Newsletter Archive

One of the men who seized an oil tanker off the Somali coast this week tells VOA he’s not a pirate. VOA’s Somali service spoke to one of the hijackers Tuesday, a day after men boarded and seized the ship about 30 kilometers off the Somali coast, then anchored off Alula, a town in Somalia’s Puntland region. The man says he and his accomplices are fishermen, not pirates.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is heading to Asia, where he’ll face significant challenges while visiting Japan, South Korea and China. There’s the issue of how to deal with North Korea, the recent ouster of South Korea’s president, and a dispute with China over the deployment of a controversial American missile-defense system in South Korea.

Promoting the values of a free press might be a core value of the United States, but the secretary of state might not be on board. Rex Tillerson has pretty much avoided the media since taking office, and even broke with longstanding tradition when he banned reporters from traveling on his plane during his upcoming trip to Asia. What message does Tillerson’s decision send to countries like China, that don’t have a free press?

The FBI put a human face on the issues of encryption and cyber security at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, talked about the quandaries law enforcement grapples with in the digital age. Here’s what he asked of the public.

For the first time, Pakistan’s transgender community will be counted in the national census. However, it’s the decision to include around 3 million registered and unregistered Afghan refugees that might be more controversial.

A Muslim constitutional expert who was gunned down in Myanmar had discovered a way to limit the power of the military, his friend tells VOA. Ko Ni was a prominent legal adviser for Myanmar’s ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) party. Suspicion that the military was involved in his death, which happened at the airport in broad daylight, has created a ‘climate of fear’ within the country’s civilian-led government.

Haiti doesn’t have a functioning government at the moment, because parliament failed to confirm Prime Minister-designate Jack Guy Lafontant and his proposed cabinet members. Several senators from his own party walked off the floor of parliament in an apparent demand for power sharing. It’s another setback for Haiti, which has grappled with almost two years of political turmoil.