SUMMARY: The White House says Americans will now be able to sue businesses operating on land confiscated by the Castro regime. Previous administrations declined to enforce the related Helms-Burton Law. Canada and the EU, which have private-sector interests on Cuban land, decried the move. Nick Schifrin talks to National Security Advisor John Bolton about that, plus U.S. policy on Venezuela and North Korea.
SUMMARY: President Trump declared victory on Monday on a deal more than a year in the making. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, largely keeps the structure of the 1994 North American Trade Agreement, but gives U.S. dairy farmers greater access to the Canadian market, add stipulations for the auto industry and increases certain protections. Amna Nawaz reports.
SUMMARY: President Trump made renegotiating NAFTA a priority of his administration. What's really in the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and what does it mean for the U.S. economy? Amna Nawaz learns more from Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations.
SUMMARY: President Trump has long criticized NAFTA, so it’s little surprise that he is pursuing an alternative trade deal with Mexico. The tentative agreement reached this week contains provisions for keeping auto manufacturing in North America, ensures workers earn higher wages and addresses new industries. But where do talks stand with Canada? Judy Woodruff speaks with Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal.
SUMMARY: The United States and Canada failed to reach a new free trade agreement by a self-imposed deadline Friday. Instead, President Trump announced he will sign a pact with Mexico in 90 days, and that Canada could still join it. The Canadian foreign minister said she's confident they can get a deal. Judy Woodruff learns more from Yamiche Alcindor.
SUMMARY: After leaving the G-7 summit in Quebec early, President Trump withdrew from the group's joint statement on trade and blasted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as "dishonest" for criticizing the U.S. tariffs and moving to retaliate. As Lisa Desjardins reports, a key relationship for both sides is at risk.
SUMMARY: President Trump has grown frustrated with Canada on a lack of progress in crafting a new NAFTA agreement, says Marc Short, director of legislative affairs for the Trump administration. Short sits down with Judy Woodruff to discuss reactions to the G-7 summit, the President’s focus on Canada and more.
SUMMARY: President Trump came into office insisting that the U.S. wouldn't be taken advantage of, by allies or adversaries. What do we learn from the most recent rancor at the G-7? Judy Woodruff gets analysis on Trump’s trade complaints from Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group.
SUMMARY: The idea of a basic guaranteed income is getting a trial run in a Canadian province for three years. Four thousand randomly selected Ontario residents will get thousands of dollars a year, and in exchange, they give up some social supports, while the government gets back some money. Economics correspondent Paul Solman talks with some participants, as well as some skeptics.
SUMMARY: In Canadian public schools, the children of new immigrants do as well as native-born children within three years of arriving. There kids don't just get language and academic support; their home cultures are celebrated as they are integrated into classes. And strong social services and healthy education funding help too. Special correspondent Kavitha Cardoza of Education Week reports.
Judy Woodruff (NewsHour): The United States a Canada have a lot in common. But when it comes to education outcomes, the two are very different.
Unlike the U.S., Canada is one of the top performing education systems in the world. It does a good job educating its English-language learners. Within three years of arriving in Canada’s public schools, children of new immigrants do as well as native-born children.
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Kavitha Cardoza, Education Week: Three-fourths of the 500 students at Islington Junior Middle School speak a language other than English at home, including Somali, Korean, and Russian.
It mirrors the diversity of Toronto, where almost half the population was born in a different country. Every afternoon, all English learners join regular classes. This intentional integration is meant to help them feel part of the larger school.
SUMMARY: President Trump's efforts to change the terms of NAFTA have divided farmers and ranchers, who depend, in different ways, on global trade. Special correspondent Grant Gerlock of NET traveled around the state to hear their perspective on the ways the trade agreement between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada affects their income and livelihoods.
SUMMARY: In our NewsHour Shares moment of the day, bison have returned to Canada's Banff National Park after being wiped out more than a century ago. A biologist explains the efforts to help anchor a herd to its new home.
SUMMARY: The Dakota Access Pipeline and Keystone XL Pipeline were put on hold during the Obama administration. But new executive orders by President Trump begin putting them back on track, as part of efforts to undo former President Obama's legacy. How do these moves fit into the broader Trump agenda for energy and the environment? William Brangham talks with Valerie Volcovici of Reuters.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): Two of those moves gave new life to two of the most contentious oil pipelines in America, the Dakota Access Pipeline, which hundreds of Native American groups have been protesting, as well as the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Both of these had been delayed or put on hold by the Obama administration.
To understand how these moves fit into the Trump administration's broader plans for energy and environmental policy, I'm joined by Valerie Volcovici. She covers this for Reuters.
Welcome.
VALERIE VOLCOVICI, Reuters: Thank you.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So let's talk about these two pipelines in particular.
The Dakota Access pipeline, what did Trump's order say about that?
VALERIE VOLCOVICI: So, Trump's order this morning basically said that he wants to expedite the process.
As you well know, the Dakota Access protest has really galvanized Native American tribal sovereignty issues. It's brought together so, wide coalition of environmentalists, social activists, in addition to tribes.
So it's been one of the more high-profile protests that we have seen in a while. Right now, it's kind of stalled because former President Obama ordered an environmental review of a kind of contentious section of this pipeline that the tribe argues crosses into some sacred sites. His aim is really to move it along, because…
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: He wants to get this built.
VALERIE VOLCOVICI: He wants to get it built, and he said so on the campaign trail, and he is following through on day four, whatever it is, of the administration.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Yes, this one really wasn't that much of a surprise, if you had been listening to him all along.
VALERIE VOLCOVICI: Right.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And then what about the Keystone XL? That is a slightly different issue. This was another pipeline that goes from Canada down to the Gulf.
And this was one that Obama for many, many years seemed to wrangle with and debate what to do, and then eventually denied the permit for it. What did Trump do today?
VALERIE VOLCOVICI: Well, what Trump did today is, first of all, it invited Canada to reapply. TransCanada is the company that wants to get it built. As far as I'm aware, TransCanada has said it wants to reapply.
And then it will have the State Department. They will do an environmental impact assessment of the permit and decide whether or not to issue it. And it needs to be done within 60 days.
So, again, another sign that Trump wants to fast-track this, because, as we remember from the Keystone fights, it lasted a long time and kind of became a symbol of President Obama's environmental goals and it really also galvanized the environmentalists.
SUMMARY: Since Sunday, a wildfire burning in the heart of Canada’s oil country has forced nearly 100,000 residents to flee their homes for safety, creating the largest mass evacuation in Alberta’s history. Friday saw evacuees being ferried from the fire’s path via airlift and land convoy as the blaze spread across more than 300 square miles -- five times its original size. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Evacuees from an enormous wildfire moved to safety today in Alberta, Canada. They were ferried out by an airlift and a land convoy from a large section of the province, the heart of the country’s oil industry.
Hari Sreenivasan reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): They rolled down a deserted highway about 50 vehicles at a time, taking evacuees south to safety.
Over the next four days, thousands will convoy from north of Fort McMurray, where they’ve been stranded, toward Edmonton. They’re driving through a fire zone that’s roughly ten times the size of Manhattan.
Chad Morrison is Alberta’s manager of wildfire prevention.
CHAD MORRISON, Manager of Wildfire Prevention, Alberta: No firebreak here would have stopped this fire, because this fire is jumping kilometers at a time. We’re seeing fire spreads where, you know, it’s creating its own lightning fires out of this fire. This is an extreme, rare, rare fire event and that’s something that’s historic for us.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The big blaze has scorched some 1,600 homes and buildings, burning entire suburbs, but, Alberta premier Rachel Notley says the Fort McMurray city center has survived, so far.
RACHEL NOTLEY, Premier, Alberta: As of this morning, the downtown is largely intact. The hospital is still standing. And municipal buildings and the airport also remain intact. Firefighters have also been working to save as much of the residential areas as possible.
HARI SREENIVASAN: More than 1,100 firefighters are on the fire lines, backed by 145 helicopters and 22 air tankers. But, there’s only so much they can do.
The fire first broke out Sunday, and by Tuesday, towering walls of flames closed in on the city, with a blanket of thick smoke choking the sky.
Some 88,000 residents fled for their lives, many of them to evacuation centers to the south.
SUMMARY: At least 1,600 homes and buildings have burned this past week in a fire in Alberta, Canada that continues to grow. So far no injuries have been reported, but more than 80,000 people have been displaced. New York Times reporter Ian Austen joins Megan Thompson via Skype from Canada to discuss.
For roughly 30 years the FBI has virtually ignored a system meant to help cops track the behavioral patterns of violent criminals
More than 30 years ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a revolutionary computer system in a bomb shelter two floors beneath the cafeteria of its national academy. Dubbed the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or ViCAP, it was a database designed to help catch the nation’s most violent offenders by linking together unsolved crimes. A serial rapist wielding a favorite knife in one attack might be identified when he used the same knife elsewhere. The system was rooted in the belief that some criminals’ methods were unique enough to serve as a kind of behavioral DNA — allowing identification based on how a person acted, rather than their genetic make-up.
Equally as important was the idea that local law enforcement agencies needed a way to better communicate with each other. Savvy killers had attacked in different jurisdictions to exploit gaping holes in police cooperation. ViCAP’s “implementation could mean the prevention of countless murders and the prompt apprehension of violent criminals,” the late Sen. Arlen Specter wrote in a letter to the Justice Department endorsing the program’s creation.
In the years since ViCAP was first conceived, data-mining has grown vastly more sophisticated, and computing power has become cheaper and more readily available. Corporations can link the food you purchase, the clothes you buy, and the websites you browse. The FBI can parse your emails, cellphone records and airline itineraries. In a world where everything is measured, data is ubiquitous — from the number of pieces of candy that a Marine hands out on patrol in Kandahar, to your heart rate as you walk up the stairs at work.
That’s what’s striking about ViCAP today, the paucity of information it contains. Only about 1,400 police agencies in the U.S., out of roughly 18,000, participate in the system. The database receives reports from far less than 1 percent of the violent crimes committed annually. It’s not even clear how many crimes the database has helped solve. The FBI does not release any figures. A review in the 1990s found it had linked only 33 crimes in 12 years.
Canadian authorities built on the original ViCAP framework to develop a modern and sophisticated system capable of identifying patterns and linking crimes. It has proven particularly successful at analyzing sexual-assault cases. But three decades and an estimated $30 million later, the FBI’s system remains stuck in the past, the John Henry of data mining. ViCAP was supposed to revolutionize American law enforcement. That revolution never came.
Few law enforcement officials dispute the potential of a system like ViCAP to help solve crimes. But the FBI has never delivered on its promise. In an agency with an $8.2 billion yearly budget, ViCAP receives around $800,000 a year to keep the system going. The ViCAP program has a staff of 12. Travel and training have been cut back in recent years. Last year, the program provided analytical assistance to local cops just 220 times. As a result, the program has done little to close the gap that prompted Congress to create it. Police agencies still don’t talk to each other on many occasions. Killers and rapists continue to escape arrest by exploiting that weakness. “The need is vital,” said Ritchie Martinez, the former president of the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts. “But ViCAP is not filling it.”
Local cops say the system is confusing and cumbersome. Entering a single case into the database can take an hour and hits — where an unsolved crime is connected to a prior incident — are rare. False positives are common. Many also said the FBI does little to teach cops how to use the system. Training has dropped from a high of about 5,500 officers in 2012 to 1,200 last year.
“We don’t really use ViCAP,” said Jeff Jensen, a criminal analyst for the Phoenix Police Department with 15 years of experience. “It really is quite a chore.”
The FBI has contributed to the confusion by misrepresenting the system. On its website, the FBI says cases in its database are “continually compared” for matches as new cases are entered. But in an interview, program officials said that does not happen. “We have plans for that in the future,” said Nathan Graham, a crime analyst for the program. The agency said it would update the information on its website.
The agency’s indifference to the database is particularly noteworthy at a time when emerging research suggests that such a tool could be especially useful in rape investigations.
For years, politicians and women’s advocates have focused on testing the DNA evidence in rape kits, which are administered to sexual assault victims after an attack. Such evidence can be compared against a nationwide database of DNA samples to find possible suspects. Backlogs at police departments across the country have left tens of thousands of kits untested.
But DNA is collected in only about half of rape cases, according to recent studies. A nationwide clearinghouse of the unique behaviors, methods, or marks of rapists could help solve those cases lacking genetic evidence, criminal experts said. Other research has shown that rapists are far more likely than killers to be serial offenders. Different studies have found that between one-fourth to two-thirds of rapists have committed multiple sexual assaults. Only about 1 percent of murderers are considered serial killers.
Studies have questioned the assumptions behind behavioral analysis tools like ViCAP. Violent criminals don’t always commit attacks the same way and different analysts can have remarkably different interpretations on whether crimes are linked. And a system that looks for criminal suspects on the basis of how a person acts is bound to raise alarms about Orwellian overreach. But many cops say any help is welcome in the difficult task of solving crimes like rape. A recent investigation by ProPublica and The New Orleans Advocate found that police in four states repeatedly missed chances to arrest the former NFL football star and convicted serial rapist Darren Sharper after failing to contact each other. “We’re always looking for tools,” said Joanne Archambault, the director of End Violence Against Women International, one of the leading police training organizations for the investigation of sexual assaults. “I just don’t think ViCAP was ever promoted enough as being one of them.”
The U.S. need only look north for an example of how such a system can play an important role in solving crimes. Not long after ViCAP was developed in the United States, Canadian law enforcement officials used it as a model to build their own tool, known as the Violent Criminal Linkage Analysis System, or ViCLAS. Today, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police maintains a database containing more than 500,000 criminal case profiles. The agency credits it with linking together some 7,000 unsolved crimes since 1995 – though not all of those linkages resulted in an arrest. If the FBI collected information as consistently as the Mounties, its database would contain more than 4.4 million cases, based on the greater U.S. population.
Instead, the FBI has about 89,000 cases on file.
Over the years, Canada has poured funding and staff into its program, resulting in a powerful analytical tool, said Sgt. Tony Lawlor, a senior ViCLAS analyst. One critical difference, in the U.S., reporting to the system is largely voluntary. In Canada, legislators have made it mandatory. Cops on the street still grumble about the system, which resembles the American version in the time and effort to complete. But “it has information which assists police officers, which is catching bad guys,” Lawlor said. “When police realize there’s a value associated with it, they use it.”
The ViCAP program eventually emerged from the fallout shelter where it began. It set up shop in an unmarked two-story brick office building in a Virginia business park surrounded by a printer’s shop, a dental practice and a Baptist church.
In a lengthy interview there, program officials offered a PowerPoint presentation with case studies of three serial killers who were captured in the past eight years with the help of the ViCAP program. They called the system “successful.”
“We do as good a job as we possibly can given our resources and limitations,” said Timothy Burke, a white-haired, 29-year agency veteran who is the program manager for ViCAP. “ As with anything, we could always do better.”
SUMMARY: A bill approving the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline was the first order of business for the Republican-led Congress this year, and today that bill was vetoed by President Obama. Gwen Ifill gets two views from Jeremy Symons of the Environmental Defense Fund and Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Now to the political power struggle over legislation to build the Keystone XL pipeline, which landed today on the president’s desk and was promptly vetoed.
The president chose to carry out the veto in private, out of the glare of cameras, a sharp contrast to House Speaker John Boehner’s decision to stage a very public bill signing at the Capitol only 11 days ago.
SEN. JOHN HOEVEN: Senate Bill 1, as amended, is passed.
GWEN IFILL: The Keystone bill was the first order of business after Republicans claimed majorities in both houses of Congress this year. It’s been seven years since the 1,200-mile-long pipeline was first proposed. Parts of it are already under construction, with the ultimate goal of carrying Canada’s tar sands oil to refineries along the Gulf Coast, a project many lawmakers say would create needed jobs.
But environmentalists and landowners in some of the states it would travel through argue it would cause more harm than good.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the president’s veto is not about the merits of that argument, but about the review process.
JOSH EARNEST, White House Press Secretary: It just merely says that the benefits and consequences of building that pipeline should be thoroughly evaluated by experts and through this administrative process that has existed for decades and has been used by previous presidents of both parties.
SUMMARY: A labor dispute between shipowners and longshoreman on the West Coast has been going on for months now. This weekend, the President dispatched labor secretary Thomas Perez to California to try to resolve it. For more, economist Christopher Thornberg joins Alison Stewart from Los Angeles.
ALISON STEWART (NewsHour): In Canada today, 3,000 members of the Teamsters went on strike.
They are in a dispute with the Canadian Pacific Railway over wages and benefits. Analysts say a prolonged strike would affect the flow of oil, lumber, auto parts and other products into the United States.
Another labor dispute between ship owners and longshoremen has been going on for months now on the West Coast of this country. And, this weekend, the President dispatched Labor Secretary Thomas Perez to California to try to resolve it.
For more about this, we are joined now from Los Angeles by Christopher Thornberg. He is an economist and a founding partner of Beacon Economics.
So, Christopher, tell me, what is at the center of this dispute, and why has it gone on for something like nine months?
CHRISTOPHER THORNBERG, Founding Partner, Beacon Economics, LLC: Well, we have to remember that, you know, there is a long history of tension between the longshoremen and the various owners of the shipping companies that move products in and out of those ports.
This time around, the contract was up for renewal. Those negotiations had been carrying on.
I know the workers at the port have been working under the old expired contract for a number of months.
Contract negotiations haven’t been going very fast.
And, as a result of that, there’s been kind of this, if you will, guerrilla action going on between both parties.
It’s somewhat of a work slowdown by one side of the equation, and, of course, these kind of weekend-long lockouts on the other side of it. And, overall, the tensions are just getting hotter and hotter.
ACTOR: You must not just take his blood. You must take his hope
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): In 2009, Maziar Bahari was held for 118 days in solitary confinement in a Tehran prison, a very real ordeal dramatized in the new film “Rosewater.” (trailer link)
Bahari was a Canadian citizen who’d returned to his native Iran as a journalist working for Western media organizations, his assignment, to cover a momentous election that would end in mass demonstrations and mass arrests, after reformer Mir Hossein Mousavi’s challenge to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ended in a defeat widely condemned and discredited as fraudulent.
The film shows how Bahari, played by actor Gael Garcia Bernal, met and interviewed protagonists on both sides, before being arrested and charged as a spy. He then endures interrogation by a man known only as Rosewater.
One bit of absurdist evidence, an actual appearance in a Tehran cafe that Bahari had made on the Comedy Central program “The Daily Show.”
MAN: What do I have in common with you?
MAN: Who is the number one enemy of the United States?
MAN: Al-Qaida.
MAN: Al-Qaida is also the number one enemy of Iran.
JON STEWART, “Rosewater”: And then you are going to back up and just go out of frame that way.
JEFFREY BROWN: That connection and the courage and even humor shown by Bahari even in the face of torture drew the real-life host of “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart, to the story, and to his first foray into directing a feature film.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): During the past week, there have been at least three separate attacks launched by what are referred to as lone wolf terrorists, who are often inspired by propaganda from groups like ISIS.
Last Monday in Quebec, a man who had converted to Islam and had become radicalized purposely crashed his car into two soldiers, killing one of them, before he was shot dead.
Two days later, another gunman with a similar story killed a soldier standing guard at a war memorial in Ottawa. He later raced into the Parliament building, before being shot dead.
Then Thursday, in Queens, New York, a man who had posted comments sympathetic to the jihadists used a hatchet to attack four rookie police officers posing for a picture on the street. He, too, was shot dead.
Today, on the Sunday talk shows, the heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees commented on the attacks.
CHARLIE ROSE (talk show host): What kind of threat does that pose to our own national security?
REP. MIKE ROGERS: Huge, and getting worse.
SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: These attacks and the multiplicity of attacks in 2014 show that their propaganda is having some effect.
HARI SREENIVASAN: For more about all this, we are joined now from Boston by Jytte Klausen. She is a professor at Brandeis University and the Founder of the Western Jihadism Project, which tracks the activity of Islamist extremists in the West.
So, I want to ask, what is behind these lone wolf attacks?
JYTTE KLAUSEN, Brandeis University: Well, we call them lone wolves, but, in most cases, they have been connected to networks and peer groups and militants for some time.
And they carry out the attacks by themselves, but they are not actually lone wolves, in the sense that they had just become radicalized off the Internet or something like that. It — of course, there are exceptions to this general rule.
But, right now, there is a call out from the Islamic State group, sometimes referred to as ISIL, to carry out attacks on — on people who represent the Western states.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Campbell Clark is chief political writer for The Globe and Mail newspaper.
I spoke to him a short time ago about the surprising attack in Canada’s capital.
[missing audio]
CAMPBELL CLARK, The Globe and Mail: Half-hour, hour, we have been hearing reports about who the shooter may have been. At least, there has been a name reported, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. But we don’t know too much about him yet.
In fact, a lot of it is speculation. There is now though some suspicion that this is somebody who was probably inspired by sort of Islamist ideology and ISIL. That’s not confirmed, and the police certainly haven’t confirmed the identity yet.
GWEN IFILL: Well, let’s get back to what we do know about what happened today. There is a definite connection as far as we know between what happened at the war memorial and what happened at the Parliament; is that correct?
CAMPBELL CLARK: That’s correct, yes.
Now, there was somebody who was shot and killed at the war memorial, and then just a few minutes away at the Parliament buildings, there were shootings a few minutes later. It’s not clear if there was one shooter, two shooters, three shooters, but it appears that the person who did the shooting at the war memorial then ran towards the Parliament buildings.
There was a shooter. The person who was shot and killed was shot dead in the Parliament buildings, right in the main Hall of Honor, they call it in the Parliament buildings. So, you walk in the front door of the Parliament of Canada, and just down that hall, that is where…
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Elsewhere in the Middle East, three Al-Jazeera journalists learned their fate in a Cairo courtroom today, sparking an international outcry.
Jeffrey Brown has the story.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Tanks were deployed and tight security in place for the readings of the verdicts, after a five-month trial that was widely denounced outside Egypt as a sham.
JUDGE MOHAMED NAGY SHEHATA (through interpreter): Seven years of maximum jail time.
JEFFREY BROWN: The sentences for Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, a Canadian- Egyptian, Australian correspondent Peter Greste, and Egyptian Baher Mohamed, who received 10 years, led to pandemonium at the court; 17 co-defendants were also sentenced. Fahmy is a former CNN producer who once helped the NewsHour’s Margaret Warner and crew escape an attack by a mob in Cairo
Today, he was yelling, “They will pay for this,” as he and the others were taken away.
His brother, Adel Fadel Fahmy:
ADEL FADEL FAHMY, Brother of Defendant (through interpreter): This is clear-cut corruption; it is a corrupt and politicized case and everything is wrong in this case.
JEFFREY BROWN: Fahmy’s family vowed to appeal, as did Peter Greste’s brother, Mike.
MIKE GRESTE, Brother of Defendant: Wrong verdict. I don’t — I don’t know how the judge came to that decision. I would be very interested to hear his reasons for giving that verdict. But it doesn’t make any sense.
JEFFREY BROWN: The three journalists were arrested last December and accused of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood by reporting on civil strife in Egypt. The Brotherhood had been banned as a terrorist group.
At the time, the journalists were working undercover because the government had accused Al-Jazeera of pro-Brotherhood bias. Last week, the company terminated its operations in Egypt. Al-Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar; the Gulf emirate is a political supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the network denies any charges of bias.
AL ANSTEY, Managing Director, Al-Jazeera English: Today was a really grim day for journalists and for journalism.
JEFFREY BROWN: It’s managing director spoke in Doha.
AL ANSTEY: People who respect freedom of expression, people who respect basic freedoms should say, no, enough is enough. Governments who deal with Egypt should recognize the injustice of what took place in Cairo today.
JEFFREY BROWN: Official denunciations also poured in from around the world. This was Secretary of State Kerry from Baghdad.
JOHN KERRY, Secretary of State: Today’s conviction is obviously — it’s a chilling and draconian sentence. And, you know, it’s deeply disturbing to see in the midst of Egypt’s transition.
JEFFREY BROWN: Just a day earlier, Secretary Kerry visited Egypt, with word the U.S. is releasing $575 million in assistance that had been on hold, and that Egypt will be getting Apache helicopter gunships to fight insurgents in the Sinai region.
The secretary met with President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, among others. Last year, the former army leader ousted Egypt’s first democratically-elected president, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, and last month, he was elected president himself. All the while, a crackdown on political opponents has intensified. Alaa Abdel Fattah, a leader of the January 2011 revolution, was sentenced last week to 15 years for violating a ban on protests.
And, on Saturday, Mohamed Badie, the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, had his death sentence upheld, along with nearly 200 supporters.
SUMMARY: The controversial convictions of three Al Jazeera journalists in Egypt are among the most high-profile cases in a general crackdown on dissent. Jeffrey Brown talks to Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Michael Hanna of the The Century Foundation about the geopolitics behind the convictions and shifting U.S. policy toward Egypt.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): The prospect of reaching new cross-border trade deals was very much on the mind of President Obama during his trip to Mexico this week. But a trade agreement that’s now two decades old and still the subject of strong debate is casting a long shadow over the president’s plans.
Jeffrey Brown has the story.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Canada and Mexico are two of our largest trading partners, with trade that supports millions of American jobs.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): President Obama’s one-day summit with his Mexican and Canadian counterparts marked 20 years of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: American exports to Canada and Mexico continue to grow faster than our exports to the rest of the world. Together, our countries have strength to give North America a tremendous competitive advantage, the skills of our workers, manufacturing that’s growing, and new sources of energy.
JEFFREY BROWN: NAFTA was originally spearheaded by the first President (H.W.) Bush, in a bid to eliminate cross-border trade duties and other barriers. It got the backing and was eventually signed into law by President Clinton.
Supporters argued it would spur growth. But in a CNN debate with Vice President Gore, billionaire businessman Ross Perot famously argued it would send thousands of jobs to lower-paying, less-regulated Mexico.
