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Donald Trump is safe after what officials say was the second, unsuccessful assassination attempt in two months. The FBI took the lead after Sunday’s shooting with the suspect in custody — and with Americans facing another dramatic event in what is already a high-stakes, high-drama election. VOA White House correspondent Anita Powell reports from Washington.
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LOS ANGELES — “Hacks” won the comedy series at Sunday’s Emmy Awards, topping “The Bear,” which took home several of the night’s honors.

“Shogun” won the best drama series win, collecting a whopping 18 Emmys for its first season, just one of several historic wins.

Hiroyuki Sanada won best actor in a drama for “Shogun” on Sunday night at the Emmy Awards, and Anna Sawai won best actress as they became the first two Japanese actors to win Emmys.

Their wins gave the FX series momentum going into one of the night’s top awards, where “Shogun” won best drama series.

“The Bear” came back for seconds in a big way at the ceremony four times including best actor, best supporting actor and best supporting actress in a comedy, while British upstart “Baby Reindeer” won four of its own, including best limited series.

The star of FX’s “The Bear” Jeremy Allen White won best actor in a comedy for the second straight year, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach repeated as best supporting actor.

A surprise came when Liza Colón-Zayas won best supporting actor over major competition.

“How could I have thought it would be possible to be in the presence of Meryl Streep and Carol Burnett,” Colón-Zayas said as tears welled in her eyes as she accepted the award on the stage of the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.

She is the first Latina to win in the category.

“To all the Latinas who are looking at me,” she said, “keep believing and vote.”

Netflix’s darkly quirky “Baby Reindeer” won best actor and best writing for the show’s creator and star Richard Gadd and best supporting actress for Jessica Gunning, who plays his tormentor.

Accepting the best limited series award, Gadd urged the makers of television to take chances.

“The only constant across any success in television is good storytelling,” he said. “Good storytelling that speaks to our times. So take risks, push boundaries. Explore the uncomfortable. Dare to fail in order to achieve.”

“Baby Reindeer” is based on a one man-stage show in which Gadd describes being sexually abused along with other emotional struggles.

Accepting that award, he said, “no matter how bad it gets, it always gets better.”

The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly as Gadd has.

Jodie Foster won her first Emmy to go with her two Oscars when she took best actress in a limited series for “True Detective: Night Country.”

The creator of “The Bear” was also a repeat winner. Christopher Storer took his second straight Emmy for directing, an award handed out by reunited “Happy Days” co-stars Ron Howard and Henry Winkler.

White said backstage that he was watching in the wings as Colón-Zayas won and “that was just the greatest.”

He also shouted out two acting wins the show had already scored at last weekend’s Creative Arts Emmy Awards, when Jamie Lee Curtis won best guest actress in a comedy for playing his mother, and Jon Bernthal won best guest actor for playing his big brother.

“The Bear” won six times including most of the top comedy categories at the strike-delayed Emmys in January.

While the third season of FX’s “The Bear” has already dropped, the trio won their second Emmys for its second, in which White’s chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto attempts to turn his family’s grungy Chicago sandwich shop into an elite restaurant. It could still win more Sunday night including best comedy series.

The father-son hosting duo of Eugene and Dan Levy in their monologue at the top of the show mocked the very dramatic “The Bear” being in the comedy category.

“In honor of ‘The Bear’ we will be making no jokes,” Eugene Levy said, to laughs.

Jean Smart won best actress in a comedy for “Hacks.” She has won for all three seasons of “Hacks,” and has six Emmys overall.

She beat nominees including Ayo Edebiri, who as co-star of “The Bear” moved from supporting actress, which she won in January, to lead actress.

Coming into the show the big story was “Shogun,” which had already taken the most Emmys for a show in a single season with 14 at the Creative Arts ceremony.

The FX series about lordly politicking in feudal Japan can still win best drama series.

If “Shogun” faces competition for the best drama prize, it could come for the sixth and final season of “The Crown,” the only show among the nominees that has won before in a category recently dominated by the retired “Succession.”

Elizabeth Debicki took best supporting actress in a drama for playing Princess Diana at the end of her life in the sixth and final season of the show.

“Playing this part, based on this unparalleled, incredible human being, has been my great privilege,” Debicki said. “It’s been a gift.”

Billy Crudup won best actor in a drama for “The Morning Show.”

Streep wasn’t the only Oscar winner trumped by a little-known name. Robert Downey Jr., the reigning best supporting actor winner for “Oppenheimer,” was considered the favorite to win best supporting actor in a limited series for “The Sympathizer,” but that award went to Lamorne Morris for “Fargo.”

“Robert Downey Jr. I have a poster of you in my house!” Morris said from the stage as he accepted his first Emmy.

Several awards were presented by themed teams from TV history, including sitcom dads George Lopez, Damon Wayans and Jesse Tyler Ferguson and TV moms Meredith Baxter, Connie Britton, and Susan Kelechi Watson.
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Washington — The FBI is investigating what it said was another assassination attempt on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The incident occurred Sunday at the Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach in Florida where Trump, the former president, was golfing.

Law enforcement officials said Secret Service saw a man with a rifle in the bushes and shot at the suspected assassin.

The suspect fled the bushes and was later apprehended on a highway, according to law enforcement.

Previous attempt on Trump

In July, Trump was shot by a gunman during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in what the FBI said was an attempted assassination. The former president was wounded in the ear.

The Congressional Research Service says direct assaults against presidents, presidents-elect, and candidates have occurred on at least 15 separate occasions, with five resulting in death.

Below is a list of other previous attempts on the lives of American leaders, successful or not.

Assassinations

Four U.S. presidents were assassinated while in office.

Abraham Lincoln: Killed in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington.

James Garfield: Shot in 1881 in Washington at a train station and died of his wounds two and a half months later.

William McKinley: Assassinated in 1901 by an anarchist in Buffalo, New York.

John F. Kennedy: Assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963 in Dallas, Texas, as the president rode in a motorcade.

Leaders who survived assassination attempts

Four presidents were wounded but survived assassination attempts, while in office or afterward.

Donald Trump: Trump had just started a campaign speech in Pennsylvania on July 13 when shots rang out. Trump was shot in the ear. He was rushed by security officials to a black SUV.

Ronald Reagan: He was shot in 1981 outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington. Reagan was wounded when one of the bullets ricocheted off a limousine and struck him under the left armpit.

Gerald Ford: Survived two attempts on his life in less than three weeks in 1975 without being hurt.

Theodore Roosevelt: He was shot in the chest in 1912 while campaigning for election in Milwaukee but insisted on delivering his speech to supporters before being taken to a hospital.

Assassination attempts on other US leaders

Robert F. Kennedy: A U.S. presidential candidate, and a U.S. senator, Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 by a gunman in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Alabama Governor George C. Wallace: A candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, he was shot in 1972 and became paralyzed from the waist down.
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Washington — The Federal Reserve is gearing up to announce its first interest rate cut for more than four years on Wednesday, with policymakers expected to debate how big a move to make less than two months before the U.S. presidential election.   

Senior officials at the U.S. central bank including Fed chair Jerome Powell have in recent weeks indicated that a rate cut is coming this month, as inflation eases toward the bank’s long-term target of two percent, and the labor market continues to cool.   

The Fed, which has a dual mandate from Congress to act independently to ensure both stable prices and maximum sustainable employment, has repeatedly stressed it will make its decision on rate cuts based solely on the economic data.  

But a cut on Wednesday could still cause headaches for Powell, as it would land shortly before the election, in which former Republican president Donald Trump is running against the current Democratic vice president, Kamala Harris. 

“As much as I think the Fed tries to say that they’re not a political animal, we are in a really wild cycle right now,” Alicia Modestino, an associate professor of economics at Northeastern University, told AFP.   

How big a cut? 

The debate among policymakers on Tuesday and Wednesday this week will likely center on whether to move by 25 or 50 basis points.   

However, a rate cut of any size would be the Fed’s first since March 2020, when it slashed rates to near-zero in order to support the US economy through the Covid-19 pandemic.  

The Fed started hiking rates in 2022 in response to a surge in inflation, fueled largely by a post-pandemic supply crunch and the war in Ukraine.   

It has held its key lending rate at a two-decade high of between 5.25 and 5.50 percent for the past 14 months, waiting for economic conditions to improve.   

Now, with inflation falling, the labor market cooling, and the US economy still growing, policymakers have decided that conditions are ripe for a cut.   

Policymakers are left with a choice: making a small 25 basis point cut to ease into things, or a more aggressive cut of 50 basis points, which would be helpful for the labor market but could also risk reigniting inflation.   

“I think that in advance of the November meeting, there’s not quite enough data to say we’re in jeopardy on the employment side,” said Modestino, who was previously a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.    

Analysts see the smaller cut as a safe bet.   

“We expect the Fed to cut by 25bp [basis points],” economists at Bank of America wrote in a recent note to clients.   

“The Fed likes predictability,” Modestino from Northeastern said. “It’s good for markets, good for consumers, good for workers.”   

“So a 25 basis point cut now, followed up by another 25 basis point cut in November after the next round of economic data, offers a somewhat smoother glide path for the economy,” she added.    

How many cuts?  

While analysts overwhelmingly expect the Fed to start cutting in September, there is less clarity about what comes next.   

Economists at some banks, including Goldman Sachs, expect cuts totaling 75 basis points over the last three meetings of the year, while others see more aggressive cuts, like economists at Citi, who have 125 basis points of easing as their base case.   

“The continued softening of the labor market is likely to provoke larger-sized cuts if not at this FOMC meeting then in November and December,” the Citi economists wrote in a recent note to clients, referring to the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).   

The Fed will shed some light on the issue on Wednesday, when it publishes the updated economic forecasts of its 19-member FOMC — including their rate cut expectations.  

In June, FOMC members sharply reduced the number of cuts they had penciled in for this year from a median of three down to just one amid a small uptick in inflation.     

But as inflation has fallen and the labor market has weakened, expectations of more cuts have grown.  

Traders also see a greater-than 99 percent chance of at least four more cuts in 2025, which would bring the Fed’s key lending rate down to between 3.5 and 3.75 percent — 175 basis points below current levels. 
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A billionaire spacewalker returned to Earth with his crew on Sunday, ending a five-day trip that lifted them higher than anyone has traveled since NASA’s moonwalkers.

SpaceX’s capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s Dry Tortugas in the predawn darkness, carrying tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot.

They pulled off the first private spacewalk while orbiting nearly 740 kilometers above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope. Their spacecraft hit a peak altitude of 1,408 kilometers following Tuesday’s liftoff.

Isaacman became only the 264th person to perform a spacewalk since the former Soviet Union scored the first in 1965, and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis the 265th. Until now, all spacewalks were done by professional astronauts.

“We are mission complete,” Isaacman radioed as the capsule bobbed in the water, awaiting the recovery team. Within an hour, all four were out of their spacecraft, pumping their fists with joy as they emerged onto the ship’s deck.

It was the first time SpaceX aimed for a splashdown near the Dry Tortugas, a cluster of islands 113 kilometers west of Key West. To celebrate the new location, SpaceX employees brought a big, green turtle balloon to Mission Control at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company usually targets closer to the Florida coast, but two weeks of poor weather forecasts prompted SpaceX to look elsewhere.

During Thursday’s commercial spacewalk, the Dragon capsule’s hatch was open barely a half-hour. Isaacman emerged only up to his waist to briefly test SpaceX’s brand-new spacesuit followed by Gillis, who was knee-high as she flexed her arms and legs for several minutes. Gillis, a classically trained violinist, also held a performance in orbit earlier in the week.

The spacewalk lasted less than two hours, considerably shorter than those at the International Space Station. Most of that time was needed to depressurize the entire capsule and then restore the cabin air. Even SpaceX’s Anna Menon and Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who remained strapped in, wore spacesuits.

SpaceX considers the brief exercise a starting point to test spacesuit technology for future, longer missions to Mars.

This was Isaacman’s second chartered flight with SpaceX, with two more still ahead under his personally financed space exploration program named Polaris after the North Star. He paid an undisclosed sum for his first spaceflight in 2021, taking along contest winners and a pediatric cancer survivor while raising more than $250 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

For the just completed so-called Polaris Dawn mission, the founder and CEO of the Shift4 credit card-processing company shared the cost with SpaceX. Isaacman won’t divulge how much he spent. 
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ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico — A bag of Cheetos gets dropped and left on the floor. Seems inconsequential, right?

Hardly.

Rangers at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in southern New Mexico describe it as a “world-changing” event for the tiny microbes and insects that call this specialized subterranean environment home. The bag could have been there a day or two or maybe just hours, but those salty morsels of processed corn made soft by thick humidity triggered the growth of mold on the cavern floor and on nearby cave formations.

“To the ecosystem of the cave it had a huge impact,” the park noted in a social media post, explaining that cave crickets, mites, spiders and flies soon organized to eat and disperse the foreign mess, essentially spreading the contamination.

The bright orange bag was spotted off trail by a ranger during one of the regular sweeps that park staff make through the Big Room, the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America, at the end of each day. They are looking for straggling visitors and any litter or other waste that might have been left behind on the paved trail.

The Big Room is a popular spot at Carlsbad Caverns. It is a magical expanse filled with towering stalagmites, dainty stalactites and clusters of cave popcorn.

Tons of trash

From this underground wonderland in New Mexico to lake shores in Nevada, tributaries along the Grand Canyon and lagoons in Florida, park rangers and volunteers collect tons of trash left behind by visitors each year as part of an ongoing battle to keep unique ecosystems from being compromised while still allowing visitors access.

According to the National Park Service, more than 300 million people visit the national parks each year, bringing in and generating nearly 70 million tons of trash, most of which ends up where it belongs – in garbage bins and recycling containers.

But for the rest of the discarded snack bags and other debris, it often takes work to round up the waste, and organizations like Leave No Trace have been pushing their message at trailheads and online.

At Carlsbad Caverns, volunteers comb the caverns collecting lint. One five-day effort netted as much as 50 pounds (22.68 kilograms). Rangers also have sweep packs and spill kits for the more delicate and sometimes nasty work that can include cleaning up human waste along the trail.

“It’s such a dark area, sometimes people don’t notice that it’s there. So they walk through it and it tracks it throughout the entire cave,” said Joseph Ward, a park guide who is working specifically on getting the “leave no trace” message out to park visitors and classrooms.

The rangers’ kits can include gloves, trash bags, water, bleach mixtures for decontamination, vacuums and even bamboo toothbrushes and tweezers for those hard-to-reach spots.

As for the spilled Cheetos, Ward told The Associated Press that could have been avoided because the park doesn’t allow food beyond the confines of the historic underground lunchroom.

Cheetos response

After the bag was discovered in July, cave specialists at the park settled on the best way to clean it up. Most of the mess was scooped up, and a toothbrush was used to remove rings of mold and fungi that had spread to nearby cave formations. It was a 20-minute job.

Some jobs can take hours and involve several park employees, Ward said.

Robert Melnick, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon, has been studying the cultural landscape of Carlsbad Caverns, including features like a historic wooden staircase that has become another breeding ground for exotic mold and fungi. He and his team submitted a report to the park in recent days that details those resources and makes recommendations for how the park can manage them in the future.

The balancing act for park managers at Carlsbad and elsewhere, Melnick said, is meeting the dual mandate of preserving and protecting landscapes while also making them accessible.

“I don’t quite know how you would monitor it except to constantly remind people that the underground, the caves, are a very, very sensitive natural environment,” he said.

Pleas to treat the caverns with respect are plastered on signs throughout the park, rangers give orientations to visitors before they go underground, and reminders of the dos and don’ts are printed on the back of each ticket stub.

But sometimes there is a disconnect between awareness and personal responsibility, said JD Tanner, director of education and training at Leave No Trace.

Personal stake is vital

Many people may be aware of the need to “keep it pristine,” but Tanner said the message doesn’t always translate into action or there is a lack of understanding that small actions — even leaving a piece of trash — can have irreversible damage in a fragile ecosystem.

“If someone doesn’t feel a personal stake in the preservation of these environments, they may not take the rules seriously,” Tanner said.

Diana Northup, a microbiologist who has spent years studying cave environments around the world, once crawled up the main corridor at Carlsbad Caverns to log everything that humans left behind.

“So this is just one thing of very many,” she said of the Cheetos.

As many as 2,000 people go through the caverns on any given day during the busy season. With them come hair and skin fragments, and those fragments can have their own microbes on board.

“So it can be really, really bad or it can just be us and all the stuff we’re shedding,” Northup said of human contamination within cave environments. “But here’s the other side of the coin: The only way you can protect caves is for people to be able to see them and experience them.”

“The biggest thing,” she said, “is you have to get people to value and want to preserve the caves and let them know what they can do to have that happen.”
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SEATTLE — A strike at Boeing “could go on for a while” as workers are confident they can get bigger wage increases and an improved pension, union leader Jon Holden said in an interview with National Public Radio on Saturday.

More than 30,000 members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), who produce Boeing’s top-selling 737 MAX and other jets in the Seattle and Portland, began a strike Friday after overwhelmingly voting down a new contract.

Boeing and union negotiators are to return to the bargaining table next week, in talks overseen by U.S. federal mediators, after more than 94% of workers voted to reject an initial contract offer that Holden had endorsed.

Holden said the priorities for his members were a bigger wage increase and the restoration of a defined-benefit pension scheme that the union lost during a previous round of negotiations with Boeing a decade ago.

“We have the most leverage and the most power at the most opportune time that we’ve ever had in our history, and our members are expecting us to use it,” Holden told NPR.

“I know that our members are confident. They’re standing shoulder to shoulder and they’re ready. So it (the strike) could go on for a while,” he said.

The initial deal included a 25% pay raise spread over four years and a commitment by Boeing to build its next commercial jet in the Seattle region, if the plane program is launched within the four-year period of the contract.

Union members, venting frustration at years of stagnant wages and rising living costs, said removal of a performance bonus in the Boeing offer would erode half of the headline salary increase.

Boeing’s stock fell 3.7% on Friday. It has tumbled almost 40% so far this year, slashing the company’s market value by roughly $58 billion.

A long strike could further damage Boeing’s finances, already groaning because of $60 billion in debt. A lengthy pause on plane production would also weigh on airlines that fly Boeing jets and suppliers that manufacture parts. 
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Kyiv, Ukraine — U.S. President Joe Biden will use the remaining four months of his term “to put Ukraine in the best possible position to prevail,” a senior adviser said Saturday. 

Speaking remotely to a forum in Kyiv, Ukraine, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, also said Biden will meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in late September at the U.N. General Assembly in New York to discuss aid to Ukraine. 

“President Zelenskyy has said that ultimately this war has to end through negotiations, and we need them to be strong in those negotiations,” Sullivan said, adding Ukraine would decide when to enter talks with Russia. 

Biden will be replaced next January either by Vice President Kamala Harris, who has indicated she will continue his policies of backing Ukraine, or by former President Donald Trump, who would not say at a debate earlier this week whether he wanted Kyiv to win the war. 

The announcement of the upcoming Biden-Zelenskyy meeting came after Moscow and Kyiv earlier Saturday swapped 103 prisoners of war each in a UAE-brokered deal, and as Russian forces continue to gain ground in their grinding offensive in east Ukraine. 

Sullivan, in his comments by video link to the forum in Kyiv, said “difficult and complicated” logistics — rather than unwillingness — was delaying aid to Ukraine. 

“It’s not a matter of political will,” Sullivan said. “But given what Ukraine is up against, we’ve got to do more, and we’ve got to do better.” 
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Caracas, Venezuela — Three American citizens, two Spaniards and a Czech citizen have been detained in Venezuela on suspicion of plotting to destabilize the country through “violent actions,” the government said Saturday, adding that hundreds of weapons had been seized.  

Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said that the five were held on suspicion of planning an attack on President Nicolas Maduro and his government.  

The arrests come amid heightened tensions between Venezuela and both the United States and Spain over Venezuela’s disputed July 28 presidential election, which the country’s opposition accuses Maduro of stealing.  

Maduro, a former bus driver, who succeeded iconic left-wing leader Hugo Chavez on his death in 2013, insists he won a third term but failed to release detailed voting tallies to back his claim.  

“We know that the United States government has links to this operation,” Cabello asserted.   

He said the two Spaniards were recently detained in Puerto Ayacucho in the southwest.  

He added that three Americans and a Czech national were also arrested and linked the alleged plot to intelligence agencies in the United States and Spain as well as to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado.  

“They contacted French mercenaries, they contacted mercenaries from Eastern Europe, and they are in an operation to try to attack our country,” he said.  

He added that “more than 400 rifles were seized” and accused the detainees of plotting “terrorist acts.”  

The United States, Spain and Czech Republic had yet to react to the sensational claims, which come amid a deepening standoff between Maduro and Western powers.   

Maduro’s ‘dictatorship’ 

Tensions between Caracas and former colonial power Spain rose sharply after Venezuelan opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, 75, went into exile in Spain a week ago, after being threatened with arrest.  

Earlier this week Caracas recalled its ambassador to Madrid for consultations and summoned Spain’s envoy to Venezuela for talks after a Spanish minister accused Maduro of running a “dictatorship.”  

Venezuela was also angered by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s decision to meet with Gonzalez Urrutia and warned Spain against any “interference” in its affairs.   

Caracas has additionally been engaged in a war of words with the United States, which recognized Gonzalez Urrutia as the winner of the election.   

Washington announced Thursday new sanctions against 16 Venezuelan officials, including some from the electoral authority, for impeding “a transparent electoral process” and not publishing accurate results.  

Venezuela denounced the measures as a “crime of aggression” and Maduro decorated four military officers among those targeted by the sanctions.   

Maduro’s claim to have won a third term in office sparked mass opposition protests, which claimed at least 27 lives and left 192 people wounded.   

The opposition published polling station-level results, which it said showed Gonzalez Urrutia winning by a landslide.  

About 2,400 people, including numerous teens, were arrested in the unrest. 

After Venezuela’s last election, in 2018, Maduro also claimed victory amid widespread accusations of fraud.  

With the support of the military and other institutions, he managed to cling to power despite international sanctions.   

Maduro’s tenure since 2013 has seen GDP drop 80% in a decade, prompting more than 7 million of the country’s 30 million citizens to migrate.  
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TOKYO — Japan and the United States should avoid confrontation about the steel industry and work together amid competition from China, the world’s top steelmaker, leading prime ministerial candidate Shinjiro Koizumi said Saturday.

Sources told Reuters Friday that a powerful U.S. national security panel reviewing Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion bid for U.S. Steel faces a September 23 deadline to recommend whether the White House should block the deal.

Koizumi, Japan’s former environment minister, said at a debate Saturday that Japan and the U.S. should not confront each other when it comes to the steel industry but to face together the “shared challenge” coming from China’s steel industry.

“If China, producing cheap steel without renewable or clean energy, floods the global market, it will most adversely affect us, the democratic countries playing by fair market rules,” Koizumi said.

Nippon Steel’s key negotiator on the deal, Vice Chairman Takahiro Mori, said last month that his company and other Japanese steelmakers were urging Tokyo to consider curbing cheap steel imports coming from China to protect the local market.

On Sunday, Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden about their deal, as Biden, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump have all opposed the merger.

“We are also in the midst of elections, just like the U.S., and during elections, various ideas may arise. Overreacting to each of these would, in my view, call into question diplomatic judgment,” Koizumi said when asked about the deal.

Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s minister in charge of economic security and another prime ministerial candidate, also defended the deal during the same debate attended by eight other Liberal Democratic Party’s, or LDP, leadership contenders Saturday.

“It appears they are using CFIUS to frame this as an economic security issue,” she said,  referring to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. “However, Japan and the U.S. are allies, and the steel industry is about strengthening our combined resilience.”

The 43-year-old son of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, the junior Koizumi, is seen as a leading contender in the September 27 race to pick the LDP’s new leader, who will become the next prime minister due to the party’s control of parliament.

Koizumi said Saturday that he would seek a dialog with the North Korean leadership to resolve the issue over the abduction of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s. The purported primary goal was to train North Korean agents to impersonate Japanese people.

“We want to explore new opportunities for dialog between people of the same generation, without being bound by conventional approaches, and without preconditions,” Koizumi said.

After admitting in 2002 that it had abducted 13 Japanese, North Korea apologized and allowed five to return home. It said eight others had died and denied that an additional four entered its territory. It promised to reinvestigate but has never announced the results.

Japan says North Korea has refused to send the others home because of concern that they might reveal inconvenient information about the country.
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NEW YORK — New York City lawmakers approved legislation Thursday to study the city’s significant role in slavery and consider reparations to descendants of enslaved people.

If signed into law, the package of bills passed by the City Council would follow in the footsteps of several other municipalities across the U.S. that have sought ways to address the country’s dark history, as well as a separate New York state commission that began working this year.

New York fully abolished slavery in 1827. But businesses, including the predecessors of some modern banks, continued to benefit financially from the slave trade — likely up until 1866. The lawmakers behind the proposals noted that the harms caused by the institution are still felt by Black Americans today.

“The reparations movement is often misunderstood as merely a call for compensation,” Council Member Farah Louis, a Democrat who sponsored one of the bills, told the City Council on Thursday. She explained that systemic forms of oppression are still impacting people through redlining, environmental racism and services in predominantly Black neighborhoods that are underfunded.

The bills still need to be signed by Democratic Mayor Eric Adams. City Hall signaled his support in a statement calling the legislation “another crucial step towards addressing systemic inequities, fostering reconciliation, and creating a more just and equitable future for all New Yorkers.”

The bills would direct the city’s Commission on Racial Equity to suggest remedies to the legacy of slavery, including reparations. It would also create a truth and reconciliation process to establish historical facts about slavery in the state.

One of the proposals would also require that the city install an informational sign on Wall Street in Manhattan to mark the site of New York’s first slave market, which operated between 1711 and 1762. A sign was placed nearby in 2015, but Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams, a Democrat who sponsored the legislation, said its location is inaccurate.

The commission would work with the existing state commission, which is also considering the possibility of reparations. A report from the state panel, which held its first public meeting in late July, is expected in early 2025. The city effort wouldn’t need to produce recommendations until 2027.

The city’s commission was created out of a 2021 racial justice initiative during then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, which also recommended the city track data on the cost of living and add a commitment to remedy “past and continuing harms” to the city charter’s preamble.

“Your call and your ancestors’ call for reparations had not gone unheard,” Linda Tigani, executive director of the racial equity commission, said at a news conference ahead of the council vote.

A financial impact analysis of the bills estimated that the studies would cost $2.5 million.

New York is the latest city to study reparations. Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a notorious massacre of Black residents took place in 1921, announced a similar commission last month.

Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to offer reparations to Black residents and their descendants in 2021, including distributing some payments of $25,000 in 2023, according to PBS. The eligibility was based on harm suffered as a result of the city’s discriminatory housing policies or practices.

San Francisco approved reparations in February, but the mayor later cut the funds, saying that reparations should instead be carried out by the federal government. California budgeted $12 million for a reparations program that included helping Black residents research their ancestry, but it was defeated in the state’s Legislature this month.
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LONDON — Prince Harry was always something different.

From the moment he first appeared in public, snuggled in Princess Diana’s arms outside the London hospital where he was born in 1984, Harry was the ginger-haired scamp who stuck his tongue out at photographers. He grew to be a boisterous adolescent who was roundly criticized for wearing a Nazi uniform to a costume party, and then a young man who gave up the trappings of royal life and moved to Southern California with his American wife.

Through it all, there was a sense that Harry was rebelling against an accident of birth that made him, in the harsh calculus of the House of Windsor, just “the spare.” As the second son of the man who is now King Charles III, he was raised as a prince but wouldn’t inherit the throne unless brother William came to harm.

Now the angry young man is turning 40, the halfway point in many lives, providing a chance to either dwell on the past or look forward to what might still be achieved.

For the past four years, Harry has focused mainly on the past, making millions of dollars by airing his grievances in a wildly successful memoir and a Netflix docu-series. But he faces the likelihood that the royal aura so critical to his image may be fading, said Sally Bedell Smith, author of “Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life.”

“He is at a sort of crossroads,’’ Smith told The Associated Press. “And he appears to be struggling with how he wants to proceed.’’

How did we get here?

It wasn’t always this way.

Six years ago, Harry and his wife were among the most popular royals, a glamorous young couple who reflected the multicultural face of modern Britain and were expected to help revitalize the monarchy.

Their wedding on May 19, 2018, united a grandson of Queen Elizabeth II with the former Meghan Markle, a biracial American actress who had starred for seven years in the U.S. television drama “Suits.” George Clooney, Serena Williams and Elton John attended their wedding at Windsor Castle, after which the couple were formally known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

But the optimism quickly faded amid allegations that Britain’s tabloid media and even members of the royal household treated Meghan unfairly because of racism.

By January 2020, the pressures of life in the gilded cage had become too much, and the couple announced they were giving up royal duties and moving to America, where they hoped to become “financially independent.” They signed lucrative deals with Netflix and Spotify as they settled into the wealthy enclave of Montecito, near Santa Barbara, California.

Since then, Harry has missed few opportunities to bare his soul, most famously in his memoir, aptly titled “Spare.”

In the ghostwritten book, Harry recounted his grief at the death of Princess Diana, a fight with Prince William and his unease with life in the royal shadow of his elder brother. From accounts of cocaine use and losing his virginity to raw family rifts, the book was rife with damning allegations about the royal family.

Among the most toxic was Harry’s description of how some family members leaked unflattering information about other royals in exchange for positive coverage of themselves. The prince singled out his father’s second wife, Queen Camilla, accusing her of feeding private conversations to the media as she sought to rehabilitate an image tarnished by her role in the breakup of Charles’ marriage to Diana.

The allegations were so venomous that there is little chance of a return to public duty, Smith said.

“He criticized the royal family in such a powerful and damaging way. You can’t un-say those things,” she said. “And you can’t unsee things like Meghan in that Netflix series doing a mock curtsey. It’s such a demeaning gesture to the queen.’’

Harry, who agreed not to use the honorific HRH, or “his royal highness,” after he stepped away from front-line royal duties, is now fifth in line to the British throne, behind his brother and William’s three children.

While he grew up in a palace and is said to be in line to inherit millions of dollars on his 40th birthday from a trust set up by his great-grandmother, applied developmental psychologist Deborah Heiser thinks that, in many ways, Harry is just like the rest of us.

Like anyone turning 40, he is likely to have learned a few lessons and has a good idea of who his real friends are, and that will help him chart the next phase of his life, said Heiser, who writes a blog called “The Right Side of 40” for Psychology Today.

“He has had a very public display of what a lot of people have gone through,” Heiser said. “I mean, most people are not princes, but … they have all kinds of issues within their families. He’s not alone. That’s why he’s so relatable.’’

Harry’s next chapter

Of course, Harry’s story isn’t just about the drama within the House of Windsor.

If he wants to write a new chapter, Harry can build on his 10 years of service in the British Army. Before retiring as a captain in 2015, the prince earned his wings as a helicopter pilot, served two tours in Afghanistan and shed the hard-partying reputation of his youth.

Harry also won accolades for establishing the Invictus Games in 2014, a Paralympic-style competition to inspire and aid in the rehabilitation of sick and wounded servicemembers and veterans.

Harry and Meghan made headlines this year with their two international trips to promote mental health and internet safety. While some in British media criticized them for accepting royal treatment in Nigeria and Colombia, the couple said they visited at the invitation of local officials.

Will Charles see the grandkids?

The prospects of reconciliation are unclear, although Harry did race home to see his father after Charles’ cancer diagnosis. And in what may be seen as a tentative olive branch, the paperback edition of “Spare” slated for October has no additions — so nothing new to stir the pot.

But plainly at this point, Harry is thinking about his family in California. He told the BBC about the importance of his two young children, Archie and Lilibet.

“Being a dad is one of life’s greatest joys and has only made me more driven and more committed to making this world a better place,” the prince said in a statement released by his spokesperson.
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SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Many cities have been reshaped by immigrants in the last few years without attracting much notice. Not Springfield, Ohio.

Its story of economic renewal and related growing pains has been thrust into the national conversation in a presidential election year — and maliciously distorted by false rumors that Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbors’ pets. Donald Trump amplified those lies during Tuesday’s nationally televised debate, exacerbating some residents’ fears about growing divisiveness in the predominantly white, blue-collar city of about 60,000.

At the city’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center on Wednesday, Rose-Thamar Joseph said many of the roughly 15,000 immigrants who arrived in the past few years were drawn by good jobs and the city’s relative affordability. But a rising sense of unease has crept in as longtime residents increasingly bristle at newcomers taking jobs at factories, driving up housing costs, worsening traffic and straining city services.

“Some of them are talking about living in fear. Some of them are scared for their life,” Joseph said.

A “Welcome To Our City” sign hangs from a parking garage downtown, where a coffee shop, bakery and boutique line Springfield’s main drag, North Fountain Street. A flag advertising “CultureFest,” the city’s annual celebration of unity through diversity, waves from a pole nearby.

Melanie Flax Wilt, a Republican commissioner in the county where Springfield is located, said she has been pushing for community and political leaders to “stop feeding the fear.”

“After the election and everybody’s done using Springfield, Ohio, as a talking point for immigration reform, we are going to be the ones here still living through the challenges and coming up with the solutions,” she said.

Ariel Dominique, executive director of the Haitian American Foundation for Democracy, said she laughed at first at the absurdity of the false claims. But seeing the comments repeated on national television by the former president was painful.

“It is so unfair and unjust and completely contrary to what we have contributed to the world, what we have contributed to this nation for so long,” Dominique said.

The falsehoods about Springfield’s Haitian immigrants were spread online by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, on the eve of Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s part of a timeworn American political tradition of casting immigrants as outsiders.

“This is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame,” Trump said at the debate after repeating the falsehoods. When challenged by ABC News moderator David Muir over the false claims, Trump held firm, saying “people on television” said their dogs were eaten, but he offered no evidence.

Officials in Springfield have tried to tamp down the misinformation by saying there have been no credible or detailed reports of any pets being abducted or eaten. State leaders are trying to help address some of the real challenges facing the city.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said Tuesday he would add more law enforcement and health care resources to an aid package the state has already provided to Springfield.

Many Haitians have come to the U.S. to flee poverty and violence. They have embraced President Joe Biden’s new and expanded legal pathways to enter, and have shunned illegal crossings, accounting for only 92 border arrests out of more than 56,000 in July, the latest data available.

The Biden administration recently announced an estimated 300,000 Haitians in the U.S. could remain in the country at least through February 2026, with eligibility for work authorization, under a law called Temporary Protected Status. The goal is to spare people from being deported to countries in turmoil.

Springfield, about 72 kilometers from the state capital of Columbus, suffered a steep decline in its manufacturing sector toward the end of the last century, and its population shrank as a result. But its downtown has been revitalized in recent years as more Haitians arrived and helped meet the rising demand for labor as the economy emerged from the pandemic. Officials say Haitians now account for about 15% of the population.

The city was shaken last year when a minivan slammed into a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy. The driver was a Haitian man who recently settled in the area and was driving without a valid license. During a city commission meeting on Tuesday, the boy’s parents condemned politicians’ use of their son’s death to stoke hatred.

Last week, a post on the social media platform X shared what looked like a screengrab of a social media post apparently out of Springfield. The post claimed without evidence that the person’s “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” saw a cat hanging from a tree to be butchered and eaten, outside a house where it claimed Haitians lived. It was accompanied by a photo of a Black man carrying what appeared to be a goose by its feet.

On Monday, Vance posted on X: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” The next day, he posted again, saying his office had received inquiries from Springfield residents who said “their neighbors’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants.”

Longtime Springfield resident Chris Hazel, who knows the park and neighborhood where the pet and goose abductions were purported to have happened, called the claims “preposterous.”

“It reminds me of when people used to accuse others and outsiders as cannibals. It’s dehumanizing a community,” he said of the accusations against the city’s Haitian residents.

Sophia Pierrilus, the daughter of a former Haitian diplomat who moved to the Ohio capital of Columbus 15 years ago and is now an immigrant advocate, agreed, calling it all political.

“My view is that’s their way to use Haitians as a scapegoat to bring some kind of chaos in America,” she said.

With its rising population of immigrants, Springfield is hardly an outlier. So far this decade, immigration has accounted for almost three-quarters of U.S. population growth, with 2.5 million immigrants arriving in the United States between 2020 and 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Population growth is an important driver of economic growth.

“The Haitian immigrants who started moving to Springfield the last few years are the reason why the economy and the labor force has been revitalized there,” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, which provides legal and social services to immigrants across the U.S.

Now, she said, Haitians in Springfield have told her that, out of fear, they are considering leaving the city.
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AURORA, Colorado — She was eight months pregnant when she was forced to leave her Denver homeless shelter. It was November.

Ivanni Herrera took her 4-year-old son, Dylan, by the hand and led him into the chilly night, dragging a suitcase containing donated clothes and blankets away from the Microtel Inn & Suites. It was one of 10 hotels where Denver has housed more than 30,000 migrants, many of them Venezuelan, over the last two years.

First, they walked to Walmart. There, with money she and her husband earned begging on the street, they bought a tent.

They chose for their new home a grassy median along a busy thoroughfare in Aurora, the next town over, a suburb known for its immigrant population.

“We wanted to go somewhere where there were people,” Herrera, 28, said in Spanish. “It feels safer.”

That night, temperatures dipped to 32 degrees. And as she wrapped her body around her son’s, Ivanni Herrera cried.

Over the past two years, a record number of Venezuelans have come to the United States seeking a better life. Instead, they’ve found themselves in communities roiling over how much to help the newcomers — or whether to help at all.

Unable to legally work without filing expensive and complicated paperwork, some have found themselves sleeping on the streets — even those who are pregnant.

Herrera had found inspiration for her journey to the U.S. on social media. On Facebook and TikTok, young, smiling Venezuelan migrants in nice clothes stood in front of new cars. Some 320,000 Venezuelans have tried to cross the U.S. border since October 2022, according to U.S. Border Patrol reports — more than in the previous nine years combined.

Just weeks after arriving in Denver, Herrera began to wonder if the success she had seen was real.

She was seeing doctors and social workers at a Denver hospital where she planned to give birth because they served everyone, even those without insurance. They were alarmed their pregnant patient was now sleeping outside in the cold.

In Colorado’s third-largest city, Aurora, officials have turned down requests to help migrants. In February, the City Council passed a resolution telling other cities and nonprofits not to bring migrants into the community because it “does not currently have the financial capacity to fund new services.” Yet still they come, because of its lower cost of living and Spanish-speaking community.

Former President Donald Trump last week called attention to the city, suggesting a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment complex. Authorities say that hasn’t happened.

The doctors urged Herrera to sleep at the hospital. It wouldn’t cost anything, they assured her, just as her birth would be covered by emergency Medicaid.

Herrera refused.

“How,” she asked, “could I sleep in a warm place when my son is cold on the street?”

Denver struggled to keep up with the rush of migrants, many arriving on buses chartered by Texas to draw attention to the impact of immigration. All told, Denver officials say they have helped some 42,700 migrants since last year, either by giving them shelter or a bus fare to another city.

Initially, the city offered migrants with families six weeks in a hotel. But any migrants arriving since May have received only three days in a hotel. After that, some have found transportation to other cities, scrounged for a place to sleep or wandered into nearby towns like Aurora.

Today, fewer migrants are coming to the Denver area. But Candice Marley, founder of a nonprofit called All Souls, still receives dozens of outreaches per week from social service agencies looking to help homeless migrants. All Souls had run encampments for migrants, but Denver shut them down because they lacked a permit.

“It’s so frustrating that we can’t help them,” Marley said. “That leaves families camping on their own, unsupported, living in their cars. Kids can’t get into school. There’s no stability.”

When Herrera started feeling labor pains in early December, she waited until she couldn’t bear the pain anymore and could feel the baby getting close. She called an ambulance.

The paramedics didn’t speak Spanish but called an interpreter. They told Herrera they had to take her to the closest hospital, instead of the one in Denver, since her contractions were so close together.

Her son was born healthy at 7 pounds, 8 ounces. She took him to the tent the next day. A few days later the whole family, including the baby, had contracted chicken pox. “The baby was in a bad state,” said Emily Rodriguez, a close friend living with her family in a tent next to Herrera’s.

Herrera took him to the hospital, then returned to the tent before being offered a way out. An Aurora woman originally from Mexico invited the family to live with her — at first, for free. After a couple weeks, the family moved to a small room in the garage for $800 a month.

To earn rent and pay expenses, Herrera and Rodriguez have cleaned homes, painted houses and shoveled snow while their children waited in a car by themselves. Finding regular work and actually getting paid for it has been difficult. While their husbands can get semi-regular work in construction, the women’s most consistent income comes from standing outside with their children and begging. On a good day, each earns about $50.

Herrera and her husband recently became eligible to apply for work permits and legal residency for Venezuelans who arrived in the United States last year. But it will cost $800 each for a lawyer to file the paperwork, along with hundreds of dollars in government fees. They don’t have the money.

What’s worse, they’re deeply in debt. Despite what the hospital had said when she was pregnant, Herrera was never signed up for emergency Medicaid. She says she owes $18,000 for the ambulance ride and delivery of her baby. Now, she avoids going to the doctor or taking her children because she’s afraid her large debt will jeopardize her chances of staying in the U.S. “I’m afraid they’re going to deport me,” she says.

Herrera and Rodriguez now hold cardboard signs along a busy street in Denver and then knock on the doors of private homes, never returning to the same address. They type up their request for clothes, food or money on their phones and translate it to English using Google. They hand their phones to whoever answers the door.

Herrera recently sent $500 to her sister to make the monthslong trip from Venezuela to Aurora with Herrera’s 8-year-old daughter. “I’ll have my family back together,” she says. And she believes her sister will be able to watch her kids so Herrera can look for work.

The problem is, Herrera hasn’t told her family back in Venezuela how she spends her time. “They think I’m fixing up homes and selling chocolate and flowers,” she says. “I’m living a lie.”

Finally, her sister and daughter are waiting across the border in Mexico. When we come to America, her sister asks, could we fly to Denver? The tickets are $600.

Herrera has to come clean. Life is far more difficult than she has let on.

She texts back:

No.
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washington — Recent moves by Pyongyang have focused attention on what will be one of the first major foreign policy challenges facing the next U.S. president: how to deal with North Korea’s rapidly developing nuclear threat.

In a set of rapid-fire developments on Friday:

— North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called for an “exponential increase” in the size of his nation’s nuclear arsenal, according to the state-run news agency KCNA. He made the same call in speeches on Tuesday and on the last day of 2022.

— State media released photos for the first time of the Nuclear Weapons Institute where North Korea processes uranium for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. The photos, which showed a sophisticated array of centrifuges, were made public as Kim toured the facility.

— North Korea announced that it had tested a new type of 600 mm multiple rocket launcher the previous day. South Korea said on Thursday that North Korea test-fired several short-range ballistic missiles into the waters off the eastern coast.

The developments came in the context of enhanced military cooperation between North Korea and Russia, which is believed to be helping Pyongyang to develop its weapons capabilities in exchange for munitions used in Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

“The threat from North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs has been growing steadily and virtually unchecked over the course of several U.S. administrations,” said Evans Revere, a former State Department official with extensive experience negotiating with North Korea.

“Whoever the next U.S. president is, she or he will face a more sophisticated and dangerous North Korean threat.”

Revere said in an interview that the winner of the U.S. election would have to find ways to weaken the link between Moscow and Pyongyang “and demonstrate to Beijing that its ‘partnership without limits’ with Russia is a dangerous and ill-advised path that will yield no benefits” for China.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping declared in May a “new era” in opposition to the U.S. and reaffirmed the “no limits” partnership that was first announced just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

While China has held back on providing Russia with arms for its war effort, the United States has accused it of delivering electronic components and other dual-use items that are keeping Moscow’s arms industry afloat.

Pyongyang, for its part, denies participating in any arms transfers to Russia, an act that would violate United Nations sanctions.

But a report this week by Conflict Armament Research, a U.K.-based group that tracks weapons in armed conflicts, said parts from four North Korean missiles have been found in Ukraine.

The missiles, examined by Kyiv, are either KN-23 or KN-24, known as Hwasong-11 short-range missile series, and thought to have been used in attacks in July and August, the report said.

Pyongyang-Moscow military ties have also been expanded to include tourism, trade, and economic and technical cooperation.

This makes the use of sanctions less effective as a policy tool to counter North Korea’s nuclear buildup, according to Gary Samore, former White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction during the Obama administration.

“That’s not as much leverage now as it was before because of the Russian-North Korean relationship,” said Samore. “The U.S. doesn’t have very strong economic leverage that it can use with North Korea.”

With few obvious policy options available, the two presidential candidates – former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris – have largely confined themselves to criticizing each other’s approach without laying out any specific plans to roll back the North Korean threat.

At Tuesday night’s televised debate, Harris criticized Trump for exchanging “love letters with Kim Jong Un” during his presidency while Trump disapproved of the current administration’s handling of the issue, saying, “Look at what’s going on in North Korea.”

During his presidency, Trump held three summits with Kim but the diplomatic effort ultimately failed when Trump refused Kim’s demand for sanctions relief in exchange for a partial rollback of his nuclear program.

There have been no formal talks between the two countries since, although the Biden administration insists it is open to negotiations without preconditions, a policy that Harris could be expected to continue if elected.

The Biden administration also maintains that its goal remains the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, even as many experts suggest it is time to acknowledge that Pyongyang will not give up its weapons and say the international community should focus on containment.

Samore predicted that a Harris administration would continue to say that “as an ultimate objective … the U.S. seeks denuclearization in the long term.”

A second Trump administration, he theorized, may say “denuclearization is no longer possible” and “accept North Korea as a nuclear power.”

Robert Rapson, who served as charge d’affaires and deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul from 2018 to 2021, said much would depend on how the winner of the election decides to work with regional allies South Korea and Japan.

“In the likely absence of any grand outreach towards Pyongyang, Harris will have to carefully manage the relationship with ally Seoul, with a focus for the foreseeable future on maintaining peace and stability on the peninsula,” he said.

He added that it was “uncertain at this moment” whether Trump would feel compelled to reach out to Kim and whether he would diminish the value of the alliances with South Korea and Japan.

Eunjung Cho contributed to this report.
…

washington — The United States and some of its allies have launched a global campaign to undercut efforts by RT and other Russian state-backed media outlets, accusing them of operating on behalf of the Kremlin’s intelligence agencies.

The State Department on Friday announced sanctions against two people and three entities, including RT’s Moscow-based parent company, saying new intelligence leaves no doubt that they are no longer engaged in providing anything that resembles news and information.

RT’s parent company and its subsidiaries “are no longer merely fire hoses of Russian government propaganda and disinformation,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters at the State Department.

“They are engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracy, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus,” he said, adding the Russian operations also seek to “meddle in the sovereign affairs of countries around the world.”

Blinken and other U.S. officials declined to share details about the new intelligence, saying only that some of it comes from RT employees, and that it shows how the Russian-controlled television network is playing a key role in running cyber operations and even acquiring lethal weapons for Russian troops fighting in Ukraine.

RT quickly ridiculed the U.S. accusations both on social media and in a response to VOA.

“RT: Lives rent free in the State Department head,” the outlet posted on X. “We’re running out of popcorn, but we’ll be here live, laughing hard…”

In response to a query from VOA, RT pointed to comments by editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan on her Telegram channel.

“American intelligence services have uncovered that we are helping the front lines,” Simonyan wrote, according to a translation from Russian. “We’ve been doing this openly, you idiots. Should I send you a list of what we’ve bought and sent? We regularly publish this, just so you know.”

The Russian Embassy in Washington has not yet responded to a request from VOA for comment.

U.S. officials, though, said comments like the ones from RT’s Simonyan only give more weight to the allegations.

“They’ve admitted it,” said James Rubin, the special envoy for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. “They have said they’re operating under direct instruction of [Russian President] Vladimir Putin. That’s what they say they’re doing.”

And the U.S. says the intelligence shows those Kremlin-assigned responsibilities go far beyond what could be considered normal broadcast operations, including oversight of a crowdsourcing campaign to provide Russian troops in Ukraine with sniper rifles, body armor, drones, night vision equipment and other weaponry.

“That’s not what a TV station normally does. That’s what … that’s what a military entity does,” Rubin said. RT is “a fully fledged member of the intelligence apparatus and operation of the Russian government on the war in Ukraine.”

The U.S. intelligence also points to Kremlin-directed RT operations in Argentina, Germany and the South Caucasus – some linked to a Russian military intelligence cyber team that has been embedded within the company.

U.S. officials also said evidence shows RT is “almost certainly” coordinating with traditional Russian intelligence services to meddle in next month’s presidential elections in Moldova.

“RT is going to be used to try to manipulate an election and, if they don’t win the election, manipulate a crowd to try to generate violence for the possibility of overthrowing [the government],” Rubin said.

U.S. officials also called out RT for covert influence operations in Latin America and Africa that have had serious consequences.

“One of the reasons why so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine as you would think they would be — given that Russia has invaded Ukraine and violated rule number one of the international system — is because of the broad scope and reach of RT,” Rubin said.

The State Department said Friday that it had instructed its diplomats to share evidence about RT’s efforts with countries around the world.

“We urge every ally, every partner, to start by treating RT’s activities as they do other intelligence activities by Russia within their borders,” Blinken said.

Friday’s sanctions came a little more than a week after the U.S. took action against what it described as two Russian plots, one of them involving RT, aimed at undermining the U.S. presidential elections in November.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced the takedown of 32 fake websites designed by Russia to mimic legitimate news sites, to bombard U.S. voters with propaganda aimed at building support for Russia in its war against Ukraine and bolstering support for Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump.

The U.S. also unsealed indictments against two RT employees, accusing them of funneling nearly $10 million to a U.S. company in Tennessee to promote and distribute English-language material favorable to the Russian government.
…

Taipei, Taiwan — The United States and China are taking steps to resume top-level military-to-military communication, which analysts say is aimed at avoiding miscommunication and preventing tensions in the Indo-Pacific region from spiraling out of control.

The head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Sam Paparo, and the head of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Southern Theater Command, General Wu Yanan, held a video call Tuesday.

The Chinese defense ministry said the two commanders had an “in-depth exchange of views on issues of common concern” while Paparo urged the Chinese military “to reconsider its use of dangerous, coercive and potentially escalatory tactics in the South China Sea and beyond.”

On Thursday, the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Wu is expected to attend a defense conference held by the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii next week, citing anonymous U.S. defense officials.

Meanwhile, Michael Chase, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, is holding defense policy coordination talks with Chinese defense officials while attending the annual Xiangshan Security Dialogue held in Beijing.

The U.S. delegation led by Chase will “engage with regional allies and partners on the sidelines of the Xiangshan Forum to underscore the United States’ shared vision for the region ‘underpinned by a set of enduring beliefs,’” said the U.S. Department of Defense in a readout released Thursday.

The Biden administration has been working to restore communication between Chinese and American militaries since the U.S. president’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in California last November.

It also follows the first meeting between U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan and China’s vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, Zhang Youxia, last month.

During that meeting, Zhang said maintaining military security is “in line with the common interests of both sides” and Sullivan highlighted the two nations’ shared responsibility to “prevent competition from veering into conflict or confrontation.”

Some analysts see a potential for further communication and engagement between the two militaries.

“I won’t rule out the possibilities that Beijing and Washington may look to establish a hotline between the two militaries, and whether that mechanism could be extended to the theater command level remains to be seen,” Lin Ying-Yu, a military expert at Tamkang University in Taiwan, told VOA by phone.

While the resumption of top-level communication allows Beijing and Washington to avoid miscalculations, other experts say it is unclear whether China and the U.S. can establish a more sustainable mechanism to cope with potential crises.

“While having contact and knowing your interlocutors are positive things during non-crisis times, the real test is whether these contacts can hold back any unintended escalation when incidents happen,” said Ian Chong, a political scientist at the National University of Singapore.

Chong said since theater commanders from the U.S. and China oversee implementing rather than formulating policies, it is unclear whether the latest development can become established protocols.

“If there’s a persistence of [maintaining military-to-military communication], then it would suggest that it has become a policy,” he told VOA by phone.

Tensions remain high over contentious issues

Tensions remain high between China and the U.S. over a range of issues, including the repeated collision between Chinese and Philippine vessels near disputed reefs in the South China Sea and Beijing’s increased maneuvers in waters and airspace near Taiwan and Japan.

During the Xiangshan Forum, Lieutenant General He Lei, the former vice president of the PLA Academy of Military Sciences, characterized the Philippines’ attempt to safeguard its territorial claims in the South China Sea as “a unilateral change of the status quo” while accusing the U.S. of undermining security across the Taiwan Strait by selling weapons to Taiwan.

“The Chinese people and the People’s Liberation Army will never allow any external forces to interfere in China’s internal affairs or invade China’s territory,” he told Chinese state broadcaster CGTN in an interview.

Some analysts say there are limits to what military-to-military communications can do to ease tensions over what are essentially political disagreements.

“The military tension is only a manifestation of their political differences over Taiwan and the South China Sea, so if their disagreements are not resolved, the military tension is very unlikely to see a permanent resolution,” Yun Sun, China program director at the Stimson Center in Washington, told VOA by phone.

With less than two months until the U.S. presidential election, Chong in Singapore said Beijing and Washington’s recent efforts may be an attempt to lay the foundation for bilateral military-to-military communication to be continued after the November election.

“On the Democrat side, if some of the current team stays [after November], perhaps we would see this momentum continue,” he told VOA.

“On the Republican side, things are a bit messier, because you have those who prefer the isolationist approach, those who advocate a containment approach in Asia, and people who talk about competing against China to win,” Chong added.

Sun said if Donald Trump wins the election in November, Beijing will expect instability in bilateral relations and be prepared for the military relationship to be affected.
…