Highly classified military and intelligence documents that appeared online, with details ranging from Ukraine’s air defenses to Israel’s Mossad spy agency, have U.S. officials scrambling to identify the leak’s source, with some Western security experts and U.S. officials saying they suspected it could be someone from the United States. 

Officials say the breadth of topics addressed in the documents, which touch on the war in Ukraine, China, the Middle East and Africa, suggest they may have been leaked by an American rather than an ally. 

“The focus now is on this being a U.S. leak, as many of the documents were only in U.S. hands,” Michael Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official, told Reuters in an interview. 

U.S. officials said the investigation is in its early stages and those running it have not ruled out the possibility that pro-Russian elements were behind the leak, which is seen as one of the most serious security breaches since more than 700,000 documents, videos and diplomatic cables appeared on the WikiLeaks website in 2013. 

The Russian embassy in Washington and the Kremlin did not respond to requests for comment. 

Following disclosure of the leak, Reuters has reviewed more than 50 documents labeled “Secret” and “Top Secret” that first appeared last month on social media websites, beginning with Discord and 4Chan. While some of the documents were posted weeks ago, their existence was first reported on Friday by The New York Times. 

Reuters has not independently verified the authenticity of the documents. Some giving battlefield casualty estimates from Ukraine appeared to have been altered to minimize Russian losses. It is not clear why at least one is marked unclassified but includes top secret information. Some documents are marked “NOFORN,” meaning they cannot be released to foreign nationals. 

The White House referred questions to the Pentagon. 

In a statement on Sunday, the Pentagon said it was reviewing the validity of the photographed documents that “appear to contain sensitive and highly classified material.” 

The Pentagon has referred the issue to the Department of Justice, which has opened a criminal investigation. 

One of the documents, dated Feb. 23 and marked “Secret,” outlines in detail how Ukraine’s S-300 air defense systems would be depleted by May 2 at the current usage rate. 

Such closely guarded information could be of great use to Russian forces, and Ukraine said its president and top security officials met on Friday to discuss ways to prevent leaks. 

Watching allies 

Another document, marked “Top Secret” and from a CIA Intel update from March 1, says the Mossad intelligence agency was encouraging protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to tighten controls on the Supreme Court. 

The document said the U.S. learned this through signals intelligence, suggesting the United States had been spying on one of its most important allies in the Middle East. 

In a statement on Sunday, Netanyahu’s office described the assertion as “mendacious and without any foundation whatsoever.” 

Another document gave details of internal discussions among senior South Korean officials about U.S. pressure on Seoul to help supply weapons to Ukraine, and its policy of not doing so. 

A South Korean presidential official said on Sunday the country was aware of news reports about the leaked documents and it plans to discuss “issues raised” with Washington. 

The Pentagon has not addressed the contents of any specific documents, including the apparent surveillance of allies. 

Two U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that while there was concern about the leak at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, the documents showed a snapshot in time from more than a month ago, rather than more recent assessments. 

The two officials said the military and intelligence agencies were looking at their processes for how widely some of the intelligence is shared internally. 

Officials are looking at what motivations a U.S. official or a group of officials would have in leaking such sensitive information, said one of the officials who spoke to Reuters. 

The official said investigators were looking at four or five theories, from a disgruntled employee to an insider threat who actively wanted to undermine U.S. national security interests. 
…

Audiences said let’s go to the movie theater for “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” this weekend. The animated offering from Universal and Illumination powered up with $204.6 million in its first five days in 4,343 North American theaters, including $146.4 million over the weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday.

With an estimated $173 million in international earnings and a global total of $377 million, “Mario” broke records for video game adaptations (passing “Warcraft’s” $210 million) and animated films (“Frozen 2’s” $358 million).

Its global total makes it the biggest opening of 2023 and the second biggest three-day domestic animated opening (behind “Finding Dory”). It’s also a record for Illumination, the animation shop behind successful franchises like “Minions,” which has made over $5 billion from its 13 films.

“This partnership between Nintendo and Illumination is just incredible and led to this extraordinary performance,” said Jim Orr, Universal’s president of domestic distribution.

The PG-rated “Mario” is an origin story of Brooklyn plumbers Mario, voiced by Chris Pratt, and Luigi (Charlie Day), who fall into a pipe and come out in another world full of Nintendo’s most famous characters, from Bowser (Jack Black) to Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy). Critics were largely mixed. “Mario” currently has a 56% on Rotten Tomatoes. But audiences were more favorable, giving it an A CinemaScore.

Orr said that theater owners were surprised by just how broad the audiences were and reported seeing some ticket buyers decked out in character costumes for the movie. According to exit polls, 59% of the audience was male and 45% were between the ages of 18 and 34.

“$377 million worldwide is just astounding and a testament to how important outside of the home activities are for families,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “Kids and their parents collectively were able to go out, have an outside the home event for the whole family at a relatively bargain price compared to a trip or a sporting event.”

Also, Dergarabedian noted, there is a long runway before “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” opens on May 5.

“This was a perfect release date,” Dergarabedian said.

“Mario” wasn’t the only movie based on a brand that opened in theaters this week. Ben Affleck’s “Air,” about the origins of Nike’s Air Jordan and how the corporation signed Michael Jordan, also debuted in 3,507 theaters Wednesday. The film, which marks Amazon Studios’ first global theatrical release, has grossed an estimated $20.2 million since opening Wednesday in North America, with $14.5 million coming from the weekend to give it a fourth-place start.

With an R-rating, “Air,” starring Matt Damon, Viola Davis and Affleck, was a bit of adult-targeted counter programming to the “Mario” juggernaut. Reviews were glowing (95% on Rotten Tomatoes) for the film which debuted as a surprise screening at the South by Southwest Film Festival last month, helping to bolster buzz. Audiences were 55% male and 39% over the age of 45.

“‘Air’ found its audience. It’s a solid gross,” Dergarabedian said. “This one is in it for the long haul.”

“Air” is the first film from Affleck and Damon’s new company Artists Equity which was formed last year in partnership with RedBird Capital.

Second place went to “John Wick Chapter 4” which made $14.6 million in its third weekend, bringing its total grosses to $147.1 million. Close behind was “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” which placed third with $14.5 million in its second weekend, while “Scream VI” rounded out the top 5 with $3.3 million.

In limited release, Kelly Reichardt’s art centric ” Showing Up,” with Michelle Williams and Hong Chau, also bowed on four screens, grossing $66,932.

“This is such an important weekend for theaters, a home stretch heading into the summer movie season, and this is a perfect scenario,” Dergarabedian said. “It’s game on for movie theaters when a lot of people thought it was game over.”

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” $146.4 million.

2. “John Wick: Chapter 4,” $14.6 million.

3. “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” $14.5 million.

4. “Air,” $14.5 million.

5. “Scream VI,” $3.3 million.

6. “His Only Son,” $3.3 million.

7. “Creed III,” $2.8 million.

8. “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” $1.6 million.

9. “Paint,” $750,000.

10. “A Thousand and One,” $600,000.
    …

Electric car maker Tesla Inc. plans to build a factory in Shanghai to produce power-storage devices for sale worldwide, state media reported Sunday.

Plans call for annual production of 10,000 Megapack units, according to the Xinhua News Agency and state television. They said the company made the announcement at a signing ceremony in Shanghai, where Tesla operates an auto factory.

The factory is due to break ground in the third quarter of this year and start production in the second quarter of 2024, the reports said.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to requests for information.
…

More than half a century before the Pilgrims set up a colony at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, and 42 years before the first permanent English settlement in North America was founded at Jamestown in Virginia, the Spanish established the city of St. Augustine in the far northeastern corner of Florida.

And yet, despite its status as the oldest continuously occupied settlement founded by non-Indigenous residents in the United States, St. Augustine is rarely mentioned in American history classes.

“I think it’s because it’s Spanish colonial history that we’re talking about,” says Nancy Sikes-Klein, mayor of St. Augustine. “Some people might say it’s Anglo biased.”

Retired American history professor Thomas Graham, who says he can trace his lineage back to the Spanish period, agrees.

“People are oriented towards the northeast, towards the original English-speaking colonies, and for the longest time, St. Augustine and Florida were part of the Spanish Empire,” says Graham, who taught at Flagler College in St. Augustine before retiring in 2008. “St. Augustine and Florida have been neglected for a long time. Although that’s changing a bit as our horizons have broadened.”

The Spanish controlled St. Augustine from 1565 until 1821, except for a brief period of English rule between 1763 and 1783. St. Augustine became part of the United States in 1821 when Spain peacefully turned its Florida territories, which had become a financial burden, over to the Americans.

Today, St. Augustine is a relatively small town. It covers 10.7 square miles (27.7 square kilometers) and has a population of about 15,000.

And, despite centuries of Spanish rule, little visual evidence of Spain’s influence remains in St. Augustine because most of the buildings from that era are long gone.

“We have a plaza, and we have streets laid out in a grid in a traditional Spanish, and before that, Roman style,” Graham says. “The streets are still here, the narrow streets, the small city blocks, and they survive as a part of the oldest part of St. Augustine.”

The oldest structure in St. Augustine is Castillo de San Marcos, a fort built by the Spanish in 1695 to protect against English attacks. The fort is now a national monument.

“It was designed to protect an entire town. Whoever controls the city of St. Augustine and that fortress, at the time, controlled the territory of Florida,” says Chris Leverett of the National Park Service. “The records we have of St. Augustine being under attack describe the town being surrounded by ships, and soldiers occupying the city, the town’s inhabitants taking shelter within the fort.”

The central plaza, as well as the buildings surrounding it, were a key part of St. Augustine’s heyday as a playground for wealthy Americans escaping harsh winters in northern U.S. states. In the 1870s, American industrialist Henry Flagler, a founder of Standard Oil, decided to build three world-class hotels — Hotel Ponce de Leon, Hotel Alcazar and Hotel Cordova — for rich visitors.

“He saw that wealthy northerners have discovered that St. Augustine had warm weather and sunshine in January, which New York did not have,” Graham says. “Prior to this, resort hotels tended to be what we would think of as frontier hotels. You went to one of these hotels and you expected to rough it. You expected that the accommodations and food would not be as good. And, Flagler said, ‘We’re going to change that.’”

But the wealthy didn’t stay long. Within 20 years, the rich discovered that Palm Beach, Florida, had even better weather. Today, Hotel Ponce de Leon is Flagler College and Hotel Alcazar, once famous for its casino and enormous swimming pool, houses city hall and a museum. Only Hotel Cordova, the smallest of the three, still hosts overnight guests, but is now called Hotel Casa Monica.

Still, tourism remains a main source of income for the city. More than 3 million people visited St. Augustine between July 2021 and June 2022. Many are day-trippers, and the city is looking for ways to entice them to stay longer.

“We would like to see the cultural visitor, the civic tourist so to speak, because we feel like they will stay longer and they will dig deeper,” Sikes-Klein says. “We have so many layers of history here that we want them to stay longer so that they can explore.”

The city hopes to attract even more visitors as St. Augustine’s status as the nation’s oldest continuously occupied U.S. city becomes more widely known. Centuries after its founding, the historic city still waits to be fully appreciated by a modern audience.
…

Tiger Woods withdrew from the Masters before the resumption of the third round Sunday, ending his streak of completing all 72 holes of every tournament he has played at Augusta National as a professional.

The tournament said about 90 minutes before play was to begin that Woods, who is still hobbled by the effects of a 2021 car accident that nearly cost him his right leg, had withdrawn with an injury. He had limped through practice rounds early in the week and again during the first and second rounds, but it had become more pronounced as the weather worsened.

The five-time champion finished his second round in cold, driving rain on Saturday to make the cut on the number at 3 over, extending his Masters streak to 23 straight and tying Fred Couples and Gary Player for the longest in history.

The 47-year-old Woods headed back out for the start of the third round as temperatures struggled to reach 50 degrees, and it wound up being a water-logged slog. Wearing a gray winter hat over a baseball cap, he started on the 10th hole with a bogey, added another at No. 14, and then had back-to-back double bogeys after finding the water on Nos. 15 and 16.

It was the first time Woods has ever had consecutive double bogeys at the Masters.

By the time the horn blew ending play with rain still pouring and puddles beginning to stand at Augusta National, Woods was at 9 over and alone in last place among those that made the cut. That was 22 shots behind leader Brooks Koepka.

The 15-time major champion also withdrew before the final round of last year’s PGA Championship with what his agent, Mark Steinberg, described as pain and discomfort in his right foot. That came hours after he shot 79 at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in similarly cold and windy weather.

 
…

Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who tried Nazis for genocidal war crimes and was among the first outside witnesses to document the atrocities of Nazi labor and concentration camps, has died. He turned 103 in March.

Ferencz died Friday evening in Boynton Beach, Florida, according to St. John’s University law professor John Barrett, who runs a blog about the Nuremberg trials. The death also was confirmed by the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington.

“Today the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes,” the museum tweeted.

Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz immigrated as a very young boy with his parents to New York to escape rampant antisemitism. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz joined the U.S. Army in time to take part in the Normandy invasion during World War II. Using his legal background, he became an investigator of Nazi war crimes against U.S. soldiers as part of a new War Crimes Section of the Judge Advocate’s Office.

When U.S. intelligence reports described soldiers encountering large groups of starving people in Nazi camps watched over by SS guards, Ferencz followed up with visits, first at the Ohrdruf labor camp in Germany and then at the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. At those camps and later others, he found bodies “piled up like cordwood” and “helpless skeletons with diarrhea, dysentery, typhus, TB, pneumonia, and other ailments, retching in their louse ridden bunks or on the ground with only their pathetic eyes pleading for help,” Ferencz wrote in an account of his life.

“The Buchenwald concentration camp was a charnel house of indescribable horrors,” Ferencz wrote. “There is no doubt that I was indelibly traumatized by my experiences as a war crimes investigator of Nazi extermination centers. I still try not to talk or think about the details.”

At one point toward the end of the war, Ferencz was sent to Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps to search for incriminating documents but came back empty-handed.

After the war, Ferencz was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army and returned to New York to begin practicing law. But that was short-lived. Because of his experience as a war crimes investigator, he was recruited to help prosecute Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, which had begun under the leadership of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Before leaving for Germany, he married his childhood sweetheart, Gertrude.

At the age of 27, with no previous trial experience, Ferencz became chief prosecutor for a 1947 case in which 22 former commanders were charged with murdering more than 1 million Jews, Romani and other enemies of the Third Reich in Eastern Europe.  

Rather than depending on witnesses, Ferencz mostly relied on official German documents to make his case. All the defendants were convicted, and more than a dozen were sentenced to death by hanging even though Ferencz hadn’t asked for the death penalty.

“At the beginning of April 1948, when the long legal judgment was read, I felt vindicated,” he wrote. “Our pleas to protect humanity by the rule of law had been upheld.”

With the war crimes trials winding down, Ferencz went to work for a consortium of Jewish charitable groups to help Holocaust survivors regain properties, homes, businesses, art works, Torah scrolls, and other Jewish religious items that had been confiscated from them by the Nazis. He also later assisted in negotiations that would lead to compensation to the Nazi victims.

In later decades, Ferencz championed the creation of an international court that could prosecute any government’s leaders for war crimes. Those dreams were realized in 2002 with establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, though its effectiveness has been limited by the failure of countries like the United States to participate.

Ferencz is survived by a son and three daughters. His wife died in 2019.
…

Visitors at the Memphis Zoo said goodbye Saturday to giant panda Ya Ya during a farewell party ahead of her departure back to China.

Highlighted by Chinese cultural performances, the sendoff marked the end of a 20-year loan agreement with the Chinese Association of Zoological Gardens that landed Ya Ya in Memphis. About 500 people attended the event, which featured a demonstration by the Tennessee Happy Kung Fu School.

Ya Ya was born August 3, 2000, in Beijing. She was joined in Memphis under the loan agreement by Le Le, a male panda who was born July 18, 1998, and died in February ahead of the pair’s planned return to China.

Ya Ya will likely head back to China at the end of month, according to zoo spokesperson Rebecca Winchester.

The zoo says the pandas were key to research and conservation projects and helped people experience some of Chinese culture.

The life expectancy of a giant panda in the wild is about 15 years, but in captivity they have lived to be as old as 38. Decades of conservation efforts in the wild and study in captivity saved the giant panda species from extinction, increasing its population from fewer than 1,000 at one time to more than 1,800 in the wild and captivity.

Advocacy groups In Defense of Animals and Panda Voices previously applauded the return to China, saying the pandas had been suffering in the zoo setting. Zoo officials said the groups were spreading false information. Zoo President and CEO Matt Thompson called Le Le and Ya Ya “two of the most spoiled animals on the planet.”

A memorial for Le Le was on display at the zoo Saturday.
…

The Biden administration next week will begin testing faster asylum screenings for migrants caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, the Department of Homeland Security said on Saturday, part of preparations for the end of COVID-19 border restrictions in May.

U.S. asylum officers will conduct initial asylum screenings for a small number of migrants within days while they remain in the custody of border authorities, Homeland Security spokesperson Marsha Espinosa said. The interviews will take place over the phone and migrants will have access to legal counsel during the screenings, she said.

U.S. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, has implemented new border restrictions in recent months as he grapples with record numbers of migrants caught crossing illegally. Former U.S. President Donald Trump, a Republican, also used rapid asylum screenings to speed up the resolution of cases but those screenings were conducted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel and without the guarantee of legal representation.

Since March 2020, U.S. authorities have been able to quickly expel migrants caught crossing the border illegally back to Mexico under a COVID-19 order known as Title 42. The order is set to end on May 11 along with the broader pandemic public health emergency and the Biden administration is bracing for a possible rise in crossings afterward.

The experiment with faster asylum screenings “will inform best practices” if the administration decides to apply it more broadly in the future, Espinosa said. The spokesperson declined to say where on the border it would be implemented next week.

Reuters first reported in December that Biden officials were weighing whether to use the accelerated asylum screenings among other Trump-style restrictions.
…

North Dakota lawmakers have appointed an Ojibwe woman as the state’s poet laureate, making her the first Native American to hold the position in the state and increasing attention to her expertise on the troubled history of Native American boarding schools.

Denise Lajimodiere, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band in Belcourt, has written several award-winning books of poetry. She’s considered a national expert on the history of Native American boarding schools and wrote an academic book called Stringing Rosaries in 2019 on the atrocities experienced by boarding school survivors.

“I’m honored and humbled to represent my tribe. They are and always will be my inspiration,” Lajimodiere said in an interview, following a bipartisan confirmation of her two-year term as poet laureate on Wednesday.

Poet laureates represent the state in inaugural speeches, commencements, poetry readings and educational events, said Kim Konikow, executive director of the North Dakota Council on the Arts.

Lajimodiere, an educator who earned her doctorate degree from the University of North Dakota, said she plans to leverage her role as poet laureate to hold workshops with Native students around the state. She wants to develop a new book that focuses on them.

Lajimodiere’s appointment is impactful and inspirational because “representation counts at all levels,” said Nicole Donaghy, executive director of the advocacy group North Dakota Native Vote and a Hunkpapa Lakota from the Standing Rock Nation.

The more Native Americans can see themselves in positions of honor, the better it is for our communities, Donaghy said.

“I’ve grown up knowing how amazing she is,” said Rep. Jayme Davis, a Democrat of Rolette, who is from the same Turtle Mountain Band as Lajimodiere. “In my mind, there’s nobody more deserving.”

By spotlighting personal accounts of what boarding school survivors experienced, Lajimodiere’s book Stringing Rosaries sparked discussions on how to address injustices Native people have experienced, Davis said.

From the 18th century and continuing as late as the 1960s, networks of boarding schools institutionalized the legal kidnapping, abuse and forced cultural assimilation of Indigenous children in North America. Much of Lajimodiere’s work grapples with trauma as it was felt by Native people in the region.

“Sap seeps down a fir tree’s trunk like bitter tears…. I brace against the tree and weep for the children, for the parents left behind, for my father who lived, for those who didn’t,” Lajimodiere wrote in a poem based on interviews with boarding school victims, published in her 2016 book Bitter Tears.

Davis, the legislator, said Lajimodiere’s writing informs ongoing work to grapple with the past like returning ancestral remains — including boarding school victims — and protecting tribal cultures going forward by codifying the federal Indian Child Welfare Act into state law.

The law, enacted in 1978, gives tribes power in foster care and adoption proceedings involving Native children. North Dakota and several other states have considered codifying it this year, as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a challenge to the federal law.

The U.S. Department of the Interior released a report last year that identified more than 400 Native American boarding schools that sought to assimilate Native children into white society. The federal study found that more than 500 students died at the boarding schools but officials expect that figure to grow exponentially as research continues.
…

Joe Blewitt is just about the busiest man in Ballina. His phone rings constantly with calls from locals and the world’s media as he prepares to welcome a relative — U.S. President Joe Biden. 

Biden is scheduled to travel to Ireland next week, with a stop in Ballina, the town from which one of his great-great grandfathers left for the United States in 1850. Blewitt, a distant cousin who first met Biden when he came to town as vice president in 2016, said the U.S. leader pledged to return once he’d won the presidency. 

“He said, ‘I’m going to come back into Ballina.’ And sure to God he’s going to come back into Ballina,” Blewitt said. “His Irish roots are really deep in his heart.” 

The 43-year-old plumber was among Biden relations invited to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day last month. He says it was a “surreal” experience that included a half-hour private meeting with the president. 

“He’s a people person. He loves meeting the Irish people,” said Blewitt, who shares Biden’s high forehead — he says people joke that he looks like the president “from the mouth up.” 

“The Irish people love him back.” 

Buildings are getting a new coat of paint and American flags are being hung from shopfronts in Ballina, a bustling agricultural town of about 10,000 at the mouth of the River Moy in western Ireland that proclaims itself the nation’s “salmon capital.” 

There’s already a mural of a beaming Biden, erected in 2020 in the center of town. Many people from Ballina and the surrounding County Mayo moved to Pennsylvania in the 19th century. Ballina is twinned with Scranton, Biden’s hometown. 

“I wouldn’t think there’s a family in Ballina that doesn’t have someone, some connection with the States,” said Anthony Heffernan, owner of Heffernan’s Fine Foods, where Biden had lunch with his local relatives during his 2016 visit. 

“It was a fantastic day for Ballina,” Heffernan recalled. 

“He was very keen to talk about the town — how it was, and how it is now. He was really connected with the area.” 

The White House says Biden will visit Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Tuesday and Wednesday to mark 25 years since the Good Friday peace accord, before heading south to the Republic of Ireland, where he will address the Dublin parliament. In Ballina, he’s due to deliver a speech Friday in front of the 19th-century cathedral, which local lore says was built partly using bricks supplied by his great-great-great grandfather, Edward Blewitt, a brickmaker and civil engineer. 

The Irish Family History Center says Biden “is among the most ‘Irish’ of all U.S. Presidents” — 10 of his 16 great-great grandparents were from the Emerald Isle. All of them left for the U.S. during the Great Famine of the mid-19th century, which killed an estimated 1 million people. 

Biden also plans to visit the Cooley Peninsula in County Louth, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) from Ballina on Ireland’s east coast. His great-grandfather, James Finnegan, left the mountainous, wind-battered peninsula as a child in 1850, one of more than a million Irish people who emigrated during the famine years. 

“There’s a great sense of euphoria around the place. Everyone is asking ‘What’s happening, when’s he coming, where’s he going?'” said Andrea McKevitt, a local politician and distant Biden relative. 

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that the president would use his Irish trip to highlight “how his family history is part of that larger shared history” between the U.S. and Ireland. 

The trip is also a reminder of the central role of Irish Americans in U.S. political life. Ireland has warmly welcomed American presidents since John F. Kennedy became the first to visit in 1963. Barack Obama got a jubilant reception in 2011 when he visited the tiny hamlet of Moneygall, home to one of his great-great-great grandfathers. 

“My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way,” he joked to a crowd in Dublin. 

More than 30 million Americans — almost one in 10 — claim some Irish ancestry. Richard Johnson, senior lecturer in U.S. politics at Queen Mary University of London, said Irish Americans no longer form the solidly Democrat voting bloc of decades gone by, but it’s still “good politics domestically for Americans to emphasize their Irish roots.” 

“One of the reasons Irish identity resonates so much with Americans is that U.S. identity is based in part on the notion that the United States broke free from the British Empire and set its own course,” he said. “There is a kind of echo of that story that can be found in the Irish experience. It makes it feel like the Irish have shared a common experience of breaking out of British rule that I think is attractive to Americans.” 

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said Biden “has always been a friend of Ireland,” and the visit would be “an opportunity to welcome a great Irish-American president home.” 

In Ballina, Blewitt said the town is getting ready to give Biden a rousing welcome. 

“The streets will be packed,” he said. “It’ll be like another St. Patrick’s Day.”
…

Tennessee has become a new front in the battle for the future of American democracy after Republicans expelled two Black lawmakers from the state Legislature for their part in a protest urging passage of gun-control measures. 

In separate votes Thursday, the GOP supermajority expelled Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, a move leaving about 140,000 voters in primarily Black districts in Nashville and Memphis with no representation in the Tennessee House.  

Kevin Webb, a 53-year-old teacher from Pearson’s district, said removing him “for such a small infraction” is “classic America.” 

“There’s been bias against Black individuals in this country for 500 years,” Webb said. “What makes us think that it’s going to stop all of a sudden?” 

Pearson and Jones were expelled in retaliation for their role in the protest, which unfolded in the aftermath of a school shooting in Nashville that killed six people, including three young students. A third Democrat was spared expulsion by a one-vote margin. 

The removal of the lawmakers, who were only recently elected, reflects a trend in dozens of states where Republicans are trying to make it harder to cast ballots and challenging the integrity of the election process. 

At least 177 bills restricting voting or creating systems that can intimidate voters or permit partisan interference were filed or introduced in dozens of states so far this year, according to the Brennan Center. 

“It represents a really slow erosion of our democracy,” said Neha Patel, co-executive director of the State Innovation Exchange, a strategy center for state legislators working toward progressive policies. 

Patel called the expulsions “the third prong of a long-range strategy.” She said it was once “unprecedented” for states to make it harder for people to vote, but the practice has become “commonplace.” 

It’s also become common for the GOP to challenge the electoral process and raise questions about election integrity. The next question is whether states with Republican supermajorities will follow Tennessee’s lead in expelling opponents with different points of view, she said. 

Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan organization advocating for better government, said expulsions have generally been reserved for lawmakers involved in criminal activity. 

Voters losing their chosen representatives for doing their jobs is “unheard of,” Wertheimer said. He has not learned of any similar action in other states, “but this stuff travels.” 

The action in Tennessee drew outcries from a range of groups. 

National Urban League President Marc Morial said the issue was about race, but “it’s not only about race. It’s about basic American values.” 

Referring to the right to vote, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, he said, “It appears as though the Tennessee Legislature needs a refresher on the American Constitution.” 

The president of the Congressional Black Caucus, Nevada Rep. Steven Horsford, called for the Tennessee lawmakers to be returned to their seats and for Attorney General Merrick Garland to look into potential violations of the Voting Rights Act. 

NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said the civil rights organization was prepared to take legal action “to ensure that this heinous attempt to silence the voice of the people is addressed in a court of law.” 

House Speaker Cameron Sexton pushed back against criticism that he was leaving thousands of Tennesseans without representation and taking away their voice. 

“There are consequences for actions,” he said. “Those members took away the voice of this chamber for 45 minutes when they were on the House floor leading the protest and disrupting the business that we’re doing.” 

The trio’s participation in the demonstration lasted only a few minutes. It was Sexton who called for a recess to meet with lawmakers. 

Webb questioned why Jones and Pearson would be expelled while Rep. Gloria Johnson, who is white, was not. 

Clayton Cardwell, who lives in Jones’ district in Nashville, said in a telephone interview that the protest in favor of stricter gun laws last week was “the right thing to do.” 

“I was hoping that the entire House would join in,” he said. When the retired teacher was getting his master’s degree in special education, Cardwell remembers being told that teaching was the safest occupation you could have. “Now I think it is one of the most dangerous.” 

Cardwell, who is white, also questioned the motives behind the expulsions: “We’ve just got a lot of old white men there who are prejudiced.” 

Nashville attorney Chris Wood was so concerned about the possible expulsion of his representative that he went to the Capitol on Thursday to watch the proceedings. 

“It was appalling,” he said. “It was an abuse of power.” 

Wood has three children in public schools and called it “unbelievable and immoral” that the Republican majority would refuse to even consider gun restrictions. 

No issue could be more important to the community “than ending gun violence and letting our kids come home at the end of the day,” he said. “This is the only country in the world where this happens.” 

Wood expects Jones and Pearson to be back soon. They could be reappointed to the House by county commissions in their districts and run again in a special election. 

Andrea Wiley, a lifelong Tennessee resident who lives and works in Pearson’s district, said she was embarrassed for the state. 

“It’s really hard to be from here and see us in the national news at this level,” she said. “It is really scary to me that I don’t have a voice in Nashville that’s representing me, my community, my neighborhood.” 

Tamala Johnson said she and her family voted for Pearson and she agreed with him about changing gun laws. 

“I don’t think he should have been expelled for voicing his opinion,” Johnson said. 

The vote to expel “makes me feel like we don’t have a word,” she said. “You threw him out just because he’s fighting to improve gun laws. … There’s no trust.” 
…

A growing number of state legislatures are considering bans on cosmetics and other consumer products that contain a group of synthetic, potentially harmful chemicals known as PFAS.

In Vermont, the state Senate gave final approval this week to legislation that would prohibit manufacturers and suppliers from selling or distributing any cosmetics or menstrual products in the state that have perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, as well as a number of other chemicals.

The products include shampoo, makeup, deodorant, sunscreen, hair dyes and more, said state Sen. Terry Williams, a Republican, and member of the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare.

“Many known toxic chemicals are used in or found as contaminants in personal care products, including PFAS, lead and formaldehyde,” Williams said in reporting the bill to Senate colleagues.

California, Colorado and Maryland passed similar restrictions on cosmetics that go into effect in 2025. Other proposals are under consideration in Washington and Oregon while bills have also been introduced in Illinois, Rhode Island and Georgia.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, studies have linked PFAS exposure to increased cancer risk, developmental delays in children, damage to organs such as the liver and thyroid, increased cholesterol levels and reduced immune functions, especially among young children.

Like in Colorado and California, the proposed Vermont crackdown on PFAS — known as “forever chemicals” for their persistence in the environment — goes beyond cosmetics. The bill, which now must be considered by the Vermont House, would extend the ban to apparel, including outdoor apparel for severe wet conditions, athletic turf, clothing, ski wax and textiles, including upholstery, draperies, towels and bedding that intentionally contain PFAS. The bill has been referred to a House committee and the chairwoman said Friday that she’s not sure if the panel will get to it this session. The legislation gives various timelines for the phaseouts.

“We must stop importing dangerous chemicals like PFAS into our state so we can prevent the harms they are causing up and down the supply chain — from their production and use to their disposal,” Lauren Hierl, executive director of Vermont Conservation Voters, said in a statement.

In March, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed the first federal limits on the chemicals in drinking water, saying the protection will save thousands of lives and prevent serious illnesses, including cancer. The chemicals had been used since the 1940s in consumer products and industry, including in nonstick pans, food packaging and firefighting foam. Their use is now mostly phased out in the U.S., but some still remain. Pressure is also growing to remove PFAS from food packaging.

A study by University of Notre Dame researchers released in 2021 found that more than half the cosmetics sold in the United States and Canada were awash with a toxic industrial compound associated with serious health conditions.

Researchers tested more than 230 commonly used cosmetics and found that 56% of foundations and eye products, 48% of lip products and 47% of mascaras contained fluorine — an indicator of PFAS.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says on its website that there have been few studies of the presence of PFAS in cosmetics, and the ones published found the concentration is at very low levels.

The Personal Care Products Council, which represents the cosmetics industry, says in 2020 it supported California legislation to phase out certain ingredients, including 13 PFAS in cosmetics, and identical legislative language in Maryland the following year. The group called for states to pass uniform laws to avoid confusion.

As for bans on apparel containing the chemicals, the American Apparel & Footwear Association supports the bill passed unanimously in the Vermont Senate and appreciates that amendments were made to align with phase-out timelines in existing PFAS restrictions in California and New York, said Chelsea Murtha, AAFA’s director of sustainability, in a statement.

The Outdoor Industry Association, based on Colorado, said overall it supports the Vermont bill, also noted the current version more closely matches the timeline for compliance with California’s.

“We are also appreciative of the exemption for outdoor apparel severe wet conditions until 2028, as our industry is diligently working to move toward non-regrettable alternatives that will not compromise consumer safety or the quality of the product,” said association President Kent Ebersole in a statement.
…

The U.S. House of Representatives has voted unanimously to challenge China’s status as a developing nation, a classification made by organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations that gives the world’s second-largest economy special treatment for trade and low-interest loans.

Young Kim, a Republican congresswoman from Southern California who introduced the bill, told lawmakers before the vote that China accounted for 18.6% of the global economy.

“Their economy size is second only to that of the United States. [The] United States is treated as a developed country, so should PRC,” Kim said before the March 27 vote on The PRC Is Not a Developing Country Act. Kim, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Indo-Pacific Subcommittee, introduced the bill with Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat.

China’s state-backed media Global Times responded by saying that the U.S. has no right to play referee on China’s developing country status.

“Such attempt has only further exposed Washington’s sinister intentions to increase China’s development cost and force China to assume international responsibilities beyond its ability,” it said.

How is China, the world’s second-largest economy and home to the most billionaires —China has 969 while the U.S. has 691 — still categorized as a developing country, which means it enjoys the same special treatment in international trade as nations such as Bolivia and Zambia?  When will China graduate and join the U.S. as a developed country?

Developing or developed? 

China has long referred to itself as a developing country in its official narrative. Wang Yi, director of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Foreign Affairs Office, said when he was serving as China’s foreign minister in 2019 that China’s per capita GDP was only one-sixth that of the United States.

“Requiring a country that has only been developing for a few decades to shoulder the responsibilities of those industrial countries who have developed for hundreds of years, this itself is unfair,” he said at a news conference when meeting with European scholars, according to Xinhua News Agency. 

Yet on the world stage, people are watching China’s economic power explode. Since 1978, its GDP has increased from less than $150 billion to $18.3 trillion in 2022, making it the second-largest economy after the United States. In 2023, China’s military spending will reach $230 billion, ranking second in the world after the U.S., which will spend more than $800 billion in fiscal year 2023.

And China has established a series of international organizations, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Origination, to challenge the international aid order established by the U.S. after World War II.

“A widely adopted understanding for assessing a country’s development status is the income per capita, not the size of the whole economy,” said Weifeng Zhong, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

The World Bank uses gross national income (GNI) per capita and categorizes the world’s economies into four income groups: low, lower-middle, upper-middle and high income. The high-income countries, which need to have a GNI per capital above $13,205, are commonly considered to be developed countries.

The latest GNI per capita for China, $11,880 in 2021, is $1,325 below the threshold, so it is a developing country by the World Bank standard. Yet experts cautioned that classifying a country’s development status is inexact.

“International organizations … do not always have a clear income threshold for a country to ‘graduate’ from a developing country status,” Zhong told VOA in an emailed response.

The United Nations uses an aggregate indicator called the Human Development Index, which includes but is not limited to income. By this measure, China is a developing country. 

The World Trade Organization allows countries to self-declare whether they are a developing country, and China always maintains that it is.

With that self-declaration being approved by other members when China joined the WTO in 2001, Beijing is able to enjoy special treatment, such as higher subsidies and better tariff rates, reserved for developing countries.

Robert Ross, a professor of political science at Boston College and an associate at Harvard’s John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, told VOA Mandarin that the WTO classification of China is political rather than economic.

“China lobbies hard to pressure countries not to change China’s status because it benefits immensely from the conditions for its exports and tariff levels and other issues. The U.S. has been unable to reach a consensus among WTO membership to change China’s status,” he said in a phone interview last week.

Why China wants the label

Experts who spoke with VOA Mandarin said there are tangible benefits in international trade to being recognized as a developing country.

When China joined the WTO in 2001, its GDP per capita was less than $1,000. Trading as a developing country meant China could impose an import tariff of 14%, compared with the 7% imposed by developed countries, according to the WTO. Developing countries also enjoy relaxed restrictions on trade subsidies and receive technical assistance from developed countries.

“Being considered a developing country for an unduly long time may allow China to enjoy a host of special and differential treatments that it may no longer fairly deserve,” said Zhong of George Mason University.

He said the Chinese government is known for heavily subsidizing preferred sectors to encourage growth. For example, as the world confronts the challenge of over-fishing, being considered a developing country would allow China, a world leader in fishing capacity, to retain more subsidies in negotiations with other countries, making the global over-fishing problem harder to tackle.

James Wen, an emeritus professor of economics at Trinity College in the U.S. state of Connecticut, said that in addition to tariff reductions and subsidies, China also enjoys special treatment in terms of loans from international financial institutions.

“International financial institutions have long been providing low-interest or interest-free loans to developing countries. China is qualified for such preferential treatment as a developing country. There are also many private NGOs offering financial aid to developing countries; China has benefited immensely from them as well,” he told VOA Mandarin via phone.

Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that apart from material benefits, China is using the label as a political signaling tool.

“I think in places like the WTO, what China really likes to do is to be able to cast itself as the leading developing country. It sees itself as being able to corral developing countries together on certain issues, and that’s a place where it really likes to be,” he told VOA Mandarin. 

Ross from Boston College told VOA Mandarin said that the contradiction between China’s developing country status and its economic and political influence worldwide is “frequently frustrating to other countries, because China has these advantages that enable it to have a greater impact than it would otherwise have if we examine its political and economic clout.” 

Zhong from George Mason University cautioned that the vote in the U.S. House of Representative won’t be enough to change China’s status. 

He told VOA Mandarin, “U.S. representatives at various international organizations would need to work with like-minded countries to challenge China’s development status, which, depending on an international organization’s rule, may be a bigger undertaking than Washington policymakers think.” 
…

Former President Donald Trump was arraigned on 34 felony charges earlier this week, accused of falsifying New York business records to conceal his role in paying hush money to an adult film actress before the 2016 election. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara looks at how the unprecedented charges could inject fresh uncertainties into the 2024 presidential race.
…

Leaked Western documents with information about the war in Ukraine appear to have been doctored by Russia to minimize their own losses and exaggerate Ukraine’s. VOA’s Laurel Bowman reports.
…

Changes in air patterns as the world warms will likely push more and nastier hurricanes up against the United States’ East and Gulf coasts, especially in Florida, a new study said.

While other studies have projected how human-caused climate change will probably alter the frequency, strength and moisture of tropical storms, the study in Friday’s journal Science Advances focuses on where hurricanes are going.

It’s all about projected changes in steering currents, said study lead author Karthik Balaguru, a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory climate scientist.

“Along every coast they’re kind of pushing the storms closer to the U.S.,” Balaguru said. The steering currents move from south to north along the Gulf of Mexico; on the East Coast, the normal west-to-east steering is lessened considerably and can be more east-to-west, he said.

Overall, in a worst-case warming scenario, the number of times a storm hits parts of the U.S. coast in general will probably increase by one-third by the end of the century, the study said, based on sophisticated climate and hurricane simulations, including a system researchers developed.

The central and southern Florida Peninsula, which juts into the Atlantic, is projected to get even more of an increase in hurricanes hitting the coast, the study said.

Climate scientists disagree on how useful it is to focus on the worst-case scenario as the new study does, because many calculations show the world has slowed its increase in carbon pollution. Balaguru said because his study looks more at steering changes than strength, the levels of warming aren’t as big a factor.

The study projects changes in air currents traced to warming in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of South America. Climate change is warming different parts of the world at different rates, and models show the eastern Pacific area warming more quickly, Balaguru said.

According to the study, that extra warming sets things in motion through Rossby waves — atmospheric waves that move west to east and are connected to changes in temperature or pressure, like the jet stream or polar vortex events.

“I like to explain it to my students like a rock being dropped in a smooth pond,” said University of Albany atmospheric scientist Kristen Corbosiero, who wasn’t part of the study. “The heating is the rock and Rossby waves are the waves radiating away from the heating which disturbs the atmosphere’s balance.”

The wave ripples trigger a counterclockwise circulation in the Gulf of Mexico, which bring winds blowing from east to west in the eastern Atlantic and south to north in the Gulf of Mexico, Corbosiero and Balaguru said.

It also reduces wind shear — which is the difference in speed and direction of winds at high and low altitudes — the study said. Wind shear often decapitates hurricanes and makes it harder for nascent storms to develop.

Less wind shear means stronger storms, Balaguru said.

Overall, the steering current and wind shear changes increase the risk to the United States, Corbosiero said in an email.
…

Classified U.S. and NATO planning documents related to the war in Ukraine have appeared on social media, prompting officials in Washington to scramble to have them removed from Twitter and other online platforms.

Officials in Kyiv, meanwhile, cautioned that the documents were altered by the Russians, in part to cover up the true extent of casualties suffered by Moscow’s forces and inflate the number of Ukrainians they killed.

Photographs of documents labeled “top secret” and “secret,” including some containing folds and creases, were posted on Twitter and Telegram in recent days, according to officials and media reports. The files include charts and maps indicating locations of military forces and weaponry in Ukraine as of March 1 and appear to have been disseminated online as soon as that day.

“We are aware of the reports of social media posts, and the department is reviewing the matter,” the U.S. Defense Department said in a statement.

A Pentagon official insisted to VOA that there was no formal investigation underway, despite news reports to the contrary.

The disclosure was the first public intelligence breakthrough for Russia since it invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, according to The New York Times, which initially reported the leak Thursday.

The Times on Friday evening reported that a second batch of documents had surfaced on social media that “appear to detail American national security secrets from Ukraine to the Middle East to China.”

The first batch of documents also contain specific information about training schedules for Ukrainian combat brigades and expenditure rates for the HIMARS rocket launcher system the United States has provided ahead of Kyiv’s expected spring counteroffensive, according to media reports.

“I do not see any risks from the publication of this information, including the distorted information about the plans the General Staff of Ukraine is developing,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, told VOA’s Ukrainian Service. “They are irrelevant to what will work in a month or at a certain time when these scenarios will be implemented on the battlefield.”

Podolyak added that if the intercepted documents were wholly authentic, the Russians “would certainly not release them. You would pretend that you don’t know the plans.”

An altered chart lists Russian fatalities at 16,000 to 17,500, far below the plausible estimates of up to 200,000 killed, wounded or missing by numerous analysts and lowered from the 35,500 to 43,500 listed on an earlier leaked version. The doctored chart also lists the estimate of Ukrainian soldiers killed at 61,000 to 71,500, up from 16,000 to 17,500 in an earlier photograph of the document posted online.

“The altered numbers expose them [the Russian intelligence services] completely. And it shows that the main reason of this was to convince the Russian public that only 17,000 [Russian] soldiers died,” said Andrey Piontkovsky, senior fellow at the Institute of Modern Russia, headquartered in New York.

“This is a propaganda operation designed primarily for Russian public opinion,” Piontkovsky told VOA’s Russian Service on Friday, adding that what has been released does not contain “any detailed harmful military information.”

Some Russian military bloggers are pointing fingers in the other direction, asserting the documents were leaked by Western intelligence to mislead Russian commanders ahead of the upcoming counteroffensive by the Ukrainians.

Such a warning was posted to Telegram by the Grey Zone account, which is associated with the Russian private paramilitary force known as the Wagner Group.

More than 30 of the documents initially appeared on a Discord server on March 1 and 2, according to Aric Toler, a researcher at Bellingcat, a fact-checking and open source intelligence group based in the Netherlands. Discord is a popular voice, video and text communication service based in San Francisco.

“They were all photographed from hard copies,” as the hand of a person can be seen in the pictures, Toler told VOA on Friday.

By March 5, after they propagated to other Discord servers and the anonymous 4chan online bulletin board, a doctored document and others apparently unaltered were posted on Russian Telegram channels, according to Toler.

U.S. government officials have been requesting that social media companies delete the postings, although it is unknown when they first became aware of the leak. It is also not known how successful they have been in getting the documents deleted or how Twitter responded to the requests.

An e-mailed query from VOA on Friday to the social media platform generated an automated reply with a “poop” emoji, Twitter’s standard response recently to all media inquiries.

A number of the documents were still visible on Twitter as of Friday afternoon, with some racking up hundreds of thousands of views.

Tatiana Vorozhko and Rafael Saakyan contributed to this report.
…

The U.S. is committed to removing landmines and other explosive remnants of the war in Vietnam throughout Southeast Asia, according to an annual report released by the State Department.

According to the report, To Walk the Earth in Safety, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia all face challenges in the safe removal of explosive remnants of war.

Iraq is the largest recipient of the U.S. government’s global program, having received more than $675 million since 1993. It is followed in the top five recipients by Afghanistan with nearly $574 million, then Laos with more than $355 million, Vietnam with over $206 million and Cambodia with nearly $192 million.

One of the biggest challenges to the implementation of the conventional weapons destruction (CWD) programs in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia is the impact of climate change that causes hotter weather, flooding, landslides and droughts, according to the report.

Karen Chandler, deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department, told VOA Vietnamese on Tuesday, “There are two effects: One is that unexploded ordnance that previously has been hidden becomes exposed … and suddenly you see all of this new contamination that’s been laid bare by these landslides. … Another aspect of it is that it slows down the work and makes it more difficult.”

Difficult job, but ‘big payoff’

Chandler described the work of removing unexploded ordnance as “a hard job, but one with a big payoff of people’s lives and well-being.” To leave ordnance behind had “catastrophic consequences for civilians living in proximity to these dangerous depots.” Removing the lethal leftovers also boosts food security by making the land safe for cultivation.

The U.S. is the world’s single largest financial supporter of CWD programs. Since 1993, the U.S. has spent more than $4.6 billion for the safe clearance of landmines and explosive weapons of war, as well as for securing and safely disposing of excess small arms and light weapons and munitions in more than 120 countries and areas, according to the report.

In fiscal 2022, the U.S. supported conventional weapons destruction in more than 65 countries and areas with more than $376 million.

The U.S. has provided nearly $753 million over the past three decades for conventional weapons destruction in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. They receive the largest amounts of U.S. funding for CWD in the East Asia and Pacific region. The three countries received almost $75 million in the past fiscal year. Laos received just over $45 million, Vietnam received more than $20.2 million and Cambodia received the rest, or just over $9.5 million, according to the report.

“Vietnam is one of our longest and strongest programs,” Chandler told VOA Vietnamese when referring to the CWD program the U.S. is implementing in more than 120 countries around the world. “Our assistance in the East Asia Pacific region overall spans about $822 million since 1993, and about $168 million of that has been assistance between the United States and the government of Vietnam.”

Nguyen Hanh Phuc, deputy director of the Vietnam National Mine Action Center, which partners with the State Department for the CWD programs in Vietnam, told a conference in Hanoi commemorating the International Day for Mine Awareness on April 4 that the unexploded ordnance contaminates 6.1 million hectares. Most of the ordnance is lethal cluster munitions concentrated in the central provinces near the former Demilitarized Zone, according to the report.

Chandler said removal efforts are focused on “addressing the contamination in Quang Binh and Quang Tri provinces. … Those are the central provinces where we see the highest amount of, or the highest density of, legacy contamination from the Vietnam War.”

The report said that significant concentrations of unexploded ordnance also remain in parts of southern Vietnam as well as landmine contamination along the country’s northern border with China, where the neighboring countries fought in 1979.

40,000 deaths

Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh said last April that bombs and mines left behind by the U.S. and its allies after the Vietnam War had killed more than 40,000 people and injured 60,000 since 1975.

In Laos, most of the explosive remnants of war are from U.S. aerial bombing campaigns against the communist Pathet Lao conducted during the Vietnam War, according to a 2019 report by the Congressional Research Service, War Legacy Issues in Southeast Asia: Unexploded Ordnance (UXO). Unexploded cluster munitions, referred to locally as “bombies,” remain in most of the country’s provinces.

Laos received more than $355 million in 1995 from the U.S. for CWD. During the so-called “shadow war” from 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on Laos, making it, per capita, the most heavily bombed country in history.

In Cambodia, according to the report, in addition to the explosive remnants of war from the Vietnam War, internal conflicts that ended in 1999 also left behind unexploded ordnance. The report said extensive minefields were laid by the Khmer Rouge, Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, and Vietnamese and Thai militaries during fighting and occupations.

“We’ve provided approximately $191.5 million for clearance operations in Cambodia and about $9 million of that was just this year,” said Chandler, adding that the Cambodia Mine Action Center has sent some of its people to train Ukrainian deminers because Cambodians are expert in using a “very specific type of landmine detector that Japan has provided.” It is more modern than the aging Russian-built detectors Ukrainians are using as they fight invading Russian forces.

Chandler told VOA Khmer after the briefing that “with the Cambodian government, it’s absolutely a priority for us to be able to continue to help Cambodia remove landmines and explosive remnants of war as a way to return lands to Cambodian people and promote economic prosperity and food security.”

VOA Khmer’s Khemara Pov Sok contributed to this report.
…

Russian Federal Security Service investigators have formally charged Evan Gershkovich with espionage, but The Wall Street Journal reporter denied the charges and said he was working as a journalist, Russian news agencies reported on Friday.

Russia’s Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said on March 30 that it had detained Gershkovich in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg and had opened an espionage case against the 31-year-old for collecting what it said were state secrets about the military industrial complex.

“Gershkovich has been charged,” Interfax quoted a source as saying.

TASS reported that FSB investigators had formally charged Gershkovich with carrying out espionage in the interests of the United States but that Gershkovich had denied the charge.

“He categorically denied all the accusations and stated that he was engaged in journalistic activities in Russia,” TASS cited an unidentified source as saying.

The TASS source declined further comment citing the classified nature of the case.

Gershkovich is the first American journalist detained in Russia on espionage charges since the end of the Cold War.

The Journal has denied that Gershkovich was spying and demanded the immediate release of its “trusted and dedicated reporter.” The Journal said his arrest was “a vicious affront to a free press and should spur outrage in all free people and governments throughout the world.”

The Kremlin said that Gershkovich had been carrying out espionage “under the cover” of journalism. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has told the United States that Gershkovich was caught red handed while trying to obtain secrets.

The United States has urged Russia to release Gershkovich and cast the Russian claims of espionage as ridiculous. U.S. President Joe Biden has called for Gershkovich’s release.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has yet to comment publicly on the case.

A fluent Russian speaker born to Soviet emigres and raised in New Jersey, Gershkovich moved to Moscow in late 2017 to join the English-language Moscow Times and subsequently worked for the French national news agency Agence France-Presse.

Russia announced the start of its “special military operation” in February 2022, just as Gershkovich was in London, about to return to Russia to join The Journal’s Moscow bureau.

It was decided that he would live in London but travel to Russia frequently for reporting trips, as a correspondent accredited with the Foreign Ministry.
…

South Korea, the U.S. and Japan called for stronger international support of efforts to ban North Korea from sending workers abroad and curb the North’s cybercrimes as a way to block the country’s means to fund its nuclear program. 

The top South Korean, U.S. and Japanese nuclear envoys met in Seoul on Friday in their first gathering in four months to discuss how to cope with North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal. The North’s recent weapons tests show it is intent on acquiring more advanced missiles designed to attack the U.S. and its allies, rather than returning to talks. 

Despite 11 rounds of U.N. sanctions and pandemic-related hardships that have worsened its economic and food problems, North Korea still devotes much of its scarce resources to its nuclear and missile programs. Contributing to financing its weapons program is also likely the North’s crypto hacking and other illicit cyber activities and the wages sent by North Korean workers remaining in China, Russia and elsewhere, despite an earlier U.N. order to repatriate them by the end of 2019, experts say. 

In a joint statement, the South Korean, U.S. and Japanese envoys urged the international community to thoroughly abide by U.N. resolutions on the banning of North Korean workers overseas, according to Seoul’s Foreign Ministry. 

The ministry said a large number of North Korean workers remains engaged in economic activities around the world and transmits money that is used in the North’s weapons programs. It said the three envoys tried to call attention to the North Korean workers because the North may further reopen its international borders as the global COVID-19 situation improves. 

It is not known exactly how many North Korean workers remain abroad. But before the 2019 U.N. deadline passed, the U.S. State Department had estimated there were about 100,000 North Koreans working in factories, construction sites, logging industries and other places worldwide. Civilian experts had said that those workers brought North Korea an estimated $200 million to $500 million in revenue each year. 

“We need to make sure that its provocations never go unpunished. We will effectively counter North Korea’s future provocations and cut their revenue streams that fund these illegal activities,” Kim Gunn, the South Korean envoy, said in televised comments at the start of the meeting. 

Sung Kim, the U.S. envoy, said that with its nuclear and missile programs and “malicious cyber program that targets countries and individuals around the globe,” North Korea threatens the security and prosperity of the entire international community. 

South Korea’s spy agency said in December that North Korean hackers had stolen an estimated $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency and other virtual assets in the past five years, more than half of it last year alone. The National Intelligence Service said North Korea’s capacity to steal digital assets was considered among the best in the world because it has focused on cybercrimes since U.N. economic sanctions were toughened in 2017 in response to its earlier nuclear and missile tests. 

Friday’s trilateral meeting will likely infuriate North Korea, which has previously warned that the three countries’ moves to boost their security cooperation prompted urgent calls to reinforce its own military capability. 

North Korea has long argued the U.N. sanctions and U.S.-led military exercises in the region are proof of Washington’s hostility against Pyongyang. The North has said it was compelled to develop nuclear weapons to deal with U.S. military threats, though U.S. and South Korean officials have steadfastly said they have no intention of invading the North. 

Earlier this week, the United States conducted anti-submarine naval drills with South Korean and Japanese forces in their first such training in six months. The U.S. also flew nuclear-capable bombers for separate, bilateral aerial training with South Korean warplanes. 

North Korea hasn’t performed weapons tests in reaction to those U.S.-involved drills. But last month, it carried out a barrage of missile tests to protest the earlier South Korean-U.S. military training that it sees as an invasion rehearsal. 

Takehiro Funakoshi, the Japanese envoy, said North Korea’s recent weapons tests and fiery rhetoric pose a grave threat to the region and beyond. “Under such circumstances, our three countries have significantly deepened our coordination,” he said. 

Sung Kim reiterated that Washington seeks diplomacy with Pyongyang without preconditions. North Korea has previously rejected such overtures, saying it won’t restart talks unless Washington first drops its hostile policies, in an apparent reference to the sanctions and U.S.-South Korean military drills. Many experts say North Korea would still eventually use its enlarged weapons arsenal to seek U.S. concessions such as the lifting of the sanctions in future negotiations. 

There are concerns that North Korea could conduct its first nuclear test in more than five years, since it unveiled a new type of nuclear warhead last week. Foreign experts debate whether North Korea has developed warheads small and light enough to fit on missiles. 
…

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has for more than two decades accepted luxury trips nearly every year from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow without reporting them on financial disclosure forms, ProPublica reports.

In a lengthy story published Thursday, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization catalogs various trips Thomas has taken aboard Crow’s yacht and private jet as well as to Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. A 2019 trip to Indonesia the story detailed could have cost more than $500,000 had Thomas chartered the plane and yacht himself, ProPublica reported.

Supreme Court justices, like other federal judges, are required to file an annual financial disclosure report that asks them to list gifts they have received. It was not clear why Thomas omitted the trips, but under a judiciary policy guide consulted by The Associated Press, food, lodging or entertainment received as “personal hospitality of any individual” does not need to be reported if it is at the personal residence of that individual or the individual’s family. That said, the exception to reporting is not supposed to cover “transportation that substitutes for commercial transportation” and properties owned by an entity.

A Supreme Court spokeswoman acknowledged an email from the AP seeking comment from Thomas but did not provide any additional information. ProPublica wrote that Thomas did not respond to a detailed list of questions from the organization.

Last month, the federal judiciary beefed up disclosure requirements for all judges, including the high court justices, although overnight stays at personal vacation homes owned by friends remain exempt from disclosure.

Last year, questions about Thomas’ ethics arose when it was disclosed that he did not step away from election cases following the 2020 election despite the fact that his wife, conservative activist Virginia Thomas, reached out to lawmakers and the White House to urge defiance of the election results. The latest story will likely increase calls for the justices to adopt an ethics code and enhance disclosure of travel and other gifts.

In a statement, Crow told ProPublica that he and his wife have been friends of Thomas and his wife since 1996, five years after Thomas joined the high court. Crow said that the “hospitality we have extended to the Thomases over the years is no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends” and that the couple “never asked for any of this hospitality.”

He said they have “never asked about a pending or lower court case, and Justice Thomas has never discussed one, and we have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue.”

ProPublica’s story says that Thomas has been vacationing at Crow’s lavish Topridge resort virtually every summer for more than two decades. During one trip in 2017, other guests included executives at “Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, major Republican donors and one of the leaders of the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business conservative think tank,” ProPublica reported.

Crow wrote that he is “unaware of any of our friends ever lobbying or seeking to influence Justice Thomas on any case, and I would never invite anyone who I believe had any intention of doing that.”

The disclosure of the lavish trips stands in contrast to what Thomas has said about his preferred methods of travel. Thomas, who grew up poor in Georgia, has talked about enjoying traveling in his motorcoach and preferring “Walmart parking lots to the beaches.”
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Republican lawmakers in the Southern U.S. state of Tennessee made the rare move of expelling two Democratic lawmakers Thursday from the state legislature because they participated in a protest last week at the State Capitol calling for more gun control, following the recent deadly school shooting in Nashville that killed three adults and three 9-year-old students.

A third lawmaker avoided the ouster by one vote.

“We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy,” Justin Jones, one of the ousted politicians said.

U.S. President Joe Biden posted on Twitter: “Three kids and three officials gunned down in yet another mass shooting. And what are GOP officials focused on? Punishing lawmakers who joined thousands of peaceful protesters calling for action. It’s shocking, undemocratic, and without precedent.”  

The expelled lawmakers –  Jones and Justin Pearson – are African American men.  The third lawmaker – Gloria Johnson – is a white woman.  Republican leaders, however, have denied that race had anything to do with the expulsions. 

“You cannot ignore the racial dynamic of what happened today. Two young Black lawmakers get expelled and the one white woman does not. That’s a statement in and of itself,” Pearson said. 

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Twitter has labeled National Public Radio as “state-affiliated media” on the social media site, a move some worried could undermine public confidence in the news organization.

NPR said it was disturbed to see the description added to all of the tweets that it sends out, with president and CEO John Lansing on Wednesday calling it “unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way.”

It was unclear why Twitter made the move. Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, quoted a definition of state-affiliated media in the company’s guidelines as “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.”

“Seems accurate,” Musk tweeted in a reply to NPR.

NPR does receive U.S. government funding through grants from federal agencies and departments, along with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The company said it accounts for less than 1% of NPR’s annual operating budget.

But until Wednesday, the same Twitter guidelines said that “state-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the U.K. or NPR in the United States, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.”

NPR has now been removed from that sentence on Twitter’s website.

Asked for comment, Twitter’s press office responded with an automated poop emoji.

The move came just days after Twitter stripped The New York Times of its verification check mark.

“NPR and our member stations are supported by millions of listeners who depend on us for the independent, fact-based journalism we provide,” Lansing said. “NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable.”

The literary organization PEN America, in calling for Twitter to reverse the move, underlined that NPR “assiduously maintains editorial independence.”

Liz Woolery, PEN America’s digital policy leader, said Twitter’s decision was “a dangerous move that could further undermine public confidence in reliable news sources.”
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China vowed reprisals against Taiwan after a meeting between the United States House speaker and the island’s president, saying Thursday that the U.S. was on a “wrong and dangerous road.”

Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday in a show of U.S. support for the self-ruled island, which China claims as its own, along with a bipartisan delegation of more than a dozen U.S. lawmakers.

The Biden administration maintains there is nothing provocative about the visit by Tsai, which is the latest of a half-dozen to the U.S. Yet, it comes as the U.S.-China relationship has fallen to historic lows, with U.S. support for Taiwan becoming one of the main points of difference between the two powers.

But the formal trappings of the meeting, and the senior rank of some of the elected officials in the delegation from Congress, could lead China to view it as an escalation. No speaker is known to have met with a Taiwan president on U.S. soil since the U.S. broke off formal diplomatic relations in 1979.

In response to the meeting, Beijing said it would take “resolute and forceful measures to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” in a statement issued early Thursday morning by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

It urged the U.S. “not to walk further down a wrong and dangerous road.”

In December, China’s military sent 71 planes and seven ships toward Taiwan in a 24-hour display of force directed at the self-ruled island after China expressed anger at Taiwan-related provisions in a U.S. annual defense spending bill. China’s military pressure campaign on Taiwan has intensified in recent years, and the Communist Party has sent planes or ships toward the island on a near-daily basis.

But as of Thursday afternoon, there was no overt sign of a large-scale military response.

“We will take resolute measures to punish the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces and their actions, and resolutely safeguard our country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said a statement from China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Thursday morning, referring to Tsai and her political party as separatists.

Chinese vessels were engaged in a joint patrol and inspection operation in the Taiwan Strait that will last three days, state media said Thursday morning. The Fujian Maritime Safety Administration said its ship, the Haixun 06, would inspect cargo ships and others in the waters that run between Taiwan and China as part of the operation.

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said Wednesday evening it had tracked China’s Shandong aircraft carrier passing southeast of Taiwan through the Bashi Strait. On Thursday morning, it tracked three People’s Liberation Army navy vessels and one warplane in the area around the island.

U.S. Congressional visits to Taiwan have stepped up in frequency in the past year, and the American Institute in Taipei, the de facto embassy, announced the arrival of another delegation Thursday. House Foreign Affairs Committee head Michael McCaul of Texas is leading a delegation of eight other lawmakers for a three-day visit to discuss regional security and trade, according to a statement from AIT.

At their meeting Wednesday, Tsai and McCarthy spoke carefully to avoid unnecessarily escalating tensions with Beijing. Standing side by side at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, the two acknowledged China’s threats against the island government.

“America’s support for the people of Taiwan will remain resolute, unwavering and bipartisan,” McCarthy said at a news conference later. He also said U.S.-Taiwan ties are stronger than at any other point in his life.

Tsai said the “unwavering support reassures the people of Taiwan that we are not isolated.”

More than a dozen Democratic and Republican lawmakers, including the House’s third-ranking Democrat, had joined the meeting.

Tsai said she and McCarthy spoke of the importance of Taiwan’s self-defense, of fostering robust trade and economic ties and supporting the island government’s ability to participate in the international community.

But she also warned, “It is no secret that today the peace that we have maintained and the democracy which we have worked hard to build are facing unprecedented challenges.”

“We once again find ourselves in a world where democracy is under threat and the urgency of keeping the beacon of freedom shining cannot be understated,” she said.

The United States broke off official ties with Taiwan in 1979 while formally establishing diplomatic relations with the Beijing government. As part of its recognition of China, the U.S. “One China” policy acknowledges that Beijing lays claim to Taiwan, but does not endorse China’s claim, and the U.S. remains Taiwan’s key provider of military and defense assistance.

Washington also has a policy of strategic ambiguity, where it does not explicitly say whether it will come to Taiwan’s aid in the case of a conflict with China.

In Taiwan, Tsai’s visit did not make a huge splash, though fellow politicians paid close attention.

Ko Wen-je, the former Taipei city mayor who’s thought to have presidential aspirations, said he welcomed any exchange between Taiwan and international leaders.

“Taiwan hopes to have a greater space to operate globally, and the mainland shouldn’t get flustered because of this,” Ko wrote on his Facebook page. “It should show the attitude of a civilized nation and stop its suppression by military force.”

Opposition lawmaker Johnny Chiang of the Nationalist party said that Tsai’s meeting with McCarthy was still within the guardrails of the “One China” policy because it showed that while Congress was relatively free to support Taiwan, the White House was more constrained, according to local media.

In August, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi traveled to Taiwan to meet with Tsai. China responded with its largest live-fire drills in decades, including firing a missile over the island.

Taiwan and China split in 1949 after a civil war and have no official relations, although they are linked by billions of dollars in trade and investment.
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