Not all branches of the U.S. military are equally worried about keeping pace with China’s military expansion.

While U.S. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro warned earlier this week that he needed more ships to meet the threat posed by China’s rapidly expanding naval forces, top Army officials believe U.S. ground forces still hold a critical edge over their Chinese counterparts.

“The human dimension of the United States Army, I think, is a comparative advantage,” U.S. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth cautioned during a breakfast in Washington on Thursday with the Defense Writers Group. “The quality of how our soldiers are trained, the kind of leaders that they have, the kind of combat experience that the force has.”

Army Chief of Staff General James McConville added that the quality of leadership, especially that rising from the ranks of the Army’s enlisted soldiers, cannot be understated.

“One of the biggest lessons from Ukraine and Russia is the value of these non-commissioned officers that we have in our organization,” McConville said. “Everyone would like to have the folks we have.”

Despite that confidence, both McConville and Wormuth acknowledged the threat posed by China’s military modernization and expansion is not being taken lightly.

“One should never underestimate the PLA [People’s Liberation Army],” Wormuth said. “We’re just as focused as the Navy and the Air Force and the other services on China as the pacing challenge … how that expresses itself for the Army, I think, is a little bit different.”

Wormuth said the Army’s investments in long-range weapons systems, integrated air and missile defense systems, and even helicopters are all “very much geared towards looking at China as the pacing challenge.”

Still, the sheer size of China’s military cannot be dismissed.

The Pentagon’s annual report on China’s military, issued late last year, notes PLA ground forces boast about 975,000 active-duty personnel who have been put through increasingly “realistic training scenarios,” both with the Chinese Navy, and in 2021, with Russian forces on Chinese soil.

“The PLA is aggressively developing capabilities to provide options for the PRC [People’s Republic of China] to dissuade, deter, or, if ordered, defeat third-party intervention in the Indo-Pacific region,” the report said.

In contrast, the U.S Army has about 485,000 soldiers and missed last year’s recruiting goal by about 15,000 people.

“That is a major priority for us this year,” Wormuth said of growing the number of recruits, saying she and her team “are pulling out all of the stops” to increase recruiting numbers.

But the Pentagon’s China report warns that China is also growing key capabilities, even doubling its nuclear arsenal, to about 400 warheads, over the past two years.

And the report echoed concerns that Beijing wants to at least have the ability to take Taiwan by force by 2027.

Unlike their Army counterparts, U.S. naval officials have expressed concern about losing the numbers game to China.

“Capacity does matter,” Del Toro warned Tuesday, speaking at the National Press Club in Washington.

The Chinese navy “have approximately 340 ships and are moving towards a fleet of 440 ships by 2030,” he said. “We do need more ships in the future, more modern ships in the future, in particular, that can meet that threat.”

Still, like his Army counterparts, Del Toro said China is still not ready to compete when it comes to the quality of equipment and personnel.

“Our shipbuilders are better shipbuilders. That’s why we have a more modern, more capable, more lethal navy than they do,” he said.

“They script their people to fight. We actually train our people to think,” Del Toro added. “That gives us an inherent advantage.”
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Harvey Weinstein, the onetime Hollywood titan who came to epitomize a culture of pervasive sexual misconduct by powerful men that ignited the #MeToo movement, was sentenced Thursday to 16 years in prison for the 2013 rape of an actress in Los Angeles.  

Weinstein was sentenced in a Los Angeles courtroom, where a jury in December found him guilty of rape, forcible oral copulation and sexual penetration by a foreign object.  

The charges stemmed from an assault on a former model and actress, identified in court as Jane Doe 1, at a Los Angeles hotel in February 2013.  

Weinstein, the powerful co-founder of Miramax Films, a U.S. movie production and distribution house, will serve the sentence after completing his 23-year sentence for a sexual misconduct conviction in New York.  

Allegations against Weinstein helped fuel the #MeToo movement, which has encouraged women to speak out about sexual harassment and abuse by powerful men in media, politics and other endeavors. The movement, which went viral on social media in 2017, seeks to break a culture of silence that has long allowed such conduct to go unchallenged. 

Weinstein, who produced “Pulp Fiction,” “Shakespeare in Love” and other successful independent films, has said all of his sexual encounters have been consensual, and he pleaded not guilty in the Los Angeles case. 

Prosecutors called for a penalty of 24 years because of the prior conviction, rather than a sentence of 18 years that California law would otherwise prescribe, absent additional “aggravating” factors. 

Weinstein’s team opposed the district attorney’s recommendation for a consecutive sentence, given Weinstein’s “advanced age and deteriorating health,” defense lawyer Mark Werksman told Reuters in an email.  

The jury acquitted Weinstein of charges relating to a second alleged victim and failed to reach a unanimous verdict on charges arising from two other accusers.  

One of them, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, now the wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom, had disclosed she was the alleged rape victim referred to in court records as Jane Doe 4. 

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lisa Lench declared a mistrial on the deadlocked charges. 

Defense attorneys argued that the women willingly had sex with Weinstein because they believed he would advance their careers, part of what they said was a widespread “casting couch” culture in the film industry. In two of the cases, they said the alleged sexual contact was fabricated. 

Weinstein was convicted of sexual misconduct in New York in February 2020. He was extradited from New York to Los Angeles prison in July 2021. Weinstein is appealing the New York conviction and prison sentence.
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Federal wildlife officials on Wednesday announced a proposal to classify one of two dwindling California spotted owl populations as endangered after a lawsuit by conservation groups required the government to reassess a Trump administration decision not to protect the brown and white birds.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed that California spotted owls that have their habitats in coastal and Southern California be protected under the Endangered Species Act.

That population “does not have a strong ability to withstand normal variations in environmental conditions, persist through catastrophic events, or adapt to new environmental conditions throughout its range,” which led the agency to propose listing it as endangered, wildlife officials said.

The other California spotted owl population, which lives in Sierra Nevada forests in California and western Nevada, would be classified as threatened, the agency said.

The habitat of the medium-sized brown owl with white spots on its head and chest and a barred tail is under serious threat from current logging practices and climate change, including increased drought, disease and more extreme wildfires.

Most California spotted owls live on land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service.

How much the population has declined since conservation groups started their effort to protect it more than 20 years ago is unclear.

The only available demographic data on spotted owls living in coastal and Southern California was collected in San Bernardino National Forest and shows a decline of 9%, the federal wildlife service said.

The Sierra Nevada population shows declines ranging from 50% to 31% percent in some areas, the agency said.

The federal agency’s decision follows an agreement reached in November between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and several conservation groups that sued the federal agency in 2020 over its decision not to protect the California spotted owl population.

Justin Augustine, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that sued, applauded the agency’s decision and said he was happy to see the California spotted owls could finally get the safeguards they need.

Augustine said he planned to use the 60-day public comment period to push for more protections for the California spotted population in the Sierra Nevada.

“One of the things I’ll be addressing is the issue of how to make sure that (Sierra Nevada) spotted owls are actually protected under their threatened status rather than potentially allowing some logging to occur that would be harmful,” he said.

The California spotted owl is one of three spotted owl subspecies and the last to be protected under the Endangered Species Act, Augustine said.

The other two subspecies are the northern spotted owl and the Mexican spotted owl.

The northern spotted owl habitat is in Oregon, Washington state and Northern California. The tiny owl was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, sparking an intense battle over logging in the region. In 2020, the Trump Administration refused to upgrade it to endangered status despite losing nearly 4% of its population annually.

The Mexican spotted owl was first listed as threatened in the U.S. in 1993. It is found in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, parts of West Texas and Mexico.

The species is in danger of extinction due to lose of habitat to logging, development, mining and wildfires.
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Overdose deaths from the drug fentanyl have communities across the United States scrambling to respond. In Washington state, librarians are becoming unlikely first responders in this latest wave of the US opioid crisis. Natasha Mozgovaya has our story
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U.S. first lady Jill Biden is due to speak Thursday at a state luncheon with Namibia’s President Hage Geingob and first lady Monica Geingos at the Namibian presidential residence, the second day of her visit to the country.

Biden is also due to go Thursday to a U.S.-funded project in the capital, Windhoek, that focuses on empowering women and children and ensuring access to economic opportunities and health resources.

After arriving in the country on Wednesday, Biden said Namibia was chosen because of its vibrancy.

“We wanted to come because you know this is a young democracy, and we want to support democracies around the world,” Biden said. “We met each other in December, and we’re just continuing the relationship. Monica and I think it’s safe to say that we became good friends instantly.” 

Geingos said there was a lot in Namibia she would like to show Biden, who is making the first visit to the country by an incumbent first lady. 

“It is a very vibrant democracy. We’ve got a very large youth population, who drives that democracy, very energetic and fully enabled by our constitutional values but also by the personal values of our leadership,” Geingos said.

Jill Biden is the first White House official to visit the country after President Joe Biden last year pledged to send administration officials to the continent. She follows Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who visited earlier this year. 

Like Biden, Thomas-Greenfield focused part of her visit around a food security crisis in East Africa — something Biden plans to highlight when she visits Kenya later this week. But these high-profile visits are also happening against the background of increased visits by top-level Russian and Chinese officials to the continent.  

While the nation is a multiparty democracy, the same party — Geingob’s South West Africa People’s Organization — has led since the nation won independence more than three decades ago. And that liberation struggle pulled in other countries for support. Earlier Wednesday, Biden laid a wreath at Heroes’ Acre, a memorial to those who fought for the nation’s independence. 

That memorial, with its brutalist sculpture and wide expanses of stone, bears an uncanny similarity to the Heroes’ Acre in Zimbabwe’s capital, maybe because both memorials were built by the same North Korean company. That same firm built the imposing, modernist gray cement State House where Biden was so warmly, colorfully received by the first couple. 

Jill Biden heads Friday to Kenya, where she will use her popularity and platform to draw attention to women’s empowerment, children’s issues and the hunger crisis that is again ravaging the Horn of Africa.
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The man who shot dead Grammy-winning rapper Nipsey Hussle on a Los Angeles street in 2019 was jailed for at least 60 years Wednesday.

Eric Holder had not denied killing Hussle — a fast-rising star whose death sent shockwaves through the music world — but his lawyers argued it was an impulsive crime that took place in the “heat of passion.”

But a jury last year found Holder had acted with premeditation as he fired at Hussle at least 10 times following a dispute between the two men over claims the assailant was “snitching” to the police.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge H. Clay Jacke sentenced Holder to a minimum of 25 years for the killing, with an additional 25 years because a gun was used in the crime.

Holder was given another 10 years for shooting and wounding two other men who were nearby.

The violent killing of Hussle, a former gang member, in front of a clothing store he owned triggered widespread grief in his native Los Angeles and among his superstar peers, who hailed his musical talents and community activism.

Raised in the city’s Crenshaw district, Hussle, who was 33 when he died, had transformed the block he used to hustle on into a retail, job-creating hub for his Marathon Clothing company.

But he remained linked to the gang-ridden world he grew up in.

Holder, a 32-year-old gang member, and Hussle were both members of the same “Rollin 60s” Crips faction.

During the trial, prosecutor John McKinney said Hussle had told Holder there were rumors Holder had been “snitching,” before Holder left the parking lot where the two were talking.

When he returned a short time later, Holder “pulls out not one but two guns and starts shooting” in an “explosion of violence.”

The killing was captured on video.

In his closing argument, McKinney called the killing “cold-blooded” and “calculated,” saying Holder had “quite a bit of time for premeditation and deliberation.”

But Holder’s attorney told jurors the killing was “an act of impulse and rashness” which should have been charged as manslaughter.

Aaron Jansen said his client, who he said suffered from mental illness, had already received death threats and that “his life in prison is going to be hell for as long as it lasts.”

The judge said he would recommend Holder be housed in a facility that can address his mental health needs.

‘He saw hope’

The month after his 2019 killing, thousands of people gathered for a service in Hussle’s honor, with Stevie Wonder and Snoop Dogg among those paying tribute, and former President Barack Obama penning a letter that was read during the service.

“While most folks look at the Crenshaw neighborhood where he grew up and see only gangs, bullets and despair, Nipsey saw potential,” wrote Obama.

“He saw hope. He saw a community that, even through its flaws, taught him to always keep going.”

Hussle — real name Ermias Asghedom — was posthumously honored with two Grammy Awards in 2020 for best rap performance for Racks in the Middle and best rap/sung performance for Higher.

In August, on what would have been his 37th birthday, he was granted a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
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