damascus, according to SANA, wounding at least 28 people.

Al Jazeera’s Natasha Ghoneim, reporting from the Turkish city of Gaziantep along the Syrian border, said the suicide bomber in the first blast reportedly detonated himself after he was stopped by security at the gate of the court.

“The attack happened during a peak time to inflict the maximum number of casualties,” she said.

There was no immediate claim for the bombing, which came as the country’s civil war entered its seventh year.

The attack on capital’s Palace of Justice, located near the famous and crowded Hamidiyeh market in Damascus, was the latest in a spate of explosions and suicide attacks targeting government-controlled areas in Syria and its capital.

Attackers have also twice struck the government-held city of Homs in the past few weeks

Analysts who follow Syria have predicted that as rebels fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad suffer military setbacks, they will increasingly turn to guerrilla attacks in territory controlled by the government.

Damascus police chief Mohammad Kheir Ismail told state TV that a man wearing a military uniform and carrying a shotgun and grenades arrived to entrance of the palace in the early afternoon.

The guards stopped the man, took away his arms and asked to search him. At that point, the man hurled himself inside the building and detonated his explosives, the chief said.

Ahmad al-Sayed, Syria’s attorney general, confirmed that account to state TV, saying when the security guards tried to arrest the man, he threw himself inside the palace and blew himself up.

“This is a dirty action as people who enter the palace are innocent,” he said, noting that the timing of the explosion was planned to kill the largest number of lawyers, judges and other people who were there at the time.

Ambulances rushed to the scene to transfer casualties to hospital.

The blast followed twin attacks on Saturday targeting Shia holy sites in the capital’s Old City that killed at least 40 people in Damascus, an attack claimed by a hardline coaltion known as Tahrir al-Sham, which includes groups with links to al-Qaeda.

But in a statement put out shortly after the bombings, Tahrir al-Sham denied involvement in Wednesday’s attacks, and emphasised that its “objectives are limited to security branches and military barracks of the criminal regime and its allies”.

Esewhere in Syria, air raids in the rebel-held city of Idlib killed at least 21 civilians, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Syrian Civil Defence, a rescue group also known as the White Helmets that operates in opposition territory, put the death toll from the pre-dawn bombing at 22, and said that 15 children were among the dead.

Source:BBC