As the only current U.S. senator to have visited space, Mark Kelly knows something about unexplained objects in the skies. 

Back in his aviator days, Kelly saw Mylar party balloons fly by his cockpit. And once when he was piloting a NASA aircraft, he spotted an object at roughly 45,000 feet (13,700 meters) — much higher than commercial airplanes fly — that he couldn’t identify by sight. 

He’s not sure he would want to see American missiles flying at those objects, either. 

“I don’t think we want to get into the business of launching AIM-9Xs — at $400,000 a pop — at weather balloons,” Kelly told The Associated Press, referring to the heat-seeking, air-to-air missiles used in recent weeks to shoot down a series of aerial objects, including a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon. 

The Biden administration’s unprecedented peacetime downing of the Chinese balloon and three other objects has raised new and troubling questions about the security of American airspace, alarming lawmakers who fear the episode has exposed a vulnerability that could be exploited by other foreign adversaries. 

While the House and the Senate both voted unanimously to condemn China’s ruling political party for the incursion and largely supported the Biden administration’s decision to shoot down the balloon, they have questions about what’s next. 

Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat who has been tasked with heading up an investigation into how the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon was allowed to pass over crucial U.S. missile sites, said that he would ensure the Defense Department has funds for a protocol to assess the threat of unidentified flying objects. 

“We’re going to get to the bottom of what happened and make sure we have a plan going forward to detect and then find out what potential problems this balloon may cause and then a way to bring it down that doesn’t cost us a $400,000 missile,” Tester, who chairs the Defense subcommittee on appropriations, told Fox News Channel. 

Concerns over China, which has criticized the U.S. for “an obvious overreaction,” and worries about interference with civilian aircraft are shared by members of both political parties, creating the potential in Congress to mount a robust bipartisan response. But lawmakers are also mindful of adding yet more military costs — the U.S. already spends more than $800 billion yearly on defense programs — and are wary of expensive shooting sprees for every random object that appears in America’s skies. 

Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, is working on legislation that would require weather balloons to carry transponders that could communicate with air traffic control systems to separate research balloons from mysterious objects where “we don’t know what that is. We don’t know where it came from.” 

“It would really help the Defense Department to be able to sort out what is civilian science payload, what’s a weather balloon, what’s a NASA balloon, what’s a private company in the United States doing, what might be even a U.S. military [project],” said Kelly, who logged 54 days in space as an astronaut before jumping into politics. 

Other lawmakers have launched a flurry of proposals aimed at the skies including a comprehensive examination of encounters with unidentified aerial objects as well as an investigation into how the military is tracking objects floating over the country. 

President Joe Biden has said the military is developing “sharper rules” to track, monitor and potentially shoot down unknown aerial objects. He has justified the take downs by saying the objects presented a remote risk to civilian planes. 

But the four missile attacks were the first known peacetime shootdowns of unauthorized objects in U.S. airspace. Officials now say the three later objects shot down likely had a “benign purpose” and were detected after the U.S. military set its radar systems to detect slow-moving balloons. 

China’s alleged practice of using balloons for surveillance exploits a potential oversight in air traffic control systems, Kelly said. The systems aren’t designed to track the thousands of objects that move in on high-altitude winds. 

The National Weather Service alone launches roughly 60,000 balloons every year to monitor extreme weather. Universities, government organizations and even ham radio hobbyists send up thousands of others. 

“This is about whether an adversary has developed a capability that they know we’re not looking for because our systems are set up to see missiles and airplanes. They’re not set up to see smaller objects at lower altitudes,” said Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, who is pushing for the recent encounters to be included in a wider government study of “unidentified aerial phenomena” — better known as UFOs, short for unidentified flying objects. 

Rubio, along with Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, also jumped on the opportunity to renew a proposal to create the Space National Guard. 

“China has fused its commercial, military and technological applications in ways no other nation ever has,” Rubio told reporters. “So, it’s a multifaceted challenge and one that will require a comprehensive, long term and committed response.” 

But the bills face uncertain paths to becoming law. 

As senators were advised on the natures and origins of the objects shot down this month, some appeared ready to move on. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, quipped about aliens and said, “there’s just a bunch of junk up there.”  
…

The U.N. Security Council expressed its “deep concern and dismay” Monday on Israel’s announcement last week that it plans to expand settlements and retroactively legalize nine existing ones.

It is the first time in more than six years that the 15-nation Security Council has expressed itself about settlements, mainly due to the veto power of the United States, which traditionally acts to protect ally Israel at the U.N.

It comes at a time of rising tensions and violence between the two sides. At least 47 Palestinians and 10 Israelis have been killed since the start of the year.

“We strongly oppose Israel’s announcement that it will advance thousands of settlement units,” U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said. “And we strongly oppose Israel’s announcement that it will begin a process to retroactively legalize nine outposts in the West Bank that were previously illegal under Israeli law.

“These unilateral measures exacerbate tensions. They harm trust between the parties. They undermine the prospects for a negotiated two-state solution. The United States does not support these actions — full stop.”

After a weekend of diplomatic activity, including phone calls Saturday from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Washington signed up to what is known as a presidential statement from the council.

The Palestinians had originally sought a resolution to be voted on Monday, a move that could have forced the Biden administration to use its veto, at a moment when it wants to keep international focus on the war in Ukraine. Instead, the Palestinians, working with council member United Arab Emirates, withdrew the draft resolution and a presidential statement was agreed. It is a step below a resolution but must be unanimously agreed.

“The fact that we have a united front, everyone, to isolate one side, is a step in the right direction,” Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour told reporters.

“This meeting was once again initiated to condemn Israel, this time for issuing building permits in already existing communities – already existing,” said Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan.

“Building permits in our homeland spark international uproar, while dead Jewish children elicit nothing. This is an utter disgrace.”

Thomas-Greenfield told the council that the United States strongly supports the presidential statement, which “demonstrates the Security Council’s unanimous, collective voice on these issues.”

The last time the Security Council made a pronouncement against Israel as a group was the adoption of resolution 2334 in December 2016. Fourteen Council members voted in favor of that resolution with the United States abstaining — just before the Obama administration left power. That resolution said that Israeli settlements constitute “a flagrant violation under international law” and all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, must “immediately and completely cease.”

Monday’s Security Council statement also reaffirmed its “unwavering commitment” to the vision of a two-state solution and that Israeli settlement activities “are dangerously imperiling” that possibility.

The Council called for calm, restraint and for upholding the historic status quo at the holy sites in Jerusalem. Several Council members expressed concern that violence could spike again as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan coincides this year with the Jewish Passover holiday and Easter.

In a first, the Council included language expressing concern about instances of discrimination, intolerance and hate speech “motivated by racism or directed against persons belonging to religious communities, in particular cases motivated by Islamophobia, anti-Semitism or Christianophobia.”

“In light of the alarming rise in extremist hate speech and incitement, it is vital that the Security Council has addressed these issues for the first time in a product,” said UAE Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh, who guided the effort for the Palestinians in the council.

She told reporters that the presidential statement is a strong, unified signal from the Council that they want to see “de-escalation, dialogue and a focus on the political parameters to a long-standing conflict.”

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s office told the Biden administration Monday that it would not greenlight any new wildcat settlements in the occupied West Bank beyond the nine retroactively approved earlier this month.

That pledge to hold off on approving new settlements contradicts the Israeli government’s guiding principles, which means Netanyahu could face a backlash from his far-right, pro-settler coalition partners. Construction in established settlements is expected to continue, as it has under past Israeli administrations.

Some information in this report is from The Associated Press.
…

Even though Buffalo, New York, native Suzanne Taylor was aware that 98-year-old former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s health was failing, the news that he was entering hospice care at his Plains, Georgia, home still came as a shock.

“I have to admit that I cried at breakfast,” she told VOA during a Skype interview. “That was a little bit of a wake-up call for me, that we are going to lose him at some point.” 

Between 2006 and 2019, Taylor was among hundreds of volunteers who worked alongside Carter and his wife Rosalynn on their annual Habitat for Humanity Work Project, building homes around the world for those in need.

“So many people really appreciate him,” she said. “He’s had such an impact, and it’s going to be so hard to close that chapter.”

Author Jonathan Alter agrees.

“It was sad because he has led such an epic American life,” he said.

Alter spent five years writing a biography about Jimmy Carter titled “His Very Best” that allowed him to interview and observe the former president before his health declined.

“When you take stock of his life, he won at life. Ninety-eight years — longest-lived president — married for close to 77 years — happily,” Alter explained to VOA during a recent Skype interview. 

“I think that it is fitting that Jimmy Carter is ending his journey on his own terms. He was the first American president ever born in the hospital, but he doesn’t want to die in the hospital. So, he is going home to the home that he and Rosalynn built in 1961 that has an assessed valuation of about $160,000. And that gives you some sense of his modesty, in which he built most of the furniture. He is preparing to die in the town of 660 people in which he was born. There is a kind of circularity to that.”

After Carter, a Democrat, lost the presidency in a resounding defeat in 1980 to Republican Ronald Reagan, Alter said Carter’s increased popularity came through his volunteerism with Habitat for Humanity, his efforts to promote peace and fight neglected tropical diseases through the programs of the Carter Center, and as the voice of a seasoned politician and elder statesman.

“Historians and people who want a fuller picture need to look at how a president changed the world, changed people’s lives, and that’s a different kind of assessment that takes longer and is not really directly connected to his popularity as president,” said Alter.

“This is a guy, even though he was in business and thought about the bottom line plenty in the years before he was president, spent most of his life thinking about what could he do to improve the lives of other people. And that’s still extraordinarily rare.”

Carter’s popularity was also boosted in the decades after he left the White House by traveling the country autographing and promoting the dozens of books he wrote. And by hosting crowds and taking pictures with scores of visitors to his small church in Plains, Georgia, during his semi-regular Sunday School lessons, where one day after the announcement of his decision to enter hospice care, Carter’s niece Kim Fuller led the congregation in prayer.

“I think at this time in all of our lives, and in the lives of those we love very much who are going through this today and will be going through it, that maybe if we think about it, maybe it’s time to pass the baton,” Fuller told those attending in person, and others watching the church’s live feed on Facebook. “Who will pick it up, I have no clue, because this baton is going to be a really big one,” she said. 

Taylor joined thousands more around the globe sharing messages of support for the 39th U.S. president and his family in the wake of his health announcement. 

“I am hearing from so many people who have met him, who went to his Sunday School, who went to the Carter Center events. … Both Rosalynn and Jimmy are accessible and gracious, and people feel like they really got to know him,” said Taylor, which is why she believes the news of his deteriorating health is that much harder for many to accept.

“I think his accessibility has created a bond with a lot of Americans that most presidents don’t have. I think that is why it’s more difficult to let him go, that people feel more connected to him in a different way,” she said. 
…

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Ghenya Grondin of Waltham, Massachusetts, was a postpartum doula – a person charged with helping young couples navigate the first weeks of their newborn child’s life at home.

Grondin, now aged 44, was infected with SARS-CoV-2 in mid-March of that year – before there were tests, before social distancing or masks, and many months before the medical community recognized long COVID as a complication of COVID-19.

She is part of a community of first-wave long-haulers who faced a new disease without a roadmap or support from the medical establishment.

Three years later, at least 65 million people worldwide are estimated to have long COVID, according to an evidence review published last month in Nature Reviews Microbiology. More than 200 symptoms have been linked to the syndrome – including extreme fatigue, difficulty thinking, headaches, dizziness when standing, sleep problems, chest pain, blood clots, immune dysregulation, and even diabetes.

There are no proven treatments but research is underway.

People infected later in the pandemic had the benefit of vaccination, which “protects at least to some degree” from long COVID, said Dr. Bruce Levy, a Harvard pulmonologist and a co-principal investigator of the National Institute of Health’s $1.15 billion U.S. RECOVER trial, which aims to characterize and find cures for the disease.

“The initial variant of the virus caused a more severe illness than we’re seeing currently in most patients,” he said.

According to the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, in the first two years of the pandemic women were twice as likely as men to develop long COVID, and 15% of all of those affected at three months continued to experience symptoms beyond 12 months.

An analysis of thousands of health records by the RECOVER trial found that non-Hispanic white women in wealthier areas were more likely than others to have a long COVID diagnosis. Researchers said that likely reflected disparities in access to health care, and suggests that many cases of long COVID among people of color are not being diagnosed.

Grondin grew concerned when she continued to have symptoms three months after her initial infection – but there was no name for it then.

“I just kept saying to my husband, something isn’t right,” she said.

Like her fellow long-haulers, she has experienced a host of symptoms, including fatigue, sleep apnea, pain, cognitive dysfunction, and in her case, a brain aneurysm. She described a frightening moment when she was driving a car with her toddler in the back and had a seizure that left her in the path of oncoming traffic.

She has since been diagnosed with long COVID and can no longer work.

“It just feels like a constant punch in the face,” said Grondin.

Scientists are still working out why some people infected with COVID develop long-term symptoms, but syndromes like this are not new. Other infections such as Lyme disease can result in long-term symptoms, many of which overlap with long COVID.

Leading theories of the root causes of long COVID include the virus or viral proteins remaining in the tissues of some individuals; the infection causing an autoimmune response; or the virus reactivating latent viruses, leading to inflammation that damages tissue.

Kate Porter, 38, of Beverly, Massachusetts, a project manager for a financial services company, believes she was infected on a flight back from Florida in late March of 2020.

She had daily fevers for seven months, muscle weakness, shortness of breath, and excruciating nerve pain.

“I don’t think people realize how brutal physically everything was,” she said. In one of her darker moments, Porter recalled, “I cried on the floor begging for something to take me peacefully. I’ve never been like that.”

Frustrated by the lack of answers from a list of 10 specialists she has seen, Porter has explored alternative medicine. “It has opened me up to other remedies,” she said.

Although her health is much improved now, she still suffers from near daily migraines and neck pain she fears may never go away.

Genie Stevens, 65, a director of climate education, got infected while traveling from her home in Santa Fe to Cape Cod in late March 2020 to visit her mother, and never left. “It completely upended my life,” she said.

She went to an emergency department seeking tests and was told there were none – the typical answer in the spring of 2020, when scientists were scrambling to understand the nature of the virus and tests were being rationed. She was sent home to manage on her own.

A lifelong practitioner of meditation, Stevens took solace there, finding it eased her symptoms.

Confined to her bed that spring, she focused on an ancient crabapple tree outside her room. “I watched every bud unfurl.”

Although largely recovered, Stevens still has flare-ups of brain fog, exhaustion and high-pitched ringing in her ears when she pushes too hard. “This is the astoundingly maddening part of the illness. I feel totally fine, and then bam.”
…

The woman flying out of Philadelphia’s airport last year remembered to pack snacks, prescription medicine and a cellphone in her handbag. But what was more important was what she forgot to unpack: a loaded .380-caliber handgun in a black holster.

The weapon was one of the 6,542 guns the Transportation Security Administration intercepted last year at airport checkpoints across the country. The number — roughly 18 per day — was an all-time high for guns intercepted at U.S. airports, and is sparking concern at a time when more Americans are armed.

“What we see in our checkpoints really reflects what we’re seeing in society, and in society there are more people carrying firearms nowadays,” TSA administrator David Pekoske said.

With the exception of pandemic-disrupted 2020, the number of weapons intercepted at airport checkpoints has climbed every year since 2010. Experts don’t think this is an epidemic of would-be hijackers — nearly everyone caught claims to have forgotten they had a gun with them — but they emphasize the danger even one gun can pose in the wrong hands on a plane or at a checkpoint.

Guns have been intercepted literally from Burbank, California, to Bangor, Maine. But it tends to happen more at bigger airports in areas with laws more friendly to carrying a gun, Pekoske said. The top 10 list for gun interceptions in 2022 includes Dallas, Austin and Houston in Texas; three airports in Florida; Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta; Phoenix; and Denver.

Pekoske isn’t sure the “I forgot” excuse is always true or whether it’s a natural reaction to getting caught. Regardless, he said, it’s a problem that must stop.

When TSA staffers see what they believe to be a weapon on the X-ray machine, they usually stop the belt so the bag stays inside the machine and the passenger can’t get to it. Then they call in local police.

Repercussions vary depending on local and state laws. The person may be arrested and have the gun confiscated. But sometimes they’re allowed to give the gun to a companion not flying with them and continue on their way. Unloaded guns can also be placed in checked bags assuming they follow proper procedures. The woman in Philadelphia saw her gun confiscated and was slated to be fined.

Those federal fines are the TSA’s tool to punish those who bring a gun to a checkpoint. Last year TSA raised the maximum fine to $14,950 as a deterrent. Passengers also lose their PreCheck status — it allows them to bypass some types of screening — for five years. It used to be three years, but about a year ago the agency increased the time and changed the rules. Passengers may also miss their flight as well as lose their gun. If federal officials can prove the person intended to bring the gun past the checkpoint into what’s called the airport’s sterile area, it’s a federal offense.

Retired TSA official Keith Jeffries said gun interceptions can also slow other passengers in line.

“It’s disruptive no matter what,” Jeffries said. “It’s a dangerous, prohibited item and, let’s face it, you should know where your gun is at, for crying out loud.”

Experts and officials say the rise in gun interceptions simply reflects that more Americans are carrying guns.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade group, tracks FBI data about background checks completed for a firearm sale. The numbers were a little over 7 million in 2000 and about 16.4 million last year. They went even higher during the coronavirus pandemic.

For the TSA officers searching for prohibited items, it can be jarring.

In Atlanta, Janecia Howard was monitoring the X-ray machine when she realized she was looking at a gun in a passenger’s laptop bag. She immediately flagged it as a “high-threat” item and police were notified.

Howard said it felt like her heart dropped, and she was worried the passenger might try to get the gun. It turns out the passenger was a very apologetic businessman who said he simply forgot. Howard says she understands travel can be stressful but that people have to take care when they’re getting ready for a flight.

“You have to be alert and pay attention,” she said. “It’s your property.”

Atlanta’s airport, one of the world’s busiest with roughly 85,000 people going through checkpoints on a busy day, had the most guns intercepted in 2022 — 448 — but that number was actually lower than the year before. Robert Spinden, the TSA’s top official in Atlanta, says the agency and the airport made a big effort in 2021 to try to address the large number of guns being intercepted at checkpoints.

An incident in November 2021 reinforced the need for their efforts. A TSA officer noticed a suspected gun in a passenger’s bag. When the officer opened the suitcase the man reached for the gun, and it went off. People ran for the exits, and the airport was shut down for 2 1/2 hours, the airport’s general manager Balram Bheodari said during a congressional hearing last year.

Officials put in new signage to catch the attention of gun owners. A hologram over a checkpoint shows the image of a revolving blue gun with a red circle over the gun with a line through it. Numerous 70-inch television screens flash rotating messages that guns are not allowed.

“There’s signage all over the airport. There is announcements, holograms, TVs. There’s quite a bit of information that is sort of flashing before your eyes to just try to remind you as a last ditch effort that if you do own a firearm, do you know where it’s at?” Spinden said.

Miami’s airport also worked to get gunowners’ attention. The airport’s director told Congress last year that after setting a gun interception record in 2021 they installed high-visibility signage and worked with airlines to warn passengers. He said the number of firearms intercepted declined sharply.

Pekoske said signage is only part of the solution. Travelers face a barrage of signs or announcements already and don’t always pay attention. He also supports gradually raising penalties to grab people’s attention.

But Aidan Johnston, from the gun advocacy group Gun Owners of America, said he’d like to see the fines lessened, saying they’re not a deterrent. While he’d like to see more education for new gun owners, he also doesn’t think of this as a “major heinous crime.”

“These are not bad people that are in dire need of punishment,” he said. “These are people who made a mistake.”

Officials believe they’re catching the vast majority, but with 730 million passengers screened last year even a miniscule percentage getting through is a concern.

Last month, musician Cliff Waddell was traveling from Nashville, Tennessee, to Raleigh, North Carolina, when he was stopped at the checkpoint. A TSA officer had seen a gun in his bag. Waddell was so shocked he initially said it couldn’t be his because he’d just flown the day before with the same bag. It turned out the gun had been in his bag but missed at the screening. TSA acknowledged the miss, and Pekoske says they’re investigating.

When trying to figure out how the gun he keeps locked in his glove compartment got in his bookbag, Waddell realized he’d taken it out when he took the vehicle in for repairs. Waddell said he recognizes it’s his responsibility to know where his firearm is but worries about how TSA could have missed something so significant.

“That was a shock to me,” he said.
…

Richard Belzer, the longtime stand-up comedian who became one of TV’s most indelible detectives as John Munch in “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “Law & Order: SVU,” has died. He was 78. 

Belzer died Sunday at his home in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, in southern France, his longtime friend Bill Scheft said. Scheft, a writer who had been working on a documentary about Belzer, said there was no known cause of death, but that Belzer had been dealing with circulatory and respiratory issues. The actor Henry Winkler, Belzer’s cousin, tweeted, “Rest in peace Richard.” 

For more than two decades and across 10 series — even including appearances on “30 Rock” and “Arrested Development” — Belzer played the wise-cracking, acerbic homicide detective prone to conspiracy theories. Belzer first played Munch on a 1993 episode of “Homicide” and last played him in 2016 on “Law & Order: SVU.” 

Belzer never auditioned for the role. After hearing him on “The Howard Stern Show,” executive producer Barry Levinson brought the comedian in to read for the part. 

“I would never be a detective. But if I were, that’s how I’d be,” Belzer once said. “They write to all my paranoia and anti-establishment dissidence and conspiracy theories. So it’s been a lot of fun for me. A dream, really.” 

From that unlikely beginning, Belzer’s Munch would become one of television’s longest-running characters and a sunglasses-wearing presence on the small screen for more than two decades. In 2008, Belzer published the novel “I Am Not a Cop!” with Michael Ian Black. He also helped write several books on conspiracy theories, about things like President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. 

“He made me laugh a billion times,” his longtime friend and fellow stand-up Richard Lewis said Sunday on Twitter. 

Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Belzer was drawn to comedy, he said, during an abusive childhood in which his mother would beat him and his older brother, Len. He would do impressions of his childhood idol, Jerry Lewis.  

“My kitchen was the toughest room I ever worked,” Belzer told People magazine in 1993. 

After he was expelled from Dean Junior College in Massachusetts, Belzer embarked on a life of stand-up in New York in 1972. At Catch a Rising Star, Belzer became a regular performer and an emcee. He made his big-screen debut in Ken Shapiro’s 1974 film “The Groove Tube,” a TV satire co-starring Chevy Chase, a film that grew out of the comedy group Channel One that Belzer was a part of. 

Before “Saturday Night Live” changed the comedy scene in New York, Belzer performed with John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray and others on the National Lampoon Radio Hour. In 1975, he became the warm-up comic for the newly launched “SNL.” While many cast members quickly became famous, Belzer’s roles were mostly smaller cameos. 

But Belzer became one of the era’s top stand-ups. Belzer often played a stand-up comic in film, including in 1980’s “Fame” and 1983’s “Scarface.” But Munch would change Belzer’s career. 

“Munch was based on a real guy in Baltimore who was a star detective, in a way. He would come onto grisly murder scenes, start doing one-liners, because someone had to break the tension,” Belzer told the AV Club. “So Munch served a very important function. Not only was he a dissident who said what was on his mind, he kind of had the gallows humor that’s needed in a homicide squad.” 

Belzer is survived by his third wife, the actress Harlee McBride, whom he married in 1985. For the past 20 years, they lived mostly in France. 
…

The Atlanta-based nonprofit Carter Center announced 98-year-old former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is receiving hospice care at his home in Plains, Georgia. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh has more.
…

Space has “fundamentally changed” in just a few years due to a growing arms race, a U.S. general said, singling out China as the “most challenging threat,” followed by Russia.

“We are seeing a whole mix of weapons being produced by our strategic competitors,” General Bradley Chance Saltzman, the U.S. chief of space operations, told a group of media, including AFP.

“The most challenging threat is China but also Russia,” he said, speaking late Saturday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, listing technologies including anti-satellite missiles, ground-based directed energy and orbit interception capacities.

“We have to account for the fact that space as a contested domain has fundamentally changed. The character of how we operate in space has to shift, and that’s mostly because of the weapons (China) and Russia have tested and in some cases operationalized,” he said.  

His words carry even more weight given surging U.S.-China tensions — highlighted by tense exchanges in Munich Saturday between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Beijing’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, over a suspected Chinese spy balloon.

Blinken warned Wang that China must not repeat such an “irresponsible act” of sending a balloon over U.S. airspace, while Wang said Washington’s reaction — it shot the craft down — had damaged their countries’ relations.

Space arms race  

The space arms race is nothing new. As early as 1985, the Pentagon used a missile to destroy a satellite in a test.  

Since then, the United States’s rivals have been seeking to show they can compete — China did the same in 2007, and India in 2019.  

In February 2020, an American general noted that there were two Russian satellites placed into orbit that were tracking a U.S. spy satellite.  

And in late 2021, Russia destroyed one of its own satellites with a missile fired from Earth, in a show of force condemned as an irresponsible act by NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg.  

“Adversaries are leveraging space… targeting and extending the range of their weapons,” said General Saltzman.  

“That’s really the change that happens inside the domain.”

Countries are increasingly secretive when it comes to their military activities in space, but the race is such that in 2019, the year that the Pentagon launched its Space Force, it predicted that Russia and China could potentially overtake the United States.  

Saltzman rejects the idea that Washington is behind.

But the fight has evolved, shifting from the idea of destroying satellites with missiles or “kamikaze” satellites, to that of finding ways of damaging them with laser weapons or powerful microwaves.

“I am always going to make sure that I preserve capabilities to do the most critical functions, like national command and control, or nuclear command and control,” said the general.

‘Responsible behavior’  

The war in Ukraine has served as a reminder of the fundamental importance of space in conflicts today and in the future.  

“Space is important to the modern fight,” said Saltzman.

“You can attack space without going (into) space, through cyber networks or other vectors. We have to make sure we are defending all these capabilities.”

The growing military activity, combined with increasing commercial production, does however raise the potential problems of collateral damage, destructive debris and, more broadly, an international code of conduct.

Saltzman has never held talks with his Chinese and Russian counterparts, his aides told AFP. In Munich, he met Norway’s defense minister and participated in a panel. 

“We talked about responsible behavior,” he said. “There is proper way to behave in space, that is not debris-generating, that does not interfere, that has safe distances and safe trajectories, and we communicate when we have problems.”

Space will become “more and more congested,” he added.

“If we can operate with a clear understanding of what the standards are, we are going to be a lot safer.”
…

On the back seat of Marilyn Bragg’s car are her late husband’s five guns.

“I don’t want that at home, I don’t even know how to shoot,” said the Houston, Texas, retiree before handing them over to the authorities.

In this American state, bruised by shootings, initiatives are multiplying to offer residents a chance to get rid of their pistols, rifles, and semi-automatic weapons, in complete safety.

“I have grandchildren, I don’t want them to have access to that,” Bragg said as a long line of cars winds its way to an arms dump site.

At the end of the line, drivers are asked to leave their weapons in their trunk or on the back seat for inspection.

Specialized police then approach and check that the weapons are unloaded and registered.

They often find more than a dozen weapons in the vehicle.

“I think it’s a great program,” said Stuart Wolf, with 11 guns in the back of his truck. “There is really no other safe way than this to part with it,” said the 60-year-old.

A total of 793 weapons will be handed over to law enforcement by the end of the day Saturday.

In exchange, participants are given vouchers: $50 for a weapon that no longer works, $100 for a rifle, and $200 for a semi-automatic rifle, the weapon used in so many shootings in the United States.

“We already have enough weapons, and there are some that we put down that we don’t need,” said Kenneth Blackmon, alongside his wife, Loretta.

“So why keep them? We have to get rid of them,” the 69-year-old man said, handing over seven weapons. Especially since thefts of firearms are recurrent and dangerous, he said.

“Gun thefts have increased 16% over the past 10 years,” said Rodney Ellis, an official of the county that surrounds Houston.

In Texas, shootings are a daily occurrence.

“Since 2009, more people have died in deadly shootings in Texas than in any other U.S. state,” Ellis said.

According to figures from the FBI, in 2020, the state’s violent crime rate — 446.5 cases per 100,000 population — was significantly higher than the national average, which is 398.5.

One example, among many others: a few days ago, a person was killed and three others were injured during an altercation in a shopping center in El Paso.

The tragedy happened just steps away from where a young white supremacist killed 23 people at a supermarket popular with the Hispanic community in 2019.

Texas will be marked forever by the massacre in Uvalde, when an 18-year-old man entered an elementary school and killed 19 children and two teachers.

This U.S. state of 30 million is also one where it is easiest to obtain a weapon.

The carrying of weapons is authorized there without restriction, in the name of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

But for Ellis, the county official, the framers of the Constitution, in the 18th century, could never have imagined the modernity of today’s firearms.

“So until we manage to change the mentality and we arrive at a reasonable framework for firearms in this country, this type of initiative is the kind of thing that we have to do.”
…

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says his Chinese counterpart, top diplomat Wang Yi, did not apologize during a meeting in Munich for Beijing’s violation of U.S. airspace with its high-altitude surveillance balloon, even as Blinken told him the spying was unacceptable and must never occur again.

The two diplomats met for an hour Saturday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. This marked their first face-to-face meeting since the United States shot down the balloon earlier this month over the Atlantic Ocean off the U.S. Eastern Seaboard after it traversed the mainland for eight days.

Blinken told NBC’s “Meet the Press” show in an interview aired Sunday, “There was no apology. But what I can also tell you is this was an opportunity to speak very clearly and very directly about the fact that China sent a surveillance balloon over our territory, violating our sovereignty, violating international law.”

“And I told him quite simply that that was unacceptable and can never happen again,” Blinken said. “We’re of course not the only ones on the receiving end of these surveillance balloons. More than 40 countries have had these balloons fly over them in recent years, and that’s been exposed to the world.”

China has contended that the balloon, the size of two or three school buses, was a weather aircraft that drifted off course in the winds over the U.S., but U.S. officials, including Blinken, have rejected that explanation.

“What is clear is that, once the balloon was over the United States and flying basically west to east, it attempted to surveil very sensitive military sites,” he said. “In some cases, it loitered or returned to them as it progressed east. So, there’s no doubt in our minds at all that, A) this was a surveillance balloon and, B) it was attempting to engage in active surveillance.”

The U.S. subsequently has retrieved much of the balloon’s payload from the ocean floor off the coast of the southern state of South Carolina and sent the parts to the FBI’s laboratory outside Washington for examination.

Both countries deploy spy satellites. China has accused the U.S., while offering no evidence, of sending at least 10 balloons over China in recent years, an allegation the U.S. said is false.

Blinken, who canceled a scheduled trip to Beijing because of the spy balloon incident, said rescheduling it was not discussed with Wang.

Aside from their discussions about the spy balloon, Blinken said he shared the “very real concerns” of the U.S. about China’s support for Russia’s war against Ukraine, with the anniversary of the conflict this Friday.

To date, he said, the U.S. has seen “some political and rhetorical support, even some nonlethal support. But we are very concerned that China is considering providing lethal support to Russia in its aggression against Ukraine. And I made clear that that would have serious consequences in our relationship as well, something that President [Joe] Biden has shared directly with President Xi [Jinping] on several occasions.”

Blinken said, however, that “to the best of our knowledge they haven’t crossed that line yet” to provide military assistance to Russia and offered no specifics. “But the main concern is material support to Russia’s war effort that would have a lethal effect,” he said.

“China’s trying to have it both ways,” Blinken contended. “Publicly, they present themselves as a country striving for peace in Ukraine. But privately, as I said, we’ve seen already over these past months the provision of nonlethal assistance that does go directly to aiding and abetting Russia’s war effort.”

“So I think it’s important that we make clear, as I did this evening in my meeting with Wang Yi, that this is something that is of deep concern to us,” Blinken said. “And I made clear the importance of not crossing that line, and the fact that it would have serious consequences in our own relationship, something that we do not need on top of the balloon incident that China’s engaged in.”

Despite the current contentions, Blinken said the U.S. does not want to engage in a Cold War with China, whose economy is second in the world to the U.S.

“This is obviously among the most consequential but also complex relationships that we have, and probably the same could be said for many other countries around the world,” Blinken said.

“And of course, we’re in a vigorous competition with China, and that’s something we’re not at all shy about,” he said. “We intend to compete very vigorously, and we’ve taken important steps over the last couple of years to invest in ourselves so that we compete effectively. But also to align with allies and partners around the world so that we have a shared approach to some of the challenges that China poses.”

“And also, it’s important to note that there are some very big issues out there that are affecting all of our citizens and affecting people around the world where, if we can, it would be in our interest to find ways to cooperate on climate, on global health, on the macroeconomic situation around the world,” he said. “And we have a responsibility to at least try to do that. So that’s why I say you can’t reduce this to a bumper sticker or to a label. It’s complicated. It’s consequential. And we need to manage it responsibly.”

China’s state-run news outlet reported that Wang met with Blinken at the request of the U.S. and that Wang stated China’s “solemn position,” requesting the U.S. “change course” and fix the damage done to the bilateral relationship caused by the U.S.’s “abuse of force” in shooting down the balloon.
…

Michigan State University professor Marco Díaz-Muñoz is still haunted by what he witnessed last Monday night, when a gunman entered his classroom in Berkey Hall, killing two of his students in what he describes as “12 minutes of terror.”

“Those images haunt me. The images of those two girls,” Díaz-Muñoz told The Associated Press.

Arielle Anderson and Alexandria Verner, both juniors, would die that night, Feb. 13. The suspected gunman, Anthony McRae, would shoot six more students during the rampage in two campus buildings. Brian Fraser also would die. Five others would suffer critical gunshot wounds.

On Monday, Díaz-Muñoz and others are set to return to class. The university confirmed Friday in an email to students and staff that campus operations would resume, even as officials have faced pressure to delay the return. There will be no classes for the rest of the semester in Berkey Hall, where two students died.

Díaz-Muñoz said the university offered to have another professor to teach through the end of the semester. While he has yet to make a final decision, his plan is to go back next week and teach.

“On one hand, I want to forget it all. But then on the other hand, I think I need to help my students pick up the pieces,” Díaz-Muñoz said. “I think I need to help my students build a sense of meaning.”

Some in the community, however, aren’t ready for the rapid return. The editorial board of The State News, the student newspaper, wrote Thursday that they wouldn’t attend class next week, either in person or online. More time was needed to heal, the students wrote.

In the days following the shooting, students across campus were seen packing their belongings to leave East Lansing with all activities shut down for 48 hours and no classes until at least Monday. A petition demanding hybrid or online options for students received over 20,000 signatures as of Saturday. Michigan State has about 50,000 students, including 19,000 who live on campus.

Díaz-Muñoz understands that some students won’t be ready to return, saying that some will still have “the fear of looking over their shoulder and looking out the window, at the doors.”

“There are some kids in my class that are graduating this semester. And they need this horrific nightmare to have a better ending than the way it ended on Monday,” Díaz-Muñoz said.

In an email sent out to faculty Friday, the university said that all students will be given a credit/no credit option this semester, which allows students to receive credit for all classes without it impacting their overall grade point average. The email, written by interim Provost Thomas Jeitschko, asked all teachers to “extend as much grace and flexibility as you are able with individual students, now and in the coming weeks.”

“We are encouraging empathy and patience and an atmosphere for all to recover at their own pace,” Interim President Teresa Woodruff said Thursday.

Four wounded students remain in critical condition at Sparrow Hospital, a hospital spokesman confirmed Saturday. One had been upgraded to stable condition on Thursday.

Dozens of people have died in mass shootings so far in 2023. In 2022, there were more than 600 mass shootings in the U.S. in which at least four people were killed or injured, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

The shootings at Michigan State happened Monday during evening classes at Berkey Hall and nearby at the MSU Union, a social hub where students can study, eat and relax. Students across the vast campus were ordered to shelter in place for four hours — “run, hide, fight” if necessary — while police hunted for Anthony McRae, 43, who eventually killed himself when confronted by police not far from his home in Lansing.

Police said he left a note with a possible motive but have not said what it was. He was the lone shooter and had no connection to the victims or to Michigan State as a student or employee, they said.

Díaz-Muñoz describes hearing “explosions” outside his class before a masked man appeared in the doorway of Room 114 and began open firing. Students hid behind desks and chairs before breaking windows to escape.

After “one to two minutes” of shooting, the gunman turned around and left, leaving behind “destruction and death in my classroom,” said Díaz-Muñoz.

For Díaz-Muñoz, the terror didn’t end as abruptly. The carnage that occurred in his classroom was “something you saw in a movie,” he said.

Díaz-Muñoz says he has taken prescription medication as a way to force himself to sleep, only emerging from his room “for a bowl of soup.”

The assistant professor said that he is sharing his story in hopes of bringing about gun reform.

“If the lawmakers and the senators saw what I saw, instead of hearing in the news one more statistic. If they had seen those girls and the pools of blood that I saw, the horror we lived, they would be shamed into action,” Díaz-Muñoz said.
…

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visits Turkey on Sunday to observe firsthand the devastating aftermath of of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that has killed more than 46,000 and left millions homeless in Turkey and neighboring Syria.

While in Turkey, he is expected to meet with Turkey President Tayyip Erdogan and Mevlut Cavusoglu, Blinken’s Turkish counterpart.

The top U.S. diplomat’s meetings in Turkey follow a visit to Washington by Cavusoglu last month. The two NATO allies have tried to mend fences over disagreements on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, plus Sweden’s and Finland’s bids to enter NATO.

Against all odds, rescue workers have continued to recover people from the rubble of the February 6 earthquake, but the head of the country’s disaster response agency has said their efforts would end Sunday.
…

The push for free-fare public transit is growing in the United States, despite a debate over its feasibility.

While some cities have been taking small steps, Washington recently passed a measure to eliminate fares on city buses. It is the largest city to put into place a zero-fare transit program, set to begin by July 1.

“Having free fare is the right thing to do,” said Charles Allen, a member of Washington’s governing council, which unanimously passed the bill.

Allen, who is also the chair of the city’s transportation committee, thinks public transit should be considered the same as other free public services.

“I don’t pay to use the library or to call the fire department,” he told VOA. “I think public transit was primarily set up so that people didn’t view it as a public good, and I disagree with that.”

Allen noted that Washington’s “transit [system] doesn’t make money. It’s not supposed to since it’s a public good. And so, fare collection is where you get a little bit extra money in the system. And we’re just shifting the burden from the rider, especially because our bus riders are predominantly lower income.”

Work-from-home drove change

As in other cities, many Washingtonians began working remotely at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Ridership on public transportation dropped significantly.

“The bus ridership has now bounced back to 95% [of pre-pandemic levels],” Allen said, adding that Washington’s local government will provide funding for the project.

“The bill adds about a dozen 24-hour bus routes and creates a $10-million-a-year service fund for improving the bus service,” he said.

Allen hopes to entice more people to use public transit.

“The more we can get people out of their cars and onto the free public transit, the better,” he said.

Some see an environmental benefit to the free-fare movement.

“The Sierra Club supports the free-fare movement and believes that it’s critical for slashing pollution from the transportation sector,” said Katherine Garcia, director of the environmental group’s Clean Transportation for All campaign. “We know that when there are more riders on public transit, traffic congestion is reduced, and air quality improves.”

Just outside Washington, the city of Alexandria in the state of Virginia is continuing its DASH bus service, which became free-fare during the coronavirus pandemic.

“It saves me a lot of money and time,” said Resident Eduardo Campos. “And I can easily go from my neighborhood to other places in the city.”

New York-based TransitCenter, a foundation that advocates for better public transit in the United States, is against the zero-fare movement.

“With inflation, public transit needs more money to operate, and some of that money should come from taxpayers, and some of the revenue from fares,” TransitCenter executive director David Bragdon told VOA. “So, in most large cities, to abolish fares would reduce the revenue severely, and the amount of transit would be cut.”

Kansas City was first

Kansas City, Missouri, became the first U.S. city to embrace zero-fare public transit, making streetcars free for military veterans. Then, beginning in 2019, everyone was allowed to ride buses and streetcars for free.

Richard Jarrold, deputy CEO of the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, said the program has been successful and “benefits the community by helping people save money they can use for rent and medical care.”

But Bragdon sees a downside, saying Kansas City used to have “low-quality transit that cost $1.50 to ride. Now, it has low-quality transit that costs nothing but not a lot of people ride it because it’s still low quality.”

Instead of eliminating the fares, said Bragdon, they should have used the income to improve the services.

Kansas City is facing substantial financial challenges to continue the free fares.

“Politically, we have the support of the city of Kansas City, which has provided additional funding to partially offset the loss of the revenue,” Jarrold said. “But long-term, we’re looking at possible different funding, including from health insurance companies and a social service agency.”

Other cities have come up with innovative ideas to experiment with free fares.

The public transit system in Denver, Colorado, set up a zero-fare month when pollution is high in August.

In San Francisco, a pilot program for young people and seniors “offers free rides on all public transit,” said Stephen Chun, deputy spokesperson for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Despite riders clamoring for free transit for everyone, “no steps have been taken in that direction,” he said.

TransitCenter’s Bragdon said providing fare subsidies is a better idea than no fares.

“There are cities already doing that in Seattle, Portland and New York. There are ways to subsidize the fares for low-income people,” he said.

Council member Allen in Washington also backs subsidies for the district’s subway system.

“It’s not going to happen right away,” he said, “but the plan is, we’ll be able to get subsidies for people who ride the Metro rail.”
…

When Microsoft’s nascent Bing chatbot turns testy or even threatening, it’s likely because it essentially mimics what it learned from online conversations, analysts and academics said.

Tales of disturbing exchanges with the artificial intelligence chatbot, including it issuing threats and speaking of desires to steal nuclear code, create a deadly virus, or to be alive, have gone viral this week.

“I think this is basically mimicking conversations that it’s seen online,” Graham Neubig, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s language technologies institute, said Friday.

A chatbot, by design, serves up words it predicts are the most likely responses, without understanding meaning or context.

However, humans taking part in banter with programs naturally tend to read emotion and intent into what a chatbot says. 

“Large language models have no concept of ‘truth,’ they just know how to best complete a sentence in a way that’s statistically probable based on their inputs and training set,” programmer Simon Willison said in a blog post. “So they make things up, and then state them with extreme confidence.”

Laurent Daudet, co-founder of French AI company LightOn, said that the chatbot seemingly gone rogue was trained on exchanges that themselves turned aggressive or inconsistent.

“Addressing this requires a lot of effort and a lot of human feedback, which is also the reason why we chose to restrict ourselves for now to business uses and not more conversational ones,” Daudet told AFP.

The Bing chatbot was designed by Microsoft and the startup OpenAI, which has been causing a sensation since the November launch of ChatGPT, the headline-grabbing app capable of generating all sorts of written content in seconds on a simple request.

Since ChatGPT debuted, the technology behind it, known as generative AI, has been stirring fascination and concern.

“The model at times tries to respond or reflect in the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses (and) that can lead to a style we didn’t intend,” Microsoft said in a blog post, noting the bot is a work in progress.

The Bing chatbot said in some shared exchanges that it had been codenamed Sydney during development, and that it was given rules of behavior.

Those rules include “Sydney’s responses should also be positive, interesting, entertaining and engaging,” according to online posts.

Disturbing dialogues that combine steely threats and professions of love could be the result of dueling directives to stay positive while mimicking what the AI mined from human exchanges, Willison said.

Chatbots seem to be more prone to disturbing or bizarre responses during lengthy conversations, losing a sense of where exchanges are going, eMarketer principal analyst Yoram Wurmser told AFP.

“They can really go off the rails,” Wurmser said.

Microsoft announced on Friday it had capped the amount of back-and-forth people can have with its chatbot over a given question, because “very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model in the new Bing.”
…

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi in Munich on Saturday and told him the violation of U.S. airspace by China’s high-altitude surveillance balloon must never occur again. 

“The Secretary made clear the United States will not stand for any violation of our sovereignty, and that the PRC’s high altitude surveillance balloon program — which has intruded into the air space of over 40 countries across 5 continents — has been exposed to the world,” Ned Price, State Department spokesperson said in a statement after the meeting, referring to China by its full name of People’s Republic of China.

Blinken also warned Wang of “the implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia or assistance with systemic sanctions evasion,” Price said. 

Effort to east tension

The two met in an undisclosed location in an effort widely seen as an attempt to cool rising tensions between the two countries.  

The meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference is the first face-to-face talk between the two top diplomats since the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon this month. The incident led Blinken to postpone a planned trip to Beijing.      

Earlier Saturday, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris told an audience at the Munich Security Conference that she is troubled by the Beijing government’s deepening relationship with Moscow since Russia invaded Ukraine. Harris added that the Chinese support for Russia amid its war on Ukraine would undermine rule-based international order.    

Also Saturday, Wang — whose title is director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China Central Committee — said the U.S. shootdown of the Chinese “airship” is “a clear violation of international practice.”    

“This behavior is unimaginable and borders on hysteria,” Wang told an audience at the Munich Security Conference. “It is 100% an abuse of force.”

‘An irresponsible act’

On February 3, Blinken told Wang via phone that the spy balloon, which drifted across the continental U.S., was “an irresponsible act and a clear violation of U.S. sovereignty and international law that undermined the purpose” of Blinken’s trip. China said it was a weather balloon that strayed off course and later charged that the U.S. has conducted more than 10 balloon flights over China since May 2022. The U.S. has rejected both claims.     

U.S. officials say the Chinese military’s refusal to speak with Pentagon counterparts after the balloon was shot down last week was a dangerous development.   

Senior U.S. officials have said open lines of communication between the two countries are critical to prevent unintended conflicts, particularly in times of tension.    

U.S. officials note they also see the talks as a move to get back to a broader discussion on a range of issues, while the discussion on China’s surveillance balloon operation over U.S. territory is high on the agenda.   
…

The Carter Center said Saturday that former President Jimmy Carter has entered home hospice care. 

The charity created by the 98-year-old former president said on Twitter that after a series of short hospital stays, Carter “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention.” 

It said he has the full support of his medical team and family, which “asks for privacy at this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.” 

Carter, a Democrat, became the 39th U.S. president when he defeated former President Gerald R. Ford in 1976. He served a single term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980. 

In recent years the Georgia native suffered from a series of health issues including an aggressive form of melanoma that spread to his liver and brain, although he had responded well to the treatment he received. 

In August 2015, Carter had a small cancerous mass removed from his liver. The following year, Carter announced that he needed no further treatment, as an experimental drug had eliminated any signs of cancer. 

Carter celebrated his most recent birthday in October with family and friends in Plains, the tiny Georgia town where he and his wife, Rosalynn, were born in the years between World War I and the Great Depression. 

The Carter Center, which the 39th president and the former first lady established after their one White House term, last year marked 40 years of promoting democracy and conflict resolution, monitoring elections, and advancing public health in the developing world. 

James Earl Carter Jr. won the 1976 presidential election after beginning the campaign as a little-known, one-term Georgia governor. His surprise performance in the Iowa caucuses established the small, Midwestern state as an epicenter of presidential politics. Carter went on to defeat Ford in the general election, largely on the strength of sweeping the South before his native region shifted heavily to Republicans. 
…

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken is meeting with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi in Munich on Saturday, a meeting widely seen as an attempt to cool rising tensions between the two countries. 

Blinken’s motorcade has left the Munich Marriott Hotel where he’s staying, heading to an undisclosed location for the meeting with Wang. 

The meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference is the first face-to-face talk between the two top diplomats since the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon early this month. The incident led Blinken to postpone a planned trip to Beijing.

Earlier Saturday, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris told an audience at the Munich Security Conference that she is troubled by the Beijing government’s deepening relationship with Moscow since Russia invaded Ukraine. Harris added that the Chinese support for Russia amid its war on Ukraine would undermine rule-based international order.

Also on Saturday, Wang said the U.S. shootdown of the Chinese “airship” is “a clear violation of international practice.”

“This behavior is unimaginable and borders on hysteria. It is 100% an abuse of force,” Wang told an audience at the Munich Security Conference. Wang Yi’s formal title is director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee.

On February 3, Blinken told Wang Yi in a phone call that the spy balloon, which drifted across the continental United States, was “an irresponsible act and a clear violation of U.S. sovereignty and international law that undermined the purpose” of Blinken’s trip. China said it was a weather balloon that strayed off course and later charged that the U.S. has conducted more than 10 balloon flights over China since May 2022. The U.S. has rejected both claims.

U.S. officials say the Chinese military’s refusal to speak with Pentagon counterparts after the balloon was shot down last week was a dangerous development.

Senior U.S. officials have said open lines of communication between the two countries are critical to prevent unintended conflicts, particularly in times of tensions.

U.S. officials note they also see the talks as a move to get back to a broader discussion on a range of issues, while the discussion on China’s surveillance balloon operation over U.S. territory is high on the agenda.
…

The Biden administration formally concluded that Russia has committed “crimes against humanity” during its nearly year-long invasion of Ukraine, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said Saturday.

“In the case of Russia’s actions in Ukraine we have examined the evidence, we know the legal standards, and there is no doubt: these are crimes against humanity,” Harris, a former prosecutor, said at the Munich Security Conference.

“And I say to all those who have perpetrated these crimes, and to their superiors who are complicit in these crimes, you will be held to account.”

The official determination, which came at the end of a legal analysis led by the U.S. State Department, carries with it no immediate consequences for the ongoing war.

But Washington hopes that it could help further isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin and galvanize legal efforts to hold members of his government accountable through international courts and sanctions.

Harris’ speech comes as senior Western leaders meet in Munich to assess Europe’s worst conflict since World War II.  

She said Russia was now a “weakened” country after Biden led a coalition to punish Putin for the invasion, but Russia is only intensifying assaults in Ukraine’s east. Meanwhile, Ukraine is planning a spring counteroffensive, for which it is seeking more, heavier and longer-range weapons from its Western allies.

The nearly year-long war has killed tens of thousands, uprooted millions from their homes, pummeled the global economy and made Putin a pariah in the West.

Washington already had concluded that Russian forces were guilty of war crimes, as has a U.N.-mandated investigation, but the Biden administration conclusion that Russia’s actions amount to “crimes against humanity” implies a legal analysis that acts from murder to rape are widespread, systematic and intentionally directed against civilians. In international law, it is seen as a more serious offense.

The U.N.-backed Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine has not yet concluded that the war crimes it says it has identified amount to crimes against humanity.

‘Barbaric and inhumane’

In her remarks, Harris cited as “barbaric and inhumane” the scores of victims found in Bucha shortly after Russia’s invasion last February; the March 9 bombing of a Mariupol maternity hospital, that killed three people, including a child; and the sexual assault of a four-year-old by a Russian soldier that was identified by the U.N. report.

Organizations supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have documented more than 30,000 war crimes incidents since the invasion, according to the U.S. government.  

Ukrainian officials said they were investigating the shelling of the city of Bakhmut just this week as a possible war crime.  

Russia, which says it is conducting a “special military operation” in Ukraine to eliminate threats to its security and protect Russian speakers, has denied intentionally targeting civilians or committing war crimes.  

“Let us all agree: on behalf of all the victims, both known and unknown, justice must be served,” Harris said.

The Biden administration has sought to bring alleged war criminals to justice, including training Ukrainian investigators, imposing sanctions, blocking visas and hiking penalties under U.S. war crimes laws.

Washington has spent some $40 million on the efforts so far and says it is working with Congress to secure an additional $38 million for the efforts.

But the Biden administration’s ability to enforce any such efforts beyond its borders – and certainly within Russia – is limited. Collecting evidence in the war-torn country, too, has proven difficult.

International legal bodies also are constrained. At the International Criminal Court, for instance, jurisdiction extends only to member states and states that have agreed to its jurisdiction, such as Ukraine but not Russia. Kyiv has been pushing for a new international war crimes organization to focus on the Russian invasion, which Moscow has opposed.

“If Putin thinks he can wait us out, he is badly mistaken,” Harris said. “Time is not on his side.”
…

As he languished in a Missouri prison for nearly three decades, Lamar Johnson never stopped fighting to prove his innocence, even when it meant doing much of the legal work himself.

This week a St. Louis judge overturned Johnson’s murder conviction and ordered him freed. Johnson closed his eyes and shook his head, overcome with emotion. Shouts of joy rang out from the packed courtroom, and several people — relatives, civil rights activists and others — stood to cheer. Johnson’s lawyers hugged each other and him.

“I can’t say I knew it would happen, but I would never give up fighting for what I knew to be the right thing, that freedom was wrongfully taken from me,” Johnson said.

Thanks to a team of lawyers, a Missouri law that changed largely because of his case, and his own dogged determination, he can start to put his life back together. “It’s persistence,” the 49-year-old said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press.

“You have to distinguish yourself. I think the best way to get [the court’s] attention, or anyone’s attention, is to do much of the work yourself,” Johnson said. “That means making discovery requests from law enforcement agencies and the courts, and that’s what I did. I wrote everybody.”

He said that he was able to contact people “who were willing to come forward and tell the truth.”

Johnson was just 20 in 1994 when his friend, Marcus Boyd, was shot to death on Boyd’s front porch by two masked men. Police and prosecutors arrested Johnson days later, blaming the killing on a dispute over drug money; both men were drug dealers.

From the outset, Johnson said he was innocent. His girlfriend backed his alibi that they were together when the killings occurred. The case against him was built largely on the account of an eyewitness who picked Johnson out of a police lineup, and a jailhouse informant who told a police detective that he overheard Johnson discussing the crime.

Decades of studies show that eyewitness testimony is right only about half the time — and since Johnson’s conviction, across the country there has been a reexamination of eyewitness identification procedures, which have been shown to often reproduce racial biases.

St. Louis Circuit Judge David Mason also heard testimony calling into question the informant’s integrity. Even more, an inmate at South Central Correctional Center in Licking, Missouri — James Howard — came forward to tell the judge that he and another man were the shooters — and that Johnson wasn’t involved. Howard is currently serving a life term for an unrelated murder.

After two months of review, Mason announced his ruling Tuesday.

“It felt like a weight had been lifted off me,” Johnson said. “I think that came out in how emotional I got afterward. I was finally heard.”

It was a moment that he wasn’t sure would ever come.

A connection to another wrongfully convicted man also played a pivotal role in Johnson’s eventual freedom.

Ricky Kidd was convicted of killing two men in Kansas City in 1996. He was sent to the Potosi Correctional Center, where he and Johnson became friends. One day, in the prison yard, Johnson turned to Kidd.

“He said, ‘You might not believe me, but I’m innocent,’” Kidd recalled. “I said, ‘Oh yeah? You might not believe me but I’m innocent, too!’”

The two became cellmates. Eventually, the Midwest Innocence Project agreed to take on Kidd’s case. Meanwhile, Johnson’s effort was going nowhere. Kidd recalled a night when he was awakened by Johnson’s quiet sobs and the sound of his feet pacing the floor.

“He said, ‘Man, I don’t think I’m going to make it out. I keep getting these doors shut,’” Kidd said. “I said, ‘You got to hang in there.’”

Johnson tried to stay busy. That included working in the prison hospice unit. It gave him a new perspective.

“Growing up where I grew up, death, shootings, all those kinds of things are kind of normal,” he said. Working in hospice, “You develop a greater appreciation of life, as you see someone go through that death process.”

Meanwhile, Kidd talked to an investigator with the Innocence Project and made the case that since Johnson had already done so much background work himself that the process would have a head start. The organization took on his case.

Lindsay Runnels, a Kansas City attorney who partners with the Innocence Project, said Johnson’s work was vital. For example, she said his Freedom of Information Act requests uncovered the extensive criminal background of the jailhouse informant, which called into question the man’s integrity.

“He just did all of that groundwork on his own from his jail cell, with nothing but paper and stamp,” Runnels said.

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner believed Johnson was innocent. But her efforts to help him were blocked when the Missouri Supreme Court, in March 2021, ruled that Gardner lacked the authority to seek a new trial 28 years after the conviction.

Missouri lawmakers, disturbed that an innocent person could remain in prison on the technicality that too much time had passed since his conviction, passed a law enacted in August 2021, that allows prosecutors to request a hearing before a judge in cases of potential wrongful conviction. That law freed another longtime inmate, Kevin Strickland, in 2021. He had served more than 40 years for a Kansas City triple-killing.

Some states, including California and Hawaii, are also wrestling with how to handle wrongful convictions cases. In California, Attorney General Rob Bonta is setting up a commission to review criminal cases for possible wrongful convictions. The Innocence Project’s website says that across the U.S., it has helped free or exonerate more than 240 people, 58% of whom are Black.

The vast majority of their clients were exonerated by DNA evidence.

Now, Kidd is a public speaker who also works with prosecutors to help them avoid convicting innocent people. He hopes Johnson will join him in his effort. What Johnson chooses to do next as a free man is unclear.

“I think we can move the needle, prevent wrongful convictions in the first place and help extricate more individuals on the back end,” Kidd said.

Johnson said he’s thankful to be free, even if he’s unsure what the future holds.

“It’s exciting and a little intimidating,” he said. “I have to go out there and learn, and survive, and get my life back in order.”
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President Joe Biden will mark the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a speech Tuesday in Poland, where he is expected to reiterate the United States’ commitment to support the defense of Ukraine “for as long as it takes” despite growing Republican reticence and softening overall support among Americans.

Scheduled to arrive in Warsaw on Tuesday morning, Biden will meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda to discuss “collective efforts to support Ukraine and to bolster NATO’s deterrence,” said John Kirby, National Security Council (NSC) spokesperson in a briefing to reporters Friday.

Biden also will meet with NATO leaders from the so-called Bucharest Nine (B-9), the countries on NATO’s easternmost flank, which include Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.

B-9 countries feel the Russian threat more acutely and are pushing for a more robust military response compared with other European nations including France and Germany, whose citizens are more concerned about ways to end the conflict and are questioning the war’s impact on their own economies.

The White House said there are no plans for Biden to visit Ukraine nor to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during this trip. Observers say Biden may not cross the border to avoid provoking Putin, but it’s likely that Zelenskyy will meet him in Poland in a summit that would not be revealed until the last minute for security reasons. The pair last met in person in late December when Zelenskyy made a surprise visit to Washington.

Meanwhile Vice President Kamala Harris is in Germany to attend the annual Munich Security Conference, in which the Ukraine war dominates conversations among world leaders.

War of attrition

Despite repeated public confirmation that the U.S. will support Zelenskyy for “as long as it takes,” observers note that time is not on Kyiv’s side as Moscow turns the conflict into a war of attrition in a bid to grind down Ukrainian resolve and exhaust the West’s patience. Ukraine has the advantage of Western high-tech weapons and intelligence support, but Russia is favored by the sheer size of its economy, manpower and defense production capacity.

The U.S. wants Ukraine to make battlefield progress rapidly without dragging NATO into a direct military confrontation with Moscow, said George Beebe, director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute.

“We are trying to essentially achieve a balance here to give the Ukrainians enough military wherewithal that they can bring this war to a successful conclusion but to do so without recklessly raising the risk of World War III as President Biden is fond to say,” Beebe told VOA. “That’s not an easy balance to strike.”

With the U.S. and Russia having most of the world’s nuclear weapons, escalation could be catastrophic.

Amid reports of Russia ramping up its ground and air attacks, administration officials would not say whether Biden will announce another security package or offensive weaponry including jet fighters that Kyiv says it needs to make significant gains on the battlefield.

No pathways to peace

White House officials are quick to point out that Russian President Vladimir Putin can end the war immediately by halting his offensive. Instead, Moscow is mobilizing and ramping up long-term defense production.

“At the same time, Ukrainians are absolutely not ready to give up any of their territory, not that that would stop the war because Putin would just be encouraged by this,” said Michal Baranowski, managing director for German Marshall Fund East.

Polls show an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians believe the country should get back all its territory, including Crimea, which Moscow annexed illegally in 2014.

Baranowski told VOA that Biden is unlikely to force Zelenskyy into a premature compromise, however it remains unclear how much Western support can be sustained long term. Already NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is saying that Ukraine is using up ammunition faster than the West can provide, straining its weapons industries.

Another contentious element is Ukraine’s future geostrategic alignment. Moscow is adamant that Kyiv does not join NATO or have a separate military alliance with the U.S. even if it doesn’t become a NATO member.

“Unless there’s some understanding reached with the Russians on that, I think their fallback position is going to be simply to wreck Ukraine to the point where it’s in no condition to ally with anybody,” Beebe said.

Beebe points to cease-fires where neither side recognizes territorial changes and simply accepts them as unsettled issues, at least at first. “That may be where we want to go into here,” he said.

Next week, the United Nations General Assembly will vote on a draft resolution co-sponsored by the U.S. that stresses “the need to reach, as soon as possible, a comprehensive, just and lasting peace” in Ukraine.

“We are also urging countries to support the resolution,” a National Security Council spokesperson told VOA.

Republican questions

While there is still broad support for Ukraine in Congress, some Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives, where their party now holds a slim majority, are increasingly questioning the massive flow of American funds to Kyiv — $40 billion in security, economic and humanitarian aid since the invasion.

“This war is being fought on the backs of U.S. taxpayers,” said Ryan Zinke, a Republican congressman from Montana. “And what’s our plan, Mr. President? Is it an endless war? Are we going to continue to feed armament that we don’t know where it’s going exactly, or how it’s going to be used? To what extent?” he said to VOA following Biden’s State of the Union remarks earlier this month.

Traditionally, Republicans are more likely to support foreign military spending. But former President Donald Trump’s “America First” doctrine has motivated a small but vocal non-interventionist faction in the party.

Earlier this month a group of House Republicans who support Trump introduced the “Ukraine Fatigue” resolution that calls for an end to U.S. military and financial aid to Ukraine and urges combatants to reach a peace agreement.

Although the group represents a minority even within the Republican Party, its members could jeopardize future Ukraine aid packages since the January adoption of a new House rule where only one member is needed to bring a “motion to vacate” to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — a concession McCarthy agreed to in exchange for support to secure his speakership.

Nearly half of Americans (47%) now say Washington should urge Kyiv to settle for peace as soon as possible.
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US President Joe Biden is gearing up to mark the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a speech in neighboring Poland on Tuesday, where he will reiterate the US commitment to support the defense of Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes.’ This despite growing Republican reticence and softening overall support among Americans. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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Nearly 50 lawmakers from both major political parties of the United States on Friday attended the start of Europe’s premier annual security conference to affirm bipartisan support for U.S. aid to Ukraine.

Four delegations of Democratic and Republican leaders and members of the Senate and House converged as one of the largest groups of U.S. lawmakers to attend the Munich Security Conference since its inception in 1963, U.S. officials said.

Hundreds of politicians, military officers and diplomats from around the world gathered in Munich a week before the anniversary of Russia’s invasion, with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urging allies to speed up weapons deliveries.

The war has tested not only the unity of the NATO alliance and European Union, but the ability of the U.S. parties to overcome deep policy differences.

“We are here to send a clear message to this conference and everyone around the world: The U.S. is on a bipartisan basis totally behind the effort of help Ukraine,” Mitch McConnell, the Democratic-controlled Senate’s Republican minority leader, told Reuters after meeting conservative German politicians.

Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Soeder said McConnell’s unequivocal support for Ukraine was welcome after the uncertainty of the former President Donald Trump administration’s isolationist America First policy.

“Today is a very good signal,” he said.

Other prominent U.S. lawmakers in Munich included Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Republican chairmen of the House foreign relations and intelligence committees and their Democratic Senate counterparts.

The Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in last year’s mid-terms raised questions about the future of the U.S. aid on which Kyiv depends to halt a new offensive by Russia in a war that has killed thousands and displaced millions.

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy declared there would be no “blank check” for Ukraine and far-right Republicans hold that resources are needed to address other pressing problems.

Some senators share that view. On Thursday, Republican Senator Josh Hawley had urged an end to U.S. military aid to Ukraine until the European allies increased their backing, saying sending arms to Kyiv was threatening the ability of the U.S. to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

But Lindsey Graham, a leading advocate of aiding Ukraine, said in Munich that China would be encouraged to invade Taiwan if the U.S. and its European allies failed to back Ukraine.

“If you care about China and you don’t get the connection between Russia, Ukraine and China, you are missing a lot,” Graham told Reuters.

But Republicans and some Democrats also say President Joe Biden’s administration should better explain its Ukraine policy.

The United States is Ukraine’s leading military aid supplier at some $30 billion, including long-range artillery, air defense systems and advanced armored vehicles.

There are now calls on both sides of the Atlantic for Ukraine to receive advanced Western fighter jets.
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Editor’s note: Here is a fast take on what the international community has been up to this past week, as seen from the United Nations perch.

Aid efforts ramp up in aftermath of earthquakes 

As hopes fade for finding survivors under the rubble more than one week after  massive earthquakes killed more than 40,000 people in parts of Turkey and Syria, relief efforts are ramping up to reach the millions of survivors who need winter clothes, food, water and sanitation. The United Nations launched a $1 billion appeal for Turkey and a nearly $400 million one for Syria this week. 

For the first time since the Syrian war began in 2011, the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has agreed to allow the U.N. to bring humanitarian assistance into opposition-held parts of the country. Since 2014, the organization has relied on Security Council resolutions to cross from Turkey into Syria. Now, with millions of residents in the area impacted by the earthquake, Assad has agreed to let humanitarian workers use two additional crossings for three months. The United States says it will be watching, and if the Syrian leader reneges on his promise, it will seek council authorization to keep the crossings open. 

Syria’s Assad to Allow UN More Access to Quake Victims 

Aid appeal for Ukraine as war hits one-year mark 

The United Nations appealed Wednesday for $5.6 billion to provide humanitarian assistance to millions of Ukrainians affected by Russia’s invasion of their country nearly one year ago. Nearly $4 billion of the appeal will go toward easing the plight of 11.1 million people displaced or living in dangerous and difficult situations inside Ukraine. The remainder will assist 4.2 million Ukrainian refugees and communities hosting them in 10 European countries.

UN Appeals for $5.6 Billion for Millions of Ukrainian Victims of Russian Invasion 

Uganda closes UN human rights office in Kampala 

Uganda said this week that it would not renew the U.N. human rights office’s mandate in the country because it was no longer necessary. Human rights activists have protested the action and the U.N. human rights office is reportedly in discussions with the government to see what can be done.

Ugandan Activists Decry Closure of UN Human Rights Office in Uganda 

In brief        

—  U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for the African Union summit. He will address leaders Saturday on issues including peace and security threats, the cost-of-living crisis, and the impact of the climate crisis on the continent. He is also participating in high-level meetings on the situations in the Sahel, Libya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He has had several bilateral meetings with leaders, including the AU Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and Rwandan President Paul Kagame. 

—  The U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, known as UNMISS, said Thursday that violence rose sharply there at the end of 2022, mainly in Upper Nile, Warrap and Jonglei states. The number of civilians harmed by violence rose 87% between October and the end of December over the same period in 2021. There was also a huge spike in abductions (464%) and conflict-related sexual violence (360%). UNMISS urged the Juba government to urgently address the escalation and to protect civilians. For its part, the mission has increased patrols and set up temporary operating bases in hot spots. 

— On Thursday, the U.N. launched a $1.3 billion appeal to help 6 million people in northeastern Nigeria, where child malnutrition rates are rising and 2.4 million people are in acute need due to conflict, disease and disaster. Women and girls make up 80% of those in need across three hard hit areas – Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states. The U.N. says already high levels of severe acute malnutrition in children are forecast to more than double, from 300,000 children impacted last year to a projected 697,000 children this year.  

— In Bangladesh, the World Food Program said Tuesday that because of a major funding shortfall, it will have to cut food assistance to Rohingya refugees for the first time since they fled Myanmar six years ago. The WFP is appealing for $125 million to avoid ration cuts, or at a minimum $80 million, to limit the ration cuts to one in 2023. The food agency said the first cut would be from $12 to $10 per person per month and would seriously impact food security and nutrition, which are already alarming. The WFP says without a cash injection by April, it could be forced to further cut an additional $4 per person. Most Rohingya refugees are fully dependent on that money to feed their families. 

— The U.N. said Friday that Malawi is fighting its worst recorded cholera outbreak, with more than 1,400 deaths and 43,000 cases to date. U.N. agencies have been responding for several months, providing cholera beds, tents for cholera treatment, essential supplies including hygiene items, and mobile units for safe food storage. 

Quote of note  

“Low-lying communities and entire countries could disappear forever. We would witness a mass exodus of entire populations on a biblical scale. And we would see ever-fiercer competition for fresh water, land and other resources.” 

– Secretary-General Guterres, on the consequences of sea-level rise, speaking Monday during a debate in the Security Council. He urged climate action to stem the warming, rising sea waters.

Next week

February 24 will mark one year since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. The fighting has displaced 5.3 million Ukrainians inside the country, caused nearly 8 million more to flee as refugees, and left 17.6 million people in the country in need of humanitarian assistance. The U.N. General Assembly is expected to take action on a draft resolution on Thursday that promotes peace in Ukraine in line with the U.N. Charter and international law. The Security Council will hold a ministerial level meeting on Friday on the subject.
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The United States successfully concluded recovery efforts off South Carolina on Thursday for debris from the suspected Chinese balloon shot down by a U.S. fighter jet on February 4, the U.S. military said in a statement Friday. 

“Final pieces of debris are being transferred to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory in Virginia for counterintelligence exploitation, as has occurred with the previous surface and subsurface debris recovered,” the U.S. military’s Northern Command said in a statement. 

“U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard vessels have departed the area. Air and maritime safety perimeters have been lifted.” 
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