President Joe Biden sat down with his British counterpart for the first time Wednesday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, calling Britain “our closest ally in the world” and resolving to work together on issues from dealing with the conflict in Ukraine to maintaining peace in Northern Ireland as Britain exits the European Union.

Biden and Prime Minister Liz Truss chose to meet in New York, rather than in London, where Biden was just days earlier for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. Both began their brief public comments by mentioning the queen, who reigned for 70 years.

“She was the rock on which modern Britain was built,” Truss said, after thanking Biden and first lady Jill Biden for attending the queen’s funeral on Monday.

“There’s no issues I can think of global consequence where the United States and United Kingdom are not working in cooperation,” Biden said ahead of the meeting between top U.S. and British officials. “And I expect that we’ll be able to continue to be able to do that. And we have a full agenda today from supporting Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia, and Putin’s challenges, as well as China, and as posed by preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons as well. There’s a lot on the agenda.”

Truss also said her nation would boost defense spending to meet the challenges posed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We face huge challenges as autocracies seek to cement and increase their assertiveness around the world,” she said. “And that is why we’re stepping up in terms of our defense spending, we’re going to be moving to 3% of GDP on defense spending. And that’s why we want to work more closely with the United States, especially on energy security, on our economic security, but also in reaching out to fellow democracies around the world to make sure that democracies prevail, and we protect the freedom and future of our citizens.”

One analyst said the link between defense spending and democracy promotion is thin.

“Prime Minister Truss is doubling down on the democracy vs. autocracies agenda but with little detail on how raising the UK’s defense budget will help democracies prevail,” said Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the U.S. and Americas Program at British think tank Chatham House.

“The U.S. is under pressure to demonstrate that democracy can deliver … and it feels like the prime minister is a little behind the curve. The U.S. would probably see a lot of value in a UK that returns to its role as a champion of international development, especially at a time when the challenge of food security and longer development issues are top of the global agenda,” Vinjamuri said.

Both leaders also agreed to discuss how to uphold the 1998 Good Friday agreement that ended conflict in Northern Ireland.

Biden did not answer shouted questions about mounting protests in Russia over President Vladimir Putin’s Wednesday announcement that he would mobilize 300,000 more troops for the conflict in Ukraine. And when asked if the U.S.-UK relationship was still “special,” Truss simply nodded.
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U.S. President Joe Biden called out Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine at the United Nations, as the Russian leader significantly escalated war efforts and threatened nuclear retaliation.

Speaking to the annual gathering of the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) in New York Wednesday morning, Biden used most of his address to condemn Moscow.

“Let us speak plainly. A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council invaded its neighbor, attempted to erase a sovereign state from the map,” Biden said. “Russia has shamelessly violated the core tenets of the United Nations Charter, no more important than the clear prohibition against countries taking the territory of their neighbor.”

In the biggest escalation of the Ukraine war since Russia’s February 24 invasion, hours before world leaders gathered at the U.N. headquarters, Putin in Moscow announced the partial mobilization of his country’s military, calling up 300,000 reservists and vowing he would consider all options to protect what he considers Russian territory, raising concerns of a nuclear attack.

“If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will without doubt use all available means to protect Russia and our people – this is not a bluff,” Putin said in a televised address to the nation.

Biden called out Putin’s “overt nuclear threats against Europe” as a “reckless disregard for the responsibilities of the Non-Proliferation regime” – the various international treaties that prohibit the use of nuclear weapons.

“And the Kremlin is organizing a sham referendum to try to annex parts of Ukraine, an extremely significant violation of the U.N. Charter,” he added, referring to Putin’s move to hold referendums on four occupied Ukrainian regions to join Russia, widely seen as a prelude to annexation of those territories.

The Russian leader’s announcement came after his troops suffered battlefield setbacks in northeastern Ukraine and came at a fortuitous time for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his Western allies, who were concerned that war fatigue had set in among U.N. members gathering this week, observers noted.

“You never want to talk about escalation, particularly when they’re vague nuclear threats, as a positive thing,” said David Bosco, who teaches international studies with a focus on the U.N. Security Council at Indiana University. “But from a diplomatic standpoint for Ukraine and for Ukraine’s backers, I do think this helped sharpen the focus on that conflict and also probably had the effect of isolating Russia to an even greater degree than it’s already been isolated,” Bosco told VOA.

Zelenskyy was to deliver remarks Wednesday afternoon. Last week, a majority of the General Assembly’s 193 member states allowed the Ukrainian leader an exception to U.N. rules that say speeches in this year’s high-level session must be delivered in person.

Belarus, Cuba, Eritrea, Nicaragua, North Korea and Syria supported Russia in voting against allowing Zelenskyy’s video speech. Since Putin is not attending in person, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will make the address on behalf of his country on Saturday, as ministers are given later speaking slots than leaders.

Traditionally, as host, U.S. presidents always speak second after Brazil, but Biden forfeited his Tuesday speaking slot as he was returning from London, where he attended Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.

China

In his UNGA remarks, Biden called out Beijing’s “horrible abuses against pro-democracy activists and ethnic minorities” in China’s Xinjiang region and “the increased repression of women and girls by the Taliban in Afghanistan.”

Human rights groups have accused China of detaining more than 1 million minorities in camps, restricting freedom of movement, and engaging in torture, forced sterilization and sexual violence under the guise of Beijing’s campaign against religious extremism in Xinjiang. China has denied the accusations.

Biden touched on other global conflicts, including the war in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, the violence in Haiti and political oppression in Venezuela, and reiterated support for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinian people.

As negotiations stalled, Biden said the United States will never allow Tehran to obtain nuclear weapons. He also said the U.S. stands with “the brave women of Iran,” in reference to protests this week over the death of 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, under suspicious circumstances after she was arrested in Tehran by the morality police – a unit that enforces headscarves and strict dress codes for women.

Authorities have denied that Amini suffered any mistreatment at their hands and say heart problems caused her death. Her family said she had no history of heart trouble.

Security Council reform

In a jab to Russia, which has used its veto power to block Security Council action on Ukraine, Biden said UNSC members including the United States should refrain from wielding the veto, “except in rare, extraordinary situations,” to ensure that the council remains credible and effective.

“Russia’s use of the veto in the Ukraine situation has really brought new attention to veto and it’s obviously very unpopular with the U.N. members as a whole,” Bosco said.

In his remarks, Biden threw his support behind expansion of the membership of the Security Council “to become more inclusive, so they can better respond to the needs of today’s world.”

“This includes permanent seats for those nations we have long supported and permanent seats for countries in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean,” he said.

By showing that it’s open to reform, the administration hopes it can put China and Russia in a corner, said Richard Gowan, U.N. director at the International Crisis Group. “The U.S. will want to highlight the fact that they are blocking improvements to the U.N.,” Gowan told VOA.

Observers have voiced skepticism that progress on the decades-long UNSC reform debate is imminent. The U.N. Charter must first be amended, which requires a two-thirds vote of its members, and any reform must be agreed to by the five permanent members with veto power.

Last week, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield, noted that since 2009, Russia has cast 26 vetoes and that in 12 cases it was joined by China, while the U.S. has used its veto only four times since 2009.

Food security and global health

Global food prices have dramatically increased because of supply chain disruptions and rising energy and fertilizer costs brought upon by the pandemic and exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Biden announced more than $2.9 billion would be used to address global food insecurity, in addition to the $6.9 billion already committed by the administration this year, according to the White House.

“A multiyear drought in the Horn of Africa has created a dire humanitarian emergency, with parts of Somalia at risk of famine for the second time in just over a decade. This new announcement of $2.9 billion will save lives through emergency interventions and invest in medium- to long-term food security assistance in order to protect the world’s most vulnerable populations from the escalating global food security crisis,” the White House said in a statement.

On Tuesday, the U.S. convened a Global Food Security Summit co-chaired by Secretary of State Antony Blinken with the leaders of the European Union, African Union and Spain, and hosted with Colombia, Germany, Indonesia and Nigeria.

Beyond aid, the world needs a much more robust international agenda to meet the U.N. goal of ending hunger by 2030, which it is currently not on track to meet, said Rob Vos, economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute.

“We do need a lot more investments in food systems for the coming decades to make them more resilient,” Vos said in an interview with VOA, “to monitor much more closely the risk of food crisis from breaking out.”

Later Wednesday, Biden delivers remarks at a Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria replenishment conference. His administration has proposed a $6 billion pledge over the next three years to meet the $18 billion the Global Fund is seeking to fight the three diseases.

The Global Fund has helped reduce AIDS-related deaths by 70 percent and new infections by 54 percent, but the gains are fragile, according to the ONE Campaign, a group working to end preventable diseases by 2030.

“In just two years, two decades of progress against AIDS slammed on the brakes as COVID-19 and other global crises took center stage,” ONE Campaign’s president, Tom Hart, said in a statement.

ONE’s analysis shows that falling just $1 billion short could result in 25 million more new cases of the three diseases in countries where the Global Fund invests from 2024 to 2026.

VOA’s Michael Lipin contributed to this report.
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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is co-hosting a food security summit on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. Top U.N. officials have warned that drought, rising global commodity prices, the impacts of COVID-19, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could trigger famine in many countries. VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports.
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Venezuelan migrants flown to the upscale Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard sued Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his transportation secretary Tuesday for engaging in a “fraudulent and discriminatory scheme” to relocate them.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Boston, alleges that the migrants were told they were going to Boston or Washington, “which was completely false,” and were induced with perks such as $10 McDonald’s gift certificates.

“No human being should be used as a political pawn,” said Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, which is seeking class-action status in the lawsuit filed on behalf of several migrants who were aboard last week’s flights and Alianza Americas, a network of advocacy groups.

DeSantis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit, which also names Florida Secretary of Transportation Jared W. Perdue as a defendant.

The lawsuit alleges that migrants were induced to cross state lines under false pretenses, a line that some Democratic officials are using to urge a federal investigation.

On Monday, Javier Salazar, the sheriff of Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, opened an investigation into the flights, but the elected Democrat did not say what laws may have been broken. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, whose district includes San Antonio, have asked the Justice Department to begin a probe.

DeSantis and another Republican governor, Greg Abbott of Texas, have been busing and flying migrants across the country to Democratic strongholds with little or no notice.

Asked Tuesday about speculation that DeSantis may send migrants to his home state of Delaware, President Joe Biden said: “He should come visit. We have a beautiful shoreline.”

DeSantis declined to confirm speculation, based on flight-tracking software, that more migrants were being moved. He again defended his decision to fly about 50 Venezuelans to Martha’s Vineyard, saying their decisions were completely voluntary and, without evidence, that they were in awful condition when Florida got involved.
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American and Canadian warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Tuesday, in the first military freedom of navigation operation since U.S. President Joe Biden said the U.S. would defend Taiwan if it were attacked by China.

USS Higgins, a U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer, and HMCS Vancouver, a Royal Canadian Navy frigate, conducted “a routine Taiwan Strait transit on September 20 through waters where high seas freedoms of navigation and overflight apply in accordance with international law,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters Tuesday.

China has claimed the Taiwan Strait is not international waters, but “are China’s internal waters” and “territorial sea.” However, under international law, the Taiwan Strait contains a corridor of international waters and airspace beyond the territorial sea of any state where all vessels can navigate freely.

“Higgins’ and Vancouver’s transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the commitment of the United States and our allies and partners to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” added a statement from U.S. Seventh Fleet, which covers U.S. military naval operations in the eastern Pacific and Indian Oceans.

The strait separates Taiwan, a democratic self-ruled island, from mainland China.

Beijing claims sovereignty over Taiwan and its surrounding waters despite the Chinese Communist Party never controlling the island.

The transit comes shortly after CBS “60 Minutes” aired an interview with President Biden in which he said U.S. troops would defend the island from attack. The U.S. president had pledged to defend Taiwan before, but he added in this interview that “U.S. men and women” would be part of that defense.

Prior to his statement, U.S. policy has remained intentionally ambiguous as to how the U.S. would defend Taiwan if the democratic island were to come under attack from China.

Tuesday’s transit marked the second time a U.S. Navy warship had made the voyage in the Taiwan Strait since Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island. USS Antietam and USS Chancellorsville sailed through the strait in late August.

Tensions between Beijing and Taipei are high, with the Chinese military holding large military drills near the island.
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Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Washington are pressing forward with plans to rewrite the rules under which Congress counts electoral votes in presidential elections, to prevent another attempt to overturn legitimate results, which happened when former President Donald Trump refused to accept his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 contest.

The effort is a bipartisan one, with members of both parties in agreement that the rules need to change. However, there are some disagreements about precisely how to reform current law, which was put in place by the Electoral Count Act of 1887.

The push to rewrite the rules for counting votes comes at a time when the integrity of elections across the country is under challenge. Large numbers of mostly Republican candidates for important state offices, as well as the House and Senate, have refused to say they will abide by the results of the elections scheduled for November. Many have suggested that in specific races, the only way a Republican candidate can lose is through voter fraud.

A large number of Republicans continues to insist, incorrectly, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. Republican candidates in swing states that Biden won in 2020 such as Arizona and Pennsylvania have said they would not have certified Biden’s victory if they had been in office at the time. Biden’s victory in both states has been confirmed by post-election audits.

Others have said they would be open to retroactively “decertifying” Biden’s victory — something that has not been done before and which would face major legal challenges.

Threat to democracy

Some experts have been raising the alarm for most of the past two years, warning that the willingness of elected officials to set aside the results of an election is a mortal threat to the United States’ system of government.

“We’ve never faced this before in American history, where a large faction of one of the two major parties seems bound and determined to declare elections that they lose to be fraudulent,” Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told VOA. “And they are preparing the way legally, to be able to do it by electing individuals who will have a say, in various respects, over the election results.”

He added, “If this becomes the norm in one of the two major parties, you cannot have a functioning democratic system.”

While successful and bipartisan reform of the Electoral Count Act would not eliminate all the ways in which partisan actors could try to overturn election results, it would eliminate one of the justifications used by Trump’s supporters after the 2020 contest.

2020 count disruption

Under U.S. law, during a presidential election, voters in each state choose a slate of “electors” who then cast their votes for president. The candidate who receives a majority of the 538 electoral votes wins the presidency.

At a set time after a presidential election, Congress assembles to formally count the electoral votes. This is where things became complicated in 2020, as supporters of Trump insisted that Vice President Mike Pence, who presided over the Senate during the counting, had the unilateral authority to refuse to count the votes from specific states.

In the end, Pence, in agreement with most legal authorities, decided he did not actually have that authority. The count went forward, until it was interrupted by a mob of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol building and forced members of Congress to flee. Lawmakers later returned and completed their task.

The bills currently being considered in Congress would eliminate ambiguous language from the 1887 act, making it clear that the vice president’s role in the vote counting is ministerial — meaning that he has no discretion to choose what votes get counted.

Competing bills

In the Senate, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Republican Susan Collins and Democrat Joe Manchin spent much of the year hammering out a proposal to rewrite election rules.

In the House, the bill with the most chance for success appears to be a piece of legislation recently introduced by Republican Liz Cheney and Democrat Zoe Lofgren.

Both bills would place clear limits on the authority of the vice president during the counting of votes, but they differ in other particulars.

Currently, it only takes the objection of one member of the House and one senator to begin debate on whether lawmakers should decline to accept a specific state’s electoral votes. However, while the Collins-Manchin bill would raise the bar to one-fifth of the votes in each chamber, the House version sets the threshold even higher, at one-third of all members.

Both bills also have provisions covering the possibility that a state fails to submit its electoral votes, and give candidates the right to seek relief in federal court if a governor refuses to transmit election results to Congress. However, they differ on the question of how to define a “failed election” in a specific state — that is, an election that fails to generate a result.

The House bill requires that the vote be interrupted by a natural disaster and that the failure of the election be certified by a federal judge. The Senate bill is less specific about what constitutes a failed election.

Prospects of passage

In general, Democrats are more supportive of Electoral Count Act reform than Republicans. In the House, that is not a major impediment to passage, because Democrats hold an outright majority. In the Senate, though, a reform bill would have to win at least 10 Republican votes and unified Democratic backing in order to advance and ultimately pass the chamber.

“The question is whether these two different versions can be reconciled in a way that 10 Republicans in the Senate will accept,” William A. Galston, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program, told VOA. “If the Senate bill is as far as the Republicans are willing to go, will the House Democrats accept the Senate version as better than nothing?”

He added, “I’ve heard seemingly persuasive arguments on both sides, but my own position is this: The Senate version would be significantly better than nothing. That is, it would represent a significant advance over the status quo. …This is no time to let the best be the enemy of the good, or at least the good enough.”

Similarities encouraging

Michael Thorning, director of the Structural Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told VOA that the overall similarity of the bills, and the fact that both have bipartisan support, suggests that there is a good chance lawmakers will find some agreement.

“There is not just bipartisan agreement, but I think there is also a bicameral agreement that Congress needs to act on this, and it needs to act soon,” he said.

Thorning noted that while the proximate cause of the drive to reform the way electoral votes are counted is Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, that was not the only challenge to an election’s legitimacy in recent memory.

In 2000 and 2016, the Democratic presidential candidate won the national popular vote but lost in the Electoral College, a result highly frustrating to members of that party, but one that is nonetheless well within the bounds of U.S. election law.

In 2004, Democrats claimed that election irregularities in Ohio might have unfairly tipped that state’s 20 votes to George W. Bush, giving him the margin he needed to defeat his Democratic rival, John Kerry for the presidency.

In all three cases, Democratic members of Congress attempted to hold up the certification of the election by challenging the votes of individual states.

“That speaks to the need to raise the threshold for objections,” Thorning said. “I think the experience of the last few decades is that the threshold is too low, and it makes it too easy for members to launch unfounded, or ‘statement’ objections.”
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U.S. lawmakers moved Tuesday to give the administration of President Joe Biden expanded authority to enforce sanctions on Russia for the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine earlier this year.  

Republican Senator Pat Toomey and Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen introduced a framework supporting the administration’s efforts, along with G-7 leaders, to cap the price of Russian oil exports.  

“We’re effectively depriving the Russian government of the profits that they probably are using to fund this war,” Toomey told reporters on a press call Tuesday. “We’re going to demonstrate whether or not the free world has the resolve to prevent a brutal autocrat from redrawing international boundaries because he thinks he can.”  

The United States and G-7 allies are expected to agree on a price cap for Russian oil exports by December, around the time a European Union oil embargo also goes into effect.  

“If you want to set a worldwide price cap on Russian oil, you need to ensure that it’s uniformly applied. And to do that, we believe you need the backup of the secondary sanctions. Otherwise, Russia will exploit big loopholes. And there are other countries like China that are already dramatically increasing their imports of Russian oil,” Van Hollen told reporters Tuesday.  

“If the price cap works, just as the administration hopes and we hope, then sanctions are never triggered, because you have a worldwide price gap. These sanctions will only trigger if the administration is not successful at achieving that uniform price,” Van Hollen said.  

The framework calls for monitoring Russian oil purchases and would allow Biden to impose sanctions on countries and financial institutions that attempt to profiteer off a cap on Russian oil.  

Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the United States has imposed harsh sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian oligarchs and the Russian banking industry.  

The U.S. and its allies also cut off Russian access to Western banking institutions and blocked many of Putin’s family members and friends from traveling abroad.  

The U.S. Treasury Department “has sanctioned hundreds of Russian individuals and entities, and this includes a majority of Russia’s largest financial institutions, key nodes and Russia’s military, industrial supply chains, and the oligarchs and cronies who helped perpetuate Putin’s war,” Elizabeth Rosenberg, assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes at Treasury, told lawmakers earlier Tuesday. 

“The United States has been joined by over 30 countries collectively representing more than half of the global economy and imposing sanctions, the largest sanctions regime in modern history,” Rosenberg said. 

Rosenberg told lawmakers the threat of a price cap was already having an impact on the global market, changing the behavior of countries that have not imposed it.  

“They can no less use the existence of the price cap to leverage lower prices from Russia. And in fact, we’re seeing that already where Asian purchasers have used the price cap in order to leverage lower prices, cut rate prices for Russian energy. That’s this policy already at work,” she said.  

The Toomey-Van Hollen framework is set to become the first major bipartisan Russian sanctions legislation introduced in Congress since this February.  

 
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