The United Auto Workers union is striking against all three major U.S. automotive manufacturers, seeking higher wages and other benefits. As negotiations continue, the same manufacturers are showcasing their latest offerings at the 2023 Detroit Auto Show, an annual celebration of cars and trucks that has changed to reflect consumer demand and new technology. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh has more from Detroit.
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House Republicans plan to hold their first hearing next week in their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

The hearing — scheduled for Sept. 28 — is expected to focus on “constitutional and legal questions” that surround the allegations of Biden’s involvement in his son Hunter’s overseas businesses, according to a spokesperson for the House Oversight Committee.

Republicans — led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — have contended in recent weeks that Biden’s actions from his time as vice president show a “culture of corruption” and that his son used the “Biden brand” to advance his business with foreign clients.

The spokesperson also said Republican Representative James Comer of Kentucky, chairman of Oversight, plans to issue subpoenas for the personal and business bank records of Hunter Biden and the president’s brother James Biden “as early as this week.” McCarthy appointed Comer to lead the inquiry in coordination with Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and Ways & Means Chairman Jason Smith.

The White House has called the effort by House Republicans in the midst of the presidential campaign “extreme politics at its worst.”

“Staging a political stunt hearing in the waning days before they may shut down the government reveals their true priorities: To them, baseless personal attacks on President Biden are more important than preventing a government shutdown and the pain it would inflict on American families,” Ian Sams, a White House spokesman, said in a statement Tuesday.

McCarthy announced the impeachment inquiry last week after facing mounting pressure from the far-right House members to take action against Biden or risk being ousted from his leadership job. At the same time, the speaker is struggling to pass legislation needed to avoid a federal government shutdown at the end of the month.

The California lawmaker launched the inquiry without a House vote, and it’s unclear if he would have enough support to approve it from his slim GOP majority. Some lawmakers have criticized the evidence so far as not reaching the Constitution’s bar of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

An inquiry is a step closer to an impeachment of the president, a constitutional tool which until recently was rare in Congress.

But McCarthy and other Republicans have been facing months of direct challenges from Trump — who is now the Republican front-runner to challenge Biden in next year’s election — to move forward with proceedings against his opponent. The action also is seen as an effort to distract attention from the indicted former president’s legal challenges and turn a negative spotlight on Biden.

The impeachment inquiry is expected to build upon the work that Comer and others have done since gaining the House majority in January. There are several investigative lanes but Comer has been tasked with following the money that went through Biden’s son’s and brother’s various businesses accounts.

The chairman has claimed repeatedly that the Biden family engaged in an influence-peddling scheme but has yet to directly tie any of that to the president.

Republicans have focused much attention on an unverified tip to the FBI that alleged a bribery scheme involving Biden when he was vice president.

The bribery claim, which emerged in 2019 and was part of Trump’s first impeachment, relates to the allegation that Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor in order to stop an investigation into Burisma, the oil and gas company where Hunter Biden was on the board.

Democrats have countered that the Justice Department investigated the Burisma claim when Trump was president and closed the matter after eight months, finding insufficient evidence to pursue it further. Other countries were also pushing for the firing of the Ukrainian official, viewing him as corrupt. And a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s has testified to Congress that the bribery allegation is untrue.
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Le Diner en Blanc – or ‘dinner in white’ – has gone global since its inception in Paris about three decades ago. In 2014, Washington launched its own version of the visually striking event, and since then some 25,000 people have attended. VOA’s Laurel Bowman reports.
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World leaders get their chance to address the U.N. General Assembly beginning Tuesday, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Joe Biden among the speakers at U.N. headquarters in New York.

Zelenskyy is making his first appearance at the annual meeting since Russia invaded his country in early 2022.

“For us it’s very important that all our words, all our messages will be heard by our partners,” Zelenskyy told reporters Tuesday as he visited a New York hospital where Ukrainian soldiers have been treated for amputations.

Zelenskyy said ahead of his speech that Ukraine would put forth a proposal “on how to fortify the principle of territorial integrity and improve the U.N.’s capacity to thwart and halt aggression.”

He is due to follow his speech by attending a Wednesday session of the U.N. Security Council about the situation in Ukraine. Russia is one of the five veto-holding permanent members of the council.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres opens Tuesday’s addresses. Also scheduled to speak Tuesday are Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.

Other speakers include the presidents of Poland, Cuba, South Africa, Argentina, Nigeria and Senegal.

Tuesday’s agenda also features the second day of talks focusing on how to achieve a set of worldwide development goals

Guterres said Monday that only 15% of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are on track to be reached by 2030.

“Instead of leaving no one behind, we risk leaving the SDGs behind. … The SDGs need a global rescue plan,” Guterres said.

He said the summit is “the moment for governments to come to the table with concrete plans and proposals to accelerate progress.”

The goals include ending poverty, ending hunger, ensuring access to affordable energy, taking urgent action to combat climate change and promoting gender equality.

They were set in 2015 with the aim of being achieved by 2030. Halfway to that marker, progress is slow, and in some instances is even going backward.

The U.N. gathering will also spotlight climate change with the U.N.’s Climate Action Summit Wednesday. Guterres will host the event, which aims to reverse backsliding on Paris climate agreement goals.

Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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Just as many in the United States are starting to explore how to use artificial intelligence to make their lives easier, U.S. adversaries and criminal gangs are moving forward with plans to exploit the technology at Americans’ expense.

FBI Director Christopher Wray issued the warning Monday, telling a cybersecurity conference in Washington that artificial intelligence, or AI, “is ripe for potential abuses.”

“Criminals and hostile foreign governments are already exploiting that technology,” Wray said, without sharing specifics.

“While generative AI can certainly save law-abiding citizens time by automating tasks, it can also make it easier for bad guys to do things like generate deepfakes and malicious code and can provide a tool for threat actors to develop increasingly powerful, sophisticated, customizable and scalable capabilities,” he said.

Wray said the FBI is working to identify and track those using AI to harm U.S. citizens but added that the bureau is being cautious about employing AI itself.

“To stay ahead of the threat at the FBI, we’re determining how we can ethically and legally leverage AI to do our jobs,” he said.

When contacted by VOA, the FBI declined to elaborate on its concerns about employing AI. Nor did the bureau say when or if it has used AI, even on a limited basis.

Other U.S. national security agencies, however, are currently making use of AI.

The Department of Homeland Security is using AI to combat fentanyl trafficking, counter child sexual exploitation and protect critical infrastructure, according to department officials, even as they roll out guidelines governing its use.

“Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement last Thursday. “Our department must continue to keep pace with this rapidly evolving technology, and do so in a way that is transparent and respectful of the privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties of everyone we serve.”

DHS has also issued directives aimed at preventing its use of AI from being skewed by biased learning models and databases, and to give U.S. citizens a choice of opting out of systems using facial recognition technology.

But across multiple U.S. departments and agencies, the fear of the potential damage AI could cause is growing.

FBI officials, for example, warned in July that violent extremists and terrorists have been experimenting with AI to more easily build explosives.

And they said a growing number of criminals appear to be gravitating to the technology to carry out everything from petty crimes to financial heists.

It is China, though, that is driving the bulk of the concern.

National Security Agency officials have warned that Beijing started using AI to disseminate propaganda via what they described as a fake news channel last year.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” David Frederick, the NSA’s assistant deputy director for China, told a cybersecurity summit earlier this month.

“[Artificial intelligence] will enable more effective malign influence operations,” he added.

Such concerns have been bolstered by private cybersecurity companies.

Microsoft, for example, warned earlier this month that Chinese-linked cyber actors have started using AI to produce “eye-catching content” for disinformation efforts that has been gaining traction with U.S. voters.

“We can expect China to continue to hone this technology over time, though it remains to be seen how and when it will deploy it at scale,” Microsoft said.

For its part, China has repeatedly denied allegations it is using AI improperly.

“In recent years, some western media and think tanks have accused China of using artificial intelligence to create fake social media accounts to spread so-called ‘pro-China’ information,” Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu told VOA in an email, following the publication of the Microsoft report.

“Such remarks are full of prejudice and malicious speculation against China, which China firmly opposes,” Liu added.
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A New Jersey mayor barred from a White House event earlier this year is among a dozen Muslim Americans suing the U.S. government over its continued use of a terror watchlist created after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. 

Mohamed Khairullah, the five-term mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, was invited along with other Muslim elected officials to attend an Eid celebration at the White House in May but was told shortly before the event that he wouldn’t be allowed to enter the compound. 

The Secret Service did not explain why it turned him away but a new lawsuit brought by Khairullah and 11 others claims he was barred because his name was on the terror watchlist between 2019 and 2022. 

“After approximately August 2022, after Defendants removed Mr. Khairullah from the watchlist, they continued — and continue, to this day — to retain records of his past watchlist status and use them to harm and stigmatize him,” the lawsuit says. 

The lawsuit was filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, against 29 federal agencies, including the Justice Department, the FBI, the Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and the Transportation Security Administration. 

The lawsuit alleges that the plaintiffs, including eight U.S. citizens, three permanent residents, and one asylum recipient, were placed on the list because of their religion. 

“All of them have been placed on the federal watchlist even though they have never been investigated or convicted of a terrorism-related crime and even though the federal government has no reason to suspect that they’re terrorists except for their Muslim faith, their Muslim sounding names, their countries of origin from Muslim-majority countries and other markers of their identity as Muslims,” CAIR lawyer Hannah Mullen said in an interview with VOA. 

U.S. officials view the watchlist as a vital security tool and deny using it to target Muslims. They note that only a fraction of the names on the list belongs to Muslim Americans. 

The FBI says the list includes “people reasonably suspected to be involved in terrorism or terrorism related activists” and that sharing the list with other agencies “keeps the American people safe.” 

The Secret Service said it does not comment on pending or proposed litigation. But in a statement to VOA, a spokesperson for the agency said, “As we stated in the past, we were not able to grant entry to the Mayor at the White House and we regret any inconvenience that may have caused.” 

Several other agencies contacted by VOA did not immediately respond.

The lawsuit wants the U.S. District Court in Boston, where the complaint was filed, to order the government to remove the plaintiffs’ names and institute changes to ensure the list is in compliance with the Constitution and the law. 

The case comes on the anniversary of a 2003 presidential directive that established the Terrorist Screening Center, an FBI-run outfit that maintains the Terrorist Screening Dataset, colloquially known as the watchlist.

The watchlist includes more than 1.5 million names of what the government calls “known or suspected terrorists.”

It has two subsets known as the “No-Fly List” and the “Selectee List” that federal agencies use to screen air travelers.

The No-Fly List consists of the names of about 80,000 people who are barred from air travel within, to and from the United States. The smaller Selectee List includes people who are subjected to enhanced screening at airports before they are permitted to board an aircraft. 

The consequences of being placed on the watchlist are not limited to airport hassles. They include being denied jobs, security clearance, U.S. citizenship, visas, gun licenses, and other government benefits, the lawsuit says. 

What is more, even when the FBI drops someone from the list, as it allegedly did with Khairullah, the agency retains the person’s information in its database, the lawsuit says. 

This information can then be used by various agencies to vet the person for access to federal buildings, jobs and programs, as well as for background and security checks, according to the lawsuit.

Mullen said that it was “extraordinary” that a person who was no longer deemed a threat by the government can still face harm and stigma because of their past inclusion in the list. 

Khairullah “is certainly not the only person in this circumstance, and he’s certainly not the only person of which we’re aware who appears to have been harmed by past watchlist status,” Mullen said.  
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