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Month: September 2024
Japan, US face ‘shared challenge’ from China steel, PM hopeful says
TOKYO — Japan and the United States should avoid confrontation about the steel industry and work together amid competition from China, the world’s top steelmaker, leading prime ministerial candidate Shinjiro Koizumi said Saturday.
Sources told Reuters Friday that a powerful U.S. national security panel reviewing Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion bid for U.S. Steel faces a September 23 deadline to recommend whether the White House should block the deal.
Koizumi, Japan’s former environment minister, said at a debate Saturday that Japan and the U.S. should not confront each other when it comes to the steel industry but to face together the “shared challenge” coming from China’s steel industry.
“If China, producing cheap steel without renewable or clean energy, floods the global market, it will most adversely affect us, the democratic countries playing by fair market rules,” Koizumi said.
Nippon Steel’s key negotiator on the deal, Vice Chairman Takahiro Mori, said last month that his company and other Japanese steelmakers were urging Tokyo to consider curbing cheap steel imports coming from China to protect the local market.
On Sunday, Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden about their deal, as Biden, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump have all opposed the merger.
“We are also in the midst of elections, just like the U.S., and during elections, various ideas may arise. Overreacting to each of these would, in my view, call into question diplomatic judgment,” Koizumi said when asked about the deal.
Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s minister in charge of economic security and another prime ministerial candidate, also defended the deal during the same debate attended by eight other Liberal Democratic Party’s, or LDP, leadership contenders Saturday.
“It appears they are using CFIUS to frame this as an economic security issue,” she said, referring to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. “However, Japan and the U.S. are allies, and the steel industry is about strengthening our combined resilience.”
The 43-year-old son of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, the junior Koizumi, is seen as a leading contender in the September 27 race to pick the LDP’s new leader, who will become the next prime minister due to the party’s control of parliament.
Koizumi said Saturday that he would seek a dialog with the North Korean leadership to resolve the issue over the abduction of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s. The purported primary goal was to train North Korean agents to impersonate Japanese people.
“We want to explore new opportunities for dialog between people of the same generation, without being bound by conventional approaches, and without preconditions,” Koizumi said.
After admitting in 2002 that it had abducted 13 Japanese, North Korea apologized and allowed five to return home. It said eight others had died and denied that an additional four entered its territory. It promised to reinvestigate but has never announced the results.
Japan says North Korea has refused to send the others home because of concern that they might reveal inconvenient information about the country.
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Thousands attend rally organized by Poland’s nationalist opposition party
WARSAW, Poland — Thousands of people attended an antigovernment rally organized by Poland’s nationalist conservative opposition party to boost support before next year’s presidential election.
Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski called on supporters to be active at social and political levels and to back the party’s candidate in next year’s presidential election. He hasn’t yet named the candidate.
Kaczynski also accused the pro-European Union government of acting against the nation’s interests and violating its laws and cited recently opened investigations into allegations of mismanagement and corruption of the Law and Justice government.
Up to 4,000 people with national white-and-red flags gathered for the rally held in windy weather outside the Justice Ministry in Warsaw, which has become a symbol of years of deep rifts between the backers of Kaczynski and Donald Tusk, now the prime minister and leader of the center-right Civic Platform party.
Law and Justice, which governed Poland for from 2015 until 2023, drew criticism from Brussels and Tusk alike for making changes to Poland’s judicial system that were deemed undemocratic.
Many in the nation of 38 million people were also tired of the aggressive and divisive language that Kaczynski, who dictated the government’s policies from the sidelines, used to energize support.
The party lost power in the 2023 election, but is still exerting control through President Andrzej Duda, who is allied with Law and Justice. Duda, whose second and last term runs out in August, has been blocking many of the government’s draft laws.
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Sudanese city pounded as analysts report ‘unprecedented’ combat
Port Sudan, Sudan — Heavy fighting on Saturday shook a Sudanese city besieged by paramilitaries, witnesses told AFP, as U.S. researchers reported unprecedented and escalating combat in the North Darfur state capital.
El-Fasher is one of five state capitals in Sudan’s western Darfur region and the only one not in the hands of the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, who have been battling the regular army since April 2023.
The United Nations says the war across much of Sudan has created the world’s largest displacement crisis, with millions uprooted, and has led to famine at a displacement camp near El-Fasher.
Darfur has seen some of the war’s worst atrocities, and the RSF has besieged El-Fasher since May.
“Neighborhoods are completely deserted and all you can hear are explosions and missiles,” Ibrahim Ishaq, 52, told AFP.
“The central market area has become unlivable because of the intensity of the explosions,” said Ishaq, who fled westward from the city on Friday.
Witnesses reported army bombardment south and east of the city on Saturday and said they heard air-defense batteries firing.
The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab said in a report Friday that its analysis confirmed “unprecedented large-scale combat operations” in El-Fasher within the previous 10 days, “with significant escalation in the past 36 hours” involving the army and the paramilitaries.
It cited reports that describe “a major multidirectional RSF attack from the northern, eastern, and southern directions” on Thursday.
Reduced to rubble
Darfur Governor Mini Minawi had on Thursday said on social media platform X that the army had repelled “a large attack” by the RSF. The paramilitaries, however, said they seized military sites in El-Fasher.
Using satellite imagery and other data, the Yale researchers said they found munition impacts “likely related to high-tempo aerial bombardment” from the regular army, but they said other structural damage resulted from “RSF bombardment” and combat activity by both sides.
Whatever the battle’s ultimate outcome, current levels of fighting “are likely to effectively reduce what is left of El-Fasher to rubble,” the Yale study said.
The United States special envoy for Sudan, Tom Perriello, on Saturday said on social media platform X: “We are extremely concerned about the RSF’s renewed attacks.”
He urged the RSF “to stop its assault.”
It was not immediately possible to determine the number of victims.
Sudan’s war has already killed tens of thousands of people, with some estimates as high as 150,000, according to Perriello.
Strikes near Khartoum
In the capital, Khartoum, on Saturday, about 800 kilometers from El-Fasher, witnesses reported heavy explosions and strikes to the city’s south.
Independent United Nations experts earlier this month appealed for deployment of an “impartial force” to be urgently deployed in Sudan for civilian protection.
Sudan’s foreign ministry, loyal to the army, rejected the idea.
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Iran says it is open to talks but rejects pressure from US, EU
DUBAI — Iran’s foreign minister said that Tehran was open to diplomacy to solve disputes but not “threats and pressure,” state media reported on Saturday, after the U.S. and three European powers imposed sanctions against the country’s aviation sector.
Abbas Araqchi’s comments come a day after the European Union’s chief diplomat said the bloc is considering new sanctions targeting Iran’s aviation sector, in reaction to reports Tehran supplied Russia with ballistic missiles in its war against Ukraine.
“Iran continues on its own path with strength, although we have always been open to talks to resolve disputes … but dialogue should be based on mutual respect, not on threats and pressure,” Araqchi said, according to the official news agency IRNA.
Araqchi said on Wednesday that Tehran had not delivered any ballistic missiles to Russia and that sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and three European powers would not solve any problems between them.
The United States, Germany, Britain and France on Tuesday imposed new sanctions on Iran, including measures against its national airline, Iran Air.
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Algerian court certifies Tebboune’s landslide reelection win
ALGIERS, Algeria — Algeria’s constitutional court on Saturday certified the landslide victory of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune in last weekend’s election after retabulating vote counts that he and his two opponents had called into question.
The court said that it had reviewed local voting data to settle questions about irregularities that Tebboune’s opponents had alleged in two appeals Monday.
“After verification of the minutes of the regions and correction of the errors noted in the counting of the votes,” it had lowered Tebboune’s vote share and determined that his two opponents had won hundreds of thousands more votes than previously reported, said Omar Belhadj, the constitutional court’s president.
The court’s decision makes Tebboune the official winner of the September 7 election. His government will next decide when to inaugurate him for a second term.
The court’s retabulated figures showed Tebboune leading Islamist challenger Abdellali Hassan Cherif by around 75 percentage points. With 7.7 million votes, the first-term president won 84.3% of the vote, surpassing the 2019 win by millions of votes and a double-digit margin.
Cherif, running with the Movement of Society for Peace, won nearly 950,000 votes, or roughly 9.6%. The Socialist Forces Front’s Youcef Aouchiche won more than 580,000 votes, or roughly 6.1%.
Notably, both challengers surpassed the threshold required to receive reimbursement for campaign expenses. Under its election laws, Algeria pays for political campaigns that receive more than a 5% vote share. The results announced by the election authority last week showed Cherif and Aouchiche with 3.2% and 2.2% of the vote, respectively. Both were criticized for participating in an election that government critics denounced as a way for Algeria’s political elite to make a show of democracy amid broader political repression.
Throughout the campaign, each of the three campaigns emphasized participation, calling on voters and youth to participate and defy calls to boycott the ballot. The court announced nationwide turnout was 46.1%, surpassing the 2019 presidential election, when 39.9% of the electorate participated.
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US historian leads Kyiv charity run highlighting plight of Ukrainian POWs
KYIV, Ukraine — U.S. historian and author Timothy Snyder led a charity run in Kyiv Saturday to raise awareness of the conditions under which Ukrainian prisoners of war are held in Russia as the conflict approaches a third winter.
The race came following a recent escalation in Russian missile and drone attacks, largely aimed at Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure.
People clapped and cheered after Snyder, a 55-year-old Yale University professor who has written extensively on eastern Europe and the global resurgence of authoritarian regimes and is much admired in Ukraine, addressed the nearly thousand runners. He then joined a workout and participated in the run.
“Thousands of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers are illegally held in captivity during an illegal war,” Snyder told The Associated Press just ahead of the run. “This race is about reminding everyone of that and expressing solidarity with Ukrainians and giving Ukrainians a chance to do something together.”
The 5K and 10-kilometer runs took place around a sprawling park in the Ukrainian capital created out of a renovated Soviet-era exhibition center.
The runners included members of the public, service people and veterans, as well as wives of the POWs. Among them was 27-year-old Anastasia Ofyl, whose husband Oleksandr was captured by the Russians. “We have to fight for him,” she said. “That’s why I’m running.”
Ukrainian soldiers often give harrowing accounts of their conditions in Russian captivity when they return home as part of regular prisoner exchanges.
In a report issued in July, a United Nations human rights agency said it “continued to document the widespread use of torture and ill-treatment, including sexual violence, against civilians and Ukrainian prisoners of war held by the Russian Federation.”
Snyder, who has organized fundraisers as part of the country’s war-relief effort, enjoys near-celebrity status in Ukraine. On Tuesday, he visited President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who thanked him for his charity work. The Ukrainian head of state also received former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and the American actor Michael Douglas this week.
After Saturday’s race, Snyder was surrounded by admirers, many of whom waited in line for autographs and selfies. Some asked the historian to sign translated copies of his widely read books on Ukraine, “Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin” and “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.”
Saturday’s race was organized by the Kyiv School of Economics’ charity foundation which, according to its website, has been raising funds for charitable assistance for Ukrainians since the start of the Russian invasion.
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5 dead in Romania as central Europe braces for severe flooding
BUCHAREST, Romania — Five people in eastern Romania were found dead after torrential rainstorms dumped unprecedented rain, leaving hundreds stranded in flooded areas, emergency authorities said Saturday.
Rescue services scrambled to save people in the hard-hit eastern counties of Galati and Vaslui. The bodies of three elderly women and two men were found in the localities of Pechea, Draguseni, Costache Negri and Corod, the Department for Emergency Situations said.
Authorities later added that one of the victims had been dead for two days and “did not die due to the effects of the weather” but from other causes.
Emergency authorities released video footage showing teams of rescuers evacuating people using small lifeboats through muddy waters and carrying some elderly people to safety.
Some of the most significant flood damage was concentrated in Galati, where 5,000 households were affected. A Black Hawk helicopter was also deployed there to help with the search and rescue.
The storms battered 19 localities in eight counties in Romania, with strong winds downing dozens of trees that damaged cars and blocked roads and traffic. Authorities sent text message alerts to residents to warn them of adverse weather as emergency services rushed to remove floodwaters from homes.
By 1 p.m. Saturday, more than 250 people had been evacuated with the help of 700 Interior Ministry personnel deployed to affected communities, authorities said.
Romania’s environment minister, Mircea Fechet, told The Associated Press that in some of the badly flooded areas, more than 160 liters of rain fell per one square meter, which he said is a rare occurrence.
“What we are trying to do right now is save as many lives as possible,” said the minister, who was on his way to Galati to assess the situation.
Romanian President Klaus Iohannis offered his condolences to the victims’ families, writing on Facebook: “We must continue to strengthen our capacity to anticipate extreme weather phenomena.
“Severe floods that have affected a large part of the country have led to loss of lives and significant damage,” Iohannis said. “We are again dealing with the effects of climate change, which are increasingly present throughout the European continent, with dramatic consequences on people.”
Central Europe braces for intense flooding
The stormy weather comes as several central European nations anticipate severe flooding to hit the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Germany, Slovakia and Hungary over the weekend.
In the Czech Republic, river waters reached dangerous levels in dozens of areas across the country Saturday morning, flooding houses and roads in several towns and villages. Heavy rain and high winds left more than 63,000 households without power, the Czech power company CEZ said.
A hospital in the country’s second-largest city of Brno was forced to evacuate as dozens of citizens moved to safer grounds. Fallen trees and floodwaters caused a dozen railways across the country to also shutter.
In neighboring Austria, authorities declared 24 villages in the northeast Lower Austria province disaster zones Saturday afternoon and began evacuating residents from those areas.
“The coming hours will be the hours of truth for flood protection, for our emergency forces and numerous compatriots,” State Governor Johanna Mikl-Leitner said, adding that in one area, “we expect challenges of historical dimensions.”
The torrential downpours have also caused a sharp rise in water levels on the Danube River in Austria’s capital, Vienna, where special flood relief channels were built in the 1970s and ’80s and are likely to be tested over the weekend. The River Kamp, a tributary of the Danube, is also swelling due to the unprecedented weather.
Heavy rain also hit Moldova on Saturday, where emergency workers pumped floodwater from dozens of peoples’ homes in several localities, authorities said.
Meteorologists say a low-pressure system from northern Italy was predicted to dump much rain in most parts of the Czech Republic, including the capital and border regions with Austria and Germany in the south, and Poland in the north.
“We have to be ready for worst-case scenarios,” Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said after the government’s central crisis committee met. “A tough weekend is ahead of us.”
In Poland, dozens of people were evacuated as a precautionary measure Saturday from two villages near the town of Nysa, in the Nysa River basin, after meteorologists warned of unprecedented rainfall, and water levels on some rivers in the area sharply rose, according to Interior Minister Tomasz Siemoniak.
“The worst is yet to come,” he warned.
Polish authorities appealed to residents Friday to stock up on food and to prepare for power outages by charging power banks.
The weather change arrived following a hot start to September in the region. Scientists have documented Earth’s hottest summer, breaking a record set just one year ago.
A hotter atmosphere, driven by human-caused climate change, can lead to more intense rainfall.
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New York City lawmakers approve bill to study slavery and reparations
NEW YORK — New York City lawmakers approved legislation Thursday to study the city’s significant role in slavery and consider reparations to descendants of enslaved people.
If signed into law, the package of bills passed by the City Council would follow in the footsteps of several other municipalities across the U.S. that have sought ways to address the country’s dark history, as well as a separate New York state commission that began working this year.
New York fully abolished slavery in 1827. But businesses, including the predecessors of some modern banks, continued to benefit financially from the slave trade — likely up until 1866. The lawmakers behind the proposals noted that the harms caused by the institution are still felt by Black Americans today.
“The reparations movement is often misunderstood as merely a call for compensation,” Council Member Farah Louis, a Democrat who sponsored one of the bills, told the City Council on Thursday. She explained that systemic forms of oppression are still impacting people through redlining, environmental racism and services in predominantly Black neighborhoods that are underfunded.
The bills still need to be signed by Democratic Mayor Eric Adams. City Hall signaled his support in a statement calling the legislation “another crucial step towards addressing systemic inequities, fostering reconciliation, and creating a more just and equitable future for all New Yorkers.”
The bills would direct the city’s Commission on Racial Equity to suggest remedies to the legacy of slavery, including reparations. It would also create a truth and reconciliation process to establish historical facts about slavery in the state.
One of the proposals would also require that the city install an informational sign on Wall Street in Manhattan to mark the site of New York’s first slave market, which operated between 1711 and 1762. A sign was placed nearby in 2015, but Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams, a Democrat who sponsored the legislation, said its location is inaccurate.
The commission would work with the existing state commission, which is also considering the possibility of reparations. A report from the state panel, which held its first public meeting in late July, is expected in early 2025. The city effort wouldn’t need to produce recommendations until 2027.
The city’s commission was created out of a 2021 racial justice initiative during then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, which also recommended the city track data on the cost of living and add a commitment to remedy “past and continuing harms” to the city charter’s preamble.
“Your call and your ancestors’ call for reparations had not gone unheard,” Linda Tigani, executive director of the racial equity commission, said at a news conference ahead of the council vote.
A financial impact analysis of the bills estimated that the studies would cost $2.5 million.
New York is the latest city to study reparations. Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a notorious massacre of Black residents took place in 1921, announced a similar commission last month.
Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to offer reparations to Black residents and their descendants in 2021, including distributing some payments of $25,000 in 2023, according to PBS. The eligibility was based on harm suffered as a result of the city’s discriminatory housing policies or practices.
San Francisco approved reparations in February, but the mayor later cut the funds, saying that reparations should instead be carried out by the federal government. California budgeted $12 million for a reparations program that included helping Black residents research their ancestry, but it was defeated in the state’s Legislature this month.
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Prince Harry turns 40 as the royal scamp moves to middle age
LONDON — Prince Harry was always something different.
From the moment he first appeared in public, snuggled in Princess Diana’s arms outside the London hospital where he was born in 1984, Harry was the ginger-haired scamp who stuck his tongue out at photographers. He grew to be a boisterous adolescent who was roundly criticized for wearing a Nazi uniform to a costume party, and then a young man who gave up the trappings of royal life and moved to Southern California with his American wife.
Through it all, there was a sense that Harry was rebelling against an accident of birth that made him, in the harsh calculus of the House of Windsor, just “the spare.” As the second son of the man who is now King Charles III, he was raised as a prince but wouldn’t inherit the throne unless brother William came to harm.
Now the angry young man is turning 40, the halfway point in many lives, providing a chance to either dwell on the past or look forward to what might still be achieved.
For the past four years, Harry has focused mainly on the past, making millions of dollars by airing his grievances in a wildly successful memoir and a Netflix docu-series. But he faces the likelihood that the royal aura so critical to his image may be fading, said Sally Bedell Smith, author of “Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life.”
“He is at a sort of crossroads,’’ Smith told The Associated Press. “And he appears to be struggling with how he wants to proceed.’’
How did we get here?
It wasn’t always this way.
Six years ago, Harry and his wife were among the most popular royals, a glamorous young couple who reflected the multicultural face of modern Britain and were expected to help revitalize the monarchy.
Their wedding on May 19, 2018, united a grandson of Queen Elizabeth II with the former Meghan Markle, a biracial American actress who had starred for seven years in the U.S. television drama “Suits.” George Clooney, Serena Williams and Elton John attended their wedding at Windsor Castle, after which the couple were formally known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
But the optimism quickly faded amid allegations that Britain’s tabloid media and even members of the royal household treated Meghan unfairly because of racism.
By January 2020, the pressures of life in the gilded cage had become too much, and the couple announced they were giving up royal duties and moving to America, where they hoped to become “financially independent.” They signed lucrative deals with Netflix and Spotify as they settled into the wealthy enclave of Montecito, near Santa Barbara, California.
Since then, Harry has missed few opportunities to bare his soul, most famously in his memoir, aptly titled “Spare.”
In the ghostwritten book, Harry recounted his grief at the death of Princess Diana, a fight with Prince William and his unease with life in the royal shadow of his elder brother. From accounts of cocaine use and losing his virginity to raw family rifts, the book was rife with damning allegations about the royal family.
Among the most toxic was Harry’s description of how some family members leaked unflattering information about other royals in exchange for positive coverage of themselves. The prince singled out his father’s second wife, Queen Camilla, accusing her of feeding private conversations to the media as she sought to rehabilitate an image tarnished by her role in the breakup of Charles’ marriage to Diana.
The allegations were so venomous that there is little chance of a return to public duty, Smith said.
“He criticized the royal family in such a powerful and damaging way. You can’t un-say those things,” she said. “And you can’t unsee things like Meghan in that Netflix series doing a mock curtsey. It’s such a demeaning gesture to the queen.’’
Harry, who agreed not to use the honorific HRH, or “his royal highness,” after he stepped away from front-line royal duties, is now fifth in line to the British throne, behind his brother and William’s three children.
While he grew up in a palace and is said to be in line to inherit millions of dollars on his 40th birthday from a trust set up by his great-grandmother, applied developmental psychologist Deborah Heiser thinks that, in many ways, Harry is just like the rest of us.
Like anyone turning 40, he is likely to have learned a few lessons and has a good idea of who his real friends are, and that will help him chart the next phase of his life, said Heiser, who writes a blog called “The Right Side of 40” for Psychology Today.
“He has had a very public display of what a lot of people have gone through,” Heiser said. “I mean, most people are not princes, but … they have all kinds of issues within their families. He’s not alone. That’s why he’s so relatable.’’
Harry’s next chapter
Of course, Harry’s story isn’t just about the drama within the House of Windsor.
If he wants to write a new chapter, Harry can build on his 10 years of service in the British Army. Before retiring as a captain in 2015, the prince earned his wings as a helicopter pilot, served two tours in Afghanistan and shed the hard-partying reputation of his youth.
Harry also won accolades for establishing the Invictus Games in 2014, a Paralympic-style competition to inspire and aid in the rehabilitation of sick and wounded servicemembers and veterans.
Harry and Meghan made headlines this year with their two international trips to promote mental health and internet safety. While some in British media criticized them for accepting royal treatment in Nigeria and Colombia, the couple said they visited at the invitation of local officials.
Will Charles see the grandkids?
The prospects of reconciliation are unclear, although Harry did race home to see his father after Charles’ cancer diagnosis. And in what may be seen as a tentative olive branch, the paperback edition of “Spare” slated for October has no additions — so nothing new to stir the pot.
But plainly at this point, Harry is thinking about his family in California. He told the BBC about the importance of his two young children, Archie and Lilibet.
“Being a dad is one of life’s greatest joys and has only made me more driven and more committed to making this world a better place,” the prince said in a statement released by his spokesperson.
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Comoros president ‘out of danger’ after knife attack, minister says
MORONI, COMOROS — Comoros President Azali Assoumani is “out of danger” after he was injured on Friday in a knife attack by a 24-year-old police officer who was found dead in his cell a day later, officials said Saturday.
The attack occurred around 2 p.m. Friday in Salimani Itsandra, a town just north of the capital, Moroni.
“The president is doing well. He has no health problems; he is out of danger. A few stitches were given,” Energy Minister Aboubacar Said Anli said at a press conference in Moroni on Saturday.
Azali was attacked as he attended a funeral, according to the presidency. The motive for the attack has not yet been determined.
The attacker, Ahmed Abdou, went on leave Wednesday before orchestrating the attack on Friday.
Abdou was placed in a cell after he was taken into custody. However, “this Saturday morning, when investigators went to see him, they found him lying on the ground, his body was lifeless,” Ali Mohamed Djounaid, Comoros’ public prosecutor, said at a separate press conference.
He added that an investigation was being conducted to determine the motive of the attack and the cause of his death.
In May, Assoumani was sworn in for a fourth term in office following a tense January election, which his opponents claim was tainted by voter fraud. Officials deny the allegations.
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On the streets of a Colorado city, pregnant migrants struggle to survive
AURORA, Colorado — She was eight months pregnant when she was forced to leave her Denver homeless shelter. It was November.
Ivanni Herrera took her 4-year-old son, Dylan, by the hand and led him into the chilly night, dragging a suitcase containing donated clothes and blankets away from the Microtel Inn & Suites. It was one of 10 hotels where Denver has housed more than 30,000 migrants, many of them Venezuelan, over the last two years.
First, they walked to Walmart. There, with money she and her husband earned begging on the street, they bought a tent.
They chose for their new home a grassy median along a busy thoroughfare in Aurora, the next town over, a suburb known for its immigrant population.
“We wanted to go somewhere where there were people,” Herrera, 28, said in Spanish. “It feels safer.”
That night, temperatures dipped to 32 degrees. And as she wrapped her body around her son’s, Ivanni Herrera cried.
Over the past two years, a record number of Venezuelans have come to the United States seeking a better life. Instead, they’ve found themselves in communities roiling over how much to help the newcomers — or whether to help at all.
Unable to legally work without filing expensive and complicated paperwork, some have found themselves sleeping on the streets — even those who are pregnant.
Herrera had found inspiration for her journey to the U.S. on social media. On Facebook and TikTok, young, smiling Venezuelan migrants in nice clothes stood in front of new cars. Some 320,000 Venezuelans have tried to cross the U.S. border since October 2022, according to U.S. Border Patrol reports — more than in the previous nine years combined.
Just weeks after arriving in Denver, Herrera began to wonder if the success she had seen was real.
She was seeing doctors and social workers at a Denver hospital where she planned to give birth because they served everyone, even those without insurance. They were alarmed their pregnant patient was now sleeping outside in the cold.
In Colorado’s third-largest city, Aurora, officials have turned down requests to help migrants. In February, the City Council passed a resolution telling other cities and nonprofits not to bring migrants into the community because it “does not currently have the financial capacity to fund new services.” Yet still they come, because of its lower cost of living and Spanish-speaking community.
Former President Donald Trump last week called attention to the city, suggesting a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment complex. Authorities say that hasn’t happened.
The doctors urged Herrera to sleep at the hospital. It wouldn’t cost anything, they assured her, just as her birth would be covered by emergency Medicaid.
Herrera refused.
“How,” she asked, “could I sleep in a warm place when my son is cold on the street?”
Denver struggled to keep up with the rush of migrants, many arriving on buses chartered by Texas to draw attention to the impact of immigration. All told, Denver officials say they have helped some 42,700 migrants since last year, either by giving them shelter or a bus fare to another city.
Initially, the city offered migrants with families six weeks in a hotel. But any migrants arriving since May have received only three days in a hotel. After that, some have found transportation to other cities, scrounged for a place to sleep or wandered into nearby towns like Aurora.
Today, fewer migrants are coming to the Denver area. But Candice Marley, founder of a nonprofit called All Souls, still receives dozens of outreaches per week from social service agencies looking to help homeless migrants. All Souls had run encampments for migrants, but Denver shut them down because they lacked a permit.
“It’s so frustrating that we can’t help them,” Marley said. “That leaves families camping on their own, unsupported, living in their cars. Kids can’t get into school. There’s no stability.”
When Herrera started feeling labor pains in early December, she waited until she couldn’t bear the pain anymore and could feel the baby getting close. She called an ambulance.
The paramedics didn’t speak Spanish but called an interpreter. They told Herrera they had to take her to the closest hospital, instead of the one in Denver, since her contractions were so close together.
Her son was born healthy at 7 pounds, 8 ounces. She took him to the tent the next day. A few days later the whole family, including the baby, had contracted chicken pox. “The baby was in a bad state,” said Emily Rodriguez, a close friend living with her family in a tent next to Herrera’s.
Herrera took him to the hospital, then returned to the tent before being offered a way out. An Aurora woman originally from Mexico invited the family to live with her — at first, for free. After a couple weeks, the family moved to a small room in the garage for $800 a month.
To earn rent and pay expenses, Herrera and Rodriguez have cleaned homes, painted houses and shoveled snow while their children waited in a car by themselves. Finding regular work and actually getting paid for it has been difficult. While their husbands can get semi-regular work in construction, the women’s most consistent income comes from standing outside with their children and begging. On a good day, each earns about $50.
Herrera and her husband recently became eligible to apply for work permits and legal residency for Venezuelans who arrived in the United States last year. But it will cost $800 each for a lawyer to file the paperwork, along with hundreds of dollars in government fees. They don’t have the money.
What’s worse, they’re deeply in debt. Despite what the hospital had said when she was pregnant, Herrera was never signed up for emergency Medicaid. She says she owes $18,000 for the ambulance ride and delivery of her baby. Now, she avoids going to the doctor or taking her children because she’s afraid her large debt will jeopardize her chances of staying in the U.S. “I’m afraid they’re going to deport me,” she says.
Herrera and Rodriguez now hold cardboard signs along a busy street in Denver and then knock on the doors of private homes, never returning to the same address. They type up their request for clothes, food or money on their phones and translate it to English using Google. They hand their phones to whoever answers the door.
Herrera recently sent $500 to her sister to make the monthslong trip from Venezuela to Aurora with Herrera’s 8-year-old daughter. “I’ll have my family back together,” she says. And she believes her sister will be able to watch her kids so Herrera can look for work.
The problem is, Herrera hasn’t told her family back in Venezuela how she spends her time. “They think I’m fixing up homes and selling chocolate and flowers,” she says. “I’m living a lie.”
Finally, her sister and daughter are waiting across the border in Mexico. When we come to America, her sister asks, could we fly to Denver? The tickets are $600.
Herrera has to come clean. Life is far more difficult than she has let on.
She texts back:
No.
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Ohio city reshaped by Haitian immigrants lands in unwelcome spotlight
SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Many cities have been reshaped by immigrants in the last few years without attracting much notice. Not Springfield, Ohio.
Its story of economic renewal and related growing pains has been thrust into the national conversation in a presidential election year — and maliciously distorted by false rumors that Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbors’ pets. Donald Trump amplified those lies during Tuesday’s nationally televised debate, exacerbating some residents’ fears about growing divisiveness in the predominantly white, blue-collar city of about 60,000.
At the city’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center on Wednesday, Rose-Thamar Joseph said many of the roughly 15,000 immigrants who arrived in the past few years were drawn by good jobs and the city’s relative affordability. But a rising sense of unease has crept in as longtime residents increasingly bristle at newcomers taking jobs at factories, driving up housing costs, worsening traffic and straining city services.
“Some of them are talking about living in fear. Some of them are scared for their life,” Joseph said.
A “Welcome To Our City” sign hangs from a parking garage downtown, where a coffee shop, bakery and boutique line Springfield’s main drag, North Fountain Street. A flag advertising “CultureFest,” the city’s annual celebration of unity through diversity, waves from a pole nearby.
Melanie Flax Wilt, a Republican commissioner in the county where Springfield is located, said she has been pushing for community and political leaders to “stop feeding the fear.”
“After the election and everybody’s done using Springfield, Ohio, as a talking point for immigration reform, we are going to be the ones here still living through the challenges and coming up with the solutions,” she said.
Ariel Dominique, executive director of the Haitian American Foundation for Democracy, said she laughed at first at the absurdity of the false claims. But seeing the comments repeated on national television by the former president was painful.
“It is so unfair and unjust and completely contrary to what we have contributed to the world, what we have contributed to this nation for so long,” Dominique said.
The falsehoods about Springfield’s Haitian immigrants were spread online by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, on the eve of Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s part of a timeworn American political tradition of casting immigrants as outsiders.
“This is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame,” Trump said at the debate after repeating the falsehoods. When challenged by ABC News moderator David Muir over the false claims, Trump held firm, saying “people on television” said their dogs were eaten, but he offered no evidence.
Officials in Springfield have tried to tamp down the misinformation by saying there have been no credible or detailed reports of any pets being abducted or eaten. State leaders are trying to help address some of the real challenges facing the city.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said Tuesday he would add more law enforcement and health care resources to an aid package the state has already provided to Springfield.
Many Haitians have come to the U.S. to flee poverty and violence. They have embraced President Joe Biden’s new and expanded legal pathways to enter, and have shunned illegal crossings, accounting for only 92 border arrests out of more than 56,000 in July, the latest data available.
The Biden administration recently announced an estimated 300,000 Haitians in the U.S. could remain in the country at least through February 2026, with eligibility for work authorization, under a law called Temporary Protected Status. The goal is to spare people from being deported to countries in turmoil.
Springfield, about 72 kilometers from the state capital of Columbus, suffered a steep decline in its manufacturing sector toward the end of the last century, and its population shrank as a result. But its downtown has been revitalized in recent years as more Haitians arrived and helped meet the rising demand for labor as the economy emerged from the pandemic. Officials say Haitians now account for about 15% of the population.
The city was shaken last year when a minivan slammed into a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy. The driver was a Haitian man who recently settled in the area and was driving without a valid license. During a city commission meeting on Tuesday, the boy’s parents condemned politicians’ use of their son’s death to stoke hatred.
Last week, a post on the social media platform X shared what looked like a screengrab of a social media post apparently out of Springfield. The post claimed without evidence that the person’s “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” saw a cat hanging from a tree to be butchered and eaten, outside a house where it claimed Haitians lived. It was accompanied by a photo of a Black man carrying what appeared to be a goose by its feet.
On Monday, Vance posted on X: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” The next day, he posted again, saying his office had received inquiries from Springfield residents who said “their neighbors’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants.”
Longtime Springfield resident Chris Hazel, who knows the park and neighborhood where the pet and goose abductions were purported to have happened, called the claims “preposterous.”
“It reminds me of when people used to accuse others and outsiders as cannibals. It’s dehumanizing a community,” he said of the accusations against the city’s Haitian residents.
Sophia Pierrilus, the daughter of a former Haitian diplomat who moved to the Ohio capital of Columbus 15 years ago and is now an immigrant advocate, agreed, calling it all political.
“My view is that’s their way to use Haitians as a scapegoat to bring some kind of chaos in America,” she said.
With its rising population of immigrants, Springfield is hardly an outlier. So far this decade, immigration has accounted for almost three-quarters of U.S. population growth, with 2.5 million immigrants arriving in the United States between 2020 and 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Population growth is an important driver of economic growth.
“The Haitian immigrants who started moving to Springfield the last few years are the reason why the economy and the labor force has been revitalized there,” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, which provides legal and social services to immigrants across the U.S.
Now, she said, Haitians in Springfield have told her that, out of fear, they are considering leaving the city.
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Limited role for US Navy SEAL Team in defense of Taiwan
Washington — The United States Navy’s elite SEAL Team Six would likely have a limited role in defending Taiwan should China invade the self-governing and democratic island, say analysts responding to a Financial Times report that the unit has been training for it for more than one year.
Lyle J. Morris, senior fellow for foreign policy and national security at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, tells VOA Mandarin if the unit is indeed preparing for an attack by Beijing, it may indicate that the U.S. is more deeply involved in defending Taiwan than previously thought.
However, he stressed that the secret and precise combat characteristics of SEAL Team Six mean its role in resisting China’s invasion of Taiwan would be very limited, and the focus would be on carrying out special tasks.
“As far as their sheer capability to repel an invasion. I think that’s more limited,” he says. “I think it’s in a very discreet, narrow way of coming in for a specific task that Taiwan might need, whether it’s helping to protect, let’s say, an airfield in Taiwan or protect a communication asset in Taiwan, in Taipei, they could come in and out very discreetly and very lethally to protect that asset.”
SEAL Team Six specializes in performing sensitive, highly difficult missions. In 2009, the unit rescued Richard Phillips, captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, who was taken hostage by Somali pirates.
The elite unit gained an international reputation after the successful raid on al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan in 2011.
It is one of the most highly regarded U.S. military units, along with the United States Army’s Delta Force, the 75th Ranger Regiment’s Regimental Reconnaissance Company, the Intelligence Support Activity, and the Air Force’s 24th Special Tactics Squadron, and part of the Joint Special Operations Command.
“Navy SEALs usually deployed from submarines or, most likely, small ships. And are useful for targeting vulnerabilities in enemies’ presentation,” Richard D. Fisher Jr., senior fellow with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, tells VOA.
Analysts say the U.S. military likely revealed the SEAL Team Six training program to the Financial Times to send a warning to Beijing amid China’s increasingly assertive moves in the region.
“This is one way the U.S. is bolstering deterrence towards China, towards preventing a Chinese invasion of Taiwan,” says Morris. “So, I think this is just an added factor getting China to second guess or to reconsider what it will face if it were to invade Taiwan.”
Dennis Wilder, a senior fellow for the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University and a former Central Intelligence Agency military analyst, posted on social media platform X, “It is sure to get under Beijing’s skin.”
In a written response to VOA Mandarin, Liu Pengyu, the spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., said, “The Taiwan question is the very core of China’s core interests and the first red line that must not be crossed in the China-U.S. relationship.”
He urged “the U.S. to earnestly abide by the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. joint communiqués, stop enhancing military contact with the Taiwan region or arming it by any means or under whatever pretext, stop creating factors that could heighten tensions in the Taiwan Strait, and stop conniving at and supporting the separatists’ attempt to seek ‘Taiwan independence’ by force.”
Taiwan split from China during the civil war that saw the Communist Party seize power in Beijing in 1949 and the Nationalist Party flee to the island, which developed into a flourishing democracy. But China’s one-party, authoritarian state never gave up its claim to Taiwan and considers it a renegade province that must one day reunite with the mainland, by force if necessary.
Admiral Philips Davidson, former commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, warned in 2021 that China could attack Taiwan within six years. President Joe Biden has repeatedly stressed that if China invades Taiwan, the U.S. will intervene militarily to defend it.
The U.S. Department of Defense declined to confirm or deny the Financial Times report. Pentagon spokesperson John Supple said in an email to VOA, “The DoD and our service members prepare and train for a wide range of contingencies. We will not comment on specifics, but will restate that we are committed to our longstanding one China policy, guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances. As we have said before, conflict is neither imminent nor inevitable.”
America’s one-China policy is a strategically ambiguous agreement it made in 1972 to establish relations with China that recognizes Beijing as the only government of China and acknowledges, but does not endorse, Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is part of China.
Washington has unofficial relations with Taiwan defined through the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Joint Communiques with Beijing, and the Six Assurances with Taipei, which underscore U.S. opposition to attempts to unilaterally alter the status quo and determination to help Taiwan defend itself through weapons sales.
There has been previous U.S. military training for Taiwan’s defense, both on the island and in the United States. Reuters reported last year the U.S. was set to expand the number of troops helping train Taiwanese forces on the island and Taiwanese officials confirmed more of their troops would be training in the U.S.
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US-Russia battle for influence in Africa plays out in Central African Republic
BANGUI, Central African Republic — Hours after Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin rebelled against his country’s top military leaders, his private army’s biggest client in Africa panicked, turning for help to his foe in the West.
Officials from Central African Republic, where some 1,500 of Prigozhin’s Wagner Group mercenaries were stationed, wrote a letter that day, requesting to “rapidly” arrange a meeting with a private U.S. security firm to discuss collaboration.
Dated June 23, 2023, the day Prigozhin launched the armed rebellion, the letter sparked a series of meetings, culminating in a deal with the central African nation and Bancroft Global Development. That sparked backlash from Russian mercenaries, according to a dozen diplomats, locals, and analysts.
The tensions in Central African Republic are a window into a larger battle playing out across the continent as Moscow and Washington vie for influence.
The Russian mercenaries — using success in staving off rebels in this impoverished nation as a model for expansion — have long been accused by locals and rights groups of stripping natural resources such as minerals and timber and are linked to the torture and death of civilians. In the wake of Prigozhin’s rebellion and suspicious death in a plane crash, the Russians are recalibrating their Africa operations. The United States, which has been largely disengaged from the region for years, is attempting to maintain a presence and stymie Russian gains as it pushes African countries to distance themselves from the mercenaries.
U.S. officials blame Russia for anti-American sentiment in the region and say they’re trying to shift the narrative.
“If the U.S. can’t regain a foothold, it could give Russia greater economic and political leverage,” said Samuel Ramani of the Royal United Services Institute, a defense and security think tank. “If Russia loses Central African Republic, its flagship model on the continent, there could be a domino effect in other countries.”
Russia’s influence
In recent years, Russia has emerged as the security partner of choice for a growing number of governments in the region, displacing traditional allies such as France and the U.S.
Moscow expanded its military cooperation by using mercenaries like Wagner, which since around 2017 has operated in at least half a dozen countries by protecting African leaders and in some cases helping fight rebels and extremists.
They’re also plagued by their human rights record. Two years ago in Mali, Wagner and the army were accused of executing about 300 men — some suspected of being Islamist extremists, but most civilians — in what Human Rights Watch called the worst single atrocity reported in the country’s decade-long armed conflict. And in Central African Republic, mercenaries train the army on torture tactics, including how to tburn people alive, according to watchdog The Sentry.
Central African Republic
Central African Republic was one of the first places the mercenaries entered. The country has been in conflict since 2013, when predominantly Muslim rebels seized power and forced the president from office. Six of the 14 armed groups that signed a 2019 peace deal later left the agreement. Locals and the government credited Wagner with fighting back rebels who tried to overtake Bangui, the capital, in 2021. The Russians soon expanded to Burkina Faso and Niger, and have ambitions for further growth.
Russia is refurbishing a military base some 80 kilometers from Bangui. Alexander Bikantov, Russia’s ambassador to Central African Republic, said the base will improve the country’s security.
Fidele Gouandjika, adviser to President Faustin-Archange Touadera, said the base aims to have 10,000 fighters by 2030 to engage with more African nations.
Touadera’s office didn’t reply to written requests for comment for this story. His adviser to the country’s spy agency declined to be interviewed.
Pressure from United States
The U.S. had been pushing Central African Republic to find an alternative to Wagner for years. A more assertive U.S. approach came as it faced new setbacks and tried to rework agreements in the region. Its troops left Chad and Niger, where they were no longer welcome.
Still, the State Department said in a statement this year that it wasn’t involved in the decision to establish Bancroft Global Development’s presence in Central African Republic.
But Washington could deny such contracts if it wanted, said Sean McFate, a former contractor in Africa and author of “The New Rules of War.”
The U.S. has used private military companies to reduce American “boots on the ground” in Africa, McFate said, and companies like Bancroft have to play by Washington’s rules if they want future government work.
In response to AP questions, the U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity said it uses private contractors in Africa to help countries operate more effectively, with U.S. government oversight to ensure accountability. The official said the State Department has overseen Bancroft’s work in Somalia but not Central African Republic or elsewhere.
Bancroft’s background
Washington-based Bancroft is a nonprofit working in nine countries — five in Africa. Its involvement in Central African Republic has been shrouded in secrecy since signs emerged of its presence last fall.
During an AP visit months later, rumors swirled about Bancroft’s activities, fueling speculation the U.S was bringing its own Wagner to oust Russia.
But according to Bancroft founder Michael Stock, the group entered at Bangui’s behest.
Stock received the letter from the presidency within a day of Prigozhin’s mutiny, and the two signed a deal in September, he said.
Fewer than 30 Bancroft personnel work there, Stock said, helping Central African Republic with intelligence systems, interagency cooperation and law enforcement.
Bancroft has invested some $1.4 million there, Stock said.
Much of Bancroft’s funding has come from U.S. and United Nations grants. From 2018 to 2020, it received more than $43 million from the U.S., according to audits required as part of tax forms.
Amal Ali, a former U.S. intelligence analyst, is among critics who say that despite its yearslong presence in Somalia, Bancroft hasn’t contributed to any eradication of terrorism.
Stock dismissed such comments as uninformed and said the Somali and U.S. governments “agree Bancroft has done a great deal to damaging illegal armed groups and developing the capacity of the government to perform its national defense functions professionally.”
Backlash on the ground
Rights groups say a lack of transparency about Bancroft’s operations has fostered an atmosphere of distrust in a country already rampant with armed actors. Wagner, a U.N. peacekeeping mission and Rwandan troops are all on the ground to try to quell violence.
“Operating in a vague and nontransparent way in the Central African Republic only leads to suspicion,” said Lewis Mudge, of Human Rights Watch.
Stock defended Bancroft’s work and policies. “It is perfectly normal for a government not to publicize how it is defending the people and the state,” he told AP.
Unclear future
As the U.S. and Russia jockey for power, African governments say they want to make their own choices.
Central African Republic officials approached Bancroft, which shows that these governments haven’t become Russian puppets, said Jack Margolin, an expert on private military companies.
But, he added, Russia’s reaction to Bancroft could hurt Moscow’s standing with other nations.
After Prigozhin’s death, Russia moved quickly to take control of Wagner’s assets, and the defense ministry told countries where Wagner operated that it would take over. The country and its military intelligence arm have taken a more direct role in Africa operations, deploying more official detachments from its army.
In Central African Republic, it’s unclear how much sway the Russian state has with the mercenaries, who are beloved by many. For most people here, there’s little interest in squabbles among foreign nations.
“There are problems between the Americans and Russians, but that doesn’t matter to us,” said Jean Louis Yet, who works at Bangui’s market. “We are here working, trying our best to make a living. All we want is security.”
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China condemns German navy’s transit of Taiwan Strait
BEIJING — China’s military on Saturday condemned the transit of two German navy ships through the Taiwan Strait saying it increased security risks and sent the “wrong” signal, adding that Chinese forces monitored and warned the vessels.
China, which claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own, says it alone exercises sovereignty and jurisdiction over the strait. Both the United States and Taiwan say the strait — a major trade route through which about half of global container ships pass — is an international waterway.
The People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command said the passage of the two ships — a frigate and a supply vessel — was “public hyping,” and that its navy and air forces monitored and warned them throughout.
“The German side’s behavior increases security risks and sends the wrong signal. Troops in the theater are on high alert at all times and will resolutely counter all threats and provocations,” it said in a statement.
China’s embassy in Germany said in a separate statement it had lodged “representations” with Berlin, saying Taiwan belonged to China, a position the democratically elected government in Taipei strongly rejects.
“The question of Taiwan is not a matter of ‘freedom of navigation’, but of China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” it said.
The Taiwan Strait is Chinese waters “and there are no so-called ‘international waters’ at all,” the embassy added.
China urges Germany to avoid any “interference” that would jeopardize the healthy and stable development of bilateral relations, it added.
Taiwan’s government says only the island’s people can decide their future.
U.S. warships sail through the strait around once every two months, drawing the ire of Beijing, and some U.S. allies like Canada and Britain have also made occasional transits.
China, which has never renounced the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control, has over the past five years stepped up military activities around the island, including staging war games.
On Saturday, Taiwan’s coast guard said it had again sent ships to monitor and warn away four Chinese maritime police vessels sailing in restricted waters near the Taiwan-controlled Kinmen islands, which sit right next to China’s coast.
The Chinese ships have continued to provoke and damage peace in the strait, and the coast guard is determined to defend Taiwan’s sovereignty upholding the principles of no provocation, no conflict and no show of weakness, it said.
Calls to China’s defense ministry seeking comment went unanswered.
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In Belarus, the native language is vanishing as Russian takes prominence
TALLINN, Estonia — When school started this year for Mikalay in Belarus, the 15-year-old discovered that his teachers and administrators no longer called him by that name. Instead, they referred to him as Nikolai, its Russian equivalent.
What’s more, classes at his school — one of the country’s best — are now taught in Russian, not Belarusian, which he has spoken for most of his life.
Belarusians like Mikalay are experiencing a new wave of Russification as Moscow expands its economic, political and cultural dominance to overtake the identity of its neighbor.
It’s not the first time. Russia under the czars and in the era of the Soviet Union imposed its language, symbols and cultural institutions on Belarus. But with the demise of the USSR in 1991, the country began to assert its identity, and Belarusian briefly became the official language, with the white-red-white national flag replacing a version of the red hammer and sickle.
But all that changed in 1994, after Alexander Lukashenko, a former Soviet collective farm official, came to power. The authoritarian leader made Russian an official language, alongside Belarusian, and did away with the nationalist symbols.
Now, with Lukashenko in control of the country for over three decades, he has allowed Russia to dominate all aspects of life in Belarus, a country of 9.5 million people. Belarusian, which like Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, is hardly heard on the streets of Minsk and other large cities anymore.
Official business is conducted in Russian, which dominates the majority of the media. Lukashenko speaks only Russian, and government officials often don’t use their native tongue.
The country depends on Russian loans and cheap energy and has created a political and military alliance with Moscow, allowing President Vladimir Putin to deploy troops and missiles on its soil, which was used as a staging area for the war in Ukraine.
“I understand that our Belarus is occupied. … And who is the president there? Not Lukashenko. The president is Putin,” said Svetlana Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature and lives in Germany in effective exile. “The nation has been humiliated and it will be very difficult for Belarusians to recover from this.”
Belarusian cultural figures have been persecuted and hundreds of its nationalist organizations have been closed. Experts say Moscow is seeking to implement in Belarus what the Kremlin intended to do in neighboring Ukraine when the war there began in 2022.
“It is obvious that our children are being deliberately deprived of their native language, history and Belarusian identity, but parents have been strongly advised not to ask questions about Russification,” said Mikalay’s father, Anatoly, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition his last name not be used, for fear of retribution.
“We were informed about the synchronization of the curriculum with Russia this year and were shown a propaganda film about how the Ukrainian special services are allegedly recruiting our teenagers and forcing them to commit sabotage in Belarus,” he said.
Mikalay’s school was one of the few where paperwork and some courses were conducted in Belarusian. In recent years, however, dozens of teachers were fired and the Belarusian-language section of its website vanished.
Human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, convicted in 2023 on charges stemming from his Nobel Peace Prize-winning work, demanded his trial be conducted in Belarusian. The court rejected it and sentenced him to 10 years.
Lukashenko derides his native language, saying “nothing great can be expressed in Belarusian. … There are only two great languages in the world: Russian and English.”
Speaking to Russian state media, Lukashenko recounted how Putin once thanked him for making Russian the dominant language in Belarus.
“I said, ‘Wait, what are you thanking me for? … The Russian language is my language, we were part of one empire, and we’re taking part in [helping] that language develop,'” Lukashenko said.
Belarus was part of the Russian empire for centuries and became one of 15 Soviet republics after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Daily use of the Belarusian language decreased and continued only in the country’s west and north and in rural areas.
In 1994, about 40% of students were taught in Belarusian; it’s now down to under 9%.
Although Belarusian, like Russian, is an eastern Slavic language, its vocabulary is considerably different. In 1517, Belarusian publisher Francysk Skaryna was one of the first in Eastern Europe to translate the Bible into his native language.
Even speaking Belarusian is seen as a show of opposition to Lukashenko and a declaration of national identity. That played a key role in the mass protests after the disputed 2020 election gave the authoritarian leader a sixth term. In the harsh crackdown that followed, a half-million people fled the country.
“The Belarusian language is increasingly perceived as a sign of political disloyalty and is being abandoned in favor of Russian in the public administration, education, culture and the mass media, upon orders from the hierarchy or out of fear of discrimination,” said Anaïs Marin, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Belarus.
At the same time, “more people want to speak Belarusian, which has become one of the symbols of freedom, but they’re afraid to do it in public,” said Alina Nahornaja, author of Language 404, a book about Belarusians who experienced discrimination for speaking their native language.
Like Ukraine, Belarusians had a desire for rapprochement with Europe that accompanied their nationalist sentiment, said Belarusian analyst Valery Karbalevich.
“But the Kremlin quickly realized the danger and began the process of creeping Russification in Belarus,” he added.
That prompted pro-Russian organizations, joint educational programs and cultural projects to spring up “like mushrooms after the rain — against the backdrop of harsh repressions against everything Belarusian,” Karbalevich said.
Censorship and bans affect not only contemporary Belarusian literature but also its classics. In 2023, the prosecutor’s office declared as extremist the 19th-century poems of Vincent Dunin-Martsinkyevich, who opposed the Russian Empire.
When the Kremlin began supporting Lukashenko against the anti-government protests in 2020, it ensured his loyalty and received carte blanche in Belarus.
“Today, Lukashenko is paying Putin with our sovereignty,” said exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. “Belarusian national identity, cultures and language are our strongest weapons against the Russian world and Russification.”
Four cities in Belarus now host a “Russia House” to promote its culture and influence, offering seminars, film clubs, exhibitions and competitions.
“The goal is to plant Russian narratives so that as many Belarusians as possible view Russian as their own,” said analyst Alexander Friedman. “The Kremlin spares no expense and acts on a grand scale, which could be especially effective and dangerous in a situation where Belarus has found itself in information isolation, and there is almost no one left inside the country to resist the Russian world.”
Almost the entire troupe of the Yanka Kupala Theater, the country’s oldest, fled Belarus amid the political crackdown. Its former director, Pavel Latushka, now an opposition figure abroad, said the new management couldn’t recruit enough new actors, and had to invite Russians, “but it turned out that no one knew the Belarusian language.”
“Putin published an article denying the existence of an independent Ukraine back in 2021, and even then we understood perfectly well that he was pursuing similar goals in Belarus,” Latushka said.
“The main course was supposed to be Ukraine,” he added, with a Russified Belarus “as a dessert.”
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Biden meets UK’s Starmer to discuss Ukraine, Israel
US President Joe Biden met with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the White House on Friday to discuss support for Ukraine amid a push by Kyiv for Western partners to lift restrictions on using their long-range missiles to attack targets deep inside Russian territory. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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South Sudan postpones elections by 2 years, citing incomplete preparations
JUBA, South Sudan — The government in South Sudan has postponed elections scheduled for December for two years citing the need to complete processes such as a census, the drafting of a permanent constitution and the registration of political parties.
The Presidential Adviser on National Security Tut Gatluak on Friday said the extension would provide an opportunity to complete critical processes before the new election date of December 22, 2026.
This is the second time the country, which gained independence in 2011, is postponing elections and extending a transitional period that started in February 2020.
President Salva Kiir and his former rival turned deputy, Riek Machar, signed a peace agreement in 2018 that ended a five-year civil war in which more than 400,000 people died.
Cabinet Affairs Minister Martin Elia Lomuro said the extension followed recommendations from both electoral institutions and the security sector.
Last month, the chairperson of National Election Commission, Professor Abednego Akok, told The Associated Press the country was behind the electoral calendar, which required voter registration to have started in June but was still pending due to a shortage of funds.
The country is going through an economic crisis that has seen civil servants go unpaid for almost one year, after it’s oil exports were affected by a damaged pipeline in war-torn neighboring Sudan through which it exports.
The Tumaini initiative peace talks that have been going on in neighboring Kenya, believed to provide a foundation for the inclusion of non-signatory groups to sustain peace, have also stalled.
A new security act that allows for warrantless detentions became law in August despite concerns from human rights groups that it would create fear in the runup to the elections.
Andrea Mach Mabior, an independent political analyst, warned that any sham elections may result in a waste of resources and chaos.
“Going for elections that do not meet international standards will be a waste of money,” Mabior told the AP.
But others like Edmund Yakani, executive director of the Community Empowerment Progress Organization, said delays to the elections or any extension of the transitional period would create a possibility of violence erupting across the fragile country.
“If we fail to conduct the elections in December 2024 the chance of the country turning into violence is higher than if we go for the elections,” Yakani told the AP in August.
The country, which has gone through the shocks of civil war and climate change is in need of humanitarian aid with an estimated 9 million people — 73% of the country’s population — projected to be in need of humanitarian assistance during 2024, according to the 2024 UN Humanitarian Needs Overview for South Sudan.
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Dozens of Hong Kong journalists threatened in harassment campaign, says HKJA
BANGKOK — Dozens of Hong Kong journalists and their families have been harassed and intimidated in the past three months, according to the chair of a local press club.
The Hong Kong Journalists Association or HKJA said Friday it had tracked “systematic” and “organized” attacks on journalists from June to August this year.
At least 15 journalists and their family members, employers and neighbors were harassed both online and offline, the press club said.
Selina Cheng, the chair of the HKJA, said in a press conference Friday that it is the biggest case of intimidation that the association has ever seen.
“I don’t believe this is right, and that’s why we are making a loud call today to say we do not accept such behavior,” she said.
“This type of intimidation and harassment, which includes sharing false and defamatory content and death threats, damages press freedom,” she added.
Journalists from multiple Hong Kong media outlets have been affected, with anonymous threats and harassment made via social media email or in the mail, the HKJA said in a statement.
Some of those targeted received threats to their personal safety and were warned to give up their employment or position within associations, the HKJA added.
“HKJA has gathered detailed information on a number of affected journalists and organisations,” the statement read. Those affected include two journalism education institutions and 13 media outlets, including the executive committee of the HKJA, Hong Kong Free Press, InMediaHK, and HK Feature.
Many of the letters and emails warned that association with the named organizations or people could be a violation of Hong Kong’s national security laws.
The emails and letters were sent anonymously, with emails sent from Microsoft Outlook accounts.
On social media, posts showed photos of journalists and members of the HKJA executive committee pictured alongside images of knives, blood, shooting targets and “memorial” signs.
The Hong Kong Free Press condemned the attacks. In a statement shared on social media, it said that the landlord of the news website’s director, Tom Grundy, had received threatening letters, saying “unimaginable consequences” would occur unless Grundy was evicted from his property.
Grundy reported the threats to police, the news website said.
Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders or RSF called on the international community to take action.
“We strongly condemn this harassment campaign led against the independent media outlets that managed to survive the previous waves of government repression,” said Cedric Alviani, RSF’s Asia-Pacific bureau director. “We urge the international community to intensify its pressure on the Chinese regime so press freedom is fully restored in the territory.”
VOA requested comment late Friday from the Hong Kong Police Force but did not immediately receive a response.
Hong Kong’s undersecretary for security, Michael Cheuk, told media “no one should be intimidated, insulted, or so-called harassed.”
Cheuk urged anyone who felt under pressure to report it to law agencies, Reuters reported.
The HKJA said that it has contacted Meta, which owns Facebook, and Wikimedia Foundation, the two main platforms used in the harassment campaign.
Cheng told VOA she believes a person or group of people are responsible.
“Bots means they are machine-controlled. I don’t think that’s the case,” she added.
Details of the intimidation campaign come as critics warn that press freedom is being eroded in Hong Kong.
Since Beijing imposed a national security law on Hong Kong in 2020 — which carries life imprisonment for those found guilty of what are deemed as sedition, subversion, foreign interference or terrorism — news outlets have shuttered and there is greater self-censorship on sensitive issues, say media experts.
Activists, political figures, lawmakers and reporters are cautious about speaking on the record to the media, with most declining to be interviewed for fear of reprisal.
Media unions like the Hong Kong Journalist Association have also come under pressure, after being criticized by authorities and Chinese state media for alleged links to activist organizations.
The governments of Hong Kong and China have said that the security law has brought stability back to the former British colony.
But since 2020, dozens of people have been arrested under the legislation. At least 28 of those arrested were journalists or press freedom defenders.
In August, two journalists from the now-defunct Stand News website were found guilty of sedition in a landmark case. And the pro-democracy publisher Jimmy Lai is in prison and on trial under the national security law for charges he denies.
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China’s retirement age, among youngest in world, set to rise
BEIJING — Starting next year, China will raise its retirement age for workers, which is now among the youngest in the world’s major economies, in an effort to address its shrinking population and aging work force.
The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, the country’s legislature, passed the new policy Friday after a sudden announcement earlier in the week that it was reviewing the measure, state broadcaster CCTV announced.
The policy change will be carried out over 15 years, with the retirement age for men raised to 63 years, and for women to 55 or 58 years depending on their jobs. The current retirement age is 60 for men and 50 for women in blue-collar jobs and 55 for women doing white-collar work.
“We have more people coming into the retirement age, and so the pension fund is (facing) high pressure. That’s why I think it’s now time to act seriously,” said Xiujian Peng, a senior research fellow at Victoria University in Australia who studies China’s population and its ties to the economy.
The previous retirement ages were set in the 1950’s, when life expectancy was only around 40 years, Peng said.
The policy will be implemented starting in January, according to the announcement from China’s legislature. The change will take effect progressively based on people’s birthdates.
For example, a man born in January 1971 could retire at the age of 61 years and 7 months in August 2032, according to a chart released along with the policy. A man born in May 1971 could retire at the age of 61 years and 8 months in January 2033.
Demographic pressures made the move long overdue, experts say. By the end of 2023, China counted nearly 300 million people over the age of 60. By 2035, that figure is projected to be 400 million, larger than the population of the U.S. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences had previously projected that the public pension fund will run out of money by that year.
Pressure on social benefits such as pensions and social security is hardly a China-specific problem. The U.S. also faces the issue as analysis shows that currently, the Social Security fund won’t be able to pay out full benefits to people by 2033.
“This is happening everywhere,” said Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But in China with its large elderly population, the challenge is much larger.”
That is on top of fewer births, as younger people opt out of having children, citing high costs. In 2022, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that for the first time the country had 850,000 fewer people at the end of the year than the previous year, a turning point from population growth to decline. In 2023, the population shrank further, by 2 million people.
What that means is that the burden of funding elderly people’s pensions will be divided among a smaller group of younger workers, as pension payments are largely funded by deductions from people who are currently working.
Researchers measure that pressure by looking at a number called the dependency ratio, which counts the number of people over the age of 65 compared to the number of workers under 65. That number was 21.8% in 2022, according to government statistics, meaning that roughly five workers would support one retiree. The percentage is expected to rise, meaning fewer workers will be shouldering the burden of one retiree.
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Mounting North Korean threats await next US president
washington — Recent moves by Pyongyang have focused attention on what will be one of the first major foreign policy challenges facing the next U.S. president: how to deal with North Korea’s rapidly developing nuclear threat.
In a set of rapid-fire developments on Friday:
— North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called for an “exponential increase” in the size of his nation’s nuclear arsenal, according to the state-run news agency KCNA. He made the same call in speeches on Tuesday and on the last day of 2022.
— State media released photos for the first time of the Nuclear Weapons Institute where North Korea processes uranium for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. The photos, which showed a sophisticated array of centrifuges, were made public as Kim toured the facility.
— North Korea announced that it had tested a new type of 600 mm multiple rocket launcher the previous day. South Korea said on Thursday that North Korea test-fired several short-range ballistic missiles into the waters off the eastern coast.
The developments came in the context of enhanced military cooperation between North Korea and Russia, which is believed to be helping Pyongyang to develop its weapons capabilities in exchange for munitions used in Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The threat from North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs has been growing steadily and virtually unchecked over the course of several U.S. administrations,” said Evans Revere, a former State Department official with extensive experience negotiating with North Korea.
“Whoever the next U.S. president is, she or he will face a more sophisticated and dangerous North Korean threat.”
Revere said in an interview that the winner of the U.S. election would have to find ways to weaken the link between Moscow and Pyongyang “and demonstrate to Beijing that its ‘partnership without limits’ with Russia is a dangerous and ill-advised path that will yield no benefits” for China.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping declared in May a “new era” in opposition to the U.S. and reaffirmed the “no limits” partnership that was first announced just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
While China has held back on providing Russia with arms for its war effort, the United States has accused it of delivering electronic components and other dual-use items that are keeping Moscow’s arms industry afloat.
Pyongyang, for its part, denies participating in any arms transfers to Russia, an act that would violate United Nations sanctions.
But a report this week by Conflict Armament Research, a U.K.-based group that tracks weapons in armed conflicts, said parts from four North Korean missiles have been found in Ukraine.
The missiles, examined by Kyiv, are either KN-23 or KN-24, known as Hwasong-11 short-range missile series, and thought to have been used in attacks in July and August, the report said.
Pyongyang-Moscow military ties have also been expanded to include tourism, trade, and economic and technical cooperation.
This makes the use of sanctions less effective as a policy tool to counter North Korea’s nuclear buildup, according to Gary Samore, former White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction during the Obama administration.
“That’s not as much leverage now as it was before because of the Russian-North Korean relationship,” said Samore. “The U.S. doesn’t have very strong economic leverage that it can use with North Korea.”
With few obvious policy options available, the two presidential candidates – former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris – have largely confined themselves to criticizing each other’s approach without laying out any specific plans to roll back the North Korean threat.
At Tuesday night’s televised debate, Harris criticized Trump for exchanging “love letters with Kim Jong Un” during his presidency while Trump disapproved of the current administration’s handling of the issue, saying, “Look at what’s going on in North Korea.”
During his presidency, Trump held three summits with Kim but the diplomatic effort ultimately failed when Trump refused Kim’s demand for sanctions relief in exchange for a partial rollback of his nuclear program.
There have been no formal talks between the two countries since, although the Biden administration insists it is open to negotiations without preconditions, a policy that Harris could be expected to continue if elected.
The Biden administration also maintains that its goal remains the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, even as many experts suggest it is time to acknowledge that Pyongyang will not give up its weapons and say the international community should focus on containment.
Samore predicted that a Harris administration would continue to say that “as an ultimate objective … the U.S. seeks denuclearization in the long term.”
A second Trump administration, he theorized, may say “denuclearization is no longer possible” and “accept North Korea as a nuclear power.”
Robert Rapson, who served as charge d’affaires and deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul from 2018 to 2021, said much would depend on how the winner of the election decides to work with regional allies South Korea and Japan.
“In the likely absence of any grand outreach towards Pyongyang, Harris will have to carefully manage the relationship with ally Seoul, with a focus for the foreseeable future on maintaining peace and stability on the peninsula,” he said.
He added that it was “uncertain at this moment” whether Trump would feel compelled to reach out to Kim and whether he would diminish the value of the alliances with South Korea and Japan.
Eunjung Cho contributed to this report.
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