Three cases in which white police officers killed black men are in the public spotlight this week, highlighting the difficulties of determining when officers should be criminally prosecuted in such instances and renewing questions over the Trump administration’s commitment to counter civil rights violations by police officers. In one of the most highly publicized police shootings in recent years, Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old African-American street vendor, was shot and killed by two white police officers last July as he allegedly reached for his gun while pinned to the ground by the officers outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The shooting, captured on video and widely circulated on social media, sparked days of protests and calls for an investigation. But the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that its 10-month investigation into the shooting found “insufficient evidence” to bring civil rights charges against the two officers involved in …

A U.S. government study finds that a majority of homes and apartments now rely solely on cellphones to communicate. That’s according to data collected during the latter half of 2016. Renters and younger adults are more likely to have just a cellphone, which researchers attribute to their mobility and comfort with newer technologies. Nearly half of U.S. households still have a landline phone, even though it might seem redundant in the mobile-phone era. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health Interview Survey doesn’t get into why people ditch or keep landlines. Landline users reached by The Associated Press cite a range of reasons. Some people want one for emergencies, others for older relatives to call. Telemarketers can also be sent straight to the answering machine. …

International students already in the United States or looking start studying in the countries posed questions about visas, financial aid and cultural acceptance at a VOA town hall with George Washington University. As VOA’s Greg Flakus reports from Washington, the event included questions from the crowd on campus and via social media and video from around the world. …

The man Hillary Clinton blames in part for last year’s election loss to Donald Trump, FBI Director James Comey, has defended his bombshell announcement on reopening the Clinton email probe less than two weeks before Americans went to the polls. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports, Comey also told a Senate panel his reasons for not disclosing an FBI investigation of possible contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign until after the election. …

A leading civil rights organization says African Americans and Hispanics have made positive strides economically and educationally during the past year. But VOA’s Chris Simkins reports the National Urban League finds minority groups lag behind their white counterparts in other measurements of racial equality. …

The U.S. president and the leader of the Palestinian Authority pledged Wednesday at the White House to try to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough for Middle East peace. The meeting comes a couple of months after Donald Trump hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. VOA White House bureau chief Steve Herman reports. …

Major League Baseball is reviewing its security protocols in all 30 stadiums after Orioles outfielder Adam Jones complained of fans shouting racial slurs in Boston this week and other black players reacted by saying it’s a common reality. League officials are starting by figuring out how individual clubs handle fan issues and complaints. “We have reached out to all 30 clubs to assess what their in-ballpark announcement practices are regarding fan behavior,” MLB spokesman Pat Courtney said. “We are also reviewing text message and other fan security notification policies that are operating in the event there is an incident.” Each stadium is different All MLB teams have a mechanism for fans to alert security to issues, but individualized ballparks mean different protocols and practices in each stadium. The Red Sox on Wednesday said another fan had been ejected from the previous game for using a racial slur toward another spectator. …

Ever since he can remember, Richard Saunders has seen families cross the fence on his Native American reservation in southern Arizona, where the U.S.-Mexican border splits his tribe’s land in two, to seek work, see a doctor or go to school. Laborers from Mexico would stop by his grandfather’s house on the U.S. side of the reservation, the ancestral home of the Tohono O’odham nation, which today is marked off by a barrier of loosely spaced metal bars designed to block vehicles between the two nations. “He’d stand out there and converse with them, take a shot of tequila. Grandma would make them some burritos, and they’d be on their way,” recalled Saunders, a senior figure in the nation’s administration, heading its public safety department. But Saunders and other nation members fear U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to sever their land with a border wall will be no different to …

U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order on religious freedom Thursday at a National Day of Prayer event. A handout distributed to journalists by the White House late Wednesday said the order “declares that it is the policy of the administration to protect and vigorously promote religious liberty.” Christian conservatives have been hoping to see a sweeping executive order that would permit groups and business owners to cite their religious faith as a reason to refuse services and goods to people. “This executive order isn’t about discrimination,” said a senior administration official briefing reporters late Wednesday. “Anything currently illegal under current law would still be illegal.” Legal challenges planned Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Human Rights Campaign said they plan to immediately file legal challenges against the order, if it is as broad as a draft that leaked earlier this year. They’re …

Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin says his department is seeking to close perhaps more than 1,100 VA facilities nationwide as it develops plans to allow more veterans to receive medical care in the private sector. At a House hearing Wednesday, Shulkin said the VA had identified more than 430 vacant buildings and 735 that he described as underutilized, costing the federal government $25 million a year. He said the VA would work with Congress in prioritizing buildings for closure and was considering whether to follow a process the Pentagon had used in recent decades to decide which of its underused military bases to shutter, known as Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC. “Whether BRAC is a model that we should take a look, we’re beginning that discussion with members of Congress,” Shulkin told a House appropriations subcommittee. “We want to stop supporting our use of maintenance of buildings we don’t …

Australia’s prime minister said Wednesday that he and U.S. President Donald Trump will engage as two seasoned businessmen-turned-politicians when they meet for the first time, focusing on North Korea, security and economic issues. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was speaking hours before he departed Sydney for New York, where he will meet Trump on Thursday, more than three months after the two had a heated telephone conversation over a refugee deal. “We’ll talk about the wide range of security and economic issues, but top of the list obviously at the moment is North Korea,” Turnbull told Seven Network television. Turnbull described media reports of his Jan. 28 telephone conversation with Trump, in which the president reluctantly agreed to honor an agreement with President Barack Obama’s administration to take up to 1,250 refugees off Australia’s hands, as “very exaggerated.” He has previously denied media reports that Trump hung up on him, but …

A meeting of foreign ministers from the 10 member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) with the U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson this week comes amid ongoing tensions on the Korean peninsular as well as concerns over China’s growing influence in Southeast Asia. The meeting is officially geared towards planning regional summits in November, which U.S. President Trump is committed to attend. U.S. officials said the ASEAN foreign ministers had been calling for the meeting as part of regional efforts to engage with the new administration. Secretary of State Tillerson earlier said the ministers were expected to discuss trade, territorial claims in the South China Sea, trafficking, crime and other issues. The meeting in Washington follows U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s recent visit to the Asia Pacific, including Indonesia. During the visit, Pence said Washington was “taking steps to strengthen our partnership with ASEAN and deepen our friendship,” …

The U.S. National Security Agency collected more than 151 million records of Americans’ phone calls last year, even after Congress limited its ability to collect bulk phone records, according to an annual report issued on Tuesday by the top U.S. intelligence officer. The report from the office of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was the first measure of the effects of the 2015 USA Freedom Act, which limited the NSA to collecting phone records and contacts of people U.S. and allied intelligence agencies suspect may have ties to terrorism. It found that the NSA collected the 151 million records even though it had warrants from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court to spy on only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016, in addition to a handful identified the previous year. The NSA has been gathering a vast quantity of telephone “metadata,” records of callers’ and recipients’ phone numbers and the …

A new report says Black America held steady and Hispanic America improved slightly during former President Barack Obama’s final year.   But the National Urban League says progress may be in danger under President Donald Trump.   Its State of Black America report uses an equality index, with 100 percent being full equality with whites. The equality index for blacks was 72.3 percent in 2016, a small drop from 2015’s 72.2 percent. The equality index for Hispanics was 78.4 percent, which is an increase from 77.9 percent in 2015.   National Urban League CEO Marc Morial says he is concerned Trump could reverse some of the gains from the Obama era.   He says the first full report card of blacks and Hispanic America under Trump won’t come out until next year.   …

German broadcaster Deutsche Welle says it is giving its annual freedom of speech award to the White House Correspondents’ Association for “holding U.S. leadership accountable.” The public broadcaster said Wednesday that WHCA president Jeff Mason will be presented with the award in Bonn, Germany on June 19. Previous winners of the prize, created two years ago, were imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi and Sedat Ergin, at the time the chief editor of Turkish daily Hurriyet.   Deutsche Welle said that “in spite of the current U.S. president denying their credibility and being exposed to sometimes personal attacks on their integrity, the accredited journalists of the WHCA are establishing a new benchmark in reporting about the policies of the new U.S. administration.”   …

Former acting attorney general Sally Yates is expected to testify to Congress next week that she expressed alarm to the White House about President Donald Trump’s national security adviser’s contacts with the Russian ambassador, which could contradict how the administration has characterized her counsel. Yates is expected to recount in detail on Monday her Jan. 26 conversation about Michael Flynn and to say that she saw discrepancies between the administration’s public statements on his contacts with ambassador Sergey Kislyak and what really transpired, according to a person familiar with that discussion and knowledgeable about Yates’s plans for her testimony. The person spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to pre-empt the testimony.   Yates is expected to say that she told White House counsel Don McGahn that she was concerned Flynn’s communications with Kislyak could leave Flynn in a compromised position as a result of the contradictions between the …

German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle has announced the White House Correspondents’ Association as the winner of its 2017 Freedom of Speech Award. Deutsche Welle said the White House press corps is “establishing a new benchmark in reporting about the policies of the new administration” in spite of President Donald Trump denying their credibility and sometimes using personal attacks. “We have complete trust in the democracy in the United States of America,” said DW Director General Peter Limbourg.”This entails that we are reliant on a strong media.The White House Correspondents’ Association is a guarantor for the control of those in power.” The award will be presented at Deutsche Welle’s Global Media Forum in Bonn in June. WHCA President Jeff Mason said the group is “deeply humbled and honored” to be chosen. “Press freedom in the United States is not a given, despite the protection provided by the constitution.We must remain vigilant …