The “deep state.” It is a murky and ominous term often suggesting a conspiracy — usually involving intelligence agencies, the armed forces or even judges — to influence policy and undercut democratically elected administrations. It has been uttered in recent years to describe the situation in Turkey as well as the internal battles faced by governments in Egypt and Pakistan. “A lot of times other people have seen this nefarious actor that kind of does what it wants to do and sometimes doesn’t follow the directions of a leadership,” said Robert Tomlinson, an associate professor at the Naval War College. The deep state is a “classic” conspiracy theory, said Professor Tim Melley of Miami University in Ohio, who has written extensively on the subject. “It’s describing what might be called bureaucracy.” In decades past, intimations of “deep state” conspiracies in the United States have bubbled to the surface from the …

A gay veterans group said Wednesday it has been denied permission to march in this year’s Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade just two years after organizers made the groundbreaking decision to allow gay groups to participate for the first time. The veterans group, OutVets, said on its Facebook page that the reason for the denial is unclear, but “one can only assume it’s because we are LGBTQ.” The South Boston Allied War Veterans Council, the parade’s organizer, drew immediate condemnation from Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, who said he would not participate in the March 19 parade unless the council reversed course. “I will not tolerate discrimination in our city of any form,” he said in a statement. Republican Gov. Charlie Baker said he would not participate either, while Democratic U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton called for a boycott of the parade. Moulton, who served four tours of duty in Iraq, has …

President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law are renting a house from a foreign billionaire who is fighting the U.S. government over a proposed mine in Minnesota. The Wall Street Journal reports that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are renting a $5.5 million house in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood from Andrónico Luksic. One of the Chilean billionaire’s companies is suing the federal government over lost mineral rights leases for a proposed copper-nickel mine in northeastern Minnesota. Luksic’s company, Twin Metals Minnesota, filed suit in September to force renewal of its leases. The lawsuit remains pending. Luksic bought the Kalorama property after the November presidential election. Former President Barack Obama’s administration announced in December it would not renew mineral rights critical to the proposed $2.8 billion Twin Metals project near Ely, near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, about 250 miles north of Minneapolis. Ivanka Trump and Kushner, the president’s senior adviser, moved …

President Donald Trump’s administration is weighing a deployment of up to 1,000 American soldiers to Kuwait to serve as a reserve force in the fight against Islamic State as U.S.-backed fighters accelerate the offensive in Syria and Iraq, U.S. officials told Reuters. Proponents of the option, which has not been previously reported, said it would provide U.S. commanders on the ground greater flexibility to quickly respond to unforeseen opportunities and challenges on the battlefield. It would also represent a step away from standard practices under President Barack Obama’s administration by leaving the ultimate decision on whether to deploy some of those Kuwait-based reserve forces in Syria or Iraq to local commanders. “This is about providing options,” said one U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The officials said the deployment would differ from the existing U.S. troop presence in Kuwait. It was unclear whether the proposal had the support …

Michael Flynn, who was fired last month as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, has registered as a foreign agent with the Justice Department for $530,000 worth of lobbying work that may have aided the Turkish government. A lawyer for the former U.S. Army lieutenant general and intelligence chief said in paperwork filed Tuesday with the Justice Department’s Foreign Agent Registration Unit that Flynn was voluntarily registering for lobbying that “could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.” Under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, U.S. citizens who lobby on behalf of foreign governments or political entities must disclose their work to the Justice Department. Willfully failing to register is a felony, though the Justice Department rarely files criminal charges in such cases. They routinely work with lobbying firms to get individuals back in compliance with the law by registering and disclosing their work. Flynn’s attorney did not …

A federal court in Minneapolis sentenced a Minnesota man to a year in prison Wednesday for threatening to blow up an Islamic center. Daniel George Fisher pleaded guilty in November to charges of sending a letter to the Tawfiq Islamic Center and threatening to “blow up your building with all you immigrants in it.” He also faces three years of federal supervision after he is released from prison. Fisher, 57, told investigators he has been angry at Muslims since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and wanted to stop them from building an Islamic center in his neighborhood. “This sentence sends a message that anyone who threatens others with violence because of religious intolerance will face significant consequences,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Tom Wheeler said Wednesday. …

Kansas rancher Greg Gardiner got into some of his scorched pastures for the first time Wednesday and surveyed what he likened to a battle zone: carcasses of dead cattle everywhere. “It’s pretty much a catastrophe,”’ Gardiner said as he looked out on his ranch near Ashland, charred by wildfires that have burned through hundreds of acres in four states. “It’s as bad as a mind can make it.”   Gardiner cries when he talks about how thankful he is that none of his family members were lost in wildfires that that have led to the deaths of six people. Gardiner’s brother Mark lost his home — like dozens of other people in largely rural areas of Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado — but he is safe. Gardiner figures he lost 500 cattle. Any badly burned animals found still alive are mercifully shot. “A lot of people have gone out and …

The state of Hawaii can sue over President Donald Trump’s new executive order temporarily banning the entry of refugees and travelers from six Muslim-majority countries, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday. U.S. District Court Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii said the state could revise its initial lawsuit, which had challenged Trump’s original ban signed in January. The state is claiming the revised ban signed by the president on Monday violates the U.S. Constitution. It is the first legal challenge to the revised order. The state of Hawaii will ask the court on Wednesday to put an emergency halt to Trump’s new order, according to a court schedule signed by the judge. A hearing is set for March 15, a day before the new ban is to go into effect. The government has said the president has wide authority to implement immigration policy and that the travel rules are necessary to …

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said on Wednesday that substantial negotiations to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement likely will not get started until the latter part of this year and could take a year to complete. Ross, speaking to Bloomberg Television, said U.S. legal notification requirements with partners Mexico and Canada create some built-in delays to the start of substantial discussions. “You’re talking probably the latter part of this year before the real negotiations get underway,” Ross said. NAFTA renegotiation ‘complex’ The 79-year-old billionaire investor, who was sworn into his job just last week, said he hoped the renegotiations could be completed within a year, but it was unclear how long it would take to see benefits like a smaller U.S. trade deficit with Mexico. He said the NAFTA renegotiation would be “complex,” with more than 20 chapters in the 23-year-old agreement that needed to be modernized, along …

U.S. lawmakers are moving quickly to learn more about Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election and to try to determine whether there is any substance to President Donald Trump’s so-far unfounded claim that former President Barack Obama wiretapped his Trump Tower headquarters in the weeks before the voting. Senators and congressmen on intelligence panels have been visiting the Central Intelligence Agency outside Washington in recent days to look at raw intelligence reports about Russian cybersecurity attacks aimed at helping Trump defeat his Democratic challenger, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The lawmakers say they have been looking at binders of classified information the CIA collected, with more visits planned to the highly secure facility. Both the Senate and House intelligence committees plan public hearings in the coming weeks. The U.S. intelligence community already has concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking into the computer of Clinton’s …

Ernestine Shepherd is the world’s oldest competitive female body builder. VOA’s Shahzad Khokhar caught up with her in Baltimore, Maryland. This is Ernestine’s story, in her own words. …

A senior U.S. diplomat said Tuesday that China’s objections to deployment of a controversial U.S. missile defense system in South Korea were “unwarranted,” and he urged China to redirect its response to “a better use.” The United States has deployed the first elements of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system in South Korea, following North Korea’s launch of at least four ballistic missiles Monday.   Beijing strongly opposed deployment of the advanced U.S. weapons system as an unnecessary and provocative military escalation, and it said the powerful radar the system uses to track incoming missiles also posed a potential threat to China. State media called for a boycott of South Korean goods and sanctions after the Korean conglomerate Lotte Group approved a land swap that paved the way for the THAAD deployment. “We think China’s objections, if in fact they are based on China’s security concerns, …

Amid reports that the White House is reviewing its policy toward North Korea, the former head of the U.S. Pacific Command says it’s crucial to consider a full range of options — including the use of military force, if necessary — to deter the growing nuclear threat from Pyongyang.  In an interview with VOA Tuesday, Admiral Samuel Locklear, who led the U.S. Pacific Command from 2012 to 2015, said “dealing across the spectrum of options of how to deal with North Korea is becoming more urgent,” given the communist state’s apparent eagerness to demonstrate its nuclear capability. “Certainly there are many elements of national and coalition power that range from diplomatic to economic,” Locklear said, “but at the base of all of those would be military power that the U.S. and its allies must continue to consider, particularly when there remains a significant threat such as from what we see …

A day after President Donald Trump signed a revised travel ban, attorneys for Hawaii said the state plans to challenge that order as well. The state wants to amend its existing lawsuit challenging Trump’s previous order to contest the revised one, according to a motion filed Tuesday in federal court in Honolulu. The new order bars new visas for people from six Muslim-majority countries and temporarily shuts down America’s refugee program, affecting would-be visitors and immigrants from Iran, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Libya. Hawaii’s lawsuit had been on hold while a nationwide injunction on the initial ban remained in place. This is the second time Hawaii has asked a judge to lift the stay in order to file an amended lawsuit. Last month, U.S. District Court Judge Derrick Watson in Honolulu allowed the state to file an amended lawsuit adding the Muslim Association of Hawaii’s imam as a plaintiff. …

The latest alleged bombshell meant to send shockwaves through the U.S. intelligence community is stoking renewed fears about the ability to secure classified information. But former intelligence officials say, at least for now, it is unlikely the apparent leak will do significant damage to U.S. cyber capabilities. The online whistleblower organization WikiLeaks Tuesday published thousands of pages of what it described as “the entire hacking capacity” of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. VOA was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the 8,771 documents published on the WikiLeaks website, but cybersecurity experts and former intelligence officials said many of the documents appeared to be real.  In a statement, WikiLeaks said the CIA “lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal.” The group added the spy agency’s cybertools had been disseminated among some former U.S. government hackers and that one then shared them with WikiLeaks. A U.S. intelligence official, speaking …

The Trump administration is moving to roll back federal fuel-economy requirements that would have forced automakers to increase significantly the efficiency of new cars and trucks, a key part of former President Barack Obama’s strategy to combat global warming. The Environmental Protection Agency is close to an announcement reversing a decision made in the waning days of the Obama administration to lock in strict gas mileage requirements for cars and light trucks through 2025. Automakers asked EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to discard a January 13 decision that requires the fleet of new cars to average a real-world figure of 36 miles per gallon. Obama rules cost jobs? The automakers said the Obama rules could add thousands of dollars to the price of new cars and cost more than a million jobs. Lawmakers, industry groups and environmentalists say the administration has signaled it plans to take this step. An announcement could …