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From Washington, this is VOA news. I'm David DeForest reporting. Brazil's political crisis deepens.
The interim speaker of Brazil's lower house of Congress said Monday his chamber was wrong to send impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff to the Senate. But the leader of the Senate quickly asserted that a vote on the matter will go ahead as scheduled. Acting House Speaker Waldir Maranhão said the April 17 vote was full of irregularities and gave Ms. Rousseff no chance to defend herself. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Monday opened access on its website to a searchable database of 200,000 offshore tax havens. Those entities are expected to involve account holders in more than 200 countries and territories. The ICIJ holds more than 11.5 million documents leaked from a Panama law firm and initially shared with only a select group of journalists. The Syrian government has announced a 48-hour extension of a localized cease-fire in Aleppo, where an uptick in fighting between the government and rebels has threatened a nationwide cessation of hostilities. The U.S. and Russia helped negotiate similar localized cessations last month for the areas of Latakia and East Ghouta. U.S. officials say the overall goal is to get a nationwide cessation of fighting to hold in Syria. The presumptive U.S. Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is beginning to tap key advisers for a move to the White House, should he win in November. He has named New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to serve as chairman of a potential transition team. Numerous U.S. polls show Trump trailing the likely Democratic nominee, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This is VOA news. The Obama administration is suing the state of North Carolina over its so-called bathroom bill, saying it breaks federal anti-discrimination laws. The law requires transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond to their sex at birth instead of the sex with which they identify. Here is U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch: "They created state-sponsored discrimination against transgender individuals who simply seek to engage in the most private of functions in a place of safety and security." Earlier Monday, North Carolina sued the federal government to keep the law in place. Governor Pat McCrory said the federal government is behaving like a bully, trying to define gender identity when there is no such definition. "We believe a court rather than a federal agency should tell our state, our nation and employers across the country what the law requires." Governor McCrory defended the measure as necessary to protect privacy in public bathrooms and guard against men using women's restrooms to prey on women. Twitter has blocked American intelligence agencies from accessing a service that has been used to fight terrorism. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday a senior U.S. intelligence official said Twitter blocked access to Dataminr to avoid the appearance of being too friendly with intelligence agencies. Dataminr looks for suspicious patterns in information transmitted by a Twitter. British Prime Minister David Cameron says Britain would raise the risk of war if it chooses to leave the European Union. Mr. Cameron gave a major speech Monday on national security. "The European Union has helped reconcile countries which were once at each others' throats for decades. Britain has a fundamental national interest in maintaining common purpose in Europe to avoid future conflict between European countries." Former London Mayor Boris Johnson supports the British exit from the EU: "I don't think the prime minister can seriously believe that leaving the EU would trigger war on the European continent, given that he was prepared, only a few months ago, to urge that people should vote leave if they failed to get a substantially reformed European Union." Voters will decide on British participation in the EU in a June referendum. The United Nations refugee agency is calling on Kenya to reconsider its plans to close the country's two main refugee camps. The UNHCR says the move would have "devastating consequences" for hundreds of thousands of people. Kenya announced Friday that it would close the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps "within the shortest time possible," citing security concerns, particularly from al-Shabaab, a Somali-backed Islamist group. In Washington, I'm David DeForest. That's the latest world news from VOA. |