San Antonio, Texas, is home to the greatest concentration of Catholic missions in North America, including The Alamo, the state’s first mission dating to 1718. The most visited historic landmark in Texas was also a fort and the site of a battle that played a pivotal role in the state’s dramatic history. San Antonio Missions In the 18th century, the government of Spain established Catholic missions in the American southwest, in an attempt to exert control and expand its influence in the region. The Spanish Crown looked upon the natives as potential subjects and saw the missions as a way to convert as many of them as possible to Catholicism. But the native tribes in what is now east Texas showed little interest in what Spain had to offer. So in 1731, the missions there were relocated westward to the San Antonio River, where, according to the U.S. National Park …

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is updating its website to reflect the views of the Trump administration. The agency has removed several pages from the Obama administration explaining the science behind climate change. The EPA said in a statement the website is “undergoing changes that reflect the agency’s new direction under President Donald Trump and Administrator Scott Pruitt.” The statement was released late Friday, just hours before thousands of people descend Saturday on Washington’s National Mall for the People’s Climate March, where scientists and activists are expected to condemn the president for what they call his disdain for the dangers of climate change. Trump has stated he does not believe the science behind climate change. Until now, content from the Obama administration had been available on the agency’s site. “As EPA renews its commitment to human health and clean air, land and water, our website needs to reflect the views …

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Friday that Washington would not rule out a military response to future North Korean aggression and that it would seek to increase the rogue nation’s financial and international isolation. VOA’s Margaret Besheer has more from the United Nations, where the secretary chaired a meeting of the Security Council on the North Korean issue. …

With President Donald Trump’s presidency reaching the symbolic 100-day milestone, battle lines are sharply drawn on the effectiveness of his still developing foreign policy. VOA White House correspondent Peter Heinlein reports that, amid fierce criticism of the president’s early performance, the outlines of a “Trump Doctrine” are beginning to emerge. …

On Friday, Donald Trump became the first US president to address the National Rifle Association since Ronald Reagan in 1983. During his campaign, Trump said his rival would “decimate the Second Amendment,” which guarantees Americans the right to bear arms. But Trump’s election has been a bit of a mixed bag for gun dealers and enthusiasts. VOA’s Masood Farivar reports. …

President Donald Trump will spend his 100th day in office talking tough on trade in one of the states that delivered his unlikely win.   The president is expected to sign an executive order Saturday that will direct his Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative to perform a comprehensive study of the nation’s trade agreements to determine whether America is being treated fairly by its trading partners and the 164-nation World Trade Organization. It’s one of two executive orders the president will sign at a shovel factory in Pennsylvania’s Cumberland County, the kind of place that propelled his surprise victory. Rally in Pennsylvania  The last week has been a frenzy of activity at the White House as Trump and his team have tried to rack up accomplishments and make good on campaign promises before reaching the symbolic 100-day mark. In addition to the visit to the Ames tool factory, …

A senior U.S. official is warning that the North Korean regime poses the greatest threat to the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT). The U.S. position on the treaty was released in advance of next week’s meeting in Vienna of the Preparatory Committee for the 2020 NPT review conference. Robert Wood, the U.S. ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament, said his main goal at the two-week NPT PrepCom would be to get the international community to stand together in condemnation of North Korea’s provocations, threats and actions. A change of behavior He said the U.S. was not after regime change in North Korea; it is after a change of behavior by the government. “When you have a situation like this where a country back in 2003 announced its withdrawal from the NPT, this is a huge concern for the international community that has not been addressed,” Wood said. “And, we …

Reporters Without Borders accuses him of engaging in “hate speech” against journalists. Freedom House questions whether he believes in the fundamental principles of press freedom. And the Committee to Protect Journalists, which last year labeled him an “unprecedented threat” to global media freedom, says things haven’t gotten any better since he took office. That’s just a sampling of the kind of blistering language leading media rights groups use to describe U.S. President Donald Trump in several reports published ahead of World Press Freedom Day, May 3. Taken together, the reports amount to a stunning rebuke of the U.S., which has long seen itself as a standard-bearer of free speech and a model for countries around the world. Watch: Global Press Freedom at Tipping Point,’ Report Warns National political discourse The outrage stems from Trump’s verbal attacks on the news media since entering the national political scene. Trump has referred to …

The Republican-led Congress on Friday passed a bill to avert a government shutdown at midnight and give U.S. lawmakers another week to work out federal spending through the end of the fiscal year, with tricky issues like military spending still unresolved. The Senate passed the stopgap measure by voice vote without opposition after the House earlier approved it 382-30. The measure now goes to Republican President Donald Trump to sign into law, preventing a shutdown of many parts of the federal government on Saturday, his 100th day in office. The bill provides federal funding until the end of May 5, allowing lawmakers time to agree on legislation in the coming days to keep the government funded for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends September 30. Congress has been tied in knots over $1 trillion in spending priorities for months. Lawmakers were supposed to have taken care of the …

President Donald Trump is re-opening for oil exploration areas that President Barack Obama had closed, a move that environmental groups have promised to fight. In an executive order Friday, the president reversed the Obama administration’s decision to prohibit oil and gas drilling in the Arctic waters off Alaska. The order also instructs the Interior Department to review current restrictions on energy development in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. In addition, it bars the creation or expansion of marine sanctuaries and orders a review of all areas protected within the last 10 years. Trump cites advantages The White House says 90 billion barrels of oil and 327 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are buried off the U.S. coastline, but 94 percent of the area is off limits. “Renewed offshore energy production will reduce the cost of energy, create countless new jobs and make America more secure and far …

The United States issued about 40 percent fewer temporary visas in March to citizens of seven countries covered by President Donald Trump’s temporary travel bans than it did in an average month last year, according to a Reuters analysis of preliminary government data released on Thursday. At the same time, the data showed that the total of U.S. non-immigrant visas issued to people from all countries was up by nearly 5 percent in March compared to the 2016 monthly average. Citizens of the seven Muslim-majority nations under the bans – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen – received about 3,200 non-immigrant visas in March 2017, compared to about 5,700 on average per month during the 2016 fiscal year and more than 6,000 on average per month in 2015 and 2014. Trump’s travel bans were later blocked by the courts. The State Department released the data to comply with …

Saturday, April 29 will mark the anniversary of the outbreak of riots in Los Angeles, sparked by the acquittal of white police officers accused of beating a black motorist, Rodney King.  Mike O’Sullivan spoke to police and community members about the state of race relations, 25 years later. …

U.S. President Donald Trump fiercely defended the right to gun ownership on Friday, telling the National Rifle Association “the eight-year assault on your Second Amendment freedoms has come to a crashing end.” An estimated 10,000 NRA delegates welcomed the president with thunderous applause in Atlanta, Georgia, where he became the first president to address the group since Ronald Reagan in 1983. The president told the attendees he wanted to assure them of “the sacred right of self-defense for all of our citizens” and vowed “I will never, ever infringe on the right of the people to bear arms.” The gun rights issue has become highly polarizing in America, particularly after a string of gun-related massacres around the country, including at schools. Trump, who supported tougher gun restrictions before he entered the political arena, noted he was the only presidential candidate during last year’s campaign to address the NRA.   No …

A U.S. appeals court on Friday granted a Trump administration request to put on hold a legal challenge by industry and a group of states to former President Barack Obama’s regulations aimed at curbing greenhouse emissions mainly from coal-fired power plants, rules that the Republican president is moving to undo. A 10-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit granted the request to put the litigation involving the regulations known as the Clean Power Plan in abeyance for at least 60 days while the administration plans its next steps. …

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Love him or hate him, President Donald Trump engenders strong feelings, and with his presidency reaching the symbolic 100-day milestone at a moment of international tensions, battle lines are sharply drawn on the effectiveness of his still-developing foreign policy. As an understaffed White House team navigates through a spate of early tests, the outlines of a Trump Doctrine are beginning to emerge. Critics have been withering in their assessments. No less a media star than New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick, a fierce Trump critic, wrote: “His Presidency has become the demoralizing daily obsession of anyone concerned with global security…” “A pretty abysmal record,” James Goldgeier, dean of the School of International Service at American University in Washington, told VOA. Missteps Goldgeier described as “laughable” administration missteps such as announcing that a U.S. Navy battle group was speeding toward the Korean Peninsula when it was actually heading elsewhere. “The best …

“I would like for you to have a pencil out on your desk,” fifth-grade teacher Mary Fucella said to her reading class at Point Pleasant Elementary School in Glen Burnie, Maryland. A kilometer and a half away, in a pink bedroom, Cloe Gray pulled a pencil out, too, and listened. Cloe, 11, is at home, recuperating from leg surgery. For the first month after the operation, a home tutor visited her. But the precocious child grew withdrawn and didn’t want to leave her bed. She missed routine. She missed her friends. She missed real school. “You could tell she wasn’t happy,” said Rob Gray, Cloe’s dad.      The Anne Arundel County school system in Maryland had a cure. Cloe now attends class virtually through a $3,000 robot. Hers, which she named Clo-Bot, was donated by the local Rotary Club. Since she began using it, the learning hasn’t stopped. Clo-Bot is …