President Joe Biden on Tuesday assured Israel’s president that the friendship between their countries is “just simply unbreakable,” amid Washington’s concerns over events in Israel, including the leadership’s push to amend the judicial system and recent settler violence in the West Bank.  

Those words came during President Isaac Herzog’s second visit to Biden’s White House, an honor not yet accorded to the nation’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who began his sixth term in December. 

“As I affirmed to Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday, America’s commitment to Israel is firm,” Biden said. “And it is ironclad. And we’re committed, as well, to assure that Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon. So we’ve got a lot to talk about.”  

After the meeting, the White House said the two also discussed Tehran’s growing defense partnership with Moscow.    

Herzog also addressed Biden’s concerns over Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul the country’s judiciary, which has sparked 28 straight weeks of massive street protests by Israelis who say the plan pushes the nation toward autocracy.  

“It’s a heated debate, but it’s also a virtue and a tribute to the greatness of Israeli democracy,” he said. “And let me reiterate, clear, crystal clear: Israeli democracy is sound, strong, is resilient. We are going through pains. We are going through heated debates. We are going through challenging moments. But I truly, truly believe and I will say to you, Mr. President, as I’ve said it as head of state to the people of Israel, we should always seek to find amicable consensus.”  

Millions of Americans with ties to Israel are watching.  

They include those who support conservative American politics and policies and tend to also support Netanyahu.  

But the majority of Jewish Americans lean left.  

And on Tuesday, as protests in Tel Aviv turned violent, a clutch of about a dozen protesters also stood outside the White House, bearing signs critical of Netanyahu. 

“We stand in solidarity with the protesters,” said Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of the largest Jewish denomination in the U.S., Reform Judaism. He spoke to VOA via Zoom from his office near Washington. 

“It is the best, greatest hope for Israel to continue to thrive as an inclusive democracy. There are so many issues at stake: everything from women’s rights to LGBTQIA equality, to the rights of different forms of Jewish expression, and frankly, other faith groups that would seek to have their rights protected in Israel,” he said. 

On recent violence in the West Bank, he said: “We need to end the violence. And this coalition government led by this prime minister and his incredibly problematic partners — Itamar Ben-Gvir, [Bezalel Yoel] Smotrich and the like, who have normalized violence by settlers and by vigilantes against Palestinians — is anti-Jewish, it’s inhuman, and it needs to end.” 

Other Jewish groups, like the more conservative American Israel Public Affairs Committee, disagree. In an email, AIPAC declined to give VOA an interview.  

That group blames Palestinian leaders for violence in the West Bank and seeks a more forceful response. 

“The United States must continue its efforts to persuade and enable the Palestinian Authority to act responsibly and regain control of the areas now controlled by Iranian-backed terror groups,” the group said in a recent memo.   

Some Republicans are demanding the Biden administration stay out of Israel’s affairs.   

“What this Biden administration has done, I think, has been disgraceful,” said Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is running for president, at this week’s Christians United for Israel summit near Washington. “The way they treat a strong ally like Prime Minister Netanyahu has been disgraceful. What they’re trying to do, to shoehorn Israel into bad policies has been disgraceful. You have different things that go on in Israel, like with this judicial reform. Biden needs to butt out of that and let Israel govern itself.” 

The White House said this week that the two leaders — Biden and Netanyahu — will meet in coming months but did not say when or where. After leaving the White House, Herzog speaks before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.   
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A call for increased oversight of the billions of dollars in aid that the United States is sending to Ukraine faces an uncertain future as lawmakers in the Senate begin debate on a bill to fund the U.S. military for the coming year.

The demand, to establish a special inspector general for Ukraine assistance, is a key part of the $874.2 billion version of the bill passed by the House of Representatives this past Friday by a vote of 219-210, with its mainly Republican supporters insisting it is the only way to make sure U.S. assistance does not fall prey to corruption and incompetence.

“The American people, the taxpayers of this country, deserve to know where their money is going and how it is being spent,” Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said last November, when she and other lawmakers started to build momentum for the creation of a special inspector general.

“The American people are not going to support this war without review, without asking tough questions,” said Republican Matt Gaetz, a member of the House Freedom Caucus.

With the support of Greene, Gaetz and others, language in the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act would require the departments of Defense and State to set up and staff an office dedicated to examining the more than $42 billion in security aid to Ukraine, as well as the approximately $25 billion in humanitarian and economic assistance.

Specifically, the provision would require the special inspector general to maintain staff in Ukraine and produce quarterly reports on the fate of U.S. aid, to some extent following the model set by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which has been producing reports since October 2008.

“That actually worked,” Republican Representative Warren Davidson said of SIGAR during a March 2023 hearing on aid to Ukraine.

“We weren’t getting results until we did that,” he added, suggesting aid to Ukraine might benefit from similar oversight.

But there has been pushback from the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House.

The Defense Department Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office “are currently undertaking multiple investigations regarding every aspect of this assistance — from assessing the [Defense Department’s] processes for developing security assistance requirements to evaluating the end-use monitoring processes for delivered assistance — at the request of the Congress,” the White House said in a statement earlier this month.

There also seems to be little appetite in the Democrat-controlled Senate to add another layer of oversight.

A measure introduced by Republican Senator Josh Hawley to create a special inspector general for Ukraine was defeated 68-26 in a vote this past March. Among those voting no were some prominent Republicans, including Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Roger Wicker and Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Marco Rubio.

Some analysts have also raised doubts about the need for a special inspector general for Ukraine.

“There’s no question accountability is needed. However, I don’t think this inspector general is really the way to go,” said Elizabeth Hoffman, director of congressional and government affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Hoffman echoed concerns that creating a new special inspector general for Ukraine would likely create redundancies. And she rejected comparisons to the special inspector general that was set up to oversee efforts in Afghanistan.

“The two situations are so, so different that I don’t think it’s a simple copy-paste solution,” she said. “Ukraine has, and had, a very robust civil society, a functioning government. … That wasn’t the case in Afghanistan.”

Hoffman also expressed concern that the additional oversight could have “a chilling effect.”

“[SIGAR] made people very risk averse,” she said, worrying that another special inspector general could bog down efforts to help Kyiv.

“It could make people unwilling to take calculated risks … to be creative with assistance and respond to the situation on the ground.”

“We are not going to relent. We are not going to back down. We are not going to give up on the cause that is righteous,” Republican Representative Scott Perry said this past Friday after passage of the House version of the bill. “We are going to use every single tool at our disposal to ensure that we change from crazy to normal.”

Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.
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Does generative artificial intelligence pose a risk to humanity that could lead to our extinction?

That was among the questions put to experts by the head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission at a workshop hosted with the National Science Foundation.

FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said she is more hopeful about artificial intelligence than pessimistic. “That might sound contrarian,” she said, given that so much of the news about AI is “dark,” raising questions such as, “How do we rein in this technology? What does it mean for the future of work when we have intelligent machines? What will it mean for democracy and elections?”

The discussion included participants from a range of industries including network operators and vendors, leading academics, federal agencies, and public interest representatives.  

“We are entering the AI revolution,” said National Science Foundation senior adviser John Chapin, who described this as a “once-in-a-generation change in technology capabilities” which “require rethinking the fundamental assumptions that underline our communications.” 

“It is vital that we bring expert understanding of the science of technology together with expert understanding of the user and regulatory issues.” 

Investing in AI 

FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington pointed out that while technology may sometimes give the appearance of arriving suddenly, in many cases it’s a product of a steady but unnoticed evolution decades in the making. He gave the example of ChatGPT as AI that landed seemingly overnight, with dramatic impact. 

“Where the United States has succeeded in technological development, it has done so through a mindful attempt to cultivate and potentiate innovation.”

Lisa Guess, senior vice president of Solutions Engineering at the firm Ericsson/Cradlepoint, expressed concern that her company’s employees could “cut and paste” code into the ChatGPT window to try to perfect it, thereby exposing the company’s intellectual property. ”There are many things that we all have to think through as we do this.” 

Other panelists agreed. “With the opportunity to use data comes the opportunity that the data can be corrupted,” said Ness Shroff, a professor at The Ohio State University who is also an expert on AI. He called for “appropriate guardrails” to prevent that corruption.

FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said AI “has the potential to impact if not transform nearly every aspect of American life.” Because of that potential, everyone, especially in government, shoulders a responsibility to better understand AI’s risks and opportunities. “That is just good governance in this era of rapid technological change.”  

“Fundamental issues of equity are not a side salad here,” he said. “They have to be fundamental as we consider technological advancement. AI has raised the stakes of defending our networks” and ultimately “network security means national security.” 

Digital equity, robocalls 

Alisa Valentin, senior director of technology and telecommunications policy at the civil rights organization the National Urban League, voiced her concerns about the illegal and predatory nature of robocalls. “Even if we feel like we won’t fall victim to robocalls, we are concerned about our family members or friends who may not be as tech savvy,” knowing how robocalls “can turn people’s lives upside down.”

Valentin also emphasized the urgent need to close the digital divide “to make sure that every community can benefit from the digital economy not only as consumers but also as workers and business owners.” 

“Access to communication services is a civil right,” she said. “Equity has to be at the center of everything we do when having conversations about AI.” 

Global competition

FCC Commissioner Simington said global competitors are “really good, and we should assume that they are taking us seriously, so we should protect what is ours.” But regulations to protect the expropriation of American innovation should not go overboard.

“Let’s make sure we don’t give away the store, but let’s not do it by keeping the shelves empty.” 
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The White House on Tuesday along with companies such as Amazon.com Inc, Alphabet’s Google and Best Buy will announce an initiative that allows Americans to identify devices that are less vulnerable to cyberattacks.

A new certification and labeling program would raise the bar for cybersecurity across smart devices such as refrigerators, microwaves, televisions, climate control systems and fitness trackers, the White House said in a statement.

Retailers and manufacturers will apply a “U.S. Cyber Trust Mark” logo to their devices and the program will be up and running in 2024.

The initiative is designed to make sure “our networks and the use of them is more secure, because it is so important for economic and national security,” said a senior administration official, who did not wish to be named.

The Federal Communications Commission will seek public comment before rolling out the labeling program and register a national trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the White House said.

Other retailers and manufacturers participating in the program include LG Electronics U.S.A., Logitech, Cisco Systems and Samsung.

In March, the White House launched its national cyber strategy that called on software makers and companies to take far greater responsibility to ensure that their systems cannot be hacked.

It also accelerated efforts by agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Defense Department to disrupt activities of hackers and ransomware groups around the world.

Last week, Microsoft and U.S. official said Chinese state-linked hackers secretly accessed email accounts at around 25 organizations, including at least two U.S. government agencies, since May.
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U.S. lawmakers have introduced a new bill that would require the secretary of defense to develop a strategy for building “Rings of Fire” in the Indo-Pacific region to shrink the missile gap with China in concert with allies.

Republican Representatives Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa introduced the Rings of Fire Act of 2023 on Friday.

“China’s aggression is growing, and a strong deterrence strategy is needed to confront the Chinese Communist Party. As China’s rocket force has taken the lead in the Indo-Pacific, the shocking gap in America’s missile capabilities calls deterrence into question,” Ernst said.

“The Chinese Communist Party has spent years building a rocket force that can push American ships out of a fight and target American forces further out across the Indo-Pacific — reaching our own borders,” Gallagher said in a press release.

The bill includes a list of potential locations to place missile systems in the region, the designation of a specific commander tasked with overseeing the effort, and a list of allies with which Washington could develop a strategy, according to Gallagher’s office.

Geologically, the “ring of fire” refers to a 40,000-kilometer-long zone marked by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions extending in a horseshoe shape around the Pacific Ocean.

A report titled “Rings of Fire: A Conventional Missile Strategy for a Post-INF Treaty World,” released last August by the Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says the most appropriate set of rings corresponds to the ranges of the existing classes of conventional missiles: short-, medium- and intermediate-range.

One of the report’s authors, Tyler Hacker, told VOA Mandarin via email on July 13 that a “rings of fire” strategy would optimally match different ground-based missile systems with potential operating locations, as it can “take advantage of the plethora of existing allied missile capabilities in the first island chain (inner ring) and maximize the utility of strategic geography in the middle and outer rings.”

The bill’s sponsors wrote in an op-ed for Fox News that “Japan and the Philippines could host shorter-range systems, while longer-range systems could be deployed to northern Australia, the Pacific Islands and Alaska.”

The op-ed also mentioned that according to a Pentagon report, China has deployed more than 1,250 ground-launched theater-range ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km that can strike U.S. targets in the Indo-Pacific region.

When asked during a hearing before the Senate Armed Forces Committee on April 20 whether the U.S. deployed land-based theater missiles with the same range, Admiral John Aquilino, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said it did not. Asked if the U.S. is developing the missiles with a range at 3,000 to 5,000 kilometers, Aquilino responded it was not.

The commander of U.S. Strategic Command, Anthony Cotton, who oversees nuclear forces, told both House and Senate Armed Services committees on January 26 via letter that China has more land-based fixed and mobile Intercontinental ballistic missile launchers than the U.S.

Bryan Clark, director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, told VOA Mandarin via email on July 12 that the U.S. and allied forces will have far too few air defense missiles to counter China’s growing inventory of ballistic and cruise missiles.

According to research compiled by the Federation of American Scientists, China has had more than 450 launchers as of October 2022, while the U.S. Air Force has 400 silos with missiles and another 50 empty silos that could be loaded if necessary.

“As we see in Ukraine, missile defenses can be effective but are depleted quickly in even a relatively small conflict,” Clark said. “U.S. forces will have to withdraw to longer ranges from China to reduce the number of Chinese missiles they face and use long-range anti-ship missiles of their own to attack Chinese forces invading Taiwan. These longer-range U.S. anti-ship missiles are expensive and in limited supply. They are, therefore, likely to run out before even the initial fighting has subsided.”

Clark suggests a better approach “has been to prioritize shorter-range cruise missiles that can be carried by submarines or aircraft flying from U.S. carriers or land bases to attack Chinese ships and targets ashore. By using stealth aircraft or ships, these missiles can be launched closer to Chinese territory and, therefore, be smaller and less expensive. They can, therefore, be more numerous.”

Kyle Bass, the founder and chief investment officer of Hayman Capital Management, is on the China Center Advisory Board at the Hudson Institute. At a July 12 event there, “China Prepares for War: A Timeline,” he told VOA Mandarin he thinks the U.S. has the best submarine fleet in the world and doesn’t need to encircle China with conventional missiles.

“I don’t think encircling China with our missiles is necessarily even a good idea on the land base. But I do think that we have all the firepower we need at the moment. And I don’t think the basic missile counts matter,” Bass said.

He said the U.S. should cripple China economically by disconnecting it from SWIFT, the international financial transaction settlement system. That, he suggested, would quickly bring China’s economy to a halt.

He said the U.S. should get “Treasury and OFAC [the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control] to socialize the concept of pressing this economic nuclear button. But if we really want to be effective, we press that button.”

Clark believes the reliance of the “Rings of Fire” on expensive ballistic missiles and host nation basing makes it ill-suited as a primary strategy for countering China, as “U.S. allies may not want to host them, where they would be a clear provocation to China.”

He suggested the U.S. strategy should prioritize the use of expendable uncrewed air and surface vehicles. For example, he said, U.S. forces could field uncrewed surface vessels to Taiwan and the Southwest Islands of Japan, where they could be quickly employed as suicide boats or launch loitering munitions and small missiles against Chinese ships.

“This approach has worked for Ukraine against the Russian Navy in the Black Sea,” he said, “and in the constrained waters around Taiwan, it could be an effective counter to a Chinese invasion force.”

Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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A review of the status of a vanishing species of whale found that the mammal’s population is in worse shape than previously thought, federal ocean regulators said Monday.

The North Atlantic right whale numbers less than 350, and it has been declining in population for several years. The federal government declared the whale’s decline an “unusual mortality event,” which means an unexpected and significant die-off, in 2017.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released new data that 114 of the whales have been documented as dead, seriously injured or sub-lethally injured or sick — since the start of the mortality event. That is an increase of 16 whales since the previous estimate released earlier this year.

The agency recently completed a review of the whales using photographs from researchers and surveys to create the new estimate, said Andrea Gomez, a spokesperson for NOAA.

“Additional cases will continue to be reviewed, and animals will be added if appropriate, as more information is obtained,” Gomez said.

Thirty-six of the 114 whales included in the estimate had died, NOAA documents state. The agency cautioned that only about a third of right whale deaths are documented, so the total number of dead or injured animals could be much higher.

Right whales are found off the Atlantic coast of the U.S. They are vulnerable to collisions with large ships and entanglement in commercial fishing gear. The federal government has worked to craft stricter rules to protect the whales from both threats.

Commercial fishing and shipping interests have both vowed to fight stricter protections. A federal appeals court sided with fishermen last month after they filed a complaint that proposed new restrictions could put them out of business.

The new data illustrate how dire the situation is for the whales, said Sarah Sharp, an animal rescue veterinarian with International Fund for Animal Welfare. The number of injured animals is especially significant because injured whales are less likely to reproduce, Sharp said.

“If animals are putting energy into healing from a wound, they are not necessarily going to have those energy stores for other things,” Sharp said. “I think this just paints a much more accurate picture of the threats these whales are facing.”

The whales give birth off Florida and Georgia and feed off New England and Canada. They have been protected under the Endangered Species Act for decades, and federal authorities ruled in December that they must retain that protection.
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