LOS ANGELES — A federal judge Friday ordered the former longtime interpreter for Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani released on $25,000 bond and mandated he undergo gambling addiction treatment.

Ippei Mizuhara exploited his personal and professional relationship with Ohtani to plunder $16 million from the Major League Baseball player’s bank account for years, prosecutors said, at times impersonating Ohtani to bankers so he could cover his bets and debts.

Mizuhara only spoke to answer the judge’s questions, saying “yes” when she asked if he understood several parts of the case and his bond conditions.

Mizuhara, wearing a dark suit and a white collared shirt, entered the courtroom with his ankles shackled, but was not handcuffed. The judge approved his attorney’s request to remove the shackles.

Other bond conditions stipulate that Mizuhara cannot gamble, either electronically or in person, or go inside any gambling establishments, or associate with any known bookmakers.

Mizuhara turned himself in Friday ahead of his initial court appearance. He is charged with one count of bank fraud and faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted.

Prosecutors said there was no evidence that Ohtani was involved in or aware of Mizuhara’s gambling, and authorities said Ohtani was cooperating with investigators.

Mizuhara was not asked to enter a plea during Friday’s brief court appearance in downtown Los Angeles. A criminal complaint filed Thursday detailed the alleged scheme through evidence that included text messages, financial records and recordings of phone calls.

While Mizuhara’s winning bets totaled over $142 million, which he deposited in his own bank account and not Ohtani’s, his losing bets were around $183 million — a net loss of nearly $41 million.

In a message to his illegal bookmaker on March 20, the day the Los Angeles Times and ESPN broke the news of the federal investigation, Mizuhara wrote: “Technically I did steal from him. It’s all over for me.”

Major League Baseball opened its own investigation after the controversy surfaced, and the Dodgers immediately fired Mizuhara.
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WASHINGTON — The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives voted to reauthorize a controversial surveillance program Friday, in a major step toward keeping a key element of the United States’ foreign intelligence-gathering operation in place.

The House passed a bill reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in a 273-147 vote. The FISA bill now moves to the Senate, which is expected to give it bipartisan approval. Without congressional action, the program will expire on April 19.

Approval came after the duration of the bill was changed to two years from a previous version of five years, as some Republicans had sought.

FISA has attracted criticism from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who argue it violates Americans’ constitutional right to privacy. The bill was blocked three times in the past five months by House Republicans bucking their party.

The White House, intelligence chiefs and top lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee have warned of potentially catastrophic effects of not reauthorizing the program, which was first created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The reauthorization was thwarted earlier this week when House Republicans refused to support the bill House Speaker Mike Johnson had put forward, which fell short of the changes they wanted.  

“We will go blind on April 19” without the program, Representative Mike Turner, the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters Wednesday.

Although the right to privacy is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the data of foreign nationals gathered by the program often includes communications with Americans and can be mined by domestic law enforcement bodies such as the FBI without a warrant.  

That has alarmed both hardline Republicans and far-left Democrats. Recent revelations that the FBI used this power to hunt for information about Black Lives Matter protesters, congressional campaign donors and U.S. lawmakers have raised further doubts about the program’s integrity.

A key issue has been an amendment which would require domestic law enforcement agencies to obtain warrants before searching the database. Executive branch officials argue that such a change would undermine the program’s utility for agencies such as the FBI.

The amendment barely failed in a 212-212 vote ahead of the vote on the bill’s final passage. 
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U.S. President Joe Biden this week welcomed the prime minister of Japan and the president of the Philippines to the White House to discuss security in the Indo-Pacific region. VOA Senior Washington Correspondent Carolyn Presutti compares Biden’s security policies with those of his 2024 presidential opponent Donald Trump.
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MOSCOW — Russell Bentley, an American who fought against Ukrainian forces, is missing in the Russian-controlled Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, police there said Friday, adding that a search was underway.

Bentley went missing on April 8, according to police. The online news outlet Mash said he had disappeared after a district in the city of Donetsk was shelled by Ukrainian forces.

Mash cited his wife as saying he had gone to see if anyone needed help but had not returned. She was quoted as saying she had found his car with his baseball cap in it along with his smashed mobile phone and a pair of glasses.

Bentley, 64, is a self-declared supporter of Russian-backed forces in Ukraine.

He joined pro-Russian fighters in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and used the military call-sign “Texas,” the Russian state news agency RIA reported.

It said Bentley had later swapped his gun for journalism and had worked with the Sputnik news agency, another state-owned entity, and obtained Russian citizenship.

Russian state media have described Bentley as a war correspondent.

In 2022, Rolling Stone magazine ran an interview with Bentley titled “The Bizarre Story of How a Hardcore Texas Leftist Became a Front-line Putin propagandist.”
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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Twenty years ago this month, photos of abused prisoners and smiling U.S. soldiers guarding them at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were released, shocking the world.

Now, three survivors of Abu Ghraib will finally get their day in U.S. court against the military contractor they hold responsible for their mistreatment.

The trial is scheduled to begin Monday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, and it will be the first time that Abu Ghraib survivors are able to bring their claims of torture to a U.S. jury, said Baher Azmy, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights representing the plaintiffs.

The defendant in the civil suit, CACI, supplied the interrogators who worked at the prison. The Virginia-based contractor denies any wrongdoing and has emphasized throughout 16 years of litigation that its employees are not alleged to have inflicted any abuse on any of the plaintiffs in the case.

The plaintiffs, though, seek to hold CACI responsible for setting the conditions that resulted in the torture they endured, citing evidence in government investigations that CACI contractors instructed military police to “soften up” detainees for their interrogations.

Retired Army Gen. Antonio Taguba, who led an investigation into the Abu Ghraib scandal, is among those expected to testify. His inquiry concluded that at least one CACI interrogator should be held accountable for instructing military police to set conditions that amounted to physical abuse.

There is little dispute that the abuse was horrific. The photos released in 2004 showed naked prisoners stacked into pyramids or dragged by leashes. Some photos had a soldier smiling and giving a thumbs up while posing next to a corpse, or detainees being threatened with dogs, or hooded and attached to electrical wires.

The plaintiffs cannot be clearly identified in any of the infamous images, but their descriptions of mistreatment are unnerving.

Suhail Al Shimari has described sexual assaults and beatings during his two months at the prison. He was also electrically shocked and dragged around the prison by a rope tied around his neck. Former Al-Jazeera reporter Salah Al-Ejaili said he was subjected to stress positions that caused him to vomit black liquid. He was also deprived of sleep, forced to wear women’s underwear and threatened with dogs.

CACI, though, has said the U.S. military is the institution that bears responsibility for setting the conditions at Abu Ghraib and that its employees weren’t in a position to be giving orders to soldiers. In court papers, lawyers for the contractor group have said the “entire case is nothing more than an attempt to impose liability on CACI PT because its personnel worked in a war zone prison with a climate of activity that reeks of something foul. The law, however, does not recognize guilt by association with Abu Ghraib.”

The case has bounced through the courts since 2008, and CACI has tried roughly 20 times to have it tossed out of court. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 ultimately turned back CACI’s appeal efforts and sent the case back to district court for trial.

In one of CACI’s appeal arguments, the company contended that the U.S. enjoys sovereign immunity against the torture claims, and that CACI enjoys derivative immunity as a contractor doing the government’s bidding. But U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, in a first-of-its kind ruling, determined that the U.S. government can’t claim immunity when it comes to allegations that violate established international norms, like torturing prisoners, so CACI as a result can’t claim any derivative immunity.

Jurors next week are also expected to hear testimony from some of the soldiers who were convicted in military court of directly inflicting the abuse. Ivan Frederick, a former staff sergeant who was sentenced to more than eight years of confinement after a court-martial conviction on charges including assault, indecent acts and dereliction of duty, has provided deposition testimony that is expected to be played for the jury because he has refused to attend the trial voluntarily. The two sides have differed on whether his testimony establishes that soldiers were working under the direction of CACI interrogators.

The U.S. government may present a wild card in the trial, which is scheduled to last two weeks. Both the plaintiffs and CACI have complained that their cases have been hampered by government assertions that some evidence, if made public, would divulge state secrets that would harm national security.

Government lawyers will be at the trial ready to object if witnesses stray into territory they deem to be a state secret, they said at a pretrial hearing April 5.

Judge Brinkema, who has overseen complex national security cases many times, warned the government that if it asserts such a privilege at trial, “it better be a genuine state secret.”

Jason Lynch, a government lawyer, assured her, “We’re trying to stay out of the way as much as we possibly can.”

Of the three plaintiffs, only Al-Ejaili, who now lives in Sweden, is expected to testify in person. The other two will testify remotely from Iraq. Brinkema has ruled that the reasons they were sent to Abu Ghraib are irrelevant and won’t be given to jurors. All three were released after periods of detention ranging from two months to a year without ever being charged with a crime, according to court papers.

“Even if they were terrorists, it doesn’t excuse the conduct that’s alleged here,” she said at the April 5 hearing.
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President Joe Biden hosted Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Thursday, aiming to send a clear message to Beijing that it must stop behaving aggressively against its South China Sea neighbors. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports.
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indianapolis, indiana — Semiconductors, or microchips, are critical to almost everything electronic used in the modern world. In 1990, the United States produced about 40% of the world’s semiconductors. As manufacturing migrated to Asia, U.S. production fell to about 12%.  

“During COVID, we got a wake-up call. It was like [a] Sputnik moment,” explained Mark Lundstrom, an engineer who has worked with microchips much of his life. 

The 2020 global coronavirus pandemic slowed production in Asia, creating a ripple through the global supply chain and leading to shortages of everything from phones to vehicles. Lundstrom said increasing U.S. reliance on foreign chip manufacturers exposed a major weakness. 

“We know that AI is going to transform society in the next several years, it requires extremely powerful chips. The most powerful leading-edge chips.” 

Today, Lundstrom is the acting dean of engineering at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, a leader in cutting-edge semiconductor development, which has new importance amid the emerging field of artificial intelligence. 

“If we fall behind in AI, the consequences are enormous for the defense of our country, for our economic future,” Lundstrom told VOA. 

Amid the buzz of activity in a laboratory on Purdue’s campus, visitors can get a vision of what the future might look like in microchip technology. 

“The key metrics of the performance of the chips actually are the size of the transistors, the devices, which is the building block of the computer chips,” said Zhihong Chen, director of Purdue’s Birck Nanotechnology Center, where engineers work around the clock to push microchip technology into the future. 

“We are talking about a few atoms in each silicon transistor these days. And this is what this whole facility is about,” Chen said. “We are trying to make the next generation transistors better devices than current technologies. More powerful and more energy-efficient computer chips of the future.” 

Not just RVs anymore

Because of Purdue’s efforts, along with those on other university campuses in the state, Indiana believes it’s an attractive location for manufacturers looking to build new microchip facilities. 

“Purdue University alone, a top four-ranked engineering school, offers more engineers every year than the next top three,” said Eric Holcomb, Indiana’s Republican governor. “When you have access to that kind of talent, when you have access to the cost of doing business in the state of Indiana, that’s why people are increasingly saying, Indiana.” 

Holcomb is in the final year of his eight-year tenure in the state’s top position. He wants to transform Indiana beyond the recreational vehicle, or “RV capital” of the country.  

“We produce about plus-80% of all the RV production in North America in one state,” he told VOA. “We are not just living up to our reputation as being the number one manufacturing state per capita in America, but we are increasingly embracing the future of mobility in America.” 

Holcomb is spearheading an effort to make Indiana the next great technology center as the U.S. ramps up investment in domestic microchip development and manufacturing.  “If we want to compete globally, we have to get smarter and healthier and more equipped, and we have to continue to invest in our quality of place,” Holcomb told VOA in an interview. 

His vision is shared by other lawmakers, including U.S. Senator Todd Young of Indiana, who co-sponsored the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which commits more than $50 billion in federal funding for domestic microchip development. 

‘We are committed’

Indiana is now home to one of 31 designated U.S. technology and innovation hubs, helping it qualify for hundreds of millions of dollars in grants designed to attract technology-driven businesses. 

“The signal that it sends to the rest of the world [is] that we are in it, we are committed, and we are focused,” said Holcomb. “We understand that economic development, economic security and national security complement one another.” 

Indiana’s efforts are paying off. 

In April, South Korean microchip manufacturer SK Hynix announced it was planning to build a $4 billion facility near Purdue University that would produce next-generation, high-bandwidth memory, or HBM chips, critical for artificial intelligence applications.  

The facility, slated to start operating in 2028, could create more than 1,000 new jobs. While U.S. chip manufacturer SkyWater also plans to invest nearly $2 billion in Indiana’s new LEAP Innovation District near Purdue, the state recently lost bidding to host chipmaker Intel, which selected Ohio for two new factories. 

“Companies tend to like to go to locations where there is already that infrastructure, where that supply chain is in place,” Purdue’s Lundstrom said. “That’s a challenge for us, because this is a new industry for us. So, we have a chicken-and- egg problem that we have to address, and we are beginning to address that.” 

Lundstrom said the CHIPS and Science Act and the federal money that comes with it are helping Indiana ramp up to compete with other U.S. locations already known for microchip development, such as Silicon Valley in California and Arizona. 

What could help Indiana gain an edge is its natural resources — plenty of land and water, and regular weather patterns, all crucial for the sensitive processes needed to manufacture microchips at large manufacturing centers. 
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washington — Months after Manila withdrew from China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects, Washington announced a set of infrastructure projects in the Philippines, the first under an initiative to accelerate investments in partner countries in the Indo-Pacific.

The infrastructure projects, known as PGI Luzon corridor, were announced by U.S. President Joe Biden as he hosted Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House on Thursday. 

“It means more jobs for people across the entire region,” Biden said. “It means more investment in sectors critical to our future clean energy, ports, railroads, agriculture and much more.” 

Marcos is seen as much closer to Washington than his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte. Last year, he skipped a BRI summit in Beijing that marked the 10th anniversary of China’s $1 trillion international infrastructure-building program.

“We seek to identify ways of growing our economies and making them more resilient, climate-proofing our cities and our societies, sustaining our development progress,” he said at the trilateral summit. 

PGI is an initialism for Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, an initiative that offers grants, federal financing and private sector investment to partner countries. It was launched in 2021 by the U.S. and G7 partners under the title “Build Back Better World” and billed as an alternative to China’s BRI.

PGI Luzon corridor

PGI Luzon corridor is the first project of its kind in the Indo-Pacific and will “connect Subic Bay, Clark, Manila and Batangas in the Philippines to accelerate coordinated investments in high-impact infrastructure projects, including ports, rail, clean energy, semiconductors, supply chains and other forms of connectivity in the Philippines,” a senior administration official said during a briefing on Wednesday. The official asked for anonymity in speaking to reporters.

The official did not provide more details on the project but noted “it will take some time” to secure investments. She highlighted a recent U.S. trade and investment mission to the Philippines that announced “more than $1 billion” in combined investments to promote the Philippines’ innovation economy, clean energy transition and supply chain resilience.

Rebecca Ray, senior researcher with the Global China Initiative at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, said that PGI Luzon corridor could lead to “healthy competition among major sources of lending and investment globally.”

Those lending sources now recognize that developing countries “need support in overcoming hard infrastructure bottlenecks for industrialization,” she told VOA.

The U.S. and Japan will also provide funding for technology in the Philippines that will improve wireless communication throughout the region, the official said.

In addition, the official said, the Development Finance Corporation, a U.S. development bank that partners with the private sector, will open its first regional office in the Philippines.

If the U.S. can sustain its focus and investments, PGI will be quite beneficial to the Philippines, said Derek Grossman, a senior analyst at the Rand Corporation, an American global policy research group.

“That said, we have seen numerous funding battles to get funds passed through Congress on these types of programs,” he told VOA. “And thus, this essential part is hardly guaranteed.”

Manila out of BRI

As ties with Beijing become increasingly strained over territorial disputes in the South China Sea, Manila announced in November that it has given up on Chinese funding for three major transportation projects, expressing confidence in securing financial backing elsewhere.

Even so, Chinese investment in the Philippines does not appear to be waning, Ray said, citing Chinese firm Yadea’s 2023 announcement of a $1 billion investment in e-motorcycle manufacturing, the second-largest investment in the Philippines for the year.

The Biden administration said it mobilized billions of dollars of U.S. private sector investments in the Indo-Pacific, including from Vena Energy, a company developing 2.4GW of renewable-energy projects in the Philippines.
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Reproductive rights are again at the forefront of the U.S. presidential campaign, as Republican candidate Donald Trump distances himself from an Arizona Supreme Court decision to ban most abortions in the state. VOA’s Scott Stearns has the story.
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The Midwestern state of Indiana aspires to become the next great technology center as the United States ramps up investment in domestic microchip development and manufacturing. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh has more from Indianapolis. Videographer: Kane Farabaugh, Adam Greenbaum
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Washington — Strong growth in the United States has helped to lift the outlook for the world economy, but more needs to be done to stem a slide in productivity, the head of the IMF said Thursday. 

“Global growth is marginally stronger on account of robust activity in the United States and in many emerging markets economies,” International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told reporters in prepared remarks. 

The U.S. economy grew by 2.5 percent last year, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, far outstripping most other advanced economies. 

“Robust household consumption and business investment, and an easing of supply chain problems helped,” Georgieva added. “And inflation is going down, somewhat faster than previously expected.” 

She spoke just a few days before the IMF-World Bank spring meetings of world financial leaders in Washington, one of two such gatherings hosted each year by the international financial institutions. 

Her remarks suggest the IMF now expects the world economy to grow faster than it predicted in January, when it forecast global growth to rise by 3.1 percent in 2024, and 3.2 percent in 2025. 

“It is tempting to breathe a sigh of relief. We have avoided a global recession and a period of stagflation — as some had predicted,” Georgieva said. “But there are still plenty of things to worry about.” 

Among the challenges, Georgieva mentioned rising geopolitical tension, which, she said, is increasing the risks of fragmentation of the global economy. 

She also highlighted the challenges of growing public debt and a “broad-based slowdown in productivity.” 

Because of this, the IMF expects growth to remain at just above 3 percent over the medium term — below its historical average. 

To help the global economy to heal and fix the productivity challenge, Georgieva laid out a series of steps to bring global inflation and public debt back down to sustainable levels, and also called for steps to eliminate “constraints to economic activity” and boost productivity. 

“In short, if there is a market failure that is being addressed — such as accelerating innovation to address the existential threat of climate change — there is a case for government intervention, including through industrial policy,” she said. 

“If there is no market failure, there is a need for caution,” she added. 
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Beijing — China on Thursday announced rare sanctions against two U.S. defense companies over what it said is their support for arms sales to Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy Beijing claims as its own territory to be recovered by force if necessary.

The announcement freezes the assets of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and General Dynamics Land Systems held within China. It also bars the companies’ management from entering the country. 

Filings show General Dynamics operates a half-dozen Gulfstream and jet aviation services operations in China, which remains heavily reliant on foreign aerospace technology even as it attempts to build its own presence in the field. 

The company helps make the Abrams tank being purchased by Taiwan to replace outdated armor intended to deter or resist an invasion from China. 

General Atomics produces the Predator and Reaper drones used by the U.S. military. Chinese authorities did not go into details on the company’s alleged involvement with supplying arms to Taiwan. 

Beijing has long threatened such sanctions, but has rarely issued them as its economy reels from the COVID-19 pandemic, high unemployment and a sharp decline in foreign investment. 

“The continued U.S. arms sales to China’s Taiwan region seriously violate the one-China principle and the provisions of the three China-U.S. joint communiqués, interfere in China’s internal affairs, and undermine China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. It insists that the mainland and the island to which Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces fled amid civil war in 1949 remain part of a single Chinese nation. 

Sanctions were leveled under Beijing’s recently enacted Law of the People’s Republic of China on Countering Foreign Sanctions. 

General Dynamics fully owned entities are registered in Hong Kong, the southern Chinese semi-autonomous city over which Beijing has steadily been increasing its political and economic control to the point that it faces no vocal opposition and has seen its critics silenced, imprisoned or forced into exile. 

Despite their lack of formal diplomatic ties — a concession Washington made to Beijing when they established relations in 1979 — the U.S. remains Taiwan’s most important source of diplomatic support and supplier of military hardware from fighter jets to air defense systems. 

Taiwan has also been investing heavily in its own defense industry, producing sophisticated missiles and submarines. 

China had 14 warplanes and six navy ships operating around Taiwan on Wednesday and Thursday, with six of the aircraft crossing into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone — a tactic to test Taiwan’s defenses, wear down its capabilities and intimidate the population. 

So far, that has had little effect, with the vast majority of the island’s 23 million people opposing political unification with China.
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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — South Florida researchers trying to prevent predatory fish from devouring laboratory-grown coral are grasping at biodegradable straws in an effort to restore what some call the rainforest of the sea.

Scientists around the world have been working for years to address the decline of coral reef populations. Just last summer, reef rescue groups in South Florida and the Florida Keys were trying to save coral from rising ocean temperatures. Besides working to keep existing coral alive, researchers have also been growing new coral in labs and then placing them in the ocean.

But protecting the underwater ecosystem that maintains more than 25% of all marine species is not easy. Even more challenging is making sure that coral grown in a laboratory and placed into the ocean doesn’t become expensive fish food.

Marine researcher Kyle Pisano said one problem is that predators like parrot fish attempt to bite and destroy the newly transplanted coral in areas like South Florida, leaving them with less than a 40% survival rate. With projects calling for thousands of coral to be planted over the next year and tens of thousands of coral to be planted over the next decade, the losses add up when coral pieces can cost more than $100 each.

Pisano and his partner, Kirk Dotson, have developed the Coral Fort, claiming the small biodegradable cage that’s made in part with drinking straws boosts the survival rate of transplanted coral to over 90%.

“Parrot fish on the reef really, really enjoy biting a newly transplanted coral,” Pisano said. “They treat it kind of like popcorn.”

Fortunately the fish eventually lose interest in the coral as it matures, but scientists need to protect the coral in the meantime. Stainless steel and PVC pipe barriers have been set up around transplanted coral in the past, but those barriers needed to be cleaned of algae growth and eventually removed.

Pisano had the idea of creating a protective barrier that would eventually dissolve, eliminating the need to maintain or remove it. He began conducting offshore experiments with biodegradable coral cages as part of a master’s degree program at Nova Southeastern University. He used a substance called polyhydroxyalkanoate, a biopolymer derived from the fermentation of canola oil. PHA biodegrades in ocean, leaving only water and carbon dioxide. His findings were published last year.

The coral cage consists of a limestone disc surrounded by eight vertical phade brand drinking straws, made by Atlanta-based WinCup Inc. The device doesn’t have a top, Pisano said, because the juvenile coral needs sunlight and the parrot fish don’t generally want to position themselves facing downward to eat.

Dotson, a retired aerospace engineer, met Pisano through his professor at Nova Southeastern, and the two formed Reef Fortify Inc. to further develop and market the patent-pending Coral Fort. The first batch of cages were priced at $12 each, but Pisano and Dotson believe that could change as production scales up.

Early prototypes of the cage made from phade’s standard drinking straws were able to protect the coral for about two months before dissolving in the ocean, but that wasn’t quite long enough to outlast the interest of parrot fish. When Pisano and Dotson reached out to phade for help, the company assured them that it could make virtually any custom shape from its biodegradable PHA material.

“But it’s turning out that the boba straws, straight out of the box, work just fine,” Dotson said.

Boba straws are wider and thicker than normal drinking straws. They’re used for a tea-based drink that includes tapioca balls at the bottom of the cup. For Pisano and Dotson, that extra thickness means the straws last just long enough to protect the growing coral before harmlessly disappearing.

Reef Fortify is hoping to work with reef restoration projects all over the world. The Coral Forts already already being used by researchers at Nova Southeastern and the University of Miami, as well as Hawaii’s Division of Aquatic Resources.

Rich Karp, a coral researcher at the University of Miami, said they’ve been using the Coral Forts for about a month. He pointed out that doing any work underwater takes a great deal of time and effort, so having a protective cage that dissolves when it’s no longer needed basically cuts their work in half.

“Simply caging corals and then removing the cages later, that’s two times the amount of work, two times the amount of bottom time,” Karp said. “And it’s not really scalable.”

Experts say coral reefs are a significant part of the oceanic ecosystem. They occupy less than 1% of the ocean worldwide but provide food and shelter to nearly 25 percent of sea life. Coral reefs also help to protect humans and their homes along the coastline from storm surges during hurricanes.
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The United States and Japan celebrated their decades-long alliance Wednesday night as President Joe Biden hosts Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House for a state dinner. The Japanese leader’s visit marks a significant strengthening in defense and technology ties. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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For years, the U.S. state of Ohio was a solid indicator of American political opinion, choosing the winning presidential candidate in every election from 1964 to 2016. VOA Correspondent Scott Stearns reports that Ohio now appears more conservative, presenting a challenge for a Democratic Party trying to re-elect President Joe Biden and keep control of the U.S. Senate.
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washington — U.S. House lawmakers rejected an attempt to reform a controversial foreign intelligence program Wednesday, the latest blow in Speaker Mike Johnson’s effort to lead a narrow Republican majority.

A renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, failed to advance, 228-193, following a warning from former President Donald Trump on TruthSocial.

Trump said that FISA “was illegally used against me, and many others. They spied on my campaign!!” he wrote, using all capital letters.

A Justice Department investigation found in 2019 that surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page continued for months after it should have ended.

The law — also referred to as Section 702 — allows U.S. intelligence agencies to collect data on foreigners overseas without obtaining a warrant. But it has received the most criticism for so-called “backdoor searches” that allow collection of U.S. citizens’ data. An attempted reform would have required the FBI to secure a warrant before collecting data.

“We’re enacting sweeping changes — 50 reforms, 56 to be exact — to the program that are in the base text that will stop the abuse of politicized FBI queries and prevent another Russia hoax debacle, among many other important reforms,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday morning. “No more of the intelligence community relying on fake news reports to order a FISA order, no more collusion.”

But Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — who has filed a procedural motion to remove Johnson from the speakership — said those reforms were not enough.

“It’s like asking the deep state to hold itself accountable,” Greene told reporters Wednesday. “The FBI is abusing American people’s trust. The [Justice Department] has abused the American people’s trust. So, this doesn’t give me confidence that it will stop it.”

Nineteen House Republicans voted against the bill. Democrats said Wednesday that the proposed FISA reforms had not secured their votes.

“Whatever the vote count is, or whatever happens to that, it’s because the speaker has chosen not to advance this issue in a single standalone process. If he chooses to go a different route, then we’ll reassess,” Representative Pete Aguilar, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said Wednesday morning.

An attempt to pass surveillance laws failed in December when House leadership pulled a vote amid internal Republican divisions.

Johnson argued to colleagues in a letter on Friday that the law would “establish new procedures to rein in the FBI, increase accountability at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC, impose penalties for wrongdoing, and institute unprecedented transparency across the FISA process so we no longer have to wait years to uncover potential abuses.”

Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, warned against some of the proposed changes in a speech Tuesday to the American Bar Association.

“Bottom line, a warrant requirement would be the equivalent of rebuilding the pre-9/11 intelligence ‘wall,’ ” he said in his prepared remarks. “As the threats to our homeland continue to evolve, the agility and effectiveness of 702 will be essential to the FBI’s ability — and really our mandate from the American people — to keep them safe for years to come.”

Unless Congress acts, authorization for the program expires on April 19.

Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
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the white house — Preparations take months. No detail is overlooked, for this is perhaps the most evolved form of diplomacy: the state dinner.

As first lady Jill Biden prepares Wednesday to host her fifth state dinner, for Japan’s leader, she made it clear that every aesthetic detail — from the crystal on the tables, to the food on the White House china, the decor in the State Dining Room, the music and the fashion — drips with diplomatic significance. This dinner, she said in her preview of the event, makes frequent reference to Washington’s famous cherry trees, a gift from Japan more than a century ago.

“As guests sit among the field of flowers, glass and silk butterflies from both our countries will dance over the tables, their graceful flight a reminder that as our nations navigate the winds of change, we do so together as partners in peace and prosperity,” she said.

The White House Historical Association lays out the high stakes, saying a state dinner “showcases global power and influence and sets the tone for the continuation of dialogue between the president and the visiting head of state.”

Roxanne Roberts, a style writer for The Washington Post who has covered state dinners for more than 30 years, likens the dinner to “the frosting on an already-baked cake.”

“The state dinner is the least important part of a state visit, but it’s the thing that gets the most attention,” she told VOA. “… And it sends a signal to not only the government of that country, but the people of that country that you’re important to us. We care about you.”

That’s reflected in the numbers. Records journalists requested from the State Department, which foots the bill, show that Obama-era dinners cost U.S. taxpayers more than $500,000 each. More recent dinner tabs have not been released.

The food!

Imagine, Roberts said, a lavish wedding.

“It’s as if,” she said, “There was a marriage between the two countries and this is the wedding reception.”

The most obvious manifestation of that is on the plate.

White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford said this menu took her “a couple of months” to design and field test. Over three courses, guests will take a tour through her Japan-influenced creations, starting with a nod to the beloved American twist on sushi, the California roll. Her version is rendered as a salad of house-cured salmon with avocado, grapefruit, watermelon radish, cucumber and shiso leaf fritters.

Beef has been a fixture of past Biden dinners – the exception, of course, being the menu for the 2023 state dinner for Indian leader Narendra Modi, a strict vegetarian. Guests at this dinner, accordingly, will move on to a dry-aged rib eye steak with blistered shishito pepper butter, a fricassee of fava beans, morels and cipollini mushrooms and a sesame oil sabayon.

And for dessert: a salted caramel pistachio cake with matcha tea ganache, cherry ice cream and a drizzle of raspberry coulis.

“We wanted to bring a little bit of the cherry blossoms that are here on the Tidal Basin right here to our dessert, in order for everyone to enjoy the cherry blossoms that we enjoy every year,” said White House executive pastry chef Susie Morrison.

The wines, as is now custom, will be American.

“The days when only French wines were served at state dinners are long gone,” Roberts said. “Primarily because there were a lot of American vineyards who basically said, ‘Whoa, what about us? We’re cool.'”

The fripperies!

A temporary water feature in the White House’s Cross Hall will feature live koi — “symbols of friendship, peace, luck and perseverance,” Biden said.

Paul Simon will perform for guests. And the first couples are exchanging gifts that include a three-legged black walnut table made by a Japanese-American-owned company, a set of records autographed by American singer Billy Joel, and, as a personal touch, “a framed painting of the Yoshino cherry tree that she planted with Mrs. Kishida on the South Lawn last spring.”

The fashion!

Japan’s first lady, Yuko Kishida, garnered rave reviews for her choice to don India’s most culturally and technically fraught of garments, the sari, by draping and meticulously pleating five meters of green Kanjeevaram silk around her body for a summit of global leaders last year in New Delhi.

As she landed in Washington for her first state visit on Tuesday — but her second trip to meet the Bidens — she greeted the couple in a flowing dress of autumn-toned watercolor florals. President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida wore suits, while the U.S. first lady donned a black dress with a deep keyhole neckline and razor-sharp tailoring.

These decisions, Roberts said, are “more than just going off to the store and going, ‘Oh, that’s pretty. I think I’ll wear that.'”

And the pressure, she said, falls disproportionately on the leaders’ spouses, who are traditionally women.

“They’re ambassadors for the clothing that they wear, the look that they have,” she said. “And so all of those, all of those elements play into all of these choices. You know, the guys have it easy – just throw on the tuxedo.”

… And finally, the faux pas!

What could possibly go wrong?

Surprisingly, not a lot, Roberts said, adding, “The truth of the matter is that these state dinners tend to go off without a hitch, because the planning is done so well.”

But, she said, mistakes sometimes happen.

She described a long-ago dinner for Mexico’s leader that featured “an elaborate desert that had a guy with a sombrero sleeping as a decorative piece.”

“It was meant to be charming and kind of fun, and it just hit wrong,” she said.

Another memorable slip, she said, was at a 2009 state dinner for India, where two uninvited reality stars crashed the event.

“The fact that two people were able to get in who were not supposed to be there was, in fact, a scandal,” she said.

The East Wing, in its preview, chose to focus instead on the positive, with White House social secretary Carlos Elizondo homing in on the theme while raising the stakes of this impossibly complex event.

“That’s what we hope to capture,” he said. “…the magic of spring in our lasting friendship, each detail chosen to create a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
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WASHINGTON — The tenacity of Ukrainian troops will soon be no match for Russia’s manpower and missiles should U.S. lawmakers fail to approve additional security assistance for Ukraine, the top American general in Europe told lawmakers, part of a stark warning about the direction of the more than two-year-old conflict.

U.S. military officials have warned repeatedly in recent weeks that Russian forces have been able to make incremental gains in Ukraine and that without renewed U.S. backing, Ukraine’s forces will eventually falter.

Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday, the commander of U.S. European Command described the battlefield in blunt terms.

“If we do not continue to support Ukraine, Ukraine will run out of artillery shells and will run out of air defense interceptors in fairly short order,” said General Christopher Cavoli, explaining that Kyiv is dependent on the United States for those key munitions.

“I can’t predict the future, but I can do simple math,” he said. “Based on my experience in 37-plus years in the U.S. military, if one side can shoot and the other side can’t shoot back, the side that can’t shoot back loses.”

Cavoli also said the failure of U.S. lawmakers to approve a $60 billion supplemental security package is already giving Russia a significant advantage.

“They [Ukraine] are now being outshot by the Russian side 5-to-1,” he told lawmakers. “That will immediately go to 10-to-1 in a matter of weeks.

“We are not talking about months. We are not talking hypothetically,” Cavoli said.

Multiple U.S. officials have warned that Ukraine’s military has been forced to ration artillery and air defense capabilities as Kyiv waits for U.S. lawmakers to approve the supplemental assistance.

“We are already seeing the effects of the failure to pass the supplemental,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Celeste Wallander told the panel, testifying alongside U.S. European Command’s Cavoli.

“We don’t need to imagine,” she said, blaming the lack of U.S. provided artillery for why “the Russian attacks are getting through.”

That supplemental defense package passed in the U.S. Senate back in February, but leadership in the House of Representatives has so far refused to bring the legislation to the floor for a vote.

During a press conference on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Republican House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson said lawmakers were continuing to “actively discuss our options on a path forward.”

“It’s a very complicated matter at a very complicated time. The clock is ticking on it, and everyone here feels the urgency of that,” Johnson said. “But what’s required is that you reach consensus on it, and that’s what we’re working on.”

House Democrats, however, have voiced frustration with Johnson’s refusal to call a vote.

“The House has waited months now to approve the security package to help protect Ukraine,” said Representative Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. “Weeks ago, we were too late. And now every day is at an extreme cost to our ability to deter Russia.”

Another Democrat on the committee, Representative Elissa Slotkin, scolded Johnson, saying he needs to call a vote despite opposition from a small group of House Republicans.

“We do need to get it over the finish line,” she said. “I accept that he’s at risk of losing his job over that choice, but that’s what leadership is — it’s the big boy pants and making tough choices.”

Some Republicans, though, chastised Democratic lawmakers for what they described as misguided priorities.

“We’ve got hundreds of thousands of Americans who are dying, fentanyl overdoses, child and human sex trafficking, not to mention 178-plus countries that are crossing our border,” said Republican Representative Cory Mills.

“But, oh wait, that’s not the priority. Let’s secure Ukraine’s borders,” he said.

VOA’s Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.
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The White House blames militant group Hamas for the failure to reach a cease-fire with Israel before the end of Ramadan, as Washington prepares for a high-level meeting on Israel’s plans to invade Rafah and faces lingering questions over the killing of aid workers by Israeli forces. VOA White House correspondent Anita Powell reports from Washington.
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