Author: Worldcrew

DAKAR, Senegal — State television in Niger broadcast footage on Thursday of Russian military trainers arriving in the country aboard a plane equipped with military supplies to boost its air defenses amid deteriorating relations between Niger and the United States. 

Two Russian trainers were filmed in front of the plane wearing military uniforms, caps and face coverings. The plane arrived Wednesday night, the report said. 

“We are here to train the Nigerian army to use the military equipment that is here,” one of the Russian trainers said in French in the broadcast. “We are here to develop military cooperation between Russia and Niger.” 

Until recently, Washington considered Niger a key partner and ally in a region swept by attempted coups in recent years. 

A U.S. airbase was established as the heart of Niger’s counterinsurgency operations in the sub-Saharan region known as the Sahel. Since 2012, the region has been gripped by a worsening insurgency fought by groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group. 

The U.S. invested heavily in training Niger’s forces to beat back the insurgency that has ravaged the country and its neighbors, but last summer, some of those elite U.S.-trained forces took part in a coup that ousted the elected president. 

U.S. relations with Niger took a further downturn last month when the junta announced on state television the flights from its airbase were illegal and that it no longer recognized the American military presence in the country. The junta criticized the U.S. for trying to force it to choose between partners, warning them against cooperating with Russia and Iran. 

Niamey has yet to order American troops out, U.S. officials have said. 

The broadcast said the arrival of Russian trainers followed a call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the country’s military leaders in March. Niger’s military leaders are seeking to diversify their partnerships and achieve greater sovereignty, the broadcast said. 
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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Twenty years ago this month, photos of abused prisoners and smiling U.S. soldiers guarding them at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were released, shocking the world.

Now, three survivors of Abu Ghraib will finally get their day in U.S. court against the military contractor they hold responsible for their mistreatment.

The trial is scheduled to begin Monday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, and it will be the first time that Abu Ghraib survivors are able to bring their claims of torture to a U.S. jury, said Baher Azmy, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights representing the plaintiffs.

The defendant in the civil suit, CACI, supplied the interrogators who worked at the prison. The Virginia-based contractor denies any wrongdoing and has emphasized throughout 16 years of litigation that its employees are not alleged to have inflicted any abuse on any of the plaintiffs in the case.

The plaintiffs, though, seek to hold CACI responsible for setting the conditions that resulted in the torture they endured, citing evidence in government investigations that CACI contractors instructed military police to “soften up” detainees for their interrogations.

Retired Army Gen. Antonio Taguba, who led an investigation into the Abu Ghraib scandal, is among those expected to testify. His inquiry concluded that at least one CACI interrogator should be held accountable for instructing military police to set conditions that amounted to physical abuse.

There is little dispute that the abuse was horrific. The photos released in 2004 showed naked prisoners stacked into pyramids or dragged by leashes. Some photos had a soldier smiling and giving a thumbs up while posing next to a corpse, or detainees being threatened with dogs, or hooded and attached to electrical wires.

The plaintiffs cannot be clearly identified in any of the infamous images, but their descriptions of mistreatment are unnerving.

Suhail Al Shimari has described sexual assaults and beatings during his two months at the prison. He was also electrically shocked and dragged around the prison by a rope tied around his neck. Former Al-Jazeera reporter Salah Al-Ejaili said he was subjected to stress positions that caused him to vomit black liquid. He was also deprived of sleep, forced to wear women’s underwear and threatened with dogs.

CACI, though, has said the U.S. military is the institution that bears responsibility for setting the conditions at Abu Ghraib and that its employees weren’t in a position to be giving orders to soldiers. In court papers, lawyers for the contractor group have said the “entire case is nothing more than an attempt to impose liability on CACI PT because its personnel worked in a war zone prison with a climate of activity that reeks of something foul. The law, however, does not recognize guilt by association with Abu Ghraib.”

The case has bounced through the courts since 2008, and CACI has tried roughly 20 times to have it tossed out of court. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 ultimately turned back CACI’s appeal efforts and sent the case back to district court for trial.

In one of CACI’s appeal arguments, the company contended that the U.S. enjoys sovereign immunity against the torture claims, and that CACI enjoys derivative immunity as a contractor doing the government’s bidding. But U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, in a first-of-its kind ruling, determined that the U.S. government can’t claim immunity when it comes to allegations that violate established international norms, like torturing prisoners, so CACI as a result can’t claim any derivative immunity.

Jurors next week are also expected to hear testimony from some of the soldiers who were convicted in military court of directly inflicting the abuse. Ivan Frederick, a former staff sergeant who was sentenced to more than eight years of confinement after a court-martial conviction on charges including assault, indecent acts and dereliction of duty, has provided deposition testimony that is expected to be played for the jury because he has refused to attend the trial voluntarily. The two sides have differed on whether his testimony establishes that soldiers were working under the direction of CACI interrogators.

The U.S. government may present a wild card in the trial, which is scheduled to last two weeks. Both the plaintiffs and CACI have complained that their cases have been hampered by government assertions that some evidence, if made public, would divulge state secrets that would harm national security.

Government lawyers will be at the trial ready to object if witnesses stray into territory they deem to be a state secret, they said at a pretrial hearing April 5.

Judge Brinkema, who has overseen complex national security cases many times, warned the government that if it asserts such a privilege at trial, “it better be a genuine state secret.”

Jason Lynch, a government lawyer, assured her, “We’re trying to stay out of the way as much as we possibly can.”

Of the three plaintiffs, only Al-Ejaili, who now lives in Sweden, is expected to testify in person. The other two will testify remotely from Iraq. Brinkema has ruled that the reasons they were sent to Abu Ghraib are irrelevant and won’t be given to jurors. All three were released after periods of detention ranging from two months to a year without ever being charged with a crime, according to court papers.

“Even if they were terrorists, it doesn’t excuse the conduct that’s alleged here,” she said at the April 5 hearing.
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President Joe Biden hosted Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Thursday, aiming to send a clear message to Beijing that it must stop behaving aggressively against its South China Sea neighbors. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports.
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As the Biden administration and the US Senate look to the US House to take up a bill for aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, experts say U.S. allies are not the only ones in need of the funding boost. As VOA Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb reports, some say the US defense industry desperately needs the boost as well.
Camera: Mary Cielak
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Reproductive rights are again at the forefront of the U.S. presidential campaign, as Republican candidate Donald Trump distances himself from an Arizona Supreme Court decision to ban most abortions in the state. VOA’s Scott Stearns has the story.
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The Midwestern state of Indiana aspires to become the next great technology center as the United States ramps up investment in domestic microchip development and manufacturing. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh has more from Indianapolis. Videographer: Kane Farabaugh, Adam Greenbaum
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Washington — A surge of confidence by supporters of the Islamic State terror group — reflected in a series of online threats against Europe combined with its deadly attack on a concert hall in Russia — is giving security officials in the United States cause for concern.

National security and law enforcement officials have long been worried about small groups or individuals drawing inspiration from terror plots around the world to conduct attacks in the U.S. But FBI Director Christopher Wray is set to tell lawmakers Thursday that something more worrisome may be in the works.

“Now increasingly concerning is the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland, akin to the ISIS-K attack we saw at the Russia Concert Hall a couple weeks ago,” Wray warns in prepared testimony, using an acronym for the Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate.

Just days ago, police agencies across Europe boosted security after media outlets linked to Islamic State, also known as IS or ISIS, posted calls to attack stadiums hosting Champions League soccer matches this week in Madrid, London and Paris.

The FBI warning also signals a potential shift in U.S. thinking about the possible reach of IS and its Afghan affiliate, which claimed responsibility for the March 22 attack on the Crocus City concert hall outside Moscow. The attack killed 145 people.

Following the incident, the Department of Homeland Security said it had no specific or credible intelligence to suggest IS had the ability to threaten the United States. 

And multiple U.S. military and intelligence officials have said that while IS has ambitions to carry out attacks, there have been no indications IS or any of its global affiliates has the capability to reach into the U.S. homeland.

The terror group is “struggling in many ways to mount a major capability that is relevant to the United States,” said National Counterterrorism Center Director Christine Abizaid recently. She spoke during an appearance on the In the Room podcast with terrorism analyst Peter Bergen.

Other warnings have focused on the threat to U.S. targets outside the United States.

“ISIS-Khorasan retains the capability and will to attack U.S. and Western interests abroad in as little as six months and with little to no warning,” General Michael “Erik” Kurilla, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, told a Senate committee hearing last month.

For now, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is urging Americans to be wary.

“The U.S. continues to be in a heightened threat environment,” a DHS spokesperson told VOA Wednesday in response to questions about the IS threats to various European venues.

“DHS continues to work with our partners to evaluate the threat environment, provide updates to the American public, and protect our homeland,” the spokesperson added. “We urge the public to stay vigilant and to promptly report suspicious activity to their local law enforcement.”  
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Washington — O.J. Simpson, the American football star and actor who was acquitted in a sensational 1995 trial of murdering his former wife but was found responsible for her death in a civil lawsuit and was later imprisoned for armed robbery and kidnapping, has died at the age of 76.

Simpson, cleared by a Los Angeles jury in what the U.S. media called “the trial of the century,” had died on Wednesday after a battle with cancer, his family posted on social media on Thursday.

Simpson avoided prison when he was found not guilty in the 1994 stabbing deaths of former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles. Simpson later served nine years in a Nevada prison after being convicted in 2008 on 12 counts of armed robbery and kidnapping two sports memorabilia dealers at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel.

Nicknamed “The Juice,” Simpson was one of the best and most popular athletes of the late 1960s and 1970s. He overcame childhood infirmity to become an electrifying running back at the University of Southern California and won the Heisman Trophy as college football’s top player. After a record-setting career in the NFL with the Buffalo Bills and San Francisco 49ers, he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Simpson parlayed his football stardom into a career as a sportscaster, advertising pitchman and Hollywood actor in films including the “Naked Gun” series.

All that changed after Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman were found fatally slashed in a bloody scene outside her Los Angeles home on June 12, 1994.

Simpson quickly emerged as a suspect. He was ordered to surrender to police but five days after the killings, he fled in his white Ford Bronco with a former teammate – carrying his passport and a disguise. A slow-speed chase through the Los Angeles area ended at Simpson’s mansion and he was later charged in the murders.

What ensued was one of the most notorious trials in 20th century America and a media circus. It had everything: a rich celebrity defendant; a Black man accused of killing his white former wife out of jealousy; a woman slain after divorcing a man who had beaten her; a “dream team” of pricy and charismatic defense lawyers; and a huge gaffe by prosecutors.

Simpson, who at the outset of the case declared himself “absolutely 100 percent not guilty,” waved at the jurors and mouthed the words “thank you” after the predominately Black panel of 10 women and two men acquitted him on Oct. 3, 1995.

Prosecutors argued that Simpson killed Nicole in a jealous fury, and they presented extensive blood, hair and fiber tests linking Simpson to the murders. The defense countered that the celebrity defendant was framed by racist white police.

The trial transfixed America. In the White House, President Bill Clinton left the Oval Office and watched the verdict on his secretary’s TV. Many Black Americans celebrated his acquittal, seeing Simpson as the victim of bigoted police. Many white Americans were appalled by his exoneration.

Simpson’s legal team included prominent criminal defense lawyers Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz and F. Lee Bailey, who often out-maneuvered the prosecution. Prosecutors committed a memorable blunder when they directed Simpson to try on a pair of blood-stained gloves found at the murder scene, confident they would fit perfectly and show he was the killer.

In a highly theatrical demonstration, Simpson struggled to put on the gloves and indicated to the jury they did not fit.

Delivering the trial’s most famous words, Cochran referred to the gloves in closing arguments to jurors with a rhyme: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Dershowitz later called the prosecution decision to ask Simpson to try on the gloves “the greatest legal blunder of the 20th century.”

“What this verdict tells you is how fame and money can buy the best defense, can take a case of overwhelming incriminating physical evidence and transform it into a case riddled with reasonable doubt,” Peter Arenella, a UCLA law professor, told the New York Times after the verdict.

“A predominantly African-American jury was more susceptible to claims of police incompetence and corruption and more willing to impose a higher burden of proof than normally required for proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” Arenella said.

After his acquittal, Simpson said that “I will pursue as my primary goal in life the killer or killers who slayed Nicole and Mr. Goldman… They are out there somewhere… I would not, could not and did not kill anyone.”

The Goldman and Brown families subsequently pursued a wrongful death lawsuit against Simpson in civil court. In 1997, a predominately white jury in Santa Monica, California, found Simpson liable for the two deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages.

“We finally have justice for Ron and Nicole,” Fred Goldman, Ron Goldman’s father, said after the verdict.

Simpson’s “dream team” did not represent him in the civil trial in which the burden of proof was lower than in a criminal trial – a “preponderance of the evidence” rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” New evidence also hurt Simpson, including photographs of him wearing the type of shoes that had left bloody footprints at the murder scene.

After the civil case, some of Simpson’s belongings, including memorabilia from his football days, were taken and auctioned off to help pay the damages he owed.

On Oct. 3, 2008, exactly 13 years after his acquittal in the murder trial, he was convicted by a Las Vegas jury on charges including kidnapping and armed robbery. These stemmed from a 2007 incident at a casino hotel in which Simpson and five men, at least two carrying guns, stole sports memorabilia worth thousands of dollars from two dealers.

Simpson said he was just trying to recover his own property but was sentenced to up to 33 years in prison.

“I didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Simpson, donning a blue prison jumpsuit with shackles on his legs and wrists, said at his sentencing. “I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong.”

Simpson was released on parole in 2017 and moved into a gated community in Las Vegas. He was granted early release from parole in 2021 due to good behavior at age 74.  

His life saga was recounted in the Oscar-winning 2016 documentary “O.J.: Made in America” as well as various TV dramatizations.

Orenthal James Simpson was born in San Francisco on July 9, 1947. He contracted rickets at age 2 and was forced to wear leg braces until he was 5 but recovered so thoroughly that he became one of the most celebrated football players of all time.

During nine seasons for the Buffalo Bills and two for the San Francisco 49ers, Simpson became one of the greatest ball carriers in NFL history. In 1973, he became the first NFL player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season. He retired in 1979.

Simpson also became an advertising pitchman, best known for years of TV commercials for Hertz rental cars. As an actor, he appeared in movies including “The Towering Inferno” (1974), “Capricorn One” (1977) and the “The Naked Gun” cop spoof films in 1988, 1991 and 1994, playing a witless police detective.

Simpson married his first wife, Marguerite, in 1967 and they had three children, including one who drowned in the family’s swimming pool at age 2 in 1979, the year the couple divorced.

Simpson met future wife Nicole Brown when she was a 17-year-old waitress and he was still married to Marguerite. Simpson and Brown married in 1985 and had two children. She later called police after incidents in which he struck her. Simpson pleaded no contest to spousal abuse charges in 1989.
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Beijing — China on Thursday announced rare sanctions against two U.S. defense companies over what it said is their support for arms sales to Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy Beijing claims as its own territory to be recovered by force if necessary.

The announcement freezes the assets of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and General Dynamics Land Systems held within China. It also bars the companies’ management from entering the country. 

Filings show General Dynamics operates a half-dozen Gulfstream and jet aviation services operations in China, which remains heavily reliant on foreign aerospace technology even as it attempts to build its own presence in the field. 

The company helps make the Abrams tank being purchased by Taiwan to replace outdated armor intended to deter or resist an invasion from China. 

General Atomics produces the Predator and Reaper drones used by the U.S. military. Chinese authorities did not go into details on the company’s alleged involvement with supplying arms to Taiwan. 

Beijing has long threatened such sanctions, but has rarely issued them as its economy reels from the COVID-19 pandemic, high unemployment and a sharp decline in foreign investment. 

“The continued U.S. arms sales to China’s Taiwan region seriously violate the one-China principle and the provisions of the three China-U.S. joint communiqués, interfere in China’s internal affairs, and undermine China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. It insists that the mainland and the island to which Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces fled amid civil war in 1949 remain part of a single Chinese nation. 

Sanctions were leveled under Beijing’s recently enacted Law of the People’s Republic of China on Countering Foreign Sanctions. 

General Dynamics fully owned entities are registered in Hong Kong, the southern Chinese semi-autonomous city over which Beijing has steadily been increasing its political and economic control to the point that it faces no vocal opposition and has seen its critics silenced, imprisoned or forced into exile. 

Despite their lack of formal diplomatic ties — a concession Washington made to Beijing when they established relations in 1979 — the U.S. remains Taiwan’s most important source of diplomatic support and supplier of military hardware from fighter jets to air defense systems. 

Taiwan has also been investing heavily in its own defense industry, producing sophisticated missiles and submarines. 

China had 14 warplanes and six navy ships operating around Taiwan on Wednesday and Thursday, with six of the aircraft crossing into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone — a tactic to test Taiwan’s defenses, wear down its capabilities and intimidate the population. 

So far, that has had little effect, with the vast majority of the island’s 23 million people opposing political unification with China.
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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — South Florida researchers trying to prevent predatory fish from devouring laboratory-grown coral are grasping at biodegradable straws in an effort to restore what some call the rainforest of the sea.

Scientists around the world have been working for years to address the decline of coral reef populations. Just last summer, reef rescue groups in South Florida and the Florida Keys were trying to save coral from rising ocean temperatures. Besides working to keep existing coral alive, researchers have also been growing new coral in labs and then placing them in the ocean.

But protecting the underwater ecosystem that maintains more than 25% of all marine species is not easy. Even more challenging is making sure that coral grown in a laboratory and placed into the ocean doesn’t become expensive fish food.

Marine researcher Kyle Pisano said one problem is that predators like parrot fish attempt to bite and destroy the newly transplanted coral in areas like South Florida, leaving them with less than a 40% survival rate. With projects calling for thousands of coral to be planted over the next year and tens of thousands of coral to be planted over the next decade, the losses add up when coral pieces can cost more than $100 each.

Pisano and his partner, Kirk Dotson, have developed the Coral Fort, claiming the small biodegradable cage that’s made in part with drinking straws boosts the survival rate of transplanted coral to over 90%.

“Parrot fish on the reef really, really enjoy biting a newly transplanted coral,” Pisano said. “They treat it kind of like popcorn.”

Fortunately the fish eventually lose interest in the coral as it matures, but scientists need to protect the coral in the meantime. Stainless steel and PVC pipe barriers have been set up around transplanted coral in the past, but those barriers needed to be cleaned of algae growth and eventually removed.

Pisano had the idea of creating a protective barrier that would eventually dissolve, eliminating the need to maintain or remove it. He began conducting offshore experiments with biodegradable coral cages as part of a master’s degree program at Nova Southeastern University. He used a substance called polyhydroxyalkanoate, a biopolymer derived from the fermentation of canola oil. PHA biodegrades in ocean, leaving only water and carbon dioxide. His findings were published last year.

The coral cage consists of a limestone disc surrounded by eight vertical phade brand drinking straws, made by Atlanta-based WinCup Inc. The device doesn’t have a top, Pisano said, because the juvenile coral needs sunlight and the parrot fish don’t generally want to position themselves facing downward to eat.

Dotson, a retired aerospace engineer, met Pisano through his professor at Nova Southeastern, and the two formed Reef Fortify Inc. to further develop and market the patent-pending Coral Fort. The first batch of cages were priced at $12 each, but Pisano and Dotson believe that could change as production scales up.

Early prototypes of the cage made from phade’s standard drinking straws were able to protect the coral for about two months before dissolving in the ocean, but that wasn’t quite long enough to outlast the interest of parrot fish. When Pisano and Dotson reached out to phade for help, the company assured them that it could make virtually any custom shape from its biodegradable PHA material.

“But it’s turning out that the boba straws, straight out of the box, work just fine,” Dotson said.

Boba straws are wider and thicker than normal drinking straws. They’re used for a tea-based drink that includes tapioca balls at the bottom of the cup. For Pisano and Dotson, that extra thickness means the straws last just long enough to protect the growing coral before harmlessly disappearing.

Reef Fortify is hoping to work with reef restoration projects all over the world. The Coral Forts already already being used by researchers at Nova Southeastern and the University of Miami, as well as Hawaii’s Division of Aquatic Resources.

Rich Karp, a coral researcher at the University of Miami, said they’ve been using the Coral Forts for about a month. He pointed out that doing any work underwater takes a great deal of time and effort, so having a protective cage that dissolves when it’s no longer needed basically cuts their work in half.

“Simply caging corals and then removing the cages later, that’s two times the amount of work, two times the amount of bottom time,” Karp said. “And it’s not really scalable.”

Experts say coral reefs are a significant part of the oceanic ecosystem. They occupy less than 1% of the ocean worldwide but provide food and shelter to nearly 25 percent of sea life. Coral reefs also help to protect humans and their homes along the coastline from storm surges during hurricanes.
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The United States and Japan celebrated their decades-long alliance Wednesday night as President Joe Biden hosts Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House for a state dinner. The Japanese leader’s visit marks a significant strengthening in defense and technology ties. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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the white house — Preparations take months. No detail is overlooked, for this is perhaps the most evolved form of diplomacy: the state dinner.

As first lady Jill Biden prepares Wednesday to host her fifth state dinner, for Japan’s leader, she made it clear that every aesthetic detail — from the crystal on the tables, to the food on the White House china, the decor in the State Dining Room, the music and the fashion — drips with diplomatic significance. This dinner, she said in her preview of the event, makes frequent reference to Washington’s famous cherry trees, a gift from Japan more than a century ago.

“As guests sit among the field of flowers, glass and silk butterflies from both our countries will dance over the tables, their graceful flight a reminder that as our nations navigate the winds of change, we do so together as partners in peace and prosperity,” she said.

The White House Historical Association lays out the high stakes, saying a state dinner “showcases global power and influence and sets the tone for the continuation of dialogue between the president and the visiting head of state.”

Roxanne Roberts, a style writer for The Washington Post who has covered state dinners for more than 30 years, likens the dinner to “the frosting on an already-baked cake.”

“The state dinner is the least important part of a state visit, but it’s the thing that gets the most attention,” she told VOA. “… And it sends a signal to not only the government of that country, but the people of that country that you’re important to us. We care about you.”

That’s reflected in the numbers. Records journalists requested from the State Department, which foots the bill, show that Obama-era dinners cost U.S. taxpayers more than $500,000 each. More recent dinner tabs have not been released.

The food!

Imagine, Roberts said, a lavish wedding.

“It’s as if,” she said, “There was a marriage between the two countries and this is the wedding reception.”

The most obvious manifestation of that is on the plate.

White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford said this menu took her “a couple of months” to design and field test. Over three courses, guests will take a tour through her Japan-influenced creations, starting with a nod to the beloved American twist on sushi, the California roll. Her version is rendered as a salad of house-cured salmon with avocado, grapefruit, watermelon radish, cucumber and shiso leaf fritters.

Beef has been a fixture of past Biden dinners – the exception, of course, being the menu for the 2023 state dinner for Indian leader Narendra Modi, a strict vegetarian. Guests at this dinner, accordingly, will move on to a dry-aged rib eye steak with blistered shishito pepper butter, a fricassee of fava beans, morels and cipollini mushrooms and a sesame oil sabayon.

And for dessert: a salted caramel pistachio cake with matcha tea ganache, cherry ice cream and a drizzle of raspberry coulis.

“We wanted to bring a little bit of the cherry blossoms that are here on the Tidal Basin right here to our dessert, in order for everyone to enjoy the cherry blossoms that we enjoy every year,” said White House executive pastry chef Susie Morrison.

The wines, as is now custom, will be American.

“The days when only French wines were served at state dinners are long gone,” Roberts said. “Primarily because there were a lot of American vineyards who basically said, ‘Whoa, what about us? We’re cool.'”

The fripperies!

A temporary water feature in the White House’s Cross Hall will feature live koi — “symbols of friendship, peace, luck and perseverance,” Biden said.

Paul Simon will perform for guests. And the first couples are exchanging gifts that include a three-legged black walnut table made by a Japanese-American-owned company, a set of records autographed by American singer Billy Joel, and, as a personal touch, “a framed painting of the Yoshino cherry tree that she planted with Mrs. Kishida on the South Lawn last spring.”

The fashion!

Japan’s first lady, Yuko Kishida, garnered rave reviews for her choice to don India’s most culturally and technically fraught of garments, the sari, by draping and meticulously pleating five meters of green Kanjeevaram silk around her body for a summit of global leaders last year in New Delhi.

As she landed in Washington for her first state visit on Tuesday — but her second trip to meet the Bidens — she greeted the couple in a flowing dress of autumn-toned watercolor florals. President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida wore suits, while the U.S. first lady donned a black dress with a deep keyhole neckline and razor-sharp tailoring.

These decisions, Roberts said, are “more than just going off to the store and going, ‘Oh, that’s pretty. I think I’ll wear that.'”

And the pressure, she said, falls disproportionately on the leaders’ spouses, who are traditionally women.

“They’re ambassadors for the clothing that they wear, the look that they have,” she said. “And so all of those, all of those elements play into all of these choices. You know, the guys have it easy – just throw on the tuxedo.”

… And finally, the faux pas!

What could possibly go wrong?

Surprisingly, not a lot, Roberts said, adding, “The truth of the matter is that these state dinners tend to go off without a hitch, because the planning is done so well.”

But, she said, mistakes sometimes happen.

She described a long-ago dinner for Mexico’s leader that featured “an elaborate desert that had a guy with a sombrero sleeping as a decorative piece.”

“It was meant to be charming and kind of fun, and it just hit wrong,” she said.

Another memorable slip, she said, was at a 2009 state dinner for India, where two uninvited reality stars crashed the event.

“The fact that two people were able to get in who were not supposed to be there was, in fact, a scandal,” she said.

The East Wing, in its preview, chose to focus instead on the positive, with White House social secretary Carlos Elizondo homing in on the theme while raising the stakes of this impossibly complex event.

“That’s what we hope to capture,” he said. “…the magic of spring in our lasting friendship, each detail chosen to create a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
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