washington — Some top U.S. officials have sought to publicly reassure Ukraine of continued support from Washington, arguing that backing Kyiv in its fight against Russia is in America’s best interest.

The United States has provided Ukraine with almost $54 billion in military equipment and other security assistance since Russian forces invaded in February 2022, including a $225 million package earlier this month.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General CQ Brown on Friday called such help from the U.S. and other Western countries crucial, warning of dire consequences if that aid stopped flowing.

“If collectively we stop supporting Ukraine, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wins,” Brown told an audience at the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado.

“What that allows, it also emboldens others,” he said. “We have credibility that’s at stake associated with this. Not just the United States, but NATO, the West.

“If we just back away, that opens the door for [Chinese President] Xi Jinping and others that [have] wanted to do unprovoked aggression.”

Some U.S. politicians, however, argue that the current level of support for Ukraine is unsustainable. And they have been led, in part, by the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio Republican Senator J.D. Vance.

“There are a lot of bad guys all over the world, and I’m much more interested in some of the problems in East Asia right now than I am in Europe,” Vance told a major security conference in Munich earlier this year.

“Can we send the level of weaponry we’ve sent for the last 18 months?” Vance asked. “We simply cannot. No matter how many checks the U.S. Congress writes, we are limited there.”

The Republicans’ presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, has also been critical at times of U.S. support for Ukraine, telling supporters during his nomination acceptance speech Thursday that the war “would never have happened if I was president.”

This past May, at a town hall event sponsored by CNN, Trump said, if elected, he would end the fighting in one day.

Brown, the most senior U.S. military official, was cautious about such predictions when pressed at the Aspen conference.

“If he can get it done in 24 hours, that’d be great,” he said, while also rejecting arguments that the U.S. is incapable of providing Ukraine with continued military support.

“We have the capability to produce,” Brown said. “We have the capacity to do it. We’ve just got to make the commitment to do it.”

Other senior U.S. officials also pushed back against arguments that Washington’s European allies are not doing enough.

“The Europeans are doing a lot more than I think Americans give them credit for,” said White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking separately at the Aspen forum.

“When you calculate their contribution to Ukraine in terms of military assistance, economic assistance, humanitarian assistance and other forms, they [European allies] are combined doing considerably more than the United States,” he said, adding that the Ukrainian cause remains popular despite some vocal skeptics.

“Poll after poll shows the American people still care,” Sullivan said. “[They] still support funding Ukraine. Still support the notion that it is our duty-bound obligation to continue to help Ukraine fight for its freedom and its sovereignty and its territorial integrity.”

Some of those supporters, including both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, have urged the White House and President Joe Biden to be even more aggressive and loosen restrictions preventing Ukraine from using U.S.-made weapons systems to strike deep in Russian territory.

“As the war has evolved, our support has evolved, the capacities we provided have evolved, and the parameters under which we’ve provided them have evolved,” Sullivan said. “But thus far, [Biden’s] policy on long-range strikes in Russia has not changed.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on Britain’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, earlier Friday to help remove those types of restrictions instituted by the U.S. and other Western allies.

Addressing a meeting of the Cabinet at the official residence of the British prime minister, Zelenskyy said Ukraine has proved it can prevent Russian attempts to expand the war by hitting Russian military targets positioned not just along the border but deeper inside Russia.

In an interview with the BBC, British Defense Secretary John Healey was asked about the issue of Ukraine’s use of British-supplied weapons, and he said nothing precludes “them hitting targets in Russia, but that must be done by the Ukrainians. It must be done within the parameters and the bounds of international humanitarian law.”

Also Friday, Zelenskyy said that following a meeting with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Thursday, Ukraine received a “positive decision from the Polish government” that will allow Ukraine to receive U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets sooner.

He did not specify what the decision was in his statement, shared on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. The Reuters news service said there was no immediate word from the Polish prime minister’s office on Zelenskyy’s comment.

VOA’s Jeff Custer contributed to this report. Some information came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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NEW YORK — A swath of Americans watching U.S. President Joe Biden is seeing something beyond debate-stage stumbles and prime-time miscues: themselves.

Debate about the 81-year-old Democrat’s fitness for another term is especially resonating with other older Americans who, like him, want to stay on the job.

“People were telling me I should retire, too,” says 89-year-old D’yan Forest, a New York comedian. “But you’ve got to keep working, no matter what.”

Forest has stumbled on an occasional joke and finds it more difficult to memorize her lines. But she’s busier than ever, drawing audiences and getting big laughs with bawdy jokes and ukulele-strummed songs. She dismisses Biden’s debate performance as a “blip” and grows angry that a single night would cause people to look past all the benefits age brings.

People 75 and older are the fastest-growing age group in the U.S. workforce. All told, about 1 in 5 Americans age 65 and older are employed, according to the Census Bureau.

Many older adults are wary of seeing a peer shoved aside because of his age and, like Forest, insist it should be up to each individual when they decide to exit the workplace.

“He has the experience,” she says. “He has judgment. He’s seen it all.”

Even among that growing population of older workers, though, some want Biden to give up.

“Forget it! The party’s over!” says Betty Ann Talomie, an 81-year-old from Seneca Falls, New York, who was born just a few weeks after the president. “Some people can’t face that it’s time.”

Talomie worked her last shift as a waitress in January. She still treasured regular customers, loved her co-workers and relished having something to occupy boring winter days. But she started feeling more tired at the end of her shift and knew the time had come.

“It’s like anything at this age: It’s twice as hard to do anything,” says Talomie.

She plans to vote for Donald Trump, as she did in 2020, but says he’s ready for retirement too.

“I think they should both sit in lounge chairs,” she says.

Biden insists he’s not stepping aside. Trump, 78, has escaped similar questioning about his age. If he is elected and serves a full term, he would eventually supplant Biden as the oldest president in U.S. history.

Eli Trujillo, an 87-year-old barber in Cheyenne, Wyoming, sees age taking its toll on Biden, but he knows he doesn’t cut hair as fast as he used to or log as many hours either.

Who is he to judge when it comes to the president’s decision?

“If he feels he could still do it,” Trujillo says, “I don’t hold it against him.”

Older employees see rampant age discrimination in their workplaces, and for those who remain on the job, being asked about retirement plans is a constant aggravation.

“They look at me and say, ‘Why don’t you retire? You can take it easy,’” says Paul Durietz, a 76-year-old teacher in Gurnee, Illinois. “I just like teaching,” he tells them.

Durietz, who teaches seventh-grade social studies, may come home a little more tired than he used to, but he says working into later life is no longer a big deal.

Polls have shown older Americans are more likely than younger people to have a favorable view of Biden and are less likely to say he should withdraw to allow another candidate. But even among older people, Biden faces steep skepticism.

Six in 10 people over 70 favored Biden’s withdrawal from the race in a survey released Wednesday by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Harriet Newman Cohen is one of them. Although she will vote for Biden if he remains, she finds his appearances painful to watch and fears he has lost all sense of self awareness.

“What’s happening now,” the 91-year-old attorney says, “is giving older age such a bad rap.”

Cohen says she hasn’t slowed at all and finds old age has brought her “more acuity, more keenness, more energy.” Even as she bristles at the idea of anyone suggesting she retire from the work she loves, she believes the time has come for Biden to step aside.

“I’ve just been so lucky,” Cohen says. “But the president has not been so lucky.”

Although many younger people can’t imagine working longer than they have to, older workers often say they can’t imagine themselves not remaining on the job.

Some who work into their 70s, 80s and beyond do so because their finances force them to, but many others do so out of preference. Polls consistently show job satisfaction grows with age and for those who love their work, deciding to quit is a tough decision.

Jim Oppegard, a 94-year-old school bus driver in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, is wrestling with whether to return to work next month as a new school year begins.

He loves the children and having extra cash to donate, and he continues to pass annual exams to make sure he’s up to the job. The Guinness World Records certified him earlier this year as the world’s oldest bus driver, an honor that made him reflect on his future.

He’s considered retiring before but has always gone back. This time might be different.

“There’s something to be said,” Oppegard says, “for going out on top.”
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Members of the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity met this week in Washington to establish concrete projects for economic development
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U.S. President Joe Biden faces physical and political isolation as he deals with COVID and as more Democrats urge him to step aside as the party’s nominee. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports.
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Though America has seen a number of political parties throughout its history, the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans still dominates the political process.
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LOS ANGELES — Bob Newhart, who fled the tedium of an accounting job to become a master of stammering, deadpan humor as a standup comedian and later as a U.S. television sitcom star, died on Thursday at the age of 94, his publicist said.

Newhart died at his home in Los Angeles after a series of short illnesses, said his longtime publicist, Jerry Digney.

Newhart had two hit shows — first playing a psychologist on “The Bob Newhart Show” from 1972 to 1978, and then portraying a Vermont innkeeper on “Newhart” from 1982 through 1990. In both shows he relied on a bland, cardigan-clad everyman character who is confounded by the oddball people around him.

Newhart was nominated for Emmy Awards nine times, beginning in 1962 for writing on his short-lived variety show, but he did not win until 2013 when he was given the award for a guest appearance on “The Big Bang Theory.”

Newhart’s career began in the late 1950s, with a comedy routine in which he played straight man to an unheard voice on the other end of a telephone call. Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers duo called Newhart “a one-man comedy team” because of his dialogues with invisible partners.

His 1960 live album, “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” was a big hit that was also highly influential. It became the first comedy album to top the charts and earned him three Grammy awards.

Newhart’s characters had a trademark stammer, which he said was not an act but the way he really talked. He said a TV producer once asked him to cut down on the stammer because it was making the shows run too long.

“‘No,’ I told him. ‘That stammer bought me a house in Beverly Hills,'” Newhart wrote in his memoir, “I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This!”

He ended his “Newhart” show in 1990 with an episode regarded as one of the most unique in the annals of U.S. television. In the last scene of the series, he awakens in bed with his wife from the first series after “dreaming” his life in the second series.

Newhart sprung from an era of angry, edgy standup comics such as Lenny Bruce, Shelley Berman and Mort Sahl, but his act was subtly subversive, without the profanity or shock used by his contemporaries.

He exploited his hesitant, bashful ordinariness to skewer society in his own fashion — including sketches about how a publicity agent would “handle” Abraham Lincoln or one featuring an inept official on the phone with a frantic man trying to defuse a bomb.

In the late 1950s, Newhart had a boring accounting job — in which he claimed that his credo was “that’s close enough” — and began writing comedy sketches with a colleague as a diversion.

Those led to radio performances and eventually a record deal with Warner Bros.

“Probably the best advice I ever got in my life was from the head of the accounting department, Mr. Hutchinson, I believe, at the Glidden Company in Chicago, and he told me, ‘You really aren’t cut out for accounting,'” Newhart told an interviewer.

Before winning an Emmy in 2013, Newhart had been nominated three times for his acting on “Newhart,” once for writing on his 1961 variety show and twice for appearances on other shows. He also was a frequent guest on variety shows and talk shows.

He appeared in several movies, including “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” “Catch-22” and “Elf.”

In 2002, he was awarded the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Asked by the New York Times in 2019 whether he felt 90 years old, Newhart said, “My mind doesn’t. I can’t turn it off.”

Newhart was introduced by comedian Buddy Hackett to his future wife, Virginia, whom he married in 1964. The Newharts had four children.
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WASHINGTON — The United States issued Yemen-related counterterrorism sanctions on Thursday targeting individuals and entities linked to Houthi financial facilitator Sa’id al-Jamal.

The Treasury Department said the actions affected a dozen people and vessels, including Indonesia-based Malaysian and Singaporean national Mohammad Roslan Bin Ahmad and China-based Chinese national Zhuang Liang, “who have facilitated illicit shipments and engaged in money laundering for the network.”
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ROME — The U.S. military is celebrating a little-known part of World War II history, honoring the Japanese-American U.S. Army unit that was key to liberating parts of Italy and France even while the troops’ relatives were interned at home as enemies of the state following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. 

Descendants of the second-generation “Nisei” soldiers traveled to Italy from around the United States – California, Hawaii and Colorado – to tour the sites where their relatives fought and attend a commemoration at the U.S. military base in Camp Darby ahead of the 80th anniversary Friday of the liberation of nearby Livorno, in Tuscany. 

Among those taking part were cousins Yoko and Leslie Sakato, whose fathers each served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which went onto become the most decorated unit in the history of the U.S. military for its size and length of service. 

“We wanted to kind of follow his footsteps, find out where he fought, where he was, maybe see the territories that he never ever talked about,” said Yoko Sakato, whose father Staff Sgt. Henry Sakato was in the 100th Battalion, Company B that helped liberate Tuscany from Nazi-Fascist rule. 

The 442nd Infantry Regiment, including the 100th Infantry Battalion, was composed almost entirely of second-generation American soldiers of Japanese ancestry, who fought in Italy and southern France. Known for its motto “Go For Broke,” 21 of its members were awarded the Medal of Honor. 

The regiment was organized in 1943, in response to the War Department’s call for volunteers to form a segregated Japanese American army combat unit. Thousands of Nisei — second-generation Japanese Americans — answered the call. 

Some of them fought as their relatives were interned at home in camps that were established in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, to house Japanese Americans who were considered to pose a “public danger” to the United States. In all, some 112,000 people, 70,000 of them American citizens, were held in these “relocation centers” through the end of the war. 

The Nisei commemoration at Camp Darby was held one week before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Livorno, or Leghorn, on July 19, 1944. Local residents were also commemorating the anniversary this week. 

In front of family members, military officials and civilians, Yoko Sakato placed flowers at the monument in memory of Pvt. Masato Nakae, one of the 21 Nisei members awarded the Medal of Honor. 

“I was feeling close to my father, I was feeling close to the other men that I knew growing up, the other veterans, because they had served, and I felt really like a kinship with the military who are here,” she said. 

Sakato recalled her father naming some of the areas and towns in Tuscany where he had fought as a soldier, but always in a very “naive” way, as he was talking to kids. 

“They were young, it must have been scary, but they never talked about it, neither him nor his friends,” Sakato said of her father, who died in 1999. 

Her cousin Leslie Sakato’s father fought in France and won a Medal of Honor for his service. “It was like coming home,” she said of the commemoration.
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Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance took center stage at the third night of the Republican National Convention Wednesday. Donald Trump’s running mate embraced an “America First” approach to foreign policy and security. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson has more from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
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MILWAUKEE — Introducing himself to the nation after being tapped as Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance is planning to use his Wednesday night address to the Republican National Convention to share the story of his hardscrabble upbringing and make the case that his party best understands the challenges facing struggling Americans.

The 39-year-old Ohio senator is a relative political unknown. In his first primetime speech since becoming the nominee for vice president, Vance is expected to talk about growing up poor in Kentucky and Ohio, his mother addicted to drugs and his father absent, and how he later went on to the highest levels of U.S. politics.

Vance, who rapidly morphed in recent years from a bitter critic of the former president to an aggressive defender, is positioned to become the future leader of the party and the torch-bearer of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” political movement, which has reshaped the Republican Party and broken longtime political norms. The first millennial to join the top of a major party ticket, he enters the race as questions about the age of the men at the top — 78-year-old Trump and 81-year-old Biden — have been high on the list of voters’ concerns.

Speaking earlier Wednesday, at his first fundraiser as Trump’s running mate, Vance said he will use the speech to highlight the contrast between Trump and Biden.

“The guy who actually connects with working people in this country is not Fake Scranton Joe, it’s Real President Donald Trump,” he said.

Vance was introduced at the fundraiser by Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, who said Trump’s decision to choose Vance wasn’t about picking a running mate or the next vice president.

“Donald Trump’s decision this week in picking JD Vance was about the future,” he said. “Donald Trump picked a man in JD Vance that is the future of the country, the future of the Republican Party, the future of the America First movement.”

Along with his relative youth, Vance is new to some of the hallmarks of Republican presidential politics: This year’s gathering is the first RNC that Vance has attended, according to a Trump campaign official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Trump, who entered the arena to a version of the song “It’s a Man’s World” by James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti, will be watching from his family box.

Convention organizers had stressed a theme of unity, even before Trump survived an attempted assassination at a rally in Pennsylvania Saturday. Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol, officials said, would be absent from the stage.

But that changed with former White House official Peter Navarro, who was greeted with enthusiastic cheers and a standing ovation hours after he was released from a Miami prison where he served four months for defying a subpoena from the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of the former president’s supporter.

“If they can come for me, if they can come for Donald Trump, be careful. They will come for you,” he said in a fiery speech. He compared his legal troubles to those faced by Trump, who earlier this year was convicted on 34 felony charges in his criminal hush money trial. Trump is also facing two indictments for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

“They did not break me,” Navarro said, “and they will never break Donald Trump.”

Also spotted on the floor of the convention: Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign chair, who was convicted as part of the investigation into Russia’s meddling in that election.

Vance is an Ivy League graduate and former businessman, but gained prominence following the publication of his bestselling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which tells the story of his blue-collar roots. The book became a must-read for those seeking to understand the cultural forces that propelled Trump to the White House that year.

Still, most Americans — and Republicans — don’t know much about Vance. According to a new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which was conducted before Trump selected the freshman senator as his choice, 6 in 10 Americans don’t know enough about him to have formed an opinion.

About 2 in 10 U.S. adults have a favorable view of him, and 22% view him negatively. Among Republicans, 61% don’t know enough to have an opinion of Vance. About one-quarter have a positive view of him, and roughly 1 in 10 have a negative one.

Vance will be introduced Wednesday night by his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is a close friend of Vance, will also speak.

Beyond Vance’s prime-time speech, the Republican Party focused Wednesday on a theme of American global strength. Speakers were to include family members of service members killed during the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and someone taken hostage during the Oct. 7 attack in Israel, according to a person familiar with the program.

Republicans contend that the country has become a “global laughingstock” under Biden’s watch. The party that was once home to defense hawks and neoconservatives has fully embraced Trump’s “America First” foreign policy that redefined relationships with allies and adversaries.

Democrats have sharply criticized Trump — and Vance — for their positions, including their questioning of U.S. support for Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion.

In a video released Wednesday by Biden’s reelection campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris dismissed Vance as someone Trump “knew would be a rubber stamp for his extreme agenda.”

“Make no mistake: JD Vance will be loyal only to Trump, not to our country,” Harris says in a video.
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LOS ANGELES — A former Syrian military official who oversaw a prison where human rights officials say torture and abuse routinely took place has been arrested, authorities said Wednesday.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents took Samir Ousman al-Sheikh into custody last week at Los Angeles International Airport, said agency spokesperson Greg Hoegner.

The 72-year-old has been charged with immigration fraud, specifically that he denied on his U.S. visa and citizenship applications that he had ever persecuted anyone in Syria, according to a criminal complaint filed on July 9 and reviewed by The Associated Press. Investigators are considering additional charges against al-Sheikh, the complaint shows.

He was in charge of Syria’s infamous Adra Prison from 2005 to 2008 under President Bashar Assad. Human rights groups and United Nations officials have accused the Syrian government of widespread abuses in its detention facilities, including torture and arbitrary detention of thousands of people, in many cases without informing their families about their fate. Many remain missing and are presumed to have died or been executed.

“This is the highest-level Assad regime official arrested anywhere in the world. … This is a really big deal,” said Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a U.S.-based opposition organization.

Moustafa said Wednesday that one of his staff members, a former Syrian detainee, was first tipped off in 2022 by a refugee that there was “potentially a war criminal” in the United States. His organization alerted several federal agencies and began working with them to build a case against al-Sheikh.

Al-Sheikh’s attorney, Peter Hardin, called it a “simple misunderstanding of immigration forms” that has been politicized and said al-Sheikh “finds himself being made a pawn caught up in a larger international struggle.”

“He vigorously denies these abhorrent accusations,” Hardin said.

Investigators interviewed five former inmates at the Syrian prison, who described being hanged by their arms from the ceiling, severely beaten with electrical cables, and witnessing other prisoners being branded by hot rods, according to court documents. One inmate described how guards broke his back.

According to the complaint, al-Sheikh, a resident of Los Angeles since 2020, stated in his citizenship application that he had “never persecuted (either directly or indirectly) any person because of race, religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” and “never been involved in killing or trying to kill someone.” This was false, as al-Sheikh persecuted political dissidents and ordered the execution of prisoners while he was head of Adra, the complaint states.

He began his career working police command posts before transferring to Syria’s domestic intelligence agency, which focused on countering political dissent, the complaint says. He later became head of Adra Prison and brigadier general in 2005. He also served for one year as the governor of Deir Ez-Zour, a region northeast of the Syrian capital of Damascus, where there were violent crackdowns against protesters.

He had purchased a one-way plane ticket to depart LAX on July 10, en route to Beirut, Lebanon, which shares a border with Syria, according to the complaint. After his arrest, al-Sheikh made his first appearance in Los Angeles federal court last Friday. He has family in the United States, including a daughter living in the Los Angeles area, according to the Syrian Emergency Task Force.

Syria’s civil war, which has left nearly half a million people dead and displaced half the country’s prewar population of 23 million, began as peaceful protests against Assad’s government in March 2011.

Other players in the war, now in its 14th year, have also been accused of abuse of detainees, including insurgent groups and the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which guard suspected and convicted Islamic State members imprisoned in northeastern Syria.

In May, a French court sentenced three high-ranking Syrian officials in absentia to life in prison for complicity in war crimes in a landmark case against Assad’s regime and the first such case in Europe.

The court proceedings came as Assad had begun to shed his longtime status as a pariah because of the violence unleashed on his opponents. Human rights groups involved in the case hoped it would refocus attention on alleged atrocities.
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Washington — Russia and China are edging ever closer to unleashing space-based weapons, a decision that could have far-reaching implications for America’s ability to defend itself, U.S. military and intelligence agencies warn.

Adding to the concern, they say, is what appears to be a growing willingness by both countries to set aside long-running suspicions and animosity in order to gain an edge over the United States.

“I would highlight … the increasing amount in intent to use counterspace capabilities,” said Lieutenant General Jeff Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“Both Russia and China view the use of space early on, even ahead of conflict, as important capabilities to deter or to compel behaviors,” Kruse told the annual Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday. “We just need to be ready.”

Concerns about the safety of space surged earlier this year when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner called for the declassification of “all information” related to what was described as a new Russian anti-satellite capability involving nuclear weapons.

More recently, Turner has warned that the U.S. is “sleepwalking” into a disaster, saying that Russia is on the verge of being able to detonate a nuclear weapon in space, which would impose high costs on the U.S. military and economy.

The White House has responded repeatedly that U.S. officials have been aware of the Russian plans, and that Moscow has not yet deployed a space-based nuclear capability.

It is a stance that Kruse reaffirmed Wednesday, with added caution.

“We have been tracking for almost a decade Russia’s intent to design the ability to put a nuclear weapon in space,” he said. “They have progressed down to a point where we think they’re getting close.”

The Russians “don’t intend to slow down, and until there’s repercussions, will not slow down,” he said.

Russian and Chinese officials have yet to respond to VOA’s requests for reaction to the latest U.S. accusations, but both countries have repeatedly denied U.S. criticisms of their space policies.

In May, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov dismissed U.S. concerns about Moscow trying to put nuclear weapons in space as “fake news.”

But the Chinese Embassy in Washington, while admitting there are some “difficulties” when it comes to China-U.S. relations in space, rejected any suggestion Beijing is acting belligerently in space.

“China always advocates the peaceful use of outer space, opposes weaponizing space or an arms race in space and works actively toward the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind in space,” spokesperson Liu Pengyu told VOA in an email.

“The U.S. has been weaving a narrative about the so-called threat posed by China in outer space in an attempt to justify its own military buildup to seek space hegemony,” Liu said. “It is just another illustration of how the U.S. clings on to the Cold War mentality and deflects responsibility.”

Despite Beijing’s public posture, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Kruse suggested Wednesday that China’s rapid expansion into the space domain is just as worrisome.

“They’re in multiple orbits that they did not used to be before,” he told the audience in Aspen, Colorado, warning that Beijing has already invested heavily in directed energy weapons, electronic warfare capabilities and anti-satellite technology.

“China is the one country that more so even than the United States has a space doctrine, a space strategy, and they train and exercise the use of space and counterspace capabilities in a way that we just don’t see elsewhere,” he said.

The general in charge of U.S. Space Command described the Chinese threat in even starker terms.

“China is building a kill web, if you will, in space,” said General Stephen Whiting, speaking alongside Kruse at the Aspen conference. 

“In the last six years, they’ve tripled the number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites they have on orbit — hundreds and hundreds of satellites, again, purpose built and designed to find, fix, track target and, yes, potentially engage U.S. and allied forces across the Indo-Pacific,” he said.

Whiting also raised concerns about the lack of clear military communication with China about space.

“We want to have a way to talk to them about space safety as they put more satellites on orbit,” he said, “so that we can operate effectively and don’t have any miscommunication or unintended actions that cause a misunderstanding.”
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Milwaukee —  On the floor of the Republican National Convention Tuesday evening, vice presidential candidate JD Vance greeted and shook hands with excited delegates as he walked toward his seat.

It was a marked contrast from former President Donald Trump, who entered the hall a few minutes later and was separated from supporters by a column of Secret Service agents. His ear still bandaged after an attempted assassination, Trump closely hugged the wall. Instead of handshakes or hellos for those gathered, he offered fist pumps to the cameras.

The contrast underscores the new reality facing Trump after a gunman opened fire at his rally in Pennsylvania Saturday, raising serious questions about the agency that is tasked with protecting the president, former presidents and major-party candidates. Trump’s campaign must also adjust to a new reality after he came millimeters from death or serious injury — and as law enforcement warns of the potential for more political violence.

Trump campaign officials declined to comment on the stepped-up security and how it might impact his interactions going forward.

“We do not comment on President Trump’s security detail. All questions should be directed to the United States Secret Service,” said Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose agency oversees the Secret Service, said Monday that he could not discuss “specifics of the protection or the enhancements made, as they involve sensitive tactics and procedures. I can say, however, that personnel and other protective resources, technology, and capabilities have been added.”

The Secret Service had already stepped up Trump’s protection in the days before the attack following an unrelated threat from Iran, two U.S. officials said Tuesday. But that extra security didn’t stop the gunman, who fired from an adjacent roof, from killing one audience member and injuring two others along with Trump.

The FBI and Homeland Security officials remain “concerned about the potential for follow-on or retaliatory acts of violence following this attack,” according to a joint intelligence bulletin by Homeland Security and the FBI and obtained by The Associated Press. The bulletin warned that lone actors and small groups will “continue to see rallies and campaign events as attractive targets.”

Underscoring the security risks, a man armed with an AK-47 pistol, wearing a ski mask and carrying a tactical backpack was taken into custody Monday near the Fiserv Forum, where the convention is being held.

The attack has led to stepped-up security not only for Trump. President Joe Biden’s security has also been bolstered, with more agents surrounding him as he boarded Air Force One to Las Vegas on Monday night. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also received Secret Service protection in the shooting’s wake.

Trump’s campaign has also responded in other ways, including placing armed security at all hours outside their offices in Florida and Washington, D.C.

Trump has already scheduled his next rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday. That’s where he will appear with Vance for their first event as a presidential ticket.

But the new posture complicates, at least for now, the interactions Trump regularly has with supporters as he signs autographs, shakes hands and poses for selfies at events and on airplane tarmacs.
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