Even after escalating its strike against Detroit automakers on Friday, the United Auto Workers union still has plenty of leverage in its effort to force the companies to agree to significant increases in pay and benefits. 

Only about 12% of the union’s membership is so far taking part in the walkout. The UAW could, if it chose to, vastly expand the number of workers who could strike assembly plants and parts facilities of General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, the owner of the Jeep and Ram brands. 

Yet the UAW’s emerging strategy also carries risks for the union. By expanding its strike from three large auto assembly plants to all 38 parts distribution centers of GM and Ford, the UAW risks angering people who might be unable to have their vehicles repaired at service centers that lack parts. 

The union’s thinking appears to be that, by striking both vehicle production and parts facilities, it will force automakers to negotiate a relatively quick end to the strike, now in its second week. To do so, though, some analysts say the union might have to act even more aggressively. 

“We believe the next step for UAW is the more nuclear option — going for a much more widespread strike on the core plants in and around Detroit,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. “That would be a torpedo.” 

Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at the consulting firm Guidehouse Insights, suggested that with so many workers and factories still running, the union has a number of options with which to squeeze the companies harder. 

“They could add more assembly plants to the list,” Abuelsamid said. “They could target more of the plants that are building the most profitable vehicles.” 

As examples, he mentioned a plant in Flint, Michigan, where GM builds heavy-duty pickups, and a Stellantis factory in Sterling Heights, Michigan, that produces Ram trucks. 

All three companies said that talks with the union continued on Saturday, though officials said they expected no major announcements. 

Workers in Canada vote

In Canada on Saturday, Ford workers began voting on a tentative agreement that their union said would increase base pay by 15% over three years and provide cost-of-living increases and $10,000 ratification bonuses. The tentative deal was forged earlier this week, hours before a strike deadline. 

The union, Unifor, said the deal, which covers 5,600 workers, also includes better retirement benefits. If the deal is ratified in voting that will end Sunday morning, the union will use it as a pattern for new contracts at GM and Stellantis plants in Canada. 

UAW tries to increase pressure

In the United States, the UAW began its walkout more than a week ago by striking three assembly plants — one each at GM, Ford and Stellantis. In expanding the strike on Friday, the UAW struck only the parts-distribution centers of GM and Stellantis. Ford was spared from the latest walkouts because of progress that company has made in negotiations with the union, said UAW President Shawn Fain. 

Striking the parts centers is designed to turn up pressure on the companies by hurting dealers who service vehicles made by GM and Stellantis, the successor to Fiat Chrysler. Service shops are a profit center for dealers, so the strategy could prove effective. Millions of motorists depend on those shops to maintain and repair their cars and trucks. 

“It severely hits the dealerships, and it hurts the customers who purchased those very expensive vehicles in good faith,” said Art Wheaton, a labor expert at Cornell University. “You just told all your customers, ‘Hey we can’t fix those $50,000 to $70,000 cars we just sold you because we can’t get you the parts.'” 

Unionn keeps companies guessing

The union has declined to discuss its strike strategy publicly. Fain has said repeatedly that a critical part of its plan is to keep the companies guessing about the UAW’s next move. Indeed, the union has shown unusual discipline in sticking to its talking points. 

On a picket line Friday, Fain was asked whether striking against the spare-parts centers would hurt — and potentially alienate — consumers. 

“What has hurt the consumers in the long run is the fact the companies have raised prices on vehicles 35% in the last four years,” he shot back. “It’s not because of our wages. Our wages went up 6%, the CEO pay went up 40%.” 

Selling parts and performing service is highly profitable for car dealers. AutoNation reported a gross profit margin of 46% from service shops at its dealerships last year. The problem for the companies is that dealerships and other repair shops typically have lean inventories and depend on receiving parts quickly from the manufacturers’ warehouses. 

Mike Stanton, president of the National Automobile Dealers Association, said his members want to avoid anything that would impair customer service, “so we certainly hope automakers and the UAW can reach an agreement quickly and amicably.” 

To make up for the loss of striking workers, the automakers are weighing their options, including staffing the parts warehouses with salaried workers. 

“We have contingency plans for various scenarios and are prepared to do what is best for our business and customers,” said David Barnas, a GM spokesman. “We are evaluating if and when to enact those plans.” 

Similarly, Jodi Tinson, a Stellantis spokeswoman, said, “We have a contingency plan in place to ensure we are fulfilling our commitments to our dealers and our customers.” She declined to provide additional details. 

In negotiating with the companies, the union is pointing to the carmakers’ huge recent profits and high CEO pay as it seeks wage increases of about 36% over four years. The companies have offered a bit more than half that amount. 

The companies have said they cannot afford to meet the union’s demands because they need to invest profits in a costly transition from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles. They have dismissed out of hand some of the demands, including 40 hours’ pay for a 32-hour work week. 
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Former FBI official Charles McGonigal pleaded guilty on Friday to accepting $225,000 from Albanian-American Agron Nezaj, a former Albanian intelligence officer who McGonigal admitted was helping him foster relationships in Albania to help lay the groundwork for future business opportunities in the country.

According to court documents, Nezaj became an informant for the FBI’s investigation into McGonigal’s contacts in Albania.

In Washington, McGonigal faced a nine-count indictment charging him with failing to report cash payments, contacts with foreign officials and trips to Europe he took with Nezaj in 2017 and 2018 that neither he nor the FBI paid for.

The guilty plea was entered in U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia in Washington, based on a deal between prosecutors and McGonigal’s lawyers. He pleaded guilty to one count of the indictment — concealing material evidence — and prosecutors dropped the other eight counts.

The settlement means the case will not go to trial.

McGonigal apologized to the court for his actions.

“Before I left the FBI in September 2018, I was planning to launch a security consulting business with a friend. I knew that my government contacts and international relationships might be useful to me when I later launched the business,” he told U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

“I did not disclose an approximately $225,000 loan I received from my friend and prospective business partner in the U.S. for several meetings I attended with foreign nationals. These meetings were an effort to develop potential business relationships for my future consulting business. And the loan was intended to help start the business,” McGonigal said.

Those contacts included several meetings in 2017 and 2018 with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in the presence of Nezaj and an adviser to the prime minister, who had business interests in arranging the meetings.

In one instance, McGonigal opened a criminal investigation in New York into a U.S. lobbyist who was working for an Albanian opposition party. According to the indictment, he received this information from the Albanian prime minister’s office. The indictment does not identify the American lobbyist nor the Albanian party.

But on November 14, 2017, lobbyist Nick Muzin — an ex-Trump aide — filed on the lobbying activity on behalf of the Albanian Democratic Party, the main opposition party, with the Department of Justice. While lobbying for a foreign political force is not illegal for a registered lobbyist, Muzin had filed that activity months after an initial filing that was not complete.

The payment he received eventually became the subject of an investigation in Albania over the suspect origin of the money.

McGonigal told the court he had an ongoing relationship with the prime minister.

Rama has denied any wrongdoing.

McGonigal’s lawyer Seth DuCharme said after the hearing that his client takes full responsibility for his actions and looks forward to putting the case behind him.

“While he may have had or did have, I think, some pretty legitimate interests that aligned with the United States in keeping up those relationships, he also clearly had a personal interest,” DuCharme said.

McGonigal led the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York before retiring in 2018.

In a separate case in New York, McGonigal pleaded guilty in August to a conspiracy charge, admitting that after leaving the FBI he agreed to work for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. McGonigal went to work for Deripaska, whom McGonigal had once investigated, to dig up dirt on the oligarch’s wealthy rival in violation of U.S. sanctions on Russia. He faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced in mid-December.

The District of Columbia court charge carries a maximum of five years in prison, but prosecutors will likely seek a more lenient sentence as part of the plea agreement.

The judge said McGonigal will be sentenced in February and said he will not be able to appeal it.

Some information for this report was provided by Reuters and The Associated Press.
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A longshot candidate for governor in the U.S. state of Missouri and his supporters describe his use of a flamethrower at a recent “Freedom Fest” event outside St. Louis as no big deal. They said it was a fun moment for fellow Republicans who attended, and that no one talked about burning books as he torched a pile of cardboard boxes.

But after the video gained attention on social media, State Sen. Bill Eigel said he would burn books he found objectionable, and that he’d do it on the lawn outside the governor’s mansion. He later said it was all a metaphor for how he would attack the “woke liberal agenda.”

“From a dramatic sense, if the only thing in between the children in the state of Missouri and vulgar pornographic material like that getting in their hands is me burning, bulldozing or launching (books) into outer space, I’m going to do that,” Eigel said in an interview with The Associated Press. “However, I would I make the point that I don’t believe it’s going to come to that.”

Experts say Eigel’s use of the flamethrower is a sign that rhetoric and imagery previously considered extreme are now being treated as normal in American politics. While Eigel didn’t actually destroy books, his later statement about burning ones he deemed offensive ratcheted up fears that the video’s circulation and his words on social media could help take the U.S. to a darker place.

“The slippery slope is that everything is a joke — everything can be kind of waved away,” said Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of public communications at American University in Washington. “Everything can be seen as just rhetoric until it can’t anymore and people start using it as an excuse to actually hurt people.”

The 30-second video that put Eigel at the center of a social media storm is from a Sept. 15 event for Republicans at a winery near tiny Defiance, Missouri, about 48 kilometers west of St. Louis. He and another state senator shot long streams of flame onto a pile of cardboard in front of an appreciative crowd.

The video posted on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, caught the attention of Jonathan Riley, a liberal activist in Durham, North Carolina, who posted Sunday that it showed “Missouri Republicans at a literal book burning,” though he’d later walk that statement back to a “metaphorical” book burning.

“It fit a narrative that they wanted to put out there,” Freedom Fest organizer Debbie McFarland said about claims that Eigel burned books. “It just didn’t happen to be the truth.”

Some of Republicans’ skepticism over the online outrage stems from Eigel’s status as a dark horse candidate to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Mike Parson. The best known candidates for the August 2024 GOP primary are Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe.

The Ashcroft campaign declined to respond to the video, the uproar it caused or Eigel’s follow-up statement. Kehoe’s campaign had no official comment, but Gregg Keller, a Republican consultant working on Kehoe’s campaign, said Eigel’s promise to burn objectionable books is “typical electioneering hyperbole.”

He added, “I would challenge you to find me any non-psychotic Republican who has actually burned” a book deemed objectionable by conservatives.

Eigel posted on the X platform that his flamethrower stunt was meant to show what he would do to the “swamp” in the state capital of Jefferson City, but “let’s be clear, you bring those woke pornographic books to Missouri schools to try to brainwash our kids, and I’ll burn those too — on the front lawn of the governor’s mansion.”

Republicans across the U.S. are backing conservative efforts to purge schools and libraries of materials with LGBTQ+ themes or books with LGBTQ+ characters. The issue resonates with Republicans in Missouri. An AP VoteCast survey of Missouri voters in the 2022 midterm elections showed that more than 75% of those voting for GOP candidates thought the K-8 schools in their community were teaching too much about gender identity or sexual orientation.

The outcry also comes after Missouri’s Republican-supermajority Legislature banned gender-affirming health care for transgender minors and required K-12 and college students to play on sports teams that match their sex assigned at birth. Eigel has sponsored measures to ban schools from teaching about gender identity or gender-affirming care and to make it a crime to perform in drag in public.

Aggressive and even violent imagery have long been a part of American politics. It can sometimes backfire.

Large guns have been a popular prop for some Republicans. Last year, a Black candidate seeking the Republican nomination in an Arizona congressional district aired an ad in which he held an AR-15 rifle as people wearing Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods tried to storm a home. He finished last.

In Missouri in 2016, Republican candidate and ex-Navy SEAL Eric Greitens ran an ad featuring him firing 100 rounds from a machine gun on his way to winning the governor’s race. After a sex and invasion-of-privacy scandal in 2018 forced him to resign, he attempted a political comeback in the state’s 2022 U.S. Senate race, running an ad featuring him with a shotgun declaring he was going hunting for RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only. He finished third in the primary.

Flamethowers also have popped up previously. In 2020, a GOP congressional candidate in Alabama showed her support for then-President Donald Trump by torching a mockup of the first articles of impeachment against him. She finished third in the primary. And in South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem’s staff gave her a flamethrower last year as a Christmas gift.

Experts who study political extremism said images involving fire or bonfires have long been associated with extremist groups. Eigel’s critics quickly posted online images involving the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi book burnings before World War II.

Evan Perkoski, an associate political science professor at the University of Connecticut, said it’s been “traditional” for extremist groups to use images of fire to “simultaneously intimidate people and signal their intentions to destroy what exists and to rebuild or start over.”

“We’ve seen this time and time again from groups across countries where groups will burn effigies, crosses and other items, or even just film themselves around large conflagrations,” he said in a email to AP. “A large part of their motivation is the symbolic, frightening nature of fire.”

Experts continue to worry about how social media can spread extreme or violent images or words to potentially millions of people, increasing the chances of a single person seeing the material as a call to violence.

Javed Ali, a former senior FBI counterterrorism official who’s now an associate professor at the University of Michigan, said law enforcement agencies struggle with thwarting homegrown political violence. He said the sheer volume of social media postings means, “Sometimes, you almost have to get lucky in order to stop it.”

Braddock, the American University professor, said that after portraying a flamethrower as a weapon against “the woke agenda,” Eigel’s supporters don’t need “that big a leap of logic” to see it as a tool for settling actual political grievances. Talking about book burning enough can plant the idea in people’s minds so that “people think it’s actually a righteous thing to do.”

Ali added: “That’s a pretty dangerous game to play.”

Eigel said he’s not worried the video will inspire violence in “reasonable, everyday Missourians,” which he said is the majority of people. But he said he’s concerned about the number of threats he, his family and his staff have received as a result.
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Amid stalled progress on gun control legislation in the U.S. Congress, President Joe Biden announced the creation of a new federal office for gun violence prevention, tapping Vice President Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor of gun homicide cases, to lead it.

“Guns are the number one killer of children in America,” Biden said Friday during the launch event in the White House Rose Garden. “More than car accidents, more than cancer or other diseases.”

On average, more than 116 people in the U.S. die from gun violence every day, according to data from the Giffords Law Center.

The new federal office will support implementation of existing legislation and executive actions, and work with lawmakers, state officials and advocates to push for further gun violence prevention efforts.

The office, Biden said, will also coordinate more support for survivors, families and communities affected by gun violence, including mental health care and financial assistance, in the same way that the Federal Emergency Management Agency responds to natural disasters.

The National Rifle Association, a pro-gun-rights lobbying group, slammed Biden’s move as “another distraction, crafted to divert America’s and the media’s gaze from the Biden crime wave and their soft-on-crime policies.”

“Instead of confronting the real challenges and holding accountable the [district attorneys] who turn a blind eye to crime, this administration unfairly targets law-abiding citizens exercising their Second Amendment rights,” Randy Kozuch, director of NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, said on social media. 

Activists’ support 

U.S. Representative Lucy McBath, a Democratic lawmaker and advocate for stricter gun legislation, lost her son to gun violence in 2012. She said the new office would increase coordination among states and ensure proper implementation of gun safety legislation already passed in Congress.

The new office was also applauded by gun violence prevention groups, who have pressed Biden to create such an office to coordinate efforts across the federal government and to exert more leadership on the issue.

“It’s all about implementing new strategies and interventions and supporting the community-based organizations already doing great work,” said Chethan Sathya, director of Northwell Health’s Center for Gun Violence Prevention, who attended the Rose Garden event.

“From a health care perspective, we need to treat gun violence for what it is, a public health crisis,” Sathya, who is also a pediatric surgeon who has treated children who have been shot, told VOA.

Biden appointed Stefanie Feldman, his longtime gun policy adviser, to direct the office, and gun control advocates Greg Jackson and Rob Wilcox to serve as deputy directors.

Second Amendment 

In general, Democrats support tighter gun laws while Republicans are concerned that such laws will infringe upon the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which protects Americans’ right to bear arms.

During Friday’s event, Harris rejected the argument that the two stances are at odds. “President Biden and I believe in the Second Amendment, but we also know common sense solutions are at hand,” she said.

Earlier this week, a group of House Republicans introduced a bill called the Protecting the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act of 2023.

The bill would explicitly prohibit the president from declaring an emergency for the purposes of imposing gun control. It would also block government officials from prohibiting the manufacturing, sale or transfer of firearms and ammunition during a major disaster or emergency.

Illegal trafficking

It’s unclear what kind of bearing the new office for gun violence prevention will have on actual policy, including the impact on neighboring Mexico, which has repeatedly asked the Biden administration to curb illegal gun trafficking. The majority of all arms used in Mexico, where gun control laws are very strict, are bought in the U.S.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre maintains that the administration’s policy on guns is “comprehensive.”

The office will have regular contact with the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security, Jean-Pierre told VOA during her briefing to the press Friday. “We’re going to do everything that we can to combat international trafficking and smuggling as well.”

In June 2022, less than a month after 19 children and two teachers were gunned down in an elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Biden signed the most significant gun control legislation in decades, although it was more limited than what the president had sought.

The bipartisan law enhances background checks for potential gun buyers and strengthens laws against straw purchasing and trafficking of guns. It provides millions of dollars for states to implement intervention programs, such as the so-called red flag laws that allow officials to temporarily confiscate guns from people deemed in court to be too dangerous to own them.

Biden has also signed several executive actions aimed at reducing gun violence, including steps to increase the number of background checks for gun sales and to crack down on “ghost guns,” or home-assembled firearms, which are difficult to track.

On Friday, he again called for the banning of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
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For about a decade, Eudora, Kansas, counted itself among the many small towns across the U.S. that no longer had their own newspapers.

The recession marked the end of its local paper in 2009, turning Eudora into what is known as a “news desert” — a region that has no dedicated media coverage.

Then Teri Finneman, a journalist-turned-media professor at the University of Kansas, stepped in. Her solution: The Eudora Times, a student-led outlet that has brought news back to this town of 6,500 people.

“A lot of the coverage that we do wouldn’t be considered newsworthy with a capital N,” Finneman told VOA. But that doesn’t matter to The Eudora Times, because that’s not the point of the outlet, she said.

“We very much want to be a service organization and a partner with our community,” Finneman said. The paper’s focus: covering what matters to residents.

Tough times

The Times is a rare good-news story at a difficult time for the industry. By bringing back local news, the paper helped to reinvigorate the community while pioneering a road map that may help address news deserts elsewhere.

“Before we had The Eudora Times, I didn’t know really anything that was going on in the community, other than things a customer would come in and tell me,” said Kathy Weld, owner of Zeb’s Coffeehouse in Eudora. “Before I opened the coffee shop, I didn’t know anything.”

Finneman, who is from a small town in western North Dakota, wanted to fix that.

After some newsy social media posts, the first article was about the 2018 opening of Weld’s coffee shop — named after her dog, Zeb.

Once the article was written, Finneman realized she needed a website to put it on.

“I would get an F in business school for this business plan,” she told VOA as she recalled the paper’s early days from the coffee shop that was first featured. She used online software to create a website within five minutes. “I’m like, Eudora Times – that sounds good. And then we just put it online.”

Lucie Krisman, one of the paper’s founding reporters, said that from that small start, the idea “sort of ramped up.”

“We realized what kind of potential there was to create an honest-to-God newspaper here,” she said. “It grew from literally nothing.”

Thousands of closures

The outlet’s slow beginnings belie its significance not just for Eudora but for local media across the country.

Around a fourth of local and regional newspapers — or 2,500 — have closed since 2005 and one-third are expected to shutter by 2025, according to a report by the Northwestern Medill Local News Initiative.

The hard work is paying off. A member of the Kansas Press Association, The Eudora Times has won several awards, including for its reporting on government and education.

But there are far more communities that will remain or become news deserts, and that’s something that worries Finneman.

“It’s not just the current crisis that needs to be addressed, but it’s the pending crisis,” she said, particularly in the Midwest. “It’s going to be disastrous.”

With the closure of local media outlets across the U.S., more than 14 million Americans are getting their news from student reporters, according to the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont.

Like the Times, those outlets cover everything from local government and politics to school board meetings and high school sports.

“That’s not Watergate-type of coverage,” Finneman said. But it is the kind of coverage that breathes life into towns that are often ignored by the media and are at risk of being left stagnant as a result.

“People want to feel that community connection,” Finneman said.

A difference noticed

Her approach appears to be working, with several Eudora residents telling VOA they have noticed a clear difference since the Times came to town. Eudora is a case study in what happens when a town loses its newspaper — and what happens when the news comes back.

“There’s so much divisiveness in our country. Local news has a way of bringing us together,” Weld, the coffee shop owner, said.

People had relied on getting information “through the grapevine,” said Laura Smith, who helps in-need residents access resources as the town’s community resource navigator.

“With The Eudora Times, they’re everywhere, and they do such a phenomenal job of covering things, that everyone just feels connected,” she said.

For Krisman, now a reporter at the Shawnee Mission Post in Kansas, the paper helps people “be proud of their community.”

“It creates a sense of connectivity that you just can’t really get without having your own news outlet,” Krisman said.

Studies show that the decline of local news often contributes to a rise in polarization and government corruption, the spread of disinformation and misinformation, and a decline in civic engagement.

The Eudora Times had to win the town’s trust when it started.

“Because they did not have local news for so long, because we were still in the era when people were frequently being told that the press was an enemy of the people, there was a lot of concern from people that we were going to be a partisan news outlet,” Finneman said.

Funded by donations, some of which help cover reporters’ expenses, the Times hosted community meetings to help address those concerns. And most interviews are conducted in person to help build trust.

Cami Koons, a former features reporter at the paper, said she thinks people are more likely to trust national media when they have positive experiences with journalists at the local level.

“I really think that just having a positive interaction with a reporter, with some news media, makes such a big difference in people’s opinion of news, and hopefully leads them to trust it a little bit more,” Koons, now a reporter at Kansas City PBS, said. “If you don’t have a paper in town, how are you going to do that?”

Finneman wishes she could fix all the news deserts in the country. For now, she’s turning her sights on the nearby town of De Soto, where Panasonic’s $4 billion electric vehicle battery factory will be located.

De Soto will need media coverage more than ever once the factory opens, and The Eudora Times is preparing to step in, Finneman said. “They also don’t have a newspaper.”
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The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday said it was formally launching two new U.S.-China working groups on economic and financial issues aimed at providing a regular policy communications forum between the world’s two largest economies.

In a statement, the Treasury said the two groups would “meet on a regular cadence” and report to Yellen and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng.

China’s Ministry of Finance will be Treasury’s counterpart for the Economic Working Group, while the People’s Bank of China will be its counterpart for the Financial Working Group.

Formation of the groups followed Yellen’s visit to Beijing in July, where she met with He and other senior officials to re-establish communications on economic and financial issues after years of deteriorating relations.

Yellen said on X, formerly Twitter, that the working groups “will serve as important forums to communicate America’s interests and concerns, promote a healthy economic competition between our two countries with a level playing field for American workers and businesses, and advance cooperation on global challenges.”

“It is vital that we talk, particularly when we disagree,” she added.

China’s Finance Ministry and central bank both issued statements confirming the establishment of the economic and financial working groups but gave few details beyond saying they were aimed at strengthening communication and collaboration on these issues.

A senior Treasury official said Yellen has reiterated to Chinese officials that the U.S. will use the groups to promote cooperation where possible with China on global challenges, including restructuring debt for distressed developing economies, climate finance and anti-money laundering efforts.

Establishment of the two working groups also follows Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s agreement with Chinese officials in August to establish a working group on U.S. export controls aimed at explaining U.S. policies.  

The Treasury and State Departments in past years held annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue meetings with China, but that forum ended in 2017 after former President Donald Trump took office, ushering in a more confrontational approach to China in Washington that led to a years-long tariff war between the two countries.  
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