As protests continue in cities across China over the government’s harsh “zero-COVID” policy, a separate battle is taking place on social media sites within China and around the world; a fight that is testing the strength of China’s online censorship apparatus, known as the Great Firewall.

Human Rights Watch China Director Sophie Richardson said Chinese officials appear to be resorting to “low-tech approaches” to tamp down online speech even as the protesters have become more adept at getting their messages past government censors.

“Literally police stopping people on the streets, on public transportation, and forcing them to hand over their smartphones so that police can inspect them to see if they’ve got chats about the protests, if they’ve taken pictures or videos, or if they’ve sent these kinds of materials to other people,” she told VOA via Skype on Tuesday.

Some protesters in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai are getting information out about the crackdown by using technology and other techniques to circumvent government censors who are believed to be using an automated system to help block prohibited content.

Over the weekend, researchers noted that outside of China, when people on Twitter tried to share tweets about the protests and the ensuing crackdown at the hands of police, Chinese language accounts intervened to block the information from spreading.

“Numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years, came to life early Sunday and started spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names,” according to The Washington Post.

Many Chinese citizens have been able to use virtual private networks – or VPNs – to get over the Great Firewall to post photos, messages, videos and other materials on platforms including Twitter.

Ji Feng, a former student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, told VOA that students with VPNs are “jumping over the great firewall,” to gain access to information.

Richardson says those postings have been “an extraordinary breach of the firewall” with Chinese authorities likely to crack down on VPN use.

“As of a few years ago, the use of unauthorized VPNs was criminalized,” she says. “And so we are expecting to hear that people will be prosecuted simply on charges of using that kind of technology.”

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that “videos and posts on Chinese social media about protests were deleted by the ruling party’s vast online censorship apparatus.”

Richardson expects a more complete assessment in the next few weeks of “the extent to which authorities will have used basic garden variety surveillance cameras, which are just legion across all urban Chinese areas now, to identify protesters, and possibly they’ll be used as a basis for prosecuting people who were doing nothing more than exercising their right to free speech.”
…

The Biden administration declared the northern long-eared bat endangered on Tuesday in a last-ditch effort to save a species driven to the brink of extinction by white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease.

“White-nose syndrome is decimating cave-dwelling bat species like the northern long-eared bat at unprecedented rates,” said Martha Williams, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The agency is “deeply committed to working with partners on a balanced approach that reduces the impacts of disease and protects the survivors to recover northern long-eared bat populations,” she said.

First documented in the U.S. in 2006, the disease has infected 12 types of bats and killed millions. The northern long-eared bat is among the hardest hit, with estimated declines of 97% or higher in affected populations. The bat is found in 37 eastern and north-central states, plus Washington, D.C., and much of Canada.

Named for white, fuzzy spots that appear on infected bats, white-nose syndrome attacks bats’ wings, muzzles and ears when they hibernate in caves and abandoned mines.

It causes them to wake early from hibernation and to sometimes fly outside. They can burn up their winter fat stores and eventually starve.

The disease has spread across nearly 80% of the geographical range where northern long-eared bats live and is expected to cover it all by 2025.

Little brown bat also suffering

Another species ravaged by the fungus is the tricolored bat, which the government proposed to classify as endangered in September. A third, the little brown bat, is being evaluated for a potential listing.

Bats are believed to give U.S. agriculture an annual boost of $3 billion by gobbling pests and pollinating some plants.

The Fish and Wildlife Service designated the northern long-eared bat as threatened in 2015. With its situation increasingly dire, the agency proposed an endangered listing in March and considered public comments before deciding to proceed. The reclassification takes effect January 30, 2023.

“This species is in dire straits, but we never want to give up hope,” said Winifred Frick, chief scientist with Bat Conservation International, a nonprofit group. “We can do amazing things when we work hard and have legal protections in place to protect these small colonies that are left.”

In many cases, the service identifies “critical habitat” areas considered particularly important for the survival of an endangered species. Officials decided against doing so for the northern long-eared bat because habitat loss isn’t the primary reason for its decline, spokeswoman Georgia Parham said. Calling attention to their winter hibernation spots could make things worse, she added.

Recovery efforts will focus on wooded areas where the bats roost in summer — usually alone or in small groups, nestling beneath bark or in tree cavities and crevices. Emerging at dusk, they feed on moths, beetles and other insects.

Under the Endangered Species Act, federal agencies are required to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service to be sure projects that they fund or authorize — such as timber harvests, prescribed fires and highway construction — will not jeopardize a listed species’ existence.

For nonfederal landowners, actions that could result in unintentional kills could be allowed but will require permits.

Turbines also a threat

The Fish and Wildlife Service said it will also work with wind energy companies to reduce the likelihood that bats will strike turbines. These collisions are currently a threat in roughly half of the northern long-eared bat’s range, an area likely to grow as wind energy development expands.

The service has approved nearly two dozen plans allowing wind energy and forestry projects to proceed after steps were taken to make them more bat-friendly, said Karen Herrington, Midwest regional coordinator for threatened and endangered species.

Operators can limit the danger by curtailing blade rotation during bats’ migration season and when winds are low.

Research continues for methods to fight white-nose syndrome, including development of a vaccine. The service has distributed more than $46 million for the campaign, which involves around 150 agencies, private organizations and Native American tribes.

“We have to find a cure for white-nose syndrome that is killing our bats and we have to protect the forests where they live,” said Ryan Shannon, senior attorney at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. “This endangered listing will help on both counts.”
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The Supreme Court on Tuesday wrestled with a politically tinged dispute over a Biden administration policy that would prioritize deportation of people in the country illegally who pose the greatest public safety risk.

It was not clear after arguments that stretched past two hours and turned highly contentious at times whether the justices would allow the policy to take effect, or side with Republican-led states that have so far succeeded in blocking it.

At the center of the case is a September 2021 directive from the Department of Homeland Security that paused deportations unless individuals had committed acts of terrorism, espionage or “egregious threats to public safety.” The guidance, issued after Joe Biden became president, updated a Trump-era policy that removed people in the country illegally regardless of criminal history or community ties.

On Tuesday, the administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer told the justices that federal law does “not create an unyielding mandate to apprehend and remove” every one of the more than 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said it would be “incredibly destabilizing on the ground” for the high court to require that. Congress has not given DHS enough money to vastly increase the number of people it holds and deports, the Biden administration has said.

But Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone told the court the administration is violating federal law that requires the detention and deportation of people who are in the U.S. illegally and who have been convicted of any serious crime, not just the most serious, specifically defined ones.

Chief Justice John Roberts was among the conservative justices who pushed back strongly on the Biden administration’s arguments.

“It’s our job to say what the law is, not whether or not it can be possibly implemented or whether there are difficulties there, and I don’t think we should change that responsibility just because Congress and the executive can’t agree on something. … I don’t think we should let them off the hook,” he said.

Yet Roberts, in questioning Stone, also called Prelogar’s argument compelling.

“It’s impossible for the executive to do what you want it to do, right?” Roberts asked.

Roberts wasn’t totally satisfied when Stone said the number of people potentially affected total 60,000 to 80,000.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that whatever the actual number, “the resources still aren’t there.”

The court’s three liberal justices, on the other hand, were sympathetic to the Biden administration’s arguments. Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, made clear they believed that Texas and Louisiana, which joined Texas in suing over the directive, weren’t even entitled to bring their case.

The case is the latest example of a Republican litigation strategy that has succeeded in slowing Biden administration initiatives by going to GOP-friendly courts. Kagan picked up on that during arguments, saying that Texas could file its suit in a courthouse where it was guaranteed to get a sympathetic hearing and that one judge stopped “a federal immigration policy in its tracks.”

In a separate ongoing legal dispute, three judges chosen by then-President Donald Trump are among the four Republican-appointed judges who have so far prevented the administration’s student loan cancellation program from taking effect.

The states said they would face added costs of having to detain people the federal government might allow to remain free inside the United States, despite their criminal records.

Federal appeals courts had reached conflicting decisions over DHS guidance.

The federal appeals court in Cincinnati earlier overturned a district judge’s order that put the policy on hold in a lawsuit filed by Arizona, Ohio and Montana.

But in the separate suit filed by Texas and Louisiana, a federal judge in Texas ordered a nationwide halt to the guidance and a federal appellate panel in New Orleans declined to step in.

In July, the court voted 5-4 to leave the immigration policy frozen nationwide. Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals in saying they would have allowed the Biden administration to put in place the guidance.

At the same time, the court said it would hear arguments in the case in late November.

The justices have several questions to sort through, whether the states should have been permitted to file their challenge in the first place, whether the policy violates immigration law and, if it does, whether it was appropriate for the Texas-based judge to block it.

On that last point, Prelogar said the judge’s decision to “vacate” the policy was wrong, and her argument questioned whether judges have been getting it all wrong for decades.

The issue touched a nerve, especially among Roberts, Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the justices who once served on the federal appeals court in Washington that regularly vacates policies it determines are unlawful.

“Fairly radical,” Roberts said. “Pretty astonishing,” Kavanaugh said. Jackson, more restrained, also questioned Prelogar’s reasoning.

“There seems to be a kind of D.C. Circuit cartel,” Kagan joked.

A decision in U.S. v. Texas, 22-58, is expected by late June.
…

President Joe Biden said Tuesday he hopes lawmakers can work together to fund the government, boost spending for Ukraine and avert a crippling rail strike as he hosted congressional leaders at the White House. But Republicans’ pick to be the next speaker of the House served notice that things are “going to be different” once the GOP takes control of the chamber.

The meeting came as Biden looks to lock in more legislative wins before Democrats lose unified control of Washington on Jan. 3 and as the president is dependent on Congress to avoid a government shutdown on Dec. 16. Biden also wants a government funding bill to provide additional money for the COVID-19 response and to bolster U.S. support for Ukraine’s economy and defense against Russia’s invasion.

Biden has also called on Congress to step in and impose a tentative agreement between railroads and workers to avert a potentially crippling freight rail strike on Dec. 9.

Lawmakers are months behind on passing funding legislation for the current fiscal year, relying on stop-gap measures that largely maintain existing funding levels, that federal agencies have warned leaves them strapped for cash.

“We’re going to work together, I hope, to fund the government,” Biden told lawmakers, emphasizing the importance of Ukraine and pandemic funding as well.

The president said the “economy’s at risk” because of the looming rail strike, and he said he is “confident” that Congress could act to avert it. “There’s a lot to do, including resolving the train strike,” he said.

Meeting in the Roosevelt Room, Biden sat at the head of the conference table, flanked on either side by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the two smiling brightly at the start of the meeting.

Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy sat next to Schumer, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was next to Pelosi and appeared more reserved.

As the meeting began, Biden quipped, “I’m sure this is going to go very quickly” to reach agreement on everything. Lawmakers spent a bit more than an hour with the president, who was joined by Vice President Kamala Harris and senior aides.

McCarthy is working to become speaker in January, though he must first overcome dissent within the GOP conference to win a floor vote on Jan. 3. Speaking to reporters outside the White House, McCarthy said Biden “got an indication that it’s going to be different” once Republicans take control of the House.

The GOP House leader, who has hardly spoken with Biden during the president’s first two years in office, said “I can work with anybody,” but that the Nov. 8 midterm elections show that “America likes a check and balance.”

Schumer and Pelosi described it as a “good” and “productive” meeting as they left the White House.

“There was good will in the room,” Schumer said, saying they were “trying to have a meeting of the minds.”

All the leaders said their preference was to pass a comprehensive spending bill for the fiscal year, rather than a continuing resolution that largely maintains existing funding levels.

“If we don’t have an option we may have to have a yearlong” stop-gap bill, Pelosi added.

McCarthy, who has promised to look more critically at the Biden administration’s requests for Ukraine aid, told reporters that, “I’m not for a blank check for anything.” He said he wasn’t necessarily opposed to more funding, but wanted to ensure “there’s accountability and audits.”

Congress is also taking up legislation to codify same-sex marriage, raise the debt limit and reform the Electoral Count Act in a bid to prevent another attempt like in 2020 when then-President Donald Trump and allied lawmakers tried to overturn the will of voters in the presidential election he lost to Biden. The Senate is set to take up the marriage bill on Tuesday, and the House will have to approve it before it goes to Biden’s desk.

“We’re going to find other areas of common ground, I hope,” Biden added, “because the American people want us to work together.”

Republicans are set to hold a narrow majority in the House come January, while Democrats are retaining control of the Senate. A runoff election in Georgia next week will determine whether Biden’s party will hold a 51-49 majority or Vice President Harris will be needed to break a 50-50 tie.
…

Former U.S. President Donald Trump made headlines over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend after it was revealed he hosted two men known for making virulently antisemitic statements for dinner at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort.

In the meeting, Trump reportedly sat down with the rapper and fashion designer Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, as well as Nick Fuentes, a far-right activist who has promoted people with white nationalist views and has denied the reality of the Holocaust.

Trump later claimed he was not aware that Ye was planning to bring Fuentes to the meeting, but he can hardly have been unaware of the recent antisemitic comments by the rapper that caused major companies, including sporting goods giant Adidas, to sever ties with him.

The meeting took place scarcely a week after Trump officially declared himself a candidate for president in 2024 and harked back to his 2016 campaign when his willingness to associate with fringe figures on the far right made the Republican establishment hesitant to embrace him.

Fringe candidates

Republicans are still stinging from the results of the midterm elections in which they failed to capture the Senate and only eked out a slim majority in their takeover of the House of Representatives. Many blamed the poor showing largely on Trump, whose hand-picked candidates — usually chosen for their willingness to repeat his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen from him — performed poorly.

On Monday, the deadline for counties in the state of Arizona to certify the results of the November 8 election, Trump was still posting false claims of widespread fraud and election irregularities, which he has blamed for his favored candidates’ losses in that state.

Some county-level officials who supported Trump’s claims on Monday refused to certify the election results, though they are expected to be compelled to do so by court challenges, given the lack of evidence of malfeasance.

Now, with Trump seeking the party’s backing for another run at the White House, experts wonder whether his continued association with extremist figures, combined with another unsuccessful election, will finally be too much for the broader GOP.

While the most prominent members of the party have avoided discussing Trump’s association with Ye and Fuentes, others are speaking out.

“President Trump hosting racist antisemites for dinner encourages other racist antisemites,” Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy wrote on Twitter Monday. “These attitudes are immoral and should not be entertained. This is not the Republican Party.”

In an appearance on CNN Sunday, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for a leader that’s setting an example for the country or the party to meet with (an) avowed racist or antisemite. And so, it’s very troubling and it shouldn’t happen, and we need to avoid … empowering the extremes.”

Not all Republicans came down hard on Trump. Politico reported that South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds said he wouldn’t “condemn anybody” even though Fuentes is “not somebody that I would have a meeting with.”

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley told Politico, “It’s a free country, [Trump] can do whatever he wants.”

Another political ‘fumble’

“Trump has long played footsie with people who espouse horrifying, bigoted beliefs,” Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told VOA. “This dinner is only the latest incidence of what is a very familiar trend. Trump is now a candidate seeking a third straight Republican presidential nomination. We’ll just have to see if enough Republicans are tired of him and prefer to go with a different option.”

“The private dinner with [Ye] West could have generated attention in the mainstream press and lots of likes from the trollish quarters of the nationalist right, even if it would have further alienated some Jewish supporters,” Chris Stirewalt, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told VOA.

Stirewalt, the former political editor of Fox News Channel, added, “But even if it was just because of indifferent or sloppy staff work, hosting Fuentes at exactly the moment that mainstream Republicans are reconsidering their relationship with Trump following the bad turn he gave the GOP in midterms was yet another in a series of fumbles by the former president.”

Blaming Ye

On Sunday, Trump was still dealing with the fallout from the meeting and used a post on his social networking site, Truth Social, to point the finger at Ye for bringing Fuentes to his home unannounced.

Accounts of what went on in the meeting included Ye asking Trump to consider running with him, in the role of vice-presidential candidate in 2024.

“So, I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black, Ye (Kanye West), who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else, and who has always been good to me, by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, alone, so that I can give him very much needed ‘advice,'” Trump wrote.

“He shows up with 3 people, two of which I didn’t know, the other a political person who I haven’t seen in years. I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win. Fake News went CRAZY!”

Easy access

Taking Trump at his word that he didn’t expect Ye to bring Fuentes, analysts still see the fact that a known Holocaust denier made it in to see the former president as indicative of the kind of organization Trump tends to run, whether in office or out of it.

“It reflects the fact that at Mar-a-Lago, as in the Oval Office, there’s virtually no screening process to determine who gets in to see the ‘great man,'” William A. Galston, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program, told VOA. “And that is by design, because Donald Trump mistrusts people who try to manage him or screen the people he meets with or talks with.”

Galston said Trump might be willing to continue associating with Ye out of a belief that the relationship will eventually benefit him.

“He has a long history of not deserting people that he thinks may be helpful to him down the road,” Galston said.

In the case of Ye, he said, that might be in Trump’s search for a larger share of the African American vote.

“Trump has this persistent fantasy that he’s enormously popular among Black men,” Galston said. “And that the Black men he anoints are influencers and thought leaders within that group.”
…

The Supreme Court is making a fuller reopening to the public following more than two and a half years of closures related to the coronavirus pandemic. 

Beginning Thursday, the high court will be open to the public from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., according to the Supreme Court’s website. The high court closed to the public in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. 

In October, the high court began allowing the public to attend arguments in the courtroom again on the approximately six days a month the court hears arguments, but the court building remained closed to visitors at other times. 

The high court initially postponed arguments because of the pandemic, then started hearing arguments by phone. The justices began hearing arguments in the courtroom again in October 2021 but without the public present. 
…

The United States should end its prosecution of Julian Assange, leading media outlets from the United States and Europe that had collaborated with the WikiLeaks founder said on Monday, citing press freedom concerns.

“This indictment sets a dangerous precedent and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press,” editors and publishers of The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País said in an open letter.

Assange is wanted by U.S. authorities on 18 counts, including a spying charge, related to WikiLeaks’ release of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables. His supporters say he is an anti-establishment hero who has been victimized because he exposed U.S. wrongdoing, including in conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Monday marked 12 years since those media outlets collaborated to release excerpts from over 250,000 documents obtained by Assange in the “Cablegate” leak.

The material was leaked to WikiLeaks by the then-American soldier Chelsea Manning and revealed the inner workings of U.S. diplomacy around the globe. The documents exposed “corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale,” the letter said.

In August, a group of journalists and lawyers sued the CIA and its former director, Mike Pompeo, over allegations the intelligence agency spied on them when they visited Assange during his stay in Ecuador’s embassy in London.

Assange spent seven years in the embassy before being dragged out and jailed in 2019 for breaching bail conditions. He has remained in prison in London while his extradition case is decided. If extradited to the United States, he faces a sentence of up to 175 years in an American maximum-security prison.

His legal team has appealed to the High Court in London to block his extradition in a legal battle that has dragged on for more than a decade.

“Publishing is not a crime,” the media outlets said in their Monday letter.
…

U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday called on Congress to intervene to avert a potential rail strike that could occur as early as December 9, warning of a catastrophic economic impact if railroad service ground to a halt.

Biden asked lawmakers to adopt the tentative deal announced in September “without any modifications or delay – to avert a potentially crippling national rail shutdown” and added that up to 765,000 Americans “could be put out of work in the first two weeks alone.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said lawmakers would take up legislation this week “to prevent a catastrophic nationwide rail strike, which would grind our economy to a halt.”

On Monday, more than 400 groups called on Congress to intervene in the railroad labor standoff that threatens to idle shipments of food and fuel and strand travelers while inflicting billions of dollars of economic damage.

A rail traffic stoppage could freeze almost 30% of U.S. cargo shipments by weight, stoke inflation and cost the American economy as much as $2 billion per day by unleashing a cascade of transport woes affecting U.S. energy, agriculture, manufacturing, health care and retail sectors.

“A rail shutdown would devastate our economy,” Biden said. “Without freight rail, many U.S. industries would shut down … Communities could lose access to chemicals necessary to ensure clean drinking water. Farms and ranches across the country could be unable to feed their livestock.”

Biden hailed the contract deal that includes a 24% compounded wage increase over a five-year period from 2020 through 2024 and five annual $1,000 lump-sum payments.

Workers in four unions have rejected the tentative deal, while workers in eight unions have approved it.

Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have been involved in discussions with the rail industry, unions and agriculture industry stakeholders.

Senator Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Commerce Committee, praised Biden’s call to Congress to act and said no one side was fully happy with the compromise contract deal “but the responsible thing to do is avoid the strike.”

The Association of American Railroads said “congressional action to prevent a work stoppage in this manner is appropriate … No one benefits from a rail work stoppage – not our customers, not rail employees and not the American economy.”

In a letter on Monday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, National Retail Federation, American Petroleum Institute, National Restaurant Association, American Trucking Associations and other groups warned that impacts of a potential strike could be felt as soon as December 5.

Biden said Congress “should set aside politics and partisan division and deliver for the American people. Congress should get this bill to my desk well in advance of December 9th so we can avoid disruption.”

“The risks to our nation’s economy and communities simply make a national rail strike unacceptable,” says the letter to congressional leaders first reported by Reuters, warning a strike could halt passenger railroad Amtrak and commuter rail services that “would disrupt up to 7 million travelers a day.”

Biden’s Presidential Emergency Board in August released the framework for the tentative deal forged in September between major railroads and a dozen unions representing 115,000 workers. Those carriers include Union Pacific, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern and Kansas City Southern.

Unions and railroads have until December 9 to resolve differences. If they do not, workers could strike or railroads could lock out employees — unless Congress intervenes. But railroads would halt hazardous materials shipments at least four days ahead of a strike deadline.
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“We the People” is Jill Biden’s holiday theme with White House decorations designed for “the people” to see themselves in the tree ornaments, mantel displays, mirrors and do-it-yourself creations that have turned the mansion’s public spaces into a winter wonderland.

“The soul of our nation is, and has always been, ‘We the People,'” the first lady said at a White House event honoring the volunteers who decorated over Thanksgiving weekend. “And that is what inspired this year’s White House holiday decoration.”

“The values that unite us can be found all around you, a belief in possibility and optimism and unity,” Jill Biden said. “Room by room, we represent what brings us together during the holidays and throughout the year.”

Public rooms are dedicated to unifying forces: honoring and remembering deceased loved ones, words and stories, kindness and gratitude, food and traditions, nature and recreation, songs and sounds, unity and hope, faith and light, and children.

A burst of pine aroma hits visitors as they step inside the East Wing and come upon trees adorned with mirrored Gold Star ornaments bearing the names of fallen service members.

Winter trees, woodland animals and glowing lanterns placed along the hallway help give the feeling of walking through snow.

Likenesses of Biden family pets — Commander and Willow, the dog and cat — first appear at the end of the hallway before they are seen later in the Vermeil Room, which celebrates kindness and gratitude, and the State Dining Room, which highlights children.

Recipes contributed by the small army of volunteer decorators spruce up the China Room’s mantel. Handwritten ones — for apple crisp and pizzelle, an Italian cookie — are family recipes shared by the first lady.

Aides say she was inspired by people she met while traveling around the country and by the nation’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

A copy of the Declaration of Independence is on display in the library, while the always-show-stopping 300-pound (136 kilogram) gingerbread White House this year includes a sugar cookie replica of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where the documents were signed.

The executive pastry chef used 20 sheets of sugar cookie dough, 30 sheets of gingerbread dough, 100 pounds (45 kilograms) of pastillage, 30 pounds (14 kilograms) of chocolate and 40 pounds (18 kilograms) of royal icing to create the gingerbread and sugar cookie masterpiece.

A new addition to the White House collection this year is a menorah, which is lit nightly during the eight-day Jewish festival of Hanukkah. White House carpenters built the menorah out of wood that was saved from a Truman-era renovation and sterling silver candle cups.

Some 50,000 visitors are expected to pass through the White House for the holidays, including tourists and guests invited to nearly a month’s worth of receptions. Among them will be French President Emmanuel Macron, who will meet with President Joe Biden at the White House Thursday and be honored at a state dinner, the first of the Biden administration.

More than 150 volunteers, including two of the first lady’s sisters, helped decorate the White House during the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

The decorations include more than 83,000 twinkling lights on trees, garlands, wreaths and other displays, 77 Christmas trees and 25 wreaths on the White House exterior. Volunteers also used more than 12,000 ornaments, just under 15,000 feet (4,500 meters) of ribbon and more than 1,600 bells.

Some of the decorations are do-it-yourself projects that the first lady hopes people will be encouraged to recreate for themselves, aides said. They include plastic drinking cups turned into bells and table-top Christmas trees made from foam shapes and dollar store ramekins.

Groupings of snowy trees fill corners of the East Room, which reflects nature and recreation, and scenes from four national parks are depicted on each fireplace mantel: Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah.

In the Blue Room, the official White House Christmas tree — an 18 1/2-foot (5.6-meter) Concolor fir from Auburn, Pennsylvania — is decorated to represent unity and hope with handmade renderings of the official birds from all 57 territories, states and the District of Columbia.

The State Dining Room is dedicated to the next generation — children — and its trees are decorated with self-portrait ornaments made by students of the 2021 Teachers of the Year, “ensuring that children see themselves” in the décor, the White House said.

Hanging from the fireplace in the State Dining Room are the Biden family Christmas stockings.

“We the People” are celebrated again in the Grand Foyer and Cross Hall on the State Floor, where metal ribbons are inscribed with the names of all the states, territories and the District of Columbia.

As part of Joining Forces, her White House initiative to support military families, Jill Biden was joined by National Guard leaders from across the country, as well as National Guard families. Her late son, Beau Biden, was a major in the Delaware Army National Guard.

She met before the event with children from National Guard families, telling them she wanted to hear their stories because “you have served right alongside of your parents and you deserve to have your courage, and your sacrifice, recognized, too.”

The White House noted that the holiday guidebook given to visitors was designed by Daria Peoples, an African American children’s book author who lives in Las Vegas. Peoples is a former elementary school teacher who has written and illustrated a series of picture books to support children of color, including those who have experienced race-based trauma.
…

More than 2 million people in the Houston area were under a boil order notice Monday after a power outage at a purification plant caused water pressure to drop, and the mayor of the nation’s fourth-largest city ordered a full review of the system.

The notice tells customers to boil water before it’s used for cooking, bathing or drinking. Multiple Houston-area public and private schools, as well as some local colleges, were closed Monday as a result of the notice, while others made adjustments to provide affected campuses with bottled water and sanitizer.

The notice was issued Sunday, hours after two transformers failed, causing power outages at the water plant, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said at a press conference Monday. There was no indication the water system had been contaminated.

Water quality testing was underway, Turner said. He said he expects the notice to be lifted by early Tuesday at the latest, once the state’s environmental agency gives an all-clear after analyzing test results.

According to Turner, the city issued a notice, which affects all of Houston and multiple adjacent areas, in an “abundance of caution” after the two transformers — a main one and its backup — “uniquely and coincidentally” failed. The problem affected the plant’s ability to treat water and pump water into the transmission system, resulting in low water pressure.

The power system at the water plant undergoes regular maintenance, Turner said, but he did not give a timeline for how often. The mayor said he has ordered a diagnostic review of the system to understand how this was possible and how it can be prevented. He said because the issue was within the plant’s system, backup power generators would not have made a difference.

Sixteen sensors marked dips under the minimum pressure levels required by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality — 14 of them for only 2 minutes and two of them for nearly 30 minutes, Turner said.

Untreated groundwater can enter a water system through cracked pipes when water pressure drops. Customers are told to boil water to kill bacteria that could be harmful.

“We are optimistic the results will come back clean,” Turner said.

Turner defended the decision to warn residents about the water quality several hours after the issue first occurred and apologized for the disruptions to businesses, schools and elective surgeries. He said the dip in pressure did not automatically trigger a water boil notice, but a decision was made to issue one based on the data once the city consulted with and was instructed to do so by TCEQ.

Water infrastructure and quality has been a prominent issue in cities large and small throughout the U.S., including Baltimore; Honolulu; Jackson, Mississippi; and Flint, Michigan.
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The white gunman who massacred 10 Black shoppers and workers at a Buffalo supermarket pleaded guilty Monday to murder and hate-motivated terrorism charges, guaranteeing he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Payton Gendron, 19, entered the plea Monday in a courthouse roughly two miles from the grocery store where he used a semiautomatic rifle and body armor to carry out a racist assault he hoped would help preserve white power in the U.S.

Gendron, who was handcuffed and wore an orange jumpsuit, occasionally licked and clenched his lips as he pleaded guilty to all of the most serious charges in the grand jury indictment, including murder, murder as a hate crime and hate-motivated domestic terrorism, which carries an automatic sentence of life without parole.

He answered “yes” and “guilty” as Judge Susan Eagan referred to each victim by name and asked whether he killed them because of their race. Gendron also pleaded guilty to wounding three people who survived the May attack.

Many of the relatives of those victims sat and watched, some dabbing their eyes and sniffling. Speaking to reporters later, several said the plea left them cold. It didn’t address the bigger problem, which they said was racism in America.

“His voice made me feel sick, but it showed me I was right,” said Zeneta Everhart, whose 20-year-old son was shot in the neck but survived. “This country has a problem. This country is inherently violent. It is racist. And his voice showed that to me.”

After the roughly 45-minute proceeding ended, Gendron’s lawyers suggested that he now regrets his crimes, but they didn’t elaborate or take questions.

“This critical step represents a condemnation of the racist ideology that fueled his horrific actions on May 14,” said Gendron’s lawyer, Brian Parker. “It is our hope that a final resolution of the state charges will help in some small way to keep the focus on the needs of the victims and the community.”

Gendron has pleaded not guilty to separate federal hate crime charges that could result in a death sentence if he is convicted. The U.S. Justice Department has not said whether it will seek capital punishment. Acknowledgement of guilt and a claim of repentance could potentially help Gendron in a penalty phase of a death penalty trial.

The plea comes at a time when many Americans have become nearly desensitized to mass shootings. In recent weeks, there have been deadly attacks at a Walmart in Virginia, at a gay club in Colorado and at the University of Virginia.

Just days after Gendron’s rampage in Buffalo, a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas.

Gendron wore body armor and used a legally purchased AR-15 style rifle in his attack on the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo. Those killed ranged in age from 32 to 86 and included an armed security guard died trying to protect customers, a church deacon and the mother of a former Buffalo fire commissioner. Gendron surrendered when police confronted him as he emerged from the store.

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, who was in the courtroom for Gendron’s guilty plea, told reporters afterwards that “It was important to hear why these precious lives were snatched from us for no other reason than the color of their skin.”

The mayor, a Democrat, called for a ban on assault weapons, as did Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. Relatives of the victims reiterated their calls for Congress and the FBI to address white supremacy and gun violence.

“We are literally begging for those in power to do something about it,” said Garnell Whitfield, whose 86-year-old mother, Ruth Whitfield, was killed.

White supremacy was Gendron’s motive. He said in documents posted online just before the attack that he’d picked the store, about a three-hour drive from his home in Conklin, New York, because it was in a predominantly Black neighborhood. He said he was motivated by a belief in a massive conspiracy to dilute the power of white people by “replacing” them in the U.S. with people of color.

Zeneta Everhart, the mother of Zaire Goodman, who survived being shot in the neck, and Mark Talley, the son of Geraldine Talley, who was killed, said they were offended by Gendron’s tone and cleaned-up appearance in court.

“He’s a thug,” Talley said.

“We show them in a way that doesn’t make them threatening, and it’s disgusting,” Everhart said.

“Am I happy he’s going to jail for life?” Tally said. “What would make me happy is if America acknowledged its history of racism.”
…

Russia postponed nuclear weapons talks with the United States set to take place this week in Cairo, the U.S. State Department said on Monday, with neither side giving a reason for the postponement.

Officials from the two countries were scheduled to meet in the Egyptian capital from Nov. 29 to Dec. 6 to discuss resuming inspections under the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, which had been suspended in March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The Russian side informed the United States that Russia has unilaterally postponed the meeting and stated that it would propose new dates,” a State Department spokesperson said in a statement.

The spokesperson said they could not provide further information, but said Washington is “ready to reschedule at the earliest possible date as resuming inspections is a priority for sustaining the treaty as an instrument of stability.”

In response to a question, the Russian foreign ministry confirmed the talks were postponed.

The New START Treaty, which came into force in 2011, caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy, and the deployment of land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov had played down expectations of a breakthrough, although the talks were a sign that both sides at least wanted to maintain dialog, even though relations are at their lowest level since the Cold War.
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Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano, has started to erupt, prompting volcanic ash and debris to fall nearby, authorities said Monday.

The eruption began late Sunday night in the summit caldera of the volcano on the Big Island, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Early Monday, it said lava flows were contained within the summit area and weren’t threatening nearby communities.

“However, lava flows in the summit region are visible from Kona. There is currently no indication of any migration of the eruption into a rift zone,” the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said in a statement. A rift zone is where the mountain is splitting apart, the rock is cracked and relatively weak and it’s easier for magma to emerge.

The USGS warned residents at risk from Mauna Loa lava flows should review their eruption preparations. Scientists had been on alert because of a recent spike in earthquakes at the summit of the volcano, which last erupted in 1984.

Portions of the Big Island were under an ashfall advisory issued by the National Weather Service in Honolulu, which said up to a quarter-inch (0.6 centimeters) of ash could accumulate in some areas.

Mauna Loa is one of five volcanoes that together make up the Big Island of Hawaii, which is the southernmost island in the Hawaiian archipelago.

Mauna Loa, rising 13,679 feet (4,169 meters) above sea level, is the much larger neighbor to Kilauea volcano, which erupted in a residential neighborhood and destroyed 700 homes in 2018. Some of its slopes are much steeper than Kilauea’s so when it erupts, its lava can flow much faster.

During a 1950 eruption, the mountain’s lava traveled 15 miles (24 kilometers) to the ocean in less than three hours.
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The treatment of migrant workers has been highlighted during the World Cup in Qatar, where many temporary foreign workers reportedly died while building the event’s infrastructure. 

Advocates for immigrant workers in the U.S. note that abuses aren’t just happening overseas.

“The fact of the matter is that migrant workers in the U.S. are struggling with many of the same issues those workers were facing in Qatar,” said Julie Taylor, executive director of the National Farm Worker Ministry, headquartered in North Carolina, speaking with VOA. 

Those issues include “being forced to work through extreme heat waves, wage theft, poor housing, lack of access to healthcare, a shortage of personal protection equipment,” Taylor said. “The tragedy in Qatar shouldn’t be tolerated, and it’s also an important opportunity to remind Americans of the tragedies happening in our own backyard.”

In some states and local jurisdictions, government agencies and advocacy organizations can point to progress for migrant workers. Last year in New York, for example, farm workers – a large proportion of whom are foreign-born, temporary laborers – won collective bargaining rights that will allow them to better advocate for higher wages and better working conditions.

And last month in New Orleans, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division renewed an agreement with the Consulate of Mexico to provide Spanish-speaking workers in Louisiana and Mississippi with information on their rights in the United States, as well as access to training, such as worker safety training.

“By partnering with the Mexican Consulate, we improve our ability to ensure both employers and workers understand their obligations and their rights,” Troy Mouton, New Orleans, Louisiana district director of the Wage and Hour Division told VOA.

The hope is the agreement will decrease wage violations against vulnerable workers toiling at the margins of society by helping those workers understand their employers’ obligation under the law to pay them.

Despite such steps, advocates insist much more needs to be done.

Essential workers

According to a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center, America has approximately 12 million migrant workers at any given time, some authorized and others not. America’s current labor shortage, with millions of jobs unfilled, would be worse without the participation of migrant and temporary workers, say labor groups.

“Migrant workers are contributing in nearly every sector in the economy,” explained Shannon Lederer, director of immigration policy for the AFL-CIO, a union federation, “and they’re also being exploited in all of them – across all industries and across all wage levels. This is a full-blown crisis.”

Mouton says temporary foreign laborers have played an indispensable role in New Orleans and across the Gulf Coast region in recent years. This, he said, underscored the need to renew an agreement with the Mexican Consulate to help to protect the rights of those workers.

“In recent history, the single most significant event that resulted in an increased migrant worker presence in Louisiana was Hurricane Katrina in 2005,” he said, recalling the infamous storm that flooded 80% of New Orleans and killed more than 1,800 people. “Most of our migrant workers came from Mexico and elsewhere in Central America, and their efforts after the storm in debris removal, demolition, and eventually reconstruction have had a huge impact on our city.”

Similar efforts took place following later hurricanes such as Laura, Delta, and last year’s Hurricane Ida, but Mouton said migrant worker contributions extend far beyond disaster recovery. 

“The majority of migrant workers in Louisiana contribute to the construction, agriculture, and seafood processing industries, all of which are important to the economy of Louisiana,” he said, adding that it is an ongoing struggle “to protect the welfare of these workers” and achieve “compliance with federal labor standards.”

Appalling conditions

Amy Liebman, chief program officer for the Migrant Clinicians Network, headquartered in Texas, believes the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored just how essential migrant workers are to America and its economy. This, she said, should make the conditions these workers endure even more appalling to the nation. 

“In a 75-mile [120-kilometer] radius from where I live, we have 10 chicken processing plants, and there are many migrant laborers doing that difficult work,” she told VOA. “During the peak part of COVID-19, it was those workers – toiling all day in tight spaces – who were getting sick and dying from the virus, and they were getting their families sick.” 

Liebman added, “But there’s a fear, and it’s a fear founded in truth, that if you complain to your boss, you’re going to not just get fired, but deported, as well.”

Immigrant advocates such as Liebman and Lederer say understanding why workers come to the United States in the first place can illuminate how desperate their situations are. It’s often “push factors” such as war, violence, political instability and natural disasters – or “pull factors” such as a demand for cheap labor in the United States – that draw people from their home country.

“When you have people who are desperate to leave home, or to come here so they can send money back home to family, you have a situation in which these workers can be exploited, and that’s exactly what is happening,” Lederer of the AFL-CIO said. 

“You have recruiters in the United States who are finding workers in other countries and demanding payment from them for the right to work in the U.S.,” Lederer continued. “So now those laborers are in debt when they arrive, making them more desperate for their job. And their visa is tied to one employer, so if they complain about subpar overcrowded housing, or if they say something about not getting paid on time, their employer can fire them and they’ll be sent back to their home country.”

21st century challenges and a need for comprehensive solutions

Liebman said a warming climate is adding to migrant workers’ woes, as they often toil outdoors in increasingly hot, dangerous conditions. This can add to health problems and compound the struggles many face.

“Getting good healthcare as an immigrant is already challenging, but now add in the migratory nature of their work,” Liebman explained. “Every time you move somewhere new you have to take the time to relearn everything. Who will take care of you and your family? Where is the community health center? How will you get there? How will you pay? In areas with large migrant worker populations, community health centers are often pushed beyond their capacity, so what then?”

While immigrant advocates hail incremental progress in some jurisdictions, they say federal action is needed to meaningfully improve conditions for migrant workers. 

“This is an emergency, and we need to get serious about finding real solutions,” Lederer said, adding that comprehensive reform of America’s immigration system would be a good start. “If we’re going to create a welcoming country for the labor our economy needs, the focus should be on longer term solutions that allow immigrants to come to this country permanently and with the ability to change jobs once they’re here.”
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The Biden administration is seeking $37 billion in aid for Ukraine in the coming weeks before the new Congress convenes in January. Michelle Quinn reports.
…

Musician Jon Batiste is on tap to perform at President Joe Biden’s first White House state dinner on Thursday that will highlight long-standing ties between the United States and France and honor President Emmanuel Macron.

“An artist who transcends generations, Jon Batiste’s music inspires and brings people together,” said Vanessa Valdivia, a spokesperson for first lady Jill Biden, whose office is overseeing dinner preparations.

“We’re thrilled to have him perform at the White House for the first state dinner of the Biden-Harris administration,” Valdivia said.

The black-tie dinner for Macron will be part of what is shaping up to be a busy social season at the White House. The Bidens’ granddaughter Naomi Biden was married on the South Lawn earlier this month. And first lady Jill Biden was set on Monday to unveil the White House decorations that will be viewed by thousands of holiday visitors over the next month.

Batiste will be adding White House entertainer to an already long list of roles, including recording artist, bandleader, musical director, film composer, museum creative director and scion of New Orleans musical royalty.

He won five Grammy Awards this year, including for album of the year for “We Are.” During the awards show in April, Batiste ended his dance-filled performance of “Freedom” by jumping up on Billie Eilish’s table.

Batiste, 36, most recently was bandleader and musical director of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” leaving the broadcast after a seven-year run.

Batiste composed music, consulted on and arranged songs for Pixar’s animated film “Soul.” He won a Golden Globe for the music alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails. The trio also earned the Academy Award for best original score. For their work on “Soul,” Batiste, Reznor and Ross won the Grammy for best score soundtrack for visual media.

The Washington Post was first to report that Batiste will perform at the dinner.
…

Amid a recent flurry of meetings that brought together officials from the United States and China, along with other world leaders, experts say the two countries can work together on climate change despite lingering tensions.

The two largest economies are the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters but also rivals as China seeks to expand its influence around the world. Tensions have also risen amid policies toward Taiwan, which Beijing views as a breakaway province.

Despite the geopolitical tensions, working together to implement the agreements at the recent G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia can be the first step, according to Belinda Schaepe, climate diplomacy researcher in London at E3G, a research group that focuses on cooperation among China, the European Union and U.S.

“The two sides should cooperate to implement the G-20 Bali Energy Transitions Roadmap that was endorsed by both Xi and Biden at the recent leaders’ summit,” Schaepe told VOA in an email this week. “They should also support implementation of the G20 Sustainable Finance roadmap developed by the Sustainable Finance Working Group which China and the US co-chaired.”

She was referring to U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. They met in person for the first time since Biden took office and held more than three hours of talks during the G-20 summit, which brought together leaders from the 20 biggest economies.

Energy roadmap

The G-20 Bali Energy Transitions Roadmap includes boosting stable, transparent and affordable energy markets, as well as accelerating energy transitions by strengthening energy security and scaling up zero and low emission power generation. The G-20 Sustainable Finance Roadmap focuses on ensuring investment goes to achieving sustainable goals. The U.S. said in a statement that this will improve the credibility of financial institutions’ net zero commitments. These commitments are pledges to fight climate change.

The U.S. and China also resumed talks on climate issues at the recently concluded 27th United Nations Climate Conference, known as COP27, hosted by Egypt. China had put the bilateral cooperation on pause in August in protest after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan.

High-level cooperation between these two countries is critical to combat climate change, said Dan Kammen, professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley at a press conference at COP27 on potential U.S.-China cooperation.“If we lose sight that those high-level agreements and partnerships, even if they are trade or rights that need to be resolved through data, verification and trust, that is these watershed moments that really define climate success,” Kammen said. “If that partnership doesn’t extend between the two major powers here, it’s not going to accelerate our global decarbonization.”

Reviving the COP26 agreement 

On a technical level, Schaepe said a climate declaration from the two countries, initiated in Glasgow, Scotland at last year’s climate conference, COP26, can offer some guidelines.

Both sides agreed last year to set up regulatory frameworks and environmental standards on cutting greenhouse gases this decade, as well as policies on decarbonization and deploying green technologies such as carbon capture.

At COP27, Kammen provided a case in point in terms of tech cooperation: His school cooperated with the city of Shenzhen on a project involving electric taxi cabs. It called for researchers to analyze data from about 20,000 electric taxis in the city and predict travel and queuing time at charging stations. With the real time information, he said, drivers could cut down time for each taxi by more than 30 minutes each day and allow the city to contract more green energy business.

Fossil fuel use

Domestic issues like improving Shenzhen’s electric taxi fleet are likely a focus for cooperation, according to Deborah Seligsohn, assistant professor at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. She focuses on environmental governance in China and U.S.-China relations. 

“A lot of the hard work on both sides is going to be domestic no matter what…the basic work of mitigation is based on a lot of domestic policy. Both countries know they need to be the leading countries for reducing emissions. It’s not a difficult issue to find common ground to discuss,” Seligsohn told VOA News in a video call last week. 

The expert suggested the two cooperate on ensuring a just transition in the fossil fuel industry. 

“Both countries have communities where the fossil fuel production is the major industry. The challenge is not just how you find jobs for the specific people who work in the fossil fuel [industry], but how you maintain the vibrancy of everything else from public schools to the grocery stores,” she explained. 

Currently, China is home to more than 1,000 coal-fired power plants, according to Statista, the largest coal producer in the world, while the U.S. is the globe’s largest oil and gas producer, with more than 94,000 such facilities. 

China’s coal output hit a record high in March, and a few months later, it was also seen to ramp up its coal supply to cope with the worst heatwaves in decades. In October, China again boosted its coal supply for winter heating. Currently, half of the country’s energy has been generated by burning coal, which is used to make electricity.

Carbon emissions in China, however, were projected to drop because of slowed economic growth due to COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Experts project the slowdown will be short-lived.

Uncertain future

Whether the U.S. and China are motivated enough to reduce the use of fossil fuels remains to be seen, according to Paul Harris, chair professor of global and environmental studies at the Education University of Hong Kong. 

“What’s most likely is that they [the U.S. and China] will, as in the past, cooperate on things that tend to distract from the real problem,” Harris told VOA earlier this week in an email. 

“Here I’m thinking of carbon capture and sequestration, and pie-in-the-sky favorite approach of polluters around the world because it makes us all think that we can keep on burning fossil fuels. We can’t.”

The climate expert said the cooperation will likely be on a bumpy road, as geopolitics likely will get in the way.

“There’s distrust on both sides, and Beijing is in no mood to compromise on its red lines, Taiwan especially,” he added. “The stop to Sino-US climate talks never should have happened. A real question is whether China is now serious about serious cooperation with the United States on climate change. I have very serious doubts.”

This story was published with support of Climate Tracker’s COP27 Climate Justice Journalism Fellowship.
…

Newly empowered U.S. Republican lawmakers set to take leadership roles in the House of Representatives in January promised Sunday that Congress would continue to support Ukraine militarily in its nine-month fight against Russia but said there would be more scrutiny of the aid before it is shipped to Kyiv’s forces.

Congressmen Michael McCaul of Texas and Mike Turner of Ohio, likely key officials overseeing new Ukraine aid packages, told ABC’s “This Week” show there would be continued bipartisan Republican and Democratic support for Ukraine as Republicans assume a narrow House majority, even though some opposition from both parties has emerged.

Turner, likely the new chairperson of the House Intelligence Committee, said, “We’re going to make sure they get what they need. We will have bipartisan support.”

McCaul, the likely head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, “If we give them what they need, they win.”

But McCaul said there would be a difference in considering Ukraine aid from the outgoing Democratic control of the House when Republicans take over.

“The fact is, we are going to provide more oversight, transparency and accountability,” he said. “We’re not going to write a blank check.”

On the battlefield, Russia struck several areas in eastern and southern Ukraine overnight Saturday, Ukrainian officials said, as utility crews tried to restore power, water and heating following devastating attacks on infrastructure in recent weeks. Some Ukrainians only have a few hours of electricity a day, if any.

But Ukrenergo, the state power grid operator, said Sunday that electricity producers are now supplying about 80% of demand, up slightly from Saturday’s 75% figure.

In its daily report, the British Defense Ministry said both Russia and Ukraine have committed “significant forces” to the area around the Ukrainian towns of Pavlivka and Vuhledar in the south-central Donetsk province.

The agency said in an intelligence update posted on Twitter Sunday that the area “has been the scene of intense combat over the last two weeks, though little territory has changed hands.”

The area will likely remain “heavily contested,” the ministry said, because “Russia assesses the area has potential as a launch point for a future major advance north to capture the remainder of Ukrainian-held Donetsk Oblast.”

However, the ministry said the odds of Russia realizing that goal are slim because “Russia is unlikely to be able to concentrate sufficient quality forces to achieve an operational breakthrough.”

On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hosted a summit in Kyiv to mark the 90th anniversary of Holodomor, or the Great Famine, and to promote the Grain from Ukraine initiative to send grain to countries most afflicted by famine and drought.

The Holodomor was a manufactured famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the winter of 1932-1933, during which as many as 8 million Ukrainians died.

Zelenskyy used the anniversary to reiterate Ukraine’s commitment to export grain and other foodstuffs to the global market. These are “not just empty words,” he said.

“In general, under the Grain from Ukraine program, by the end of next spring, we plan to send at least 60 vessels from our ports — at least 10 per month — to countries at risk of famine and drought,” he said. “This is Ethiopia, these are Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Congo, Kenya, Nigeria.”

The initiative is in addition to the U.N.-brokered deal that allows shipments of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea. The Kremlin has said those Ukraine exports have not been reaching the most vulnerable countries.

Zelenskyy said Kyiv had raised around $150 million from more than 20 countries and the European Union to export grain to at-risk countries.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Ukraine — despite its own financial straits — has allocated $24 million to purchase corn for countries in need.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty contributed to this report. Some material for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
…

Before Election Day, anxiety mounted over potential chaos at the polls.

Election officials warned about poll watchers who had been steeped in conspiracy theories falsely claiming that then-President Donald Trump did not actually lose the 2020 election. Democrats and voting rights groups worried about the effects of new election laws, in some Republican-controlled states, that President Joe Biden decried as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Law enforcement agencies were monitoring possible threats at the polls.

Yet Election Day, and the weeks of early voting before it, went fairly smoothly. There were some reports of unruly poll watchers disrupting voting, but they were scattered. Groups of armed vigilantes began watching over a handful of ballot drop boxes in Arizona until a judge ordered them to stay far away to ensure they would not intimidate voters. And while it might take months to figure out their full impact, GOP-backed voting laws enacted after the 2020 election did not appear to cause major disruptions the way they did during the March primary in Texas.

“The entire ecosystem in a lot of ways has become more resilient in the aftermath of 2020,” said Amber McReynolds, a former Denver elections director who advises a number of voting rights organizations. “There’s been a lot of effort on ensuring things went well.”

Even though some voting experts’ worst fears didn’t materialize, some voters still experienced the types of routine foul-ups that happen on a small scale in every election. Many of those fell disproportionately on Black and Hispanic voters.

“Things went better than expected,” said Amir Badat of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “But we have to say that with a caveat: Our expectations are low.”

Badat said his organization recorded long lines at various polling places from South Carolina to Texas.

There were particular problems in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston. Shortages of paper ballots and at least one polling location opening late led to long lines and triggered an investigation of the predominantly Democratic county by the state’s Republican authorities.

The investigation is partly a reflection of how certain voting snafus on Election Day are increasingly falling on Republican voters, who have been discouraged from using mailed ballots or using early in-person voting by Trump and his allies. But it’s a very different problem from what Texas had during its March primary.

Then, a controversial new voting law that increased the requirements on mail ballots led to about 13% of all such ballots being rejected, much higher compared with other elections. It was an ominous sign for a wave of new laws, passed after Trump’s loss to Biden and false claims about mail voting, but there have been no problems of that scale reported for the general election.

Texas changed the design of its mail ballots, which solved many of the problems voters had putting identifying information in the proper place. Other states that added regulations on voting didn’t appear to have widespread problems, though voting rights groups and analysts say it will take weeks of combing through data to find out the laws’ impacts.

The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law is compiling data to determine whether new voting laws in states such as Georgia contributed to a drop in turnout among Black and Hispanic voters.

Preliminary figures show turnout was lower this year than in the last midterm election four years ago in Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Texas — four states that passed significant voting restrictions since the 2020 election — although there could be a number of reasons why.

“It’s difficult to judge, empirically, the kind of effect these laws have on turnout because so many factors go into turnout,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles law school. “You also have plenty of exaggeration on the Democratic side that any kind of change in voting laws are going to cause some major effect on the election, which has been proven not to be the case.”

In Georgia, for example, Republicans made it more complicated to apply for mailed ballots after the 2020 election — among other things, requiring voters to include their driver’s license number or some other form of identification rather than a signature. That may be one reason why early in-person voting soared in popularity in the state this year, and turnout there dipped only slightly from 2018.

Jason Snead, executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project, which advocates for tighter voting laws, said the fairly robust turnout in the midterm elections shows that fears of the new voting regulations were overblown.

“We are on the back end of an election that was supposed to be the end of democracy, and it very much was not,” Snead said.

Poll watchers were a significant concern of voting rights groups and election officials heading into Election Day. The representatives of the two major political parties are a key part of any secure election process, credentialed observers who can object to perceived violations of rules.

But this year, groups aligned with conspiracy theorists who challenged Biden’s 2020 victory recruited poll watchers heavily, and some states reported that aggressive volunteers caused disruptions during the primary. But there were fewer issues in November.

In North Carolina, where several counties had reported problems with poll watchers in the May primary, the state elections board reported 21 incidents of misbehavior at the polls in the general election, most during the early, in-person voting period and by members of campaigns rather than poll watchers. The observers were responsible for eight of the incidents.

Voting experts were pleasantly surprised there weren’t more problems with poll watchers, marking the second general election in a row when a feared threat of aggressive Republican observers did not materialize.

“This seems to be an increase over 2020. Is it a small increase? Yes,” said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida. “It’s still a dry run for 2024, and we can’t quite let down our guard.”

One of the main organizers of the poll watcher effort was Cleta Mitchell, a veteran Republican election lawyer who joined Trump on a Jan. 2, 2020, call to Georgia’s top election official when the president asked that the state “find” enough votes to declare him the winner. Mitchell then launched an organization to train volunteers who wanted to keep an eye on election officials, which was seen as the driver of the poll watcher surge.

Mitchell said the relatively quiet election is vindication that groups like hers were simply concerned with election integrity rather than causing disruptions.

“Every training conducted by those of us doing such training included instruction about behavior, and that they must be ‘Peaceful, Lawful, Honest,'” Mitchell wrote in the conservative online publication The Federalist. “Yet, without evidence, the closer we got to Election Day, the more hysterical the headlines became, warning of violence at the polls resulting from too many observers watching the process. It didn’t happen.”

Voting rights groups say they’re relieved their fears didn’t materialize, but they say threats to democracy remain on the horizon for 2024 — especially with Trump announcing that he’s running again. Wendy Weiser, a voting and elections expert at the Brennan Center, agreed that things overall went smoother than expected.

“By and large, sabotage didn’t happen,” Weiser said. “I don’t think that means we’re in the clear.”
…

Editor’s note: Here is a look at immigration-related news around the U.S. this week. Questions? Tips? Comments? Email the VOA immigration team: ImmigrationUnit@voanews.com.

In Pennsylvania, Afghan Refugees Celebrate First Thanksgiving

Judith Samkoff needed a bigger dinner table for Thanksgiving this year.

The 65-year-old Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, resident helped resettle an Afghan refugee family of eight, and because this is their first holiday in the United States, Samkoff invited them to her father and sister’s home for Thanksgiving.

One of Samkoff’s guests is Hadia, a 24-year-old Afghan refugee whose family fled Afghanistan in November 2021. VOA’s immigration reporter Aline Barros has more.

New Refugees Celebrate First Thanksgiving in US

Refugees from around the world who resettled in the Washington area got together to celebrate their first Thanksgiving in the United States. VOA’s Shahnaz Nafees has the story.

‘Kite Runner’ Actor a Two-Time Refugee

The Afghan actor Ali Danish Bakhtyari, who played the role of an orphan in the 2007 film The Kite Runner, has fled the Taliban rule in his home country twice: first in the late 1990s, and then in 2021, when the United States withdrew its forces from Afghanistan. Keith Kocinski has the story from New York.

Immigration around the world

Rights Group Accuses Turkey of Mass Afghan Deportations

The U.S.-based Human Rights Watch accuses Turkish authorities of carrying out mass deportations of Afghan refugees, including those most at risk. For VOA, Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul.

EU Ministers Endorse New Migrant Plan After France-Italy Spat

European interior ministers welcomed Friday an EU plan to better coordinate the handling of migrant arrivals, after a furious argument over a refugee rescue boat erupted between Italy and France. Reported by Agence France-Presse.

The Inside Story-Cause of Death: Migrant Workers and the 2022 Qatar World Cup

Thousands of migrant workers died in Qatar building the stadiums for the 2022 World Cup. VOA’s Heather Murdock takes you to Nepal where families are asking “Why is no one taking responsibility?” on The Inside Story: Cause of Death, Migrant Workers & the 2022 Qatar World Cup.

Chinese Refugees in Italy Wary of Beijing Outposts

Chinese refugees in Italy, some of whom are dissidents, are increasingly wary of the presence of what appear to be four outposts of Beijing’s security apparatus operating without official diplomatic trappings, according to experts. Allen Giovanni Ai reports for VOA News.

News Brief

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced it is extending filing fee exemptions and expediting application processing for certain Afghan nationals.

“These actions will help Afghan nationals resettle, and in many cases reunite with family, in the United States by enabling USCIS to process their requests for work authorization, long-term status, status for immediate relatives, and associated services more quickly.”
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Oscar, Golden Globe and two-time Grammy winning singer-actress Irene Cara, who starred and sang the title cut from the 1980 hit movie “Fame” and then belted out the era-defining hit “Flashdance … What a Feeling” from 1983’s “Flashdance,” has died. She was 63.

Her publicist, Judith A. Moose, announced the news on social media, writing that a cause of death was “currently unknown.” Moose also confirmed the death to a reporter for The Associated Press Saturday. Cara died at her home in Florida. The exact day of her death was not disclosed.

“Irene’s family has requested privacy as they process their grief,” Moose wrote. “She was a beautifully gifted soul whose legacy will live forever through her music and films.”

During her career, Cara had three Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including “Breakdance,” “Out Here On My Own,” “Fame” and “Flashdance … What A Feeling,” which spent six weeks at No. 1. She was behind some of the most joyful, high-energy pop anthems of the early ’80s.

Tributes poured in Saturday on social media, including from Deborah Cox, who called Cara an inspiration, and Holly Robinson Peete, who recalled seeing Cara perform: “The insane combination of talent and beauty was overwhelming to me. This hurts my heart so much.”

Movie fame started with the movie ‘Fame’

Cara first came to prominence among the young actors playing performing arts high schoolers in Alan Parker’s “Fame,” with co-stars Debbie Allen, Paul McCrane and Anne Mear. Cara played Coco Hernandez, a striving dancer who endures all manner of deprivations, including a creepy nude photo shoot.

“How bright our spirits go shooting out into space, depends on how much we contributed to the earthly brilliance of this world. And I mean to be a major contributor!” she says in the movie.

Cara sang on the soaring title song with the chorus — “Remember my name/I’m gonna live forever/I’m gonna learn how to fly/I feel it coming together/People will see me and cry” — which would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award for best original song. She also sang on “Out Here on My Own,” “Hot Lunch Jam” and “I Sing the Body Electric.”

Three years later, she and the songwriting team of “Flashdance” — music by Giorgio Moroder, lyrics by Keith Forsey and Cara — accepted the Oscar for best original song for “Flashdance … What a Feeling.”

The movie starred Jennifer Beals as a steel-town girl who dances in a bar at night and hopes to attend a prestigious dance conservatory. It included the hit song “Maniac,” featuring Beals’ character leaping, spinning, stomping her feet and the slow-burning theme song.

“There aren’t enough words to express my love and my gratitude,” Cara told the Oscar crowd in her thanks. “And last but not least, a very special gentlemen who I guess started it all for me many years ago. To Alan Parker, wherever you may be tonight, I thank him.”

Career started on Broadway

The New York-born Cara began her career on Broadway, with small parts in short-lived shows, although a musical called “The Me Nobody Knows” ran over 300 performances. She toured in the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” as Mary Magdalene in the mid-1990s and a tour of the musical “Flashdance” toured 2012-14 with her songs.

She also created the all-female band Irene Cara Presents Hot Caramel and put out a double CD with the single “How Can I Make You Luv Me.” Her movie credits include “Sparkle” and “D.C. Cab.”
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U.S. shoppers spent a record $9.12 billion online on Black Friday, a report showed Saturday, as consumers weathered the squeeze from high inflation and grabbed steep discounts on everything from smartphones to toys.

Online spending rose 2.3% on Black Friday, Adobe Inc’s data and insights arm Adobe Analytics said, thanks to consumers holding out for discounts until the traditionally big shopping days, despite deals starting as early as October.

Adobe Analytics, which measures e-commerce by analyzing transactions at websites, has access to data covering purchases at 85% of the top 100 internet retailers in the United States.

It had forecast Black Friday sales to rise a modest 1%.

Adobe expects Cyber Monday to be the season’s biggest online shopping day again, driving $11.2 billion in spending.

Consumers were expected to flock to stores after the pandemic put a dampener on in-store shopping over the past two years, but Black Friday morning saw stores draw less traffic than usual with sporadic rain in some parts of the country.

Americans turned to smartphones to make their holiday purchases, with data from Adobe showing mobile shopping represented 48% of all Black Friday digital sales.
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The Biden family’s tradition of eating lunch, shopping and watching a Christmas tree lighting in downtown Nantucket Friday became mostly about keeping the president’s 2-year-old grandson from having a meltdown.

There was President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley, dancing and clapping with nephew Beau to “Jingle Bell Rock” to keep him entertained as they waited with the crowd that had gathered for the 48th annual tree lighting ceremony on Main Street.

There was Beau perched on the shoulders of his dad, Hunter Biden.

There was Beau being carried by his father, then not being carried by his father, then appearing to say things that suggested he wanted to get out of the cold and intermittent heavy rain.

Beau’s grandfather walked with him at various points.

Every member of the family seemed to be doing whatever they could to keep blond-haired Beau, who is named after his late uncle, happy for a few hours until the tree was lit.

The Bidens have a more than 40-year tradition of spending Thanksgiving on Nantucket, an island off the coast of Massachusetts.

The day after, they go out to lunch — this year, they dined at the Brotherhood of Thieves restaurant. Afterward, they hit Nantucket Bookworks, a nearby bookstore. The president emerged carrying his purchases in a reusable tote bag. 

They meandered along downtown Nantucket’s cobblestone streets, going into some stores and window shopping at others. The first lady and Ashley had gotten some of their shopping done earlier Friday, so the spree after lunch was mostly for the president.

Biden spent time inside a leather goods store and a pet store, among other businesses. At one point, he looked through the window of a lingerie store but did not go inside.

“We’re thankful for you,” someone yelled to the president.

The tree lighting ceremony went off with a bit of a hitch. The red, green and blue lights on the tree failed to come on following a countdown from 10.

The high school’s acapella chorus came out to sing until the problem was solved and the tree was illuminated, ushering in the Christmas season in Nantucket.
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The outlook for the global economy headed into 2023 has soured, according to a number of recent analyses, as the ongoing war in Ukraine continues to strain trade, particularly in Europe, and as markets await a fuller reopening of the Chinese economy following months of disruptive COVID-19 lockdowns.

In the United States, signs of a tightening job market and a slowdown in business activity fueled fears of a recession. Globally, inflation grew and business activity, especially in the eurozone and the United Kingdom, continued to shrink.

In an analysis released Thursday, the Institute of International Finance predicted a global economic growth rate of just 1.2% in 2023, a level on par with 2009, when the world was only beginning its emergence from the financial crisis.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) agrees with the pessimistic forecast. In a report issued this week, the organization’s interim Chief Economist Alvaro Santos Pereira wrote, “We are currently facing a very difficult economic outlook. Our central scenario is not a global recession, but a significant growth slowdown for the world economy in 2023, as well as still high, albeit declining, inflation in many countries.”

U.S. interest rates

In the U.S., inflation and the Federal Reserve’s efforts to combat it have been the dominant factors in most analyses of the current and future states of the economy.

The U.S has been experiencing its highest levels of inflation in 40 years, with prices beginning to jump significantly in mid-2021. By the beginning of 2022, annualized rates were over 6%, and while fluctuating a bit, touched a high of 6.6% in October.

Beginning in March, the central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets base interest rates, has engaged in a dramatic series of increases, raising the benchmark rate from between 0.0% and 0.25% to between 3.75% and 4.0% today.

The idea behind the Fed’s moves is to change consumers’ incentives. By making the interest rates on savings more appealing, and the rates on borrowing less so, the central bank is working to reduce demand and thereby slow the rate of price increases.

In general, the Fed believes that an annual 2% rate of inflation is healthy and considers that its long-term target.

Avoiding a recession

The Fed’s goal is to get inflation under control without plunging the economy into a damaging recession. And while a number of economic signs indicate that efforts to slow demand might be working, the threat of a recession still looms.

Evidence released this week showed that business activity in the U.S. contracted for a fifth consecutive month as companies reacted to decreased consumer demand. Although the economy has continued to add jobs in recent months, applications for unemployment benefits are on the rise, suggesting a potential softening in the labor market.

The Federal Reserve this week released the minutes from the early November meeting of the FOMC. The minutes revealed a pessimistic view among the central bank’s staff economists about the U.S. economy in the coming year.

Among their findings was that they “viewed the possibility that the economy would enter a recession sometime over the next year as almost as likely as the baseline.”

A “substantial majority” of the voting members of the committee indicated that they believe it is time to slow the rate of interest rate increases, suggesting that the FOMC will retreat from its recent 0.75% increases when it meets in December, perhaps raising rates by just 0.5%.

Global struggle

Internationally, governments are facing a difficult challenge: supporting their citizens during a time when prices are rising dramatically, particularly for necessities like food and fuel, which have been deeply affected by the war in Ukraine.

In a report this week, the International Monetary Fund pointed to the difficult balancing act governments must manage, saying, “With many people still struggling, governments should continue to prioritize helping the most vulnerable to cope with soaring food and energy bills and cover other costs — but governments should also avoid adding to aggregate demand that risks dialing up inflation. In many advanced and emerging economies, fiscal restraint can lower inflation while reducing debt.”

According to the Institute of International Finance (IIF), while global growth will be low but net positive in 2023, specific areas will face declines. Chief among them is Europe, where the IIF forecasts a 2.0% decline in cumulative GDP.

Bright spots

To the extent that there are bright spots in the global economy in 2023, they are in areas such as Latin America and China.

Many countries of Latin America, where the export of raw materials, including timber, ore, and other major economic inputs drives many economies, global inflation has proved beneficial insofar as the prices for those goods have risen. The IIF report projects a 1.2% expansion in GDP across the region, even as much of the remainder of the world sees economic contraction.

China has suffered economically as a result of President Xi Jinping’s “zero-COVID” strategy, which has forced massive lockdowns of whole cities and regions, with serious disruption to economic activity. The IFF and other organizations expect significant loosening in China’s policy in the coming year, which will lead to economic growth of as much as 2.0% as the Chinese economy attempts to revive itself.

U.K. to suffer

With the exception of Russia, which is still laboring under crushing sanctions related to its invasion of Ukraine, the United Kingdom faces the gloomiest outlook for the coming year of any of the world’s largest economies.

With inflation running significantly ahead of other countries, annualized price increases are expected to touch 10% by the end of the year, before slowly moderating in 2023.

Among the G-7 countries, the U.K. is the only one in which economic output has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, and it is forecast to shrink further. The OECD projects that the British economy will decline in size by 0.3% in 2023 and will grow at only 0.2% in 2024.
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