Members of the U.S. House of Representatives meet again Wednesday with the task of selecting the next speaker of the House, a day after Republican Kevin McCarthy’s bid for the job was met with rare opposition in a series of votes that saw him thwarted by his party’s most conservative members.

Tuesday’s session marked the first time in 100 years that neither a Republican nor Democrat won the House speakership on the first round of voting to become the leader of the 435-member chamber.

McCarthy failed to win the speakership in three rounds of voting, with 20 Republicans opposing him in the latest round. With a fourth round of voting on tap, it was unclear whether enough of McCarthy’s opponents would abandon their opposition to him, or whether new candidates might emerge.

Republicans will hold a narrow 222-212 majority in the House, with one current vacancy, requiring McCarthy, a California lawmaker for 16 years, to win at least 218 votes to claim the speakership. Under a provision in the U.S. Constitution, he also would become second in the line of succession to the U.S. presidency.

But 19 Republicans, many of them in recent weeks expressing the view that McCarthy was not conservative enough to lead House Republicans, voted for other Republican lawmakers in the first round of voting, including Representatives Andy Biggs of Arizona and Jim Jordan of Ohio, two vocal opponents of Democratic President Joe Biden.

In the third round of voting, 20 dissident Republicans voted for Jordan, even though he nominated McCarthy as his choice to lead the majority Republican caucus in the new two-year House session.

Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, with all 212 Democrats voting for him, led the voting for the speakership although he has no chance of winning because no Republicans plan to vote for him. On the latest ballot, 202 Republicans voted for McCarthy, 16 short of the 218 he needed.

The 57-year-old McCarthy, a staunch conservative himself, has sought for years to lead the House. Over the past several weeks, he has met repeatedly with his Republican foes to secure their support for his speakership bid.

McCarthy offered to change the House’s governing rules in several ways, including to permit snap votes to declare the speakership vacant and select someone else if they did not like his policy stances or how the party caucus was conducting its promised investigations of Biden and his administration.

Whoever the Republicans eventually elect, McCarthy or someone else, will replace outgoing Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who remains a House member and cast her votes for Jeffries.

Democrats, who have been locked in a 50-50 split with Republicans in the Senate the past two years, gained an edge in the nationwide congressional elections nearly two months ago and will hold a 50-49 majority in the upper chamber, even after onetime Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced she is now an independent but would not change her voting philosophy. She usually has voted with the Democratic lawmakers and Biden.

Choosing a House speaker occurs even before representatives are sworn into office for their two-year terms. Lawmakers called out the name of their choice for House speaker from the floor of the chamber, and the same scenario will play out in the fourth round of voting, and possibly beyond that.
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The U.S. House of Representatives failed to choose the next Speaker of the House Tuesday, as a group of conservative U.S. lawmakers continued to vote against fellow Republican Kevin McCarthy’s bid to lead the 118th session of Congress. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson has more.
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Since he began volunteering two months ago for weekend shifts at a clinic in one of this border city’s largest shelters, Dr. Brian Elmore has treated about 100 migrants for respiratory viruses and a handful of more serious emergencies.

But it’s a problem he hasn’t yet managed to address that worries him the most – the worsening trauma that so many migrants carry after long journeys north that often involve witnessing murders and suffering from kidnappings and sexual assault.

“Most of our patients have symptoms of PTSD — I want to initiate a screening for every patient,” said Elmore, an emergency medicine doctor, at Clinica Hope. It was opened this fall by the Catholic nonprofit Hope Border Institute with help from Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, Texas, which borders Juarez.

Doctors, social workers, shelter directors, clergy and law enforcement say growing numbers of migrants suffer violence that amounts to torture and are arriving at the U.S.-Mexican border in desperate need of trauma-informed medical and mental health treatment.

But resources for this specialized care are so scarce, and the network of shelters so overwhelmed by new arrivals and migrants who’ve been stuck for months by U.S. asylum policies, that only the most severe cases can be handled.

“Like a pregnant 13-year-old who fled gang rapes, and so needs help with childcare and middle school,” said Zury Reyes Borrero, a case manager in Arizona with the Center for Victims of Torture, who visited that girl when she gave birth. “We get people at their most vulnerable. Some don’t even realize they’re in the U.S.”

In the past six months, Reyes Borrero and a colleague have helped about 100 migrants at Catholic Community Services’ Casa Alitas, a shelter in Tucson, Arizona, that in December was receiving about 700 people daily released by U.S. authorities and coming from countries as distinct as Congo and Mexico.

Each visit can take hours, as the case workers try to build a rapport with migrants, Reyes Borrero said.

“This is not a community that we talk babbling brook with. … They might not have any memory that’s safe,” said Sarah Howell, who runs a clinical practice and a nonprofit treating migrant survivors of torture in Houston.

When she visits patients in their new Texas communities, they routinely introduce relatives or neighbors who also need help with severe trauma but lack the stability and safety necessary for healing.

“The estimated level of need is at least five times higher than we support,” said Leonce Byimana, director of U.S. clinical services for the Center for Victims of Torture, which operates clinics in Arizona, Georgia and Minnesota.

Most migrants are traumatized by what they left behind, as well as what they encountered en route, Byimana said. They need “first-aid mental health” as well as long-term care that’s even harder to arrange once they disperse from border-area shelters to communities across the country, he added.

Left untreated, such trauma can escalate to where it necessitates psychiatric care instead of therapy and self-help, said Dylan Corbett, Hope Border Institute’s executive director.

Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, the U.S. branch of the global Catholic refugee agency, is planning to ramp up mental health resources in the coming weeks in El Paso, which has seen a surge in crossings, said its director, Joan Rosenhauer.

All along the border, the most staggering trend has been the increase in pregnant women and girls, some younger than 15, who are victims of assault and domestic violence.

Volunteers and advocates are encountering so many of these survivors that they had to focus scarce legal, medical and shelter resources on helping them, leaving hundreds of other victims of political violence and organized crime to fend for themselves.

Service providers and migrants say the most dangerous spot along journeys filled with peril at every step is “la selva” – the Darien Gap jungle separating Colombia from Panama, crossed by increasing numbers of Venezuelans, Cubans and Haitians who first moved to South America and are now seeking safer lives in the United States.

Natural perils like deadly snakes and rivers only add to the risks of an area rife with bandits preying on migrants. Loreta Salgado was months into her flight from Cuba when she crossed the Darien.

“We saw many dead, we saw people who were robbed, people who were raped. We saw that,” she repeated, her voice cracking, in a migrant shelter in El Paso a few days before Christmas.

Asked about “la selva,” some women just suck in their breath — and only later reveal having saved their daughters by speeding them along and getting raped themselves, or enduring strained relationships with their partners who were made to watch the assault, Howell said.

“I don’t think it’s the first rape that most women I’ve talked to have experienced. But it’s the most violent and the most shameful, because it was in front of other people,” Howell added.

In many cases, forensic evaluations at border clinics that document mental and physical abuse are also crucial to migrants’ asylum cases, because often no other evidence is available for court proceedings, Byimana said. Asylum is granted to those who cannot return to their countries for fear of persecution on specific grounds, including sometimes very high, systemic levels of violence against women.

But it takes years for asylum cases to be decided in U.S. immigration court, with a current backlog of more than 1.5 million people, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. And that’s with pandemic-era restrictions still in place that allow authorities to turn away or expel most asylum-seekers.

A long wait for resolution, coming on top of a long journey across multiple countries, can intensify the trauma that migrants experience, advocates say.

“There’s a different tension and fear in faces than I’ve seen before,” said Howell, who’s been researching trauma and forced migration for 15 years. “They don’t know how to stop running.”
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The United States plans to hold table-top drills and expand other areas of defense cooperation with South Korea, but is not considering joint nuclear exercises with Seoul, according to a senior U.S. administration official.

The U.S. announcement came after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said in an interview Monday the United States and South Korea were in talks meant to give Seoul a bigger role in the operation of U.S. nuclear forces.

Yoon told the conservative Chosun Ilbo newspaper the discussions centered on joint planning and exercises with U.S. nuclear forces — a process he envisioned would have the same effect as “nuclear sharing.”

Asked late Monday whether he was discussing joint nuclear exercises with South Korea, U.S. President Joe Biden replied, “No.” Biden, who was returning from a trip to the eastern U.S. state of Kentucky, did not elaborate.

In a statement emailed late Tuesday to VOA, a senior U.S. official attempted to clarify the situation by saying that the United States and South Korea are “working together to strengthen extended deterrence, including eventually through table-top exercises that will explore our joint response to a range of scenarios, including nuclear use by the DPRK.”

North Korea — also known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — last year launched a record number of ballistic missiles and on Sunday vowed to “exponentially increase” production of its nuclear warheads.

North Korea’s recent actions and statements have caused “increasing concern,” the U.S. official added.

Both the U.S. and South Korean presidential offices later denied any contradiction between the Biden and Yoon comments, noting that since South Korea is not a nuclear weapons state it cannot technically participate in “joint nuclear exercises.”

Though the situation may have arisen partly because of semantics, many analysts suggest it reflects behind-the-scenes tensions between the two allies over how best to involve South Korea in countering the North Korean threat.

Yoon, a conservative, has in the past pushed for Washington and Seoul to enter a NATO-style arrangement in which South Koreans would be trained to use U.S. nuclear weapons in a conflict. For now, it seems South Korea may have to be happy with more cooperation in other areas.

Following a November meeting between Biden and Yoon in Cambodia, both leaders tasked their teams to come up with a plan “for an effective coordinated response to a range of scenarios, including nuclear use by North Korea,” a White House National Security Council spokesperson said in a statement emailed to VOA.

“As the President said, we are not discussing joint nuclear exercises,” the NSC official added.

In a statement to reporters, South Korean presidential spokesperson Kim Eun-hye defended Yoon’s remarks. “South Korea and the United States are discussing information sharing, joint planning, and subsequent joint implementation plans in relation to U.S. nuclear assets, to respond to North Korea’s nuclear threat,” she said.

The United States has not stationed nuclear weapons in South Korea since the early 1990s, when it pulled tactical nukes from the peninsula as part of a disarmament deal with the Soviet Union. Instead, South Korea is protected by the U.S. “nuclear umbrella,” under which Washington vows to use all its capabilities, including nuclear weapons, to defend its ally.

In the interview Monday, Yoon suggested such ideas were outdated. “What we call ‘extended deterrence’ means that the United States will take care of everything, so South Korea should not worry about it,” Yoon said. “But now, it is difficult to convince our people with just this idea.”

As a presidential candidate in 2021, Yoon said he would ask the United States to either redeploy tactical nuclear weapons or agree to nuclear-sharing. The U.S. State Department quickly shot down the proposal.

Many analysts are skeptical the United States would enter a nuclear-sharing arrangement with South Korea, noting it would go against Washington’s stated global nonproliferation goals as well as its support for the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

“South Korean concerns and wishes are understandable, but the U.S. won’t be able to jointly discuss nuclear plans to the degree that Seoul wants. That’s still a bridge way too far,” said Duyeon Kim, a Seoul-based Korea specialist at the Center for a New American Security.

If South Korea participates in table-top exercises, it could learn more about how the U.S. weighs its options in various crisis scenarios, according to Kim.

“Since joint nuclear planning won’t happen and Seoul wants a voice, South Korean leaders like the president could instead unilaterally tell the U.S. president which North Korean targets they’d like him/her to consider in their nuclear plans without expecting a response back,” Kim said.

“It’s conceivable that South Korean fighter jets could someday practice escorting U.S. bombers as one way of doing ‘nuclear sharing’ done by NATO, but it’s hard to imagine the U.S. doing more than that,” she added.

Ankit Panda, a senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, also doubts the United States would be open to including South Korea in nuclear planning.

“Ultimately, the decision concerning whether or not nuclear weapons ought to be introduced into a specific crisis contingency will depend on the president of the United States,” Panda told VOA.

The matter has grown more urgent as North Korea becomes more belligerent and expands its nuclear arsenal.

North Korea is already believed to have enough fissile material to build around 50 nuclear bombs and has a growing number of both short- and long-range weapons that could be capable of delivering them. If Pyongyang can destroy a major U.S. city, some South Koreans fear, Washington may be reluctant to respond to a North Korean attack on the South.

Many South Koreans were also rattled by former U.S. President Donald Trump, who regularly questioned the value of the U.S.-South Korea alliance and even threatened to pull U.S. troops from Korea.

As a result, a growing number of prominent South Koreans have called for the country to acquire its own nuclear deterrent.

According to a poll published Monday by the Seoul-based Hankook Research organization, 67% of South Koreans support the country acquiring nuclear weapons, including 70% of conservatives and 54% of liberals.

Lee Juhyun contributed to this report.
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At least 500 migrants arrived in small boats along the Florida Keys over the last several days in what the local sheriff’s office described on Monday as a “crisis.”

Economic turmoil, food shortages and soaring inflation in Cuba and other parts of the Caribbean is spurring the most recent wave of migration. Over the weekend, 300 migrants arrived at the sparsely populated Dry Tortugas National Park, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) west of Key West. The park was closed so that law enforcement and medical personnel could evaluate the group before moving them to Key West, the park tweeted.

Separately, 160 migrants arrived on boats in other parts of the Florida Keys over the New Year’s Day weekend, officials said. On Monday, 30 people in two new groups of migrants were found in the Middle Keys.

In a news release, Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay criticized the federal response to the uptick in migrant arrivals, saying they were stretching local resources. U.S. Border Patrol told the sheriff’s office that the federal response to some of the migrants arriving may have to wait a day, the news release said.

“Refugee arrivals require a lot of resources from the Sheriff’s Office as we help our federal law enforcement partners ensure the migrants are in good health and safe,” said Ramsay, whose office’s jurisdiction encompasses the Florida Keys. “This shows a lack of a working plan by the federal government to deal with a mass migration issue that was foreseeable.”

Officials at Dry Tortugas National Park said they expected it to be closed for several days because of the space and resources needed to attend to the migrants. The national park is at the southern tip of the continental U.S. — and attracts scuba divers and snorkelers for its coral reefs, nesting sea turtles, tropical fish and shipwrecks.

“Like elsewhere in the Florida Keys, the park has recently seen an increase in people arriving by boat from Cuba and landing on the islands of Dry Tortugas National Park,” the National Park Service said in a news release.

In addition to landing at the national park over the weekend, 160 other migrants arrived in the Middle and Upper Keys. At least 88 of the migrants are from Cuba, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a tweet.

U.S. Border Patrol and Coast Guard crews patrolling South Florida and the Keys have been experiencing the largest escalation of migrations by boat in nearly a decade, with hundreds of interceptions in recent months, mostly of people from Cuba and Haiti.
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Flower-covered floats, marching bands and equestrian units celebrated the New Year on a chilly but dry Monday as the 134th Rose Parade slipped through a gap in California’s siege of drenching storms.

Pasadena’s annual floral spectacle offered the optimistic theme of “Turning the Corner” for 2023, and former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords of Arizona, who survived a 2011 shooting, served as grand marshal.

“The New Year is a time for renewal, an opportunity for a fresh start,” Tournament of Roses President Amy Wainscott told the television audience.

The parade, which by tradition is held on January 2 when New Year’s Day falls on a Sunday, kicked off with the Los Angeles band Fitz and the Tantrums! performing “Let Yourself Free” and a crowd-pleasing flyby of two U.S. Air Force B-1B jets.

Rain has rarely fallen on the parade, but this year it came close. Downpours pounded Southern California over the weekend, and rain was expected to return by Monday evening, possibly affecting the Rose Bowl college football game between Utah and Penn State.

But in the meantime, thousands of spectators and the parade participants avoided a soaking.

Giffords rolled down the 8.8-kilometer route in a flower-decked antique convertible, accompanied by her husband, Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Kelly.

Marching bands came from across the U.S. and around the world.

The Riverside County, California, sheriff’s mounted unit was led by a riderless horse in honor of Deputy Isaiah Cordero, 32, who was slain during a traffic stop on December 29.

The floats offered simple beauty — birds, bees, bears, bugs and giraffes covered in flowers or other natural materials — as well as messages such as Cal Poly universities’ entry called the “Road to Reclamation” depicting animated snails and mushrooms living on a fallen tree branch.

The Louisiana Office of Tourism’s “Feed Your Soul” float depicting a paddlewheel riverboat was the stage for a mid-parade performance by Lainey Wilson.

Donate Life’s bright orange and red Chinese street dragon blowing smoke out of its nostrils was awarded the sweepstakes trophy for most beautiful entry by the Tournament of Roses judges.

“American Idol” finalist Grace Kinstler performed aboard a float promoting tourism to her home state of Illinois, and country music star Tanya Tucker sang her current single, “Ready as I’ll Never Be,” in the parade’s finale.
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