The Biden administration announced actions taken by the federal government and private industry that it says will bolster the supply chain for rare earths and other critical minerals used in technologies from household appliances and electronics to defense systems. They say these steps will reduce the nation’s dependence on China, a major producer of these elements. 

“China controls most of the global market in these minerals,” President Joe Biden said Tuesday from the White House. “We can’t build a future that’s made in America if we ourselves are dependent on China for the materials that power the products of today and tomorrow.”   

The steps include a $35 million contract to MP Materials to process heavy rare earth elements at the company’s Mountain Pass, California, production site — the first processing and separation facility of its kind in the United States.   

In 2020, the government awarded $9.6 million to the company, which owns the only American rare earths mine. The $35 million announcement Tuesday will complement the $700 million that MP Materials will invest by 2024 to create an American rare earth magnetics supply, said company CEO James Litinsky, who spoke virtually at the White House event.   

Last June, following an executive order from Biden, the administration released a report on the supply chain, concluding an over-reliance on China for critical minerals. Currently, China controls 87% of the global permanent magnet market, as well as 55% of rare earths mining capacity and 85% of its refining. 

What Beijing is holding right now is critical, said Phoebe Moon, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Irvine, focusing on global supply chains and economic statecraft. 

“We are using more hydro energy. We are using more climate and environmentally friendly energy sources,” Moon told VOA. “And the list of rare earth materials that the Biden administration announced that they will be targeting on this issue really has that in its heart.” 

Rare earths 

Rare earths are 17 minerals that are not rare, just difficult and costly to mine and process cleanly. The U.S. is the second-biggest miner of rare earths, after China, according to the latest government data.  Other top miners include Myanmar, Australia, Madagascar, India, Russia, Thailand, Vietnam and Brazil.   

The administration’s goal is to become reasonably self-sufficient for some key essential industries such as auto and network equipment for national security and competitiveness, said Jen-Yi Chen, associate professor of operations and supply chain management at Cleveland State University. 

“By ‘reasonably,’ I mean not 100% ending our dependence on the Chinese, since it would be too costly and not sustainable, as we are not that resource-rich and thus need to prioritize and focus on the real essentials,” Chen told VOA. “By and large, in the near future, we may still need the Chinese inputs and capacity to keep prices low for the nonessentials but should not compromise much on the essentials.”    

Chen said ramping up domestic production, despite its environmental costs, still makes sense. 

“In case of a shutdown in operations, the time to recover will be much shorter than going to partners, especially during the pandemic,” Chen added. It may also motivate better environmental oversight as “they are now right in our backyard.” 

Chinese pressure 

Earlier this week Beijing announced sanctions aimed to restrict access to rare earth minerals to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, two companies that provide maintenance services to Taiwan’s missile defense systems. Beijing considers Taiwan its breakaway province. 

  Last month, legislators introduced a bipartisan bill in the U.S. Senate that could prohibit defense contractors from procuring rare earths from China by 2026 and force the Pentagon to create a strategic reserve of those minerals by 2025.  

“The Chinese Communist Party has a chokehold on global rare earth element supplies, which are used in everything from batteries to fighter jets. Ending America’s dependence on the CCP for extraction and processing of these elements is critical to winning the strategic competition against China and protecting our national security,” said Republican Senator Tom Cotton, one of the bill’s sponsors.  

Moon said recognizing the importance of critical minerals supply chains is a great start, but there must also be fundamental, cooperative efforts to keep geopolitics stable. 

“The problems we face today cannot be solved by ourselves in many cases, and these efforts to reshore and ally-shore will create an echo chamber and undermine our efforts to understand each other, creating peace in a more fundamental way,” she said, referring to efforts to move production domestically or to friendly countries.  

Also at the White House event on Tuesday, Berkshire Hathaway Energy Renewables announced it is setting up a facility to test the commercial viability to extract lithium from geothermal brines at Imperial County, California, an area that contains some of the largest deposits of lithium in the world. 

Other steps the White House announced include partnerships with Ford and Volvo for the collection and recycling of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries, a $140 million pilot project to recover rare earth elements and critical minerals from mine waste, and a $3 billion investment in refining and recycling battery materials. 

  

  

  

 

 
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U.S. President Joe Biden cut off the Russian government from international financing on Tuesday and imposed sanctions on two large banks, declaring that its movement of troops into eastern Ukraine was “a flagrant violation of international law.” 

In a brief White House speech to the American public, Biden said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s order late Monday to send troops across the eastern Ukraine border into the Luhansk and Donetsk regions was “the beginning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.” Hours earlier, Putin had declared the regions as independent, no longer part of Ukraine. 

Biden pointedly asked, “Who in the Lord’s name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called countries on territory that belonged to his neighbors?” 

The U.S. leader said his sanctions would cut off the Russia government “from raising money from the West,” and vowed that Russia “will pay an even steeper price (with more sanctions) if its forces advance further” west into Ukraine. 

He said the United States has no intention of “fighting Russia.” But he said that “none of us should be fooled, none of us will be fooled” by Putin’s intentions in deploying what he characterized as “peacekeeping forces” into the one-time Soviet republic, which has been independent since 1991. 

On Monday, in a Kremlin speech, Putin declared that Ukraine was never an independent state and belonged as part of a greater Russian sphere of influence, not a “puppet” of the West. 

“He directly attacked Ukraine’s right to exist,” Biden said of Putin, while adding there is “still time to avert the worst-case scenario” of a full-scale invasion, through diplomatic settlement of the crisis. 

But, Biden concluded, “We’re going to judge Russia by its actions, not its words.”  

Biden warned Americans, “Defending freedom will have costs,” with higher gasoline prices as world oil prices surge with the threat of further violence in Ukraine and an expanded Russian invasion. 

Biden’s implementation of long-promised sanctions came as other Western allies quickly moved Tuesday to punish Russia with sanctions of their own.     

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz halted authorization for Nord Stream 2, the completed but not yet operational natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, at least temporarily curbing potential fuel deliveries to Germany but also depriving Moscow of revenue from the pipeline.   

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Parliament he had sanctioned five Russian banks and three “high net worth” executives, freezing their assets in Britain and cutting off financial transactions with them.   

“This is the first tranche, the first barrage, of what we are prepared to do,” Johnson said.   

Russian lawmakers on Tuesday gave Putin permission to use military force outside the country, possibly presaging a broader attack on Ukraine.  

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said that “Russian troops are on Ukrainian soil” in Donetsk and Luhansk but that it was not a “fully fledged invasion.”   

For weeks, the U.S. and European allies have warned of swift and severe consequences for Russia if it launched an invasion of Ukraine, a possibility viewed with growing concern as Russia deployed 150,000 troops and military equipment along its border with Ukraine and in Belarus, a Russian ally to the north of Ukraine.      

Russian tanks entered eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region overnight, Western diplomats and residents in Donetsk confirmed to VOA.  It was unclear if their presence constituted significant movement of Russian forces or instead movement of Russian-backed militias already in eastern Ukraine.  

Biden issued an initial set of sanctions Monday in response to Putin’s recognition of the breakaway regions and his order to deploy what he called Russian peacekeeping forces.      

 A senior Biden administration official told reporters that the first round of sanctions was specifically tied to those actions and did not represent the “swift and severe economic measures we have been preparing in coordination with allies and partners should Russia further invade Ukraine.”      

Biden’s Monday order prohibited new investment, trade and financing by Americans in Luhansk and Donetsk after Putin declared them independent from Ukraine.   

From a desk at the Kremlin, Putin delivered a nearly hourlong televised address to the Russian people Monday, outlining his version of the history of national boundaries in Europe and the 1990s breakup of the Soviet Union.     

Putin also said there was “no prospect” for peace to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine, but Moscow has contended it has no plans to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.     

“This wasn’t a speech just about Russia’s security,” a senior U.S. administration official said. “It was an attack on the very idea of a sovereign and independent Ukraine. He (Putin) made clear that he views Ukraine historically as part of Russia. And he made a number of false claims about Ukraine that seemed designed to excuse possible military action. This was a speech to the Russian people to justify war.”        

The official would not say whether plans were still on for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, later this week. That meeting was intended to set the scene for a possible summit between Putin and Biden, with the United States saying both were predicated on Russia not invading Ukraine.      

“We’ll continue to pursue diplomacy until the tanks roll,” the official said. “We are under no illusions about what is likely to come next. And we’re prepared to respond decisively when it does.”        

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Tuesday the Russian side was still “ready for negotiations.” 

 
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday took up a major new legal fight pitting religious beliefs against LGBT rights, agreeing to hear an evangelical Christian web designer’s free speech claim that she cannot be forced under a Colorado anti-discrimination law to produce websites for same-sex marriages.

The justices agreed to hear Denver-area business owner Lorie Smith’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling rejecting her bid for an exemption from a Colorado law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation and certain other factors. The case follows the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in favor of a Christian Denver-area baker who refused on religious grounds to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.

Smith’s case gives the justices an opportunity to answer a question that has been raised in other disputes including the baker case but never definitively resolved: can people refuse service to customers in violation of public accommodation laws based on the idea that fulfilling a creative act such as designing a website or baking a cake is a form of free speech under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently held that anti-discrimination laws, like Colorado’s, apply to all businesses selling goods and services. Companies cannot turn away LGBT customers just because of who they are,” said Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Democrat.

Colorado’s anti-discrimination law bars anyone from refusing “goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages or accommodations” based among other things on sexual orientation, age, race, gender and religion. Colorado is among 21 U.S. states that have measures explicitly barring discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in public accommodations.

These laws pose “a clear and present danger to every American’s constitutionally protected freedoms and the very existence of a diverse and free nation,” said Kristen Waggoner, general counsel of the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents Smith.

“Colorado has weaponized its law to silence speech it disagrees with, to compel speech it approves of, and to punish anyone who dares to dissent,” Waggoner added.

The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, has become increasingly supportive of religious rights and related free speech claims in recent years even as it has backed LGBT rights in other cases.

The justices declined to take up a separate question concerning whether Smith has a religious rights claim, also under the First Amendment. Smith had asked the court to overturn its important 1990 ruling that limited the ability of people to cite their religious beliefs in seeking exemptions from laws that apply to everyone.

Smith runs a web design business called 303 Creative that she wants to operate in accordance with her Christian faith. She believes that marriage should be limited to opposite-sex couples, a view shared by many conservative Christians.

Before adding wedding websites to the services she offered customers, Smith sued Colorado’s civil rights commission and other officials in 2016 because of her concern she would be punished under the anti-discrimination law.

Smith’s lawyers have said that any state action punishing her for refusing to design websites for gay weddings violates her right to religious expression and her free speech rights.

Jennifer Pizer, senior counsel at LGBT rights group Lambda Legal, said the Supreme Court should “reaffirm and apply longstanding constitutional precedent that our freedoms of religion and speech are not a license to discriminate when operating a business.”

Colorado officials have said they never investigated Smith’s company and saw no evidence that anyone ever actually asked her to design a website for a same-sex wedding. Lower courts backed Colorado, including the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a July 2021 ruling.

The justices are set to hear oral arguments and decide the case in the Supreme Court’s next term, which begins in October and ends in June 2023.

The Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide in 2015 and in 2020 expanded protections for LGBT workers under federal law. The Supreme Court has struggled to resolve cases in which conservative religious opposition to LGBT rights has clashed with situations in which LGBT people are seeking to exercise their own rights.

Smith’s appeal arises from a dispute similar to the one that prompted the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling on narrow legal grounds siding with a Colorado baker named Jack Phillips. The court said in that case that Colorado’s civil rights commission, which imposed sanctions on Phillips for discrimination, was motivated by anti-religious bias.

Similar legal fights involving other small business including a wedding photographer and a calligrapher owners have been waged in other states.

 
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Talks on restoring a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program and ease sanctions are near conclusion, a Russian envoy said on Tuesday, and sources close to the negotiations said a prisoner swap between Iran and the United States is expected soon.

“Apparently the negotiations on restoration of #JCPOA are about to cross the finish line,” Mikhail Ulyanov said on Twitter, using the 2015 agreement’s full name, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Read full story.

Reuters reported last week that a U.S.-Iranian deal was taking shape in Vienna after months of talks between Tehran and major powers to revive the nuclear deal pact, abandoned in 2018 by then-U.S. President Donald Trump, who also reimposed extensive sanctions on Iran. Read full story.

A draft text of the agreement alluded only vaguely to other issues, diplomats said, adding that what was meant by that was unfreezing billions of dollars in Iranian funds in South Korean banks, and the release of Western prisoners held in Iran.

On Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said the Islamic Republic was ready for an immediate prisoner exchange with the United States.

“Iran has always and repeatedly expressed its readiness to exchange prisoners. Months ago we were ready to do it but the Americans ruined the deal,” a senior Iranian official in Tehran told Reuters, without elaborating.

“Now I believe some of them will be released, maybe five or six of them. But those talks about prisoners are not linked to the nuclear agreement, rather associated with it. This is a humanitarian measure by Iran.”

U.S. negotiator Robert Malley has suggested that securing the nuclear pact is unlikely unless Tehran frees four U.S. citizens, including Iranian-American father and son Baquer and Siamak Namazi, that Washington says Tehran is holding hostage.

“Six years ago the Iranian government arrested Baquer Namazi and they still refuse to let him leave the country,” Malley tweeted on Tuesday. “The Iranian government can and must release the Namazis, Emad Shargi, Morad Tahbaz, and other unjustly held U.S. and foreign nationals.”

Iran, which does not recognize dual nationality, denies taking prisoners to gain diplomatic leverage. However, in recent years, the elite Revolutionary Guards have arrested dozens of dual nationals and foreigners, mostly on espionage and security-related charges.

Britain has been seeking the release of British-Iranians Anousheh Ashouri, jailed on espionage charges, and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation who was convicted of plotting to overthrow the clerical establishment. L8N2UW3FH

Tehran has sought the release of over a dozen Iranians in the United States, including seven Iranian-American dual nationals, two Iranians with permanent U.S. residency and four Iranian citizens with no legal status in the United States.

Most were jailed for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran.

In the latest comments on the final phase of 10 months of nuclear negotiations, the talks’ coordinator, Enrique Mora, tweeted that “key issues need to be fixed” but the end was near.

Several Iranian officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said some minor technical issues were being discussed in Vienna and that a deal was expected before the end of the week, though adding that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

Separately, hardline Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi told gas exporter countries on Tuesday to avoid any “cruel” sanctions imposed by the United States on Tehran.

“The members of this forum should not recognize those sanctions…(because) in today’s world we see that the sanctions are not going to be effective,” Raisi told a gas exporters conference in Doha.

The 2015 deal between Iran and world powers limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium to make it harder for it to develop material for nuclear weapons, if it chose to, in return for a lifting of international sanctions against Tehran.

Since 2019, following the U.S. withdrawal from the deal, Tehran has gone well beyond its limits, rebuilding stockpiles of enriched uranium, refining it to higher fissile purity and installing advanced centrifuges to speed up output.
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Self-driving vehicles may someday make transportation safer and less expensive, but they’re not doing so yet. To check out how it’s coming along, a skeptical transportation scientist recently joined two other experts for a ride on a mostly autonomous shuttle. Shelley Schlender reports.
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The young mother had behaved erratically for months, hitchhiking and wandering naked through two Native American reservations and a small town clustered along Northern California’s rugged Lost Coast.

But things escalated when Emmilee Risling was charged with arson for igniting a fire in a cemetery. Her family hoped the case would force her into mental health and addiction services. Instead, she was released over the pleas of loved ones and a tribal police chief.

The 33-year-old college graduate — an accomplished traditional dancer with ancestry from three area tribes — was last seen soon after, walking across a bridge near a place marked End of Road, a far corner of the Yurok Reservation where the rutted pavement dissolves into thick woods.

Her disappearance is one of five instances in the past 18 months where Indigenous women have gone missing or been killed in this isolated expanse of Pacific coastline between San Francisco and Oregon, a region where the Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, Tolowa and Wiyot people have coexisted for millennia. Two other women died from what authorities say were overdoses despite relatives’ questions about severe bruises.

The crisis has spurred the Yurok Tribe to issue an emergency declaration and brought increased urgency to efforts to build California’s first database of such cases and regain sovereignty over key services.

“I came to this issue as both a researcher and a learner, but just in this last year, I knew three of the women who have gone missing or were murdered — and we shared so much in common,” said Blythe George, a Yurok tribal member who consults on a project documenting the problem. “You can’t help but see yourself in those people.”

The recent cases spotlight an epidemic that is difficult to quantify but has long disproportionately plagued Native Americans.

A 2021 report by a government watchdog found the true number of missing and murdered Indigenous women is unknown due to reporting problems, distrust of law enforcement and jurisdictional conflicts. But Native women face murder rates almost three times those of white women overall — and up to 10 times the national average in certain locations, according to a 2021 summary of the existing research by the National Congress of American Indians. More than 80% have experienced violence.

In this area peppered with illegal marijuana farms and defined by wilderness, almost everyone knows someone who has vanished.

Missing person posters flutter from gas station doors and road signs. Even the tribal police chief isn’t untouched: He took in the daughter of one missing woman, and Emmilee — an enrolled Hoopa Valley tribal member with Yurok and Karuk blood — babysat his children.

In California alone, the Yurok Tribe and the Sovereign Bodies Institute, an Indigenous-run research and advocacy group, uncovered 18 cases of missing or slain Native American women in roughly the past year — a number they consider a vast undercount. An estimated 62% of those cases are not listed in state or federal databases for missing persons.

Hupa citizen Brandice Davis attended school with the daughters of a woman who disappeared in 1991 and now has daughters of her own, ages 9 and 13.

“Here, we’re all related, in a sense,” she said of the place where many families are connected by marriage or community ties.

She cautions her daughters about what it means to be female, Native American and growing up on a reservation: “You’re a statistic. But we have to keep going. We have to show people we’re still here.”

Like countless cases involving Indigenous women, Emmilee’s disappearance has gotten no attention from the outside world.

But many here see in her story the ugly intersection of generations of trauma inflicted on Native Americans by their white colonizers, the marginalization of Native peoples and tribal law enforcement’s lack of authority over many crimes committed on their land.

Virtually all of the area’s Indigenous residents, including Emmilee, have ancestors who were shipped to boarding schools as children and forced to give up their language and culture as part of a federal assimilation campaign. Further back, Yurok people spent years away from home as indentured servants for colonizers, said Judge Abby Abinanti, the tribe’s chief judge.

The trauma caused by those removals echoes among the Yurok in the form of drug abuse and domestic violence, which trickles down to the youth, she said. About 110 Yurok children are in foster care.

“You say, ‘OK, how did we get to this situation where we’re losing our children?'” said Abinanti. “There were big gaps in knowledge, including parenting, and generationally those play out.”

An analysis of cases by the Yurok and Sovereign Bodies found most of the region’s missing women had either been in foster care themselves or had children taken from them by the state. An analysis of jail bookings also showed Yurok citizens in the two-county region are 11 times more likely to go to jail in a given year — and half those arrested are female, usually for low-level crimes. That’s an arrest rate for Yurok women roughly five times the rate of female incarcerations nationwide, said George, the University of California, Merced sociologist consulting with the tribe.

The Yurok run a tribal wellness court for addiction and operate one of the country’s only state-certified tribal domestic violence perpetrator programs. They also recently hired a tribal prosecutor, another step toward building an Indigenous justice system that would ultimately handle all but the most serious felonies.

The Yurok also are working to reclaim supervision over foster care and hope to transfer their first foster family from state court within months, said Jessica Carter, the Yurok Tribal Court director. A tribal-run guardianship court follows another 50 children who live with relatives.

The long-term plan — mostly funded by grants — is a massive undertaking that will take years to accomplish, but the Yurok see regaining sovereignty over these systems as the only way to end the cycle of loss that’s taken the greatest toll on their women.

“If we are successful, we can use that as a gift to other tribes to say, ‘Here’s the steps we took,'” said Rosemary Deck, the newly hired tribal prosecutor. “‘You can take this as a blueprint and assert your own sovereignty.'”

Emmilee was born into a prominent Native family, and a bright future beckoned.

Starting at a young age, she was groomed to one day lead the intricate dances that knit the modern-day people to generations of tradition nearly broken by colonization. Her family, a “dance family,” has the rare distinction of owning enough regalia that it can outfit the brush, jump and flower dances without borrowing a single piece.

At 15, Emmilee paraded down the National Mall with other tribal members at the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. The Washington Post published a front-page photo of her in a Karuk dress of dried bear grass, a woven basket cap and a white leather sash adorned with Pileated woodpecker scalps.

The straight-A student earned a scholarship to the University of Oregon, where she helped lead a prominent Native students’ group. Her success, however, was darkened by the first sign of trouble: an abusive relationship with a Native man whom, her mother believes, she felt she could save through her positive influence.

Later, Emmilee dated another man, became pregnant and returned home to have the baby before finishing her degree.

She then worked with disadvantaged Native families and eventually got accepted into a master’s program. She helped coach her son’s T-ball team and signed him up for swim lessons.

But over time, her family says, they noticed changes.

Emmilee was uncharacteristically tardy for work and grew more combative. She often dropped off her son with family, and she fell in with another abusive boyfriend. Her son was removed from her care when he was 5; a girl born in 2020 was taken away as a newborn as Emmilee’s behavior deteriorated.

Her parents remain bewildered by her rapid decline and think she developed a mental illness — possibly postpartum psychosis — compounded by drugs and the trauma of domestic abuse. At first, she would see a doctor or therapist at her family’s insistence but eventually rebuffed all help.

After her daughter’s birth, Emmilee spiraled rapidly, “like a light switched,” and she began to let go of the Native identity that had been her defining force, said her sister, Mary.

“That was her life, and when you let that go, when you don’t have your kids … what are you?” she said.

In the months before she vanished, Emmilee was frequently seen walking naked in public, talking to herself. She was picked up many times by sheriff’s deputies and tribal police but never charged.

The only in-patient psychiatric facility within 300 miles (480 kilometers) was always too full to admit her. Once, she was taken to the emergency room and fled barefoot in her hospital gown.

“People tended to look the other way. They didn’t really help her. In less than 24 hours, she was just back on the street, literally on the street,” said Judy Risling, her mother. “There were just no services for her.”

In September, Emmilee was arrested after she was found dancing around a small fire in the Hoopa Valley Reservation cemetery.

Then-Hoopa Valley Tribal Police Chief Bob Kane appeared in a Humboldt County court by video and explained her repeated police contacts and mental health problems. Emmilee mumbled during the hearing then shouted out that she didn’t set the fire.

She was released with an order to appear again in 12 days after her public defender argued she had no criminal convictions and the court couldn’t hold her on the basis of her mental health.

Then, Emmilee disappeared.

“We had predicted that something like this may … happen in the future,” said Kane. “And you know, now we’re here.”

If Emmilee fell through the cracks before she went missing, she has become even more invisible in her absence.

One of the biggest hurdles in Indian Country once a woman is reported missing is unraveling a confusing jumble of federal, state, local and tribal agencies that must coordinate. Poor communication and oversights can result in overlooked evidence or delayed investigations.

The problem is more acute in rural regions like the one where Emmilee disappeared, said Abigail Echo-Hawk, citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and director of the Urban Indian Health Institute in Seattle.

“Particularly in reservations and in village areas, there is a maze of jurisdictions, of policies, of procedures of who investigates what,” she said.

Moreover, many cases aren’t logged in federal missing persons databases, and medical examiners sometimes misclassify Native women as white or Asian, said Gretta Goodwin, of the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s homeland security and justice team.

Recent efforts at the state and federal level seek to address what advocates say have been decades of neglect regarding missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Former President Donald Trump signed a bill that required federal, state, tribal and local law enforcement agencies to create or update their protocols for handling such cases. And in November, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to set up guidelines between the federal government and tribal police that would help track, solve and prevent crimes against all Native Americans.

A number of states, including California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona, are also taking on the crisis with greater funding to tribes, studies of the problem or proposals to create Amber Alert-style notifications.

Emmilee’s case illustrates some of the challenges. She was a citizen of the Hoopa Valley Tribe and was arrested on its reservation, but she is presumed missing on the neighboring Yurok Tribe’s reservation.

The Yurok police are in charge of the missing persons probe, but the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office will decide when to declare the case cold, which could trigger federal help.

The remote terrain where Emmilee was last seen — two hours from the nearest town — created hurdles common on reservations.

Law enforcement determined there wasn’t enough information to launch a formal search and rescue operation in such a vast, mountainous area. The Yurok police opted to forgo their own search because of liability concerns and a lack of training, said Yurok Tribal Police Chief Greg O’Rourke.

Instead, Yurok and Hoopa Valley police and sheriff’s deputies plied the rain-swollen Klamath River by boat and drove back roads.

Emmilee’s father, Gary Risling, says the sheriff’s office failed to act on anonymous tips, was slow to follow up on possible sightings and focused more resources on other missing person’s cases, including a wayward hunter and a kayaker lost at sea.

“I don’t want to seem like I’m picking on them, but that effort is sure not put forward when it becomes a missing Indian woman,” he said.

Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal declined interview requests, saying the Yurok are in charge and there are no signs of foul play. O’Rourke said the tips aren’t enough for a search warrant and there’s nothing further the tribal police can do.

The police chief, who knew Emmilee well, says his work is frequently stymied by a broader system that discounts tribal sovereignty.

“The role of police is protect the vulnerable. As tribal police, we’re doing that in a system that’s broken,” he said. “I think that is the reason that Native women get all but dismissed.”

Emmilee’s family, meanwhile, is struggling to shield her children, now 10 and almost 2, from the trauma of their mother’s disappearance — trauma they worry could trigger another generational cycle of loss.

The boy has been having nightmares and recently spoke everyone’s worst fear.

“It’s real difficult when you deal with the grandkids, and the grandkid says, ‘Grandpa, can you take me down the river and can we look for my mama?’ What do you tell him? ‘We’re looking, we’re looking every day,'” said Gary Risling, choking back tears.

“And then he says, ‘What happens if we can’t find her?'”
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The United States and Britain are set to announce additional sanctions against Russia on Tuesday, with European Union allies preparing their own measures, following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move to recognize the Russian-occupied regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine as independent states.

A senior U.S. official, while declining to give specifics in a phone briefing with reporters late Monday, said the further U.S. measures would “hold Russia accountable for this clear violation of international law and Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as of Russia’s own international commitments.”

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss used similar language in previewing action by her government, while French and German representatives spoke about firm measures being prepared as they addressed a late Monday meeting of the United Nations Security Council.

For weeks, the U.S. and European allies warned of severe consequences for Russia if it launched a fresh invasion of Ukraine, a possibility viewed with growing fear as Russia deployed 150,000 troops along with military equipment along its border with Ukraine.

U.S. President Joe Biden issued an initial set of sanctions Monday in response to Putin’s recognition of the breakaway regions and his order to deploy what he called Russian peacekeeping forces.

A senior Biden administration official told reporters that the first round of sanctions was specifically tied to those actions and did not represent the “swift and severe economic measures we have been preparing in coordination with allies and partners should Russia further invade Ukraine.”

Biden’s order prohibits new investment, trade and financing by Americans in those areas.  “This wasn’t a speech just about Russia’s security,” a senior administration official said. “It was an attack on the very idea of a sovereign and independent Ukraine. He (Putin) made clear that he views Ukraine historically as part of Russia. And he made a number of false claims about Ukraine contention that seemed designed to excuse possible military action. This was a speech to the Russian people to justify war.” 

The official would not say whether plans were still on for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, later this week. That meeting was intended to set the scene for a possible summit between Putin and Biden, with the United States saying both were predicated on Russia not invading Ukraine.

“We’ll continue to pursue diplomacy until the tanks roll,” the official said. “We are under no illusions about what is likely to come next. And we’re prepared to respond decisively when it does.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Tuesday the Russian side was still “ready for negotiations.”

Blinken is scheduled to host Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba for a meeting in Washington on Tuesday after speaking with him by phone Monday to “reaffirm unwavering U.S. support for Ukraine,” the State Department said in a statement.

Analyst and author Angela Stent of the Brookings Institution said Monday that a summit between Biden and Putin is an especially fraught proposition now. 

“At this point, I think, to have another in-person meeting between President Biden and President Putin without some conditions being laid for the Russians, without them showing some goodwill or sincere interest in discussions by reversing some of the things that they’re doing, I think it makes no sense to do that,” she said to reporters and analysts. “Because, you know, otherwise we’re just playing into the Kremlin’s hands, and it looks as if they’re going to go ahead and do whatever they want to do irrespective of these negotiations.” 

Author and analyst Steven Pifer agreed. 

“I don’t want to downplay diplomacy,” he said. “But at this point in time, I would think that there would have to be some indication to the White House that a meeting with Putin would actually have a chance of yielding something. And right now, again, based on the experience that (French President Emmanuel) Macron had, that (German Chancellor Olaf) Scholz had, it doesn’t seem like these meetings – I think they are ego boosters for the Russian president, but they don’t seem to be doing anything to turn him from a course which has been one of continual escalation of the crisis.”

Biden spoke to both the German and French leaders Monday, and, separately, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. In both calls, the White House said, “The leaders strongly condemned President Putin’s decision to recognize the so-called DNR and LNR regions of Ukraine as ‘independent.’”   

  

Washington was immediately joined by the European Union in announcing sanctions, with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Council President Charles Michel calling Putin’s recognition of these separatist areas “a blatant violation of international law.”

The Kremlin said Putin informed the leaders of France and Germany Monday of his decision and then signed documents declaring the regions as no longer part of Ukraine. 

Putin, from a desk at the Kremlin, delivered a lengthy televised address to the Russian people, outlining his version of the history of national boundaries in Europe and the 1990s breakup of the Soviet Union.  

He contended that Ukraine was “never” a true nation but rather historically a part of Russia.  

About 14,000 people have been killed in the flashpoint Donbas territory since 2014 in fighting between pro-Moscow separatists and Kyiv’s forces, trench warfare battles that started after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. 

The U.S. and its NATO allies have contended that Russia is staging false-flag operations in Donetsk and Luhansk to make it appear Ukrainian forces are an increasing threat. Kyiv says it does not intend to launch a full-scale attack on the region in eastern Ukraine, and the West says Russia is attempting to justify grounds for an invasion to protect Russian sympathizers. 

The separatists want Russia to sign friendship treaties and give them military aid to protect them from what they contend is an ongoing Ukrainian military offensive.  

The Russian parliament last week called on Putin to formally recognize the DNR and LNR, both of which declared independence from Ukraine in 2014. 

Putin said there was “no prospect” for peace to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine, but Moscow has contended it has no plans to invade Ukraine.

Some material in this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. VOA’s Chris Hannas contributed to the report. 
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