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The climactic end of a seven-year voyage comes Sunday when a NASA capsule is to land in the Utah desert, carrying to Earth the largest asteroid samples ever collected.

Scientists have high hopes for the sample, saying it will provide a better understanding of the formation of our solar system and how Earth became habitable.

The Osiris-Rex probe’s final, fiery descent through Earth’s atmosphere will be perilous, but the U.S. space agency is hoping for a soft landing, around 9 a.m. local (15H00 GMT), in a military test range in northwestern Utah.

Four years after its 2016 launch, the probe landed on the asteroid Bennu and collected roughly nine ounces (250 grams) of dust from its rocky surface.

Even that small amount, NASA says, should “help us better understand the types of asteroids that could threaten Earth” and cast light “on the earliest history of our solar system,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said.

“This sample return is really historic,” NASA scientist Amy Simon told AFP. “This is going to be the biggest sample we’ve brought back since the Apollo moon rocks” were returned to Earth.

But the capsule’s return will require “a dangerous maneuver,” she acknowledged.

Osiris-Rex is set to release the capsule — from an altitude of more than 108,000 kilometers — about four hours before it lands.

The fiery passage through the atmosphere will come in the last 13 minutes, as the capsule hurtles downward at a speed of more than 43,453 kph, with temperatures of up to 2,760 Celsius.

Its rapid descent, monitored by army sensors, will be slowed by two successive parachutes. Should they fail to deploy correctly, a “hard landing” would follow.

If it appears that the target zone 60 by 15 kilometers might be missed, NASA controllers could decide at the last moment not to release the capsule.

The probe would then keep its cargo and make another orbit of the sun. Scientists would have to wait until 2025 before trying a new landing.

If it succeeds, however, Osiris-Rex would head toward a date with another asteroid.

Once the tire-sized capsule touches down in Utah, a team in protective masks and gloves will place it in a net to be airlifted by helicopter to a temporary “clean room” nearby.

NASA wants this done as quickly and carefully as possible to avoid any contamination of the sample with desert sands, skewing test results.

On Monday, assuming all goes well, the sample will be flown by plane to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. There, the box will be opened in another “clean room,” the beginning of a days-long process.

NASA plans to announce its first results at a news conference on Oct. 11.

Most of the sample will be conserved for study by future generations. Roughly one-fourth of it will be immediately used in experiments, and a small amount will be sent to Japan and Canada, partners in the mission.

Japan had earlier given NASA a few grains from the asteroid Ryugu, after bringing 5.6 grams of dust to Earth in 2020 during the Hayabusa-2 mission. Ten years before, it had brought back a microscopic quantity from another asteroid.

But the sample from Bennu is much larger, allowing for significantly more testing, Simon said.

Asteroids are composed of the original materials of the solar system, dating to some 4.5 billion years ago, and have remained relatively intact.

They “can give us clues about how the solar system formed and evolved,” said Osiris-Rex program executive Melissa Morris.

“It’s our own origin story,” she said.

By striking Earth’s surface, “we do believe asteroids and comets delivered organic material, potentially water, that helped life flourish here on Earth,” Simon said.

Scientists believe Bennu, which is 500 meters in diameter, is rich in carbon — a building block of life on Earth — and contains water molecules locked in minerals.

Bennu had surprised scientists in 2020 when the probe, during the few seconds of contact with the asteroid’s surface, had sunk into the soil, revealing an unexpectedly low density, sort of like a children’s pool filled with plastic balls.

Understanding its composition could come in handy in the distant future.

There is a slight, but non-zero, chance (one in 2,700) that Bennu could collide catastrophically with Earth, though not until 2182.

But NASA last year succeeded in deviating the course of an asteroid by crashing a probe into it in a test, and it might at some point need to repeat that exercise, but with much higher stakes. 
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The surge of migrants crossing the U.S. border from Mexico has pushed the city of El Paso, Texas, to “a breaking point,” with more than 2,000 people per day seeking asylum, exceeding shelter capacity and straining resources, its mayor said Saturday.

“The city of El Paso only has so many resources and we have come to … a breaking point right now,” Mayor Oscar Leeser said.

The crush of largely Venezuelan asylum-seekers is part of a larger swell of immigrants who traveled dangerous routes on buses and cargo trains to Mexican border towns near San Diego, California, and the Texas cities of El Paso and Eagle Pass.

Migrant numbers had plummeted in recent months, and the recent dramatic increase has generated a new wave of political attacks on U.S. President Joe Biden heading into the 2024 election.

Lesser told a news conference that El Paso plans to open a new shelter, and on Saturday chartered five buses to take migrants to New York, Chicago and Denver.

Republican governors in Texas and Florida have been criticized for sending migrants to cities perceived as liberal such as New York and Sacramento. But Leeser, a Democrat, said all of the migrants on the El Paso buses were going voluntarily to the cities of their choice.

Leeser said the Biden had been a good partner. But he said the overall U.S. immigration system was broken.

Many migrants from Venezuela, he said, lacked transportation to their desired destinations, while El Paso’s current shelter houses only 400 people, and must also be available to help the homeless.

As recently as six weeks ago, about 350-400 people were crossing into El Paso per day, but the past few days have brought 2,000 or more.

Over the past 10 days, the city has worked with the U.S. Border Patrol to provide shelter for 6,500 people, he said.

About two-thirds of those crossing into El Paso recently are single men, he said. About 32% are families and 2% are unaccompanied children.

“I think it’s really important to note that we have a broken immigration system,” he said. “It’s the same thing over and over again.”
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Even after escalating its strike against Detroit automakers on Friday, the United Auto Workers union still has plenty of leverage in its effort to force the companies to agree to significant increases in pay and benefits. 

Only about 12% of the union’s membership is so far taking part in the walkout. The UAW could, if it chose to, vastly expand the number of workers who could strike assembly plants and parts facilities of General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, the owner of the Jeep and Ram brands. 

Yet the UAW’s emerging strategy also carries risks for the union. By expanding its strike from three large auto assembly plants to all 38 parts distribution centers of GM and Ford, the UAW risks angering people who might be unable to have their vehicles repaired at service centers that lack parts. 

The union’s thinking appears to be that, by striking both vehicle production and parts facilities, it will force automakers to negotiate a relatively quick end to the strike, now in its second week. To do so, though, some analysts say the union might have to act even more aggressively. 

“We believe the next step for UAW is the more nuclear option — going for a much more widespread strike on the core plants in and around Detroit,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. “That would be a torpedo.” 

Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at the consulting firm Guidehouse Insights, suggested that with so many workers and factories still running, the union has a number of options with which to squeeze the companies harder. 

“They could add more assembly plants to the list,” Abuelsamid said. “They could target more of the plants that are building the most profitable vehicles.” 

As examples, he mentioned a plant in Flint, Michigan, where GM builds heavy-duty pickups, and a Stellantis factory in Sterling Heights, Michigan, that produces Ram trucks. 

All three companies said that talks with the union continued on Saturday, though officials said they expected no major announcements. 

Workers in Canada vote

In Canada on Saturday, Ford workers began voting on a tentative agreement that their union said would increase base pay by 15% over three years and provide cost-of-living increases and $10,000 ratification bonuses. The tentative deal was forged earlier this week, hours before a strike deadline. 

The union, Unifor, said the deal, which covers 5,600 workers, also includes better retirement benefits. If the deal is ratified in voting that will end Sunday morning, the union will use it as a pattern for new contracts at GM and Stellantis plants in Canada. 

UAW tries to increase pressure

In the United States, the UAW began its walkout more than a week ago by striking three assembly plants — one each at GM, Ford and Stellantis. In expanding the strike on Friday, the UAW struck only the parts-distribution centers of GM and Stellantis. Ford was spared from the latest walkouts because of progress that company has made in negotiations with the union, said UAW President Shawn Fain. 

Striking the parts centers is designed to turn up pressure on the companies by hurting dealers who service vehicles made by GM and Stellantis, the successor to Fiat Chrysler. Service shops are a profit center for dealers, so the strategy could prove effective. Millions of motorists depend on those shops to maintain and repair their cars and trucks. 

“It severely hits the dealerships, and it hurts the customers who purchased those very expensive vehicles in good faith,” said Art Wheaton, a labor expert at Cornell University. “You just told all your customers, ‘Hey we can’t fix those $50,000 to $70,000 cars we just sold you because we can’t get you the parts.'” 

Unionn keeps companies guessing

The union has declined to discuss its strike strategy publicly. Fain has said repeatedly that a critical part of its plan is to keep the companies guessing about the UAW’s next move. Indeed, the union has shown unusual discipline in sticking to its talking points. 

On a picket line Friday, Fain was asked whether striking against the spare-parts centers would hurt — and potentially alienate — consumers. 

“What has hurt the consumers in the long run is the fact the companies have raised prices on vehicles 35% in the last four years,” he shot back. “It’s not because of our wages. Our wages went up 6%, the CEO pay went up 40%.” 

Selling parts and performing service is highly profitable for car dealers. AutoNation reported a gross profit margin of 46% from service shops at its dealerships last year. The problem for the companies is that dealerships and other repair shops typically have lean inventories and depend on receiving parts quickly from the manufacturers’ warehouses. 

Mike Stanton, president of the National Automobile Dealers Association, said his members want to avoid anything that would impair customer service, “so we certainly hope automakers and the UAW can reach an agreement quickly and amicably.” 

To make up for the loss of striking workers, the automakers are weighing their options, including staffing the parts warehouses with salaried workers. 

“We have contingency plans for various scenarios and are prepared to do what is best for our business and customers,” said David Barnas, a GM spokesman. “We are evaluating if and when to enact those plans.” 

Similarly, Jodi Tinson, a Stellantis spokeswoman, said, “We have a contingency plan in place to ensure we are fulfilling our commitments to our dealers and our customers.” She declined to provide additional details. 

In negotiating with the companies, the union is pointing to the carmakers’ huge recent profits and high CEO pay as it seeks wage increases of about 36% over four years. The companies have offered a bit more than half that amount. 

The companies have said they cannot afford to meet the union’s demands because they need to invest profits in a costly transition from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles. They have dismissed out of hand some of the demands, including 40 hours’ pay for a 32-hour work week. 
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Editor’s note: Here is a look at immigration-related news around the U.S. this week. Questions? Tips? Comments? Email the VOA immigration team: ImmigrationUnit@voanews.com.

Texas City Sees Jump in Irregular Migrant Crossings

U.S. immigration authorities reported a significant uptick in unauthorized border crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border Thursday, particularly in areas such as Eagle Pass, Texas, where the mayor has issued a state of emergency. U.S. Border Patrol officers apprehended about 9,000 migrants along the entire border in a 24-hour period, according to media reports on Wednesday. VOA asked the Border Patrol to confirm the number of apprehensions, but an official, who spoke on background, said they were waiting to release monthly migrant encounter numbers. VOA’s immigration reporter Aline Barros has the story.

New York Mayor Urges UN Leaders to Act on Migration Crisis

New York City is hosting world leaders at the United Nations this week. But it is also facing a crisis because border states such as Texas are sending hundreds of migrants to the city each day. Jorge Agobian has the story in this report narrated by Aline Barros.

Biden Grants Protection to Hundreds of Thousands of Venezuelans

The Biden administration said Wednesday that it was granting temporary legal status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who are already in the country as it grapples with growing numbers of people fleeing the South American country and elsewhere to arrive at the U.S. border with Mexico. The Associated Press reports. Watch the VOA60 American story.

VOA in Photos:

Migrants seeking asylum in the United States cross a razor-wire fence near a border wall on the banks of the Rio Bravo, as it’s known in Mexico, on the border between the U.S. and Mexico, as seen from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Sept. 18, 2023.

Immigration around the world

VOA60 Africa – UNHCR said over 1,200 children have died in Sudanese refugee camps since May

More than 1,200 children have died in refugee camps since May, while thousands of newborns are likely to die across the war-torn country by year’s end, the United Nations said Tuesday.

Rights Groups, Refugees Wary of Thailand’s New Asylum Program

Days before Thailand launches a new protection program for foreign asylum-seekers, rights groups and refugees are expressing concern that many worthy hopefuls will be turned down or feel too frightened of arrest and deportation to even apply. Story by Zsombor Peter.

Migrants Burst Into Southern Mexico Asylum Office Demanding Papers

Migrants, mostly from Haiti, burst into an asylum office in southern Mexico on Monday, demanding papers. Throngs of migrants knocked over metal barricades and rushed into the office in the city of Tapachula, pushing past National Guard officers and police stationed at the office. Some of the migrants were trampled in the rush.

Italy Toughens Asylum Laws Amid Surge in Migrant Arrivals

Italy’s government Monday passed measures to build new migrant detention centers and allow for the rapid deportation of failed asylum-seekers. Italy is facing another surge in migrant arrivals on the small island of Lampedusa. Henry Ridgwell reports from London.

Protesters Urge Compassion for Migrants Left in Limbo in Australia

Campaigners are urging Australia to allow thousands of migrants whose asylum claims were rejected under a controversial policy to stay. A weeklong protest starts Monday outside the offices of Australian Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil over the cases of up to 12,000 asylum-seekers who have spent more than a decade on temporary bridging visas but face the threat of deportation. Produced by Phil Mercer.

European Leaders Visit Lampedusa

European Union Commission President Ursula von de Leyen and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni toured a migrant center Sunday on the small Italian island of Lampedusa. The center was recently overwhelmed with almost 7,000 migrants in a 24-hour period, a total that is nearly equivalent to the number of people who live on the island. VOA News reports.

News brief

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced the extension and redesignation of Afghanistan for temporary protected status for 18 months, from November 21 to May 20, 2025, because of  continuing armed conflict and extraordinary and temporary conditions in Afghanistan that prevent individuals from safely returning.
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Here are some of the Native American-related stories making headlines this week:

Lawmakers seek to combat child abuse, neglect and family violence 

The U.S. House of Representatives this week passed the Native American Child Protection Act to help Native American communities respond to and head off family violence and child abuse.

Introduced by Representative Ruben Gallego, the Native American Child Protection Act revises programs that were originally established in 1990 and passed as part of then-Senator John McCain’s Indian Child Protection and Family Violence Prevention Act.

Its provisions are aimed at helping tribes develop programs to identify, investigate and prosecute cases of child abuse, child neglect and family violence.

“For too long, Congress has failed to uphold its promise to address the disproportionate levels of child abuse in tribal communities,” said Gallego, former chairman of the House Subcommittee on Indigenous Peoples of the U.S. “My bipartisan Native American Child Protection Act corrects that by providing tribes the resources they need to prevent, prosecute, and treat instances of family violence and child abuse.” 

The bill now passes to the Senate for consideration.

BIA’s Missing and Murdered Unit steps in where law enforcement has failed 

Agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Missing and Murdered Unit are reexamining the case of Kaysera Stops Pretty Places, who went missing on August 24, 2019, in a suburban neighborhood of Hardin, Montana, less than 0.8 kilometers from the Crow Reservation boundary. 

Law enforcement found her body five days after she disappeared but did not notify her family until September 11. Since then, the family says it has not heard from the Big Horn County Sheriff’s office, the FBI or the Montana Justice Department about investigations into her death.

The BIA unit was formed in 2021 by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and has received 845 case referrals, primarily from victims’ families. Nearly 375 cases are still under review or being investigated.  

Read more:

White House to boost restoration of Columbia River Basin salmon

The Biden-Harris administration this week announced a historic agreement with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, and the Spokane Tribe of Indians to reintroduce salmon into blocked habitats of the Upper Columbia River Basin.

Salmon were once abundant in the upper Columbia, Sanpoil, and Spokane rivers but disappeared after their habitats were blocked by the construction of hydroelectric dams in the 20th century.

As a result, tribal communities have had to change their traditional diets and traditional ways of life, and this in turn has changed the way they once taught and raised children in the cultural and spiritual beliefs centered around these fish.

“Since time immemorial, tribes along the Columbia River System have relied on Pacific salmon, steelhead, and other native fish species for sustenance and their cultural and spiritual ways of life. Today’s historic agreement is integral to helping restore healthy and abundant fish populations to these communities,” said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said.  

The agreement includes funding to support implementing these plans, including $200 million over 20 years from the U.S. Energy Department and $8 million over two years through the Bureau of Reclamation. 

Read more:  

Southern Baptists expel church after pastor defended racist role play 

The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant organization, this week voted to oust an Oklahoma pastor in Ochelata who failed to respond to allegations that his church “affirms, approves, or endorses discriminatory behavior on the basis of ethnicity.”

While the convention didn’t offer further details, it is believed to be related to two Matoaka Baptist Church events in which pastor Sherman Jaquess dressed in blackface and as a “Native American.”  

The Convention’s Executive Committee voted Tuesday that the Matoaka Baptist Church was “deemed not in friendly cooperation with the convention” — the official terminology for an expulsion.

In a video released on Facebook earlier this year, Jaquess can be seen at a 2017 Valentine’s Day event dressed in blackface at a piano, posing as singer Ray Charles. 

A separate Facebook photo shows Jaquess at a 2012 youth camp event dressed in red face, wearing “Native American” braids and a feathered headband. 

Jaquess defended his actions, saying that it is “repugnant to have people think you’re a racist” and claimed that he was paying tribute to the iconic soul singer.

“It wasn’t derogatory, wasn’t racial in any way, and we’re not racist at all,” he said. “I don’t have a racist bone in my body. I have a lot of racial friends.” 

He also stated he is of part-Cherokee heritage. 

Read more: 

Native American earthworks listed as World Heritage Site

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee this week added 27 new sites to the World Heritage List, among them the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks in southern Ohio. Those are eight enormous earthen enclosure complexes that American Indians — known as the Hopewell Culture — built between 1,600 and 2,000 years ago. 

These served as centers for Hopewell feasts, funerals, and other social and spiritual gatherings. Archaeologists excavating the site have found pottery, copper and shell ornaments, and carved pipes made from raw materials obtained through trade with tribes in the Great Lakes, Carolinas, the Rocky Mountains and elsewhere. 

Read more:

Danish trolls come to Seattle 

John “Coyote” Halliday, an artist enrolled in the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe in Washington State, helped design one of six gigantic trolls that have appeared in the Puget Sound area. 

Standing as tall as 6 meters, they are all made from recycled materials. 

It is part of a larger body of work conceived by Danish artist/activist Thomas Dambo, to bring attention to sustainability and the environment. 

VOA reporter Natasha Mozgovaya spoke with Halliday and Dambo in Seattle and filed this report. 

UPDATE:  Seattle’s KOMO News reports that vandals defaced the troll sculpture featured in Natasha Mozgovaya’s video report.  Read more:

 
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Former FBI official Charles McGonigal pleaded guilty on Friday to accepting $225,000 from Albanian-American Agron Nezaj, a former Albanian intelligence officer who McGonigal admitted was helping him foster relationships in Albania to help lay the groundwork for future business opportunities in the country.

According to court documents, Nezaj became an informant for the FBI’s investigation into McGonigal’s contacts in Albania.

In Washington, McGonigal faced a nine-count indictment charging him with failing to report cash payments, contacts with foreign officials and trips to Europe he took with Nezaj in 2017 and 2018 that neither he nor the FBI paid for.

The guilty plea was entered in U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia in Washington, based on a deal between prosecutors and McGonigal’s lawyers. He pleaded guilty to one count of the indictment — concealing material evidence — and prosecutors dropped the other eight counts.

The settlement means the case will not go to trial.

McGonigal apologized to the court for his actions.

“Before I left the FBI in September 2018, I was planning to launch a security consulting business with a friend. I knew that my government contacts and international relationships might be useful to me when I later launched the business,” he told U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

“I did not disclose an approximately $225,000 loan I received from my friend and prospective business partner in the U.S. for several meetings I attended with foreign nationals. These meetings were an effort to develop potential business relationships for my future consulting business. And the loan was intended to help start the business,” McGonigal said.

Those contacts included several meetings in 2017 and 2018 with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in the presence of Nezaj and an adviser to the prime minister, who had business interests in arranging the meetings.

In one instance, McGonigal opened a criminal investigation in New York into a U.S. lobbyist who was working for an Albanian opposition party. According to the indictment, he received this information from the Albanian prime minister’s office. The indictment does not identify the American lobbyist nor the Albanian party.

But on November 14, 2017, lobbyist Nick Muzin — an ex-Trump aide — filed on the lobbying activity on behalf of the Albanian Democratic Party, the main opposition party, with the Department of Justice. While lobbying for a foreign political force is not illegal for a registered lobbyist, Muzin had filed that activity months after an initial filing that was not complete.

The payment he received eventually became the subject of an investigation in Albania over the suspect origin of the money.

McGonigal told the court he had an ongoing relationship with the prime minister.

Rama has denied any wrongdoing.

McGonigal’s lawyer Seth DuCharme said after the hearing that his client takes full responsibility for his actions and looks forward to putting the case behind him.

“While he may have had or did have, I think, some pretty legitimate interests that aligned with the United States in keeping up those relationships, he also clearly had a personal interest,” DuCharme said.

McGonigal led the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York before retiring in 2018.

In a separate case in New York, McGonigal pleaded guilty in August to a conspiracy charge, admitting that after leaving the FBI he agreed to work for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. McGonigal went to work for Deripaska, whom McGonigal had once investigated, to dig up dirt on the oligarch’s wealthy rival in violation of U.S. sanctions on Russia. He faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced in mid-December.

The District of Columbia court charge carries a maximum of five years in prison, but prosecutors will likely seek a more lenient sentence as part of the plea agreement.

The judge said McGonigal will be sentenced in February and said he will not be able to appeal it.

Some information for this report was provided by Reuters and The Associated Press.
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A longshot candidate for governor in the U.S. state of Missouri and his supporters describe his use of a flamethrower at a recent “Freedom Fest” event outside St. Louis as no big deal. They said it was a fun moment for fellow Republicans who attended, and that no one talked about burning books as he torched a pile of cardboard boxes.

But after the video gained attention on social media, State Sen. Bill Eigel said he would burn books he found objectionable, and that he’d do it on the lawn outside the governor’s mansion. He later said it was all a metaphor for how he would attack the “woke liberal agenda.”

“From a dramatic sense, if the only thing in between the children in the state of Missouri and vulgar pornographic material like that getting in their hands is me burning, bulldozing or launching (books) into outer space, I’m going to do that,” Eigel said in an interview with The Associated Press. “However, I would I make the point that I don’t believe it’s going to come to that.”

Experts say Eigel’s use of the flamethrower is a sign that rhetoric and imagery previously considered extreme are now being treated as normal in American politics. While Eigel didn’t actually destroy books, his later statement about burning ones he deemed offensive ratcheted up fears that the video’s circulation and his words on social media could help take the U.S. to a darker place.

“The slippery slope is that everything is a joke — everything can be kind of waved away,” said Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of public communications at American University in Washington. “Everything can be seen as just rhetoric until it can’t anymore and people start using it as an excuse to actually hurt people.”

The 30-second video that put Eigel at the center of a social media storm is from a Sept. 15 event for Republicans at a winery near tiny Defiance, Missouri, about 48 kilometers west of St. Louis. He and another state senator shot long streams of flame onto a pile of cardboard in front of an appreciative crowd.

The video posted on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, caught the attention of Jonathan Riley, a liberal activist in Durham, North Carolina, who posted Sunday that it showed “Missouri Republicans at a literal book burning,” though he’d later walk that statement back to a “metaphorical” book burning.

“It fit a narrative that they wanted to put out there,” Freedom Fest organizer Debbie McFarland said about claims that Eigel burned books. “It just didn’t happen to be the truth.”

Some of Republicans’ skepticism over the online outrage stems from Eigel’s status as a dark horse candidate to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Mike Parson. The best known candidates for the August 2024 GOP primary are Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe.

The Ashcroft campaign declined to respond to the video, the uproar it caused or Eigel’s follow-up statement. Kehoe’s campaign had no official comment, but Gregg Keller, a Republican consultant working on Kehoe’s campaign, said Eigel’s promise to burn objectionable books is “typical electioneering hyperbole.”

He added, “I would challenge you to find me any non-psychotic Republican who has actually burned” a book deemed objectionable by conservatives.

Eigel posted on the X platform that his flamethrower stunt was meant to show what he would do to the “swamp” in the state capital of Jefferson City, but “let’s be clear, you bring those woke pornographic books to Missouri schools to try to brainwash our kids, and I’ll burn those too — on the front lawn of the governor’s mansion.”

Republicans across the U.S. are backing conservative efforts to purge schools and libraries of materials with LGBTQ+ themes or books with LGBTQ+ characters. The issue resonates with Republicans in Missouri. An AP VoteCast survey of Missouri voters in the 2022 midterm elections showed that more than 75% of those voting for GOP candidates thought the K-8 schools in their community were teaching too much about gender identity or sexual orientation.

The outcry also comes after Missouri’s Republican-supermajority Legislature banned gender-affirming health care for transgender minors and required K-12 and college students to play on sports teams that match their sex assigned at birth. Eigel has sponsored measures to ban schools from teaching about gender identity or gender-affirming care and to make it a crime to perform in drag in public.

Aggressive and even violent imagery have long been a part of American politics. It can sometimes backfire.

Large guns have been a popular prop for some Republicans. Last year, a Black candidate seeking the Republican nomination in an Arizona congressional district aired an ad in which he held an AR-15 rifle as people wearing Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods tried to storm a home. He finished last.

In Missouri in 2016, Republican candidate and ex-Navy SEAL Eric Greitens ran an ad featuring him firing 100 rounds from a machine gun on his way to winning the governor’s race. After a sex and invasion-of-privacy scandal in 2018 forced him to resign, he attempted a political comeback in the state’s 2022 U.S. Senate race, running an ad featuring him with a shotgun declaring he was going hunting for RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only. He finished third in the primary.

Flamethowers also have popped up previously. In 2020, a GOP congressional candidate in Alabama showed her support for then-President Donald Trump by torching a mockup of the first articles of impeachment against him. She finished third in the primary. And in South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem’s staff gave her a flamethrower last year as a Christmas gift.

Experts who study political extremism said images involving fire or bonfires have long been associated with extremist groups. Eigel’s critics quickly posted online images involving the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi book burnings before World War II.

Evan Perkoski, an associate political science professor at the University of Connecticut, said it’s been “traditional” for extremist groups to use images of fire to “simultaneously intimidate people and signal their intentions to destroy what exists and to rebuild or start over.”

“We’ve seen this time and time again from groups across countries where groups will burn effigies, crosses and other items, or even just film themselves around large conflagrations,” he said in a email to AP. “A large part of their motivation is the symbolic, frightening nature of fire.”

Experts continue to worry about how social media can spread extreme or violent images or words to potentially millions of people, increasing the chances of a single person seeing the material as a call to violence.

Javed Ali, a former senior FBI counterterrorism official who’s now an associate professor at the University of Michigan, said law enforcement agencies struggle with thwarting homegrown political violence. He said the sheer volume of social media postings means, “Sometimes, you almost have to get lucky in order to stop it.”

Braddock, the American University professor, said that after portraying a flamethrower as a weapon against “the woke agenda,” Eigel’s supporters don’t need “that big a leap of logic” to see it as a tool for settling actual political grievances. Talking about book burning enough can plant the idea in people’s minds so that “people think it’s actually a righteous thing to do.”

Ali added: “That’s a pretty dangerous game to play.”

Eigel said he’s not worried the video will inspire violence in “reasonable, everyday Missourians,” which he said is the majority of people. But he said he’s concerned about the number of threats he, his family and his staff have received as a result.
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Tropical Storm Ophelia was expected to make landfall on the North Carolina coast early Saturday morning with the potential for damaging winds and dangerous surges of water, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Life-threatening flooding caused by the weather system was forecast for parts of eastern North Carolina and southeastern Virginia, the center said in an update at 11 p.m. Friday.

Ophelia was about 115 kilometers south of Cape Lookout, North Carolina, and heading north-northwest at 19 kph late Friday after spinning into tropical storm during the afternoon.

The system had maximum sustained winds of 113 kph with some higher gusts, but was forecast to weaken after landfall, the hurricane center reported.

Ophelia was expected to turn north Saturday and then shift northeast on Sunday. The storm promised a weekend of windy conditions and heavy rain up to 18 centimeters in parts of North Carolina and Virginia and 5-10 centimeters in the rest of the mid-Atlantic region through Sunday.

A storm surge warning, indicating danger from rising water moving inland, was in effect from Bogue Inlet, North Carolina, to Chincoteague, Virginia. Surges between 1.2 and 1.8 meters were forecast in some areas, the hurricane center said.

A tropical storm warning was issued from Cape Fear, North Carolina, to Fenwick Island, Delaware. A hurricane watch was in effect in North Carolina for the area north of Surf City to Ocracoke Inlet, the center reported.

The governors of North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland declared a state of emergency Friday as some schools closed early and several weekend events were canceled.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper issued his state’s emergency declaration, aiming to expedite preparations and help provide a swift response.

“The storm’s path has been difficult to predict and we want to ensure that farmers, first responders and utility crews have the tools necessary to prepare for severe weather,” Cooper said.

The North Carolina Ferry System on Friday suspended service on all routes until conditions improve, officials said.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order sought to ease response and recovery efforts.

“We want to ensure that all communities, particularly those with the greatest anticipated impact, have the resources they need to respond and recover from the effects of this storm,” Youngkin said, encouraging residents to prepare emergency kits and follow weather forecasts closely.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said in a statement Friday evening that the state expected an extended period of strong winds, heavy rainfall and elevated tides.

In Annapolis, Maryland’s capital, water taxi driver Scott Bierman said service would be closed Saturday.

“We don’t operate when it’s going to endanger passengers and or damage vessels,” Bierman said.

In Washington, the Nationals baseball team postponed its Saturday game until Sunday.

It is not uncommon for one or two tropical storms, or even hurricanes, to form off the East Coast each year, National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan said.

“We’re right at the peak of hurricane season, we can basically have storms form anywhere across much of the Atlantic basin,” Brennan said.

Scientists say climate change could result in hurricanes expanding their reach into mid-latitude regions more often, making storms like this month’s Hurricane Lee more common.

One study simulated tropical cyclone tracks from pre-industrial times, modern times and a future with higher emissions. It found that hurricanes would track closer to the coasts including around Boston, New York and Virginia and be more likely to form along the Southeast coast.

Nancy Shoemaker and her husband Bob stopped by a waterside park in downtown Annapolis to pick up sandbags. A water surge in a storm last October washed away sandbags they had in their yard.

“We’re hoping it won’t be that way this time,” Nancy Shoemaker said. “If we have a lot of wind and a lot of surge, it can look like the ocean out there, so that’s a problem.”
…

Amid stalled progress on gun control legislation in the U.S. Congress, President Joe Biden announced the creation of a new federal office for gun violence prevention, tapping Vice President Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor of gun homicide cases, to lead it.

“Guns are the number one killer of children in America,” Biden said Friday during the launch event in the White House Rose Garden. “More than car accidents, more than cancer or other diseases.”

On average, more than 116 people in the U.S. die from gun violence every day, according to data from the Giffords Law Center.

The new federal office will support implementation of existing legislation and executive actions, and work with lawmakers, state officials and advocates to push for further gun violence prevention efforts.

The office, Biden said, will also coordinate more support for survivors, families and communities affected by gun violence, including mental health care and financial assistance, in the same way that the Federal Emergency Management Agency responds to natural disasters.

The National Rifle Association, a pro-gun-rights lobbying group, slammed Biden’s move as “another distraction, crafted to divert America’s and the media’s gaze from the Biden crime wave and their soft-on-crime policies.”

“Instead of confronting the real challenges and holding accountable the [district attorneys] who turn a blind eye to crime, this administration unfairly targets law-abiding citizens exercising their Second Amendment rights,” Randy Kozuch, director of NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, said on social media. 

Activists’ support 

U.S. Representative Lucy McBath, a Democratic lawmaker and advocate for stricter gun legislation, lost her son to gun violence in 2012. She said the new office would increase coordination among states and ensure proper implementation of gun safety legislation already passed in Congress.

The new office was also applauded by gun violence prevention groups, who have pressed Biden to create such an office to coordinate efforts across the federal government and to exert more leadership on the issue.

“It’s all about implementing new strategies and interventions and supporting the community-based organizations already doing great work,” said Chethan Sathya, director of Northwell Health’s Center for Gun Violence Prevention, who attended the Rose Garden event.

“From a health care perspective, we need to treat gun violence for what it is, a public health crisis,” Sathya, who is also a pediatric surgeon who has treated children who have been shot, told VOA.

Biden appointed Stefanie Feldman, his longtime gun policy adviser, to direct the office, and gun control advocates Greg Jackson and Rob Wilcox to serve as deputy directors.

Second Amendment 

In general, Democrats support tighter gun laws while Republicans are concerned that such laws will infringe upon the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which protects Americans’ right to bear arms.

During Friday’s event, Harris rejected the argument that the two stances are at odds. “President Biden and I believe in the Second Amendment, but we also know common sense solutions are at hand,” she said.

Earlier this week, a group of House Republicans introduced a bill called the Protecting the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act of 2023.

The bill would explicitly prohibit the president from declaring an emergency for the purposes of imposing gun control. It would also block government officials from prohibiting the manufacturing, sale or transfer of firearms and ammunition during a major disaster or emergency.

Illegal trafficking

It’s unclear what kind of bearing the new office for gun violence prevention will have on actual policy, including the impact on neighboring Mexico, which has repeatedly asked the Biden administration to curb illegal gun trafficking. The majority of all arms used in Mexico, where gun control laws are very strict, are bought in the U.S.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre maintains that the administration’s policy on guns is “comprehensive.”

The office will have regular contact with the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security, Jean-Pierre told VOA during her briefing to the press Friday. “We’re going to do everything that we can to combat international trafficking and smuggling as well.”

In June 2022, less than a month after 19 children and two teachers were gunned down in an elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Biden signed the most significant gun control legislation in decades, although it was more limited than what the president had sought.

The bipartisan law enhances background checks for potential gun buyers and strengthens laws against straw purchasing and trafficking of guns. It provides millions of dollars for states to implement intervention programs, such as the so-called red flag laws that allow officials to temporarily confiscate guns from people deemed in court to be too dangerous to own them.

Biden has also signed several executive actions aimed at reducing gun violence, including steps to increase the number of background checks for gun sales and to crack down on “ghost guns,” or home-assembled firearms, which are difficult to track.

On Friday, he again called for the banning of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
…

White supremacists appear to have settled on a new strategy to grow their numbers and ready capable fighting forces across the United States, Canada and Europe while avoiding the scrutiny of law enforcement.

New research, presented Friday by the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), warns the past several months have seen a proliferation of small, loosely affiliated combat sports and fitness clubs — known as Active Clubs — that publicly advertise fitness, self-improvement and brotherhood.

But behind the scenes, researchers say, club members are pushing a white supremacist narrative geared at preparing members to take part in a potential race war.

“They are trying to build a militia undercover,” said Alexander Ritzmann, a CEP senior adviser and the author of the new report. “The underlying assessment is there is no leadership in the U.S. for targeted violence, for a strong national event or leadership. But once such a thing occurs, you need soldiers.”

Ritzmann and his colleagues warn that more than 100 of the Active Clubs have been created since late 2020, and that at least 46 are currently active in 34 U.S. states.

They further identified another 46 clubs in 14 countries across Europe and 12 clubs in Canada.

No centralized leadership

Yet despite the spread of these clubs, there is no centralized or hierarchical leadership.

They adhere to a philosophy, sometimes called White Supremacy 3.0, espoused by Robert Rundo, the founder of the white supremacist Rise Above Movement, who was extradited to the U.S. from Romania in August to face charges connected to planning and participating in a series of riots in California.

Anyone who wants to start a club is encouraged to do so, and most clubs are relatively small, thought to have five to 25 members. Participating in events with other clubs is also encouraged.

And they do not seem to shy away from attention.

“The strategy is hiding in plain sight,” Ritzmann said. “They try to show that they’re actually just a bunch of white men doing sports together, being rather on the nice and friendly side so that law enforcement would look at this and would say, ‘This is a bit odd, but definitely, you know, not a priority for us to research now.’” 

Guidelines pushed by Active Club members seek to play up the fitness-focused persona.

Members are told to avoid any display of obvious Nazi or white supremacist symbols and imagery. They are also instructed not to talk about Jews or about history. And most refrain from posting images on social media that show them engaged in military-style training.

‘Young and active people’ sought

At the same time, members are encouraged to mingle with the public to recruit new members.

“Activism at events like concerts, NASCAR races and local festivals are also much more likely to reach young and active people,” according to a post on one Active Club website, cited by the CEP report. “These demographics are far more likely to become useful members.”

The same post encouraged club members to recruit from high schools where “changing demographics … have led to gang-beatings of minority White youth.”

Once recruited, new members are gradually indoctrinated and, according to Ritzmann, subtly taught skills designed to make them part of a capable militia using marginally legal or illegal activities like banner drops, stickering, and painting graffiti on public and private property.

“Make sure they know how to organize, to spot locations, to organize transport, to avoid law enforcement,” Ritzmann said. “It’s like an open-air militia training camp.”

In some ways, the warnings in the new CEP report on Active Clubs mirror warnings by U.S. officials, who have said for more than a year that the U.S. remains mired in a “heightened threat environment,” with the biggest threat coming from U.S.-based extremists motivated by “enduring racial, ethnic, religious and anti-government ideologies.”

U.S. homeland security and law enforcement officials have also emphasized that the greatest danger comes from small groups or individuals.

But the extent to which the U.S. government is aware of the Active Clubs in unclear.

The Department of Homeland Security has yet to respond to a VOA query about the warnings in the new CEP report. The FBI said it had no comment.

Other researchers, though, agree there is reason for concern.

The Active Club network in the U.S. “really continues to be the most active element of the white supremacist landscape, regularly hosting fight nights and streaming propaganda and hosting demonstrations,” said Morgan Lynn Moon, an investigative researcher with the Anti-Defamation League, speaking during a webinar on the report’s findings.

“These groups continue to form and currently represent an enduring threat,” she said, adding the clubs also appear to be at the vanguard of another worrisome trend.

“We’re seeing recently white supremacist groups and neo-Nazis becoming increasingly anxious about perceived threats, particularly to the white race, and this increased willingness to work together to send a message,” she said. “In this case, [that message is] uniting behind the idea of raising white racial consciousness despite their key ideological differences.”

Members of other groups

CEP’s research found that in some cases, Active Club members are current or former members of other extremist groups like Patriot Front, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and White Lives Matter.

Some researchers even fear the clubs are starting to make the sort of inroads that the other groups could not.

“The Active Clubs are who the Proud Boys thought they were. The Active Clubs are who the Proud Boys wanted to be,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

“This isn’t just merely a traditional white supremacist fight club as much as it’s individuals who really do see themselves as … harkening back to Greek and Roman soldiers fighting back against their kind of core enemies,” he said, speaking at the CEP report’s rollout. “The Active Clubs have really, truly become the tip of that fascist spear.”
…

For about a decade, Eudora, Kansas, counted itself among the many small towns across the U.S. that no longer had their own newspapers.

The recession marked the end of its local paper in 2009, turning Eudora into what is known as a “news desert” — a region that has no dedicated media coverage.

Then Teri Finneman, a journalist-turned-media professor at the University of Kansas, stepped in. Her solution: The Eudora Times, a student-led outlet that has brought news back to this town of 6,500 people.

“A lot of the coverage that we do wouldn’t be considered newsworthy with a capital N,” Finneman told VOA. But that doesn’t matter to The Eudora Times, because that’s not the point of the outlet, she said.

“We very much want to be a service organization and a partner with our community,” Finneman said. The paper’s focus: covering what matters to residents.

Tough times

The Times is a rare good-news story at a difficult time for the industry. By bringing back local news, the paper helped to reinvigorate the community while pioneering a road map that may help address news deserts elsewhere.

“Before we had The Eudora Times, I didn’t know really anything that was going on in the community, other than things a customer would come in and tell me,” said Kathy Weld, owner of Zeb’s Coffeehouse in Eudora. “Before I opened the coffee shop, I didn’t know anything.”

Finneman, who is from a small town in western North Dakota, wanted to fix that.

After some newsy social media posts, the first article was about the 2018 opening of Weld’s coffee shop — named after her dog, Zeb.

Once the article was written, Finneman realized she needed a website to put it on.

“I would get an F in business school for this business plan,” she told VOA as she recalled the paper’s early days from the coffee shop that was first featured. She used online software to create a website within five minutes. “I’m like, Eudora Times – that sounds good. And then we just put it online.”

Lucie Krisman, one of the paper’s founding reporters, said that from that small start, the idea “sort of ramped up.”

“We realized what kind of potential there was to create an honest-to-God newspaper here,” she said. “It grew from literally nothing.”

Thousands of closures

The outlet’s slow beginnings belie its significance not just for Eudora but for local media across the country.

Around a fourth of local and regional newspapers — or 2,500 — have closed since 2005 and one-third are expected to shutter by 2025, according to a report by the Northwestern Medill Local News Initiative.

The hard work is paying off. A member of the Kansas Press Association, The Eudora Times has won several awards, including for its reporting on government and education.

But there are far more communities that will remain or become news deserts, and that’s something that worries Finneman.

“It’s not just the current crisis that needs to be addressed, but it’s the pending crisis,” she said, particularly in the Midwest. “It’s going to be disastrous.”

With the closure of local media outlets across the U.S., more than 14 million Americans are getting their news from student reporters, according to the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont.

Like the Times, those outlets cover everything from local government and politics to school board meetings and high school sports.

“That’s not Watergate-type of coverage,” Finneman said. But it is the kind of coverage that breathes life into towns that are often ignored by the media and are at risk of being left stagnant as a result.

“People want to feel that community connection,” Finneman said.

A difference noticed

Her approach appears to be working, with several Eudora residents telling VOA they have noticed a clear difference since the Times came to town. Eudora is a case study in what happens when a town loses its newspaper — and what happens when the news comes back.

“There’s so much divisiveness in our country. Local news has a way of bringing us together,” Weld, the coffee shop owner, said.

People had relied on getting information “through the grapevine,” said Laura Smith, who helps in-need residents access resources as the town’s community resource navigator.

“With The Eudora Times, they’re everywhere, and they do such a phenomenal job of covering things, that everyone just feels connected,” she said.

For Krisman, now a reporter at the Shawnee Mission Post in Kansas, the paper helps people “be proud of their community.”

“It creates a sense of connectivity that you just can’t really get without having your own news outlet,” Krisman said.

Studies show that the decline of local news often contributes to a rise in polarization and government corruption, the spread of disinformation and misinformation, and a decline in civic engagement.

The Eudora Times had to win the town’s trust when it started.

“Because they did not have local news for so long, because we were still in the era when people were frequently being told that the press was an enemy of the people, there was a lot of concern from people that we were going to be a partisan news outlet,” Finneman said.

Funded by donations, some of which help cover reporters’ expenses, the Times hosted community meetings to help address those concerns. And most interviews are conducted in person to help build trust.

Cami Koons, a former features reporter at the paper, said she thinks people are more likely to trust national media when they have positive experiences with journalists at the local level.

“I really think that just having a positive interaction with a reporter, with some news media, makes such a big difference in people’s opinion of news, and hopefully leads them to trust it a little bit more,” Koons, now a reporter at Kansas City PBS, said. “If you don’t have a paper in town, how are you going to do that?”

Finneman wishes she could fix all the news deserts in the country. For now, she’s turning her sights on the nearby town of De Soto, where Panasonic’s $4 billion electric vehicle battery factory will be located.

De Soto will need media coverage more than ever once the factory opens, and The Eudora Times is preparing to step in, Finneman said. “They also don’t have a newspaper.”
…

Earlier this year, Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC announced that it was delaying the opening of a computer chip plant in the U.S. state of Arizona because of a shortage of specialized workers. But during a visit to Taiwan this week, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs told officials that the project is back on schedule and should have no further delays. From Phoenix, Arizona, Levi Stallings has our story.
…

U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and his wife have been indicted on charges of bribery.

Federal prosecutors on Friday announced the charges against the 69-year-old Democrat nearly six years after an earlier criminal case against him ended with a deadlocked jury. The latest indictment is unrelated to the earlier charges that alleged Menendez accepted lavish gifts to pressure government officials on behalf of a Florida doctor.

The Senate Historical Office says Menendez appears to be the first sitting senator in U.S. history to have been indicted on two unrelated criminal allegations. Menendez faces reelection next year in a bid to extend his three-decade career in Washington, and as Democrats hold a narrow majority in the Senate.

A lawyer for Menendez’s wife hasn’t responded to a message seeking comment. Messages were left for Menendez’s Senate spokesperson and his political consultant.

The first time Menendez was indicted, he had been accused of using his political influence to help a Florida eye doctor who had lavished him with gifts and campaign contributions.

Menendez appears to be the first sitting senator in U.S. history to have been indicted on two unrelated criminal allegations, according to a list maintained by the Senate Historical Office.

The new charges follow a yearslong investigation that examined, among other things, the dealings of a New Jersey businessman — a friend of Menendez’s wife — who secured sole authorization from the Egyptian government to certify that meat imported into that country meets Islamic dietary requirements. Investigators also asked questions about the Menendez family’s interactions with a New Jersey developer.

Menendez faces re-election next year in a bid to extend his three-decade career in Washington, and as Democrats hold a narrow majority in the Senate.

Menendez’s political career had looked as though it might be over in 2015, when a federal grand jury in New Jersey indicted him on multiple charges over favors he did for a friend, Dr. Salomon Melgen.

Menendez was accused of pressuring government officials to resolve a Medicare billing dispute in Melgen’s favor, securing visas for the doctor’s girlfriends and helping protect a contract the doctor had to provide port-screening equipment to the Dominican Republic.

Menendez has always maintained his innocence. His lawyers said campaign contributions and gifts from Melgen — which included trips on his private jet to a resort in the Dominican Republic and a vacation in Paris — were tokens of their longtime friendship, not bribes.

Prosecutors dropped the case after a jury deadlocked in November 2017 on charges including bribery, fraud and conspiracy, and a judge dismissed some counts.

The Senate Ethics Committee later rebuked Menendez, finding that he had improperly accepted gifts, failed to disclose them and then used his influence to advance Melgen’s personal interests.

But months later, New Jersey voters returned Menendez to the Senate. He defeated a well-financed challenger in a midterm election that broke a Republican lock on power in Washington.

Melgen was convicted of health care fraud in 2017 but former President Donald Trump commuted his prison sentence.

Menendez is widely expected to run for reelection next year.

The son of Cuban immigrants, Menendez has held public office continuously since 1986, when he was elected mayor of Union City, New Jersey. He was a state legislator and spent 14 years in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2006, Gov. Jon Corzine appointed Menendez to the Senate seat he vacated when he became governor.

At least two other senators — Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas; Richard Kenney, D-Delaware — were indicted on multiple occasions while still in office, but each senator’s indictments covered overlapping allegations, according to the Senate Historical Office.

Neither Kenney nor Hutchinson were ultimately convicted, and both went on to serve their full terms. In total, 13 senators have been indicted throughout history, of which six have been convicted, according to the Senate Historical Office. Two of those convictions were overturned.

Menendez first publicly disclosed that he was the subject of a new federal investigation last October.
…

The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday said it was formally launching two new U.S.-China working groups on economic and financial issues aimed at providing a regular policy communications forum between the world’s two largest economies.

In a statement, the Treasury said the two groups would “meet on a regular cadence” and report to Yellen and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng.

China’s Ministry of Finance will be Treasury’s counterpart for the Economic Working Group, while the People’s Bank of China will be its counterpart for the Financial Working Group.

Formation of the groups followed Yellen’s visit to Beijing in July, where she met with He and other senior officials to re-establish communications on economic and financial issues after years of deteriorating relations.

Yellen said on X, formerly Twitter, that the working groups “will serve as important forums to communicate America’s interests and concerns, promote a healthy economic competition between our two countries with a level playing field for American workers and businesses, and advance cooperation on global challenges.”

“It is vital that we talk, particularly when we disagree,” she added.

China’s Finance Ministry and central bank both issued statements confirming the establishment of the economic and financial working groups but gave few details beyond saying they were aimed at strengthening communication and collaboration on these issues.

A senior Treasury official said Yellen has reiterated to Chinese officials that the U.S. will use the groups to promote cooperation where possible with China on global challenges, including restructuring debt for distressed developing economies, climate finance and anti-money laundering efforts.

Establishment of the two working groups also follows Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s agreement with Chinese officials in August to establish a working group on U.S. export controls aimed at explaining U.S. policies.  

The Treasury and State Departments in past years held annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue meetings with China, but that forum ended in 2017 after former President Donald Trump took office, ushering in a more confrontational approach to China in Washington that led to a years-long tariff war between the two countries.  
…

Soon after one of Maui’s Japanese Buddhist temples, the Lahaina Hongwanji Mission, burned in the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century, its resident minister was desperate to go back and see what remained.

Six weeks later, he’s more hesitant.

“Now I feel like I have to have mental preparation to go there,” the Rev. Ai Hironaka said. “I’m kind of afraid.”

Hironaka and other Lahaina residents are grappling with a range of emotions as Maui authorities plan next week to begin allowing some on supervised visits back into the areas devastated by the Aug. 8 fire, which killed at least 97 people and demolished thousands of buildings.

Lana Vierra is bracing to see the ruins of the home where she raised five children, a house that started with three bedrooms in 1991 and was expanded to six to accommodate her extended family as the cost of living in Hawaii soared.

She’s been telling her family to be ready when it’s their turn, so that they can all visit together.

“We’re preparing our minds for that,” she said. “I don’t know know if our hearts are prepared for that.”

Authorities have divided the burned area into 17 zones and dozens of sub-zones. Residents or property owners of the first to be cleared for reentry — known as Zone 1C, along Kaniau Road in the north part of Lahaina — will be allowed to return Monday and Tuesday on supervised visits.

Government agencies including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Maui County’s highways division are involved in clearing the zones for reentry by, among other things, removing any hazardous materials, checking buildings for structural safety and ensuring safe road access.

Those returning will be provided water, shade, washing stations, portable toilets, medical and mental health care, and transportation assistance if needed, said Darryl Oliveira, Maui Emergency Management Agency interim administrator.

Authorities are also offering personal protective equipment, including respirator masks and coveralls. Officials have warned that ash could contain asbestos, lead, arsenic or other toxins. There are other hazards, too, Oliveira said, such as burned out cars along roads and chunks of metal or concrete in the ruins.

“We really want to help guide them, provide them the support, but also provide them the privacy, that space and quiet, so they can get the closure they’re looking for,” Oliveira said in a video message Thursday.

Some people might want to sift through the ashes for any belongings or mementos that survived, but officials are urging them not to, for fear of stirring up toxic dust that could endanger them or their neighbors downwind. Other residents said they didn’t immediately have plans to return to the properties because jobs or the hassle of obtaining a pass to reenter the burn zone would keep them away.

Melody Lukela-Singh plans to take a hazardous materials course before visiting the Front Street property where the house she lived in with about a dozen relatives once stood.

“I’m hoping to learn what we’re going to encounter as far as exposure to things we know nothing about,” she said. “The winds pick up and it’s going to be all in the air. It’s going be a while before all of that is gone.”

Hironaka reflected on how his feelings toward reentry have changed as the weeks have passed — and as the magnitude of losing the temple, along with his home on the temple grounds, has set in.

“After a week, I feel like I still have energy, like a car with full tank of gas,” Hironaka said. “After I use all the gasoline, I don’t know where to fill it up, what to fill it up. No gas. I feel like I’m pushing the empty-gas car only by myself. Pushing from the back.”

He, his wife, their four children and their French bulldog piled into his Honda Civic to escape the flames. As they drove off, he said, he imagined the temple as protecting their home.

In a phone interview, he said he initially intended not to cry until he could return to thank the temple and apologize to the Buddha statue that had been at its main altar. But he became emotional and sobbed as he spoke, saying, “The temple building, I was supposed to protect as resident minister.”

He has found solace, he said, in Buddhism’s teachings of wisdom and compassion, that Buddha has no judgment and allows him to feel whatever he feels in the moment.

Hironaka said he often sees a photo taken by The Maui News and distributed worldwide by The Associated Press that shows the temple burning alongside Waiola Church next door. He considered the temple, built in 1933, to be like a family member, he said.

“That’s the end-of-life picture to me,” he said.

Lahaina’s two other Japanese Buddhist temples also burned down.

Jarom Ayoso is eager to get back to the property where he and his wife rented a house for nearly 15 years. His son was able to get in the day after the fire and took video of the destruction.

“I want closure for my end,” he said. “The only way I going get that is if I go and see it.”

Ayoso wants to see what’s left of the vehicles he lovingly rebuilt, including his 1986 GMC Sierra pickup truck. There were also motors he built on the property, including one that cost more than $13,000. He was just about to install it, he said, and “poof — gone.”
…

A storm churning in waters off the eastern U.S. has increased to tropical storm strength and is forecast to reach the North Carolina coast Friday morning, the National Hurricane Center said.

The storm was off the coast of South Carolina and North Carolina late Thursday with top sustained winds of 65 kph. A storm surge watch was in effect, with surges between 91 centimeters and 1.5 meters forecast for parts of North Carolina, the center reported.

As of Thursday night, the storm was located about 570 kilometers southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, and about 635 kilometers south Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and moving north at 6 kph, the center said.

Though the system had reached tropical storm strength, it was yet to be given a name and the center was still referring to it as Potential Tropical Cyclone 16 on Thursday night. The hurricane center defines a potential tropical cyclone as a disturbance posing a threat of tropical storm or hurricane conditions to land within 48 hours.

Meteorologist Maria Torres, a public affairs officer with the Miami-based center, said people along the Atlantic coast need to watch the storm’s progress, gather supplies and make preparations for its arrival.

“This will bring some tropical storm force winds and storm surge along with the high winds to the East Coast through the weekend, mainly from the Southeast to the Mid-Atlantic states,” she told The Associated Press.

The tropical storm warning was in effect from Cape Fear, North Carolina, to Fenwick Island, Delaware. It also includes the Chesapeake Bay south of North Beach, Tidal Potomac south of Cobb Island and Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds. Storm surge warnings were in effect for areas throughout the region, the hurricane center said.

Virginia emergency management officials warned of heavy rain, high winds and flooding in the next few days.

The Virginia Department of Emergency Management said on social media Thursday that officials are coordinating with local weather service offices to watch the system developing off the coast. Officials called on residents to prepare for the storm and impacts on the region throughout the weekend.

North Carolina Emergency Management warned large swells from distant Hurricane Nigel also would reach the state’s coast on Thursday, boosting the rip current risk. The combination of those swells and the low-pressure system could mean additional ocean overwash, beach erosion and coastal flooding.

The hurricane center said storm surge between 0.6 and 1.2 meters was expected.

A storm surge warning was in effect from Duck, North Carolina, to Chincoteague, Virginia.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Nigel was headed toward cooler North Atlantic waters as a Category 1 storm. The hurricane center said Nigel was expected to become “extratropical” and was centered about 1,125 kilometers northwest of the Azores.

Nigel’s maximum sustained winds reported in the center’s most recent update late Thursday were 120 kph. There were no coastal watches or warnings associated with Nigel.
…

Ukraine’s president on Thursday wrapped up his US public relations blitz for military support and for his 10-point peace plan with meetings on Capitol Hill, at the Pentagon, and in the Oval Office with President Joe Biden. VOA’s Anita Powell looks at the diplomatic, performative aspect of the Ukraine conflict from the stage that is the White House.
…

On this International Day of Peace, and on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, the United States announced new initiatives to help consolidate the role women play in building peace and strengthening security around the world. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias has the details.
Camera: Veronica Balderas Iglesias
…

U.S. immigration authorities reported a significant uptick in unauthorized border crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border Thursday, particularly in areas like Eagle Pass, Texas, where the mayor has issued a state of emergency.

U.S. Border Patrol officers apprehended about 9,000 migrants along the entire border in a 24-hour period, according to media reports on Wednesday. VOA asked Border Patrol to confirm the number of apprehensions, but an official, who spoke on background, said they were waiting to release monthly migrant encounter numbers.

The noticeable rise in migrant arrivals in Eagle Pass strained local resources and overwhelmed already crowded facilities.

On Wednesday evening between 500 and 800 migrants, mostly from Venezuela, were waiting to be processed by Border Patrol officials under the Eagle Pass-Piedras Negras International Bridge, one of the two bridges in Eagle Pass.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection official told VOA on background — a method often used by U.S. officials to share information with reporters without being identified — that CBP suspended crossings at Eagle Pass to help with the influx of migrants over the last few days.

“But we anticipate reopening it once they [border officers] are done dealing with [migrants] today,” the official said by phone, adding that traffic was being diverted to another bridge in the same area.

“There are times that we have to close the ports. We just simply divert traffic to other ports of entry,” the spokesperson said.

After the increased number of unauthorized crossings, Eagle Pass Mayor Rolando Salinas Jr. signed an emergency declaration. In recent years, the region has become accustomed to regulating migration as it became a heavily used point for newcomers to cross into the U.S.

“The emergency declaration grants us the ability to request financial resources to provide additional services caused by the influx of undocumented immigrants,” Salinas wrote in Wednesday’s emergency declaration.

In response to the surge in encounters, the CBP spokesperson said officials expect to see more fluctuations, knowing that smugglers will continue to use misinformation to prey on vulnerable individuals.

U.S. authorities could not provide a specific reason for the recent increase in crossings. However, they said it is usually a combination of misinformation spread by smugglers, economic hardships in migrants’ home countries and migrants running from authoritative regimes.

The CBP officer told VOA that often individuals pay a smuggler but end up traveling in groups and arrive all at once at a specific part of the border.

“The big thing that we want people to know is that, ‘Look, if you come to the border and you don’t use CBP One app, and you didn’t take advantage of those lawful pathways that the administration has set up, it’s going to be presumed that you’re ineligible for asylum,’” the official said.

The CBP official also said the border continues to be closed to irregular migration and that without a legal basis to stay in the country, migrants will be processed for removal and face consequences that include “a minimum five-year bar on re-entry, loss of eligibility to access lawful pathways, and prosecution for repeat offenders.”

In May, just before the expiration of the COVID-era restriction known as Title 42, border officials encountered more than 8,000 people a day along the entire border. After the end of Title 42, these numbers decreased significantly, with daily encounters averaging 3,500 illegal crossings.

Increase border enforcement

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday announced plans to increase enforcement across the U.S.-Mexico border, including additional military personnel — on top of the 2,500 state National Guard personnel — to support border officers on the ground.

The CBP official who spoke to VOA on background said military personnel do things that do not involve contact with migrants, such as watching surveillance cameras, and other collateral duties.

Immigration authorities have not released the August migrant encounter numbers at the U.S.-Mexico border, but the last available data showed about 183,000 migrants were apprehended in July. At the same time in 2022, that number was 200,162.

“So the [Border Patrol] agents and processing coordinators can fully concentrate on the situation they have to deal with … we have a plan and we’re executing that plan. We remain on the lookout for fluctuations,” the official said.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made an urgent plea Thursday to U.S. lawmakers on Capitol Hill, telling them that without a new tranche of funding to combat Russian aggression, Ukraine will lose the war.

The White House requested $24 billion in supplemental funding for Ukraine earlier this year. But there is growing Republican concern about providing U.S. aid to Ukraine, combined with broader difficulties passing either a short-term continuing resolution or a full 2024 budget funding the U.S. government past a September 30 deadline.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer summed up the meeting with Zelenskyy, telling the members, “If we don’t get the aid, we will lose the war.”

Later in a statement, Schumer emphasized the danger of not passing the supplemental funding request, saying, “It is very clear that if we were to have a government shutdown, or pass a CR without Ukrainian aid, the damage that would occur on Ukraine’s campaign would be devastating.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a major supporter of U.S. aid to Ukraine in the Senate, was tight-lipped afterwards, only telling reporters it was “a good meeting.”

On Wednesday, McConnell applauded the appointment of an inspector general for the oversight of Ukraine aid.

“Thanks in large part to the requirements Senate Republicans have attached to our aid since the beginning of Russia’s escalation, the United States has unprecedented visibility into how Ukraine is using American weapons,” McConnell said in a statement.

Zelenskyy also met with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Thursday ahead of a Pentagon announcement of a new security package of more air defense and artillery capabilities for Ukraine.

Pentagon press secretary, Brigadier General Patrick Ryder, told reporters Thursday that “everything is on schedule” with the delivery of M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine and that if there is a government shutdown, F-16 training in the U.S. for Ukrainian pilots would still take place.

From the beginning of hostilities in February 2022 to May 2023, the U.S. has provided more than $76.8 billion in assistance, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The share of Americans who say the U.S. is providing too much aid to Ukraine has steadily increased since the start of the war in February 2022, according to a June 2023 Pew Research Center survey.

Just 14% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters said the amount of U.S. aid to Ukraine was excessive but more than 44% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said the amount of aid was too high. One-third of all Americans told Pew that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a threat to U.S. interests.

On the House side of the U.S. Capitol, where concerns are growing in the Republican majority about continuing U.S. aid to Ukraine, the reception for Zelenskyy was far more muted. Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries met with the Ukrainian president behind closed doors, but the speaker’s office did not release any photographs of the meeting.

“It was a very candid, open, forward-looking discussion,” Jeffries said in his weekly press conference Thursday.

Jeffries said the war between Ukraine and Russia is “a struggle on the global stage between democracy and autocracy, between freedom and tyranny, between truth and propaganda, between good and evil.”

More-conservative members of the Republican majority have objected to passing the Ukraine supplemental request along with funding for the U.S. government.

In an opinion piece published earlier this week by news network Fox, Republican Representative Mike Waltz wrote that “while most Americans are sympathetic to Ukraine and understand that Russian President Vladimir Putin must be prevented from his goal of recreating the old Soviet Union, President Joe Biden has not been a good-faith partner. The Biden administration has neither explained the American objective in Ukraine nor his strategy to achieve it.”

Waltz went on to call for greater burden sharing of aid to Ukraine by European countries and said “the United States must invest its savings in its own security. It should match the dollar value of any aid it gives to Ukraine with securing our southern border.”

According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the U.S. is in the top tier of countries providing aid to Ukraine, giving from 0.25% to 0.45% of its annual gross domestic product to aiding Ukraine, while Scandinavian countries such as Sweden provide slightly more at 0.75%.

But most Republicans recognize the need to include more aid.

“They need it and they’re going to get it,” Republican Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters after Zelenskyy’s meeting Thursday morning with lawmakers.

“The majority support this. I know there’s some dissension on both sides, but as I said, war of attrition is not going to win. That’s what Putin wants because he wants to break the will of the American people and the Europeans. We can’t afford a war of attrition. We need a plan for victory.”

McCaul went on to say that lawmakers pressed Zelenskyy on several issues, including “accountability, speed of weapons [delivery] and a plan for victory.”

Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
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New York City is hosting world leaders at the United Nations this week. But it is also facing a crisis because border states such as Texas are sending hundreds of migrants to the city each day. Jorge Agobian has the story in this report narrated by Aline Barros.
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Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old media magnate who created Fox News, is stepping down as leader of both Fox’s parent company and his News Corp. media holdings.

Fox said Thursday that Murdoch would become chairman emeritus of both companies. His son, Lachlan, will become News Corp. chairman and continue as chief executive officer of Fox Corp.

Lachlan Murdoch said that “we are grateful that he will serve as chairman emeritus and know he will continue to provide valued counsel to both companies.”

Besides Fox News, Murdoch started the Fox broadcast network, the first to successfully challenge the Big Three of ABC, CBS and NBC. He is owner of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.

Murdoch is a force in the conservative world, where Fox News Channel has profoundly influenced television and the nation’s politics since its start in 1996.

Murdoch vowed in a letter to employees that he would remain engaged at Fox.

“In my new role, I can guarantee you that I will be involved every day in the contest of ideas, Murdoch wrote. “Our companies are communities, and I will be an active member of our community. I will be watching our broadcasts with a critical eye, reading our newspapers and websites and books with much interest.”

There was no immediate word on why Murdoch’s announcement came now. Ironically, it is the week author and Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff is publishing a book, “The End of Fox News,” speculating on what will happen to the network when the patriarch is gone.
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Infighting among Republicans in the House of Representatives over spending bills has brought the United States to within 10 days of a government shutdown, creating uncertainty among the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors who would be affected.

Unless Congress is able to pass the 12 appropriations bills that fund the government — or can agree on a stopgap measure providing temporary funding — the authority of many federal agencies to spend money will expire at midnight on September 30.

At the heart of the dispute is the decision by some of the most right-wing members of the House to repudiate an agreement that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated earlier this year with President Joe Biden to avoid a default on the nation’s debt. A handful of House Republicans want to cut spending below the amount agreed to in that deal.

They are demanding significant cuts to domestic spending, as well as to the aid that the U.S. has been providing to Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion. Because McCarthy’s party has control of the House by only a handful of votes, defections by even a few members of his party mean that he does not have the majority needed to pass the appropriations measures.

McCarthy in a bind

It would be possible for McCarthy to bring appropriations bills to the floor and pass them with support from House Democrats, but the hard-right element of his caucus would regard that as a betrayal, possibly leading them to call for a vote to strip McCarthy of the speakership.

As part of the deal that secured his election as speaker, McCarthy agreed to be subject to a rule under which a single member of the House can force a vote on a motion to strip him of the job.

Arriving at the Capitol on Wednesday, McCarthy signaled to reporters that he has not given up hope of reaching a deal to avoid a shutdown.

“It’s not September 30 — the game is not over,” he said.

What a shutdown means

The term “government shutdown” is somewhat misleading, because in the event of a funding gap, much of the federal government will continue to operate. Services deemed essential to public safety and the national defense will not lapse. Additionally, government activities funded by multiyear appropriations will be able to continue. This includes, for example, many of the infrastructure projects funded by legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act.

However, even though much of the government would continue to operate, federal workers would not be paid. That includes members of the military. A law passed after the most recent serious shutdown codified the practice of paying government employees back for their lost wages once a shutdown ends. However, experience has shown that forcing federal employees to work without receiving paychecks can be extremely disruptive to their personal economic well-being.

Members of Congress would remain on the job, as would their essential support staff, but many nonessential employees of Congress would be furloughed, along with many of the employees of government contractors that help keep Capitol Hill functioning. Unlike federal employees, the employees of contractors are not guaranteed to receive pay lost during a shutdown.

The federal court system would continue to operate for at least a while because it would be possible to draw on previously appropriated funds and ongoing fee income, and to reallocate money earmarked for things like nonessential travel.

Off-ramp possible

Government shutdowns have occurred multiple times since the 1980s, but most of them have been short, affecting one business day or less. Four have lasted longer than a single business day, the most recent being in 2018-19 when the government was partly shut down for 35 days. This shutdown was partial because several appropriations bills had been passed.

Congress has also walked to the brink of a shutdown many times, only to avoid it with a stopgap funding measure known as a continuing resolution or a last-minute spending deal.

Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, told VOA that even short and narrowly averted shutdowns have an appreciable impact on the functioning of the federal government because resources have to be reallocated to prepare for the possibility of ceasing operations.

“It’s not like flipping a switch,” Stier said. “Everybody knows, if they’re involved in a complicated operation, to close it down not only is difficult, but starting it back up is incredibly difficult and costly, too. So a one-day shutdown has real cost and consequences, even though federal employees will do everything they can to ensure that the harm is not felt by the public.”

‘Increasingly painful’

Stier said that while the public might not notice a brief shutdown, when government operations cease for a longer time, their absence becomes increasingly obvious.

Passport applications are not processed. Small Business Administration loans are not made. Children cannot be enrolled in the federal Head Start program. These and many other unavailable services begin to take a toll on individuals and the broader U.S. economy.

“It becomes an increasingly painful and costly proposition,” he said. “In the last instance, we saw 35 days of a shutdown. The estimate was that billions of dollars were lost in the economy, and I believe that the costs were probably underestimated.”

Federal workers stressed

The federal workers who would be most directly affected by a government shutdown are frustrated with Congress, said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees.

Kelley told VOA that, as with the broader American public, many federal employees live paycheck to paycheck and would suffer if they were suddenly left unpaid.

“Our members are frustrated. They are nervous. They are wondering and worried about, ‘OK, how am I going to pay my bills? How am I going to make sure my family is fed?’” Kelley said.

“Federal workers go to work every single day and do their job. We need Congress to do their job,” Kelley said. “Because a government shutdown will impact not just federal employees, but our communities. We’re asking Congress to get this job done.”

Ukraine funding

Congress briefly considered a continuing resolution on Tuesday, before it was pulled from the floor out of concern that it lacked the votes to pass. The resolution did not include supplemental funding for Ukraine that the Biden administration has requested.

While a majority of members of Congress support continued U.S. aid for Ukraine, a small number of mostly Republican lawmakers are reluctant to send more money to Kyiv, making the supplemental funding a complicating factor in the discussion of the spending bill.

Several House Republicans who support continued aid for Ukraine told VOA on Wednesday that it would be necessary to consider Ukraine funding as a standalone matter, not as part of the discussion of how to fund the government.

“We need to figure out our bigger issue first with funding our own Defense Department and funding other agencies, and then we can talk about a supplemental,” said Republican Mike Gallagher.

“Putting Ukraine funds in a [continuing resolution], I don’t think that’s the right way to go. We’re not going to get it passed,” said Republican Rich McCormick. “I think it’s a separate issue that needs to be addressed by adults. We need to have a very complex conversation about the history of Ukraine, where the money has already gone, and the success [Ukraine has] already had, going against the third-largest army in the world.”

Kateryna Lisunova, VOA Ukrainian Service congressional correspondent,  contributed to this report.
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