Month: June 2022

President Joe Biden hosted K-pop supergroup BTS on May 31, 2022, to raise awareness of anti-Asian discrimination. Members of the Grammy-nominated South Korean group also serve as U.N. ambassadors. VOA White House Correspondent Anita Powell reports from the White House.
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U.S. President Joe Biden said Tuesday he decided to provide Ukraine with “more advanced rocket systems and munitions” as part of U.S. efforts to help the Ukrainian fight against a Russian invasion now in its fourth month. 

Biden wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times that the United States has aided Ukraine with weapons and ammunition in order to bolster its position on the battlefield and ultimately in peace negotiations with Russia.  

“Unprovoked aggression, the bombing of maternity hospitals and centers of culture, and the forced displacement of millions of people makes the war in Ukraine a profound moral issue,” Biden said. 

The decision to send more advanced weapons follows earlier reluctance on the part of the Biden administration. Biden himself said Monday that the United States would not send rockets “that can strike into Russia.” 

The Associated Press cited senior administration officials as saying the new weapons package, set to be detailed Wednesday, includes medium-range rockets that can travel about 70 kilometers.  The officials also said Ukraine had given assurances its forces would not fire rockets into Russian territory. 

Biden wrote Tuesday that he does not seek war with Russia. 

“As much as I disagree with Mr. Putin, and find his actions an outrage, the United States will not try to bring about his ouster in Moscow,” Biden said. “So long as the United States or our allies are not attacked, we will not be directly engaged in this conflict, either by sending American troops to fight in Ukraine or by attacking Russian forces. We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders.” 

Russia has taken control of half or more of the eastern Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk that plays a pivotal role in Moscow’s attempt to capture the industrial Donbas region, the city’s mayor and a Ukrainian regional governor acknowledged Tuesday.  

Luhansk’s regional governor, Serhiy Gaidai, said that after days of fierce fighting between Russian and Ukrainian troops, Moscow’s forces control most of the city but have not surrounded it.  

He said in an online post that intense Russian shelling had made it impossible to deliver humanitarian supplies or evacuate the 13,000 people still sheltering in the devastated city that once had a population of 100,000.  

Mayor Oleksandr Striuk told The Associated Press Russian forces, in a “frenzied push,” had seized half the city.  

“The city is essentially being destroyed ruthlessly block by block,” Striuk said. He said heavy street fighting is continuing along with artillery bombardments.  

Meanwhile, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Tuesday an EU embargo on most Russian oil imports will mean Russia gets “less resources, less financial resources to feed the war machine.”  

Borrell said that while the EU cannot stop Russia from selling to other customers, European countries were its “most important client,” and it will have to accept lower prices.    

EU leaders agreed late Monday to ban two-thirds of Russian oil imports as part of a compromise deal to increase pressure on Moscow while accounting for the economic effects on some EU nations that are more reliant on Russian oil supplies.     

The embargo cuts off Russian oil delivered by sea, while exempting oil imported through pipelines.     

Landlocked Hungary had threatened to oppose restrictions on oil imports, a move that would have scuttled the effort that requires consensus of all EU members. European Council President Charles Michel said he expects EU ambassadors to formally endorse the embargo, which is part of a larger sanctions package, on Wednesday.     

Russia responded to the embargo by widening its natural gas cuts to Europe on Tuesday, with state-owned Gazprom saying it would cut supplies to several “unfriendly” countries that have refused to meet Moscow’s demand to be paid in the Russian ruble currency.  

Ukrainian leaders have long called for banning Russian oil imports to deny Russia income it can use to fuel its war effort. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reiterated his appeal as he spoke to the European Union earlier Monday.     

Combined with pledges from such countries as Germany to phase out their Russian oil imports, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the agreement will “effectively cut around 90% of oil imports from Russia to the EU by the end of the year.”   

Other parts of the sanction package include assets freezes and travel bans on individuals, and excluding Russia’s biggest banks, Sberbank, from the SWIFT global financial transfer system. The European Union is also barring three Russian state-owned broadcasters from distributing content in EU countries.     

EU leaders also agreed to provide Ukraine with $9.7 billion in assistance for the country’s economy and reconstruction efforts.     

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. 
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In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 spread throughout the world in ways not fully understood, the United States faced a critical shortage of protective masks. 

Dozens of manufacturing startups attempted to meet the demand for what was then a confusing array of grades and types — N95, KN95, full-face respirators.  

Now, after a short respite from many COVID-19 precautions, the U.S. is weeks into a new surge in cases that may foreshadow a greater one this fall, and those same small companies that make masks are hurting.  

John Bielamowicz is a co-founder of United States Mask. The Fort Worth, Texas, company is among those struggling.  

Bielamowicz launched his mask-making mission after reading social media posts about medical professionals not having N95 masks in the pandemic’s terrifying early months. It was caregivers like them who had helped his family in 2016, when his son Matthew was born missing 80% of his diaphragm on the left side. 

Bielamowicz and his business partner ​David Baillargeon put their commercial real estate business on hold to start the mask company. 

“This was our way of paying it back … for the gift that they gave us for sending us home with our son,” Bielamowicz told VOA Mandarin in a virtual interview. “It was a debt that I never thought that I’d be able to pay back.” 

The partners began reading and experimenting in February 2020, and by late October of that year, their N95 masks carried a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health certification. At its peak in early 2021, the company produced millions of N95 masks a month and employed close to 50 people. 

“For me and my family, this was a mission, and we were going to do it or fail trying,” Bielamowicz said. “And we didn’t fail. We did it.”  

Masks and jobs

The American Mask Manufacturers Association (AMMA) represents small companies that started making masks during the pandemic.  

“During the pandemic, we created just over 8,000 new manufacturing jobs. And this was at a time where most businesses were laying people off or furloughing people,” Lloyd Armbrust, president of the association, told VOA in a virtual interview.  

But attitudes toward mask wearing have varied widely across the U.S. since 2020, and on April 18, a federal judge in Florida voided the national mask mandate covering airplanes and other public transportation. This came a day before the Biden administration said it would no longer enforce a U.S. mask mandate.  

Armbrust American, Armbrust’s mask company in Pflugerville, Texas, staggered from the twin blows.  

“That day, we saw our online sales be cut at half or even more,” said Armbrust, who added that he and other mask-makers had already been competing with cheap masks from China before the one-two punch.  

China and masks 

According to research published last year by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington-based think tank, 72% of the masks and respirators imported by the U.S. in 2019 came from China. 

When the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was first identified in humans in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, U.S. imports of protective masks from China plunged. 

When China resumed exporting government-subsidized masks in 2020, it attempted to create “a monopoly within the PPE (personal protective equipment) market,” the AMMA charged, and manufacturers such as Armbrust American found themselves in difficulty. 

“Our raw material costs me about $0.015 per mask,” Armbrust said. “And yet China can deliver it to the United States for less than $0.01. They say that they’re more efficient, but how is that possible when the cost of their finished products is cheaper than I buy the raw materials for? It’s just not possible. The answer is, the Chinese government is subsidizing it because they don’t want to lose this business.”  

In response to VOA Mandarin questions about China’s mask exports to the U.S., Liu Pengyu, the spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said, “I would like to point out that as a market economy, China has earnestly fulfilled its WTO (World Trade Organization) commitments and abides by multilateral economic and trade rules. Chinese merchandise is cheap and good because of the good supply chain, sufficient competition and economies of scale, not non-market behavior.” 

“I can be very competitive, but I can’t be competitive against the whole government. … In 2021, we laid off about 70% of our staff,” Armbrust said. 

Bielamowicz’s United States Mask laid off people as well. 

“It was the worst day of my career,” he said.   

An uncertain future 

Nationwide, the AMMA, which peaked with almost 30 members in 2021, now includes fewer than 10 enterprises still producing masks. 

Facing masks’ uncertain future, Armbrust American shifted to producing home air filters. 

Bielamowicz has been traveling to Washington to lobby the federal government. 

“We’re asking for free competition,” Bielamowicz said. “We know the free market works.” 

That said, Armbrust hopes the government can subsidize small companies that make masks, as it does farmers, to preserve production capability so that when the next pandemic hits, small producers can jump back into mask making. 

“If I could just have a base,” Armbrust said, “… where I could mothball these machines and … I could afford to pay the rent for the space instead of actually shutting it down and scrapping the machines, that would be another solution.”  
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked a Texas law that bars large social media companies from banning or censoring users based on “viewpoint,” siding with two technology industry groups that have argued that the Republican-backed measure would turn platforms into “havens of the vilest expression imaginable.”   

The justices, in a 5-4 decision, granted a request by NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which count Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as members, to block the law while litigation continues after a lower court on May 11 let it go into effect.   

The industry groups sued to try to block the law, challenging it as a violation of the free speech rights of companies, including to editorial discretion on their platforms, under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. 

Conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch issued a written dissent, saying that it is “not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies.” Liberal Justice Elena Kagan separately dissented but did not offer any reasons. 

The Texas law was passed by the state’s Republican-led legislature and signed by its Republican governor. Its passage comes as U.S. conservatives and right-wing commentators complain that “Big Tech” is suppressing their views. These people cite as a prominent example Twitter’s permanent suspension of former President Donald Trump, a Republican, from the platform shortly after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters, with the company citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.”   

The law, formally known as HB20, forbids social media companies with at least 50 million monthly active users from acting to “censor” users based on “viewpoint,” and allows either users or the Texas attorney general to sue to enforce it. 

In signing the bill last September, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said, “There is a dangerous movement by some social media companies to silence conservative ideas and values. This is wrong and we will not allow it in Texas.” 

The industry groups said the state’s law would unconstitutionally allow for government control of private speech. Restricting the platforms’ editorial control, the groups said, “would compel platforms to disseminate all sorts of objectionable viewpoints — such as Russia’s propaganda claiming that its invasion of Ukraine is justified.”  

“Instead of platforms engaging in editorial discretion, platforms will become havens of the vilest expression imaginable: pro-Nazi speech, hostile foreign government propaganda, pro-terrorist-organization speech, and countless more examples,” they added.   

The groups also denounced what they called “viewpoint discrimination against ‘Big Tech,'” in the Texas law through its exclusion of smaller social media platforms popular among conservatives such as Parler, Gab, Gettr and Trump’s own Truth Social.  

U.S. Judge Robert Pitman in the state capital Austin blocked the law last December. Pitman ruled that the constraints on how the platforms disseminate content violate the First Amendment.   

The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals subsequently put Pitman’s decision on hold two days after hearing oral arguments in the case. The 5th Circuit has yet to issue a ruling on the merits of the case. 
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A federal judge on Tuesday increased her sentence to 25 years for a New York City man who had attacked an FBI agent and planned to join Islamic State group. The new sentence came after a federal appeals court had called the original one of 17 years “shockingly low.” 

Fareed Mumuni, 27, pleaded guilty in 2017 to discussing plans to travel overseas to join the militant group, also known as ISIS, and trying to stab an FBI agent after authorities had arrived at his residence in the New York City borough of Staten Island in 2015 to execute a search warrant. 

The United States considers the Islamic State group a foreign terrorist organization. 

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn successfully appealed Mumuni’s 2018 sentence, with the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals arguing that U.S. District Judge Margo Brodie had improperly second-guessed whether Mumuni truly planned to kill FBI Special Agent Kevin Coughlin, who survived the attack. 

Prosecutors on Tuesday asked Brodie to sentence Mumuni to the 85 years recommended by federal guidelines. Anthony Ricco, a lawyer for Mumuni, urged Brodie to reduce the sentence, arguing that Mumuni had rehabilitated himself. 

“I got lucky,” Coughlin said during the sentencing hearing on Tuesday as Mumuni, wearing a white skullcap and black face mask, leaned back in his chair. 

Brodie called prosecutors’ request for her to sentence Mumuni to 85 years “unreasonable” but said she would place greater weight on his attack on Coughlin and increase the sentence. 

Mumuni, whose parents, uncle and two cousins sat in the courtroom’s front row, told Coughlin he was sorry. 

“I can’t apologize enough for what I’ve done,” said Mumuni, the son of immigrants from Ghana. He had once interned as a paralegal at the Staten Island district attorney’s office and had been studying to be a social worker and working as a home health aide when he was recruited into Islamic State group.

“Whatever I say cannot take back what I’ve done.” 

 
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The grieving town of Uvalde, Texas, began to hold funerals Tuesday for the first of the 19 children and two teachers who were shot to death May 24 by a teenage gunman who barged into their elementary school armed with an assault rifle.

The first funerals were set for two 10-year-old girls. One of them, Amerie Jo Garza, was described in her obituary as sweet, sassy and funny, a girl who loved swimming and drawing. The other victim, Maite Yuleana Rodriguez, was, according to her obituary, an honor student who loved learning about whales and dolphins and dreamed of becoming a marine biologist.

More funerals for the remaining victims are set in coming days, through mid-June.

In Washington, a handful of U.S. senators — Democrats Chris Murphy and Kyrsten Sinema, and Republicans John Cornyn and Thom Tillis — began virtual talks to determine whether agreement is possible on measures to curb a level of gun violence and mass killings that are unlike those anywhere else in the world.

President Joe Biden, a gun control proponent whose efforts to enact new controls on gun sales has been stymied by opposition Republicans, told reporters at the White House: “I will meet with the Congress on guns, I promise you.”

Biden, who spent seven hours Sunday in Uvalde visiting with the relatives of the victims and survivors of the attack, said, “I’ve gotten to more mass shooting aftermaths than I think any president in American history, unfortunately.”

“And it’s just, so much of it is — much of it is preventable,” he said. “And the devastation is amazing.”

Going into a meeting with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Biden said he would ask her about her country’s response after a gunman killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch in 2019, streaming the carnage on Facebook as it happened.

Within weeks, Ardern led a dramatic push to restrict firearms in New Zealand, including a permanent ban on military-style semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles and a program to buy back and destroy such guns already in circulation.

Such a plan would meet with widespread opposition in the U.S., where many people see the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of gun ownership rights as sacrosanct.

While lawmakers debate new controls on gun sales, the Justice Department has opened a review of the police response to the attack on Robb Elementary School, “to identify lessons learned and best practices to help first responders prepare for and respond to active shooter events.”

In the Texas shooting, law enforcement officials are being sharply criticized for taking more than an hour to directly confront the gunman, Salvador Ramos, a high school dropout.

In the past few days, Texas law enforcement authorities have changed their accounts of exactly how the Robb Elementary massacre unfolded and their response to it.

Even as children trapped in the classroom with the shooter made urgent emergency calls, pleading with police to rescue them, the incident commander on the scene, the police chief for Uvalde schools, assessed — wrongly — that it was no longer an active shooter incident but rather that the assailant had barricaded himself in a classroom.

As a result, the incident commander, Pete Arredondo, did not immediately order police officers into the classroom to end the mayhem before more were killed.

Eventually, U.S. Border Patrol agents arrived at the school, burst into the classroom and killed Ramos.

The head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Steven McCraw, said last week that with the benefit of hindsight, “it was the wrong decision” to wait to confront the shooter.

Some information from Reuters was used in this report.
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A lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign was acquitted Tuesday of lying to the FBI when he pushed information meant to cast suspicions on Donald Trump and Russia in the run-up to the 2016 election.

The jury in the case of Michael Sussmann deliberated on Friday afternoon and Tuesday morning before reaching its verdict.

The case was the first courtroom test of special counsel John Durham since his appointment three years ago to search for government misconduct during the investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. The verdict represents a setback for Durham’s work, especially since Trump supporters had looked to the probe to expose what they contend was sweeping wrongdoing by the FBI.

The trial focused on whether Sussmann, a cybersecurity attorney and former federal prosecutor, concealed from the FBI that he was representing Clinton’s campaign when he presented computer data that he said showed a possible secret backchannel between Russia-based Alfa Bank and Trump’s business company, the Trump Organization. The FBI investigated but quickly determined that there was no suspicious contact.

The bureau’s then-general counsel and the government’s star witness, James Baker, testified that he was “100% confident” that Sussmann had told him that he was not representing any client during the meeting. Prosecutors say he was actually acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and another client, and that he hid that information so as to make it seem more credible and to boost the chances of getting the FBI to investigate.

Lawyers for Sussmann deny that he lied, saying that it was impossible to know with certainty what he told Baker since they were the only participants in the meeting and neither of them took notes.

They argued that if Sussmann said he wasn’t acting on the Clinton campaign’s behalf that that was technically accurate since he didn’t ask the FBI to take any particular action. And they said that even if he did make a false statement, it was ultimately irrelevant since the FBI was already investigating Russia and the Trump campaign and would have looked into the Alfa Bank data no matter the source.

During the two-week trial, jurors heard from current and former FBI officials who described efforts to assess the data’s legitimacy as well as former Clinton campaign aides.

The original Trump-Russia investigation, overseen for two years by former special counsel Robert Mueller, found multiple efforts by Russia to interfere on the Trump campaign’s behalf but did not establish that the two sides had worked together to sway the election.

After Mueller’s work was done, then-Attorney General William Barr named a new Justice Department prosecutor, then-Connecticut U.S. Attorney Durham, to examine whether anyone from the FBI or other agencies violated the law as the government opened its investigation into Russian election interference and the Trump campaign.

Durham has remained at work into the Biden administration. He has brought three cases so far, though the one against Sussmann is the only to have reached trial. A former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, was given probation after pleading guilty in 2020 to altering an email related to the surveillance of an ex-Trump campaign aide, and a Russian analyst who contributed to a dossier of Democratic-funded research into ties between Russia and Trump awaits trial on charges of lying to the FBI about his sources of information.
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