U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected reports Friday that Washington and Tehran were close to deals on limiting Iran’s nuclear program and releasing U.S. citizens detained in the country. 

“With regard to Iran, some of the reports that we’ve seen about an agreement on nuclear matters or, for that matter, on detainees, are simply not accurate and not true,” Blinken said when asked about indirect talks via Oman. 

Iran said Monday it was conducting indirect negotiations with the United States through the Sultanate of Oman, with nuclear issues, U.S. sanctions and detainees on the menu. 

That sparked reports that the two sides, who haven’t negotiated directly for years, could be closing a deal. 

“We welcome the efforts of Omani officials, and we exchanged messages with the other party through this mediator” over the lifting of U.S. sanctions, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said Monday. 

“We have never stopped the diplomatic processes,” he added, emphasizing that the talks “were not secret.” 

The two sides have been unable for two years to reach a deal on President Joe Biden’s desire to revive the 2015 deal which granted Tehran much-needed sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program. 

Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal in 2018, and since then Tehran has steadily progressed in development of its nuclear industry, though not — as feared — producing a nuclear weapon.  

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reiterated last week that the country does not intend to acquire a nuclear weapon. 

Khamenei said deals could be reached with the United States, provided they do not change “the existing infrastructure of the nuclear industry.” 

Kanani said Monday a prisoner exchange could be agreed “in the near future,” if Washington exhibits “the same level of seriousness” as Tehran. 

At least three Iranian Americans are being held in Iran, including businessman Siamak Namazi, arrested in October 2015 and sentenced to 10 years in prison for espionage. 
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Daniel Ellsberg, the U.S. military analyst whose change of heart on the Vietnam War led him to leak the classified Pentagon Papers, revealing U.S. government deception about the war and setting off a major freedom-of-the-press battle, died on Friday at the age of 92, his family said in a statement.

Ellsberg, who had been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer in February, died at his home in Kensington, California, the family said.

Long before Edward Snowden and Wikileaks were revealing government secrets in the name of transparency, Ellsberg let Americans know that their government was capable of lying to them. In his later years, Ellsberg would become an advocate for whistleblowers and leakers and his Pentagon Papers leak was portrayed in the 2017 movie “The Post.”

Ellsberg secretly went to the media in 1971 in hopes of expediting the end of the Vietnam War. It made him the target of a smear campaign by the Nixon administration. Henry Kissinger, who was then the president’s national security adviser, referred to him as “the most dangerous man in America who must be stopped at all costs.”

When he went to Saigon for the State Department in the mid-1960s, Ellsberg had an impressive resume. He had earned three degrees from Harvard, served in the Marine Corps and worked at the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation, the influential policy research think tank.

He was a dedicated Cold War warrior and hawk on Vietnam at the time. But Ellsberg, in his 2003 book, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers,” said he was only one week into a two-year tour of duty in Saigon when he realized the United States was in a war it would not win.

Meanwhile at the behest of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Pentagon officials had secretly been putting together a 7,000-page report covering U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 through 1967. When it was finished in 1969, two of the 15 published copies went to the RAND Corporation, where Ellsberg was once again working.

Anti-war rallies

With his new perspective on the war, Ellsberg started attending peace rallies. He said he was inspired to copy the Pentagon Papers after hearing an anti-war protester say he was looking forward to going to prison for resisting the draft.

Ellsberg began sneaking the top-secret study out of the RAND office and copying it at night on a rented Xerox machine, using his 13-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter as helpers. He took the documents with him when he moved to Boston for a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ended up sitting on them for a year and a half before passing pages to The New York Times.

The Times ran its first installment of the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971, and the administration of President Richard Nixon moved quickly to get a judge to stop further publication. Nixon’s claim of executive authority and invocation of the Espionage Act set off a freedom-of-the-press fight over the extreme censorship of prior restraint.

Ellsberg’s next move was to give the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post and more than a dozen other newspapers. In New York Times v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled less than three weeks after first publication that the press had the right to publish the papers, and the Times resumed doing so.

The study said the U.S. officials had concluded that the war probably could not be won and that President John F. Kennedy approved of plans for a coup to overthrow the South Vietnamese leader. It also said Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, had plans to expand the war, including bombing in North Vietnam, despite saying during the 1964 campaign that he would not. The papers also revealed the secret U.S. bombing in Cambodia and Laos and that casualty figures were higher than reported.

On the run

The Times never said who leaked the papers, but the FBI quickly figured it out. Ellsberg remained underground for about two weeks before surrendering in Boston.

“I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public,” Ellsberg said at the time. “I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.”

He would say that he regretted not leaking the papers sooner.

Even though the Pentagon Papers did not cover Nixon’s handling of Vietnam, the White House’s “plumbers” unit, which would later pull off the Watergate break-in that led to Nixon’s downfall, was ordered to stop further leaks and discredit Ellsberg.

Two and a half months after first publication, two men who later figured prominently in Watergate, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to search for incriminating evidence.

Ellsberg and a RAND colleague were eventually charged with espionage, theft and conspiracy. But at their 1973 trial, the case was dismissed on the grounds of government misconduct when the break-in was revealed.

In his later years, Ellsberg, who was born April 7, 1931, in Chicago, Illinois, became a writer and lecturer in the campaign for government transparency and against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
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Researchers have been exploring the presence of cancer in animals from elephants to mollusks to learn about cancer in wild animals. They also hope their research will help with human cancers.

“Studying wildlife cancer, and more generally the evolution of cancer across the tree of life, is extremely promising to develop innovative therapies to treat cancer in humans,” Mathieu Giraudeau, a researcher at France’s La Rochelle University who has been focusing on cancer in wild animals since 2018, told VOA.

“The idea behind this is that some species have evolved some mechanisms to limit cancer initiation and progression,” he said. “If we identify and understand these mechanisms, then the goal is to use them as a source of inspiration to develop new therapies.”

Cancer affects both humans and animals but its impact on wild animals has been difficult to uncover.

“There are no basic blood tests to detect cancer in the wild animals,” Giraudeau told VOA, “so most of the studies have to use necropsies [post-mortem examinations of animals] to detect cancer cases in wild animals. That’s why using zoo animals is a fantastic opportunity, since a necropsy is performed for most of the animals dying in zoos.”

Researchers say there are more questions than answers regarding cancer in wild animals, which are hard to study in their natural habitat because they move around and are therefore difficult to observe over time.

“We don’t really know much about the different kinds of animals species that get cancer or how much,” biologist Carlo Maley, director of the Arizona Cancer Evolution Center at Arizona State University, where he is studying cancer in wild animals, told VOA.

“We’ve been focusing on collecting data to find which species are super susceptible or super resistant to cancer,” he said, “and we’re looking at questions such as how has nature figured out how to prevent cancer and then, can we translate that to humans.

It seems large and long-lived species “have evolved some powerful mechanisms to fight against cancer, and we now need to understand these mechanisms,” Giraudeau said.

They include elephants and whales.

“Elephant cells are super sensitive to DNA damage, and even with just a little DNA damage, the cell will commit suicide and not risk getting mutations,” Maley said. “So it seems to be a strategy for avoiding cancer by killing off a potentially dangerous cell, rather than risk getting a mutation that could lead to cancer.”

In Australia, however, that has not been the case for a much smaller animal, the Tasmanian devil. The carnivorous marsupials have been nearly wiped out from cancerous tumors growing in and around their mouths.

“Devils bite each other, particularly around the face, as part of their normal behavior,” Cambridge University veterinary medicine professor Elizabeth Murchison told VOA.

Murchison, a researcher on the genetics and evolution of transmissible cancers, added, “Tasmanian Devils have a transmissible cancer that spreads between the animals by the transfer of living cancer cells. There are, in fact, two independent transmissible cancers in Tasmanian devils, which was a surprise, and both are spread during biting, and result in fatal facial tumors.”

Murchison, who grew up in Tasmania, “passionately” hopes the endangered species can be saved.

“There is currently no way to control the disease,” she said. “Research directed towards developing a vaccine is ongoing, but it will be a long road to developing an effective protective vaccine.”

Even much smaller creatures, like shellfish, are dying from cancer.

On Whidbey Island in Washington state, a massive die-off of cockles, a type of bivalve mollusk, were found on the beach. It turns out the cockles had a leukemia-like contagious cancer that affects the cells that live in their hemolymph, the equivalent of blood.

It is another transmissible cancer, found in many shellfish species worldwide, but first discovered in these cockles in 2018. The cancer cells in the sea can float to enter nearby cockles, spreading the disease.

“The whole cell of the cancer moves from one animal to the next,” unlike conventional human cancer that arises due to cell mutations that don’t move from one person to another, said Michael Metzger, assistant investigator at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute in Seattle, Washington.

Researchers are working to find the cause of the contagious cancer and using genetic analysis, to learn how the disease evolves.

It’s not clear how the cockles first got the disease.

It’s possible it could have been brought to the area by a boat carrying diseased shellfish, he said. He also said environmental stressors may have played a part, including global warming.

Scientists say there is a long way to go before cancer in wild animals is widely understood and how that may help battle human cancers in the future. Besides genetics, they are also looking at the effect of viruses, pesticides, habitat destruction and pollution.

Human cancers are short-lived, from an evolutionary perspective,” Murchison said. “Our work gives us insight into how cancers evolve over long time-periods.”

“I think the main benefit is going to be preventing cancer as opposed to curing it,” said Maley. But there’s some possibility that the mechanisms that prevent cancer could also be translated into potential therapies.”
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The U.S. Senate on Thursday narrowly confirmed civil rights lawyer Nusrat Choudhury to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, making her the first Bangladeshi-American and female Muslim federal judge in the United States.

Choudhury, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois, was confirmed on a 50-49 vote. She will also be the first Bangladeshi-American federal judge.

Choudhury previously spent most of her professional career with the national ACLU, where she worked on racial justice and national security issues. She was deputy director of the organization’s racial justice program from 2018 until 2020. U.S. President Joe Biden nominated her to the federal bench in January 2022.

Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer in a statement said that Choudhury’s “experience as a talented and dedicated civil rights litigator has prepared her to serve with integrity and professionalism on the federal bench, and she will follow the facts and administer justice with fairness and a deep respect for the rule of law.”

She faced pushback from some Senate Republicans after she gave inconsistent answers on whether she made comments at 2015 event at Princeton University saying that police killings of unarmed Black men happen “every day.”

She later in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee panel said that “Such a statement is inconsistent with my deep respect for law enforcement.”

Choudhury clerked for a judge on the nearby Southern District of New York trial court as well as the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which reviews cases from the New York, Connecticut and Vermont federal courts.

Biden also appointed the first Muslim judge in U.S. history, U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi. The Senate confirmed him to the New Jersey federal trial court in 2021.
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U.S. security officials say the U.S. Energy Department and several other federal agencies have been hacked by a Russian cyber-extortion gang.

Homeland Security officials said Thursday the agencies were caught up in the hacking of MOVEit  Transfer, a file-transfer program that is popular with governments and corporations.

The Energy Department said two of its entities were “compromised” in the hack.

The Russia-linked extortion group CI0p, which claimed responsibility for the hacking, said last week on the dark web site that its victims had until Wednesday to negotiate a ransom or risk having sensitive information dumped online.  It added that it would delete any data stolen from governments, cities and police departments.

Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said while the intrusion was “largely an opportunistic one” that was superficial and caught quickly, her agency was “very concerned about this campaign and working on it with urgency.”

Reuters reports that the Britain’s Shell Oil Company, the University of Georgia, Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Health System were also among those targeted in the hacking campaign. The Associated Press quoted a senior CISA official as saying U.S. military and intelligence agencies were not affected.

MOVEit said it is working with the federal agencies and its other customers to help fix their systems.

Information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters.  
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All state-funded colleges and universities in Texas will have to close their diversity, equity and inclusion offices under a measure signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

The law, which one of its sponsors in the Texas state Senate called the most significant ban on diversity offices in higher education in the country, comes as the U.S. Supreme Court later this month is widely expected to ban colleges and universities from considering race as a factor in their admissions decisions.

Under the Texas law, signed by Abbott on Wednesday, any public college or university that does not certify it is in compliance with the measure would not be able to spend state funds allocated to it.

It also mandates that state officials every two years through 2029 conduct studies to gauge the impact of the law on students broken down by race. It will look at the rates of application, acceptance, matriculations, retention and graduation, along with grade point averages. The law does not explain the reasoning for conducting these studies.

The law is the latest salvo from Texas’ Republican lawmakers and Abbott, also a Republican, and comes as critics assail diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, efforts as divisive or anti-white, while proponents say they can help people from different backgrounds learn to work together.

“Texas is leading the nation and ensuring our campuses return to focusing on the strength of diversity and promoting a merit-based approach where individuals are judged on their qualifications, skills, and contributions,” state Senator Brandon Creighton, a Republican who was one of the bill’s authors, said in a statement.

But Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, said in a statement that the bill’s signature marked a “sad occasion for all students at Texas’ public universities.”

“By dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and offices at these institutions, Texas lawmakers have chosen to prioritize a political agenda instead of the success of these students,” Russell wrote.

She said all students, regardless of race, benefit from having a diverse student body and that her organization would not stop working for Texas universities to be increasingly accessible and inclusive.
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White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan is on an Asian diplomatic blitz this week, participating in a trilateral meeting with his counterparts from Japan and South Korea on Thursday.

On Friday, he is meeting with his counterparts from Japan and the Philippines, in the first trilateral engagement of that group’s national security advisers.

Sullivan’s meetings in Tokyo follow a stop in New Delhi earlier this week to finalize details for next week’s official visit to the White House by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India – a country that is becoming increasingly indispensable for Washington’s goals in the region.

While the timing is “coincidental,” according to an administration official, Sullivan’s meetings take place just days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing this weekend.

The State Department says the Beijing visit, which Washington postponed after it shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon flying over U.S. territory in February, is part of the Biden administration’s efforts to repair deteriorating ties and keep lines of communication open between Washington and Beijing.

Strengthening alliances and partnerships is a clear component of the administration’s strategy to effectively compete with China, while Blinken’s trip to Beijing is aimed at stabilizing the relationship, said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center. “They are two sides of the same coin,” she told VOA.

Working with more than one country at a time to shore up allies is part of what’s often called the administration’s “minilateral” strategy. The goal is to play up the strengths of each partner and encourage them to work together.

“We will not be able to get one big grouping, so let’s do lots of minilaterals,” said Aparna Pande, director of the Initiative on the Future of India and South Asia at the Hudson Institute in Washington. That way, she told VOA, the U.S. carries less burden, even as it acts as the glue that keeps the groupings together.

Geostrategic Indo-Pacific

The busy week of diplomacy is designed to reaffirm the message that Washington wants to bolster ties with allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, which it sees as the world’s key geostrategic region with vast opportunities for greater economic security cooperation, including on critical and emerging technologies.

The region’s challenges include North Korean nuclear threats, highlighted by Pyongyang’s launch on Thursday of two short-range ballistic missiles. China, meanwhile, has massively increased its military spending in the past decade and has engaged in what Washington calls “economic coercion,” imposing economic costs on various countries to achieve political goals.

Amid Beijing’s maritime expansion in the South China Sea and tensions with Taiwan, the war on Ukraine has amplified the region’s threat assessment, reminding countries of the devastating impact of a potential Chinese invasion.

This leads to increased defense spending by individual countries and demands for an increasingly muscular American presence in the region, with more joint military exercises, a ramped-up defense posture and a stronger nuclear umbrella for South Korea, known as extended deterrence.

“We know they tend to balance against threats, and countries are feeling threatened,” said Zack Cooper, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, at a recent event with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Beijing characterizes the increased U.S. presence as a “distinct military provocation,” a charge the Biden administration rejects.

“The fact that we are looking at ways to be more present is a response to changes in the security environment, not forcing changes in the security environment,” said Lindsay Ford, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia, during the CSIS event. “If that were not true, we would not have allies and partners who are so interested in having the United States there more.”

Beyond the defense context, U.S.-China relations are “more than just an arms race,” said Sheila Smith, senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“It’s a competition now for the edge, the strategic edge in the future, on technology and economic power as well,” she told VOA.

U.S. officials say Blinken’s visit to China is aimed at restoring a sense of calm and normalcy and is unlikely to achieve any significant breakthrough in the myriad problems affecting Washington-Beijing ties.
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