A U.S. envoy for Iran met Friday with the family of Iranian-German national Jamshid Sharmahd, who was sentenced to death in February in Iran after being convicted of heading a pro-monarchist group accused of a deadly 2008 bombing.

Deputy Special Envoy Abram Paley posted a picture of himself with Sharmahd’s son Shayan and daughter Gazelle on the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter.

“I welcomed the opportunity to meet with Jamshid Sharmahd’s family today. He should have never been detained in Iran, and we hope to see the day he is reunited with his loved ones,” Paley wrote.

Responding to the post, Gazelle Sharmahd said she had told Paley she needed “actions” and that her father must be part of whatever is agreed to free U.S. nationals.

“We will continue to urge the Biden administration to work with stakeholders to #LeaveNoOneBehind or stop negotiations with my dad’s kidnappers,” Sharmahd said on X. 

Jamshid Sharmahd, who also has U.S. residency, was arrested in 2020. Iran’s intelligence ministry at the time described him as “the ringleader of the terrorist Tondar group, who directed armed and terrorist acts in Iran from America.”

Based in Los Angeles, the little-known Kingdom Assembly of Iran, or Tondar, says it seeks to restore the Iranian monarchy that was overthrown by the 1979 Islamic revolution. It runs pro-Iranian opposition radio and television stations abroad.
…

The seasonal drink that made pumpkin spice a star is turning 20. And unlike the autumn days it celebrates, there seems to be no chill in customer demand. 

Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte goes on sale Thursday in the U.S. and Canada, as it does each year when the nights start getting longer and the fall winds gather. It’s the coffee giant’s most popular seasonal beverage, with hundreds of millions sold since its launch in 2003. And it has produced a huge — and growing — industry of imitators flecked with cinnamon, nutmeg and clove. 

In the year ending July 29, U.S. sales of pumpkin-flavored products reached $802.5 million, according to Nielsen. That’s up 42% from the same period in 2019. There are pumpkin spice Oreos, protein drinks, craft beers, cereals and even Spam. A search of “pumpkin spice” on Walmart’s website brings up more than 1,000 products. A thousand products that smell or taste like, well, pumpkin pie. 

For better — and, some might say, for worse — the phenomenon has moved beyond coffee shops and groceries and into the larger world. Great Wolf Lodge is featuring a Pumpkin Spice Suite at five of its resorts this fall, decked out with potpourri, pumpkin throw pillows and bottomless pumpkin spice lattes. 

It has also spawned a vocal group of detractors — and become an easy target for parodies. Comedian John Oliver once called pumpkin spice lattes “the coffee that tastes like a candle.” There’s a Facebook group called “I Hate Pumpkin Spice” and T-shirts with slogans like “Ain’t no pumpkin spice in my mug.” 

The haters, though, appear to be in the minority. Last year, Starbucks said sales of its pumpkin spice drinks — including newer offerings like Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew — were up 17% in the July-September period. And in a 2022 study of 20,000 Twitter and Instagram posts mentioning pumpkin spice, just 8% were negative, according to researchers at Montclair State University in New Jersey. 

Before the latte: what pumpkin spice was 

It wasn’t always this way. 

Canned pumpkin and pie spices were relegated to the baking aisle when Starbucks began experimenting with an autumn drink that would replicate the success of the Peppermint Mocha, which took the winter holidays by storm in 2002. Customer surveys suggested chocolate or caramel drinks, but Starbucks noticed that pumpkin scored high for “uniqueness.” That would turn out to be prescient. 

In the spring of 2003, a team gathered in a lab in Starbucks’ Seattle headquarters, bringing fall decorations to set the mood. They sipped espresso between bites of pumpkin pie, figuring out which spices most complemented the coffee. After three months, they offered taste tests; pumpkin spice beat out chocolate and caramel drinks. 

Starbucks tested the Pumpkin Spice Latte in 100 stores in Washington, D.C., and Vancouver, British Columbia, that fall. The company quickly realized it had a winner and rolled it out across the United States and Canada the following fall. And in 2015, a watershed: The company added real pumpkin to the recipe. 

These days, Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte has its own handle on X — formerly known as Twitter — with 82,000 followers, and a Facebook fan group called the Leaf Rakers Society with 43,000 members. And it has fans like Jon McBrine, who drinks black iced coffee for most of the year but eagerly awaits the latte’s return each fall. 

“I love the flavor and I love the subculture that has evolved from this huge marketing campaign,” says McBrine, a graphic designer and aspiring author who lives in the Dallas area. 

It’s hot through the end of October where he lives, so McBrine typically orders his with ice. But at least once a year, he gets a hot latte, savoring memories of the autumns of his childhood in Delaware. 

“It’s part of getting into the season,” he says. “It’s almost like a ritual, even if you’re just waiting in the drive-thru.” 

Pumpkin spice latte as sensory experience 

Jason Fischer, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies human perception through sight, sound and smell, says odor and flavor have a more direct route than other senses to the area of the brain that processes memories. 

That’s due to evolution; humans needed to remember which foods were safe to eat. But it means smells and memories are closely linked. 

Still, he said, people’s sense of smell can be malleable. In experiments, subjects have taken a sniff of something and described it in many different ways. But when they’re shown a label for that smell — say, “pumpkin spice” — their perceptions shift and their descriptions become more similar. 

“Odors and sights go with certain places, like the aroma of pine and the crunching of needles beneath your feet,” he says. “They’re associated with a certain kind of experience. And then marketing taps into that, and it’s a cue for a product.” 

Pumpkin spice doesn’t conjure happy memories for everyone. Kari-Jane Roze, who lives in Fredericton, Canada, loves many things about autumn, including back-to-school routines, changing leaves and hockey. But she’s not a fan of pumpkin pie or pumpkin bread — and she has a particular dislike for pumpkin spice lattes. 

“The artificial flavor is disgusting,” says Roze, who works at New Brunswick Community College. “The only thing I do not like about fall is seeing everyone obsess over PSLs. Makes me want to shut off social media for a month.” 

She won’t have to deal with those “PSLs” for long. The limited-time nature of the product is another thing that keeps customers hooked, marketing experts say. Last year, Starbucks’ holiday-themed drinks arrived on Nov. 3. And then, for devoted fans, the wait begins anew. 
…

All 19 defendants in an election-fraud case in the Southeastern U.S. state of Georgia — including former President Donald Trump — reported to an Atlanta jail to be booked by police before a noon deadline on Friday.

After Trump’s appearance at the Fulton County Jail on Thursday evening — in which he posed for the first-ever mug shot of a former president — seven other defendants surrendered to police on Friday. Trump’s other co-defendants reported to the jail earlier in the week.

Court records show that all of the 19 defendants except one posted bond, agreed to the bail conditions set by court officials, and were allowed to leave the jail after being booked.

Harrison William Prescott Floyd, who is accused of harassing a Fulton County election worker, remained in jail after turning himself in on Thursday.

It was not clear whether Floyd was denied bail or was not able to come up with the money to secure his release.

Federal court records said Floyd, who is active with the group Black Voices for Trump, was also arrested three months ago on charges of aggressively confronting FBI agents who had served him with a grand jury subpoena.

Trump paid a $200,000 bond his lawyers negotiated earlier this week with Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis.

The former president spent about 20 minutes in the Atlanta jail Thursday evening to be booked on felony charges of racketeering and conspiracy linked to his alleged efforts to overturn his 2020 reelection loss in Georgia.

It was the fourth time that Trump had been arrested and booked in the past five months.

Before boarding his plane at Atlanta’s airport, Trump spoke briefly to reporters about his arrest.

“What has taken place here is a travesty of justice. We did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong, and everybody knows that,” Trump said. “What they’re doing is election interference.”

Trump is facing 91 charges across the four indictments for his alleged actions before, during and after his single-term presidency ended in early 2021.

He faces 13 charges in Georgia, where Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee is expected to set arraignments for each of the defendants in the coming weeks. During an arraignment, the defendants typically appear in court for the first time and enter a plea of guilty or not guilty.

At least five of Trump’s co-defendants are trying to move their cases to federal court, instead of being tried in Georgia.

Of those wanting to keep their trials in Georgia, at least two defendants are requesting speedy trials.

Trump’s legal team has asked that Trump’s case be separated from any co-defendant who seeks a speedy trial. Trump’s lawyers have not yet proposed a date for the trial.

Regardless of when the trial in Atlanta starts, Trump is already facing weeks of criminal trials he would be obligated to appear at in the first half of 2024.

Trump has denied all wrongdoing and has said that the allegations leveled against him are a political witch hunt aimed at thwarting his 2024 campaign to reclaim the presidency.

Even with the array of charges he is facing, Trump is the leading contender for the Republican nomination to run for the presidency against the presumptive Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
…

U.S. President Joe Biden said Friday that he is planning to request more money from Congress to develop another new coronavirus vaccine, as scientists track new waves and hospitalizations rise, though not like before. 

Officials are already expecting updated COVID-19 vaccines that contain one version of the omicron strain, called XBB.1.5. It’s an important change from today’s combination shots, which mix the original coronavirus strain with last year’s most common omicron variants. But there will always be a need for updated vaccines as the virus continues to mutate. 

People should be able to start rolling up their sleeves next month for what officials hope is an annual fall COVID-19 shot. Pfizer, Moderna and smaller manufacturer Novavax all are brewing doses of the XBB update but the Food and Drug Administration will have to sign off on each, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must then issue recommendations for their use. 

“I signed off this morning on a proposal we have to present to the Congress, a request for additional funding for a new vaccine that is necessary, that works,” Biden, who is vacationing in the Lake Tahoe area, told reporters on Friday. 

He added that it’s “tentatively” recommended “that everybody get it,” once the shots are ready. 

The White House’s $40 billion funding request to Congress on August 11 did not mention COVID-19. It included funding requests for Ukraine, to replenish U.S. federal disaster funds at home after a deadly climate season of heat and storms, and funds to bolster the enforcement at the Southern border with Mexico, including money to curb the flow of deadly fentanyl. Last fall, the administration asked for $9.25 billion in funding to combat the virus, but Congress refused the request. 

For the week ending July 29, COVID-19 hospital admissions were at 9,056. That’s an increase of about 12% from the previous week. But it’s a far cry from past peaks, like the 44,000 weekly hospital admissions in early January, the nearly 45,000 in late July 2022, or the 150,000 admissions during the omicron surge of January 2022. 
…

The Federal Reserve may need to raise interest rates further to cool still-too-high inflation, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said on Friday, promising to move with care at upcoming meetings as he noted progress made on easing price pressures as well as risks from the surprising strength of the U.S. economy.

While not as hawkish a message as he delivered this time a year ago at the annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, Powell’s remarks still delivered a punch, with investors now seeing one more rate hike by year-end more likely than not.

“We will proceed carefully as we decide whether to tighten further or, instead, to hold the policy rate constant and await further data,” Powell said in a keynote address. “It is the Fed’s job to bring inflation down to our 2% goal, and we will do so.”

The Fed has raised rates by 5.25 percentage points since March 2022, and inflation by the Fed’s preferred gauge has moved down to 3.3% from its peak of 7% last summer. Although the decline was a “welcome development,” Powell said, inflation “remains too high.”

“We are prepared to raise rates further if appropriate and intend to hold policy at a restrictive level until we are confident that inflation is moving sustainably down toward our objective,” he said.

But with “signs that the economy may not be cooling as expected,” including “especially robust” consumer spending and a “possibly rebounding” housing sector, Powell said that above-trend growth “could put further progress on inflation at risk and could warrant further tightening of monetary policy.”

His remarks showed the Fed wrestling with conflicting signals from an economy where inflation has by some readings slowed a lot without much cost to the economy — a good outcome, but one that has raised the possibility that Fed policy is not restrictive enough to complete the job.

‘Finger on the trigger’

At day’s end, futures contracts tied to the Fed policy rate were pricing in just less than a 20% chance of a rate hike in September, but a better-than-50% chance of the policy rate ending the year in a 5.5%-5.75% range, a quarter-point higher than the current range. Fed policymakers will also meet in November and December.

The yield on the two-year Treasury note ended the day at 5.08%, its highest close since June 2007.

“My main takeaway is that when it comes to another rate hike, the chair still very much has his finger on the trigger, even if it’s a bit less itchy than it was last year,” said Inflation Insights’ Omair Sharif.

It is difficult, Powell said, to know with precision how high above the “neutral” rate of interest the current benchmark rate stands, and therefore hard to assess just how much restraint the Fed is imposing on growth and inflation.

Powell repeated what has become a standard Fed diagnosis of inflation progress — with a pandemic-era jump in goods inflation easing and a decline in housing inflation “in the pipeline,” but concern that continued consumer spending on a broad array of services and a tight labor market may make a return to 2% difficult.

Recent declines in measures of underlying inflation, stripped of food and energy prices, “were welcome, but two months of good data are only the beginning of what it will take to build confidence that inflation is moving down sustainably,” Powell said.

Powell ended his speech on Friday with nearly the same line he finished with last year at Jackson Hole: “We will keep at it until the job is done.”
…

The United Auto Workers (UAW) union said Friday members voted overwhelmingly in favor of authorizing a strike at three Detroit automakers if agreement is not reached before the current four-year contract expires on September 14.

The authorization was approved by 97% of voting members at General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, said UAW President Shawn Fain, who leads the union that represents about 150,000 workers.

Fain reiterated that the union did not plan to extend the deadline to get a new labor contract.

“The deadline is Sept. 14,” he said. “We have a lot of options that we are looking at but extension on the contract is not one of them.”

Separately, President Joe Biden, who met with Fain last month, told reporters in Nevada he is concerned about a potential UAW strike.

“I think that there should be a circumstance where jobs that are being displaced are replaced with new jobs” for UAW members “and the salaries should be commensurate.”

Some senators want national UAW agreements to cover jobs at battery joint ventures that currently pay less.

Fain said workers had made numerous concessions over the last two decades including giving up wage hikes, defined benefit pensions and post-retirement health care benefits.

“We’re fed up,” Fain said, listing a series of demands. “We’ve sat back for decades while these companies continue to just take and take and take from us.”

Fain has outlined an ambitious set of demands, including wage hikes of 46%, an end to the tiered wage system that pays new hires less than veterans, reinstating cost-of-living adjustments and restoring defined-benefit pension plans for new hires that the automakers ended in 2007. At Stellantis, just 30% of hourly U.S. workers are eligible for defined benefit pensions.

Fain said he expected the “Detroit Three,” as this cluster of automakers are known, to come to the bargaining table next week with counterproposals to the UAW demands. He said talks were “still going slow” after opening in July. Analysts estimate a more than 50% chance of a strike.

It was not clear how long it would take a strike to significantly reduce the Detroit Three’s inventories. Through July, Stellantis U.S. Ram, Jeep, Chrysler and Dodge each had more than 100 days of inventory but many specific popular models have less.

The vote does not guarantee a strike will be called, only that the union has the right to call a strike if there’s no agreement by September 14.

GM, Ford and Stellantis have said they want to reach a deal that is fair to workers but also gives the companies flexibility, as the industry shifts to electric models that have fewer parts and require less labor.

Ford shares were up 1%, while General Motors were unchanged in afternoon trade.
…

With White House funding to help get more electric cars on the road, some states are creating local rules to get top technologies into their charging stations. Deana Mitchell has the story.
…

A camera clicks. In a fraction of a second, the shutter opens and then closes, freezing forever the image in front of it.

When the camera shutter blinked inside an Atlanta jail on Thursday, it both created and documented a tiny inflection point in American life. Captured for posterity, there was a former president of the United States, for the first time in history, under arrest and captured in the sort of frame more commonly associated with drug dealers or drunken drivers. The trappings of power gone, for that split second.

Left behind: an enduring image that will appear in history books long after Donald Trump is gone.

“It will be forever part of the iconography of being alive in this time,” said Marty Kaplan, a professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications.

In the photo, Trump confronts the camera in front of a bland gray backdrop, his eyes meeting the lens in an intense glare. He’s wearing a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, his shoulders squared, his head tilted slightly toward the camera. The sheriff’s logo has been digitally added above his right shoulder.

Some of the 18 others charged with him in Georgia smiled in their booking photos like they were posing for a yearbook. Not Trump. His defiance is palpable, as if he’s staring down a nemesis through the lens.

“It is not a comfortable feeling — especially when you’ve done nothing wrong,” he later told Fox News Digital about the moment.

Not like any other photograph

Trump facing charges is by now a familiar sight of 2023 to Americans who watched him stand before a judge in a New York courtroom or saw watercolor sketches from the inside of federal courthouses in Miami and Washington, where cameras aren’t allowed.

This is different.

As Anderson Cooper put it on CNN: “The former president of the United States has an inmate number.” P01135809, to be exact. But until he surrendered to face charges of trying to steal the 2020 election in Georgia, his fourth indictment this year, he avoided having to pose for the iconic booking photo like millions accused of crimes before him.

Never mind that Trump, like all Americans, is innocent until proven guilty in court; the mug shot, and all it connotes, packs an extra emotional and cultural punch.

A mug shot is a visceral representation of the criminal justice system, a symbol of lost freedom. It permanently memorializes one of the worst days of a person’s life, a moment not meant for a scrapbook. It must be particularly foreign to a man born into privilege, who famously loves to be in control, who is highly attentive to his image and who rose to be the most powerful figure in the world.

“‘Indictment’ is a sort of bloodless word. And words are pale compared to images,” said Kaplan, a former speechwriter for Vice President Walter Mondale and a Hollywood screenwriter. “A mug shot is a genre. Its frame is, ‘This is a deer caught in the headlights. This is the crook being nailed.’ It’s the walk of shame moment.”

Already leveraging the moment

Trump is unlikely to treat the mug shot as a moment of shame as he seeks a second term in the White House while fighting criminal charges in four jurisdictions. His campaign has reported a spike in contributions each time he’s been indicted.

And the imagery itself? Trump hasn’t shied away from it. In fact, his campaign concocted one long before it became real.

Months before he was photographed in Georgia on Thursday evening, his campaign used the prospect of a mug shot as a fundraising opportunity. For $36, anyone can buy a T-shirt with a fake booking photo of Trump and the words “not guilty.” Dozens of similar designs are available to purchase online, including many that appeal to Trump’s critics.

Now they have a real one to work with. Within minutes of the mug shot’s release, Trump’s campaign used it in a fundraising appeal on its website. “BREAKING NEWS: THE MUGSHOT IS HERE,” reads the subject line of the campaign’s latest fundraising email, which advertises a new T-shirt with the image. And this quote: “This mugshot will forever go down in history as a symbol of America’s defiance of tyranny.”

In a show of solidarity, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, a photo of herself smiling broadly in front of a gray background, the sheriff’s logo in the top left corner to mimic the jail’s style — essentially her DIY mug. “I stand with President Trump against the commie DA Fani Willis,” she said, a swipe at the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney who persuaded a grand jury to indict Trump.

Recent history is full of politicians seeking political dividends from their booking photos. They’ve offered large smiles or defiant smirks and tried to make the best of their predicament.

Yet this is one of just 45 presidents in all of U.S. history — not only someone who held the keys to the most powerful government in the world, but who held a position that for many these days, both at home and overseas, personifies the United States. To see that face looking at a camera whose lens he is not seeking out — that’s a potent moment.

“There’s a power to the still image, which is inarguable,” said Mitchell Stevens, a professor emeritus at New York University who has written a book about the place imagery holds in modern society and how it is supplanting the word.

“It kind of freezes a moment, and in this case it’s freezing an unhappy moment for Donald Trump,” Stevens said. “And it’s not something he can click away. It’s not something he can simply brush off. That moment is going to live on. And it’s entirely possible that it will end up as the image that history preserves of this man.”
…

Police on the Hawaiian island of Maui have released the names of 388 people still unaccounted for following devastating wildfires earlier this month.

In a video statement released late Thursday, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said he understood the release of the list could cause pain for those whose loved ones are still missing, but the police department felt it could help with the investigation.

The list contains the names and points of contact for each missing person reported. Pelletier asked anyone who finds their own name on the list or with information regarding a person on the list to contact Maui police or the FBI.  

The Associated Press reports that following a 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California, officials were able to reduce a list of missing people from 1,300 to about a dozen within a month of releasing a list of those reported missing.  

In an update Monday, Maui County officials said all single story, residential properties in the disaster area had been searched and teams were beginning to search multistory residential and commercial properties.

As of Tuesday, the police department said the August 8 fires killed at least 115 people and left an unknown number of others missing, making them the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century.

Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press and Reuters.
…

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo will start a four-day visit to China this weekend. The announcement came shortly after the Biden administration issued an executive order restricting certain U.S. investments in China.  

The Department of Commerce said on Tuesday that Raimondo will visit Beijing and Shanghai from August 27 to 30 and meet with senior Chinese government officials and American business leaders. 

The trip is intended to deepen communication between the U.S. and China on issues relating to the U.S.-China commercial relationship, challenges faced by U.S. businesses, and areas for potential cooperation, according to a press release from the Commerce Department.   

Analysts said that as China’s economy may be in long-term trouble, Beijing hopes to use Raimondo’s visit to reverse the impression that China is no longer friendly to foreign companies. But the trip may not bring any breakthrough.  

Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told VOA that Beijing welcomes Raimondo’s visit because of her influence on several economic and trade issues that China cares about.  

“Secretary Raimondo is a pretty big player in all transactions involving either trade in goods or services, electronic services of various kinds, technology flows and investment flows in both directions,” Hufbauer said. 

“My guess is that the Chinese authorities will be interested and quiz her quite closely about what limits she sees on these restrictions that are being put in place, what kind of flows of goods, of technology, of investment are still permitted by the U.S., and what are basically either prohibited or very closely scrutinized.”  

Move seen as goodwill gesture

Earlier this month, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order banning U.S. investments in sensitive technologies in China, aiming to restrict China’s ability to develop next-generation military and surveillance technologies.  

However, right after Raimondo’s trip was announced, the U.S. government unexpectedly removed 27 Chinese companies and institutions from the “Unverified List” of sanctioned commercial entities, which was widely seen as a goodwill gesture from Washington to Beijing. 

The 27 Chinese entities include lithium battery material maker Guangdong Guanghua Technology and sensor maker Nanjing Gaohua Technology.  

China’s Ministry of Commerce said on Tuesday that the move is beneficial to the resumption of normal trade between companies of the two countries and is in line with the common interests of both sides. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry also visited China this year. These meetings could pave the way for Chinese President Xi Jinping to attend the APEC summit in the U.S. and meet with Biden this fall.  

‘Intense competition requires intense diplomacy’

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said Raimondo’s trip is “an encapsulation of the approach that the Biden administration is taking, where we are engaged in an intense competition with the PRC, but intense competition requires intense diplomacy to manage that competition so that it doesn’t tip over into conflict.  

“Secretary Raimondo will carry with her the message that the United States is not seeking to decouple from China, but rather to de-risk, and that means protecting our national security and ensuring resilient supply chains alongside our allies and partners while we continue our economic relationship and our trade relationship,” Sullivan said in a press briefing this week.  

Raimondo is expected to meet Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao, among other economic policymakers.  

Clark Packard, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, told VOA he expects Raimondo to bring up U.S. concerns about recent Chinese restrictions on the export of some critical minerals, seen as retaliation for the American measures. 

“I don’t know if that falls on deaf ears because China would argue, ‘We weren’t going to move forward with this, but this is in response to your export controls on semiconductors and advanced computing,'” said Packard. “I don’t know how well that will be received, but again, I think it’s positive that the two sides talk. My hope is it’s not just an airing of the grievances on both sides because, while I think it’s important to engage, you do want to see some movements.”  

Packard said he doesn’t expect Raimondo’s trip to make any substantive breakthroughs on key issues, partly because the Biden administration is “getting a lot of pressure from Congress to continue to ratchet up tensions.”  

“I think that there’s so much political pressure on the Biden administration to not appear weak on China, which is going to prevent any sort of massive thawing in the relationship even if both sides want that to happen economically,” he said.  

Sullivan said, “We are not sending Cabinet officials to China to change China, nor do we expect these conversations to change the United States; rather, we each have the opportunity through this high-level engagement to ensure that there is a basic, stable foundation in the relationship, even as we compete intensively in a number of domains.”   

Likely start of a working group

According to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the planning, one likely deliverable from the trip is a working group between the commerce agencies of the two sides to discuss U.S. export controls aimed at preventing cutting-edge American technology from being used by China’s military.   

In a letter to Raimondo and Blinken last week, four U.S. Republican lawmakers said, “U.S. export control policy towards the [People’s Republic of China] should not be up for negotiation, period. Decisions on the nature and scope of U.S. export controls should be taken in Washington, not Beijing … 

“It is time for U.S. officials to accept that China has no intention of abandoning its policies that led to expanded U.S. export controls in the first place,” said the letter. “In this vein, we urge you, prior to your trip, to publicly clarify that U.S. export controls are non-negotiable and that the PRC should expect more, not less, U.S. export controls moving forward.” 

The letter was signed by Senator Bill Hagerty and Representatives Mike Gallagher, Michael McCaul and Young Kim. 

The trip also comes as the Chinese economy is grappling with stagnant growth, a real estate crisis, sluggish exports, high youth unemployment, and weak consumer confidence. Analysts believe the downturn in China’s economy gives Beijing more reasons to ease tensions with the U.S.  

“With Secretary Raimondo, one thing they might do is try to lay out how friendly China still is to foreign business, to foreign firms that want to invest in China in a lot of sectors, including household products, but also including things like technology products, Qualcomm, whatever Apple products in China and so on,” said Hufbauer.

“Chinese authorities want to try to combat the notion that they are very unfriendly to business and, in general, private business and foreign firms in particular,” he said. “And that would be a subject they would discuss with Raimondo, and they might come out with some kind of statement saying that China is open to business, and once firms have come, it’s going to reduce regulatory oversight.”          
…

The Camp David trilateral security agreement between the United States, Japan and South Korea is likely to drive Beijing to be more aggressive in the South China Sea, analysts say.

The trilateral summit, the first stand-alone gathering of leaders from the three countries, yielded security measures aimed directly at what the participants described in a joint statement as China’s “dangerous and aggressive behavior,” especially in the South China Sea.

The agreement calls for the three allies to commit to consult with each other to coordinate their response to regional threats.

It also requires them to expand joint military drills and hold annual talks. In a statement, the three countries called out China for “dangerous and aggressive behavior supporting unlawful maritime claims” in what appeared to be a rebuke of China’s aggression in the South China Sea.

Clint Work, a fellow and director of academic affairs at the Korea Economic Institute of America, told VOA Korean in an interview that direct mentions of China’s behavior in the South China Sea and its claims had not appeared in previous U.S.-South Korea statements.

“To mention all these specific Chinese behaviors and claims is a new development. And to have it in a trilateral document is notable,” he said.

China’s protest

Beijing expressed deep displeasure with the summit.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin called the meeting “an act of gross interference in China’s internal affairs, a deliberate attempt to sow discord” between Beijing and its neighbors.

The spokesperson also rejected criticism of Beijing’s behavior in the South China Sea.

“The U.S., together with its allies, frequently conducted military exercises and close-in reconnaissance in waters around China, including the South China Sea, to flex muscle and intensify tensions in the region,” the spokesperson said at a news briefing on Monday.

‘Salami-slicing approach’

Analysts say the trio’s military exercises and increased ballistic missile cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region will likely push China to strengthen its existing aggressive approach in the disputed waters.

“China will stage its own military exercises in response, perpetuating the action-reaction cycle,” said Carl Thayer, professor emeritus of politics at the University of New South Wales Canberra, in an email to VOA Khmer.

Thayer added that although the trilateral partnership on ballistic missiles is mainly directed at North Korea, “the greater interoperability and proficiency in ballistic missile defense” resulting from the partnership will offset the threat posed by China’s ballistic missiles.

“China’s response will be to improve its offensive capabilities and increase the number of ballistic missiles it can deploy,” he said.

John Ciorciari, professor of research and policy engagement at the University of Michigan, said in an email to VOA Khmer that in the short term, China will likely act assertively to show that closer cooperation among South Korea, Japan and the U.S. is counterproductive, but in the long term, “the stronger trilateral cooperation is likely to induce more caution in Beijing.”

“China is not likely to engage in dramatic military escalation, but it will probably take economic measures to punish South Korea and Japan. This could accelerate economic decoupling,” Ciorciari said.

“China will likely continue pursuing its salami-slicing approach in the South China Sea, building steadily without escalating to major-power armed conflict,” he added.

Sweeping maritime claims

China has made sweeping claims to sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, a combined area estimated to hold 11 billion barrels of untapped oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

The claims have angered competing claimants, including Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.

In July 2016, an international tribunal in The Hague ruled against China in a claim brought by the Philippines under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

China, despite being a signatory to the treaty that established the tribunal, refused to accept the court’s ruling.

China has been increasingly aggressive in asserting its claim, using naval presence and exercises to deter opponents from inside and outside the region, and carefully conducting gray zone operations — offensive tactics below the use of armed force by its coast guard, maritime militia and fishing vessels — to harass and intimidate littoral states.

Beijing is also constructing what appears to be an airstrip on Triton Island, a contested territory that is also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan.

Recently, the Philippine Coast Guard released a video showing a China Coast Guard vessel firing a water cannon at one of its ships.

The United States has no territorial claim over the contested waters but has asserted that freedom of navigation and flight, as well as peacefully resolving disputes, are in its national interest.

VOA’s Korean Service contributed to this report.
…

Maui County sued Hawaiian Electric Company on Thursday over the fires that devastated Lahaina, saying the utility negligently failed to shut off power despite exceptionally high winds and dry conditions.

Witness accounts and video indicated that sparks from power lines ignited fires as utility poles snapped in the winds, which were driven by a passing hurricane. The Aug. 8 fires killed at least 115 people and left an unknown number of others missing, making them the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century.

Hawaii Electric said in a statement it is “very disappointed that Maui County chose this litigious path while the investigation is still unfolding.”

The lawsuit said the destruction could have been avoided and that the utility had a duty “to properly maintain and repair the electric transmission lines, and other equipment including utility poles associated with their transmission of electricity, and to keep vegetation properly trimmed and maintained so as to prevent contact with overhead power lines and other electric equipment.”

The utility knew that high winds “would topple power poles, knock down power lines, and ignite vegetation,” the lawsuit said. “Defendants also knew that if their overhead electrical equipment ignited a fire, it would spread at a critically rapid rate.”

A drought in the region had left plants, including invasive grasses, dangerously dry. As Hurricane Dora passed roughly 800 kilometers south of Hawaii, strong winds toppled at least 30 power poles in West Maui. Video shot by a Lahaina resident shows a downed power line setting dry grasses alight. Firefighters initially contained that fire, but then left to attend to other calls, and residents said the fire later reignited and raced toward downtown Lahaina.

With downed power lines, police or utility crews blocking some roads, traffic ground to a standstill along Lahaina’s Front Street. A number of residents jumped into the water off Maui as they tried to escape the flaming debris and overheated black smoke enveloping downtown.

Dozens of searchers in snorkel gear have been combing a 6.4-kilometer stretch of water this week for signs of anyone who might have perished. Crews are also painstakingly searching for remains among the ashes of destroyed businesses and multistory residential buildings.

For now, the number of confirmed dead stands at 115, a number that the county said is expected to rise.

Maui County on Thursday released eight additional names of people who have been identified, including a family of four whose remains were found in a burned car near their home: 7-year-old Tony Takafua; his mother, Salote Tone, 39; and his grandparents Faaoso Tone, 70, and Maluifonua Tone, 73.

The FBI and Maui County police are still trying to figure out how many others might be unaccounted for. The FBI said Tuesday there were 1,000 to 1,100 names on a tentative, unconfirmed list.

“Our primary focus in the wake of this unimaginable tragedy has been to do everything we can to support not just the people of Maui, but also Maui County,” Hawaiian Electric’s statement said.

Hawaiian Electric is a for-profit, investor-owned, publicly traded utility that serves 95% of Hawaii’s electric customers. It is also facing several lawsuits from Lahaina residents as well as one from some of its own investors, who accused it of fraud in a federal lawsuit Thursday, saying it failed to disclose that its wildfire prevention and safety measures were inadequate.

Maui County’s lawsuit notes other utilities, such as Southern California Edison Company, Pacific Gas & Electric, and San Diego Gas & Electric, have procedures for shutting off power during bad windstorms and said the “severe and catastrophic losses … could have easily been prevented” if Hawaiian Electric had a similar shutoff plan.

The county said it is seeking compensation for damage to public property and resources in Lahaina as well as nearby Kula.

Other utilities have been found liable for devastating fires recently.

In June, a jury in Oregon found the electric utility PacifiCorp responsible for causing devastating fires during Labor Day weekend in 2020, ordering the company to pay tens of millions of dollars to 17 homeowners who sued and finding it liable for broader damages that could push the total award into the billions.

Pacific Gas & Electric declared bankruptcy and pleaded guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter after its neglected equipment caused a fire in the Sierra Nevada foothills in 2018 that destroyed nearly 19,000 homes, businesses and other buildings and virtually razed the town of Paradise, California.
…

During a police raid earlier this month on the Marion County Record newspaper in Kansas, law enforcement secretly copied data from at least one computer they seized during the raid and didn’t return it when ordered to do so, the outlet’s attorney said.

Officers illegally copied 17 gigs of data from the newspaper’s computer system, said Bernie Rhodes, the newspaper’s lawyer.

“This simply raises even further the level of suspicion that what occurred here was not done for any legitimate purpose,” Rhodes told VOA.

On Aug. 11, local police — led by Chief Gideon Cody — raided the weekly newspaper’s office and the co-owner’s home. They seized computers, cellphones, hard drives and other items, which were then held in a storage locker at the sheriff’s office.

Police later said the raid was over a complaint filed by a local restaurant owner that a Record reporter had committed identity theft by looking up public information through the Kansas Department of Revenue website.

After the raid was widely condemned by press freedom groups and news organizations around the world, the county attorney ruled on August 16 that there was insufficient evidence to justify the raid, and a judge ordered the seized devices to be returned. Eight seized items were included on the inventory list provided to the Record.

But when the district court released an inventory list earlier this week, it included nine items, according to Rhodes. The missing item is listed as “OS Triage Digital DATA” in the court filing.

“It’s called fruit of the poisonous tree,” Rhodes said, using a legal metaphor that describes evidence obtained illegally. This latest development supports the belief that “the entire search was invalid,” he said.

The Marion County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately reply to VOA’s email requesting comment.

This development confirms the newspaper’s concerns about what the police may have done with their seized devices.

“I’m concerned about what the police looked through,” Record publisher Eric Meyer told VOA earlier this week in Marion. “They’re supposed to look for certain things. But who watches the watchers? You don’t know.”

Rhodes told VOA that if the newspaper cannot come to a resolution with the city, they plan to take legal action over the raid.

“We would intend to sue Chief Cody, the police department and the city of Marion for the constitutional violations that occurred,” he said.
…

The United States announced new sanctions Thursday against several Russian entities and individuals for their roles in the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and for human rights abuses against minors in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.

“Children are literally being ripped from their homes. In the year 2023. By a country sitting in this very chamber. By a permanent member of this council,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council. “This is straight out of a dystopian novel. But this is not fiction. Colleagues, this is not fiction. This is real life.”

She said the human rights violations are being orchestrated at all levels of the Russian government and noted that the International Criminal Court at The Hague has issued arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights. Those warrants were issued on March 17, for their involvement in the alleged deportation and transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.

At a meeting held on the 32nd anniversary of Ukraine’s independence from the former Soviet Union, focusing on the protection of children, Thomas-Greenfield said the United States would not stand by “as Russia carries out these war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

“And today, the United States is imposing sanctions on two entities and 11 individuals – including individuals who reportedly have facilitated the forcible transfer and deportation of Ukraine’s children to camps,” Thomas-Greenfield announced. “Additionally, we are taking steps to impose visa restrictions on three Russia-installed purported authorities for their involvement in human rights abuses of Ukrainian minors.”

Among the sanctioned individuals are the commissioners for children’s rights in several Russian regions, as well as a Russian government-owned “summer camp” and its director, located in Russia-occupied Crimea. Washington says the camp conducts “extensive ‘patriotic’ re-education programs” and prevents the children from returning to their families.

A human rights briefer from Ukraine told the council that according to the Ukrainian National Information Bureau, Russian agents have taken at least 19,546 children to 57 regions of Russia since February 2022, and only 386 have returned home. But Ukrainian officials say the real number could be much higher.

“After deportation to Russia or to the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, our children are exposed to aggressive brainwashing aimed at changing their consciousness, erasing their Ukrainian identity and preparing obedient soldiers for the Russian army in the future,” Ukrainian Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya told the council.

He thanked Washington for imposing sanctions on Russia and urged other countries to do the same.

The Russian envoy dismissed the accusations as lies.

“The lie about our alleged abductions of Ukrainian children, who we are actually saving,” Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said.

UN reporting

In its annual report on violations against children in conflict zones, the United Nations said in June it had verified the abduction of 91 children by Russian armed forces, all of whom were released. The U.N. also verified the transfer of 46 children to Russia from occupied areas of Ukraine, “including children forcibly separated from parents, children removed from schools and institutions without the consent of guardians, and a child who was given Russian citizenship.”

Verification is difficult and the U.N. has criticized Russia for its lack of cooperation and access. The secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, included Moscow in his annual blacklist of perpetrators of grave violations against children, citing the high number of attacks on schools and numbers of children killed and maimed by Russia’s military and affiliated armed groups.

“I am troubled by reports, some of which were verified by the United Nations, of children transferred to the Russian Federation from areas of Ukraine that, in part, are or have been under the temporary military control of the Russian Federation,” Guterres wrote in the report. “I urge the Russian Federation to ensure that no changes are made to the personal status of Ukrainian children, including their nationality.”

Russia is listed in Annex II, Section B of the report, which is for parties to conflicts that have put in place measures during the reporting period aimed at improving the protection of children. Ukraine’s ambassador criticized Moscow, however, for not implementing them.

On Friday, Kyiv signed its own action plan with the United Nations to strengthen the protection of children in Ukraine.
…

The U.S. Justice Department is suing Elon Musk’s SpaceX for refusing to hire refugees and asylum-seekers at the rocket company.

In a lawsuit filed on Thursday, the Justice Department said SpaceX routinely discriminated against these job applicants between 2018 and 2022, in violation of U.S. immigration laws.

The lawsuit says that Musk and other SpaceX officials falsely claimed the company was allowed to hire only U.S. citizens and permanent residents due to export control laws that regulate the transfer of sensitive technology.

“U.S. law requires at least a green card to be hired at SpaceX, as rockets are advanced weapons technology,” Musk wrote in a June 16, 2020, tweet cited in the lawsuit.

In fact, U.S. export control laws impose no such restrictions, according to the Justice Department.

Those laws limit the transfer of sensitive technology to foreign entities, but they do not prevent high-tech companies such as SpaceX from hiring job applicants who have been granted refugee or asylum status in the U.S. (Foreign nationals, however, need a special permit.)

“Under these laws, companies like SpaceX can hire asylees and refugees for the same positions they would hire U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents,” the Department said in a statement. “And once hired, asylees and refugees can access export-controlled information and materials without additional government approval, just like U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.”

The company did not respond to a VOA request for comment on the lawsuit and whether it had changed its hiring policy.

Recruiters discouraged refugees, say investigators

The Justice Department’s civil rights division launched an investigation into SpaceX in 2020 after learning about the company’s alleged discriminatory hiring practices.

The inquiry discovered that SpaceX “failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement.

“Our investigation also found that SpaceX recruiters and high-level officials took actions that actively discouraged asylees and refugees from seeking work opportunities at the company,” Clarke said.

According to data SpaceX provided to the Justice Department, out of more than 10,000 hires between September 2018 and May 2022, SpaceX hired only one person described as an asylee on his application.

The company hired the applicant about four months after the Justice Department notified it about its investigation, according to the lawsuit.

No refugees were hired during this period.

“Put differently, SpaceX’s own hiring records show that SpaceX repeatedly rejected applicants who identified as asylees or refugees because it believed that they were ineligible to be hired due to” export regulations, the lawsuit says.

On one occasion, a recruiter turned down an asylee “who had more than nine years of relevant engineering experience and had graduated from Georgia Tech University,” the lawsuit says.

Suit seeks penalties, change

SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, California, designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit asks an administrative judge to order SpaceX to “cease and desist” its alleged hiring practices and seeks civil penalties and policy changes.
…

Former U.S. President Donald Trump is heading Thursday to Atlanta, Georgia, to surrender on racketeering and conspiracy charges linked to his efforts to upend his 2020 reelection loss in the southern state.

After flying in from his golf resort in New Jersey, Trump will head to the Fulton County jail in Atlanta, where he will be arrested and booked for an unprecedented fourth time in the past five months. After being fingerprinted and having a mug shot taken, he is expected to be released pending trial on a $200,000 bond his lawyers negotiated earlier this week with Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis.

“Can you believe it? I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia on Thursday to be ARRESTED,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account earlier this week.

No previous U.S. president has been charged with criminal offenses, but Trump is now facing 91 charges across the four indictments for his alleged actions before, during and after his single-term presidency ended in early 2021.

He faces 13 charges in Georgia, where Willis on Thursday called for an October 23 start date for his trial and that of 18 co-defendants. But Trump and others could object to a trial starting in two months. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee will ultimately pick the date.

Even with the array of charges he is facing, Trump is the leading Republican contender for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination to run against the presumptive Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden.

Regardless of when the trial in Atlanta might start, Trump is already facing weeks of criminal trials he would be obligated to appear at in the first half of 2024. But he made a calculated decision that his national polling lead over other Republican presidential hopefuls is so commanding — 40 percentage points or more — that he skipped the party’s first presidential debate Wednesday night.

The 77-year-old Trump, if convicted in any of the cases, could face years in prison.

He has denied all wrongdoing while assailing the three prosecutors pursuing the four cases against him and two of the four judges randomly picked to oversee his trials. He has claimed that the allegations leveled against him are a political witch hunt aimed at thwarting his 2024 campaign to reclaim the presidency.

In agreeing to the bond for his release in Georgia — the first time he has had to post cash to stay free pending trial — Trump also agreed to not threaten or intimidate witnesses, including on social media platforms.

For months, Trump has claimed that Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, who has filed two of the cases against him, is “deranged” and a “crackhead,” while contending that two other prosecutors, Alvin Bragg in a New York case, and Willis, both of whom are Black, are “racist” for filing their indictments against him.

About half of Trump’s 18 co-defendants have already met Willis’ demand that they surrender by noon on Friday. Former Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, best known as the New York mayor during the 2001 al-Qaida terrorist attacks on the city, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell all turned themselves in on Wednesday and were released on bail.

Trump’s last White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and former senior Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark both reached $100,000 bond deals with Willis to secure their release pending trials. 

Ahead of his flight to Georgia, Trump hired veteran Atlanta criminal defense lawyer Steve Sadow to oversee his defense.

Sadow said in a statement that Trump “should never have been indicted,” adding, “he is innocent of all the charges brought against him.”

He added that “prosecutions intended to advance or serve the ambitions and careers of political opponents of the president have no place in our justice system.”

The Georgia case against Trump stems broadly from his taped January 2, 2021, telephone call to the state’s election chief, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find” 11,780 votes, one more than Biden’s margin of victory, so he could claim victory in the state. Until Trump, no Republican presidential candidate had lost the state since 1992.

In addition, Trump is accused in Georgia of conspiring to create a slate of fake electors in the state to cast their ballots for him, rather than the legitimate ones for Biden, when Congress met on January 6, 2021, to certify the election outcome in the Electoral College.

At stake were Georgia’s 16 electoral votes, although the state counted the popular presidential vote three times, with Biden winning each time.

The U.S. does not pick its presidents in the national popular vote, although Biden won 7 million more votes than Trump in 2020. Rather, the national outcome is determined in 50 state-by-state elections, with the biggest states holding the most sway in the subsequent Electoral College vote count.

Trump contested the outcome in seven states he narrowly lost to Biden, claiming that voting irregularities and cheating cost him another four-year term in the White House. Overturning the Georgia result by itself would not have changed the national outcome.

To this day, Trump denies he lost the election. But dozens of judges have ruled against his fraud claims. None of the seven states Trump contested reversed its conclusion that Biden had legitimately won its electoral votes.
…

A key portion of President Joe Biden’s immigration policy that grants parole to thousands of people from Central America and the Caribbean was set to be debated in a Texas federal courtroom beginning Thursday.

Under the humanitarian parole program, up to 30,000 people are being allowed each month to enter the United States from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Texas is leading a lawsuit filed by 21 Republican-leaning states to stop the program, arguing the Biden administration has overreached its authority. Other programs the administration has implemented to reduce illegal immigration also have faced legal challenges.

The parole program was started for Venezuelans in fall 2022 and then expanded in January. People taking part must apply online, arrive at an airport and have a financial sponsor in the United States. If approved, they can stay for two years and get a work permit.

The program has “been tremendously successful at reducing migration to the southwest border,” attorneys for the U.S. Justice Department, which is representing the federal government in the lawsuit, wrote in court documents.

A trial on the states’ lawsuit is being presided over by U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton in Victoria, Texas. Tipton, a Donald Trump appointee, has previously ruled against the Biden administration on who to prioritize for deportation.

The trial was scheduled to last two days and be livestreamed from Victoria to a federal courtroom in Houston. Tipton was expected to issue a ruling at a later date.

In court documents, Texas and the other states have called the Biden administration’s program an “extreme example” of not enforcing immigration laws that require it to “grant parole only on a case-by-case basis for significant public benefit or urgent humanitarian reasons.”

While the Republican states’ lawsuit is objecting to the use of humanitarian parole for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, it hasn’t raised any concerns for its use to grant entry to tens of thousands of Ukrainians since Russia invaded that country.

Texas has also argued that the parole program causes financial harm because it has to provide services, including detention, educational, social services and driver’s license programs, to the paroled migrants.

Immigrant rights groups joined the legal proceedings on behalf of seven people who are sponsoring migrants. One of the sponsors was expected to testify during the trial.

The rights groups have defended the humanitarian parole program, saying it’s a safe pathway to the U.S. for desperate migrants who would otherwise be paying human smugglers and bogging down border agents. The program is also helping reduce the humanitarian crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border, the groups said.

As of the end of July, more than 72,000 Haitians, 63,000 Venezuelans, 41,000 Cubans and 34,000 Nicaraguans had been vetted and authorized to come to the U.S. through the parole program.
…

A Moscow court on Thursday extended by three months the pre-trial detention of jailed U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich. He will now stay behind bars on espionage charges until at least the end of November, Russian state news agency Tass reported.

The Wall Street Journal reporter was detained at the end of March while on assignment in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg.

Moscow has accused him of spying, which he, his employer and the U.S. government vehemently deny. The State Department has classified him as wrongfully detained.

Gershkovich is the first American reporter to be detained in Russia on espionage charges since the Cold War.

Gershkovich, 31, arrived at the Moscow court Thursday in a white prison van and was led out handcuffed. He appeared in court to hear the result of the prosecution’s motion to extend his arrest from August 30.

This is the second time his pre-trial detention has been extended, both times by three months.

Reporters were not allowed to witness Thursday’s proceedings in the court. Tass said it took place behind closed doors due to the classified nature of some details in the case.

On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal said in a statement, “Today, our colleague and distinguished journalist Evan Gershkovich appeared for a pre-trial hearing where his improper detention was extended yet again. We are deeply disappointed he continues to be arbitrarily and wrongfully detained for doing his job as a journalist. The baseless accusations against him are categorically false, and we continue to push for his immediate release. Journalism is not a crime.”
…

A husband and wife who were farmers in their native Nigeria have turned the skills they learned there into a thriving small business in the U.S. state of Maryland.
VOA’s Thierry Kaore has the story from their farm in Brookeville, Maryland, narrated by Salem Solomon
…

Eight Republicans who want to be president of the United States shared a stage Wednesday night in Wisconsin for their party’s first debate ahead of next year’s election.

The two-hour televised debate, the first held by Republicans in this election cycle, featured spirited exchanges about what one of the moderators called “the elephant who is not in the room” – the absent party front-runner, former President Donald Trump, who decided he is so far ahead in the polls he did not need to be on the stage.

Some of the contenders, such as Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, deemed Trump disqualified from serving again because of what they said was his disrespect for the Constitution, as well as the 91 felony counts he now faces.

Trump is set to surrender for arrest and booking in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday in connection with the fourth indictment, which accuses him of racketeering and interference in trying to upend his 2020 reelection loss in the southern state.

“The American people need to know that the president asked me to put him over the Constitution,” demanding he refuse to oversee the congressional certification that Democrat Joe Biden had defeated Trump in the 2020 election, Pence told the audience in the Fiserv Forum.

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley declared, ”Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We can’t win a general election that way.”

However, political novice Vivek Ramaswamy, rising in the polls, stood by Trump, saying he believed he was “the best president of the 21st century.”

Other Republican presidential contenders, while acknowledging Pence’s role on Jan. 6, 2021, in rejecting Trump’s demand to stop congressional certification of Biden’s victory, described the prosecution of Trump as the political weaponization of the Justice Department overseen by Biden.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared, “This election is not about January 6. We’ve got to focus on your future, look forward.”

Only two of the eight candidates on the debate stage, Christie and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, said they would not support Trump if he were convicted and still won the Republican presidential nomination.

Trump leads by about 40 percentage points over his closest Republican presidential challenger, DeSantis, with all the other Republican opponents getting less than 10% apiece in national polls.

Ramaswamy on Wednesday evening stood apart in questioning American support for Ukraine, saying China is a bigger threat to the United States than Russia. Several other candidates, including Haley, also a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, expressed strong support for Ukraine in defending itself against Russian forces.

Others on the debate stage were South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

All of the candidates said they favored restrictions on U.S. abortion rights but differed on the details, such as at what gestational number of weeks it ought to be banned. Last year’s Supreme Court decision upended a nearly 50-year right to the procedure in the U.S., leaving it up to the 50 states to decide whether to allow abortions or severely restrict them.

Ramaswamy, the youngest of the candidates at 38, claimed at one point, “It’s going to take an outsider” to create “a vision of what it means to be an American.”

Pence retorted, “Now is not the time for on-the-job training.”   

After the debate, Pence told reporters no one should have been surprised by his vigor on the debate stage.

“I was the leading champion of conservative values in the Trump-Pence administration. I know how to fight and I was happy to bring that fight tonight,” said the former vice president.

Pence’s primary sparring opponent of the evening, Ramaswamy, said he relished the verbal barrages directed at him.

“Mike Pence coming at me with the experience differential, I think that’s a great thing because I don’t think the people in this country are interested in going back to people who recite slogans they memorized in 1980,” said Ramaswamy.

“There’s a lot of people who had a good night tonight,” according to Sean Spicer, who was Donald Trump’s first White House press secretary. “But does that good night move a needle? We’re going to find out really soon.”

Spicer, speaking to VOA in the post-debate “spin room,” said DeSantis and Haley had a good night while Ramaswamy “landed a bunch of good hits” but it remains to be seen “whether that was a good strategy or was he too aggressive?”

Spicer, who now hosts his own digital TV political show, added that none of the other candidates “had a bad night.”

“The rest of them were fine. I just don’t know that any of them landed a punch that’s going to move the needle,” he said.

The Republicans hold their second debate next month in California but only one of the candidates will be back on the same stage in Wisconsin in July to accept the party’s nomination. 
…

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan lowered expectations for the Saudi-Israel normalization agreement that Washington is working on, rejecting news reports that suggest it is imminent.

“There is still a ways to travel with respect to all of the elements of those discussions,” Sullivan said during a briefing for reporters Tuesday.

In past months, Sullivan and his deputies have begun separate negotiations with the Saudis and Israelis to lay groundwork for a deal.

Peace between the two countries would be “a big deal” and benefit the U.S. “in a fundamental way,” Sullivan said, highlighting the goal of a “more integrated, more stable Middle East” where countries could collaborate on “everything from economics to technology to regional security.”

He declined to comment on a potential meeting between President Joe Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in New Delhi next month.

Talk of normalization began under the administration of President Donald Trump, who leaned on Saudi Arabia to join other Arab states – United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco – in signing the 2020 U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords that recognize Israel.

Since the Accords, Riyadh’s ties with Israel have incrementally warmed, allowing Biden in July 2022 to become the first American president to fly directly to Jeddah from Tel Aviv after the Saudi Kingdom opened its airspace to flights to and from Israel.

US-Saudi-Israel deal

As negotiations continue, the parties have not publicly declared their terms, but various media reports have provided the contours of what such a deal might look like.

Israel is aiming to secure more Saudi support in deterring Iran, even as it stands to gain the most from the wider political and economic impact of normalizing relations with the Saudis, a key Arab country and opinion-maker in the Muslim world. A deal could lead to recognition from other Muslim-majority countries, including Indonesia and Malaysia.

Washington wants the Saudis to be more aligned with the U.S. in its rivalry against China and to resolve the war in Yemen, a proxy conflict between Riyadh and Tehran.

In part to secure support from his Democratic Party lawmakers in Congress, Biden may push Israel to preserve the prospects for a two-state solution with Palestinians, possibly pledging to never annex the occupied West Bank or expand Israeli settlements.

Meanwhile, for Riyadh, the deal must include protection from Iran in the form of some kind of mutual defense pact with Washington, and U.S. support for its civilian nuclear program, including in-country enrichment, as it anticipates its oil to run out.

Sullivan declined to say whether the administration would be willing to agree to those terms.

Long road ahead

“If this possible deal were a meal, the cooks right now are just assembling the ingredients and they haven’t even begun to mix them together,” said Brian Katulis, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.

In addition to its demands to Washington, the Saudis, unlike the Emiratis, Bahrainis and Moroccans in 2020, will likely not cut a deal that sidesteps the Palestinians, Katulis told VOA. It would push for Israeli concessions that echo the “land for peace” principle of the 2002 Saudi-led Arab League peace initiative, which conditions recognition of Israel on the creation of a Palestinian state.

However, while a U.S. security guarantee, civilian nuclear program and concession for Palestinians are desirable for the Saudis, Riyadh does not desperately need any of these, said Jonathan Rynhold, head of the political science department at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University.

In this context, Riyadh is different from past signatories of the Abraham Accords that have been driven by transactional motivators: Morocco signed to secure the Trump administration’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, Sudan for its removal from Washington’s state sponsors of terrorism list and relief from massive debt.

So the key issue is whether Washington is willing to give the Saudis what they want, Rynhold told VOA.

Should the Biden administration decide it is willing to meet Riyadh’s demands, it can allow the Saudis and the Israelis to seal the deal under their terms or push toward some minimal Israeli concession toward the Palestinians that “makes it clear to the Democrats in Congress that Israel’s heading in the right direction,” he added.

Palestinian compromise

Compromise with Palestinians is unlikely to happen under the current Israeli government, the most right-wing in the country’s history. But Washington could nudge Israel toward a more centrist coalition.

“What he [Biden] could do, for example, is simply say that every dollar Israel spends in the settlements, they’ll get one dollar less of American aid,” Rynhold said. “That is something that would make the Israeli public recognize the costs of having a right-wing government.”

Such a move carries considerable political risk for Biden ahead of the 2024 presidential campaign. Republicans would be eager to paint him as weak on supporting Israel, contrasting his approach to Trump’s policy of maximum pressure and isolation of the Palestinians that accompanied the Abraham Accords.

Meanwhile, Palestinian voices are skeptical.

Far from resolving conflicts, Saudi-Israel normalization will serve as a pillar of a repressive architecture that brings no justice for Palestinians, said Dana El Kurd of Al Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.

“Half-baked ideas about a final Palestinian-Israeli agreement,” El Kurd said, in reality do not resolve underlying causes of conflict but “cement an increasingly violent status quo.” 
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Research shows that prolonged exposure to high levels of noise may be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. In New York City, not only the largest U.S. city by population but also one of the loudest, avoiding noise can be an everyday struggle. Aron Ranen has the story from the Big Apple.
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Russia on Wednesday requested that the pre-trial detention of American journalist Evan Gershkovich be extended. 

The Wall Street Journal reporter’s current detention period is set to expire on August 30. The 31-year-old journalist has been in Russian custody since his arrest on March 29. 

Russia accuses Gershkovich of espionage, a charge that he, the newspaper and U.S. officials deny. 

In a request submitted Wednesday, Russian authorities requested that Gershkovich be detained for an unspecified period, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

Russian state media have reported that a Moscow court is due to hold a hearing Thursday on the request. 

“Evan’s wrongful detention is outrageous, and we continue to demand his immediate release,” The Wall Street Journal said in a statement on Wednesday. 

Few visits since arrest

Since his arrest, Gershkovich has been allowed only three consular visits with U.S. officials. 

The most recent was August 14, when he met with U.S. Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy.

“Ambassador Tracy reported that Evan continues to be in good health and remains strong, despite the circumstances,” the U.S. Embassy in Moscow said in a statement. 

In July, Moscow said officials were in contact with Washington about a possible prisoner swap. 

‘Serious about a prisoner exchange’

President Joe Biden said his administration is “serious about a prisoner exchange,” but the White House has also said discussions with the Kremlin on a potential swap have not yet given way to “a pathway to a resolution.” 

Clayton Weimers, executive director of the U.S. bureau of Reporters Without Borders, told VOA earlier in August that Gershkovich’s case shows that the U.S. needs a better strategy to respond to the threat of these issues. 

“The United States, and indeed democracies around the world, need to find ways to raise the cost of this kind of bad business,” Weimers said. “How do we impose stiffer penalties to disincentivize hostage-taking in the first place?” 
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The U.S. State Department, in coordination with other agencies from President Joe Biden’s administration, is seeking a six-month extension of the U.S.-China Science and Technology Agreement (STA) that is due to expire on August 27.

The short-term extension comes as several Republican congressional members voiced concerns that China has previously leveraged the agreement to advance its military objectives and may continue to do so.

The State Department said the brief extension will keep the STA in force while the United States negotiates with China to amend and strengthen the agreement. It does not commit the U.S. to a longer-term extension.

“We are clear-eyed to the challenges posed by the PRC’s national strategies on science and technology, Beijing’s actions in this space, and the threat they pose to U.S. national security and intellectual property, and are dedicated to protecting the interests of the American people,” a State Department spokesperson said Wednesday.

But congressional critics worry that research partnerships organized under the STA could have developed technologies that could later be used against the United States.

“In 2018, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) organized a project with China’s Meteorological Administration — under the STA — to launch instrumented balloons to study the atmosphere,” said Republican Representatives Mike Gallagher, Elise Stefanik and others in a June 27 letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“As you know, a few years later, the PRC used similar balloon technology to surveil U.S. military sites on U.S. territory — a clear violation of our sovereignty.”

The STA was originally signed in 1979 by then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter and then-PRC leader Deng Xiaoping. Under the agreement, the two countries cooperate in fields including agriculture, energy, space, health, environment, earth sciences and engineering, as well as educational and scholarly exchanges.

The agreement has been renewed roughly every five years since its inception. 

The most recent extension was in 2018. 
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