Americans Paul Whelan, Alsu Kurmasheva, Evan Gershkovich, and others are freed from Russian prisons in a deal involving 16 political prisoners exchanged for eight individuals requested by the Kremlin. With Liam Scott and Cristina Caicedo Smit, Jessica Jerreat reports. Patsy Widakuswara contributed. Cameras: Martin Bubenik, Krystof Maixner, Hoshang Fahim.
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washington — The realignment of the United States armed forces in Japan, announced on the heels of the latest U.S.-Japan security talks, will focus on developing warfighting capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region, former U.S. military officials and experts say.

During a meeting of the Japan-U.S. Security Consultative Committee in Tokyo on Sunday, the two nations agreed to upgrade the command and control of the U.S. Forces Japan (USFJ), converting the current USFJ structure into a joint force headquarters.

The new headquarters will be given “expanded missions and operational responsibilities,” according to a statement released after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with their Japanese counterparts, Yoko Kamikawa and Minoru Kihara.

Jerry Martinez, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant general who served as the USFJ commander from 2016 to 2019, said this move is “a gigantic step forward” for the United States, Japan and the alliance at large.

“This action signals the high regard in which both countries view the alliance, as well as the need to ensure Japan is always ready to withstand any threats in the region,” Martinez told VOA Korean via email on Wednesday.

“It sends a strong signal to potential threats that Japan as a whole is trained, prepared and operationally ready to meet any challenges,” he said.

Harry Harris, former U.S. ambassador to South Korea during the Trump administration, told VOA Korean in an email on Tuesday that the USFJ headquarters will take on more operational command responsibilities.

“It greatly expands the heretofore limited role of the existing USFJ,” said Harris, who was also commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command from 2015 to 2018.

“USFJ was not responsible for joint war planning,” he said, adding that the move to set up a new headquarters recognizes “the importance in Japan of effective joint planning between the U.S. and Japan.”

The reconstitution of American forces stationed in Japan, scheduled for March 2025, is widely seen as the most substantial transformation since its establishment in 1957.

“This will be the most significant change to U.S. Forces Japan since its creation and one of the strongest improvements in our military ties with Japan in 70 years,” Austin said in a press conference Sunday in Tokyo.

According to experts in Washington, the changes are aimed at giving USFJ an actual warfighting command, which has, up to now, been largely assumed by the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, headquartered in Hawaii.

“It was more of a command that focused on kind of day-to-day management of resources in Japan,” Robert Peters, research fellow for nuclear deterrence and missile defense at the Heritage Foundation, told VOA Korean by phone on Wednesday.

“USFJ is going to have more responsibilities and more capabilities, so they’re going to be able to make their own decisions when a war breaks out,” he said.

Peters, who served as a special adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during the Obama administration, said the new USFJ will be “more relevant to the warfighting.”

James Przystup, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Japan Chair, told VOA Korean via email on Tuesday that the focus of the new joint command will be the closer operational integration of U.S. military assets, which encompass elements of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force.

“USFJ as it stands today serves an administrative function,” Przystup said. “Establishing a joint force headquarters provides for the closer operational integration of U.S. forces deployed in Japan.”

According to the joint statement of the Security Consultative Committee on Sunday, the new U.S. joint force headquarters will serve as a counterpart to Japan’s Joint Operations Command, facilitating deeper interoperability and cooperation on joint bilateral operations.

The USFJ’s cooperation with the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) is expected to take a form different from the Combined Forces Command in South Korea, a joint warfighting headquarters consisting of U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) and the South Korean military.

Retired U.S. Army General Robert Abrams, who served as the commander of the USFK from 2018 to 2021, told VOA Korean in an email on Wednesday that the USFJ and JSDF are completely separate.

“There is no mention of the newly converted USFJ headquarters becoming a combined command or implying that this USFJ headquarters would have operational control of Japanese Self-Defense Forces,” Abrams said. “Japan’s minister of defense made clear that there was no plan to put JSDF under U.S. command.”

Przystup said the new USFJ Joint Forces Command, along with Japan’s own Joint Operations Command, will facilitate closer U.S.-Japan defense cooperation in dealing with security challenges posed by China as well as North Korea, “in particular with respect to operational integration of Japan’s counterstrike capability within the alliance, thus enhancing alliance-based deterrence.”

While Austin stressed during the Sunday press conference that “our decision to move in this direction is not based upon any threat from China,” the U.S. and Japan made it clear that China’s external stance and military actions pose a serious concern.

In response to an inquiry from VOA Korean, the Chinese Embassy in Washington said Tuesday that China is not a threat to global stability and peace.

“The so-called ‘China threat theory’ is groundless and should not be used as an excuse for military expansion,” Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said in a written statement via email. “U.S.-Japan relations should not target other countries, harm their interests or undermine regional peace and stability.”
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In a U.S. election season that has been filled with unexpected twists and turns, social media users have responded in kind … with coconuts and cat ladies. VOA’s Tina Trinh explains.
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EAUBONNE, France — Growing up in cutthroat New York gave Lauren Scruggs the competitive mindset needed to claim an unexpected fencing silver medal on her Olympic debut in Paris.

The 21-year-old Queens native shared the podium with fellow American Lee Kiefer, who retained her Olympic title in the women’s individual foil event gold medal bout on Sunday.

“I’ve grown up in New York my whole life. It can be kind of rough sometimes,” Scruggs, the first Black American fencer to win an Olympic medal in a women’s individual event, told Reuters.

“You develop a hard shell, and in terms of how that translates to my fencing, I think it came out, that energy and that toughness.”

When Scruggs found herself neck-and-neck with then world No. 2 Arriana Errigo in the quarterfinals, she managed to score the last touch, knocking out the Italian 15-14.

“I think that was my toughest bout of the day in terms of energy, and going past my limits, and I have definitely New York to thank for that,” said Scruggs, one of the rare Black fencers at the highest level.

“Fencing is predominantly white, I think for a multitude of reasons, it’s just the history of the sport, and the lack of representation and encouragement,” she explained.

“To have this accomplishment is a big deal for me, because when I was younger I only had a few people to look up to in the sport, so to be someone that little kids now can look up to is very special to me.”

They can draw inspiration from her impressive grit, which coach Sean McClain described in the U.S. training venue in Eaubonne, in the outskirts of Paris, saying that since she was eight, Scruggs only cared about winning medals.

“And she’s maintained that distaste for losing her entire career,” he said. “I really think in an event like the Olympics, it’s more about how you compete.”

Expensive sport

Born in the U.S. to Jamaican immigrants, Scruggs grew up in Queens with her mother and grandmother.

“I was in a single-parent household early on, so my family had to basically cut some corners around here and there to support us,” said Scruggs, whose brother was the first to get into fencing and inspired her to take up the sport.

Now a college student at Harvard, where she trains every day, Scruggs had to fight to make it into a “pretty expensive” sport.

“It was not easy growing up, trying to fence while being from where I’m from, just income-wise,” she said.

“If you have the funds, it makes it a lot easier to pursue the sport and feel comfortable asking that from your family.

“But if you’re coming from a lower-income background, it might push you harder. And I think it’s what happened with me. I just wanted it more than my peers.”

On paper, Scruggs did not have a big medal chance, but she showed her mettle at the Grand Palais arena.

“Fencing skill wise, Lauren is on par with the better fencers in the world, but she’s not better than them. What made the difference was that competitiveness,” said McClain, who has also become Scruggs’ stepfather.

“That comes from my wife,” he added. “I knew it was possible, but I didn’t really think Lauren was going to win a medal in her first Olympics. But my wife did. She was like, she’d better win a medal. So that’s where it comes from — that’s the fiery spirit!”

With Kiefer and alongside teammates Jackie Dubrovich and Maia Weintraub, Scruggs will represent the U.S. against China on Thursday in the quarterfinals of the women’s foil team event.

Scruggs is aiming for gold this time and is dreaming already of qualifying for the next Games, which will take place in Los Angeles in four years’ time.

“I can’t imagine myself not fencing,” she said. “It’s not even love, it’s just a part of me. It’s connected to who I am,” she said. 
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new york — Over 8 million people live in New York City and yet lasting romantic relationships can still seem hard to come by.

Because of this, many singles in the city have ditched swiping on dating apps for socializing in real life through in-person events such as running clubs, reading parties and singles meetups.

In the early 2010s, dating apps such as Tinder and Hinge became a prominent way to meet potential partners, and though they have produced countless successful love stories, many New York City singles are beginning to grow weary of them.

“I think there’s some disenchantment with dating apps overall. A feeling like they’re an option, but maybe not the best option,” said Kathryn Coduto, assistant professor of media science at Boston University and dating researcher. “An in-person meeting, a group maybe, where there’s similar interests, allows people to connect in person and have that initial conversation without the phone as an intermediary.”

Dating app fatigue paired with recent years of COVID-19 isolation has contributed to a recent upward trend of in-person social events. According to Eventbrite, in-person dating activities in the United States saw a 42% increase in attendance from 2022 to 2023.

Amber Soletti, founder of in-person singles dating event company Single and the City, has seen this trend, too, noting that her business is up 67% in event attendance from a year ago.

“People have this app fatigue, this swipe fatigue,” Soletti said. “They are ready to go back to in-person events and make authentic connections with people in real life.”

This is exactly the goal of the viral Lunge Run Club, a running club based in Manhattan targeted toward singles looking for love.

Founded earlier this year by Steve Cole and Rachael Lansing, the club meets every Wednesday in Manhattan for a 5-kilometer run followed by drinks at a bar. Lunge Run Club started with only 30 people and has since taken the city by storm, raking in hundreds of attendees each week.

The club encourages people to wear black if single and colors if taken, hoping to take some of the mystery and fear out of in-person dating events.

“People always use run clubs or recreational sports, anything like that, as a way to meet people,” Lansing said. “We kind of just took away that mask of, ‘I’m going and maybe I’ll meet someone’ and now it’s the intentional, ‘I’m showing up. I’m wearing all black. I’m saying I’m single. I’m looking to either meet some great friends or someone special.’”

Lunge Run Club is not alone in its mission, but rather a part of a movement of people seeking connection in one of the largest cities in the world. Soletti’s Single and the City hosts speed dating events and specialized singles mixers focused on shared interests, hobbies or even physical characteristics, such as height.

“Having something in common is a great starting point for a relationship, and that could be a friendship, but could also be a romantic relationship,” Coduto said. “That makes a lot of sense when you have something in common with someone, it gives you something to talk about.”

While Lunge Run Club and Single and the City are specifically marketed as dating scenes, other events are more broadly focused on facilitating community in general.

In June 2023, Ben Bradbury, Tom Worcester, Charlotte Jackson and John Lifrieri founded Reading Rhythms, “reading parties” during which people meet at various venues to read and socialize, helping people build community, friendships and possibly even more.

Bradbury explained how in-person interactions, such as those at Reading Rhythms, can facilitate connection in a way that cannot always be replicated online.

“Authentic connection, you can’t fake it when you’re in person. It’s either authentic or it’s not,” Bradbury said. “I think people are really enjoying that, that feeling of having people together and, also, just remembering what it’s like to connect in person. I think society is really wanting that right now.”

Despite not necessarily being advertised as a place to find romantic love, Reading Rhythms has seen an outpouring of support and engagement similar to Lunge Run Club and Single and the City’s events. Reading Rhythms has hosted over 120 parties with 7,500 readers looking for an in-person connection over a shared interest.

“It’s hard to feel someone’s energy when you just see them online. I think with this day and age of social media, and curating our online presence, you get one layer of who someone is,” said Nikki D’Ambrosio, host and longtime participant of Reading Rhythms. “What I love about Reading Rhythms is it’s not just, ‘Hi, my name is Nikki and this is what book I’m reading.’ It’s really going deeper.”

From running to reading to speed dating, people are yearning for in-person connection and New York City has countless opportunities to offer.
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columbia, south carolina — South Carolina can execute death row inmates by firing squad, lethal injection or the electric chair, the state’s high court ruled Wednesday, opening the door to restart executions after more than a decade.

All five justices agreed with at least part of the ruling. But two of the justices said they felt the firing squad was not a legal way to kill an inmate and one of them felt the electric chair is a cruel and unusual punishment.

The state allowing inmates to choose from the three execution methods is far from an effort to inflict pain but a sincere attempt at making the death penalty less inhumane, Justice John Few wrote in the majority opinion.

As many as eight inmates may be out of traditional appeals. It is unclear when executions could restart or whether lawyers for death row inmates can appeal the ruling.

Governor Henry McMaster said the justices interpreted the law correctly.

“This decision is another step in ensuring that lawful sentences can be duly enforced and the families and loved ones of the victims receive the closure and justice they have long awaited,” he said in a statement.

Lawyers for the death row inmates said they were reviewing the 94-page ruling before commenting.

South Carolina has executed 43 inmates since the death penalty was restarted in the U.S. in 1976. Nearly all inmates have chosen lethal injection since it became an option in 1995.

“Choice cannot be considered cruel because the condemned inmate may elect to have the State employ the method he and his lawyers believe will cause him the least pain,” Few wrote.

South Carolina hasn’t performed an execution since 2011. The state’s supplies of drugs for lethal injections expired and no pharmaceutical companies would sell more if they could be publicly identified.

Lawmakers authorized the state to create a firing squad in 2021 to give inmates a choice between it and the old electric chair. The inmates sued, saying either choice was cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Constitution.

In spring 2023, the Legislature passed a shield law to keep lethal injection drug suppliers secret and the state announced in September it had the sedative pentobarbital and changed the method of lethal injection execution from using three drugs to just one.

The Supreme Court allowed the inmates to add arguments that the shield law was too secret by not releasing the potency, purity and stabilization of lethal injection drugs.

South Carolina has 32 inmates on its death row. Four prisoners are suing, but four more have also run out of appeals, although two of them face a competency hearing before they could be executed, according to Justice 360, an advocacy group for inmates.

The state said in its argument before the state Supreme Court in February that lethal injection, electrocution and firing squad all fit existing death penalty protocols.

“Courts have never held the death has to be instantaneous or painless,” wrote Grayson Lambert, a lawyer for the governor’s office.

But lawyers for the inmates asked the justices to agree with Circuit Judge Jocelyn Newman, who stopped executions with the electric chair or firing squad.

She cited the inmates’ experts, who testified at a trial that prisoners would feel terrible pain whether their bodies were “cooking” by 2,000 volts of electricity in the chair, built in 1912, or if their hearts were stopped by bullets — assuming the three shooters were on target — from the yet-to-be used firing squad.

On the shield law, the attorneys for the inmates said they need to know if there is a regular supplier for the drug, which typically only has a shelf life of 45 days, and what guidelines are in place to test it and make sure it is what the seller claims.

Too weak a dose, and inmates may suffer without dying. Too strong, and the drug molecules can form tiny clumps that would cause intense pain when injected, according to court papers.

“No inmate in the country has ever been put to death with such little transparency about how he or she would be executed,” Justice 360 lawyer Lindsey Vann wrote.

Lawyers for the inmates did tell the justices in February that lethal injection appears to be legal when it follows proper protocols, with information about the drug given to the condemned in a manner that matches what other states and the federal government use.

South Carolina used to carry out an average of three executions a year and had more than 60 inmates on death row when the last execution was carried out in 2011. Since then, successful appeals and natural deaths have lowered the number to 32.

Prosecutors have sent only three new prisoners to death row in the past 13 years. Facing rising costs, the lack of lethal injection drugs and more vigorous defenses, they are choosing to accept guilty pleas and life in prison without parole.
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The United States said it was not involved in the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in an overnight strike in Tehran. Haniyeh is the second Iran-backed militant group leader assassinated this week. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has the story.
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WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is prodding Congress to help him do more to combat the scourge of fentanyl before he leaves office. 

The Democratic administration is making the new policy push as Republican former President Donald Trump steps up attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, painting her as Biden’s feckless lieutenant in the battle to slow the illegal drugs and immigrants without authorization coming into the United States from Mexico. 

The White House on Wednesday announced a series of proposals from Biden aimed at curbing the ongoing drug epidemic. These include a push on Congress to pass legislation to establish a pill press and tableting machine registry and enhance penalties against convicted drug smugglers and traffickers of fentanyl. 

Biden also wants to tighten rules on importers shipping small packages into the United States, requiring shippers to provide additional information to Customs and Border Protection officials. The move is aimed at improving the detection of fentanyl precursor chemicals that frequently find their way into the United States in relatively low-value shipments that aren’t subject to customs and trade barriers. 

The president’s new efforts at combating fentanyl may also benefit Harris, the likely Democratic nominee, as Trump and his surrogates are trying to cast her as a central player in the Biden administration’s struggles at the U.S.-Mexico border throughout his term. 

“Still, far too many of our fellow Americans continue to lose loved ones to fentanyl,” Biden said in a statement. “This is a time to act. And this is a time to stand together — for all those we have lost, and for all the lives we can still save.” 

Biden said he will also sign a national security memorandum on Wednesday aimed at improving the sharing of information between law enforcement and federal agencies to improve understanding about the flows of production and smuggling of the synthetic opioid that has ravaged huge swaths of America. In the last five months, more than 442 million doses of fentanyl were seized at U.S. borders, according to the White House. 

The Trump campaign launched its first television ad of the general election cycle on Tuesday, dubbing Harris the “border czar” and blaming her for a surge in illegal crossings into the United States during the Biden administration. After displaying headlines about crime and drugs, the video brands Harris as “Failed. Weak. Dangerously liberal.” 

Border crossings hit record highs during the Biden administration but have dropped more recently. 

The Trump campaign has so far reserved $12.2 million in television and digital ads through the next two weeks, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact. 

Biden tasked Harris early in his administration with addressing the root causes of migration. Border crossings became a major political liability for Biden when they reached historic levels. Since June, when Biden announced significant restrictions on asylum applications at the border, arrests for illegal crossings have fallen. 

House Republicans passed a symbolic resolution last week criticizing Harris’ work on the border on behalf of the Biden administration. 

The White House reiterated its call on Congress to pass sweeping immigration legislation that includes funding for more border agents and drug detection machines at the border. GOP senators earlier this year scuttled months of negotiations with Democrats on legislation intended to cut back record numbers of illegal border crossings after Trump eviscerated the bipartisan proposal. 

The proposed pill-pressing registry floated by Biden aims to help law enforcement crackdown on drug traffickers who use pill presses to press fentanyl into pills. 

Authorities say most illicit fentanyl is produced clandestinely in Mexico, using chemical precursors from China. Synthetic opioids are the biggest killers in the deadliest drug crisis the U.S. has ever seen. In 2014, nearly 50,000 deaths in the U.S. were linked to drug overdoses of all kinds. By 2022, the total was more than 100,000, according to a tally by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than two-thirds of those deaths — more than 200 per day — involved fentanyl or similar synthetic drugs. 

Meeting with China

Meanwhile, administration officials and Chinese government officials are expected to meet Wednesday to discuss efforts to curb the flow of chemical precursors coming from China, according to a senior administration official. 

Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced at a November summit in California that Beijing had agreed to press its chemical companies to curtail shipments to Latin America and elsewhere of the materials used to produce fentanyl. China also agreed to a resumption of sharing information about suspected trafficking with an international database. 

But a special House committee focused on countering the Chinese government in April issued a report that China still is fueling the fentanyl crisis in the U.S. by directly subsidizing the manufacturing of materials that are used by traffickers to make the drug outside the country. 

The official, who spoke under the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House, said China had taken “important steps,” but there is much more to do.
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Prague/Washington  — Portraits of Alsu Kurmasheva are scattered throughout the Prague apartment she shares with her husband and two daughters. But the journalist has not set foot here in more than a year.

Perhaps the most striking of the paintings, all of which were done by her husband, Pavel Butorin, is the one that remains unfinished, perched on an easel in the living room. Butorin started it after Kurmasheva, 47, was jailed in Russia in October 2023 on charges that are widely viewed as baseless and politically motivated.

Painting, Butorin says, is just one way he has tried to cope with his wife’s absence.

“Even to say, ‘We miss Alsu,’ doesn’t quite convey the emotion that we go through,” Butorin told VOA at the family’s home. “I get up, and the first thing in my head is Alsu. I’ve just been really unable to escape this.”

With their lives intertwined — from raising their daughters Bibi and Miriam, to working at the same news network — he is never far from reminders that his wife is 1,700 miles away, in a prison in the city of Kazan.

“In the evening, we sit at this table. We see an empty chair,” Butorin said, his eyes fixed on the seat at the large, wooden table, as if he were willing his wife to appear. “It signifies a broken family, a family torn apart by an unjust, merciless, heartless regime.”

When Butorin spoke with VOA in Prague in July, his wife — who has dual U.S.-Russian citizenship — was approaching nine months in custody. Less than one week later, on July 19, she was convicted behind closed doors of spreading what Moscow says is false information about its military and sentenced to six and a half years in prison.

On the same day, about 450 miles east, in the city of Yekaterinburg, Russia, a secret Russian court convicted American journalist Evan Gershkovich to 16 years behind bars.

The U.S. government has called for the immediate release of both journalists. Press freedom groups, meanwhile, have condemned the trials as shams and said the cases underscore how Moscow’s war in Ukraine means American journalists are at a heightened risk of being used as political pawns by the Kremlin.

Kurmasheva and Gershkovich count themselves among the 22 journalists jailed in Russia at the end of 2023, more than half of whom are foreign nationals, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry and embassy in Washington did not reply to VOA’s emails requesting comment for this story.

Despite the international condemnation, Butorin has largely shouldered the responsibility of advocating for Kurmasheva’s release by himself. For months, he has found himself balancing the roles of father, journalist and advocate as he shuttles between Prague and Washington.

Hostage experts say his experience is common for American families who have a loved one held hostage or unjustly detained.

A decade ago, Diane Foley was one of them as she tried to navigate complex bureaucracy and conflicting information when Islamic State militants kidnapped and later killed her son, American journalist James Foley, in 2014.

Her experience led her to establish the Foley Foundation, which supports families and advocates for Americans unjustly jailed abroad.

“A lot of families don’t have any idea how to contact media or get their story heard, how to contact their congressman, how to get their voices heard through the bureaucracy. So we seek to help them navigate that,” she told VOA during one of her regular trips to Washington.

The U.S. government has made progress in these policy areas, she says. But so much more still needs to be done.

A longtime journalist at the Tatar-Bashkir Service of VOA’s sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL, Kurmasheva had planned only a brief visit to Russia to care for her ailing mother.

Her desk at work remains relatively untouched. Business cards are still spread out on the table. And the calendar — still set to May 2023 — shows where she underlined in black ink the dates of the ill-fated trip.

In the weeks following Kurmasheva’s jailing, her colleague Ramazan Alpaut said he still turned around at his desk, half-expecting to see Kurmasheva sitting behind him.

“We miss her here as a person and as a colleague,” he told VOA.

Kurmasheva’s arrest came as a shock for the team, and a warning that travel to see family in Russia is no longer an option.

That fact, says Tatar-Bashkir Service chief Rim Gilfanov, crystallizes an already difficult reality for exiled Russians grappling with the fallout of the war in Ukraine.

But more immediately, he says, he just wants a key member of his team back.

“Alsu is our veteran journalist,” Gilfanov says. “The main quality that comes to my mind when I think of Alsu is constant eagerness and preparedness to help everyone.”

Authoritarian regimes have long targeted RFE/RL and its journalists. Russia has designated the outlet a foreign agent and an undesirable organization. And Kurmasheva is one of four of its journalists currently in prison, including two in Belarus and one in Russian-occupied Crimea.

“It’s a grim reality that starts to set in that we are targets,” RFE/RL president and CEO Stephen Capus told VOA. “They’re trying to make the pursuit of journalism a crime.”

“They are taking me to the investigative committee right now.”

Butorin was at work when he got this distressed voice message from his wife. It was October 18, 2023, and agents dressed in black and wearing balaclavas had arrived at the home of Kurmasheva’s mother to arrest the journalist.

The next time he heard his wife’s voice was in April 2024, when she spoke to reporters from a glass defendant’s box about the poor prison conditions she was experiencing.

“We love to hear her voice. But it’s also painful to see her in a glass cage,” Butorin said.

Butorin, director of Current Time TV, a Russian-language television and digital network led by RFE/RL in partnership with VOA, was at work when he listened to the message.

His office is now part shrine, filled with photos and posters and newspaper articles about his wife. On the whiteboard, Free Alsu magnets depict a cartoon of her face. Butorin drew the image for Kurmasheva’s Gmail profile picture, he said. Now it’s on magnets and buttons — like the one pinned to the lapel of his dark blue suit jacket this July afternoon.

In a corner, next to a Lego diorama of the set of the TV show “Seinfeld” — a series the family loves to watch — is a stack of copies of No to War. The book, which Kurmasheva helped edit, features stories of 40 Russians who opposed Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Pro-Russian media have reported that Kurmasheva’s arrest is linked to that book. But to date, authorities have failed to publicly provide evidence to substantiate its charges against her.

“It’s a harmless little book,” Butorin said. “It just reminds me how incredibly arbitrary this detention is.”

Butorin has spent an unknown number of hours thinking about his wife’s captors. Are they evil personified? Or, à la Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil, are they just bureaucrats “thoughtlessly” doing their jobs?

The answer likely lies somewhere in the middle, he recognizes, but Butorin still finds himself wondering whether the judges and prosecutors once listened to her deep voice on the radio, back when she hosted a show for audiences in Tatarstan.

Kurmasheva’s long absence has been marked by bittersweet birthdays and holidays, more media interviews than Butorin can count, and five trips to Washington to press lawmakers and U.S. government officials to do more for his wife.

In his office, just a few days before he departs for one of those trips, he admits that, like many journalists, he prefers to be behind the camera instead of being the story.

But that preference for privacy is no more.

“I fear if I don’t keep this story in the news, and if I don’t keep Alsu’s story alive, that U.S. policymakers, members of the administration, of any administration, will just start forgetting about her,” Butorin said. “I see a problem there.”

Butorin, who is also a U.S. citizen, is quick to voice appreciation for the support officials and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have offered. It turns out that press freedom is one of the few issues that Democrats and Republicans can agree on.

But the trips to the American capital are also stained with frustration.

Requests to meet with Secretary of State Antony Blinken have been denied, Butorin said. (Blinken also serves as an ex officio member of the board that oversees the entities under the U.S. Agency for Global Media, including RFE/RL and VOA.) To date, the highest-ranking official Butorin has met with is Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs Rena Bitter.

Feeling optimistic can be difficult, Butorin said, when, in meeting after meeting, the same officials regurgitate the same talking points and offer little concrete information.

“Sometimes I walk out with a sense of desperation, and sometimes I find these meetings very unsatisfactory,” he says.

It’s a problem familiar to Diane Foley.

When Islamic State militants kidnapped her son in 2012, she says, the process was even more opaque.

“Our government doesn’t seem to trust these desperate families, who want their loved one back, with what information they have,” she said.

To Foley, “an undue burden” is still placed on families to fight for the U.S. government’s attention.

“It’s all on the family in the U.S. That hasn’t changed a whole lot,” she said. “It was all on me, all on our family, when Jim was taken — all on us to figure it out. And now it’s still all on the family.”

Foley and her foundation are helping Butorin navigate the process, including by working behind the scenes to push the State Department.

In that time, she has grown close to the couple’s daughters. “When I see Bibi and Miriam, God bless them. They shouldn’t, as teenagers, be dealing with this,” she said.

In late July, she and Butorin took part in a Foley Foundation event in the Capitol Building, to mark the release of its annual report on U.S. hostage policy. The foundation counts 46 Americans held hostage or unjustly detained around the world.

At the panel, Dustin Stewart, the deputy special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, spoke about the support the government offers.

Butorin rebutted that because Kurmasheva has not been declared wrongfully detained, his family is not receiving any of that support.

At the panel, Stewart told VOA, “On the process, I’ll just say, it’s ongoing.”

The designation opens up extra resources and support for families and commits the government to secure their release.

It is the biggest difference between the cases of Kurmasheva and Gershkovich, the other American journalist jailed in Russia. In the latter case, the United States declared The Wall Street Journal reporter wrongfully detained within two weeks of his arrest. Press freedom groups have criticized the State Department for not declaring Kurmasheva wrongfully detained, too.

When pressed as to if and when Kurmasheva will be designated, the State Department has on several occasions sent VOA identical or nearly identical statements that say the Department “continuously reviews the circumstances” of Americans detained overseas to determine if they are wrongful. Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, has denied VOA’s multiple requests for an interview about Kurmasheva’s case.

To cope, Butorin says compartmentalizing has become a necessary strategy.

“It may come across as a little disingenuous, but you do have to treat all these little areas of your life as projects,” he said. Those “projects” range from calling on Blinken to declare his wife wrongfully detained to dealing with the “Kafkaesque bureaucracy” of the Czech postal system that prevents him from collecting his wife’s mail.

In public events and interviews, Butorin leans toward the stoic, which he notes is unlike Kurmasheva, who can go into a room and “walk away with five or 10 new friends.”

“Some people may think that I lack emotion,” Butorin said. “But it’s all a front. I’m hurting on the inside.”

It’s when Butorin is by himself that he says he feels the most pain. “When the girls go to bed, I usually go to bed soon, too,” Butorin said, “so I’m not left alone with my thoughts.”

And when he is with the couple’s daughters, there are glimpses of the joy and the humor the family still manages to share.

After an interview in Washington, Butorin excitedly showed videos from an Olivia Rodrigo concert he attended with his daughters. Nearby, Bibi, 16, and Miriam, 12, were writing postcards to friends in Prague. Butorin made fun of one of them for how she wrote the number seven.

“You cross your sevens? That’s un-American,” he said with a smirk, provoking laughter from both girls.

When Kurmasheva eventually returns, Butorin quipped that she will find their daughters taller than she is. “But more importantly, she will see very strong young women who have had to grow up really quickly,” he said.

Sometimes, when Butorin sees videos or photos of his wife in court, he finds himself wondering whether she’s still the same person. In any case, he and his daughters aren’t.

“It’s hurting my family a lot that my mom isn’t here with us,” Bibi said. “It’s been so long already, and we just don’t want to get used to our mom not being here, because we’re getting close to that, unfortunately.”

Back in the family’s Prague apartment, the teenager alternates between talking about Taylor Swift and calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin to release her mother. On the wall opposite her, an abstract painting by her father depicts Kurmasheva pregnant with Bibi.

“At the dinner table, I always feel like there’s something missing because she’s not there. And it’s weird having to cook for one less person. And it’s weird being in the car with one less person. And it’s weird, because we were always a family of four. And now there’s one of us missing,” Bibi said.

Butorin doesn’t like to dwell on the past, and by that he primarily means Kurmasheva’s decision to travel to Russia in the first place. They were both well aware of the risks, he said.

She had traveled there without incident in 2022. But the day she left in 2023, he recalls Kurmasheva saying to him, “Tell me everything will be OK.”

Some days, Butorin wishes he hadn’t let her go. But then, Kurmasheva wouldn’t be Kurmasheva if she hadn’t gone.

“She is known as a selfless friend,” Butorin said. “That empathy and her responsibility as a devoted daughter, that was what really drove her to go to Russia.”

Bibi agreed. “She pays attention to every single person around her, and she’s really willing to give up so many things about her and her life to help others.”

As the family waits for any progress in her case, Butorin channels his wife’s unselfishness and his daughters’ resiliency.

“I don’t have the luxury of just falling apart. Honestly, that’s not an option for me,” Butorin said. “It’s just something that we have to live with. I think I’m a fairly unremarkable person. It’s just something that a father — any father — I think would do.”
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NEW YORK — The director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 vision for a complete overhaul of the federal government has stepped down, the conservative think tank confirmed Tuesday. 

Paul Dans’ exit comes after the project “completed exactly what it set out to do: bringing together over 110 leading conservative organizations to create a unified conservative vision, motivated to devolve power from the unelected administrative state, and returning it to the people,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in a statement. Roberts said the group is sticking to its original timeline. 

The news comes after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has increasingly disavowed Project 2025 amid escalating attacks by Democrats, prompting speculation that Trump’s campaign forced the exit. 

Democrats for the past several months have made Project 2025 a key election-year cudgel, pointing to the ultraconservative policy blueprint as a glimpse into how extreme another Trump administration could be. 

The nearly 1,000-page handbook lays out sweeping changes in the federal government, including altering personnel rules to ensure government workers are more loyal to the president. 

Yet Trump has repeatedly disavowed the document, saying on social media he hasn’t read it and doesn’t know anything about it. At a rally in Michigan earlier this month, he said Project 2025 was written by people on the “severe right” and some of the things in it are “seriously extreme.” 

“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement. “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.” 

Trump campaign representatives did not respond to messages inquiring about whether the campaign asked or pushed for Dans to step down from the project. The Heritage Foundation said Dans left voluntarily, and it was not under pressure from the Trump campaign. Dans didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. 

But it was almost certain that Trump’s campaign forced the shakeup, said one former Heritage aide granted anonymity to discuss the situation. 

LaCivita had been aggressively monitoring the situation, the person said. It was clear that Project 2025 was becoming a liability for Trump and the party. 

For months Trump’s campaign had warned outside groups, and Heritage in particular, that they did not speak for the former president, even though the Project 2025 team was staffed with his former White House aides and advisers. 

In an interview from the Republican convention first published by Politico, LaCivita said Project 2025 was a problem because “the issues that are going to win us this campaign are not the issues that they want to talk about.” 

Many Trump allies and former top aides contributed to the project, including Dans, who was a personnel official for the Trump administration. Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign and top Democrats have repeatedly tied Trump to Project 2025 as they argue against a second term for the former president. 

The Harris campaign said Project 2025 remains linked to Trump’s agenda. 

“Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real — in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding,” said Harris for President Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez. 

Project 2025’s website will remain live, and the group will continue vetting resumes for its nearly 20,000-person database of potential government officials ready to execute the group’s vision for government, the Heritage Foundation said Tuesday. The group said Roberts will now run Project 2025 operations.
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Washington — In the moments before NASA’s DART spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos in a landmark planetary defense test in 2022, it took high-resolution images of this small celestial object and its larger companion Didymos. 

These images have enabled scientists to unravel the complicated history of these two rocky bodies located in the vicinity of Earth and gain insight into the formation of what are called binary asteroid systems — a primary asteroid with a secondary moonlet orbiting it. 

An analysis of the craters and surface strength on Didymos indicated it formed about 12.5 million years ago. A similar analysis indicated Dimorphos formed about 300,000 years ago. Didymos probably formed in our solar system’s main asteroid belt, between the planets Mars and Jupiter, and then was knocked into the inner solar system, the researchers said. 

An examination of the largest boulders on Didymos and Dimorphos gave clues about the origins of the two asteroids. 

“Both asteroids are aggregates of rocky fragments formed from the catastrophic destruction of a parent asteroid,” said astronomer Maurizio Pajola of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Italy, lead author of one of five studies on the asteroids published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. 

“These large boulders could not have formed from impacts on the surfaces of Didymos and Dimorphos themselves, as such impacts would have disintegrated these bodies,” Pajola added. 

Didymos, which has a diameter of about a half mile (780 meters), is classified as a near-Earth asteroid. Dimorphos is roughly 560 feet (170 meters) wide. Both are “rubble pile” asteroids, composed of pieces of rocky debris that coalesced through the influence of gravity. 

“Their surface is covered with boulders. The largest on Dimorphos is the size of the school bus, while the largest on Didymos is big as soccer field,” said Olivier Barnouin, a planetary geologist and geophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland and lead author of another of the studies. 

“There are cracks on the surface and the rocks of Dimorphos, while Didymos may have finer-grained soils at the equator, although it is difficult to be sure with the images we have. The surfaces of both asteroids are weak, much weaker than loose sand,” Barnouin added. 

The researchers concluded that Dimorphos is composed of material that flew off the equatorial region of Didymos due to the speed at which it was spinning. 

“In the case of Didymos, it is thought that in the past, it rotated faster around its axis due to the YORP effect (spin acceleration driven by the effect of sunlight on its uneven surface), and thus ejected the boulders from its equatorial region, forming Dimorphos,” Pajola added. 

Didymos currently spins at a rate of once every 2-1/4 hours. 

Few boulders were observed at the equatorial region of Didymos. 

“Its equator is much smoother, while mid-latitudes up to the poles are much rougher, with big boulders sitting on the surface,” Pajola said. 

The U.S. space agency’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) carried out a proof-of-principle mission, demonstrating that a spacecraft could apply kinetic force to change the path of a space object that otherwise might be on a collision course with Earth. Didymos and Dimorphos do not pose an actual threat to Earth. 

DART struck Dimorphos on Sept. 26, 2022, at about 14,000 miles per hour (22,530 kph) at a distance of roughly 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth, and succeeded in modestly changing its path. The collision also slightly changed the shape of Dimorphos. 

The DART data has improved the understanding of binary asteroid systems. 

“Binary asteroid systems represent about 10-15% of the total number of asteroids that are in near-Earth space,” Barnouin said. “More generally, with every new observation of an asteroid or asteroid system, we learn more about how asteroids form and evolve. They are complex systems, but have some key similarities, especially when we consider the smaller — less than a kilometer (0.62 mile) — asteroids.”
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BILLINGS, Montana — At least 973 Native American children died in the U.S. government’s abusive boarding school system, according to the results of an investigation released Tuesday by officials who called on the government to apologize for the schools.

The investigation commissioned by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland found marked and unmarked graves at 65 of the more than 400 U.S. boarding schools that were established to forcibly assimilate Native American children into white society. The findings don’t specify how each child died, but the causes of death included sickness, accidents and abuse during a 150-year period that ended in 1969, officials said.

The findings follow a series of listening sessions across the United States over the past two years in which dozens of former students recounted the harsh and often degrading treatment they endured while separated from their families.

“The federal government — facilitated by the Department I lead — took deliberate and strategic actions through federal Indian boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures and connections that are foundational to Native people,” Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico and the country’s first Native American Cabinet secretary, said in a news release Tuesday.

In an initial report released in 2022, officials estimated that more than 500 children died at the schools. The federal government passed laws and policies in 1819 to support the schools, the last of which were still operating in the 1960s.

The schools gave Native American children English names, put them through military drills and forced them to perform manual labor, such as farming, brickmaking and working on the railroad, officials said.

Former students shared tearful recollections of their experience during listening sessions in Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, Arizona, Alaska and other states. They talked about being punished for speaking their native language, being locked in basements and having their hair cut to stamp out their identities. They were sometimes subjected to solitary confinement, beatings and the withholding of food. Many left the schools with only basic vocational skills that gave them few job prospects.

Donovan Archambault, 85, of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana, said he was sent away to boarding schools beginning at age 11 and was mistreated, forced to cut his hair and prevented from speaking his native language. He said he drank heavily before turning his life around more than two decades later, and never discussed his school days with his children until he wrote a book about the experience several years ago.

“An apology is needed. They should apologize,” Archambault told The Associated Press by phone Tuesday. “But there also needs to be a broader education about what happened to us. To me, it’s part of a forgotten history.”

The new report doesn’t specify who should issue the apology on behalf of the federal government, saying only that it should be issued through “appropriate means and officials to demonstrate that it is made on behalf of the people of the United States and be accompanied by bold and actionable policies.”

Interior Department officials also recommended that the government invest in programs that could help Native American communities heal from the traumas caused by boarding schools. That includes money for education, violence prevention and the revitalization of indigenous languages. Spending on those efforts should be on a scale proportional to the money spent on the schools, agency officials said.

The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by more than $23 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials determined. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the institutions received federal money as partners in the campaign to “civilize” Indigenous students, according to the new report.

By 1926, more than 80% of Indigenous school-age children — some 60,000 children — were attending boarding schools that were run either by the federal government or religious organizations, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

Legislation pending before Congress would establish a Truth and Healing Commission to document and acknowledge past injustices related to boarding schools. The measure is sponsored in the Senate by Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and backed by Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
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LOS ANGELES — A federal judge ordered Monday that the University of California, Los Angeles, craft a plan to protect Jewish students, months after pro-Palestinian protests broke out on campus.

Three Jewish students sued the university in June, alleging that they experienced discrimination on campus amid demonstrations against the Israel-Hamas war. Yitzchok Frankel, a UCLA law student who is Jewish, said in the lawsuit that he declined an invitation from the director of student life to help host a lunch gathering because he did not feel safe participating.

“Under ordinary circumstances, I would have leapt at the chance to participate in this event,” Frankel said. “My Jewish identity and religion are integral to who I am, and I believe it is important to mentor incoming students and encourage them to be proud of their Judaism, too.”

But Frankel argued UCLA was failing to foster a safe environment for Jewish students on campus.

UCLA spokesperson Mary Osako said the school is “committed to maintaining a safe and inclusive campus, holding those who engaged in violence accountable, and combatting antisemitism in all forms.”

“We have applied lessons learned from this spring’s protests and continue to work to foster a campus culture where everyone feels welcome and free from intimidation, discrimination and harassment,” Osako said in a statement.

The University was ordered to craft a proposed plan by next month.

The demonstrations at UCLA became part of a movement at campuses across the country against the Israel-Hamas war. At UCLA, law enforcement ordered in May that over a thousand protesters break up their encampment as tensions rose on campus. Counter-demonstrators had attacked the encampment overnight, and at least 15 protesters suffered injuries. In June, dozens of protesters on campus were arrested after they tried to set up a new encampment.
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MORAINE, Ohio — A Chinese automotive glass maker says it was not the target of a federal investigation that temporarily shut down production last week at its Ohio plant, the subject of the Oscar-winning Netflix film “American Factory.” 

The investigation was focused on money laundering, potential human smuggling, labor exploitation and financial crimes, Homeland Security agent Jared Murphey said Friday. 

Fuyao Glass America said authorities told it that a third-party employment company was at the center of the criminal investigation, according to a filing with the Shanghai Stock Exchange. 

Agents with the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and Internal Revenue Service, along with local authorities, carried out federal search warrants Friday at the Fuyao plant in Moraine and nearly 30 other locations in the Dayton area. 

“The company intends to cooperate fully with the investigation,” Lei Shi, Fuyao Glass America community relations manager, said in a statement to the Dayton Daily News. Messages seeking comment were left with the company on Monday. 

Production was stopped temporarily Friday, but operations resumed near the end of the day, the statement said. 

Fuyao took over a shuttered General Motors factory a decade ago and eventually hired more than 2,000 workers to make glass for the automotive industry. The company, which received millions in tax breaks and incentives from the state and local governments, has said the Ohio plant was the world’s largest auto glass production facility. 

In 2019, a production company backed by Barack and Michelle Obama released “American Factory.” The film, which won a 2020 Oscar for best feature-length documentary, looked at issues including the rights of workers, globalization and automation. 

Workers voted overwhelmingly against unionizing in 2017 after some employees complained about unsafe workplace conditions, arbitrary policies and unfair treatment on the job. Earlier that year, Fuyao agreed to pay a $100,000 penalty after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited the company for alleged violations involving machine safety, electrical hazards and a lack of personal protective gear.
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