AFRICA/EDUCATION/MELANIA/STATE: “Melania Trump spent Thursday [10-4-18] in southern Africa promoting the work of a U.S. international development agency whose funding President Donald Trump has twice proposed slashing by nearly a third. Lawmakers essentially ignored those requests. Mrs. Trump toured classrooms at Lilongwe’s Chipala Primary School, which gets textbooks and other education assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development. A batch of 1.4 million books donated Thursday brought to nearly 10 million the total Malawi has received in recent years under USAID’s national reading program, officials said. Malawi’s education minister said the partnership had ‘significantly’ improved student literacy. But the Trump administration sought a roughly 30 percent cut in funding for the State Department and USAID in its first two budgets. Widespread bipartisan opposition in Congress averted the reductions.”
–The Associated Press, “Melania Trump Promotes US Agency, Trump Wants to Cut Funding,” The New York Times online, October 4, 2018