U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said the meeting of finance ministers of the G20 countries was a success Saturday despite the ministers not reaching agreement on trade protectionism.

“I will leave here confident that my colleagues and I are able to work in partnership to …foster and promote global growth and financial stability,” he said.

Citing President Donald Trump’s commitment to American companies and workers, Mnuchin pushed back on and effectively omitted a ban on protectionism from the joint statement released at the end of the summit.

Mnuchin did, however, say that the United States still believed in free trade.

“We believe in free trade, we’re one of the largest markets in the world, we’re one of the largest trading partners in the world,” Mnuchin said. “Having said that, we want to re-examine certain agreements,” he continued, speaking specifically about NAFTA.

Other world powers present played down any disagreement between the countries.

“It’s not true we are not agreed. It’s completely clear we are not for protectionism,” Wolfgang Schaeuble, finance minister of host country Germany, told reporters, though he did, without mentioning a country by name, say that “maybe one or the other important member state needs to get a sense of how international cooperation works.”

The G20 is a informal forum on economic cooperation between 19 countries plus the European Union. Representatives from the 19 countries and the EU will meet for a formal summit in July.

 
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Malaysia is sending troops to Somalia as part of the humanitarian mission to avert famine and save the lives of thousands of people, Somali government officials and diplomats said on Saturday.

“I can confirm the report and the details will be given when the delegation led by Somali Deputy Prime Minister Mohamed Omar Arte, which has been visiting Malaysia, returns to the country,” Somalia’s information minister, Mohamed Abdi Hayir Mareye, told VOA Somali.

Addressing the media in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Defense Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin said his country will send three officers and 17 personnel from the Armed Forces Medical Core to Somalia.

“The infantry unit, consisting of an officer and 10 personnel, will provide security for the delegation. The food and medical supplies will be flown to Somalia by a Hercules C-130 aircraft,” the minister said.

The minister said the troops, along with assets, will be mobilized from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where Malaysia stationed a small number of troops to help in the evacuation of Malaysians in Yemen. But many consider them as part of Riyadh’s military coalition to battle the Houthi militia in Yemen.

A Somali diplomat in the delegation, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak about the issue, said the decision was reached on Tuesday following a meeting between Somalia Deputy Prime Minister Arteh and senior Malaysian officials, including the defense minister.

“During the meeting, the Somali delegates appealed to Malaysia for assistance in providing aid and the security of the access roads, and Malaysia immediately responded to the request,” the diplomat said. “Malaysia will also ask its allies in the Gulf and Asia to assist Somalia.”

Security help

Somalia’s parliament has asked nations in the region to work together to help the  country secure humanitarian aid access to reach 6.2 million people affected by the current drought in the aid-dependent Horn of Africa nation.

In an extraordinary session held Saturday in Mogadishu, lawmakers, endorsed a resolution on the drought.

Somalia’s Information minister Mareye said the resolution puts the country into an emergency state in order to respond to the drought that threatens to turn into a full-blown famine.

“The resolution asks the African Union Mission in Somalia and the troop-contributing countries, especially neighboring countries to help the Somali National Army to secure the major roads leading to the drought-stricken areas,” Mareye said. “It puts the country into an emergency state.”

The parliamentary resolution comes as a high-level delegation — led by the newly elected African Union Commission chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat of Chad — was visiting Mogadishu.

In the city’s presidential palace, Mahamat discussed the drought and security with Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo and Prime Minister Hassan Ali Kheyre.

Fear of aid corruption  

Somali officials coordinating the drought response worry that aid supplies could be stolen, and they also are concerned al-Shabab still poses a threat to many areas in south and central Somalia.

“There is a fear that the aid falls into the wrong hand, especially the areas where the government has no authority. And another fear is about security, and both are delaying any aid meant to the needy people in the areas,” a government source told VOA. 

Al-Shabab, which has been trying to overthrow the Somali government for nearly a decade, has impeded access to areas hit by famine, making it dangerous or impossible for aid workers to reach those in need.

Poorly equipped and mostly unpaid Somali National Army forces, backed by African Union (AU) forces, seized territory previously controlled al-Shabab, but both AMISOM and Somali troops say more soldiers are needed to secure rural areas and major roads between towns, where the militants often carry out guerrilla style hit and run attacks.
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South Korean prosecutors will question the chairman of the SK Group Saturday in connection with an influence-peddling scandal that brought down President Park Geun-hye, the company and the Yonhap news agency said.

Park, South Korea’s first democratically elected leader to be removed from office, faces allegations that she colluded with a friend, Choi Soon-sil, to pressure big businesses to donate to foundations set up to back her policy initiatives.

Officials at the prosecutors’ office could not be reached for comment about the summoning of SK Chairman Chey Tae-won.

A spokesman for the SK Group however confirmed that Chey would be questioned but declined to comment further.

Reform of chaebol

Park is to appear for questioning Tuesday. She and Choi have denied wrongdoing.

An election to pick a new president will be May 9, and reform of South Korea’s powerful family-run conglomerates, known as chaebol, is a major campaign issue.

The SK Group is South Korea’s third-largest chaebol, with units in chemicals, telecoms and semiconductors.

Chey is likely to be asked about discussions between the group and the presidential Blue House in 2015, around the time he was released from prison when a four-year term for embezzlement was commuted.

Three SK executives were questioned Thursday as part of the same investigation.

Others under investigation

At least two other conglomerates are being investigated, including the Samsung Group, South Korea’s largest chaebol. Its leader, Jay Y. Lee, is in detention on trial on bribery, embezzlement and other charges. Lee denies all charges and Samsung denies wrongdoing.

A spokesman for the Lotte Group said this week it was cooperating with the prosecutors’ investigation. 

Park, who was impeached by parliament in December and dismissed from office by the Constitutional Court March 10, is accused of bribery, extortion and abuse of power in the scandal that has rocked South Korea since October. 
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Bangladesh police Saturday shot and killed a suspected militant who tried to enter a security checkpoint on a motorcycle armed with explosives, the latest in a string of security incidents since a deadly attack on a cafe in July.

The latest incident came a day after a suicide bomber blew himself up at a security forces base near the international airport in the South Asian nation’s capital, Dhaka.

Bangladesh’s counter-terrorism Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) said some of its officers opened fire when a man riding a motorcycle tried to break through a checkpoint.

“The man was carrying explosives on his body,” the RAB’s Legal and Media wing chief Mufti Mahmud Khan told Reuters. He said two officers were wounded in the attack.

Bangladesh has stepped up security across the country after Friday’s suicide attack. The most serious in a string of attacks in recent years came last July, when gunmen stormed a Dhaka cafe and killed 22 people, most of them foreigners.

On Thursday, four suspected members of an Islamist militant group blamed for the cafe attack were killed during a police raid on their hideout in the southeastern town of Chittagong.

Al-Qaida and the Islamic State militant group have made competing claims over a recent spate of killings of liberals and members of religious minorities in Bangladesh, a mostly Muslim country of 160 million people.

Authorities have consistently ruled out the presence of such transnational groups, blaming domestic militants instead.

However, security experts say the scale and sophistication of the cafe attack suggested links to a transnational network.

Police have killed more than 50 suspected militants in shootouts since the cafe attack, including the man they say was its main planner, Bangladesh-born Canadian citizen Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury.
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New research warns that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef can be saved only if urgent steps are taken to tackle climate change. The study, published in the journal Nature, says parts of the world’s largest coral system will never fully recover from repeated bleaching, caused by spikes in the water temperature.

The Great Barrier Reef faces localized threats, such as the run-off of pesticides from farms and overfishing, but scientists believe its future depends on immediate efforts to reduce global warming.

Worst bleaching on record

They say last year’s bleaching of large parts of the reef was the worst on record. There’s evidence that a similar event is occurring this year. Corals begin to starve once they bleach, the main cause of which is heat stress resulting from high sea temperatures.

The world heritage body, UNESCO, has threatened to put the Great Barrier Reef on its in danger list because of mounting concerns over its health.

In response, Australia’s Queensland state government released a discussion paper to look at ways to improve water quality on the reef, which is contaminated by fertilizers and pesticides from farms near the coast.

Nick Casule from the environment group Greenpeace says while localized threats must be addressed, so must the broader issue of climate change.

‘Warming killing the reef’

“Poor water quality is a huge threat to the health of the Great Barrier Reef,” Casule said. “There is no denying that, and that comes from activities like agriculture and agricultural run-off into the reef. It also comes from activities like the industrial ports that are all up and down the Queensland coastline, but they can’t be viewed in isolation. At the core of that has to be the recognition that global warming is what is killing the reef.” 

The Great Barrier Reef stretches for 2,300 kilometers down Australia’s northeast coast. It is home to a wondrous array of wildlife, including more than 130 species of sharks, 500 types of worms and 1,600 varieties of fish.

The reef pumps more than $4 billion into the Australian economy and employs 63,000 people mostly in the tourism industry, although some travel groups believe the damage inflicted on the coral system has been exaggerated, which has, in turn, seen many travelers from Europe and the United States cancel their trips.
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China will begin preparatory work this year for an environmental monitoring station on Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, an official said, as two U.S. senators introduced a bill to impose sanctions on its activities in the disputed waterway.

China seized the strategic shoal, which is also claimed by the Philippines, in 2012, and the United States has warned Beijing against carrying out the same land reclamation work there that it has done in other parts of the South China Sea.

This week, Xiao Jie, the mayor of what Beijing calls Sansha City, an administrative base for disputed South China Sea islands and reefs it controls, said China planned preparatory work this year to build environmental monitoring stations on a number of islands, including Scarborough Shoal.

Restoration, erosion prevention

The monitoring stations, along with docks and other infrastructure, form part of island restoration and erosion prevention efforts planned for 2017, Xiao told the official Hainan Daily.

The report came ahead of a visit to Beijing at the weekend by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, where he is expected to reiterate U.S. concern about Chinese island building.

Tillerson has called the activity “illegal.” Last June, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter warned that any move by China to reclaim land at Scarborough Shoal would “result in actions being taken by the both United States and … by others in the region which would have the effect of not only increasing tensions, but isolating China.”

A spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department, Anna Richey-Allen, said it was aware of the Chinese report and reiterated a call on South China Sea claimants to avoid building on disputed features.

The Philippine Foreign Ministry declined to comment, saying it was trying to verify the reports.

Washington stresses the importance of free navigation in South China Sea, through which about $5 trillion worth of trade passes each year. China claims nearly all of the sea, and Washington is concerned its island-building is aimed at denying access to the waters.

Senators’ bill

This week, U.S. Senators Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, and Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, introduced the South China Sea and East China Sea Sanctions Act, which would ban visas for Chinese people helping to build South China Sea and East China Sea projects.

It would also sanction foreign financial bodies that “knowingly conduct or facilitate a significant financial transaction for sanctioned individuals and entities” if China steps up activity at Scarborough Shoal, among other actions.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying called the bill “extremely grating” and said it showed the “arrogance and ignorance” of the senators.

Bonnie Glazer, an Asia expert at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said it was unclear whether China planned dredging work at Scarborough Shoal, something that could wreck efforts to agree on a code of conduct for the region that Beijing professes to support.

She noted that parties to a 2002 declaration of conduct had agreed to refrain from inhabiting uninhabited features.

During his January confirmation hearing, Tillerson said China should be denied access to islands it has built up in the South China Sea. He subsequently softened his language, saying that in the event of an unspecified “contingency,” the United States and its allies “must be capable of limiting China’s access to and use of” those islands to pose a threat.
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China, backed by Russia, blocked a short U.N. Security Council statement on Myanmar on Friday, diplomats said, after the 15-member body met to discuss the situation in Rakhine state, where the country’s military is conducting a security operation.

The U.N. human rights office last month accused the military of mass killings and rapes of Rohingya Muslims and burning their villages since October in a campaign that “very likely” amounts to crimes against humanity and possibly ethnic cleansing.

U.N. political affairs chief Jeffrey Feltman briefed the council behind closed doors. Britain requested the meeting.

“We did put forward … some proposed press elements but there was not consensus in the room,” British U.N. Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, president of the council for March, told reporters after the briefing.

Such statements have to be agreed upon by consensus. Diplomats said Myanmar neighbor China, backed by Russia, blocked the statement.

Humanitarian access

The short draft press statement, seen by Reuters, would have “noted with concern renewed fighting in some parts of the country and stressed the importance of humanitarian access to all effected areas.”

Some 75,000 people have fled from Rakhine state to Bangladesh since Myanmar’s military began a security operation last October in response to what it says was an attack by Rohingya insurgents on border posts in which nine police officers were killed.

The European Union called Thursday for the United Nations to send an international fact-finding mission urgently to Myanmar to investigate allegations of torture, rapes and executions by the military against the Rohingya Muslims.

Following a closed-door council meeting in November and as Western nations became increasingly concerned about how Aung San Suu Kyi’s government was dealing with violence in the divided northwest, Suu Kyi told diplomats in the capital, Naypyitaw, that her country was being treated unfairly.
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