For the annual fall renewal of her shaman spirit, Mee Vang Yang will soon ritually redecorate the tall altar in her living room where she keeps her father’s ring-shaped shaman bells.

She carried them across the Mekong River as the family fled the communist takeover of her native Laos four decades ago. Today, they facilitate the connection to the spiritual world she needs to help fellow refugees and their American-raised children who seek restoration of lost spirits.

“Like going to church, you’re giving beyond yourself to a greater power,” said the mother of six through a translator in Hmong.

It’s the language spoken for the most important spiritual celebration in the Hmong calendar, the “Noj Peb Caug” — translated as “new year,” but literally meaning “eat 30,” because the ceremonies traditionally were tied to the fall’s post-harvest abundance shared with the clan and offered to spirits.

During new year, which is celebrated mostly in November and December among Hmong Americans, shamans send off their spirit guides to regenerate their energy for another season of healing. Male heads of households who embrace traditional animist practices perform soul-calling ceremonies, venerate ancestor spirits and invoke the protection of good spirits.

“A traditional Hmong home is not just a home, but also a place of worship,” said Tzianeng Vang, Vang Yang’s nephew, who came to Minnesota as a teen and grew up a Christian. He’s among the community leaders trying to share knowledge of these animist traditions so they won’t be lost for his children’s generation.

“You preserve it here or you have nowhere,” he said.

Moving from east to west

Persecuted as an ethnic minority in their ancestral lands in China, the Hmong fled first to the mountains of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. There, tens of thousands fought for the United States in the Vietnam War. When communist regimes swept the region, they escaped to refugee camps in neighboring Thailand and, starting in the mid-1970s, resettled largely in California farm country and Minnesota’s capital city.

The majority of the estimated 300,000 Hmong in the United States are animists and believe that spirits live throughout the physical world. That includes multiple souls in a person — any of which can leave and needs to be ceremonially called back, said Lee Pao Xiong, director of the Center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University in St. Paul.

But many younger Hmong haven’t learned the spiritual significance of cultural traditions, even popular ones like the Thanksgiving weekend dance, music and craft performances in one of St. Paul’s largest entertainment venues, Xiong said.

“It’s intricate, it’s not just ‘go to church and pray.’ There are all these spirits to atone to. It’s about spirits that you have to appease,” said Xiong, who teaches classes about these traditions, which often include the ritual slaughter of cows, pigs or chickens as an offering or an exchange of spirits.

Educating youth in ancestral culture is a crucial aim of the Hmong Cultural Center just down the street from St. Paul’s capitol, said its director, Txongpao Lee.

“They need to learn from parents and prepare for when they have children,” said Lee, who estimates about one-third of young Hmong have converted to Christianity. Acceptance of ancestral customs differs among church denominations, he added — his family’s Lutheran and Catholic members vary in participation in new year rituals.

Lee leads them for his household, though his wife, Hlee Xiong Lee, has been a shaman since she fell ill when pregnant with the fourth of her seven children. Shamans, like other traditional healers across cultures, often associate the revelation of their gift with life-threatening sickness and believe they could die if they refuse the call.

Xiong Lee’s path to shamanism has been arduous, entailing rigorous training with a shaman mentor to learn how to communicate with the spirit world. But so was her journey to the United States, arriving in a small Minnesota town as a 14-year-old refugee with no English-speaking skills, too embarrassed to ask for help getting a lunch ticket on her first day of school.

She’s proud of how her own children wear string bracelets and effortlessly explain to inquisitive teachers or classmates they’re meant to tie the family to protecting spirits.

“They’re good at adapting to my tradition and American tradition,” she said.

Connecting with spirits

Kevin Lee, a shaman’s son who says he also first started experiencing spiritual energies when he was 5, similarly has had to navigate a regular childhood in St. Paul with his ability to connect with good and bad spirits “on the other side.”

“Kids would be like, ‘this guy is weird.’ For me, it was just another day,” he said in front of the three living-room altars in the house he shares with his parents and brother.

They will be redecorated with new paper designs for the new year after his father, Chad Lee, finishes helping his shaman mentees and has time to send off his shaman spirit for a much-deserved break — short, though, because up to half a dozen people call for his help each day. Last year, his “angel” only got three days off, the older Lee said.

“Spiritual world is confusing, but once you find a path, everything is natural,” Chad Lee said.
…

Authorities on Friday identified those missing or killed in a southeast Alaska landslide this week as five family members and their neighbor, a commercial fisherman who made a longshot bid for the state’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives last year.

Timothy Heller, 44, and Beth Heller, 36 — plus their children Mara, 16; Derek, 12; and Kara, 11 — were at home Monday night when the landslide struck near the island community of Wrangell. Search crews found the bodies of the parents and the oldest child late Monday or early Tuesday; the younger children remain missing, as does neighbor Otto Florschutz, 65, the Alaska Department of Public Safety said in an emailed statement.

Florschutz’s wife survived.

Florschutz, a Republican, was one of 48 candidates who entered the race to fill the vacant congressional seat. He received 193 votes out of nearly 162,000 cast.

In a candidate statement provided to the Anchorage Daily News back then, Florschutz said he was known for his ability to forge consensus.

“As a 42-year commercial fisherman, I have worn many hats,” he said. “Besides catching fish, I have served in community elected positions, done boat repair, mechanics, welding, carpentry, business and much more.”

Beth Heller served on the Wrangell School Board from 2019 to 2020 after several years on the district’s parent advisory committee.

The Hellers ran a construction company called Heller High Water, said Tyla Nelson, who described herself as Beth Heller’s best friend since high school. Beth and Timothy both grew up in Wrangell and married in August 2010, Nelson said.

Nelson sobbed as she described her friend as a “fantastic human.”

“And she was a wonderful mother,” she said. “She did everything for those babies.”

The slide tore down a swath of evergreen trees from the top of the mountain above the community to the ocean, striking three homes and burying a highway near the island community of Wrangell, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) south of Alaska’s state capital, Juneau. One of the homes was unoccupied.

The slide — estimated to be 137 meters (450 feet) wide — occurred during heavy rainfall and high winds.
…

About 200 wild horses roam free in a western North Dakota national park, but that number could shrink as the National Park Service is expected to decide next year whether it will eliminate that population.

Advocates fear a predetermined outcome that will remove the beloved animals from Theodore Roosevelt National Park. An extended public comment period ends Friday on the recent environmental assessment of the park’s three proposals: reduce the horse population quickly, reduce it gradually or take no immediate action.

The horses have some powerful allies — including North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and U.S. Sen. John Hoeven — while advocates are pulling out all the stops to see that the animals stay. Park officials say they want to hear from the public.

The horses are popular with park visitors, who often see and photograph them along the park’s scenic road and hiking trails through the rugged Badlands.

Evaluating whether the horses belong in the park has “been a long time in coming, and it realigns us with our overarching policies to remove non-native species from parks whenever they pose a potential risk to resources,” said Jenny Powers, a wildlife veterinarian who leads the wildlife health program for the National Park Service.

“This isn’t an easy decision for us, but it is one that is directly called for by our mission and mandates,” she told The Associated Press last month.

One of the horses’ biggest advocates fears park officials have already decided to oust the horses. Chasing Horses Wild Horse Advocates President Chris Kman cites several alternatives for keeping horses that park officials considered but dismissed in the recent environmental assessment.

In the document, the Park Service said those alternatives wouldn’t be “in alignment with NPS priorities to maintain the native prairie ecosystem” and wouldn’t address the animals’ impacts, among its reasons.

Kman said she is “optimistic that we will ultimately win this fight. I don’t have any faith that the park will do the right thing and keep the horses in the park.”

Even if the horses ultimately stay, Park Superintendent Angie Richman said they would have to be reduced to 35-60 animals under a 1978 environmental assessment. The ongoing process is part of the park’s proposed management plan for “livestock,” a term the horses’ allies reject.

Wild horses were accidentally fenced into the park in its early years. They were eventually kept as a historic demonstration herd after years of efforts to eradicate them, according to Castle McLaughlin, who researched the horses’ history in the 1980s as a graduate student working for the Park Service in North Dakota.

Wild horse advocates would like the park to conduct a greater environmental review, and want to ultimately see a genetically viable herd of at least 150 horses maintained.

A vast majority of previous public comments opposed removal of the horses, making it “really difficult to understand why the government would choose to take them away from the American people,” said Grace Kuhn, communications director for the American Wild Horse Campaign.

The wild horses “have a right to be in the national park” and align with Roosevelt’s sentiment to preserve cultural resources for future generations, she said.

“Essentially, the Park Service by implementing a plan to either eradicate them quickly or eradicate them slowly, they’re thumbing their noses at the American public and their mission,” Kuhn said last month.

Burgum in January offered state collaboration for keeping the horses in the park. His office and park officials have discussed options for the horses. State management or assistance in managing the horses in the park are options North Dakota would consider; relocation is not, spokesperson for the governor’s office Mike Nowatzki said Monday.

Park officials “are certainly willing to work with the governor and the state to find a good outcome,” Park Superintendent Richman said last month, adding that the park was working with the governor on “a lot of different options.”

“It would be premature to share pre-decisional discussions at this time,” she said Wednesday.

Sen. Hoeven has worked on negotiations with park officials, and included legislation in the U.S. Interior Department’s appropriations bill to preserve the horses. “If that doesn’t get it done,” he would pursue further legislation, he said last month.

“My objective is to keep horses in the park,” Hoeven said.

The park’s ultimate decision also will affect nine longhorn cattle in the park’s North Unit. All of the horses are in the park’s South Unit.
…

Though it’s no longer the homicide capital of the United States, the nation’s capital is witnessing a multiyear spike in the number of homicides but solving far fewer of them.

And for families of the victims, the issue of unsolved killings cuts deep.

Asiyah Timimi’s husband, Aqueel, was stabbed in a dispute in January 2021 and died several days later. “You just don’t feel safe until they’re caught,” Timimi said. “I could be walking past the person that killed my husband.”

Natalia Mitchell wants justice for her son Morris, who was fatally shot in March 2022, and closure for herself. A successful arrest of her son’s killer, she said, “doesn’t bring Morris back, but it would help.”

The percentage of homicides that are solved by the Metropolitan Police Department has declined sharply in 2023, leaving the city on track to record its lowest so-called “clearance rate” or “closure rate” in more than 15 years.

As of Nov. 13, only 75 of the 244 homicides committed this year have been solved by police. Factoring in the 33 prior-year homicides cleared thus far in 2023, the overall closure rate stands at around 45%. That would be the lowest rate dating back at least to 2007, according to statistics provided by the MPD.

Nationally, the average clearance rate tends to hover between 50% and 60%, said Rick Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

A low closure rate, particularly on homicides, can erode police morale and community trust in the police and lessen the public cooperation between citizens and police that is vital for many investigations, said Christopher Herrmann, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former crime analyst supervisor with the New York Police Department.

“That whole process can kind of spiral down, where the community doesn’t trust the police that much anymore or there’s a lack of faith,” he said. “There’s much less cooperation between the community and the police. And once the police see a lack of cooperation from the community, some of them will kind of throw their hands up in the air and say, ‘Why should we care when no one in the community wants to help?'”

Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Lyndsey Appiah acknowledged that closure represents “some sense of justice for victims.”

In addition, she said, “The surety of consequence is a deterrent to crime. So it’s important that we are, as quickly as possible, closing cases and solving cases.”

The drop in homicide closures is just part of a complicated public safety crisis facing the nation’s capital. Appiah, in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee this year, flatly acknowledged the scope of the problem.

“Oxford defines a crisis as a time of intense difficulty, trouble or danger,” she testified. “So I would say there is a crisis.”

Homicides in Washington are up 33% this year over last year. Violent crimes involving juveniles also are rising steadily, as are carjackings, with a U.S. congressman and a diplomat from the United Arab Emirates among the recent victims.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Appiah cited police staffing issues and difficulties with crime scene analysis among the potential factors impacting the clearance rate.

It’s at around 3,300 officers this year — down from 3,800 in 2020.

The MPD is at around 3,300 officers this year, down from 3,800 officers since 2020 — a decrease of 500 over three years. Police union officials have publicly blamed the D.C. Council for what they say are anti-police policies that have driven away officers and stifled recruiting efforts. The mayor, however, wants to get the number of officers up to 4,000.

D.C.’s crime lab, the Department of Forensic Science, also lost its accreditation in spring 2021 over allegations of flaws in its analysis. Appiah said the lab hopes to regain its accreditation early next year; in the meantime, the city is outsourcing its crime scene analysis, a process that consumes time and money, she said.

Appiah said that 10 months into the year is too soon to judge the success of homicide investigations that can take months or years. And, in fairness, the MPD just arrested a man in late October for a killing that took place in 2009. In cases like that, the arrest counts as part of this year’s clearance rate.

But with just a few weeks left in the year, it would take a remarkable run of successful arrests to prevent 2023 from having the lowest homicide clearance rate in more than 15 years.

The impact of these unsolved killings can have a corrosive effect in multiple directions.

“It devastates the Black family, and it can devastate the police department,” said Ronald Moten, a community activist who, in his youth, spent time in federal prison on drug charges. “It always gives the family some sense of relief if there’s a closure. It doesn’t help you heal by itself, but it’s part of the healing process.”

Moten’s half-brother was slain in 1991, during the period when homicides in D.C. regularly exceeded 400 per year. The case was never solved.

“It hurts because you feel like somebody’s gotten away with killing your child with no consequences,” Moten said. “That’s painful. You want closure, and you want somebody to be held accountable.”

Preventing that negative cycle from becoming entrenched is one of the city’s top priorities. To close cases, police need residents to help uproot violent criminals from their communities, said Appiah, the deputy mayor.

“We need their help. And they need to trust that if they come forward with information and help us, that it will move towards accountability,” she said. “If they provide us tips on someone engaged in a shooting and then that person is just back in the community, they will not trust MPD in the same way. … We need the community to help us close cases, and then we need the rest of the system to work to help keep them safe.”

Timimi, whose son Khalil was shot outside of Washington in neighboring Prince Georges County in Maryland about six weeks after her husband was stabbed, now cares for her paralyzed son and runs a charitable organization teaching modern life skills to urban youths.

She said she fears a return to the days when Washington routinely led the nation in per-capita killings. Two of her former neighbors have lost children to gun violence in recent years, and in 2021 her godson was caught in a crossfire and killed while he was home from college because of the national COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

“In the ’80s and ’90s, I remember going to a funeral every week,” she said. “And when it’s unsolved, you just feel like they’ve forgotten you.”
…

Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, was stabbed by another inmate and seriously injured Friday at a federal prison in Arizona, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

The attack happened at the Federal Correctional Institution, Tucson, a medium-security prison that has been plagued by security lapses and staffing shortages. The person was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the attack and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity.

The Bureau of Prisons confirmed that an incarcerated person was assaulted at FCI Tucson at around 12:30 p.m. local time Friday. In a statement, the agency said responding employees contained the incident and performed “life-saving measures” before the inmate, whom it did not name, was taken to a hospital for further treatment and evaluation.

No employees were injured, and the FBI was notified, the Bureau of Prisons said. Visiting at the facility, which has about 380 inmates, has been suspended.

Messages seeking comment were left with Chauvin’s lawyers and the FBI. 

Chauvin’s stabbing is the second high-profile attack on a federal prisoner in the past five months. In July, disgraced sports doctor Larry Nassar was stabbed by a fellow inmate at a federal penitentiary in Florida.

It is also the second major incident at the Tucson federal prison in a little over a year. In November 2022, an inmate at the facility’s low-security prison camp pulled out a gun and attempted to shoot a visitor in the head. The weapon, which the inmate shouldn’t have had, misfired and no one was hurt.

Chauvin, 47, was sent to FCI Tucson from a maximum-security Minnesota state prison in August 2022 to simultaneously serve a 21-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights and a 22½-year state sentence for second-degree murder.

Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric Nelson, had advocated for keeping him out of the general population and away from other inmates, anticipating he’d be a target. In Minnesota, Chauvin was mainly kept in solitary confinement “largely for his own protection,” Nelson wrote in court papers last year.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Chauvin’s appeal of his murder conviction. Separately, Chauvin is making a longshot bid to overturn his federal guilty plea, claiming new evidence shows he didn’t cause Floyd’s death.

Floyd, who was Black, died on May 25, 2020, after Chauvin, who is white, pressed a knee on his neck for 9½ minutes on the street outside a convenience store where Floyd was suspected of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.

Bystander video captured Floyd’s fading cries of “I can’t breathe.” His death touched off protests worldwide, some of which turned violent, and forced a national reckoning with police brutality and racism.

Three other former officers who were at the scene received lesser state and federal sentences for their roles in Floyd’s death.

Chauvin’s stabbing comes as the federal Bureau of Prisons has faced increased scrutiny in recent years following wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s jail suicide in 2019. 
…

Cuban and Haitian migrants are increasingly taking chartered flights to Nicaragua from where they seek to travel overland to the United States, prompting Washington to impose sanctions this week on the operators of the aircraft.

Irma Perez, a 28-year-old Cuban, told AFP she arrived in the Nicaraguan capital Managua last month aboard a charter flight run by Mexican aviation firm Viva Aerobus.

“We had a 45-minute layover in Cancun (Mexico) without disembarking, and then came to Managua,” she said.

Perez was speaking from Mexico, after she, her husband and 1-year-old son traveled there overland with the help of a smuggler. The family plans to head toward the United States.

Several Cuban migrants told AFP they had traveled with the same company on flights chartered by small travel agencies.

Viva Aerobus, which does not advertise fights between Cuba and Nicaragua on its website, did not respond to AFP’s requests for comment.

Perez said she and her husband paid $1,250 each for their tickets, and $350 for that of her son. The smuggler cost them another $2,100.

‘New phenomenon’

The use of charter flights to aid migrants in getting to their dream destination “is a relatively new phenomenon,” said Manuel Orozco, a director of migration issues at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.

The Central American country of Nicaragua has not required visas for Cubans since November 2021.

Since then, a record 421,000 Cubans have entered the United States, according to official figures from Washington.

In April, the U.S. began deporting Cubans with the first flight leaving April 24 after a two-year pause.

Two other Central American nations, Panama and Costa Rica, imposed a transit visa on Cubans in 2022 to tackle the influx of migrants.

A report by the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank said that an average of 50 charter flights a month traveled between Havana and Managua between January and October 2023.

Meanwhile flights between Haiti and Nicaragua quadrupled in the past three months.

“Nicaragua was a bridge for almost 100,000 people,” seeking to migrate, since January, according to the report.

Orozco believes that airline operators and Nicaraguan airport authorities made “an economic calculation” for their “mutual benefit.”

US sanctions

Advertisements abound on Facebook: “Tickets available Havana-Nicaragua … prices for families, charter and regular flights,” read one.

At the beginning of November, Brian Nichols, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, expressed concern about the dramatic increase in these flights.

“No one should profit from the desperation of vulnerable migrants – not smugglers, private companies, public officials or governments,” he wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

On Tuesday, Washington announced it would restrict visas for those in charge of the aviation companies.

Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio told journalists that the number of flights has begun to decrease.

Mexico began requiring an airport transit visa for Cubans in late October.

A taxi driver from Managua, who consults the airport website every day for his work, told AFP on condition of anonymity that he had noticed the number of planes carrying migrants had dropped from “22 to 23 daily” to six.
…

Authorities in the southwest U.S. state of Arizona are canceling land leases that are being used to grow alfalfa for livestock raised in Saudi Arabia. From Vicksburg, Arizona, Levi Stallings reports on a dispute over groundwater.
…

When Daniel Skousen scrubs at the ash and soot covering his Maui home, he worries about the smell.

What chemicals created the burning-trash-barrel scent that has lingered since a deadly wildfire tore through Lahaina in August? Should he believe government agencies’ assessment of when the air, land and water will be safe enough for his family to return?

Or will political and economic pressures to rebuild and restore Maui’s robust tourism industry — where visitors normally spend $14 million per day — lead officials to look at any testing results through rose-colored glasses?

“It appears very important to them to get that tourism tax revenue back,” said Skousen. “It makes you wonder if the testing will be biased.”

The fire blew out Skousen’s windows and filled his home with ash, but the building is still standing, and he hopes someday to move back in. The home next door burned to the ground.

Skousen wants a second opinion on any government environmental assessments, preferably from an expert with a stake in the community. But the raw data isn’t easy to find, and experts say the long-term health effects from fires like the one that incinerated Lahaina are mostly unknown. There are no national standards that detail how clean is clean enough for a residential home damaged by a nearby fire.

At least 100 people died in the Aug. 8 wildfire, and thousands were displaced. Nearly 7,000 were still in short-term lodging two months later.

The rubble left behind includes electrical cables, plastic pipes and vehicle tires that emit dangerous dioxins when burned; lead from melted vehicles or old house paint; and arsenic-laden ash from termite-resistant building materials.

After a major wildfire burned 1,000 homes in Boulder County, Colorado, in 2021, health officials learned that even professionally remediated homes were often still polluted with ash, char and other toxic substances long after the fire, said Bill Hayes, the county’s air quality program coordinator.

The reason? High winds — like those that plagued Maui during the wildfire this summer — forced fine particulate matter into every crevice, Hayes said. Those particulates would sit inside window panes, behind light switches, between shingles and elsewhere until the winds started up again, re-contaminating the home.

“Char is a carcinogen, so we don’t ever say any level of those particulates are safe,” Hayes said. “That became a challenge in the cleanup – determining the level of when is it clean enough?”

State and federal agencies have released regular updates on Lahaina’s relative safety. The water in much of the town is still unsafe to drink, and visitors have been advised to use protective gear in impacted areas. Officials say pregnant people and kids should stay out of the burn zone, though the Hawaii Department of Education says the schools, which are above the burned part of town, are safe.

Crews have installed air quality monitors throughout town and are spraying a soil sealant to prevent toxic ash from being washed into the ocean or blowing around.

An attorney representing Skousen and about two dozen other Lahaina residents sent a public records request to the Environmental Protection Agency last month asking for all records regarding residential testing of contaminants in Lahaina and their impact to human health.

The EPA’s reply, sent earlier this month, wasn’t reassuring: “No records could be located that are responsive to your request.”

EPA spokesperson Kellen Ashford told The Associated Press his agency did some environmental hazard testing in the burn zone, but only to determine the immediate risk for workers involved in the initial cleanup.

He referred further questions about such testing to the Hawaii Department of Health, which he said was responsible for determining longer-term safety for residents.

The Hawaii Department of Health’s Environmental Health Services Division also told Skousen’s attorney it had no records about residential testing of contaminants to release.

The Health Department declined interview requests. Spokesperson Shawn Hamamoto said in an email the department will pursue additional air quality and ash testing when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers begins removing debris from Lahaina.

“I think that they’re playing ‘hide the ball,'” said Skousen’s attorney, Edward Neiger. “The question is, why do they feel the need to hide anything?”

Ashford acknowledged some residents are skeptical of the cleanup efforts. He said the EPA has people stationed at the Lahaina Civic Center and at work sites to talk to community members about their concerns.

Andrew Shoemaker, a fine art photographer who operated a gallery on Lahaina’s famous Front Street, believes it’s an important part of healing to go back to the burned areas to see what is left, but he has recently had a lung infection and doesn’t want to risk his health.

“I don’t even want to take the chance of going over there,” he said.

Dioxins, toxic compounds that can be released when plastic pipes, tires and other household materials are burned, are a particular concern for Shoemaker. Dioxins can last for decades inside the human body, and can cause reproductive and developmental problems, damage the immune system, interfere with hormones and cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization.

The EPA has found that forest fires and household trash burning in backyard burn barrels — how Skousen now describes the scent of Lahaina — are both major sources of dioxin emissions.

Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor and environmental epidemiologist with University of California-Davis, said the air monitors are effective and can measure particles that are about 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Still, there is a lot that scientists don’t yet know about the long-term health risks posed by fires, Hertz-Picciotto said.

That post-fire smell noticed by Skousen can be a result of off-gassing, she said, which occurs when volatile organic compounds are absorbed into surfaces and released later.

Even with careful air quality monitoring, off-gassing can expose residents and cleanup workers to toxic fire emissions for months, and research shows only some volatile organic compounds can be trapped by high-quality air particle filters, according to the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“If it smells like burned plastic or burned electrical cables, then probably those chemicals are in the air and not healthy,” Hertz-Picciotto said. “The other side of that, though, is even if you can’t smell it that doesn’t mean it’s safe.”

Skousen is a teacher and runs a cleaning business on the side. He’s spent his off hours in Lahaina working on cleaning his and his neighbors’ homes. Skousen and his wife decided to homeschool their kids at their temporary residence outside of Lahaina for now rather than risk exposing them to possible health problems.

Most of the guidelines for human exposure to pollutants are based on industrial settings, where people might work 40 hours a week — not their homes, where they might spend 90% of their time, said Hayes, the Boulder County air quality coordinator. Whether a home can be made safe enough for residency comes down in part to the resident’s risk tolerance, Hayes said.

“There is no black-and-white, clear-cut answer,” he said. “If they have young children in the home, or anyone has respiratory conditions, they might want to do significantly more cleaning that what the guidance documents are recognizing.”
…

Just as they have for millions of years, sea turtles by the thousands made their labored crawl from the ocean to U.S. beaches to lay their eggs over the past several months. This year, record nesting was found in Florida and elsewhere despite growing concern about threats from climate change.

In Florida, preliminary state statistics show more than 133,840 loggerhead turtle nests, breaking a record set in 2016. Same for green turtles, where the estimate of at least 76,500 nests is well above the previous mark set in 2017.

High sea turtle nest numbers also have been reported in South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina and Georgia, although not all set records like Florida, where Justin Perrault, vice president of research at Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach, said the number of nests is remarkable this year.

“We had more nests than we had ever seen before on our local beaches,” said Perrault, whose organization monitors Palm Beach County and broke a local record by 4,000 nests. “That’s quite a bit of nesting.”

There are seven species of sea turtles: loggerhead, green, leatherback, hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley, olive ridley and flatback. All are considered either endangered or threatened. They come ashore on summer nights, digging pits in the sand and depositing dozens of eggs before covering them up and returning to the sea. Florida beaches are one of the most important hatcheries for loggerheads in the world.

Only about one in 1,000 sea turtle hatchlings live to adulthood. They face myriad natural threats, including predators on land and in the ocean, disruptions to nests and failure to make it to the water after hatching. This year along one stretch of Florida’s Gulf Coast where 75 nests had been counted, most were wiped out by the surge from Hurricane Idalia in August.

“Unfortunately, the nests pre-Idalia were almost all lost due to the high tides and flooding on our barrier islands,” said Carly Oakley, senior turtle conservation biologist at Clearwater Marine Aquarium.

Female turtles generally lay eggs in a three-year cycle, leading to up-and-down years of nests, she said. “The nesting process is very exhausting, and, in this break, females regain the energy to do the process again,” Oakley said.

Climate change has added to those challenges, reducing beaches as sea levels rise and causing more powerful tropical storms. Hotter air, water and sand and changes in the ocean currents turtles use to migrate also lower the odds of surviving, according to Oceana, an international conservation group.

Sand temperatures play a major role in determining sea turtle sex. In general, warmer temperatures produce more female turtles, and sand temperatures are projected to increase dramatically around the world by 2100, according to researchers at Florida State University.

“So the warmer the nest is, the more likely that nest is to produce females,” Perrault said. “Additionally, hatchlings that come out of warmer nests are much smaller and often slower.”

A study led by FSU professor Mariana Fuentes that was published recently in the Global Change Biology journal found sea turtles will have to nest much later or much earlier than they currently do to cope with changing environmental conditions.

Even that may not be enough for every species, said Fuentes, who works in FSU’s Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science. Turtles have adapted to altered climates over millions of years, but today’s rapid changes could happen too quickly for them to evolve, she said.

“We have found that even if they do change the timing of their nesting, that’s not going to be sufficient to maintain the temperatures of current nesting grounds,” Fuentes said.

Sea turtle mothers already have to lumber out of the water to find a good spot to nest, which can be difficult in areas where humans have built seawalls. Some female turtles make several attempts, known as false crawls, before finding a suitable location.

Racoons, coyotes and other predators raid the nests and hatchlings, once they dig their way out, have to crawl to the sea before being snatched up by birds and other animals. Electric lights can disorient them, causing turtles to head the wrong way on the beach instead of following light from the moon and stars. And when the lucky ones finally start swimming, hungry fish await.

Michelle Pate, biologist at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, said tens of thousands of hatchlings don’t make it to the water, even as nest numbers trend higher across much of the Southeast.

“If we can’t get hatchlings to emerge and make it to the ocean, then an increase in nest numbers doesn’t help,” she said.

The increase in turtle nests this year conceals an ominous future for the animals, Perrault said.

“Yes, we’re seeing record numbers, but our hatchling production may not be that great,” he said. “And so in the future, 20 to 30 years from now, and these things come back to nest, we may not be seeing these record numbers that we’re seeing now.”
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The United States is seeking a swift extradition from Mexico of Nestor Isidro Perez Salas, or “El Nini,” who is accused of heading security for the faction of the Sinaloa cartel headed by the sons of founder Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said  Thursday. 

The Mexican National Guard on Wednesday captured Perez Salas. Viewed by U.S. anti-narcotics agents as one of the most ruthless Mexican drug figures, Perez Salas was detained in Culiacan, the Sinaloa cartel’s heartland, and was taken to Mexico City, according to government detention records. 

“Shortly after the apprehension of El Nini, I spoke with Mexican Attorney General [Alejandro] Gertz to thank him for the extraordinary efforts of the Mexican authorities who made the arrest,” Garland said in a statement. 

“We are now seeking El Nini’s swift extradition from Mexico to face justice here in the United States,” the statement said. 

The capture came less than a week after U.S. President Joe Biden met with his Mexican counterpart, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. 

The U.S. State Department has accused Perez Salas of working under Ivan Archivaldo Guzman to lead the “Ninis,” a violent group of security personnel for the Guzman brothers, also known as “Los Chapitos.” 

U.S. courts have indicted Perez Salas on a number of charges in relation to his alleged role at the helm of the Chapitos’ security apparatus, including cocaine and methamphetamine trafficking, conspiracy, possession of machine guns and witness retaliation. 

The State Department had offered up to $3 million for information leading to his arrest. 

In January, Mexican authorities captured Ovidio Guzman in Sinaloa and extradited him to the United States in September. The three other Guzman brothers who are suspected of leading Los Chapitos, including the figurehead, Ivan, remain free. 
…

Human rights organizations and activists in the United States are calling for a congressional hearing in response to violent assaults on Chinese dissidents who protested against Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to the APEC summit in San Francisco November 15-17.

Pro-Xi welcoming groups and anti-Chinese government groups clashed in several locations in San Francisco ahead of and during the APEC summit, resulting in many injuries among anti-Chinese government protesters.

Demonstrators opposing Beijing’s human rights violations and supporting independence for Taiwan were confronted by Xi’s supporters wielding with metal rods, flagpoles, closed umbrellas and pepper spray at San Francisco International Airport, the Moscone Center where the summit was held and the St. Regis Hotel where Xi stayed, among other landmark locations in the city.

Topjor Tsultrim, a member of San Francisco-based Students for a Free Tibet, told VOA that at least 30 Tibetan protesters were assaulted by pro-China groups.

Tsultrim said that on November 17, at the protest site near the airport, three Tibetan college students were beaten by more than 20 Chinese men with metal rods. He said they also broke one of the Tibetans’ phones and threw another phone into a waterway. Two of the Tibetans suffered head and body injuries as well as broken bones and were taken to a hospital by ambulance.

Tsultrim said he was kicked in the chest and thrown to the ground by pro-Xi demonstrators while trying to protect a woman in his group.

Li Delong, a member of the Chinese Democracy Party Los Angeles committee, told VOA, “On November 16, I was assaulted near the Moscone Center. After the police mistakenly pushed me into a group of Xi’s supporters, two pro-Xi people pulled me down, and one of them beat me on my head with a blunt instrument. I passed out for a while and was bleeding on my head.

“It is deeply unsettling that the Chinese Communist Party dares to export violence onto the U.S. soil, openly assaulting those of us who protest against communism,” Li said.

Wang Dan, a student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement and currently a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution, told VOA the organized assaults against Chinese overseas democracy activists should be seen as a serious political event.

“The main instigators behind this violence are pro-China forces within the United States,” Wang said. “We are collecting relevant information and will submit it to Congress and other relevant authorities, urging the U.S. government and Congress to pay high attention to this event.

“Not only the perpetrators but also the political forces behind them should be held accountable.”

Wang said the Chinese Consulate General in San Francisco should be closed immediately if there is evidence that it directed the violence.

“In short, the U.S. government should not tolerate the use of violence by authoritarian forces on its soil,” he said.

Chen Chuangchuang, executive director of the Chinese Democracy Party, told VOA the violence against the demonstrators was possible only because of “long-term infiltration into the U.S.” by the CCP.

Chen believes the San Francisco city government either favored the pro-communist side or was negligent and unprofessional in handling the security and protests during Xi’s visit.

“When the [pro-Xi] greeters caused trouble and beat close to a hundred [anti-Xi] protesters in three days, they never arrested the pro-communist thugs,” he said. “But two self-defenders were arrested and prosecuted. The [anti-Xi] protesters called the police many times but received no intervention from them.”

Tsultrim said the police didn’t help when he and his group were followed and assaulted by a pro-Xi group on November 15.

“We actually have a video of us telling the police that these people had been following us, and the police did nothing to stop them. The police said, ‘OK.’ And we kept walking. But the police allowed these Chinese thugs to keep following us,” he said.

Zhou Fengsuo, executive director of Human Rights in China, a nonprofit based in New York and Hong Kong, said his organization would gather evidence of pro-China groups assaulting people and of selective law enforcement by the police.

He said that evidence would be submitted to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the congressional Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

“I hope they can hold a hearing on this matter,” Zhou said. “We will request further investigations so that the American public can be informed that the Chinese government could organize such large-scale violent assaults overseas, which is intolerable.”

On Monday, VOA went to the San Francisco Police Department to inquire whether anyone supporting Xi had been arrested last week. The police officer at the reception said he had not heard of any such arrests.

Steven Miller, a police officer with the South San Francisco Police Department, told VOA that he knew of only one case in which an anti-Xi protester reported a crime after being beaten.

VOA sent a letter to the San Francisco Police Department’s Office of Media and Public Relations seeking a response to the complaints that police officers ignored violence by Xi’s supporters and requests for help from anti-Xi protesters.

By the time of publication, VOA had not received any response.

Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
…

New York City on Thursday hosted its 97th Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, featuring 48 character and novelty balloons, 26 floats, 12 marching bands and more than 700 clowns. Aron Ranen reports.
…

In most of the United States, November and December are prime time for turkey lovers. The U.S. Poultry and Egg Association says 46 million turkeys are eaten on Thanksgiving, with another 22 million consumed on Christmas.

But in the Southern state of Louisiana, known for its decadence and creative cuisine, turkey has a competitor. For people in and around cities including New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette, it’s turducken that is the talk of the town.

“Turducken is a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey,” said Ellis Lanaux, chief executive officer of Langenstein’s, the oldest full-service grocery store in New Orleans, open since 1922.

“It’s part of this unique culinary culture we have down here,” Lanaux told VOA. “There’s nothing like our food elsewhere in America, and you see that uniqueness on our Thanksgiving table. In addition to mainstream staples like mashed potatoes and green beans, you also find Cajun dishes like chargrilled oysters, oyster dressing, cornbread and crawfish stuffing, mirliton casserole, and — if you’re lucky — a turducken.”

In addition to the trio of birds, dressing (a term in some parts of the U.S. often used interchangeably with stuffing) is added between each layer. Some turducken creators ask shoppers to choose a single dressing, with oyster dressing and cornbread and crawfish dressing among the most popular.

Others, including Hebert’s Specialty Meats, allow as many as three dressings, with alligator, boudin sausage, shrimp etouffee and rice, crawfish jalapeno cornbread, jambalaya, and wild rice and pecan among the many possibilities between layers of poultry.

When sliced, the creation presents almost like a layered French terrine.

“Eating turducken isn’t for the faint of heart, and neither is preparing one,” laughed restaurateur Brenda Prudhomme. “It takes forever. You have to prepare your dressing, you have to get your birds, you have to debone each of them, you have to stuff them and layer the dressings, you have to season them, and then you basically have to become a seamstress and sew them in together. It isn’t easy, but it brings a lot of people joy so we do it!”

Part of a long tradition

Hebert’s Specialty Meats sells thousands of turduckens each year, with spikes at both Thanksgiving and Christmas. At Chris’s Specialty Foods, the Turducken Roll Package is advertised as “enough turducken for a small banquet,” while its Holiday Turducken Feast serves even more.

The words “banquet” and “feast” aren’t accidental: Turducken is part of a larger, and older, tradition known as engastration, a cooking technique in which the remains of one animal are stuffed into another.

“It’s a tradition that reaches back to the Middle Ages, and even has roots in ancient Rome,” said Liz Williams, founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans. “It’s a culinary practice that would show up at feasts for royalty and enjoyed by the wealthy. Compared to what they were stuffing back then, filling a turkey with a duck and a chicken, quite frankly, is chump change.”

The famed Trojan Boar from the Roman Empire, for example, was a 1,000-pound hog stuffed with game birds and other small animals.

The Roti Sans Pareil, or the Roast Without Equal, was a 19th-century dish created by French gastronomist Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reyniere. The creation included an extraordinary 17 stuffed birds: bustard, chicken, duck, garden warbler, goose, guinea fowl, lapwing, lark, ortolan bunting, partridge, pheasant, plover, quail, teal, thrush, turkey and woodcock.

And, still today, the Inuits of Greenland are known to enjoy kiviak, a traditional winter community dish of seal stuffed with as many as 500 birds.

While turducken is far more modest, Lenore Newman, author of Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food, said this Louisiana Thanksgiving feast food likely comes from a similar tradition.

“It’s a dish intended to impress,” she told VOA. “That’s a commonality among dishes using engastration: They are meant to wow.”

Debated origin

Turducken most definitely wows – so much so that there are competing claims to its origin.

Many say it was Paul Prudhomme, who popularized Cajun cuisine on a national stage with his catalog of successful cookbooks and his public television show, “Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Always Cooking!” Prudhomme copyrighted the name in 1986, but others believe it was Hebert’s that created the dish a year earlier.

“A farmer walked into our store carrying a turkey, a duck and a chicken, and they asked our owners to stuff them into each other,” said Scott Catlett, the owner of several Hebert’s locations. “We thought it was a little weird, but we’re always willing to try anything once and thankfully we did!”

Some even credit turducken’s invention to New Orleans surgeon Gerald R. LaNasa. As early as the 1960s, he was locally known to use his scalpel while deboning the three birds before stuffing them — sometimes adding pork or veal roasts, andouille sausage or foie gras into the final hen’s cavity.

“I think it’s usually impossible to pin food down to one inventor because cuisine evolves and people build off of each other’s ideas,” said Williams from the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. “But the fact that there are so many competing popular stories shows just how beloved turducken has become.”

Though the debate over who created the trilogy of birds continues, there is no dispute about when the dish rose to national prominence.

That was in 1997 when American football television announcer John Madden carved into a turducken during a Thanksgiving game hosted by the New Orleans Saints. Turducken became a regular part of his Thanksgiving broadcasts, with Madden handing out turkey legs to that game’s best players.

Despite its popularity, with thousands now shipped annually from Louisiana, not everyone is impressed.

“I call it a medieval pile of poo!” laughed Poppy Tooker, host of a weekly radio show, “Louisiana Eats!” “If you’re hoping for the familiar flavor of a turkey breast, or a rich duck, or a delicious chicken, I’m afraid you’re not going to get any of that because it all gets jumbled together into a mess.”

Still, Tooker acknowledged there is something about turducken that captures the spirit of the region from which it came.

“Louisianians — men and women — aren’t afraid to roll their sleeves up in the kitchen and take on a complicated dish,” she said. “This is definitely one of them. It might not be a recipe that came from your grandmother, but it’s a newer tradition that says something about our culture, for sure. People are wild about it here.”

To find out what side of the turducken debate you fall on — delicious or not — Prudhomme advised in his 1987 “The Prudhomme Family Cookbook” to try making one yourself.

“Each time you do a turducken, it will become easier,” he wrote. “It doesn’t take magical cooking ability; it just takes care. What is magical is the way people who eat it will feel about your cooking.”
…

The Gershkovich family is accustomed to having Thanksgiving without their son, journalist Evan Gershkovich, since he has lived abroad as a reporter for several years. But this year, his absence at the Thanksgiving table weighs particularly heavily because Gershkovich is jailed in a Russian prison.

“Having a Thanksgiving with Evan there would have been a huge treat. But, of course, this Thanksgiving, it’s just hard,” Danielle Gershkovich, Evan’s sister, told VOA. There’s “a literal, physical darkness,” she said.

As millions of people across the United States and the world celebrate Thanksgiving on Thursday, two American journalists — Gershkovich, as well as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Alsu Kurmasheva — are spending the holiday jailed in Russia on charges that are widely viewed as groundless and politically motivated.

“It is shameful these Americans are spending Thanksgiving in a Russian prison, rather than celebrating at home with their families,” Daniel Kanigan, deputy spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, told VOA in a statement.

Gershkovich, a Russia correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, has been detained since March on espionage charges that he, his employer and the U.S. government vehemently deny. The U.S. government has declared Gershkovich wrongfully detained.

Gershkovich’s pretrial detention is set to expire on November 30. Originally set to expire in May, his pretrial detention has already been extended twice. 

Paul Beckett, an assistant editor at The Wall Street Journal who is leading the newspaper’s effort to secure Gershkovich’s release, predicts his colleague’s pretrial detention will be extended for another three-month period.

Alsu Kurmasheva

Meanwhile, Kurmasheva, an editor with the Tatar-Bashkir Service of VOA’s sister outlet RFE/RL, has been detained since mid-October on charges of failing to register as a “foreign agent.” She and her employer reject the “foreign agent” charges, which are often used to target the Kremlin’s critics.

Based in Prague, the dual U.S.-Russian national traveled to Russia in May for a family emergency. Kurmasheva’s passports were confiscated when she tried to leave the country in June, and she was waiting for her passports to be returned when she was detained last month. She will be held in pretrial detention until at least December 5.

Russia’s Washington embassy did not reply to VOA’s email requesting comment.

On a typical Thanksgiving, Kurmasheva joins her family and friends “for a bountiful meal with gratitude for the love and support we’ve experienced throughout the year,” her husband, Pavel Butorin, told VOA in a statement.

“This Thanksgiving, jailed in Russia, Alsu will be receiving prison food through a small window in her cell,” said Butorin, who is the director of Current Time TV, a Russian-language TV and digital network led by RFE/RL in partnership with VOA.

“Alsu is not a criminal. She deserves to be with family and friends on her favorite American holiday, not confined in a prison cell,” Butorin said. “We love her and miss her at our Thanksgiving table.”

Butorin has previously called on the U.S. government to declare Kurmasheva wrongfully detained, which would open additional government resources to help secure her release.

“We are also closely following the detention of Alsu Kurmasheva and remain deeply concerned about the extension of her pretrial detention,” said Kanigan, from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. “The Department of State continuously reviews the circumstances surrounding the detentions of U.S. nationals overseas, including those in Russia, for indicators that they are wrongful.”

In his statement, Kanigan also renewed calls for Russian authorities to immediately release Gershkovich, as well as Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine serving a 16-year sentence for espionage. Like Gershkovich, Whelan has been declared wrongfully detained.

A different Thanksgiving

For the Gershkovich family, Thanksgiving is usually a casual affair, according to Danielle Gershkovich, who said they focus on spending time together as a family, especially when her brother managed to travel home from work for the holiday.

“Especially the more time we were apart from one another in college and Evan being abroad, it was an excuse to have family dinner together,” she said.

Evan is an amazing cook, she said, so he and their dad would “do something extravagant,” Danielle said. “My mom and I got to reap the rewards and clean up after.”

This Thanksgiving, some of Gershkovich’s journalist friends, whom he met while working in Russia, are traveling from Europe to the Gershkovich home in New Jersey to celebrate the holiday together, she said.

Danielle said her family is able to stay in touch with Evan through letters. Their correspondence is full of jokes, she said, adding that she has also taken to giving her brother tarot card readings through their letters in an effort to keep him entertained.

“He’s working really hard to keep himself in good spirits. I’m just so amazed by him,” she said. “I don’t think I could be staying as strong as I am — or my parents either — if it weren’t for seeing him. If he can do it, so can we.”

As part of The Wall Street Journal’s campaign to secure Gershkovich’s release, assistant editor Beckett said the outlet is asking people to save a seat at their Thanksgiving table “to remember Evan and what he is going through in Lefortovo Prison.”

“It’s always tough when you have a colleague in such dire straits. I think it’s going to be more poignant, more immediate and more moving to know that he’s there on a holiday,” Beckett told VOA. “There are no holidays in Russian jail.”
…

Pope Francis has removed a Texas Bishop who was a vocal online critic of Vatican policy. The defrocked prelate says he was teaching the true word of God, especially regarding the LGBTQ community. Deana Mitchell has our story from the Texas capital.
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Every year, on the fourth Thursday in November, Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. It’s a commemoration of the 1621 harvest feast when the colonists, who came from England, shared a friendly meal with the land’s Native people. But how much of the Thanksgiving story is true? VOA’s Dora Mekouar visited Plymouth, Massachusetts, the site of the first Thanksgiving, to separate fact from fiction. Producers: Dora Mekouar, Adam Greenbaum. Camera: Adam Greenbaum.
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Electric vehicle sales are expected to hit a record 9% of all passenger vehicles in the U.S. this year, according to Atlas Public Policy. That will be up from 7.3% of new car sales in 2022.

It will be the first time more than 1 million EVs are sold in the United States in one calendar year, probably reaching between 1.3 million and 1.4 million cars, the research firm predicts.

Although the numbers show significant progress for electrification, the nation is lagging behind countries like China, Germany and Norway.

EVs reached 33% of sales in China, 35% in Germany, and 90% in Norway for the first six months of 2023, according to a BloombergNEF EV outlook published in June. These figures include both battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid EVs.

In those countries, ambitious government zero-emissions targets, vehicle tax incentives and subsidies, and affordable options play a role in a consumer’s decision to adopt a plug-in vehicle.

Several factors helped boost U.S. EV adoption this year, but in a word, prices have gone down.

Tesla, the current EV market leader, dropped the prices for its popular vehicles multiple times throughout the year. This forced other automakers to try to keep up. Car companies are also now offering greater incentives on their electric models, and dealers are discounting more deeply as EV supply builds up at dealerships.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which increased tax credits for qualifying new and used EV purchases, also helped bring EV costs down for buyers, by $3,750 or $7,500, depending on certain requirements.

Electric car battery costs are also falling as critical battery materials like lithium become less expensive, making the vehicles increasingly affordable, too.

But even as U.S. EV market share grows steadily, hurdles still stand in the way for some car buyers considering electric. Early EV buyers were largely higher-income, willing to try unfamiliar technology, and more likely to be able to charge their electric vehicles at home. The auto industry needs to address disparities with these factors as it targets the next wave of EV shoppers.

For many consumers, unreliable and inaccessible public charging infrastructure, as well as the increased upfront cost of going electric, remain barriers, according to BloombergNEF. Last month, new EVs still cost on average $3,826 more than the average new car, going for $51,762 versus $47,936, Kelley Blue Book estimates.

To combat some infrastructure challenges, several major automakers have signed on to Tesla’s charging technology. Tesla has long used the North American Charging Standard for its EV plugs, and it has had the strongest public charging network. The rest of the industry has largely operated on one called CCS, or the Combined Charging System. Incorporating Tesla’s tech will give non-Tesla EV drivers more opportunity to charge elsewhere and alleviate charging concerns. But those changes won’t start to kick in until next year and 2025.

The industry is also grappling with concerns over an EV market slowdown. Some automakers, including Ford Motor Co. and General Motors, are scaling back on their electrification targets.

But at the same time, many non-domestic car companies are amping up their plans. Consumers can expect Chinese EV-makers such as BYD to find their way to the U.S. market in the coming years.

Several U.S. states have set target dates by which they expect vehicle sales to be majority zero-emissions. California and Washington have mandated that 100% of new vehicles sold in the state be zero-emission by 2035, while New Jersey will ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by that same year.
…

President Joe Biden was “personally involved” in the deal to secure the release of about 50 hostages held in Gaza by Hamas, John Kirby, the National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, said in an interview Wednesday.

The release, which has now been pushed back to at least Friday, is to be accompanied by Israel’s release of 150 Palestinian prisoners, a days-long temporary cease-fire and the delivery of more humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Kirby, who spoke to Paris Huang, the VOA Mandarin White House correspondent, also dismissed recent diplomatic efforts by China to broker an end to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Analysts have described the attempt as a bid by Beijing to position itself as a more credible peacemaker in the Middle East than the United States.  

The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

VOA: What was President Biden’s role in the Israel-Hamas hostage deal? 

NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL COORDINATOR FOR STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS JOHN KIRBY: The president was personally involved at the leader level to see if we can get this deal done. In fact, he was speaking to the emir of Qatar just last week while we were in San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. So he was personally engaged and involved. He’s been updated, sometimes multiple times a day, on how things were going with a negotiation. And of course, he directed the entire national security team to work hard on this outcome as well, from the CIA director to the secretary of state and national security adviser. … And of course, special envoy on the ground David Satterfield was pivotal, as was our coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk. So it really was a team effort. 

VOA: A delegation of Arab and Muslim countries had a meeting on Gaza in Beijing this Monday. Do you believe that meeting could be constructive, and did President Xi promise to help on this issue when he met with President Biden last week? 

KIRBY: I’ll let President Xi speak for himself on what he will or won’t do. The president did raise the issue of what’s going on in the Middle East with President Xi and we certainly urge President Xi to use his influence in Tehran to make sure that we were communicating to the supreme leader how seriously we take what’s going on and that we don’t want to see this war widen or escalate. And of course, Tehran can have a role in that or not. And so that was certainly a message to President Xi. But China has interest in the region too. Our strong desire would be that they would use their influence in the region to that larger effect. 

VOA: The delegation, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Indonesia, plans to also travel to Washington. What would be your message? 

KIRBY: I’m not going to get ahead of a discussion that hasn’t happened. I think you can expect that our message will be the same as it has been; that that we want to continue to work with our partners in the region and many of these partners have been enormously helpful so far. Jordan, Egypt, certainly, in their communications with Hamas helped broker this deal. They have all been helpful in their own way. And I think what you can see us continue to do in our discussions with them is talk about ways in which they can be more helpful going forward. 

There are so many countries that have an interest in what’s going on in the region writ large, and certainly have an interest in what’s going on between Israel and Hamas. Every nation is a sovereign state. They can all speak for themselves on how they want to pursue their interests.  

What we want to make sure is a few things: Number one, that Israel has the tools and capabilities it needs to go after this very viable threat by Hamas, an existential threat to Israel. Number two, that all of us with interest in the region and obviously people that live in the region, do whatever we can to continue to help the people of Gaza through humanitarian assistance, medical assistance, food, water, medicine and fuel. The United States is leading the world in trying to get that kind of humanitarian assistance in and we’re certainly going to be looking for additional contributions that can be made by our partners who actually live in the neighborhood. 

VOA: Are you concerned that China might gain a better hand dealing with Arab and Muslim countries right now? 

KIRBY: We’re comfortable with our relationships. We’re comfortable with American leadership in the region. We’re comfortable that we have the ability to work through partners in the region to achieve outcomes and results that are beneficial to all of us. So I’ll let China speak for themselves. President Biden is comfortable with our leadership on the world stage and particularly there in the region. 

VOA: There’s an open letter signed by the international aid organization overseeing the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza accusing President Biden of destroying international rules [that civilians and hospitals should be protected] and hurting humanitarian values in his support of Israel. What is your response? 

KIRBY: President Biden has made it clear that we’re going to continue to support Israel as they conduct these operations against Hamas. They have a right and a responsibility to do it. No nation should have to suffer the attacks that they suffered on Oct. 7, and we’re going to continue to stand with Israel, and we’re going to do so in a steadfast way.

At the same time, we’re going to continue to urge Israel to be as careful and deliberate and cautious in their targeting and in their operations as possible so that an impact on civilian life can be minimized, civilian casualties can be reduced. Obviously, many, many thousands of innocent people in Gaza have been killed as a result of this conflict. And certainly, we don’t want to see any more killed. We don’t want to see any more wounded, and we’ll continue to work with Israel to that effect. 

But I also think it’s important to remember who’s putting these people in harm’s way and that’s Hamas. Hamas started this on the seventh of October by slaughtering innocent Israelis, some of them in their homes, some of them in front of their kids, and then they go back to Gaza. And what do they do? They hide in tunnels, they hide in hospitals. They put innocent people of Gaza in the crossfire between the Israel Defense Forces and themselves. That itself is a war crime. That itself is a violation of international law. That’s abominable. And that’s the kind of threat that the Israelis are facing. 

VOA: You mentioned the administration hopes President Xi will use his influence on Iran. At this moment, do you believe that Iran is still heeding U.S.’s message to not widen the war in Gaza? 

KIRBY: We haven’t turned a blind eye to Iran’s destabilizing behavior and the support that they have given to Hezbollah, the support that they’ve given to Hamas, the support that they give to the Houthis in Yemen, the attacks on maritime shipping, I could go on and on and on. The support that they’re given Mr. Putin in Ukraine. We haven’t turned a blind eye to any of that. And our message to Iran today is the same as it was yesterday, the day before that. This is not the time to be thinking about escalating or widening or deepening this conflict. Now, again, we haven’t seen any actor in the region jump all in with both feet and try to do that. Our message to anybody thinking about that, including Iran: Don’t do it. 

 
…

The White House is dismissing China’s recent diplomatic engagement in the Israel-Hamas conflict, part of Beijing’s attempt to position itself as a more credible peacemaker in the Middle East than the U.S.

“We’re comfortable with our relationships. We’re comfortable with American leadership in the region. We’re comfortable that we have the ability to work through partners in the region to achieve outcomes and results that are beneficial to all of us,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said in an interview with VOA Wednesday.

Chinese top diplomat Wang Yi has been stepping up peacemaking efforts in Gaza, meeting with Arab and Muslim officials Monday and calling for an immediate cease-fire and more humanitarian aid for Gaza.

The Beijing meeting is the first leg of a tour to the capitals of permanent members of the United Nations Security Council by a delegation of ministers from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, Indonesia and Nigeria.

The so-called Peace Committee, appointed during the Nov. 11 Joint Arab-Islamic Extraordinary Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, held subsequent meetings in London and Moscow this week, with further travel planned to Paris and Washington.

Wang told the foreign officials that the decision to start their tour in Beijing is evidence of the high level of trust in his nation. The meeting saw Arab officials praising China’s stance and disparaging Washington’s.

In comments posted by his ministry on X, formerly known as Twitter, Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry told Wang, “We look forward to a stronger role on the part of great powers such as China in order to stop the attacks against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Unfortunately, there are major countries that give cover to the current Israeli attacks.”

China’s stance on Gaza war

Within days of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, China launched a diplomatic blitz, positioning itself as a “friend to both Israel and Palestine” and urging for a cease-fire.

Beijing has called for an “international peace conference,” promising “impartial conciliation and mediation” and contrasting its position to U.S. full-throated support of Israel’s right to defend itself.

China has repeatedly shown its support of the Palestinian cause on international forums, including during Tuesday’s virtual meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) bloc of developing nations.

“The root cause of the Palestinian-Israeli situation is the fact that the right of the Palestinian people to statehood, their right to existence and their right of return have long been ignored,” said Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Xi is capitalizing on the opportunity to improve ties with the Arab and Muslim world, said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center.

“Yes, there’s an element of conflict resolution. But at this point, it seems a resolution is very unlikely to transpire,” she told VOA. “I think the Chinese priority is basically to use this opportunity to consolidate and strengthen relationships.”

Beijing has high stakes in the Middle East related to its economic and energy security. As a key trading partner for Middle East countries and the largest consumer of Saudi oil — and as it has rapidly boosted its oil purchase from Iran in recent years— China has every reason to ensure regional stability and stop the war in Gaza from broadening.

Beijing, however, also has an interest in undermining Washington, its strategic rival, said Jonathan Rynhold, head of the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University. By calling for a cease-fire, Rynhold told VOA, Beijing can be “both against American policy and trying to stop the spread of the conflict that could threaten their interests.”

And unlike Washington, Beijing does not describe Hamas attacks as terrorism and maintains that Israeli retaliation has gone beyond the acceptable under international humanitarian law — a position shared by many countries in the Global South, including Indonesia, home to 13% of the world’s Muslims.

No Chinese security investment

Under Xi, China has pushed its image as an international mediator in the Middle East, securing a normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran earlier this year.

“In terms of political and diplomatic engagement, China is catching up quite rapidly,” Yun said.

As China pitches itself as an alternative to the U.S.-led political and security order, however, it has not increased its security investments in the region.

“You can see how hollow Chinese power is in that they can’t guarantee stability themselves,” Rynhold said, adding that Beijing has “very little leverage” beyond the pressure it can exert on Tehran to refrain from broadening the conflict.

China was not involved in the Tuesday deal to secure a dayslong temporary cease-fire to allow for the release of around 50 hostages held by Hamas in return for 150 Palestinian prisoners and ensure more aid into Gaza.

By contrast, U.S. President Joe Biden was “personally involved,” Kirby said. On Wednesday, Biden spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to welcome the deal, and he thanked the leaders of Qatar and Egypt for their roles in reaching the agreement.

In a statement Tuesday, Netanyahu said he had personally asked Biden to join and “improve” the mediation effort.

“Indeed, it has been improved to include more hostages and at a lower cost,” he said.

Kirby told VOA Wednesday the U.S. has been actively engaged with countries in the Middle East, leading efforts to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance and urging Israel to restore access to water and electricity in Gaza.

“The president was able to broker a deal to enable the Rafah crossing to reopen. Israel began allowing fuel into Gaza for NGOs at our strong request,” Kirby said.

Despite his efforts in increasing humanitarian aid for Gazans, Biden is losing ground with voters of his own party on his handling of the Israel-Hamas war, hitting the lowest approval rating of his presidency.

According to a new NBC News poll, 41% of Democrats disapprove of Biden’s handling of the conflict.

The survey also found that 51% of Democrats and 42% of young voters believe Israel has gone too far in its military operations.

Paris Huang contributed to this report.
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U.S. President Joe Biden congratulated Argentine president-elect Javier Milei in a call on Wednesday, the White House said, three days after the libertarian outsider’s resounding election victory in South America’s second biggest economy.

“President Biden spoke with President-elect of Argentina Javier Milei to congratulate him and discuss the importance of continuing to build on our strong bilateral relationship,” a White House statement said.

Milei, a 53-year-old economist who has vowed to scrap multiple government departments and sometimes campaigned by waving a chainsaw from the stage, trounced Argentina’s long-dominant Peronist coalition on Sunday.

Voters punished the government for decades of economic decline, with annual inflation currently at 143%.

Milei has vowed to ditch the peso for the U.S. dollar and shut down the central bank — which he accused of rampant money printing to finance government overspending — in a bid to halt inflation.

During his campaign he said he would slash state spending and ditch about 10 government ministries, among other controversial proposals.

He later toned down some of his rhetoric, leaving uncertainty over his actual plans.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had congratulated Milei in a statement on Sunday, adding that the United States also applauded “the robust democratic process through which the Argentine public has spoken.”
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From headlines taken out of context to the framing of fringe figures as representative of wider American views, Russian state-run outlets are cherry-picking U.S. content to back up Kremlin narratives.

And it comes with results. Headlines such as “Biden accused of concealing extent of corruption in Ukraine” and “US highlights NATO inability to withstand Russia for extended period” regularly propel state-run stories into the top five spots on Russian search engines, with a potential reach of millions of views.

Americans regularly cited by Russian media include former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, Republican Representative James Comer, and members of “The Squad,” a group of Democrats who push more leftist ideals in Congress.

Extremes of the political spectrum are wrapped into Russian disinformation efforts to both amplify issues and lend an air of legitimacy to anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian narratives, said Nina Jankowicz, vice president of the Centre for Information Resilience and a former disinformation chief under the Biden administration.

“We see Russia identifying individuals on the left or right of the political spectrum who might already be critics of NATO, critics of Ukraine,” Jankowicz told VOA.

That strategy is employed by Vladimir Soloviev, a Russian TV presenter whose Telegram channel has more than a million subscribers. Soloviev gained notoriety by advocating for the invasion of Ukraine, actively supporting President Vladimir Putin and promoting the idea of nuclear warfare against the West.

To reinforce those views, he regularly references Carlson. A search by VOA for Carlson references on the Telegram account between June 2020 and November 2023 returned more than 230 instances. The number of references spiked following the full-scale invasion.

The key narratives of Carlson selected by Soloviev and Russian propaganda channels include the conservative pundit’s false claims that Christians in Ukraine are persecuted, that America’s white population is oppressed and Tucker’s characterization of some U.S. media coverage of Ukraine as lies.

Other outlets take fringe commentators most Americans are unlikely to have heard and present them as having a wider influence.

These are often used to reinforce Russia’s narrative of a “declining” West, with state-run media citing figures such as Jackson Hinkle and Jack Posobiec, who are largely unknown in the United States but are favored among the far right and in conspiracy circles on X, formerly Twitter.

RIA Novosti, for instance, highlighted Posobiec’s mocking comment about Kyiv’s interest in Abrams tanks, presenting it as a view from a respected veteran and combining it with a quote from Putin emphasizing Moscow’s purported aim to end, not escalate, the conflict.

Similarly, Russian news outlet Lenta.Ru used a headline quoting Hinkle’s suggestion that the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ counteroffensive be labeled as a suicide mission.

And Soloviev frequently references both Americans in his Telegram channel, portraying them as influential bloggers, talk show hosts, or renowned U.S. journalists.

The approach helps Russia create the appearance of more significant support for opinions that — according to analysts who spoke with VOA — are better characterized as fringe views.

And it can lead regular Russians to believe the views are more representative of how most Americans think, Jankowicz said.

Outlets such as Breitbart and Fox News on the right and The Grayzone on the left are also used by Russian state media, with stories circulating between the Russian and U.S. organizations, she said.

Jankowicz said that while she was in her role on the U.S. Disinformation Governance Board, American right-wing media outlets falsely characterized the board’s role as being to censor Americans.

“This was absolutely not true, and within a couple of days after that, we saw [the same report] on Russian Channel One with the same quotes, the same pictures, the same narratives overarching,” Jankowicz said.

The disinformation governance board — formed by the U.S. Homeland Security Department to counter misinformation — was disbanded after only a few weeks.

Featuring statements from American figures and media outlets lends a sense of credibility, she said.

“Showing these extreme viewpoints also hammers home the ideas about Ukraine or about U.S. foreign policy that the Kremlin wants its audiences to believe,” Jankowicz said.

Dominik Stecula, an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University who focuses on political polarization, has seen similar trends. Stecula said the commentator Carlson has repeated Russian propaganda narratives on his TV show.

But Carlson’s departure from Fox in April, along with a shift in media attention to other news stories such as the Israeli-Hamas conflict, slightly changed the U.S. media landscape on the right, Stecula said. “Whoever is filling in his shoes hasn’t really spent as much time on this topic at all. The general focus on Ukraine dissipated.”

Another aspect that unites some far-left and far-right political actors is populism, Stecula said. “They were repeating some of the Russian propaganda about Ukraine, about politicians in Ukraine, like President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy.”

The academic said that far-right actors in the U.S. root their narratives primarily in the idea of America-first nationalism, while those on the far left see it “through the lens of American imperialism wielded through the power of NATO.”

Overall, Carlson, Elon Musk and niche bloggers such as Hinkle and Posobiec have significant influence within their respective ideological echo chambers, Stecula said.

At the same time, members of “The Squad” — U.S. Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — have substantial influence within the Democratic Party, while not wholly representing the party’s mainstream, Stecula said.

“They’re not just your average social media influencer,” Stecula said. “These are people with significant platforms and actual positions of power. Which is why it was disappointing to see some of their behavior during the initial months of the Russian invasion and Ukraine, when they were taking stands aligned with some of right-wing Republicans.”

What the Russian invasion of Ukraine really highlighted, the academic noted, is that populism and a rejection of the mainstream have significantly united those on America’s far left and far right.

Jankowicz said that while a certain percentage of Americans may share the views of some of these people, the reality is that opinion is far more varied.

“And so, I think showing these extreme viewpoints also hammers home the ideas about Ukraine or about U.S. foreign policy that the Kremlin wants its audiences to believe,” she said.

This article originated in VOA’s Russian Service.
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All four bridges at the U.S. border with Canada in western New York were closed Wednesday afternoon after authorities reported that a “vehicle explosion” had occurred on the Rainbow Bridge near Niagara Falls.

With uncertainty surrounding the incident near the world-renowned waterfalls, officials took the precaution of also closing the Peace Bridge, Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, Whirlpool Bridge, with traffic lanes blocked both into and out of the U.S. and Canada.

Local police and the top U.S. criminal investigative agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, immediately opened an investigation into the explosion on the Rainbow Bridge, which is within sight of the much-visited Niagara Falls.

The explosion occurred on one of the busiest travel days in the U.S., the day before the annual Thanksgiving holiday when many families were driving and flying to visit relatives and friends.
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An alleged plot by Indian government agents to assassinate a Sikh separatist on American soil is a serious issue that Washington has raised with New Delhi, U.S. officials confirmed on Wednesday.

“We are treating this issue with utmost seriousness, and the U.S. government has raised it with the Indian government, including at the senior-most levels. Indian counterparts expressed surprise and concern. They stated that activity of this nature was not their policy,” White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson told VOA News.

“Based on discussion with senior U.S. government officials, we understand the Indian government is further investigating this issue and will have more to say about it in the coming days. We have conveyed our expectation that anyone deemed responsible should be held accountable,” Watson said.

U.S. authorities thwarted the conspiracy and issued a warning to India’s government over concerns it was involved in the plot, the Financial Times reported earlier Tuesday.

The general counsel of Sikhs for Justice, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, who is a citizen of the United States and Canada, was the target, according to the newspaper.

Sikh separatist movement

Pannun’s group is part of a movement that, for decades, has been advocating an independent Sikh state in India to be called Khalistan. India’s government frequently has accused such separatists of being terrorists.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs has yet to comment publicly about the alleged plot to kill Pannun. It has previously denied any government involvement in the killing this past June of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar near the western Canadian city of Vancouver.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, three months after the fatal shooting, said there were “credible allegations” linking the Indian government to Nijjar’s death. India’s government called that “absurd.”

U.S. federal prosecutors have filed a sealed indictment in a New York district court against at least one alleged perpetrator of the plot against Pannun, according to the Financial Times.

Pannun, earlier this month, issued a video warning to Sikhs, a religious minority in India, not to fly on Air India because that would be “life-threatening.” He has denied it was a violent threat against the airline.

Sikh militants are blamed for the 1985 bombing of an Air India jetliner. Flight 192, which had departed Montreal for India, via London, disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 329 people on board. It was the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history.

Pannun told the newspaper he would let American officials respond regarding specifics of the plot against him.

“The threat to an American citizen on American soil is a challenge to America’s sovereignty, and I trust the Biden administration is more than capable to handle any such challenges,” said Pannun.

Past accusations

India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, has planned assassinations targeting Sikh and Kashmiri activists living in foreign countries, according to The Intercept, citing what the online nonprofit news site said were secret Pakistani intelligence assessments that had been leaked to it.

Pakistan has previously made public allegations that RAW was involved in bombings and targeted killings inside India, including attacks on Chinese nationals working in the country.

India regularly accuses Pakistan of supporting armed attacks inside Indian-administered Kashmir. The region has been the subject of a territorial dispute between the two nuclear-armed neighbors going back to 1947, when the subcontinent was partitioned by the departing British colonialists. 
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The United States and the Philippines were conducting joint air and maritime patrols in the South China Sea, which come as the two countries step up cooperation in the face of growingly aggressive Chinese activity in the area.

The Philippine Air Force said on Wednesday its aircraft had taken part in joint patrols on Tuesday in the vicinity of Batanes, the northernmost province of the Philippines, which is only about 200 kilometers from Taiwan, a self-governed island that China claims as its own.

The patrols run through Thursday and include both the U.S. and Philippine navies.

They come only days after Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. called the situation in the South China Sea increasingly “dire” as China seeks to assert its presence in an area where multiple nations have competing territorial claims.

China claims virtually the entire South China Sea as its own waters, which has led to disputes not only with the Philippines but also with Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei, which have long been regarded as potential flashpoints in the region and the U.S.-China rivalry.

Earlier this month a Chinese coast guard ship blasted a Philippine supply ship with a water cannon in disputed waters, and last month a Chinese coast guard ship and an accompanying vessel rammed a Philippine coast guard ship and a military-run supply boat near a contested shoal, according to Philippine officials.

Speaking on Sunday in Honolulu, Marcos said China has been showing interest in atolls and shoals that are “closer and closer” to the coast of the Philippines, with the nearest atoll about 111 kilometers away.

In announcing the start of the joint patrols, Marcos said on X, the social media platform originally known as Twitter, that they were “testament to our commitment to bolster the interoperability of our military forces.”

“Through collaborative efforts, we aim to enhance regional security and foster a seamless partnership with the United States in safeguarding our shared interests,” he wrote.

Under Marcos, who was elected last year, the Philippines has been deepening its relationship with the U.S. in a shift from his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, who had been closer to China and Russia.

In February, Marcos approved an expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Philippines to add four new bases from five existing sites under a 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement between the longtime treaty allies.

The move, which Marcos said would boost the Philippines’ coastal defense, dovetails with the Biden administration’s efforts to strengthen an arc of military alliances in the Indo-Pacific to better counter China.

Marcos has also been strengthening ties with others, including Tokyo, signing an agreement earlier in the year to allow Japanese troops to join training exercises.

 
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