First lady Jill Biden has tested negative for COVID-19 and will leave South Carolina, where she had isolated since vacationing with President Joe Biden, and rejoin him at their Delaware beach home, her office said Sunday. 

The White House announced on Tuesday that the 71-year-old first lady, who like her husband has been twice-vaccinated and twice-boosted with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, had tested positive for the coronavirus. She first had symptoms on Monday. 

The 79-year-old president recovered from a rebound case of the virus on Aug. 7. 

Jill Biden was prescribed the antiviral drug Paxlovid and isolated at the Kiawah Island vacation home for five days before receiving negative results from two consecutive COVID-19 tests, spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander said. Jill Biden planned to travel to Delaware later Sunday. 
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Over a month after the controversial Supreme Court ruling that overturned a New York gun safety law requiring a license to carry concealed weapons in public, the conversation continues. Evgeny Maslov has the story on the state of the U.S. gun debate, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Alexander Barash, Dmitrii Vershinin
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 The governor of Indiana arrived in Taipei on Sunday, becoming the latest U.S. official to visit Taiwan and defying pressure from China for such trips not to happen.

China, which claims democratically-governed Taiwan as its own territory despite the Taipei government’s strong objections, has been carrying out war games and drills near Taiwan since U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a two-day visit to Taipei earlier this month.

Last week a second group of U.S. lawmakers visited Taiwan.

Governor Eric Holcomb tweeted that he would also be visiting South Korea, while Taiwan’s presidential office said he would meet President Tsai Ing-wen on Monday morning.

“I’m energized to spend this week building new relationships, reinforcing long time ones and strengthening key sector partnerships with Taiwan and South Korea,” Holcomb tweeted.

He termed his visit to Taiwan and South Korea as an “economic development trip”, saying he was the first U.S. governor to come to Taiwan since the COVID-19 pandemic began more than two years ago.

“Our delegation will spend this week meeting with government officials, business leaders and academic institutions to further strengthen Indiana’s economic, academic and cultural connections with Taiwan and South Korea,” Holcomb wrote on his Twitter account.

There was no immediate response from China to his arrival.

China says Taiwan is the most important and sensitive issue in its relations with Washington, and that it considers it an internal issue.

Taiwan’s government says that as the People’s Republic of China has never ruled the island it has no right to claim it, and that only Taiwan’s 23 million people can decide their future.

China’s military drills have been continuing around Taiwan, though on a smaller scale than immediately after Pelosi’s trip.
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Students across the United States are returning to classrooms for the start of a new school year. As classes resume, many school districts have sought to boost security. Some are arming teachers to provide a line of defense against school shooters.

It remains to be seen whether teachers toting firearms will save lives or do more harm than good.

Calls for protecting the nation’s more than 50 million public school students and staff have grown louder since the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in May. An 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two adults.

Months after the tragedy, the attack still haunts some students. “I want to go to school knowing that me and my fellow students are safe,” said high school student Tony Williams from Manassas, Virginia.

Williams doesn’t agree with arming educators but believes stronger measures are needed. “We should have more armed school security officers, more metal detectors and reinforced locked doors at all entrances,” he told VOA.

Ninth grader Rebecca McKenzie from Georgia said she would feel safer with armed teachers in the classroom. “They need to be well trained in using firearms and have easy access to a gun if a person attacks the school.”

School security response

In the wake of some of the nation’s deadliest school shootings over the past decade, gun rights activists and Republican state lawmakers have pushed for training and arming school personnel to become a first line of defense in active shooter situations.

Following the Texas school shooting, President Joe Biden signed into law the first federal gun control measure in three decades. “There are too many other schools, too many other everyday places that have become killing fields, battlefields here in America,” Biden said in June.

While the legislation is modest, it does impose new regulations on gun ownership that will tighten background checks for would-be gun purchasers convicted of domestic violence or significant crimes as juveniles. Republicans ruled out stiffer measures such as a ban on assault-style rifles or high-capacity magazines, favored by Democrats and Biden.

Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine in June signed a law that allows teachers who receive 24 hours of training to carry a gun in schools. “School safety goes much beyond the headline; it goes much beyond the tragedies that we see in schools when there is a school shooter,” DeWine said earlier this month at a school safety conference.

DeWine also announced that 1,183 schools across Ohio would receive nearly $47 million as part of a grant program. The money will cover expenses of physical security enhancements such as security cameras, public address systems and automatic door locks. The state will hire 16 mobile field trainers to work with school districts that allow teachers to carry guns. “What you do every day is focus on keeping your kids safe,” DeWine said.

School safety debate

While most adult Americans do not want teachers to carry guns in school, in a public opinion survey from PDK International, a robust 45% said they would favor arming teachers as a safety strategy.

Another poll conducted last month found 75% of educators from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade said arming teachers was an unpopular strategy, according to an American Federation of Teachers survey.

A statewide public opinion survey in Virginia conducted by Patch News found 83% of respondents were opposed to arming teachers. Those who favored allowing educators to carry weapons cited lengthy police response times to an active shooter event – a critical factor in the Uvalde massacre. “Having defense already in the room would reduce the response time, saving lives, and reduce the attractiveness of schools as a target,” said one survey respondent.

The poll, conducted last month, also found people on both sides of the debate agreed on school safety enhancements, including locking doors from the inside, improving mental health resources for students and adding more security guards.

In some communities, teachers unions and gun control advocates have pushed back against arming schoolteachers, administrators and staff.

“Bringing more guns into schools makes schools more dangerous and does nothing to shield our students and educators from gun violence,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union. “We need fewer guns in schools and teachers should be teaching, not acting as armed security guards.”

Gun control advocates argue that more weapons in schools increases the chances a gun would fall into the wrong hands or that the weapon would discharge unintentionally.

“Far more needs to be done to keep our children safe in and out of the classroom,” said Anna Morshedi, a volunteer with the Arkansas chapter of Moms Demand Action, a network of parents fighting for stronger gun laws. She believes increasing armed personnel in schools will do little to prevent gun violence. “We need lawmakers to address the root cause of the problem and stop guns from coming into our schools in the first place,” she said in an online statement.

Lawmakers in Arkansas approved a measure that mandates one armed guard at every school. The state will also spend $50 million for a school safety grant to expand youth mental health training for all school personnel who interact with students.

Updating school security

Police across the U.S. updated procedures for responding to active shooter incidents after a mass public school shooting in Colorado more than two decades ago. Officers are trained to confront and neutralize the suspect immediately even if that puts police officers’ lives in danger. In Texas, law enforcement officers were criticized for taking more than an hour to kill the gunman at the Uvalde elementary school.

In response to the Uvalde shooting, one North Carolina school district is storing high-powered rifles, ammunition and other equipment in six schools. “In the event we have someone barricaded in a classroom, we’ll have those tools to be able to breach that door if needed,” said Madison County (N.C.) Sheriff Buddy Harwood. “I do not want to have to run back out to the car to grab an AR-15 rifle, because that’s time lost,” he told reporters earlier this month.

The school district is also launching safety initiatives, including assigning social workers and counselors to each school, adding a panic button system to every building and increasing the number of armed personnel.

More than 29 U.S. states allow people other than police or security guards to carry guns on school grounds, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A federal study found only 3% of the nation’s public schools had armed faculty in 2018.

In Florida, more than 1,300 school staff across the state serve as armed guardians in 45 out of 74 school districts, according to state education records. The heightened security followed the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where 17 people were killed by a 19-year-old gunman.

Mass school shootings have hit many communities hard, with parents and policymakers demanding more be done. In Georgia, gun-rights groups have pushed for arming more educators.

“Schools are a soft target, but once people understand that there’s someone there armed, no one’s going to go in there and shoot,” said Jerry Henry, executive director of Georgia Second Amendment in an interview with Atlanta-based Reporter Newspapers. “Had one of those teachers in Uvalde, Texas, been armed, then they could have stepped in.”

Last month, the Cobb County Board of Education near Atlanta voted to allow certain school staff to carry guns. A law adopted in 2014 allows Georgia teachers and other employees to carry weapons in schools if local school boards authorize it.

“Our schools are being threatened by gun violence,” said Charles Tatum, a parent of a high school student in Atlanta. He believes arming well-trained school staff can protect students. “It would deter someone with a gun from going into the schools and taking advantage of small kids and taking lives senselessly,” Tatum told VOA.

“Going into the new school year I feel my son is fairly safe with the security upgrades like more armed guards and keeping all the doors locked.”
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The first surprise, for the Finnish conscripts and officers taking part in a NATO-hosted military exercise in the Arctic this spring: the sudden roar of a U.S. Marine helicopter assault force, touching down in a field right next to the Finns’ well-hidden command post.

The second surprise: Spilling out of their field headquarters, the Finnish Signal Corps communications workers and others inside routed the U.S. Marines — the Finns’ designated adversary in the NATO exercise and members of America’s professional and premier expeditionary force — in the mock firefight that followed.

Finnish camouflage for the Arctic snow, scrub and scree likely had kept the Americans from even realizing the command post was there when they landed, Finnish commander Lt. Col. Mikko Kuoka suspected.

“For those who years from now will doubt it,” Kuoka wrote in an infantry-focused blog of an episode he later confirmed for The Associated Press, “That actually happened.”

As the exercise made clear, NATO’s addition of Finland and Sweden — what President Joe Biden calls “our allies of the high north” — would bring military and territorial advantages to the Western defense alliance. That’s especially so as the rapid melting of the Arctic from climate change awakens strategic rivalries at the top of the world.

 

Sophisticated partners

In contrast to the NATO expansion of former Soviet states that needed big boosts in the decades after the Cold War, the alliance would be bringing in two sophisticated militaries and, in Finland’s case, a country with a remarkable tradition of national defense. Both Finland and Sweden are in a region on one of Europe’s front lines and meeting places with Russia.

Finland, defending against Soviet Russia’s invasion on the eve of World War II, relied on fighters on snowshoes and skis, expert snow and forest camouflage, and reindeers transporting weapons.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, along with his pointed reminder about the Kremlin’s nuclear arsenal and his repeated invocation of broad territorial claims stemming from the days of the Russian Empire, have galvanized current NATO nations into strengthening their collective defenses and bringing on board new members.

Finland — until 1917 a grand duchy in that empire — and Sweden abandoned longtime national policies of military nonalignment. They applied to come under NATO’s nuclear and conventional umbrella and join 30 other member states in a powerful mutual defense pact, stipulating that an attack on one member is an attack on all.

Putin justified his invasion of West-looking Ukraine as pushing back against NATO and the West as, he said, they encroached ever closer on Russia. A NATO that includes Finland and Sweden would come as an ultimate rebuke for Putin’s war, empowering the defensive alliance in a strategically important region, surrounding Russia in the Baltic Sea and Arctic Ocean, and crowding NATO up against Russia’s western border for more than 1,300 kilometers (800 miles).

“I spent four years, my term, trying to persuade Sweden and Finland to join NATO,” former NATO secretary-general Lord George Robertson said this summer. “Vladimir Putin managed it in four weeks.”

Biden has been part of bipartisan U.S. and international cheerleading for the two countries’ candidacies. Reservations expressed by Turkey and Hungary keep NATO approval from being a lock.

Russia in recent years has been “rearming up in the north, with advanced nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles and multiple bases,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said this month. “Russia’s threats, and Russia’s military build-up, mean that NATO is strengthening its presence in the north.’

Finland and Sweden would bring a lot to that mix. But they’re not without flaws.

Both countries downsized their militaries, cut defense funding and closed bases after the collapse of the Soviet Union lulled Cold War-era fears. As of just five years ago, Sweden’s entire national defense force could fit into one of Stockholm’s soccer stadiums, a critic noted.

But as Putin grew more confrontational, Sweden reinstated conscription and otherwise moved to rebuild its military. Sweden has a capable navy and a high-tech air force. Like Finland, Sweden has a valued homegrown defense industry; Sweden is one of the smallest countries in the world to build its own fighter jets.

Finnish Winter War

Finland’s defense force, meanwhile, is the stuff of legend.

In 1939 and 1940, Finland’s tiny, miserably equipped forces, fighting alone in what became known as the Winter War, made the nation one of few to survive a full-on assault by the Soviet Union with independence intact. Over the course of an exceptionally, deathly cold winter, Finnish fighters, sometimes cloaked in white bedsheets for camouflage and typically moving unseen on foot, snowshoes and skis, lost some territory to Russia but forced out the invaders.

Finns were responsible for up to 200,000 fatalities among invading forces versus an estimated 25,000 Finns lost, said Iskander Rehman, a fellow at Johns Hopkins’ Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs.

It helped fuel a Finnish national credo of “sisu,” or grit. Finnish Winter War veterans were recruited for the U.S. Army’s winter warfare training, Rehman noted.

Finland’s constitution makes rallying to the national defense an obligation of every citizen. Finland says it can muster a 280,000-strong fighting force, built on near-universal male conscription and a large, well-trained reserve, equipped with modern artillery, warplanes and tanks, much of it U.S.

The U.S. and NATO are likely to increase their presence around the Baltic and Arctic with the accession of the two Scandinavian countries.

“Just looking at the map, if you add in Finland and Sweden, you essentially turn the entire Baltic Sea into a NATO lake,” with just two smaller bits of Russia lining it, said Zachary Selden, a former director of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly’s defense and security committee who is now a national security expert at the University of Florida.

Likewise, Russia will become the only non-NATO member among countries with claims to Arctic territory, and the only non-NATO member of the Atlantic Council, an eight-member international forum created for Arctic issues.

Selden predicts a greater NATO presence in the Baltics as a result, perhaps with a new NATO regional command, along with U.S. military rotations, although likely not any permanent base.

Russia sees its military presence in the Arctic as vital to its European strategy, including ballistic missile submarines that give it second-strike capability in any conflict with NATO, analysts say.

The Arctic is warming much faster under climate change than the Earth as a whole, opening up competition for Arctic resources and access as Arctic ice vanishes.

Russia has been building its fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers, aiming to escort expected future commercial shipping traffic through the melting Arctic, “as a way to create this toll road for transit,’ said Sherri Goodman, a former U.S. first deputy undersecretary of defense, now at the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute and at the Center for Climate & Security.

Goodman points to future threats NATO will need to be able to deal with as the melting Arctic opens up, such as the kind of shadowy, unofficial forces Russia has used in Crimea and in Africa and elsewhere, and the increased risk of a hard-to-handle Russian nuclear maritime accident.

NATO strategy increasingly will incorporate the strategic advantage Finland and Sweden would bring to such scenarios, analysts said.
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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.

Venezuelan Immigrant: ‘I Regret Having Come to the United States’:

After walking for four months across nearly half a continent, a pregnant Venezuelan citizen says she regrets migrating to the United States. VOA reporter Divalizeth Cash met her twice in Delaware and Washington. In this first installment of a two-part series, this Venezuelan asylum-seeker and her partner tell their story, narrated by VOA’s immigration reporter Aline Barros.

‘Now Hiring’: US Employers Struggle to Find Enough Workers:

Salespeople, food servers, postal workers — “Help Wanted” ads are proliferating across the United States, as companies struggle to deal with a worker shortage caused by the pandemic, a rash of early retirements, and restrictive immigration laws.

Migrants, Recently Arrived in US, Grapple With Immigration Barriers:

As migrants continue to arrive in Washington from Texas- and Arizona-chartered buses, a recently arrived Colombian asylum-seeker shared his story of the barriers he faced after he crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. This is the second installment of a two-part series by VOA reporter Divalizeth Cash and VOA’s immigration reporter Aline Barros. 

Immigration Around the World

Australia Urged to Speed Up Afghan Humanitarian Resettlement Process:

Australia’s Immigration minister, Andrew Giles, is reviewing Canberra’s response to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan a year after the Taliban reassumed control. Campaigners are calling on Australia to grant more visas to refugees seeking to flee the conflict-torn country. Story by Phil Mercer for VOA.

UN Rights Chief Calls for Independent Probe of Bangladesh Disappearances:

The U.N. high commissioner for Human Rights called Wednesday for the Bangladesh government to establish “an impartial, independent and transparent investigation” into allegations of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killing, and torture. Michelle Bachelet also visited the Rohingya refugee camps in the southern district of Cox’s Bazar and met Rohingyas who fled to Bangladesh in the face of persecution and killings by the Myanmar military, which the U.N. says were conducted with “genocidal intent.”

News Brief

— U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is expanding its citizenship education training. The agency is hosting training sessions to help community partners prepare eligible immigrants for the naturalization process.

 
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Here is a summary of Native American-related news around the U.S. this week:

Oscars Apologize to Sacheen Littlefeather 50 Years After Marlon Brando Protest Speech

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is apologizing to Sacheen Littlefeather, the actress who spoke for Marlon Brando at the 1973 Academy Awards ceremony rejecting his Best Actor award over the mistreatment of Native Americans.

In a 45-second speech, Littlefeather explained Brando’s rationale was to protest “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry and on television in movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee,” referencing the then-month-old occupation of a small settlement on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

She was ushered offstage to gasps and jeers; backstage, she read out loud a more than 700-word statement from Brando protesting America’s treatment of Native Americans.

“We lied to them. We cheated them out of their lands. We starved them into signing fraudulent agreements…” Brando wrote. “What kind of moral schizophrenia is it that allows us to shout at the top of our national voice … that we live up to our commitment [to Indians] when every page of history and when all the thirsty, starving, humiliating days and nights of the last 100 years in the lives of the American Indian contradict that voice?”

Littlefeather’s speech broke an FBI-imposed media blackout of the Wounded Knee standoff.

“After that incident I was boycotted,” Littlefeather said in a 2019 short film, Sacheen: Breaking the Silence. “The FBI went around Hollywood and told … production companies that if they had me on their show that they would shut down their production.”

On June 18, then-Academy head David Rubin wrote an open “statement of reconciliation” to Littlefeather, which will be presented to her in person during an event at the Academy Museum in September.

“The abuse you endured because of this statement was unwarranted and unjustified,” the letter states. “The emotional burden you have lived through and the cost to your own career in our industry are irreparable. For too long the courage you showed has been unacknowledged. For this, we offer both our deepest apologies and our sincere admiration.”

Littlefeather, 75, reacted with wry humor.

“Regarding the Academy’s apology to me, we Indians are very patient people—it’s only been 50 years!” she said.

Academy Apologizes to Sacheen Littlefeather for Her Mistreatment at the 1973 Oscars (Exclusive)

Educators Challenge Oklahoma Critical Race Theory Law

Two school systems in Oklahoma are appealing a decision by the state’s education board to downgrade their accreditation for alleged violations of a year-old state law banning discussions of race or gender in the classroom.

In Tulsa, a high school teacher complained that during professional development training in August 2021, she heard “statements that specifically shame white people for past offenses in history, and state that all are implicitly racially biased by nature.”

In January 2022, a parent complained that children in a Mustang municipality public school were made to feel uncomfortable during an anti-bullying exercise.

On July 28, the Oklahoma Education Department downgraded both schools to “accreditation with warning” status, which, according to the department’s website, means that they “failed to meet one or more of the standards and the deficiency seriously detracts from the quality of the school’s educational program.”

“This isn’t about hanging their head in shame, this is about knowing what happened,” Cherokee Nation Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., told Tulsa’s KTUL Monday. “I think if any point in history needs to be examined critically, it is how the federal government, how the United States has dealt with Indian tribes. Young people need to know this.”

Inflation Reduction Act Invests Millions in Native American Climate and Energy Projects

President Joe Biden Tuesday signed the Inflation Reduction Act, a law which aims to control inflation by reducing the deficit and lowering prescription drug prices and to combat climate change by investing in domestic energy production and promoting clean energy solutions.

The IRA will invest more than $720 million to support Native-driven climate solutions and advance Tribal energy development priorities, including:

$150 million to help tribes install electricity in homes.
$75 million to assist tribes in energy development.





$225 million for developing Tribal high-efficiency electric home rebate programs.
$235 million for Tribal climate resilience, including fish hatchery operations and maintenance.
$25 million for climate resilience funding to the Interior Department’s Office of Native Hawaiian Relations.
$12.5 million for Tribal emergency drought relief

The law also establishes an energy loan guarantee program to give eligible tribes and Native communities access to billions of dollars through competitive grants, loans, loan guarantees and contracts.

Inflation reduction act brings new climate and energy investments to Indian Country

 

Ireland Honors Haudenosaunee Passports

Members of the Haudenosaunee Nationals (formerly, Iroquois Nationals) men’s under-21 lacrosse team were in Ireland this week to compete in World Lacrosse Men’s U21 World Championship games and were thrilled when Dublin customs authorities acknowledged and stamped their Haudenosaunee passports.

It was a diplomatic courtesy that not all governments have extended them. As the Buffalo News reported last week, they were unable to compete in world championships in Great Britain because that nation refused to accept their passports.

“They treated us the way anyone would hope to be treated,” said Nationals board member Rex Lyons.

It’s only fitting, considering that it was the Haudenosaunee who invented the game more than 1,000 years ago, and they have been playing ever since.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy consists of six Nations, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora Nations of New York and Canada. It began issuing passports to its citizens in 1923 as an expression of their sovereignty, but other Nations haven’t always honored them. In 2010, the team was unable to participate in the championships in Great Britain, which wouldn’t accept their passports.

Between Haudenosaunee and Ireland, lacrosse builds deep bond of respect

 
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