The top Chinese and U.S. business and trade officials are set to meet Thursday in Washington, Beijing announced, in what is an infrequent direct conversation between leaders of the world’s two biggest economies.

Chinese Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao is set to meet with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, Wang’s ministry confirmed, although Washington has not commented on the talks.

While U.S. President Joe Biden met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Bali last November, Thursday’s trade talks in Washington would make it the first cabinet-level meeting in the U.S. capital between American and Chinese officials during the Biden administration.

Wang is in the United States for the 2023 APEC Ministers Responsible for Trade Meeting, in Detroit, on Thursday and Friday.

In the Washington talks, “The Chinese side will exchange views on China-U.S. relations and issues of common concern,” Shu Jueting, the Chinese commerce ministry spokesperson, told a regular briefing in Beijing.

On Monday, Wang met with representatives of U.S. firms in Shanghai, including Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Dow, Merck, and Honeywell, according to the Ministry of Commerce, telling them that “China will continue to welcome U.S.-funded enterprises to develop in China and achieve win-win results.”

But China on Sunday declared U.S. chip manufacturer Micron a national security risk and banned the firm from selling its memory chips to key domestic industries. The ban followed a series of raids on American consultancies operating in China.

Wang’s trip to the U.S. follows a recent summit in Hiroshima of the leaders of the Group of Seven leading industrialized countries, at which Biden and other G-7 leaders took aim at China over “economic coercion” and said they would “de-risk” without “decoupling” from the world’s second-largest economy on an array of products.

“China hopes the G-7 will not abuse trade and investment restrictions while saying that they will not seek to decouple from the country,” Shu said.

Wang met earlier in May with U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns in Beijing, amid speculation about a visit from top U.S. officials. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a trip in February after the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon that flew over sensitive military sites.

Raimondo and Blinken, as well as U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, have all expressed interest in visiting China.

Some information in this report came from Reuters.
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Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has officially entered next year’s presidential election. But to face the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, President Joe Biden, he will have to vanquish former President Donald Trump. The story from VOA’s chief national correspondent, Steve Herman, at the White House. Videographer: Saqib Ul Islam
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The White House says it is looking into reports about the alleged use of U.S.-provided equipment in what appeared to be a raid by anti-Putin Russian volunteers Monday in the Belgorod region in Russia, although the U.S. cannot confirm the claim.

“We don’t support the use of U.S.-made equipment for attacks inside Russia. And we’ve been clear about that with the Ukrainians. We’ve been nothing but consistent about our concerns in that regard,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Wednesday.

Russia called Monday’s incident an incursion by saboteurs deployed by Kyiv, with officials and state media using various epithets ranging from “militants” to “terrorists.”

Ukraine denied involvement in this week’s Belgorod incident, calling it an act by disgruntled Russians.

Earlier, Pentagon press secretary Brigadier General Pat Ryder confirmed that the U.S. government had not approved any third-party transfers of equipment to paramilitary organizations outside the Ukrainian armed forces, nor had the Ukrainian government requested any such transfers.

“The United States has communicated regularly with Ukraine that the security assistance that we’re providing them is for them to use inside Ukraine, as part of their efforts to defend their country and their sovereignty,” said Ryder.

He noted the Pentagon could not confirm the veracity of the images with the alleged U.S.-provided vehicles inside Russia.

“I don’t know if it’s true or not,” said Ryder. He pointed out that a couple days ago there were “some bogus images” of reported explosions at the Pentagon, which never happened. “We have to take a look at these things and make sure we get the facts before we make assumptions.”

When asked by reporters about the fighters’ use of U.S.-made hardware, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday, “It is no secret for us that more and more equipment is being delivered to Ukraine’s armed forces.”

Previously, the Russian government released images of the alleged American Humvees, which according to the Russians were destroyed near Belgorod. Some users on Twitter, however, suggested the images with the trucks might have been staged.

Russia’s vulnerability

The raid in the Belgorod region means the Russians cannot effectively protect their borders, analysts told VOA.

The Russians did not expect the battles would move to their territory, said George Barros, a Russia analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, or ISW.

“If these Russian volunteers indeed penetrated as deep as they claim to have, then it demonstrates that Russian field fortifications don’t really mean anything if they’re not sufficiently manned,” Barros said. He added that the raid exposed the vulnerability of Russia’s defense lines.

“I’m sure a lot of people have seen all those maps of the extensive lines that the Russians have dug all across the entire front line. Some analysts have argued that these extensive field fortifications and trenches mean that the Ukrainians are going to have a hard time moving,” he said.

“But if you don’t have enough soldiers physically occupying those lines, then they’re not going to be effective at preventing maneuver. And we know that for the entirety of the Ukrainian front line, which is about a little over 1,000 kilometers long, the Russian forces do not have enough infantry to be able to physically occupy to effectively defend the entirety of it,” Barros said.

Former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk, now head of the Center for Defense Strategies, a Ukrainian security think tank, said that until this point, observers had seen mostly bombings or other forms of sabotage inside Russia. Now, “the idea of the inviolability of Russia as a territory was seriously undermined,” he told VOA.

“Here, we are talking about armed personnel who entered the territory of the Russian Federation and stayed there for some time,” Zagorodnyuk said. “Therefore, people who are citizens of Russia demonstrated to Russia that it is not protected. The idea that Russia is physically untouchable and completely protected from different threats or raids from any side is a fiction. Russia is as vulnerable as many other countries.”

Raid objective

Ilya Ponomarev, a political representative of the “Freedom of Russia” Legion that was involved in the raid, told VOA that the goal of the Belgorod operation was to “create a piece of free Russia and keep it as long as possible.”

Ponomarev said another objective was to distract the Russian army from the Ukrainian front line ahead of the expected Ukrainian offensive. “The Russians were surprised. They didn’t expect this.”

He said Ukraine’s role was minimal and emphasized that none of the Ukrainian military participated in the operation, only Russian citizens.

Ponomarev said he was hopeful that the Russian volunteers could free the country from the current regime. “This is our country, and we will liberate it. … There will be a new flag and a new government,” he said.

Alexander Vindman, former director for European affairs at the U.S. National Security Council, said this could be significant. “It seems to me that this is actually a Russian separatist movement – maybe with the support of Ukraine, but they act independently, achieving their own goals,” he told VOA.

ISW analysts said that so far they had not seen any unusual movement of Russian troops.

Regardless, Barros said events in the Belgorod region have caused a certain degree of panic, factionalism and incoherency within the Russian informational space.

“Frankly, I think Russian sources have done much more to actually amplify and create panic around these particular raids, more so than the Ukrainian information space,” he said.

VOA’s Tatiana Vorozhko and Iryna Matviichuk contributed to this report. Some information came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Tina Turner, the American-born singer who left a hardscrabble farming community and abusive relationship to become one of the top recording artists of all time, died on Wednesday at the age of 83.

She died peacefully after a long illness in her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland, her representative said.

Turner began her career in the 1950s during the early years of rock ’n’ roll and evolved into an MTV phenomenon.

In the video for her chart-topping song “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” in which she called love a “second-hand emotion,” Turner epitomized 1980s style as she strutted through New York City streets with her spiky blond hair, wearing a cropped jean jacket, mini skirt and stiletto heels.

With her taste for musical experimentation and bluntly worded ballads, Turner gelled perfectly with a 1980s pop landscape in which music fans increasingly valued electronically produced sounds and scorned hippie-era idealism.

Sometimes nicknamed the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Turner won six of her eight Grammy Awards in the 1980s. The decade saw her land a dozen songs on the Top 40, including “Typical Male,” “The Best,” “Private Dancer” and “Better Be Good to Me.” Her 1988 show in Rio de Janeiro drew 180,000 people, which remains one of the largest concert audiences for any single performer.

By then, Turner had been free from her marriage to guitarist Ike Turner for a decade.

The superstar was forthcoming about the abuse she suffered from her former husband during their marital and musical partnership in the 1960s and 1970s. She described bruised eyes, busted lips, a broken jaw and other injuries that repeatedly sent her to the emergency room.

“Tina’s story is not one of victimhood but one of incredible triumph,” singer Janet Jackson wrote about Turner, in a Rolling Stone issue that placed Turner at No. 63 on a list of the top 100 artists of all time.

“She’s transformed herself into an international sensation — an elegant powerhouse,” Jackson said.

In 1985, Turner gave a fictional turn to her reputation as a survivor. She played the ruthless leader of an outpost in a nuclear wasteland, acting opposite Mel Gibson in the third installment in the Mad Max franchise, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.”

Most of Turner’s hit songs were written by others, but she enlivened them with a voice that New York Times music critic Jon Pareles called “one of the more peculiar instruments in pop.”

“It’s three-tiered, with a nasal low register, a yowling, cutting middle range and a high register so startlingly clear it sounds like a falsetto,” Pareles wrote in a 1987 concert review.

She was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, in the rural Tennessee community of Nutbush, which she described in her 1973 song “Nutbush City Limits” as a “quiet little old community, a one-horse town.”

Her father worked as an overseer on a farm and her mother left the family when the singer was 11 years old, according to the singer’s 2018 memoir My Love Story. As a teenager, she moved to St. Louis to rejoin her mom.

Ike Turner, whose 1951 song “Rocket 88” has often been called the first rock ’n’ roll record, discovered her at age 17 when she grabbed the mic to sing at his club show in St. Louis in 1957.

The band leader later recorded a hit song, “A Fool in Love,” with his protégé and gave her the stage name Tina Turner, before the two married in Tijuana, Mexico.

Tina employed her strong voice and strenuously rehearsed dance routines as lead vocalist in an ensemble called the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. She collaborated with members of rock royalty, including The Who and Phil Spector, in the 1960s and 1970s and appeared on the cover of issue two of Rolling Stone magazine in 1967.

Ike and Tina Turner bounced between record labels, owing much of their commercial success to a relentless touring schedule. Their biggest hit was a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.”

Turner left her husband one night in 1976 on a tour stop in Dallas, after he pummeled her during a car ride and she struck back, according to her memoir. Their divorce was finalized in 1978.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted Ike and Tina Turner in 1991, calling them “one of the most formidable live acts in history.” Ike Turner died in 2007.

After leaving her husband, Turner spent years struggling to regain the limelight, releasing solo albums and singles that flopped and gigging at corporate conferences.

In 1980, she met new manager Roger Davies, an Australian music executive who went on to manage her for three decades. That led to a solo No.1 record — “What’s Love Got to Do With It” — and then in 1984 her album “Private Dancer” landed her at the top of the charts.

“Private Dancer” went on to become Turner’s biggest album, the capstone of a career that saw her sell more than 200 million records in total.

In 1985 Turner met German music executive Erwin Bach who became her long-term partner and in 1988 she moved to London, beginning a decades-long residency in Europe. She released two studio albums in the 1990s that sold well, especially in Europe, recorded the theme song for 1995 Bond movie “GoldenEye” and staged a successful world tour in 2008 and 2009.

After that, she retired from show business. She married Bach, relinquishing her U.S. citizenship and becoming a citizen of Switzerland.

She battled a number of health problems after retiring and in 2018 she faced a family tragedy, when her oldest son, Craig, died by suicide at age 59 in Los Angeles. Her younger son Ronnie died in December 2022.

Her name continues to draw audiences years after her retirement. Musical stage show “TINA: The Tina Turner Musical,” with Adrienne Warren initially acting and singing the star’s life story, was a hit first in London’s West End in 2018, and later on Broadway, and is still running. And in 2021 HBO released a documentary about her life, “Tina.”

She is survived by Bach and two sons of Ike Turner’s whom she had adopted.
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Four years ago, high school and college students in the class of 2023 had just entered their first year when the coronavirus pandemic hit. They were thrust into an academic world of uncertainty when in-person classes stopped and were moved to online platforms.

Now recent graduates, they are the last undergraduate class with memories of what it was like to be students when the pandemic began. 

“It was shocking and confusing because we didn’t know what was going to happen with our studies,” said Sarabeth McClain, 22, who just received her undergraduate diploma in economics and political science at Rhode Island University. 

When the World Health Organization declared COVID a global pandemic in March 2020, in-person classes stopped in the United States, forcing students to learn online.  

“It was chaotic. I was taking classes that quickly went virtual, and I started to feel more distant from my professors,” said Rachel Buxbaum, who was in a doctoral degree program in clinical psychology at Long Island University in New York. “Plus, I began seeing psychotherapy patients online, and it all felt overwhelming.”

COVID-19 changed everything, including the college experience. 

“It was a resilience test for these students and impacted their ability to focus on education,” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. 

According to a 2021 Best Colleges survey, 9 out of 10 college students said they struggled with isolation, anxiety and a lack of focus during the pandemic.

For much of two years, the lives of both college and high school students were turned upside down with uncertainty and the unease of not spending time with their classmates in person. 

“The quarantine led to an increase in social anxiety for them,” explained Caroline Clauss-Ehlers, a psychology professor in the School of Health Professions at Long Island University.  “Interacting with their peers is important to them, and with the quarantine that was lost, including some social skills.”

“I was struggling,” said high school student Jessica Hernandez, who graduated from Mount Vernon High School in Alexandria, Virginia, “because I couldn’t socialize with anyone since everyone was stuck behind a screen.” 

Besides social isolation, another Best Colleges study, in 2022, found the transition to remote learning caused significant stress from an increase in distractions and a loss of academic resources such as academic advisers.

“I felt neglected because the teacher wasn’t there to help me in person,” Hernandez told VOA, “and there were many distractions at home with my phone and TV easy to get to all the time, while I’m watching online classes from my bed.”

However, another high school student called her online learning “super easy.”

“It was such a quick transition during COVID that the teachers didn’t have much time to figure out online learning,” said Reda Adkins, a graduate of Perry High School in Perry, Ohio, “and so they were laid back and there was no pressure on the students to study and learn.”

According to a 2021 Frontiers in Psychology survey, 33% of college students were concerned about their academic futures due to the pandemic.

“I don’t feel there are many advantages to taking classes online,” said Sam Lodge, a graduate in economics at the University of Wisconsin. “It hurt me academically because it was harder to learn and process the information.”

“I didn’t like online learning and missed the structure of going to class, including classroom discussions,” said McClain.

“The professors prepared me academically,” said Matthew Shea, who received his diploma from Pennsylvania State University. “However, it was hard to pay attention during the lectures when you’re not in the classroom. I was also more hesitant to ask questions online rather than in-person, where I am more comfortable raising my hand.”

However, other students adapted to learning virtually, Pasquerella noted.

“Most students were skeptical about learning online during the pandemic, but after in-person college classes resumed, many wanted to have more online courses, especially for the flexibility.”

According to a new survey by TimelyCare, a virtual health and well-being program for students in higher education, about 80% of graduating seniors say the pandemic affected their workforce preparedness.

“I’m looking for employment right now,” Lodge told VOA. “During COVID, the lack of being social, including talking to new people, has had an impact on my reaching out to people who are hiring.”

Despite a disrupted college experience and trepidation about entering the workforce, nearly all of this year’s college graduates are hopeful for their future, TimelyCare said.

“I’m looking forward to my work as a clinical psychologist in primary health care at a hospital in New York,” said Buxbaum, who completed her doctoral degree.

“I feel like I’m regaining my mental energy, and I’m going to a local community college in northern Virginia to study to become a nurse,” said high school graduate Hernandez. 
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The idea of the American Dream can conjure up images of tidy suburban homes with immaculate green lawns, but achieving and maintaining that lush carpet of grass can seem like a nightmare.

“Most people don’t install lawns, they get them when they buy the house. They’re stuck,” says Paul Robbins, author of Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are.

“That’s the first thing we learned in our research is that most people would prefer not to have them, but they feel that they need to have them, or that they can’t do anything about it. And the need to have them is that they feel an obligation to their neighbors,” Robbins said.

Conforming to the neighbors can be timely, expensive and unhealthy, due to the chemicals used to keep the lawn perfect. But not conforming can also be costly. Janet and Jeffrey Crouch, a Maryland couple who live about 45 minutes outside of Washington, learned this lesson when they decided to forgo a lawn to plant native plants that are wildlife-friendly.

“We started planting native plants and the butterflies and bees and birds started coming immediately when we stopped using pesticides and fertilizers,” Janet Crouch says.

But their next-door neighbor complained to the homeowners association, which like a typical HOA, oversees the management of some residential communities and is usually run by a board of volunteer homeowners. The Crouches were ordered to pull out their native plants and replace them with grass. They refused.

“We were not using pesticides or fertilizers. We knew we were doing things that were beneficial for the environment,” Janet Crouch says. “So, it just seemed fundamentally wrong to tear out this piece of paradise that we’ve created and put in turf grass, which is an environmental dead zone.”

Lawns are considered environmental dead zones in part because they provide no food or shelter for wildlife, including pollinators like birds, bees and butterflies, which are among the wildlife whose numbers are decreasing at a rapid rate due to habitat destruction and other human-related actions. One million species worldwide face extinction, many within decades, due to the loss of biodiversity.

“The fundamental ecological fact about turf grass is that it’s not native to North America, with maybe one exception. And to plant a crop which is not native to the continent, and then try to engineer it into a state of absolute perfection, is like pushing a boulder up the hill,” says Ted Steinberg, author of American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn.

An industry report suggests Americans spend almost $100 billion on lawn care yearly, with each household, on average, spending $503 on lawn care and gardening.

“Super-green monoculture is an ecological boondoggle,” Steinberg adds. “It uses a lot of chemical inputs, a lot of water — you water a lot — and leaches nutrients from the soil, and that sends people back to the store for more chemical inputs, especially fertilizer.”

Chemicals used to maintain lawns include glyphosate and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, known as 2,4-D, which are suspected of causing cancer and other health ailments and can contaminate groundwater. Some states already ban the use of certain chemicals on lawns. Others, particularly in the arid West, have restrictions on how often or if people can water their grass.

“There’s more than 40 million acres across the country of turf,” says Nancy Lawson, author of The Humane Gardener and Wildscapes. Lawson is also Janet Crouch’s sister and the person who encouraged the Crouches to install native plants. “Turf is the No. 1 irrigated crop, so it’s taking up a lot of water.”

Lawson has created a wildlife oasis of native plants surrounding her house. She lives in an area of Maryland that is not governed by HOAs.

“I think the future of the lawn, as it is now, is doomed,” Lawson says. “So, what’s the alternative? Well, it shouldn’t be rock or something like that because you’re heating up the planet even more. So, the alternative is plants, and it’s native plants that know how to grow in your soil conditions, in your sun conditions, in the weather of your region.”

The Crouches’ battle against their HOA took three years. The couple says they spent $60,000 fighting to keep their natural garden. They won and as a result of their efforts, the state of Maryland passed a law that allows people to grow native plants instead of grass, no matter what their HOA wants.

Robbins, who is also an environmental studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes lawns will always be around, but not in the state they are in now.

“They’re going to be targeted in places where they’re most appropriate, where you’ve got kids and you want them to have a place to run around,” Robbins says. “There’s going to be fewer of them, and they’re going to live alongside much more biodiverse options.”
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