Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy received a standing ovation at the National Defense University in Washington Monday after he addressed U.S. military officers, kicking off a visit to Washington aimed at persuading Congress to provide more military aid to Ukraine before funding runs out.

In his speech, Zelenskyy emphasized the importance of defeating Russia in Ukraine because he said, if Russia wins in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin will not stop there.

“His [Putin’s] weapon against you right now is propaganda and disinformation. But if he sees a chance, he’ll go further,” he said. “Now he’s shifting Russia’s economy and society on[to’ what he calls ‘war tracks.’”

Zelenskyy said freedom must prevail when challenged and thanked Americans for the support.

“The whole world is watching us. … Ukraine hasn’t given up and won’t give up. We know what to do, and you can count on Ukraine. And we hope, just as much to be able to count on you,” he said.

The Ukrainian president said that, so far, Ukrainian forces have taken back 50% of the territory they lost to Russia, and he pointed to the perseverance of Ukrainian “warriors” on the battleground.

“Right now, amid fierce battles, our soldiers are holding positions on the front and preparing for further actions, and we haven’t let Russia score any victory this year.” But he stressed “we have to win in the sky.”

In his remarks at the National Defense University, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin maintained that U.S. support in Ukraine is unshakeable and warned, “If we do not stand up [to] the Kremlin’s aggression today, if we do not deter other would-be aggressors, we will only invite more aggression, more bloodshed and more chaos.”

“Now despite his crimes, and despite his isolation, Putin still believes that he can outlast Ukraine, and that he can outlast America. But he is wrong,” Austin said.

International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Kristalina Georgieva will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Washington on Monday, an IMF spokesperson said, as the fund’s executive board prepared to release more funds from the country’s $15.6 billion loan program.

The IMF last month announced a staff-level agreement with Ukraine on updated economic and financial policies, paving the way for a $900 million disbursement once it is finalized by the board.

At the time, the IMF said the Ukrainian economy continued to show “remarkable resilience” despite Russia’s invasion in February 2022, with recent developments pointing to a stronger-than-expected economic recovery in 2023 and continued growth in 2024.

On Tuesday, Zelenskyy is expected to go to Capitol Hill and to meet with Biden at the White House.

Biden has asked Congress for a $110 billion package of wartime funding for Ukraine and Israel, along with other national security priorities. Ukraine would get over $61 billion of the money.

But Republicans in the U.S. Senate have balked at the legislation, saying major U.S. border security changes are needed.

Some Republicans are asking for the immediate deportation of illegal migrants, stripping them of a chance to seek U.S. asylum. They have also called for greatly scaling back Biden administration programs that have allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to enter the U.S. lawfully.

The U.S. has already provided Ukraine $111 billion for its fight against Russia’s 2022 invasion.

Zelenskyy’s visit is intended “to underscore the United States’ unshakeable commitment to supporting the people of Ukraine as they defend themselves against Russia’s brutal invasion,” the White House said in a statement Sunday.

The stakes are especially high for Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during television interviews Sunday, given that “we are running out of funding” for the Ukrainians.

He also pointed out that 90% of the money that goes to Ukraine’s assistance is invested in the U.S.

“In terms of the production of materials and munitions and weapons that go to the Ukrainians, it’s right here, in America,” he said.

Russian submarines

Putin inspected two nuclear submarines, the Krasnoyarsk and Emperor Alexander III, at the Sevmash shipbuilding yard at the arctic port of Severodvinsk, in a televised ceremony Monday.

The Emperor Alexander III is part of Russia’s new Borei (Arctic Wind) class of nuclear submarines, the first new generation Russia has launched since the Cold War.

Last month, the defense ministry said the vessel had successfully tested a nuclear-capable Bulava intercontinental ballistic missile.

Security analysts say nuclear arms have assumed a greater importance in Putin’s thinking and rhetoric since the start of the Ukraine conflict, where his conventional forces are locked in a grinding war of attrition with no end in sight.

Polish protests

Meanwhile, a month-long blockade by protesting Polish truck drivers has been partially lifted at one border crossing between Ukraine and Poland, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said on Facebook Monday.

So far, 15 trucks had passed into Ukraine through the Yahodyn-Dorohusk crossing while 25 trucks were being cleared to head the other way toward Poland, said Kubrakov.

Blockades continued to stop traffic on three other crossings.

Polish truckers have been pushing to stop Ukrainian drivers from getting permit-free access to the EU, accusing their Ukrainian counterparts of using their permit-free access to undercut prices.

They said the protest had not ended and they were just waiting temporarily for details of a reported local order against one stoppage.

The Polish protest, which started in early November, has blocked four main land routes between the two neighbors, pushed up prices of fuel and some food items in Ukraine and delayed drone deliveries to Ukrainian troops fighting invading Russian forces.

Ukraine’s customs service said Monday 1,000 trucks were waiting to get into Ukraine from Poland and 100 trucks would go in the opposite direction.

Also, Slovak truckers resumed a partial blockade of the country’s sole freight road crossing with Ukraine Monday afternoon, the Ukrainian border service said, while Hungarian haulers are also blocking crossings to Ukraine to protest Ukrainian truckers’ EU permit-free access to Hungary.

VOA’s Carla Babb contributed to this report. Some information came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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The U.S. Air Force took disciplinary action against 15 airmen, charging that a lack of supervision and a failure to take action contributed to the so-called ‘Discord intelligence leaks’ that rattled the U.S. intelligence community.

A 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, Jack Teixeira, was arrested this past April, shortly after the leaks were discovered, and is facing multiple charges for removing documents from a secured work environment, and then posting the information or photos for a small group on Discord, a social media platform popular with gamers.

At the time, a top Pentagon official said the leaks, which revealed information about Russia’s war in Ukraine and about U.S. allies, posed “a very serious risk” to national security.

In a statement Monday, the Air Force said the commander of Teixeira’s Air National Guard unit, the 102nd Intelligence Wing, was relieved of command.

Another 14 individuals where subjected to non-judicial punishment under the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The Air Force defended the actions, saying officials in Teixeira’s unit could have and should have taken action that could have mitigated the improper disclosure of intelligence.

“Individuals in Teixeira’s unit failed to take proper action after becoming aware of his intelligence-seeking activities,’ the Air Force said, citing a report by its inspector general.

“Leadership was not vigilant in inspecting the conduct of all persons who were placed under their command,” the Air Force said.

The statement also said the intelligence leaks were further enabled by “inconsistent guidance for reporting security incidents” and “ineffective processes for administering disciplinary actions.”

“However, the investigation did not find evidence that members of Teixeira’s supervisory chain were aware of his alleged unauthorized disclosures,” the Air Force said.

According to the Air Force inspector general, evidence indicated that members of the 102nd Intelligence Wing had information on at least four incidents involving questionable activity by Teixeira, and that a smaller number of individuals “had a more complete picture” of Teixeira’s activities but “failed to report the full details of these security concerns/incidents.”

“Had any of these members come forward, security officials would likely have facilitated restricting systems/facility access and alerted the appropriate authorities, reducing the length and depth of the unauthorized and unlawful disclosures by several months,” the report said.

The inspector general’s report further found that a routine background check flagged concerns about Teixeira, but that the military granted him top secret clearance anyway.

Additionally, the report found those concerns were never shared with Teixeira’s unit.

“The details learned in background checks are not routinely shared with a member’s unit,” it said.  “Had the unit been made aware of potential security concerns identified during the clearance adjudication process, they may have acted more quickly.”

The Pentagon Monday said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has been made aware of the Air Force’s findings and actions, adding Austin is confident officials are “taking the necessary steps.”

This past July, the Pentagon released the results of its own review into the leaks, calling for a tightening of existing security measures.  But it rejected the need for any sweeping overhaul.

“There was no single point of failure,” a senior defense official said at the time, speaking to reporters about the review’s findings on the condition of anonymity.

“What we see here is we have a growing ecosystem of classified facilities and a body of personnel who are cleared,” the official said. “Within that we have opportunities to clarify policy … they are not the clearest documents always.”

Still, Defense Department officials have taken steps to reduce the number of people with access to classified information.

According to a 2017 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, approximately 4 million people have U.S. security clearances, with 1.3 million cleared to access top secret information.
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 Jury selection got underway on Monday in the federal case that will determine how how much Rudy Giuliani might have to pay two Georgia election workers he falsely accused of fraud while pushing Donald Trump’s baseless claims after the 2020 election.

The former New York City mayor has already been found liable in the defamation lawsuit brought by Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who endured threats and harassment after they became the target of a conspiracy theory spread by Trump and his allies. The only issue to be determined at the trial is the amount of damages, if any, Giuliani must pay.

Giuliani did not speak to reporters as he entered Washington’s federal courthouse — the same building where Trump is set to stand trial in March on criminal charges accusing the former president of scheming to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden.

The defamation case is among many legal and financial woes mounting for Giuliani, who was celebrated as “America’s mayor” in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack and became one of the most ardent promoters of Trump’s election lies.

Giuliani is also criminally charged alongside Trump and others in the Georgia case accusing them of trying to illegally overturn the results of the election in the state. Giuliani has pleaded not guilty and maintains he had every right to raise questions about what he believed to be election fraud.

He was sued in September by a former lawyer who alleged Giuliani only paid a fraction of roughly $1.6 million in legal fees stemming from investigations into his efforts to keep Trump in the White House. And the judge overseeing the election workers’ lawsuit has already ordered Giuliani and his business entities to pay tens of thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees.

Overseeing the defamation case is District Judge Beryl Howell, who is well-versed in handling matters related to Trump, having served as chief judge of Washington’s federal court for the entirety of Trump’s presidency.

In that role, the appointee of former President Barack Obama has made several significant rulings, including determining in 2020 that the House of Representatives was entitled to secret grand jury testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and, more recently, issuing a sealed opinion requiring a lawyer for Trump to testify before the grand jury over his objections in an investigation into the mishandling of classified documents.

Moss had worked for the Fulton County elections department since 2012 and supervised the absentee ballot operation during the 2020 election. Freeman was a temporary election worker, verifying signatures on absentee ballots and preparing them to be counted and processed.

Giuliani and other Trump allies seized on surveillance footage to push a conspiracy theory that the election workers pulled fraudulent ballots out of suitcases. The claims were quickly debunked by Georgia election officials, who found no improper counting of ballots.

The women have said the false claims led to a barrage of violent threats and harassment that at one point led Freeman to leave her home for more than two months. In emotional testimony before the U.S. House Committee that investigated the U.S. Capitol attack, Moss recounted receiving an onslaught of threatening and racist messages.

In an August decision holding Giuliani liable in the case, Howell said the Trump adviser gave “only lip service” to complying with his legal obligations and had failed to turn over information requested by the mother and daughter. The judge in October said that Giuliani had flagrantly disregarded an order to provide documents concerning his personal and business assets. She said that jurors deciding the amount of damages would be told they must infer that Giuliani was intentionally trying to hide financial documents in the hopes of “artificially deflating his net worth.”

Giuliani conceded in July that he made public comments falsely claiming Freeman and Moss committed fraud while counting ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta. But Giuliani argued that the statements were protected by the First Amendment.
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A U.S. F-16 fighter jet crashed in South Korea on Monday while on a routine training flight and the pilot was rescued after ejecting when the

aircraft experienced an “in-flight emergency,” the U.S. Air Force unit stationed in the country said.

The pilot was rescued in the Yellow Sea by the South Korean coast guard and returned to the Kunsan Air Base, the 8th Fighter Wing said in a statement.

The cause of the emergency was being investigated, it said.

The unit commander, Colonel Matthew Gaetke, said he was grateful for the pilot’s recovery and that he was in good condition, the statement said.

The air base located in the South Korean west coast city of Gunsan is one of the two main air bases used by the U.S. military in the country.
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Gregory Golodoff spent most of his years on a quiet Alaska island, living an ordinary life, managing a co-op store, fishing for crab and serving as the village council president. But Golodoff’s recent death at the age of 84 has reopened a chapter of American history and stirred up memories of a long-forgotten Japanese invasion that prompted the only World War II battle on North American soil.

Golodoff was the last survivor among 41 residents imprisoned in Japan after Japanese troops captured remote Attu Island during World War II. He was 3 when the island was taken. He died Nov. 17 in Anchorage, his family said. His sister, Elizabeth “Liz” Golodoff Kudrin, the second-to-last surviving Attuan, died in February at 82. Three of their siblings died in captivity.

“The eldest generation has passed away to the other side,” said Helena Schmitz, the great-granddaughter of the last Attu chief, who died in Japan along with his son.

Attu is a desolate, mountainous slab of tundra, about 32 kilometers (20 miles) wide by 56 kilometers (35 miles) long and sits between the North Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea on the volcanic Ring of Fire. It’s the most westerly island in the Aleutian chain — closer to Russia than mainland Alaska — and was one of just a few U.S. territories, along with Guam, the Philippines and the nearby island of Kiska, taken by enemy forces during the war.

The American effort to reclaim Attu in 1943 amid frigid rain, dense fog and hurricane-force winds became known as World War II’s “forgotten battle.” About 2,500 Japanese soldiers perished, many in hand-to-hand combat or by suicide; 28 survived. Roughly 550 U.S. soldiers died. Initially trained and equipped to fight in the North African desert, many suffered from frostbite and exposure due to inadequate gear.

Even after the surviving captives were freed at the close of the war, they were not allowed to return to Attu because the U.S. military decided it would be too expensive to rebuild the community. Most were sent to the island of Atka, about 322 kilometers (200 miles) away.

With the loss of their homeland, the Attuans’ language, Sakinam Tunuu, is now all but gone, spoken only by members of Schmitz’s immediate family. The distinctive basket-weaving style of the island is practiced by just three or four weavers, and not all are of Attuan descent. Schmitz runs a nonprofit named Atux Forever to revive the cultural heritage.

Much of what is known about the Alaska Natives’ time in Japan is chronicled in the book “Attu Boy,” written by Golodoff’s older brother, Nick, with assistance from his editor, Rachel Mason, a cultural anthropologist with the National Park Service in Anchorage.

Mason knew the three siblings. Gregory and Liz had little memory of Attu or Japan, and neither liked to talk about it, she said.

Nick Golodoff, who was 6 when he was captured, had a childlike innocence about his time as a prisoner, Mason noted. The cover of his book featured a photograph of him riding on the back of a Japanese soldier, both smiling.

That experience was far from typical. Of the Attu residents interned in Japan, 22 died from malnutrition, starvation or tuberculosis. Schmitz’s great-grandfather, Mike Hodikoff, died with his son of food poisoning from eating rotten garbage while in Japanese captivity, the book noted.

Japanese soldiers landed on Attu Island on June 7, 1942, when residents were attending services at the Russian Orthodox church. Some ran for their rifles, but Hodikoff told them, “Do not shoot, maybe the Americans can save us yet,” according to the book.

Instead, the village radio operator, Charles Foster Jones, was shot and killed before he could alert authorities, becoming the only U.S. civilian killed by the invading forces in North America, according to a tribute to Jones by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The other residents — all Alaska Natives except for Jones’ wife, a white teacher from New Jersey named Etta Jones — were kept captive in their homes for three months before being told to pack up and bring what food they could for the journey to Japan.

They first went to Kiska, another Alaska island; one Attu resident died on the way. Stuffed in the cargo hold of a ship, the others embarked on a two-week voyage to Sapporo, the largest city on Japan’s Hokkaido Island, where they were kept in four rooms in an abandoned dormitory. Only Etta Jones was separated from them and taken in a different boat to an internment facility in Yokohama, south of Tokyo.

One Japanese guard complained the Attuans ate better than the Japanese, but conditions worsened when the Alaskans ran out of the food they brought.

The Golodoffs’ mother, Olean, and others were forced to work long hours in a clay mine. As their numbers dwindled, she also became the cook for the surviving POWs, though there was little to make. She was reduced to gathering orange peels off the street and cooking them on top of a heater, said George Kudrin, who married Olean’s daughter Liz in Atka after he returned from the Vietnam War.

“I fed them to my children, and only then would they stop crying for a while,” Olean once told an interviewer.

Her husband, Lawrence, and three of their seven children died in Japan. Nick Golodoff lived until 2013. Another son who survived captivity, John, died in 2009.

Kudrin said Olean didn’t speak of her experiences in Japan, and his wife, Liz, was too young to remember anything.

“She always knew that she was part of the history of World War II and she always said, ‘I am a survivor with my mama,’” he said.

American forces reclaimed Attu on May 30, 1943, after a brutal 19-day campaign. Much of the fighting was waged in dense fog amid winds of more than 190 kph (120 mph). Attu Island today is part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge and known more for being one of the top destinations in North America for groups dedicated to viewing birds, especially those from Asia.

Greg Golodoff’s wife of 50 years, Pauline, said he never spoke with her about his experience in Japan or about being the last living resident of Attu. “I tried to ask him, but he didn’t want to talk about it,” she said.
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Donald Trump said Sunday he has decided against testifying for a second time at his New York civil fraud trial, posting on social media that he “VERY SUCCESSFULLY & CONCLUSIVELY” testified last month and saw no need to appear again.

Trump had been expected to return to the witness stand Monday as the last big defense witness in the trial in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit. The case threatens Trump’s real estate empire and cuts to the heart of his image as a successful businessman.

Trump announced he was canceling his testimony in an all-capital letters, multipart statement on his Truth Social platform, writing: “I WILL NOT BE TESTIFYING ON MONDAY.”

“I HAVE ALREADY TESTIFIED TO EVERYTHING & HAVE NOTHING MORE TO SAY,” Trump wrote, adding his oft-repeated claim that James and other Democrats have weaponized the legal system to hinder his chances at retaking the White House.

Trump was often defiant and combative when he testified on Nov. 6. Along with defending his wealth and denying wrongdoing, he repeatedly sparred with the judge, whom he criticized as an “extremely hostile judge,” and slammed James as “a political hack.”

Trump answered questions from state lawyers for about 3½ hours, often responding with lengthy diatribes. His verbose answers irked the judge, Arthur Engoron, who admonished: “This is not a political rally.”

Had Trump returned to the stand Monday, it would’ve been his defense lawyers leading the questioning, but state lawyers could have cross-examined him.

James sued Trump last year over what she claimed was his pattern of duping banks, insurers and others by inflating his wealth on financial statements.

Engoron ruled before the trial that Trump and other defendants engaged in fraud. He ordered that a receiver take control of some Trump properties, but an appeals court has paused that.

The judge is now considering six other claims, including allegations of conspiracy and insurance fraud. James seeks penalties of more than $300 million and wants Trump banned from doing business in New York.

In recent days, Trump had been insistent on testifying again, one of his lawyers said, even though some of his previous visits to the courthouse as a spectator have resulted in him getting fined for disparaging the judge’s law clerk.

The lawyer, Alina Habba, said she had discouraged Trump from taking the stand because of the gag order that is in place. The same gag order was also in effect when he testified in November.

“He still wants to take the stand, even though my advice is, at this point, you should never take the stand with a gag order,” Habba, told reporters last week. “But he is so firmly against what is happening in this court and so firmly for the old America that we know, not this America, that he will take that stand on Monday.”
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For many years, a recycling company in Los Angeles, California, has been giving a free Christmas tree to anyone who brings trash or recycling in exchange. In doing so, the company hopes to promote the proper way to dispose of trash and to eliminate illegal dumping in the city. Angelina Bagdasaryan has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Vazgen Varzhabetian.
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Amid growing criticism over its continued support of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, the United States defended its stance Sunday but also reiterated the importance of protecting Palestinian civilians. Verónica Balderas Iglesias reports.
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Established in 1634, Boston Common remains at the center of the city’s civic life
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America’s oldest public park was established in Massachusetts in 1634. Boston Common has seen a lot in its 389-year history and remains as central to city life as it was at its founding centuries ago. VOA’s Dora Mekouar reports from Boston. VOA footage by Adam Greenbaum.
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Despite some recent financial setbacks, U.S. offshore wind power has hit a milestone. A 244-meter-tall turbine is now sending electricity onto the grid from a commercial-scale offshore wind farm on pace to be the country’s first.

The moment is years in the making and at the same time a modest advance in what experts say needs to be a major buildout of this type of clean electricity to address climate change. 

Danish wind energy developer Ørsted and the utility Eversource announced Wednesday the first electricity from what will be a 12-turbine wind farm called South Fork Wind 56 kilometers east of Montauk Point, New York. It will be New York’s first offshore wind farm.

Ørsted and Eversource met Wednesday with New York officials to celebrate this “first power” milestone, in East Hampton, New York, where the wind farm connects to the onshore electric grid. They say the achievement builds a foundation for other large U.S. offshore wind farms that will follow.

So far, two of the 11-megawatt turbines are up. The second is undergoing testing, then it can begin producing power too. When the other ten are spinning and South Fork opens by early next year, it will be able to generate 132 megawatts of offshore wind energy to power more than 70,000 homes.

The first power announcement is “an incredible moment in the American clean energy story,” said Stephanie McClellan, executive director of the nonprofit Turn Forward, which advocates for offshore wind. She said South Fork will be a source of clean, reliable, domestically produced energy.

“This is just the beginning of what offshore wind can do,” she said in a statement.

Offshore wind is central to New York’s plan to transition to a carbon-free electricity system by 2040. The state aims to install 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035.

“New York’s nation-leading efforts to generate reliable, renewable clean energy have reached a major milestone,” New York Gov. Governor Kathy Hochul said in a statement Wednesday. “South Fork Wind will power thousands of homes, create good-paying union jobs and demonstrate to all that offshore wind is a viable resource New York can harness for generations to come.”

Some Long Island residents at first objected on both environmental and aesthetic grounds to the transmission line running through their community. In a lawsuit, four alleged that trenching under roads would spread contaminated groundwater. A judge dismissed their complaint in July.

The project has also overcome objections from fishermen and some environmentalists. Fishermen said they were not adequately compensated for their loss of fishing grounds. The group Save The Bay said the energy project shouldn’t be placed near such a rich diversity of fish.

Business groups and construction unions backed the project.

Large offshore wind farms have been making electricity for three decades in Europe, and more recently in Asia. The first U.S. offshore wind farm was supposed to be a project off the coast of Massachusetts known as Cape Wind. The application was submitted to the federal government in 2001. It failed after years of local opposition and litigation.

Turbines began turning off Rhode Island’s Block Island in 2016. But with just five of them, it’s not a commercial-scale wind farm.

Currently there are two commercial offshore wind farms under construction in the United States, South Fork Wind and Vineyard Wind. Vineyard Wind will be a 62-turbine wind farm 24 kilometers off the coast of Massachusetts. It has not started generating power yet, the developer said Monday. They’re installing and testing five turbines first.

At State Pier in New London, Connecticut, blades and massive tower sections for South Fork are lined up, ready to leave port for the sea where they’ll be erected in the coming weeks. The nacelles that house the generator for each wind turbine are there, too.

On Monday, a barge carrying three blades and a nacelle for the third turbine left port. As Jeff Martin, of Eversource, watched, he said it was a “joy” to see the industry finally move from concept to fruition in the United States, to help reduce the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels.

“Finally we’re taking this step to catch up with the rest of the world and do our part to collectively address climate change,” said Martin, Eversource’s director of business development for the offshore wind group.

Large, ocean-based wind farms are a linchpin of government plans to shift to renewable energy in populous East Coast states with limited land for wind turbines or solar arrays. The Biden administration aims to power 10 million homes with offshore wind by 2030 and establish a carbon-free electric grid five years later.

But the industry has had hard times recently. Ørsted announced it’s canceling two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey due to problems with supply chains, higher interest rates and a failure to obtain the amount of tax credits the company wanted. Developers in New England recently canceled power contacts too, saying their projects were no longer financially feasible. The series of setbacks for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry jeopardizes the clean energy goals.

Other projects though, are advancing. Ørsted is moving forward with Eversource on construction of Revolution Wind, Rhode Island and Connecticut’s first utility-scale offshore wind farm. The 704-megawatt project will power roughly 400,000 homes. Tower sections, blades and nacelles are expected to begin arriving in New London as early as this spring.

South Fork and Revolution Wind are a “bright spot for a challenged industry,” said David Hardy, group executive vice president and CEO Americas at Ørsted.

“As we demonstrate that we can build this project and build Revolution, then people will realize the real opportunity of offshore wind,” he said.
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Houston elected Democratic state Sen. John Whitmire as its next mayor on Saturday night, elevating a Texas lawmaker who has represented the city for 50 years by giving him a victory over U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee in a runoff.

Whitmire, 74, who is one of Texas’ most powerful Democratic legislators, will now be at the helm of America’s fourth-largest city. His campaign focused on reducing crime, improving streets and bringing people together. He heavily outspent Jackson Lee, who was running to become Houston’s first Black female mayor.

The congresswoman’s campaign also had to deal with fallout from the release in October of an unverified audio recording that purported to capture her profanely berating staff.

Whitmire built an insurmountable lead among early voters, winning among those voters by 30 percentage points.

Whitmire and Jackson Lee had made it to Saturday’s runoff after emerging from a crowded field of nearly 20 candidates in the Nov. 7 general election.

Both candidates — two of Houston’s biggest political fixtures — touted their decades-long political experience as strong qualifications to lead a growing city facing challenges that include crime, crumbling infrastructure and potential budget shortfalls.

Whitmire started in the Texas Legislature in 1973, first as a state representative and the majority of his time as a state senator. Jackson Lee has represented Houston in Congress since 1995 and before that had served on Houston’s City Council.

Booming growth over the last decade has caused municipal headaches but has also turned the Houston area into an expanding stronghold for Texas Democrats. Although the mayoral race is nonpartisan, Whitmire and Jackson Lee are both Democrats.

Whitmire will be the oldest big city mayor in the U.S. He is set to lead a city which is becoming younger, with a median age of around 35 and with 25% of its population below 18, according to census figures.

The choice between Whitmire and Jackson Lee, who is 73, frustrated some Democratic voters, particularly younger ones, at a time when the party is searching for new political stars in Texas who might end 30 years of GOP dominance statewide.

The new mayor will have to deal with new laws from the GOP-led state government over control of local elections and the ability to impose local regulations.

Whitmire will replace Mayor Sylvester Turner, who has served eight years and can’t run again because of term limits.

Whitmire will also lead what is considered one of the country’s most diverse cities. Of the city’s 2.3 million residents, 45% are Latino, with 23% Black and 24% white. One in every four Houston residents was born outside the U.S.

Known as the energy capital of the world, Houston’s economy has long been tied mainly to the oil industry. But the city is working to become a leader in the transition to cleaner energy. Like other large U.S. cities, Houston is also dealing with a lack of affordable housing and concerns among residents over growing gaps between the rich and poor.
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Severe storms that tore through the U.S. state of Tennessee killed six people Saturday and sent about two dozen to the hospital as homes and businesses were damaged in multiple cities.

Three people, including a child, were killed after an apparent tornado struck Montgomery County north of Nashville near the Kentucky state line, county officials said in a news release. And the Nashville Emergency Operation Center said in a post on a social media account that three people were killed by severe storms there. Montgomery County officials said another 23 there were treated for injuries at hospitals.

Photos posted by the Clarksvillle fire department on social media showed damaged houses with debris strewn in the lawns, a tractor trailer flipped on its side on a highway and insulation ripped out of building walls.

“This is devastating news and our hearts are broken for the families of those who lost loved ones,” said Clarksville Mayor Joe Pitts in a statement. “The city stands ready to help them in their time of grief.”

No other information about the victims was immediately available Saturday.

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that a tornado touched down around 2 p.m. A shelter was set up at a local high school.

Residents were asked to stay at home while first responders evaluated the situation. In a briefing shared on social media, Clarksville Mayor Joe Pitts said there was extensive damage.

“So please, if you need help, call 911 and help will be on the way immediately. But if you can, please stay home. Do not get out on the roads. Our first responders need time and space,” he said.

Allie Phillips, who lives in Clarksville, said she was grabbing lunch when she began receiving notifications of the tornado that was quickly approaching her neighborhood.

“It was excruciating watching the live stream and not knowing if my house was still there,” she said. “When we finally decided to leave, the road to my home was shut down because so many power lines were on the road and we had to take a detour.”

Phillips said her home survived with minimal damage – noting that her daughter’s toys were banged up and that a neighbor’s dog kennel hit the back of her home – but she was saddened to see that her neighbor’s house was missing a roof and a home up the block had all but completely disappeared.

“This doesn’t happen enough that you’re ever prepared for it,” she said.

The National Weather Service issued multiple tornado warnings in Tennessee, and said it planned to survey an area where an apparent tornado hit in Kentucky.

About 85,000 electricity customers were without power in Tennessee on Saturday night, according to PowerOutage.us.

The storm came nearly two years to the day after the National Weather Service recorded 41 tornadoes through a handful of states, including 16 in Tennessee and eight in Kentucky. A total of 81 people died in Kentucky alone.
…

The University of Pennsylvania’s president has resigned amid pressure from donors and criticism over testimony at a congressional hearing where she was unable to say under repeated questioning that calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would violate the school’s conduct policy. 

The departure of Liz Magill, in her second year as president of the Ivy League school, was announced by the school late Saturday afternoon. The statement said Magill will remain a tenured faculty member at the university’s Carey Law School. 

Calls for Magill’s resignation exploded after Tuesday’s testimony in a U.S. House committee on antisemitism on college campuses, where she appeared with the presidents of Harvard University and MIT. 

Universities across the U.S. have been accused of failing to protect Jewish students amid rising fears of antisemitism worldwide and fallout from Israel’s intensifying war in Gaza, which faces heightened criticism for the mounting Palestinian death toll. 

The three presidents were called before the committee to answer those accusations. But their lawyerly answers drew renewed blowback from opponents, which focused on a line of questioning from Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, who repeatedly asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate Penn’s code of conduct. 

“If the speech turns into conduct it can be harassment, yes,” Pressed further, Magill told Stefanik, “It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman.” 

Criticism rained down from the White House, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, members of Congress, and donors. One donor, Ross Stevens, threatened to withdraw a $100 million gift because of the university’s “stance on antisemitism on campus” unless Magill was replaced. 

A day later, Magill addressed the criticism, saying in a video that she would consider a call for the genocide of Jewish people to be harassment or intimidation and that Penn’s policies need to be “clarified and evaluated.” 

Magill had been under fire from some donors and alumni this fall over the university’s handling of various perceived acts of antisemitism. 

That included allowing a Palestinian literary arts festival to be held on its campus in September featuring speakers whose past statements about Israel had drawn accusations of antisemitism. 

A former U.S. Supreme Court law clerk, Magill, 57, is the daughter of a retired federal judge and was dean of Stanford University’s law school and a top administrator at the University of Virginia before Penn hired her as its ninth president last year. 

Earlier Saturday, New York’s governor called on the state’s colleges and universities to swiftly address cases of antisemitism and what she described as any “calls for genocide” on campus. 

In a letter to college and university presidents, Governor Kathy Hochul said her administration would enforce violations of the state’s Human Rights Law and refer any violations of federal civil rights law to U.S. officials. 

Hochul said she has spoken to chancellors of the State University of New York and City University of New York public college systems who she said confirmed “that calling for genocide of any group” or tolerating antisemitism violates codes of conduct on their campuses “and would lead to swift disciplinary action.” 

The governor’s letter doesn’t address specific incidents. Her office didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment. 

A popular chant at pro-Palestinian rallies at Penn and other universities has been falsely misrepresented in recent months as claiming to call for “Jewish genocide.” 

Experts and advocates say the chant, “Israel, we charge you with genocide,” is a typical refrain heard at pro-Palestinian rallies. Jewish and Palestinian supporters both acknowledge protesters aren’t saying “We want Jewish genocide.” 
…

The U.S. Soccer Federation and Mexico Football Federation submitted a joint bid Friday to host the 2027 Women’s World Cup projecting $3 billion in revenue, competing against a proposal from Brazil and a joint Germany-Netherlands-Belgium plan. 

The anticipated revenue in North America would be a huge increase from this year’s tournament in Australia and New Zealand, which FIFA said totaled more than $570 million. The U.S.-Mexico bid projects attendance at 4.5 million. 

Brazil’s bid estimated competition revenue at $99 million, a figure that did not include broadcast money. The European bid said it had “a target revenue well above what the FIFA Women’s World Cup has reached before.” 

Eleven cities

The U.S.-Mexico bid book proposed U.S. sites from among the same 11 to be used in the 2026 men’s World Cup, according to the document released by FIFA: Arlington, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; East Rutherford, New Jersey; Foxborough, Massachusetts; Houston, Texas; Inglewood, California; Kansas City, Missouri; Miami Gardens, Florida; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Santa Clara, California; and Seattle, Washington. The bid said other cities could be considered. 

Mexico listed Guadalajara, Mexico City and Monterrey — its three sites for the men’s World Cup — and in addition for 2027 listed as possibilities Leon and Querétaro. 

The U.S.-Mexico bid envisioned taking advantage of efficiencies from the 2026 men’s tournament, which will be co-hosted by the U.S., Mexico and Canada. 

“The U.S. and Mexico are in a unique position to host a World Cup that will leverage the same venues, infrastructure, and protocols used for the Men’s World Cup just a year prior,” U.S. Soccer President Cindy Parlow Cone said in the statement. “As a result, we believe the time is right to host a FIFA Women’s World Cup that features a truly world-class experience for players and fans, alike. This will not only unlock the economic potential of women’s soccer, it will send a message to young players around the world that there is no limit to what they can achieve.” 

The European bid listed Brussels, Charleroi, Genk and Ghent in Belgium; Cologne, Dortmund, Düsseldorf and Gelsenkirchen in Germany; and Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Enschede, Heerenveen and Rotterdam in the Netherlands. 

Germany’s three largest cities were not included: Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. 

Ticket prices

The Europe bid suggested ticket prices of 20-70 euros ($21-75) for group stage matches, rising to 50-125 euros ($53-133) for the final, with discounts for children and early purchases. It estimated hospitality seat prices of $160-$640. 

Brazil proposed stadiums in Belo Horizonte, Brasilia, Cuiaba, Fortaleza, Manaus, Porto Alegre, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Sao Paulo. They were among the 12 sites used for the 2014 men’s World Cup, with Curitiba and Natal dropped. 

The Brazil bid estimated ticket prices of $17-52 for group stage matches and $37-84 for the final, with total ticket revenue of $57.4 million. It projected hospitality revenue at $29.5 million. 

The U.S.-Mexico bid did not list specific ticket prices. 

The U.S. hosted the Women’s World Cup in 1999 and 2003. The 1999 tournament, won by the United States, drew 1.2 million fans, an average of almost 38,000 for the 32 matches at eight stadiums across the nation. 

The 2003 tournament, originally scheduled for China, was moved to the U.S. on four months’ notice because of the SARS virus and was played in six smaller venues. There were 15 doubleheaders and the tournament, won by Germany, drew about 680,000 for an average of just over 21,000. 

FIFA set a Friday deadline to submit bids. South Africa also announced a bid in September, then withdrew it last month. 

FIFA is to inspect proposed sites in February and the FIFA Congress is to vote on a host in May. 
…

U.S. presidential candidates are crossing paths again in Iowa just days after a fractious debate and with the leadoff Republican caucuses about a month away.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy are aiming to make their respective campaign cases Saturday — this time without the others interrupting — in northwest Iowa, a more rural, conservative corner of the state.

Each is getting time onstage at Dordt University in Sioux Center with U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra and his wife, Lynette, to discuss faith, family and politics. Hundreds of people, including many students at the small Christian college, filled the auditorium.

The three candidates made stops across Iowa on Friday as pressure mounts for an attention-grabbing performance in the January 15 contest that kicks off the GOP nominating calendar.

Former President Donald Trump, who was not at Saturday’s event, sits comfortably atop the field in polls of Republicans in Iowa and nationwide.

DeSantis, Haley and Ramaswamy last appeared together in Iowa before Thanksgiving, at the Family Leader’s roundtable discussion, which was an uncommonly friendly gathering.

They next look to take the stage at Drake University in Des Moines for a Republican debate five days before the caucuses.
…

The future of fossil fuels is at the center of the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, where many activists, experts and nations are calling for an agreement to phase out the oil, gas and coal responsible for warming the planet. On the other side: energy companies and oil-rich nations with plans to keep drilling well into the future.

In the background of those discussions are carbon capture and carbon removal, technologies most, if not all, producers are counting on to meet their pledges to get to net-zero emissions. Skeptics worry the technology is being oversold to allow the industry to maintain the status quo.

“The industry needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals — which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution,” International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol said before the start of talks.

What is carbon capture?

Many industrial facilities such as coal-fired power plants and ethanol plants produce carbon dioxide. To stop those planet-warming emissions from reaching the atmosphere, businesses can install equipment to separate that gas from all the other gases coming out of the smokestack and transport it to where it can be permanently stored underground. And even for industries trying to reduce emissions, some are likely to always produce some carbon, such as cement manufacturers that use a chemical process that releases CO2.

“We call that a mitigation technology, a way to stop the increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere,” said Karl Hausker, an expert on getting to net-zero emissions at World Resources Institute, a climate-focused nonprofit that supports sharp fossil fuel reductions along with a limited role for carbon capture.

The captured carbon is concentrated into a form that can be transported in a vehicle or through a pipeline to a place where it can be injected underground for long-term storage.

What is carbon removal?

Then there’s carbon removal. Instead of capturing carbon from a single, concentrated source, the objective is to remove carbon that’s already in the atmosphere. This already happens when forests are restored, for example, but there’s a push to deploy technology, too. One type directly captures it from the air, using chemicals to pull out carbon dioxide as air passes through.

For some, carbon removal is essential during a global transition to clean energy that will take years. For example, despite notable gains for electric vehicles in some countries, gas-fired cars will be operating well into the future. And some industries, like shipping and aviation, are challenging to fully decarbonize.

“We have to remove some of what’s in the atmosphere in addition to stopping the emissions,” said Jennifer Pett-Ridge, who leads the federally supported Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s carbon initiative in the United States, the world’s second-leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

How is it going?

Many experts say the technology to capture carbon and store it works, but it’s expensive, and it’s still in the early days of deployment.

There are about 40 large-scale carbon capture projects in operation around the world capturing roughly 45 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, according to the International Energy Agency, or IEA. That’s a tiny amount — roughly 0.1% — of the 36.8 billion metric tons emitted globally as tallied by the Global Carbon Project.

The IEA says the history of carbon capture “has largely been one of unmet expectations.” The group analyzed how the world can achieve net zero emissions, and its guide path relies heavily on lowering emissions by slashing fossil fuel use. Carbon capture is just a sliver of the solution — less than 10% — but despite its comparatively small role, its expansion is still behind schedule.

The pace of new projects is picking up, but they face significant obstacles. In the United States, there’s opposition to CO2 pipelines that move carbon to storage sites. Safety is one concern; in 2020, a CO2 pipeline in Mississippi ruptured, releasing carbon dioxide that displaced breathable air near the ground and sent dozens of people to hospitals.

The federal government is working on improving safety standards.

Who supports carbon capture?

The American Petroleum Institute says oil and gas will remain a critical energy source for decades, meaning that for the world to reduce its carbon emissions, rapidly expanding carbon capture technology is “key to cleaner energy use across the economy.” A check of most oil companies’ plans to get to net-zero emissions also finds most of them relying on carbon capture in some way.

The Biden administration wants more investment in carbon capture and removal, too, building off America’s comparatively large spending compared with the rest of the world.

But it’s an industry that needs subsidies to attract private financing. The Inflation Reduction Act makes tax benefits much more generous. Investors can get a $180-per-ton credit for removing carbon from the air and storing it underground, for example. And the Department of Energy has billions to support new projects.

“What we are talking about now is taking a technology that has been proven and has been tested but applying it much more broadly and also applying it in sectors where there is a higher cost to deploy,” said Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, an industry advocacy group.

Investment is picking up. The EPA is considering dozens of applications for wells that can store carbon. And in places such as Louisiana and North Dakota, local leaders are fighting to attract projects and investment.

Who is against it?

Some environmentalists argue that fossil fuel companies are holding up carbon capture to distract from the need to quickly phase out oil, gas and coal.

“The fossil fuel industry has proven itself to be dangerous and deceptive,” said Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

There are other problems. Some projects haven’t met their carbon removal targets. A 2021 U.S. government accountability report said that of eight demonstration projects aimed at capturing and storing carbon from coal plants, just one had started operating at the time the report was published despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.

Opponents also note that carbon capture can serve to prolong the life of a polluting plant that would otherwise shut down sooner. That can especially hurt poorer, minority communities that have long lived near heavily polluting facilities.
…

Afghanistan’s Taliban government denounced the United States Saturday for imposing fresh sanctions against two of its leaders for human rights abuses, saying that pressure and restrictive measures do not help solve problems.

The response came a day after the U.S. Treasury Department placed sanctions against 20 people in nine countries, including China, Iran and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, to mark International Human Rights Day on December 10.

Friday’s Afghan-related designations listed Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, head of the Taliban’s vice and virtue ministry, and Fariduddin Mahmood, a member of the group’s male-only cabinet and the head of the Afghanistan Academy of Sciences.

The U.S. said the two Taliban men were responsible for “the repression of rights for women and girls based solely on their gender.”

The Taliban ban girls from receiving an education beyond the sixth grade in Afghanistan and women from most workplaces. The Islamist group reclaimed power from an American-backed government two years ago, declaring its male-only administration as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, or IEA.

“We condemn the restrictions imposed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury on IEA’s two officials,” Zabihullah Mujahid, the chief Taliban spokesman, said in an English-language statement on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

He urged Washington to desist from “imposing pressure and restrictions” on his government, alleging the United States “should not repeat its failed experiences” of the past.

“While America itself is among the biggest violators of human rights due to its support for Israel, it is unjustified and illogical to accuse other people of violating human rights and then ban them,” Mujahid said.

Education bans

The U.S. announcement Friday identified Mahmood as a supporter of the education-related bans on women and girls. It said that members of Hanafi’s ministry “have engaged in serious human rights abuse, including abductions, whippings and beatings.” They also have assaulted Afghans protesting the restrictions on women’s activity, including access to education, the statement noted.

“Khalid Hanafi and Fariduddin Mahmood are complicit in serious human rights abuses against women and girls in #Afghanistan. We hold them accountable for denying half the #Afghan population their rights,” Karen Decker, the chargé d’affaires of the U.S. diplomatic mission to Afghanistan, said Saturday on X.

The Taliban returned to power in August 2021 when the U.S.-led international forces withdrew from Afghanistan after two decades of involvement in the war with the then-insurgent Taliban.

“Since August 2021, the Taliban has implemented expansive policies of targeted discrimination against women and girls that impede their enjoyment of a wide range of rights, including those related to education, employment, peaceful assembly and movement, among others,” said the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in its Friday statement.

It added that the Taliban’s restrictions have turned Afghanistan into the world’s only nation where women and girls are prohibited from pursuing secondary education.

Friday’s sanctions freeze all property and interests of the designated people in the United States and prohibit them from conducting business with Americans.

De facto Taliban rulers defend their policies, saying they are aligned with Afghan culture and Islamic law. Scholars and governments across the rest of Muslim-majority countries, however, dispute their claims.

No foreign government has recognized the Taliban as legitimate rulers of the country, mainly over human rights concerns and their harsh treatment of Afghan women.
…

Wyoming’s governor and other top leaders decided Thursday to hold off on auctioning a big chunk of state-owned land within Grand Teton National Park, choosing instead to continue negotiations with the U.S. government on a purchase or land swap for the pristine and valuable property.

Depending on how those talks go, the state Board of Land Commissioners made up of Governor Mark Gordon and the state’s other four statewide elected officials, all of whom are Republicans, might revisit the unpopular proposal next fall.

“Thank you very much,” Grand Teton Superintendent Palmer “Chip” Jenkins Jr. told the board members after their 5-0 vote against auction for now.

Park employees understand that revenue from such state lands funds education — they, too, have kids in Wyoming’s public schools — but are concerned about development in “inappropriate places,” Jenkins added.

An auction, recommended by State Lands Director Jenifer Scoggin to comply with a legal mandate to raise as much money for schools as possible, would have happened as soon as January. The land is appraised at $62.4 million.

Scoggin had suggested a minimum $80 million bid, investment of which would yield millions of dollars a year compared with the $2,800 a year now realized from grazing leases and recreation permits.

State lands staff speculated in a report for the board that a luxury home developer who subdivided the property into lots no smaller than 35 acres (14 hectares) would pay the most at auction.

Even compared with Wyoming officials’ previous threats to auction state-owned parcels within the park to prod the U.S. government to step in and pay millions to conserve the properties, the reaction was noteworthy for the lack of support for the proposal. In public hearings and letters since October, thousands of people opposed an auction.

“This area should not be destroyed by the construction of luxury houses and other development,” read a form statement for submission to the state on the National Wildlife Federation Action Fund website. “Too much development has already encroached on critical winter habitat near the park.”

As of Thursday, a counter showed more than 12,500 submissions of the form.

Located on the park’s eastern edge, the square-mile (2.6 square-kilometer) Kelly Parcel is undeveloped except for a road through it and offers an unobstructed, head-on view of the famously spectacular Teton Range. The land is prime habitat for moose, elk, deer and other wildlife typical of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Wyoming has owned the land since statehood and it has existed within — but is technically not part of — Grand Teton since a park expansion in 1950.

Previous sales of state mineral rights and 86 acres (34.8 hectares) of state land in the park in 2012, followed by the sale of a different square-mile (2.6 square-kilometer) parcel in 2016, have netted Wyoming over $62 million. State officials and the Interior Department originally agreed the federal government would buy the Kelly Parcel for $46 million no later than early 2015, but negotiations broke down and have dragged on ever since.

Gordon raised the issue with Interior officials in a meeting of the Western Governors Association in Jackson Hole last month, according to spokesman Michael Pearlman.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder, a member of the state land board, made Thursday’s motion to delay a possible auction, saying that $2,800 a year is “not an acceptable rate of return” but lands like the Kelly Parcel are essential to Wyoming’s character. Other options, such as a land swap, should be attainable through negotiations, she said.

“However, I do not think the answer is a sweetheart deal with the federal government,” Degenfelder said. “Our land and our education are worth more than that.”
…

Following a five-year legal battle, the settlement of a class action lawsuit concerning the practice of separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border has been approved, and, importantly, it bars the use of a similar policy for the next eight years.

The American Civil Liberties Union brought the lawsuit in 2018 to stop the forcible separation of children from their parents after they illegally crossed the border into the United States.

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in the Southern District of California approved the settlement Friday.

“When we brought this lawsuit, no one thought it would involve thousands of children, take us to so many countries searching for families, or last for years,” Lee Gelernt, the lead ACLU attorney on the case, wrote in a statement.

“While no one would ever claim that this settlement can wholly fix the harm intentionally caused to these little children, it is an essential beginning,” the statement continued.

The policy resulted in immigration agents separating more than 4,000 children from their parents and only became known after audio of scores of sobbing children screaming for their parents emerged from a U.S. federal detention facility.

About 4,500-5,000 children and their parents will be covered under this settlement. The government is expected to continue to identify families that were separated.

Though news of the separations came to light in 2018, a pilot program began in 2017 in the El Paso, Texas, area.

The policy sparked widespread bipartisan outrage and eventually pushed then-President Donald Trump to sign an executive order ending the practice. Many of the parents were deported from the United States without their children, some of whom were in foster care or with relatives they had never known before.

The settlement offers resources to help families address the trauma they suffered under the policy, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an October statement.

“The Department of Homeland Security has taken steps to ensure that the prior practice of separating families does not happen again, and we are continuing the work of reuniting children with their parents,” his statement said.

However, former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has said he could reinstitute the family separation policy if he’s reelected.

“If a family hears that they’re going to be separated — they love their family — they don’t come. I know it sounds harsh,” Trump said during a town hall in May.

But Gelernt, the ACLU attorney who represented the separated families, told VOA in an email that, “If a future administration tries to reinstate the family separation practice, the settlement allows us to go back to court to get an order stopping it.”

The order

The 46-page settlement does not offer money to families who were separated, but it does allow them to apply for temporary legal status for three years and a work permit. They can receive some help finding housing, and aid for initial rent payments such as first and last month’s rent. And the federal government must cover co-payments for medical and behavioral health services.

Families can also apply for asylum, even if they were denied it during their time in the U.S.

It also prohibits U.S. immigration officials from using the accusation that migrants entered the U.S. illegally as a reason to separate parents and their children. Agents at the border must prove child abuse or serious crimes before separating families and also record the charges, evidence and where each child is sent in a shared government database. Under the settlement, if families are separated, the ACLU lawyers must be informed so they can dispute the separations.

The Biden administration created a task force to continue to reunite separated families. According to a September report by the task force, 3,126 children have been reunited with their parents or legal guardians. The task force is still working with nonprofit and nongovernment organizations to reunite 1,073 children with their parents.

Of those, 81 children have no valid contact information for their parents or other relatives.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, child psychology experts, and other child welfare groups have spoken out against separating children from their parents. They say it can have long-lasting effects on children’s emotional growth and cognitive development.

The ACLU has settled hundreds of lawsuits in its 103-year history, its executive director, Anthony D. Romero, wrote in an email to the media.

“None more important than this one … but as welcomed as it is, the damage inflicted on these families will forever be tragic and irreversible,” he added.
…

Chinese President Xi Jinping will pay a state visit to Vietnam next week, his third to Hanoi after a six-year break and as Beijing and Washington jostle for influence.

The visit, on Tuesday and Wednesday, will coincide with the 15th anniversary of the establishment of a “comprehensive strategic partnership” between the nominally communist one-party, authoritarian states.

It also will come just three months after Vietnam upgraded its relationship with the United States to that same partnership level. U.S. President Joe Biden’s September visit to Vietnam put Washington on an equal footing with Beijing in Hanoi’s diplomatic hierarchy.

But unlike their relationships with the U.S., China and Vietnam share a high degree of ideological convergence, with leaders of both countries often describing their bilateral relationship as “comrades and brothers.”

Since Xi became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, his Vietnamese counterpart, Nguyen Phu Trong, has visited China three times, in 2015, 2017 and 2022. He was the first foreign dignitary to visit after Xi secured his unprecedented third term as leader.

Xi also visited Vietnam in 2015 and 2017 but stopped traveling for three years during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trade

Over the past decade, economic and trade relations between China and Vietnam have become increasingly close. China is Vietnam’s largest trading partner and second-largest export market, and it is now a major source of foreign investment in Vietnam. Vietnam is China’s top trading partner among countries in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

China’s General Administration of Customs says trade between China and Vietnam exceeded $200 billion for the first time in 2021, reaching $230.2 billion — a year-on-year increase of 19.7%.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative says trade between the U.S. and Vietnam in 2022 totaled $142 billion, with U.S. exports since 2021 up 3% and imports up 25%.

Despite close political and economic ties between China and Vietnam, the two countries have a decades-long sovereignty dispute over large parts of the South China Sea. Beijing’s aggressive assertion of its claims has pushed Hanoi closer to Washington.

China’s placement of an oil rig near the Paracel Islands in 2014 led to a standoff and collision with a Vietnamese fishing vessel that sparked anti-Chinese riots in Vietnam.

Tensions flared again in 2020 after a Vietnamese fishing boat and Chinese vessel collided near the Paracel Islands, sinking the Vietnamese one.

China’s militarization over the past decade of the Spratly Islands, where it has deployed anti-ship cruise missiles and long-range surface-to-air missiles, has also triggered serious concern in Vietnam.

Vietnam has responded with reclamation and expansion projects on islands under its control.

Popular perception

While most Vietnamese have come to terms with the Vietnam War that ended when the U.S. withdrew its troops in 1975, many still look warily at China — a giant neighbor with whom they fought a brief war in 1979. Beijing launched a three-week attack on Vietnam to punish Hanoi for invading Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge, and the two sides had occasional border skirmishes in the years that followed.

A survey published in February by Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute showed that while a majority of Vietnamese views on U.S. influence were positive, a growing majority saw Chinese influence as negative.

The survey showed most Vietnamese were not confident that China would do the right thing in terms of global peace, security, prosperity and governance, while 65% believed that Beijing’s economic and military power could be used to threaten their own country’s interests and sovereignty.
…

The U.S. Commerce Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Friday $1 million in funding to improve the collection of Arctic climate data.

In a statement, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the U.S. Arctic region — which consists of the state of Alaska — is warming faster than any region in the United States and demands immediate action.

She said the new funding — part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included money for clean energy development — will provide “data and tools that can build climate resilience and strengthen our economy and national security.”

The $1 million in funding will be used to solicit grant ideas from institutions of higher education, other nonprofits or commercial organizations to help improve climate and data collection, with a focus on Alaskan communities.

In the same statement, NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said, the call for grant proposals is designed to both gather data and help Alaskan rural and Indigenous communities.

“Providing communities with environmental information that allows them to make informed decisions in the face of a changing climate is the foundation of creating a more climate resilient nation,” he said.

The most recent NOAA National Climate Assessment indicates Alaska is warming at a rate that is two to three times faster than the lower 48 states, and the Arctic as a whole is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the global average.
…

The 67-year-old gunman who killed three faculty members and wounded a fourth in a roughly 10-minute rampage at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, had a list of targets at the school and more than 150 rounds of ammunition, police said Thursday. 

Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill identified the suspect, who was killed in a shootout with police, as Anthony Polito, a longtime business professor who was living in nearby Henderson, Nevada. The sheriff said at a news conference that investigators were still looking into a motive but noted that Polito had applied for several jobs at various colleges and universities in Nevada but was denied the job each time. 

However, Roseman University of Health Sciences in Henderson said Polito had an adjunct faculty contract and taught two courses in the school’s Master of Business Administration program from October 2018 to June 2022. He left when the program was discontinued, said Jason Roth, a spokesperson for the school. 

McMahill said targets on Polito’s list also included faculty members at East Carolina University in North Carolina, where Polito was a professor at the university’s business school from 2001 to 2017. 

“None of the individuals on the target list became a victim,” McMahill said, adding that police have contacted everyone on the suspect’s list, except for one person who is on a flight.

Before the shooting, Polito also mailed 22 letters to university faculty members across the U.S., according to footage reviewed by detectives from a dashcam in Polito’s vehicle, McMahill said. 

Some envelopes contained an unknown white powder that was later found to be harmless, police said. 

Terrified students and professors cowered in classrooms and offices as the gunman roamed the top three floors of UNLV’s five-story Lee Business School around lunchtime Wednesday.

Polito arrived at UNLV about 15 minutes before the shooting in a 2007 Lexus, McMahill said. He exited his car, placed items in his waistband and then entered the business school just after 11:30 a.m. The first reports of gunfire came about 15 minutes later, McMahill said.

The sheriff said the rampage ended around 11:55 a.m., when Polito left the business school and was confronted by police outside the building.

The suspect’s weapon, a 9 mm handgun, was purchased legally last year, McMahill said.

Police were still investigating how many rounds were fired during the attack. But the sheriff said that due to the sheer amount of ammunition in the gunman’s possession, he believed Polito may have been headed to the student union, which is next to the business school, when university police officers found him, and he was killed in the shootout. 

McMahill said the shooter brought 11 magazines with him to the campus, and police found nine of them on the shooter after he was killed.

It wasn’t immediately clear how many of the school’s 30,000 students were on campus at the time, but McMahill said students had been gathered outside the building and the student union to eat and play games. If police hadn’t killed the attacker, “it could have been countless additional lives taken,” he said. 

The victims

UNLV President Keith E. Whitfield identified two of the victims who were killed as business school professors Patricia Navarro-Velez and Cha Jan “Jerry” Chang. Whitfield said the name of the third victim will be released after relatives have been notified of the death. 

In a letter to students and staff, Whitfield said that the shooting “was the most difficult day in the history of our university.” 

The wounded man, a 38-year-old visiting professor, was still hospitalized Thursday. McMahill said his condition had been “downgraded to life-threatening” from critical. 

Navarro-Velez, 39, was an accounting professor who held a Ph.D. and was currently focused on research in cybersecurity disclosures and data analytics, according to the school’s website.

Chang, 64, was an associate professor in the business school’s Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology department and had been teaching at UNLV since 2001. He held degrees from Taiwan, Central Michigan University and Texas A&M University, according to his online resume. He earned a Ph.D. in management information systems from the University of Pittsburgh.

The attack at UNLV terrified a city that experienced the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history in October 2017, when a gunman killed 60 people and wounded more than 400 after opening fire from the window of a high-rise suite at Mandalay Bay on the Las Vegas Strip, just miles from the UNLV campus.

The suspect

Authorities on Thursday said Polito appeared to be struggling financially. When they arrived at his apartment Wednesday night to search the property, McMahill said, they found an eviction notice taped to his front door. Inside the apartment, detectives found a chair with an arrow pointing down to a document “similar to a last will and testament,” McMahill said, though the sheriff did not provide specifics on the contents of that document.

It wasn’t immediately clear how long Polito had been living in the Las Vegas area. He resigned from East Carolina University as a tenured associate professor, according to a statement Thursday from the university.

One of Polito’s former students at East Carolina, Paul Whittington, said Polito seemed obsessive over anonymous student reviews at the end of each semester.

Polito told Whittington’s class that he remembered the faces of students who gave him bad reviews and would express that he was sure who they were and where they sat, pointing at seats in the classroom, Whittington said.

“He always talked about the negative feedback he got,” said Whittington, now 33, who took Polito’s intro to operations management class in 2014. “He didn’t get a lot of it, but there would always be one student every semester, or at least one student every class, that would give a negative review. And he fixated on those.”

Classes at UNLV were canceled through Friday, and the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo canceled events that were scheduled Thursday night at the Thomas & Mack Center at UNLV. 
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Javier Vrox, the host of a political program on a YouTube channel in Chile who constantly monitors social networks in his country, recently noticed an uptick in pro-Russian political messaging, which had already been common in the country.

“They copy and paste the same messages on social media — that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy is an actor, that he is a funny president; they copy those videos of Zelensky’s past TV series, making the point that he is an actor and a liar.”

According to Vrox, such reports aim to convince Chileans that Ukrainians only pretend to be victims of Russian aggression but are themselves a regional threat, and that NATO and the United States, by that logic, are its partners and equally hostile to Chile while Russia is a reliable ally.

“I think they’re doing a great job of tagging influencers, people from Twitter, now X, to share video messages and posts … to create the idea that if you’re a friend of the U.S., you’re an enemy to Chile,” said Vrox, who added that some posts referred to Ukrainian leaders as “Nazis,” even though Zelenskyy himself is Jewish.

These sentiments are not shared by Chilean President Gabriel Boric, who has publicly condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine and met with Zelenskyy in September 2023 during the U.N. General Assembly in New York to discuss a possible Ukraine-Latin America summit.

“Chileans don’t really support Ukraine; they think that Ukrainians are trying to manipulate the media to look like victims,” said Vrox. But “Boric supports Zelenskyy’s government, so a weird situation has developed.”

Well-funded network

James Rubin, the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center special envoy and coordinator, agreed in an interview with VOA last month that Russia is “covertly co-opting local media and influencers to spread disinformation and propaganda” in Latin America.

In a public statement issued on November 7, the State Department said Russia “is currently financing an ongoing, well-funded disinformation campaign across Latin America,” spanning at least 13 countries, from Argentina and Chile in the south all the way to Mexico in the north.

“A cultivated group of editorial staff would be organized in a Latin American country, most likely in Chile, with several local individuals and representatives — journalists and public opinion leaders — of various countries in the region,” the statement said.

“A team in Russia would then create content and send the material to the editorial staff in Latin America for review, editing, and ultimately publication in local mass media.”

Christopher Hernandez-Roy of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS, said Russia has a “legacy of propaganda” in the region going back to the Cold War.

Hernandez-Roy is a CSIS Americas Program deputy director and senior fellow.

The Soviets, he said, were “supporting revolutionary movements throughout the region, including military support in the case of Cuba, Nicaragua and other places, Central America in general, in the 70s and 80s.”

The annexation of Crimea in 2014, he said, became the starting point of a new wave of disinformation in the region.

“It’s around then that you start to see maybe an uptick in Russia’s influence or trying to influence narratives in the Western Hemisphere,” he told VOA. “In those three years — 2014, 2015 and 2016 — you start to see, for instance, ‘Russia Today’ coming online in Chile and Mexico, and I think in Argentina, as well.”

According to an October report by the United States Institute of Peace, Actualidad RT (Russia Today in Spanish) and Sputnik Mundo are the key purveyors of Russian state media in the region. Hernandez-Roy said these two media organizations have about 32 million regular listeners in Latin America, which has 667 million inhabitants.

“So, [even] 30 million is quite significant, and those are [merely] the overt ways,” he said. “Russia has a much more sophisticated apparatus than just simply its visible media outlets, [such as] using social media, sympathetic journalists, sympathetic influencers and Russian automated bots on social media. It can amplify its messages, which then are picked up by other sympathetic mechanisms.”

“We know [Actualidad RT] have offices in Havana, Buenos Aires and Caracas,” said Armando Daniel Armas, a Venezuelan opposition politician currently living in Europe. “We know that [Actualidad RT] have over 200 Spanish-speaking, let’s say, journalists working in Moscow … who allocate resources to find professional people, good people with content” to perpetuate Russian narratives on the ground in Latin American.

The object, according to U.S. officials, is to have Russian public relations and internet companies recruit and cultivate Latin American journalists, influencers and public opinion leaders to seed their publications and broadcasts with content favorable to Moscow while hiding any links to the Kremlin.

“They’ve been somewhat successful in using RT and Sputnik in Latin America,” Rubin told VOA in November. “The difference here is they’re trying to operate surreptitiously. They’re trying to create content in Russia and launder it through Latin American journalists. They are covertly co-opting local media and influencers to spread disinformation and propaganda.”

U.S. officials said it is unclear how many of the journalists and opinion leaders are aware they are being fed Russian disinformation, although a senior State Department official told VOA, “There are definitely some willing participants.”

Others involved in the network may be sympathetic to the Russian viewpoints but unaware that the directions are coming from Moscow.

Russia’s ultimate objective, said Hernandez-Roy, is to convince people in Latin America that Moscow is not the only one to blame — that there’s blame on both sides in a war caused by the U.S. and NATO.

“Essentially, what they’re trying to do is to make sure that the region is neutral,” said Hernandez-Roy. “We’re not talking about Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, which, of course, are completely on the Russian side.”

Soft diplomacy

Yuriy Polyukhovych, Ukraine’s ambassador to Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, points to another asset utilized to influence opinions in Latin American that Moscow has used since Soviet times: its diplomatic corps.

“Russian ambassadors, Russian embassies here are a part of Russia’s propaganda machine,” he told VOA. “They’ve been doing their work for many years. These are not embassies of four or five persons. These embassies have 60, 70, 80 people each. Imagine what can be done with such a group of people! According to our information, some work for the intelligence service.”

At the same time, said Ukrainian Ambassador to Argentina Yuriy Klymenko, the Russian war against Ukraine at least somewhat undermined Russia’s standing in Latin America, presenting a diplomatic opportunity for the United States and its allies.

“From my experience, it is now considered bad manners to invite representatives of Russia to diplomatic or other public events,” he told VOA.

Yuriy Polyukhovych once called Latin America a region of “contact diplomacy,” emphasizing the need to work directly with local populations to counteract Russian influence. Hernandez-Roy suggested the U.S. project more soft power in the region.

“The U.S. used to project much more soft power decades ago than today,” he said. “Soft power means people-to-people exchanges, more high-level visits, cultural interchanges.”

Kyiv, he said, should allocate more resources to the region and conduct active diplomacy with high-level visits and ambassadors to counter Russian narratives.

This story originated in VOA’s Ukrainian Service. VOA National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed reporting.
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