The suburban Chicago, Illinois, community of Plainfield mourns a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy who authorities say was stabbed to death by his landlord. His mother, also a victim of the attack, remains hospitalized. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports.
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Hamas blames Israel for Tuesday’s devastating explosion at a Gaza hospital. Israel, however, places the blame on the group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which denies the accusation. In Lebanon, few doubt Israel’s responsibility and protesters have been expressing their rage at the U.S. Embassy, viewing the United States as Israel’s main backer. Jacob Russell reports from Beirut.
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US President Joe Biden is in Tel Aviv Wednesday, showing support for US ally Israel following the Oct. 7 attack by militant group Hamas that has escalated to an all-out war. Biden appeared to side with Israel, who denied responsibility for a massive explosion at a Gaza hospital that killed hundreds, ignited protests across the region, and scuttled Biden’s summit with regional leaders. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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The chief suspect in Natalee Holloway’s 2005 disappearance in Aruba admitted he killed her and disposed of her remains, and has agreed to plead guilty to charges he tried to extort money from the teen’s mother years later, a U.S. judge said Wednesday,

The disclosure came during a plea and sentencing hearing for Joran van der Sloot, 36, in a federal courtroom in Alabama — just a few miles from the Birmingham suburb where Holloway used to live.

“You changed the course of our lives and you turned them upside down,” her mother Beth Holloway said in court, standing a few feet from van der Sloot. “You are a killer.”

Van der Sloot is not charged in Holloway’s death. The Dutch citizen was sentenced Wednesday to 20 years in prison for extortion and wire fraud, but as part of his plea agreement, that sentence will run concurrently with his sentence in Peru, where he’s serving a 28-year prison sentence for killing Stephany Flores in 2010.

U.S. Judge Anna Manasco said she considered van der Sloot’s confession to Holloway’s murder and the destruction of her remains as part of the sentencing decision.

“You have brutally murdered, in separate instances years apart, two young women who refused your sexual advances,” the judge said.

Holloway went missing during a high school graduation trip with classmates. She was last seen leaving a bar with van der Sloot. He was questioned in the disappearance but was never prosecuted. A judge declared Holloway dead, but her body has never been found.

Manasco said the plea deal required van der Sloot to provide all the information he knew about Natalie Holloway’s disappearance.

The case has captivated the public’s attention for nearly two decades, spawning extensive news coverage, books, movies and podcasts. A heavy media presence assembled outside the federal courthouse nearly three hours before the hearing.

Holloway’s family has long sought answers about her disappearance. Van der Sloot gave different accounts over the years of that night in Aruba. Federal investigators in the Alabama case said van der Sloot gave a false location of Holloway’s body during a recorded 2010 FBI sting that captured the extortion attempt.

Prosecutors in the Alabama case said van der Sloot asked for $250,000 from Beth Holloway to reveal the location of her daughter’s remains. Van der Sloot agreed to accept $25,000 to disclose the location, and asked for the other $225,000 once the remains were recovered, prosecutors said. Van der Sloot said Holloway was buried in the gravel under the foundation of a house, but later admitted that was untrue, FBI Agent William K. Bryan wrote in a 2010 sworn statement filed in the case.

Van der Sloot moved from Aruba to Peru before he could be arrested in the extortion case.

The government of Peru agreed to temporarily extradite van der Sloot so he could face trial on the extortion charge in the United States. U.S. authorities agreed to return him to Peruvian custody after his case is concluded, according to a resolution published in Peru’s federal register.

“The wheels of justice have finally begun to turn for our family,” Beth Holloway said in June after van der Sloot arrived in Alabama. “It has been a very long and painful journey.”
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Russia’s parliament moved swiftly to fulfill the wish of President Vladimir Putin by completing the passage of a bill that shifts Moscow’s legal stance on nuclear testing at a time of acute tension with the West.

The lower house, the State Duma, on Wednesday passed the second and third readings of a bill that revokes Russia’s ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, or CTBT. Both were passed unanimously by 415 votes to 0.

Putin urged the Duma on October 5 to make the change in order to “mirror” the position of the United States, which has signed but never ratified the 1996 treaty.

“We understand our responsibility to our citizens, we are protecting our country. What is happening in the world today is the exclusive fault of the United States,” parliament speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said.

Since he invaded Ukraine last year, Putin has repeatedly reminded the West of Russia’s nuclear might. On Wednesday state TV showed rare footage of him during a visit to Beijing being accompanied by naval officers carrying the so-called nuclear briefcase that can be used to order a nuclear strike.

Russia says it will not resume atomic testing unless Washington does, but arms control experts are concerned it may be inching towards a test that the West would perceive as a Russian nuclear escalation amid the Ukraine war.

They say a test by either Russia or the United States could prompt the other to do the same, and China, India and Pakistan might then follow, triggering a new global arms race. All are currently observing test moratoriums, and only North Korea has conducted a test involving a nuclear explosion this century.

Russia originally ratified the CTBT in 2000. While it is revoking that step, it has so far said it will remain a signatory to the treaty and continue to supply data to the global monitoring system which alerts the world to any nuclear test.

But when he introduced the bill on Tuesday, parliament speaker Volodin raised the possibility Moscow might withdraw altogether and said it would keep Washington guessing about its intentions.

“And what we will do next — whether we remain a party to the treaty or not — we will not tell them. We must think about global security, the safety of our citizens and act in their interests,” he said.

The law will now go to the upper house, and to Putin for signing.

Putin said earlier this month he was aware of calls for Russia to resume nuclear testing but was not ready to say whether Moscow should do so.

Back in February, he said Russia must “make everything ready” to conduct a test in case Washington did so. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Russia’s testing ground in the remote northern archipelago of Novaya Zemlya in August.

CNN published satellite images last month showing Russia, the United States and China have all built new facilities at their nuclear test sites in recent years.

Russia’s shift on the CTBT follows its suspension earlier this year of New START, the last remaining bilateral nuclear treaty with the United States, which limits the number of strategic warheads each side can deploy.

Experts at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said both steps may be intended by Putin “to generate alarm and uncertainty among states supporting Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s illegal invasion.”

They said the CTBT move “weakens international stability and diminishes humanity’s prospects of avoiding a new nuclear arms race.”

But they added: “In this instance, it is difficult for the United States to go far in criticizing Putin’s announcement and Russia’s potential withdrawal from the CTBT since the USA has itself failed to ratify the treaty and become a party to it in the 27 years since first signing.”

Melissa Parke, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, called Russia’s action irresponsible.

She said treaties like the CTBT “are critical to making sure nuclear testing, which has harmed people’s health and caused widespread radioactive contamination, is not resumed.”

Post-Soviet Russia has never carried out a nuclear test. The Soviet Union last tested in 1990 and the United States in 1992.
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A clinical trial is recruiting thousands of volunteers — including a large number of Black women who face disparities in breast cancer death rates — to try to find out.

People like Carole Stovall, a psychologist in Washington, D.C., have signed up for the study to help answer the question.

“We all need a mammogram anyway, so why not do it with a study that allows the scientists to understand more and move closer to finding better treatments and ways of maybe even preventing it?” Stovall said.

The underrepresentation of women and minorities in research is a long-simmering issue affecting health problems including Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and COVID-19. Trials without diversity lead to gaps in understanding of how new treatments work for all people.

“Until we get more Black women into clinical trials, we can’t change the science. And we need better science for Black bodies,” said Ricki Fairley, a breast cancer survivor and advocate who is working on the issue.

Black women are 40% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women and tend to be diagnosed younger. But it’s not clear whether 3D mammography is better for them, said Dr. Worta McCaskill-Stevens of the National Cancer Institute.

“Are there populations for whom this might be important to have early diagnosis?” asked McCaskill-Stevens. “Or is it harmful,” causing too many false alarms or unneeded follow-up tests and treatments?

McCaskill-Stevens, who is Black, leads NCI’s efforts to boost access to cancer research in minority and rural communities. She has joined the study herself.

The newer 3D technique has been around for a decade, but there’s never been conclusive evidence that it’s better than 2D at detecting advanced cancers. The screening technique combines multiple pictures of the breast taken from different angles to create a 3D-like image. Both 3D and 2D mammograms compress the breast and use low doses of radiation.

Prior studies suggest that 3D finds more cancers than 2D, but catching more cancers doesn’t necessarily mean more lives saved. Some cancers missed by standard screening may not progress or need treatment. Previous studies did not randomly assign patients to a screening method, the gold standard for research.

The notion “that if it’s new, it’s shiny, then it’s better,” isn’t necessarily true, McCaskill-Stevens said. “Until we have the evidence to support that, then we need well-designed randomized trials.”

The trial has enrolled nearly 93,000 women so far with a goal of 128,000. The NCI-funded study is now running in Canada, South Korea, Peru, Argentina, Italy and 32 U.S. states. A site in Thailand will soon begin enrolling patients.

“We added more international sites to enhance the trial’s diversity, particularly for Hispanic and Asian women,” said Dr. Etta Pisano, who leads the study.

Overall, 42% of participants are Hispanic. As recruiting continues, enrolling Black women and other women of color will “absolutely” continue as a priority, Pisano said.

Participants are randomly assigned to either 2D or 3D mammograms and are followed for several years. The number of advanced cancers detected by the two methods will be compared.

At the U.S. study sites, 21% of study participants are Black women — that’s higher than a typical cancer treatment study, in which 9% of participants are Black, McCaskill-Stevens said.

The University of North Carolina has signed up more Black women than any other study site. Nearly a quarter of the nearly 3,000 women enrolled at UNC’s two locations are Black.

“Women in North Carolina want to take part in something that’s bigger than them,” said Dr. Cherie Kuzmiak, who leads the UNC arm of the study. “They want this active role in helping determine the future of health care for women.”

In Washington, D.C., word of mouth has led to successful recruiting.

A chance encounter at her hair salon persuaded Stovall to join the research. While waiting for a hair appointment, she met Georgetown University cancer researcher Lucile Adams-Campbell. The two, both Black, started chatting.

“She explained how important it was to get women of color into the program,” said Stovall, who jumped at the chance to catch up on her mammograms after the COVID-19 pandemic delayed screening for her and thousands of others.

For Stovall, there was a personal reason to join the research. Her sister recently completed treatment for triple negative breast cancer, an aggressive type that affects Black women at higher rates than white women.

Women ages 45 to 74 without a personal history of breast cancer are eligible for the study, which launched in 2017. Many women also are providing blood and cheek swab samples for a database that will be mined for insights.

“It’s a dream that people had since the beginning of screening that we wouldn’t fit everybody into the same box,” Pisano said. The study’s findings could “reduce disparities if we’re successful, assuming people have access to care.”

Stovall, 72, had a brief scare when her mammogram, the traditional 2D type, showed something suspicious. A biopsy ruled out cancer.

“I was extremely relieved,” Stovall said. “Everybody I know has heard from me about the need for them to go get a mammogram.”
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The remains of at least 189 people have been removed from a Colorado funeral home, up from an initial estimate of about 115 when the decaying and improperly stored bodies were discovered two weeks ago, officials said Tuesday.

The remains were found by authorities responding to a report of an “abhorrent smell” inside a decrepit building at the Return to Nature Funeral Home in the small town of Penrose, about 160 kilometers (100 miles) south of Denver. All the remains were removed from the site as of Oct. 13, but officials said the numbers could change again as the identification process continues.

The updated count comes as families who did business with the funeral home grow increasingly concerned about what happened to their deceased loved ones. Local officials said they will begin notifying family members in the coming days as the remains are identified.

There is no timeline to complete the work, which began last week with help from an FBI team that gets deployed to mass casualty events like airline crashes. Fremont County Coroner Randy Keller said he wanted to provide accurate information to families “to prevent further victimization as they continue to grieve.”

Officials have not disclosed further details of what was found inside the funeral home, but Fremont Sheriff Allen Cooper described the scene as horrific.

Authorities entered the funeral home’s neglected building with a search warrant Oct. 4 and found the decomposing bodies. Neighbors said they had been noticing the smell for days.

The owners of the Return to Nature Funeral Home had missed tax payments in recent months, were evicted from one of their properties and were sued for unpaid bills by a crematory that quit doing business with them almost a year ago, according to public records and interviews with people who worked with them.

A day after the odor was reported, the director of the state office of Funeral Home and Crematory registration spoke on the phone with owner Jon Hallford. He tried to conceal the improper storage of corpses in Penrose, acknowledged having a “problem” at the site and claimed he practiced taxidermy there, according to an order from state officials dated Oct. 5.

Attempts to reach Hallford, his wife, Carie, and Return to Nature have been unsuccessful. Numerous text messages to the funeral home seeking comment have gone unanswered. No one answered the business phone or returned a voice message left Tuesday.

In the days after the discovery, law enforcement officials said the owners were cooperating as investigators sought to determine any criminal wrongdoing.

The company, which offered cremations and “green” burials without embalming fluids, kept doing business as its financial and legal problems mounted. Green burials are legal in Colorado, but any body not buried within 24 hours must be properly refrigerated.

As of last week, more than 120 families worried their relatives could be among the remains had contacted law enforcement about the case. It could take weeks to identify the remains found and could require taking fingerprints, finding medical or dental records, and DNA testing.

Authorities found the bodies inside a 230-square-meter (2,500-square-foot) building with the appearance and dimensions of a standard one-story home.

Colorado has some of the weakest oversight of funeral homes in the nation with no routine inspections or qualification requirements for funeral home operators.

There’s no indication state regulators visited the site or contacted Hallford until more than 10 months after the Penrose funeral home’s registration expired. State lawmakers gave regulators the authority to inspect funeral homes without the owners’ consent last year, but no additional money was provided for increased inspections.
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President Joe Biden heads to Tel Aviv to show solidarity with Israel, secure the safe passage of Americans trapped in Gaza and ease the plight of Palestinians under Israeli siege since the brazen attack by the militant group Hamas on Oct. 7. The trip is overshadowed by an attack on a hospital in Gaza, which led to the cancellation of Biden’s summit with regional leaders. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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A former New York stockbroker who fled his job and family to fight alongside Islamic State militants in Syria, and then maintained his allegiance to the extremist group throughout his trial, was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday.

Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, who served as a sniper and instructor for the Islamic militant group at the height of its power, sat grinning in the Brooklyn courtroom, flashing a thumbs-up and stroking his bushy beard as a judge read out the sentencing.

His court-appointed attorney, Susan Kellman, declined to ask for a lighter sentence, noting her client was not interested in distancing himself from the Islamic State fighters in exchange for leniency.

“It’s rare that I start my remarks at sentencing by saying I agree with the government,” Kellman said. “This is who he is. This is what he believes, fervently.”

Asainov, a 47-year-old U.S. citizen born in Kazakhstan, was living in Brooklyn in late 2013 when he abandoned his young daughter and wife to fight alongside the Islamic State group in Syria.

After receiving training as a sniper, he participated in pivotal battles that allowed the militant group to seize territory and establish its self-proclaimed caliphate based on a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law. He rose to a rank of “emir,” or chief, then taught more than 100 aspiring snipers, acting as a “force multiplier” for the Islamic State group’s “bloody, brutal campaign,” according to prosecutors.

Asainov told law enforcement officials that he did not recall how many people he had killed. But he spoke proudly of participating in the violent jihad, bragging that his students had taken enemy lives.

“He chose to embrace killing as both a means and an end,” Matthew Haggans, an assistant United States attorney, said during the sentencing. “He holds on to that foul cause today.”

Asainov did not participate in his own trial, refusing to stand for the judge or jury. Inside the Brooklyn jail cell, he hung a makeshift Islamic State flag above his desk and made calls to his mother on a recorded line describing his lack of repentance.

Asainov was convicted earlier this year of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization and causing at least one death, among other charges. He is one of dozens of Americans — and thousands of foreign fighters worldwide — who have heeded the calls of the Islamic State militants to join the fighting in Iraq and Syria since 2011.

Mirsad Kandic, a Brooklyn resident who recruited Asainov and others to join the Islamic State group, was sentenced to life in prison this summer.

During Asainov’s trial, his ex-wife testified that he had once doted on their young daughter. But around 2009, she said, he became consumed by extremist interpretations of Islamic Law, quitting his job as a stock trader, throwing out his daughter’s toys and forbidding his wife from putting up a Christmas tree.

In late 2013, he boarded a one-way flight from New York to Istanbul, ultimately arriving in Syria with the help of Kandic. He maintained occasional contact with his wife, bragging about his connection to the “most atrocious terrorist organization in the world” and warning that he could have her executed.

He was captured in 2019 by Syrian Democratic Forces during the Islamic State group’s last stand in a tiny Syrian village near the border with Iraq, then turned over to the United States.

In their sentencing memo, federal prosecutors said Asainov should face the maximum sentence of life imprisonment for both the nature of his crimes and the fact that he has not shown “an iota of remorse, doubt, or self-reflection on past mistakes.”

On Tuesday, Judge Nicholas Garaufis said he agreed with prosecutors.

“It’s hard for the court to have any understanding or sympathy for what we have seen in this trial,” he said.
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Despite efforts to consolidate Republican support, hardline conservative representative Jim Jordan has fallen short of the majority needed to secure the speaker of the House position.

In the House of Representatives Tuesday, Jordan received 200 votes, but 20 Republicans voted for other people. Democrats were united in support of their nominee, Hakeem Jeffries, who received 212 votes. The House then went into recess. A candidate needs 217 votes to become speaker of the 118th Congress.

Some Republicans have pointed out possible alternative candidates, including Representative Tom Cole and No. 3 House Republican Tom Emmer. Other Republicans have suggested that Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry receive a temporary extension of his powers, through the November 17 deadline for government funding.

Jordan, a divisive figure on Capitol Hill, could become the third candidate to fail to unite the Republican Party, which has left the chamber leaderless following the ousting of former speaker Kevin McCarthy two weeks ago. Congressman Steve Scalise withdrew his name from contention after failing to garner enough support among Republicans.

VOA congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.
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Republican Jim Jordan is seeking the top leadership spot in the U.S. House of Representatives Tuesday. If successful, the 59-year-old, nine-term congressman’s accession to a place second in the presidential line of succession will mark a victory for one of the founding members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.

In a letter last week to House colleagues announcing his candidacy for speaker of the House, Jordan outlined his values, writing, “Far-left progressive policies are destroying our communities, our security, and our future. We have soaring crime across the country. We have an administration with open-border policies that have caused chaos and left our country vulnerable.

“We’ve seen federal agencies turned on the American people silencing speech online, targeting parents at school board meetings, and flagging pro-life Catholics as potential threats and we’ve witnessed blatant double standards in federal law enforcement. We continue to spend too much money and Americans are suffering under President Biden’s economy.”

Although Jordan has never successfully sponsored a piece of legislation during his time in the U.S. Congress, he has built a reputation for pursuing investigations into Democrats as the current chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and as the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee from 2019 to 2020. Jordan is also a prominent supporter of former President Donald Trump, signing on to lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election.

A former college wrestling coach and Ohio state representative with a law degree, Jordan was elected to represent Ohio’s 4th congressional district in 2007. According to his congressional website, Jordan has also led the fight against tax increases throughout his career.

“He is a fiscal conservative who believes that families and taxpayers, rather than government, know best how to make decisions with their money,” his congressional biography says.

In January 2015, Jordan and eight other members of Congress founded the Freedom Caucus, a right-wing voting bloc within the Republican conference. The Freedom Caucus pushed for the removal of Speaker John Boehner from power in late 2015 and gradually became a more populist group supporting strict anti-immigration policies as Trump rose to power.

Boehner said of Jordan that he’d never met someone “who spent more time tearing things apart.”

According to the committee that was set up to investigate the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Jordan played a key role in the effort to overturn the November 2020 presidential election results. The investigators, known collectively as the January 6 Committee, say Jordan participated in a December 21, 2020, meeting to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence into using his ceremonial role to overturn the election. They also say he participated in phone calls and meetings throughout January 2021 to object to the election certification.

Jordan also called Trump twice on the day of the attack. Jordan is one of 139 House representatives who voted to overturn certifying the results of then-President-elect Joe Biden’s win on January 7, 2021, one day after Trump’s followers stormed the Capitol.

If Jordan wins the speakership by securing nearly every single Republican vote, he will be the leader of one-half of the nation’s legislative branch, a member of the so-called “Gang of Eight” in congressional leadership circles who receive higher-level briefings and will be a representative of the United States on a global scale.
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West African artist Amoaka Boafo has a new exhibit of portraits in the Western U.S. state of Colorado. VOA correspondent Scott Stearns has our story
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U.S. President Joe Biden will visit Israel Wednesday, as a humanitarian crisis grows in the Gaza Strip ahead of an expected ground invasion by Israeli forces. VOA’s Michael Brown reports.
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In the two weeks since former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was forced out of his job, the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives has been unable to coalesce behind an alternative, leaving several simmering issues unaddressed by lawmakers.

In the interim, a new crisis has erupted in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine has seen a major new offensive by invading Russian troops, and the United States has crept steadily toward a spending deadline that could force a government shutdown in November.

Experts say there are few, if any, historical precedents for one-half of the U.S. Congress being leaderless during such a fraught period in history. Some have expressed concerns about the message it sends to the American public and the country’s allies and adversaries around the world.

Roots of the problem

McCarthy’s tenure as speaker began in January with a tortuous 15-vote marathon on the House floor that saw the California representative offer concessions to hard-line members on the party’s far right. That included a rule that allowed a single member of the body to force a vote of the full House on a motion to “vacate” the job of speaker.

Representative Matt Gaetz invoked that rule on Oct. 3, and eight Republicans, as well as all House Democrats, voted in favor, ousting McCarthy from the job. The Republican advantage in the House is so slim that only about four of its members can break ranks if the Republicans are to maintain a majority on any given vote.

Since McCarthy’s ouster, Representative Patrick McHenry has been serving as acting speaker, a role that does not give him the authority to bring bills to the floor for a vote.

The Republican caucus is currently preparing to vote on the candidacy of far-right Representative Jim Jordan for speaker. The polarizing politician is a close ally of former President Donald Trump who, among other things, has supported the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

No vote on Israel

On Oct. 7, the Hamas militant group launched a brutal assault on multiple communities across southern Israel, targeting and killing well over 1,400 people, including the elderly and young children. The group also took nearly 200 hostages into the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

Under normal circumstances, the House most likely would have produced a joint resolution of support for the Israeli people and might also have taken steps to assure a flow of military and humanitarian aid to the Israeli government.

But without a speaker in place, the body has been unable to act on the crisis.

In an email exchange with VOA, William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s governance studies program, said he has concerns about the message that a dysfunctional Congress delivers to the rest of the world.

“The continuing paralysis in the U.S. House of Representatives has prevented the passage of measures supporting Israel in its time of peril,” he wrote. “The inability of the U.S. government to act on this issue, aid to Ukraine, and a budget for the current fiscal year is weakening confidence in U.S. leadership around the world.”

Ukraine, government spending

The House has been similarly unable to act on a number of other high-profile issues.  President Joe Biden’s administration is seeking additional authority to provide Ukraine with the weapons and other assistance it needs to fight off Russia’s full-scale invasion of its country.

In the days since the House lost its speaker, Russia has mounted a fierce new assault on the town of Avdiivka, north of the city of Donetsk, part of Ukrainian territory that Russia claims to have annexed.

In an appearance on CBS News’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Biden renewed his request for Congress to act on aid for both Ukraine and Israel. However, a portion of the House Republican caucus, including speaker-designate Jordan, has been highly skeptical about providing more aid to Ukraine.

At the same time, the U.S. is approaching a deadline to pass multiple government spending bills. Failure to do so would result in a partial shutdown of the federal government next month.

The House and Senate agreed to a stop-gap spending measure in late September that postponed the date of a shutdown into November. However, in the past two weeks, with the House consumed by the task of choosing a new speaker, little apparent progress has been made, increasing the likelihood of a shutdown.

‘Rudderless?’

“Broadly speaking, there are few historical precedents for this,” Dan Mahaffee, senior vice president and director of policy for the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, told VOA.

Mahaffee said the drama in the House is forcing Americans to ask themselves, “Is the institution rudderless?” An additional concern is what would happen if a more serious crisis befell the body.

“Heaven forbid we had an issue with the House where you had a speaker incapacitated or some harm came to them,” he said. “This demonstrates that it’s difficult to fill that [job] or to have an acting speaker do much in such an event.”

Lesson being learned

Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman who represented his Northern Virginia district in the House from 1995 to 2008, said what we are witnessing in the body today is a crop of relatively new legislators getting a lesson in how things work in Washington.

“When I was there, we had five- and six-seat majorities, and we operated just fine, because we recognized you had to operate as a team, and you had to compromise,” he told VOA.

Now, though, he said, “You have a new group of people in there that don’t know how government can work. They’re just sent there to say, ‘No,’ and stop the other guy.”

“So, it’s just got to work its way out,” he said. “It may take another week or so. Who knows? But they have to work that out within the caucus.”

Davis said that in the short term, the crisis is harming the “Republican brand.” In the longer term, however, he said that he doesn’t believe the current crisis will seriously hurt the party.

“The election’s a year from now, and once you nominate a presidential candidate, that generally tends to suck up all the oxygen in the room,” Davis said.
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With a vote set for Tuesday afternoon in the U.S. House of Representatives, the latest Republican candidate for House speaker, Jim Jordan, is making progress in flipping detractors in his efforts to shore up Republican support.

Jordan, a right-winged representative from Ohio, has gained the support of several more Republicans, but it is still unclear whether he will be able to get enough members of his party to back him in his quest for the speakership.

“I feel real good about the momentum we have,” Jordan told reporters outside his office Monday. “We’re going to elect a speaker tomorrow.”

Jordan, who is backed by former U.S. President Donald Trump, will meet with Republican colleagues Tuesday in another closed-door meeting in an attempt to fully unify his party behind his candidacy. Some Republicans have expressed concern that Jordan is too extreme for the position of Speaker of the House.

The House has been without a speaker for two weeks after Republicans ousted former speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Republicans first put forward Representative Steve Scalise as their candidate, though he was unable to secure enough Republican votes to reach a majority and overcome Democrats who were unified in support of their Democratic candidate, Hakeem Jeffries. Scalise later withdrew his name from consideration.

Jordan can afford only four Republican detractors in the vote. He needs 217 votes, or a majority of the chamber, which Republicans control by a slim 221-212 majority.

With Democrats expected to unify around representative Jeffries again, Jordan is vowing to “bring all Republicans together” so the party can use its narrow majority to elect a speaker.

Republicans who ally with Trump, including Representative Matt Gaetz and Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, have been mounting pressure on Republicans to throw their support behind Jordan.

Though Jordan has been gaining support, the vote could see multiple rounds as some Republicans are still refusing to back the candidate.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press.
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A settlement filed Monday in a long-running lawsuit over the Trump administration’s separation of parents and their children at the border bars the government from similar separations for eight years while also providing benefits like the ability for their parents to come to America and work, according to the Biden administration.

The settlement between the Biden administration and the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been representing families separated from their children, still has to be approved by the judge. But if finalized, it would make it much more difficult for any administration including former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, to revive one of his most controversial tactics to halt immigration at the southern border if he wins next year’s election.

“It is our intent to do whatever we can to make sure that the cruelty of the past is not repeated in the future. We set forth procedures through this settlement agreement to advance that effort,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told The Associated Press.

The Trump administration separated thousands of children from their parents or guardians they were traveling with as it moved to criminally prosecute people for illegally crossing the southwestern border. Minors could not be held in criminal custody with their parents. They were transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services and then typically sent to live with a sponsor, often a relative or someone else with a family connection.

Faulty tracking systems by U.S. officials caused many to be apart for an extended time or never reunited with their parents. Facing strong opposition, Trump eventually reversed course in 2018, days before a judge put a halt to the practice after a lawsuit brought by the ACLU. During a CNN town hall earlier this year, Trump didn’t rule out once against separating families.

Lee Gelernt, lead counsel for the ACLU, praised the settlement.

“This settlement means that babies and toddlers will finally get to see their parents after years apart and that these suffering families will have an opportunity to seek lawful status. It also crucially bars an attempt by a future administration to reenact another family separation policy,” said Gelernt. “Nothing can make these families whole again but this is at least a start.”

President Joe Biden issued an executive order on his first day in office to reunite families. According to figures released by the Department of Homeland Security in February, 3,881 children were separated from their families from 2017 to 2021. About 74% of those have been reunited with their families: 2,176 before a Biden administration task force was created and 689 afterward.

Hundreds of families sued the federal government, seeking both monetary damages and policy changes.

This settlement filed in federal court in San Diego does not include monetary damages. But it does provide key benefits including authorization for parents of separated children to come to the U.S. under humanitarian parole for three years and work in the U.S. The families receive some help with housing and medical and behavioral health benefits designed to address some of the trauma associated with the separations.

Mayorkas described how he’d met with a woman who had been separated from her daughter and how after they had been reunited, her daughter still struggled with the experience.

“We need to help these families heal. And that is an obligation that we carry because of the pain that we inflicted upon them,” he said.

They’ll also get access to legal services which will be vital as they may file asylum applications to stay in the United States on a permanent basis. The settlement also waives the usual one-year timeline limiting when someone can apply for asylum, and the parents can apply even if they were previously denied, Gelernt said. A special team of supervisors will review their cases.

Some of these benefits were already available to families under a Biden-administration created task force designed to reunite separated families. But Gelernt said the settlement goes beyond the task force’s purview in key ways such as the asylum assistance. The settlement also bars future separations, which the task force did not, and Gelernt said a future administration could have disbanded the task force whereas the settlement is binding.

Under the settlement, it would still be possible to separate children at the border from their parents or guardians, but under limited scenarios, as has been the case for many years. They include if the child is being abused or the parent committed a much more serious crime than crossing the border illegally.

The settlement requires the government to keep detailed documentation when it does separate children from parents so as to avoid the chaos that erupted during the Trump-era family separations where parents and children could not be reunited.

At one point in 2021, the administration was negotiating a possible payout of hundreds of thousands of dollars to each parent and child who was separated. Word leaked on negotiations and produced a political backlash.

Now that the government and the ACLU have agreed on a settlement plan, the judge will hold a hearing to decide whether to accept it. Before that, people opposed to the settlement can raise objections to the judge.
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U.S. volunteer Shana Aufenkamp is busy round the clock – she brings animals that have been rescued from bombed Ukrainian cities to Washington, D.C. Some of the animals were left behind when their owners evacuated to safer places, and now the cats seek new loving families in America. Mariia Ulianovska has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Oleksii Osyka
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Baseball and softball will be on the roster of the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

They are part of a package of five sports that won the approval of the International Olympic Committee Monday during a meeting in Mumbai, India. The package had been proposed by officials in Los Angeles.

Additionally, viewers will get to see cricket and lacrosse, plus flag football and squash in the host city.

Flag football and squash are making their debut at the LA Games, while the other sports have made appearances at past Olympics.

Cricket was played at the Paris Games in 1900, while lacrosse was played in St. Louis in 1904 and London in 1908.

Spectators have enjoyed baseball and softball at several Olympics, most recently at the Tokyo Games in 2020.

IOC President Thomas Bach said the inclusion of the sports “will allow the Olympic Movement to engage with new athlete and fan communities in the U.S. and globally.”
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Since 2006, comic book fans have gathered at the legendary New York City Comic Con to dress up and shop. More recently, they have gathered to invest. Aron Ranen has the story from the Big Apple.
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A U.S. landlord was charged with murder and hate crimes Sunday after allegedly stabbing a Muslim woman and 6-year-old boy dozens of times in an attack that police linked to the war between Israel and Hamas.

The child, who was stabbed 26 times, died at a hospital, but the 32-year-old woman, believed to be his mother, is expected to survive the “heinous” Saturday attack, according to a statement from the Will County sheriff’s office in Illinois.

Late Sunday, U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement that he and his wife were shocked and sickened to learn of the murderous attack.

“This horrific act of hate has no place in America, and stands against our fundamental values: freedom from fear for how we pray, what we believe, and who we are. As Americans, we must come together and reject Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry and hatred.  I have said repeatedly that I will not be silent in the face of hate.  We must be unequivocal. There is no place in America for hate against anyone.”

The sheriff’s office did not give further details or the victims’ nationality, but the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) described the child as Palestinian-American.

“Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the on-going Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis,” said the statement, which located the killing about 64 kilometers west of Chicago.

Authorities said the woman managed to call 911 as she fought off the landlord, named by the sheriff’s office as 71-year-old Joseph Czuba.

“Deputies located two victims inside the residence in a bedroom. Both victims had multiple stab wounds to their chest, torso, and upper extremities,” the sheriff’s statement said.

A serrated military-style knife with a seven-inch blade was pulled from the boy’s abdomen during the autopsy, the statement said.

When police arrived, they found Czuba sitting on the ground near the driveway of the residence with a laceration on his forehead. He was taken to the hospital for treatment before being charged with murder, attempted murder, and two counts of hate crimes.

“He knocked on the door and attempted to choke her, and said, ‘you Muslims’ must die,” Ahmed Rehab, head of CAIR’s Chicago office, told reporters, citing text messages sent by the woman to the murdered boy’s father from her hospital bed.

The attack was “our worst nightmare,” CAIR said in a statement.

Israel declared war on Hamas Oct. 8, a day after waves of the militant group’s fighters broke through the heavily fortified border and shot, stabbed and burned to death more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians.

The subsequent relentless bombing by Israel has flattened neighborhoods and left at least 2,670 people dead in the Gaza Strip, the majority ordinary Palestinians.
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Rite Aid Corp filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday, as it comes under pressure from lawsuits alleging that the drugstore chain helped fuel the opioid crisis in the United States.

Rite Aid listed estimated assets and liabilities in the range of $1 billion to $10 billion in a court filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based Rite Aid operates more than 2,000 retail stores across 17 states in the U.S., although it is much smaller than its rivals such as Walgreens Boots Alliance and CVS Health.

Along with other pharmacy chains, it has been named a defendant in lawsuits that alleged they helped fuel the opioid crisis in the United States.

The U.S. Department of Justice in March sued Rite Aid, accusing the pharmacy chain of missing “red flags” as it illegally filled hundreds of thousands of prescriptions for controlled substances, including opioids.

More than 900,000 people have died of drug overdoses in the U.S. since 1999, with opioids playing an outsized role, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 
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Movie theaters turned into concert venues this weekend as Swifties brought their dance moves and friendship bracelets to multiplexes across the country. The unparalleled enthusiasm helped propel “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” to a massive, first place debut between $95 million and $97 million in North America, AMC Theatres said Sunday. 

It’s easily the biggest opening for a concert film of all time, and, not accounting for inflation, has made more than the $73 million “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never” earned in 2011. In today’s dollars, that would be around $102 million. And if it comes in on the higher end of projections when totals are released Monday, it could be the biggest October opening ever. The one to beat is “Joker,” which launched to $96.2 million in 2019. 

A unique experiment in distribution, premium pricing, star power and loose movie theater etiquette—more dancing and shouting than a Star Wars premiere—have made it an undeniable hit. Compiled from Swift’s summer shows at Southern California’s SoFi Stadium, the film opened in 3,855 North American locations starting with “surprise” Thursday evening previews. Those showtimes helped boost its opening day sum to $39 million – the second biggest ever for October, behind “Joker’s” $39.3 million. 

Internationally, it’s estimated to have earned somewhere between $31 to $33 million, bringing its global total in the range of $126 million to $130 million. 

“This is a phenomenal number,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “To have a blockbuster style opening weekend for a concert film is unprecedented.” 

Swift, who produced the film, went around the Hollywood studio system to distribute the film, making a deal directly with AMC, the largest exhibition company in the United States. With her 274 million Instagram followers, Swift hardly needed a traditional marketing campaign to get the word out. 

Beyoncé made a similar deal with the exhibitor for ” Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé, ” which will open on Dec. 1. The two superstars posed together at the premiere of “The Eras Tour” earlier this week in Los Angeles. It was a needed injection of star power with Hollywood actors over 90 days into a strike that has left most red carpets void of glamourous talent and resulted in several high-profile films being pushed to next year. 

“The Eras Tour,” directed by Sam Wrench, is not just playing on AMC screens either. The company, based in Leawood, Kansas, worked with sub-distribution partners Variance Films, Trafalgar Releasing, Cinepolis and Cineplex to show the film in more than 8,500 movie theatres globally in 100 countries. 

The spotlight on Swift has been especially intense lately as a result of her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. The two made separate surprise appearances on “Saturday Night Live” this weekend and were also photographed holding hands in New York. 

It led to some hyperbolic projections going into the weekend, with some analysts predicting that “The Eras Tour” could make over $125 million. Dergarabedian said it’s common for outsized expectations to be attached to massive brands like Swift. There’s also no precedent for something like “The Eras Tour” and a celebrity of Swift’s stature. 

“The laws of gravity don’t apply to Taylor Swift,” Dergarabedian said. 

The film scored well with both critics and audiences, who gave it an A+ CinemaScore, a metric that typically signals a film will continue to do well after its first weekend. 

Elizabeth Frank, the executive vice president of worldwide programming and chief content officer for AMC Theatres, said in a statement that they are grateful to Taylor Swift. 

“Her spectacular performance delighted fans, who dressed up and danced through the film,” Frank said. “With tremendous recommendations and fans buying tickets to see this concert film several times, we anticipate ‘Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’ concert film playing to big audiences for weeks to come.” 

The stadium tour, which continues internationally, famously crashed Ticketmaster’s site and re-sale prices became astronomical. Pollstar projects that it will earn some $1.4 billion. The concert film offered fans both better seats and a much more affordable way to see the show for the first or fifth time. Prices are higher than the national average, at $19.89, which references her birth year and 2014 album, and ran closer to $29 a pop for premium large format screens like IMAX. Even so, they are significantly less than seat at one of the stadium shows. 

Showtimes are also more limited than a standard Hollywood blockbuster, but AMC is guaranteeing at least four a day on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays at all AMC locations in the U.S. Many locations also specified that there are no refunds or exchanges. And fans will have to wait a while for “The Eras Tour” to be available on streaming — part of the AMC deal was a 13-week exclusive theatrical run. 

Michael O’Leary, CEO of the National Association of Theater Owners said in a statement the moment was, “Another landmark weekend for cinemas.” 

“This year has been marked by unprecedented experiences for movie lovers in theaters across this nation,” O’Leary continued in a statement. “The ‘Eras Tour’ debut proves, yet again, that fans are eager to share other experiences in a communal way, with theater owners working creatively to build memorable moments in their cinemas.” 

O’Leary said that a survey of 6,000 people by his organization and The Cinema Foundation found that 72% want to see more concert films on the big screen. 

“The Eras Tour” accounted for over 70% of the total weekend box office grosses. “The Exorcist: Believer” placed a very distant second in its second weekend with $11 million, followed by the “Paw Patrol” movie in third with $7 million. Rounding out the top five was “Saw X” with $5.7 million and “The Creator” with $4.3 million. 

“This is great news for theaters,” Dergarabedian said. “‘The Eras Tour’ wasn’t even on our radar in mid-August. You take this out of the equation and it would have been a totally different weekend.” 

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

1. “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” $95 to $97 million. 

2. “The Exorcist: Believer,” $11 million. 

3. “Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie,” $7 million. 

4. “Saw X,” $5.7 million. 

5. “The Creator,” $4.3 million. 

6. “A Haunting in Venice,” $2.1 million. 

7. “The Blind,” $2 million. 

8. “The Nun II,” $1.6 million. 

9. “The Equalizer 3,” $960,000. 

10. “Dumb Money,” $920,000. 
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The medicine in the diabetes drug Mounjaro helped people with obesity or who are overweight lose at least a quarter of their body weight, or about 27 kilograms (60 pounds) on average, when combined with intensive diet and exercise, a new study shows.

By comparison, a group of people who also dieted and exercised, but then received dummy shots, lost weight initially but then regained some, researchers reported Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine.

“This study says that if you lose weight before you start the drug, you can then add a lot more weight loss after,” said Dr. Thomas Wadden, a University of Pennsylvania obesity researcher and psychology professor who led the study.

The results, which were also presented Sunday at a medical conference, confirm that the drug made by Eli Lilly & Company has the potential to be one of the most powerful medical treatments for obesity to date, outside experts said.

“Any way you slice it, it’s a quarter of your total body weight,” said Dr. Caroline Apovian, who treats obesity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and wasn’t involved in the study.

The injected drug, tirzepatide, was approved in the U.S. in May 2022 to treat diabetes. Sold as Mounjaro, it has been used “off-label” to treat obesity, joining a frenzy of demand for diabetes and weight-loss medications including Ozempic and Wegovy, made by Novo Nordisk.

All the drugs, which carry retail price tags of $900 a month or more, have been in shortage for months.

Tirzepatide targets two hormones that kick in after people eat to regulate appetite and the feeling of fullness communicated between the gut and the brain. Semaglutide, the drug used in Ozempic and Wegovy, targets one of those hormones.

The new study, which was funded by Eli Lilly, enrolled about 800 people who had obesity or were overweight with a weight-related health complication — but not diabetes. On average, study participants weighed about 109.5 kilograms (241 pounds) to start and had a body-mass index — a common measure of obesity — of about 38.

After three months of intensive diet and exercise, more than 200 participants left the trial, either because they failed to lose enough weight or for other reasons. The remaining nearly 600 people were randomized to receive tirzepatide or a placebo via weekly injections for about 16 months. Nearly 500 people completed the study.

Participants in both groups lost about 7% of their body weight, or almost 8 kilograms, ( 17 pounds) during the diet-and-exercise phase. Those who received the drug went on to lose an additional 18.4% of initial body weight, or about 20 kilograms (44 pounds) more, on average. Those who received the dummy shots regained about 2.5% of their initial weight, or 2.7 kilograms 6 pounds).

Overall, about 88% of those taking tirzepatide lost 5% or more of their body weight during the trial, compared with almost 17% of those taking placebo. Nearly 29% of those taking the drug lost at least a quarter of their body weight, compared with just over 1% of those taking placebo.

That’s higher than the results for semaglutide and similar to the results seen with bariatric surgery, said Apovian.

“We’re doing a medical gastric bypass,” she said.

Side effects including nausea, diarrhea and constipation were reported more frequently in people taking the drug than those taking the placebo. They were mostly mild to moderate and occurred primarily as the dose of the drug was escalated, the study found. More than 10% of those taking the drug discontinued the study because of side effects, compared with about 2% of those on placebo.

Lilly is expected to publish the results soon of another study that the firm says shows similar high rates of weight loss. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted the company a fast-track review of the drug to treat obesity, which Eli Lilly may sell under a different brand name. A decision is expected by the end of the year.
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The United States has renewed calls to ensure that innocent civilians fleeing the Israel-Hamas war are protected and have basic needs met. Separately, concerns about a wider regional conflict have led a U.S. senator to issue a strong warning to Iran and the Lebanon-based militia Hezbollah. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias explains.
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