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«За кожен «об’єкт» ворожі спецслужби РФ обіцяли грошову винагороду, яку юнак так і не отримав»
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CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — H5N1 bird flu had been confirmed in a pig in a backyard farm in Oregon, the first detection of the virus in swine in the country, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Wednesday.

Pigs represent a particular concern for the spread of bird flu because they can become co-infected with bird and human viruses, which could swap genes to form a new, more dangerous virus that can more easily infect humans.

The USDA said there is no risk to the nation’s pork supply from the Oregon case and that the risk to the public from bird flu remains low.

Pigs were the source of the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009-2010, and have been implicated as the source of others, said Richard Webby, a St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital virologist who studies flu in animals and birds for the World Health Organization.

The finding of the virus in a small farm makes the pig infection less of a concern than if it had been detected in a commercial pig farm, he said.

“I think it probably doesn’t increase the risk much, but surely, if this virus starts transmitting in pigs, that absolutely increases the risk,” he said.

The Oregon farm has been quarantined, and other animals there, including sheep and goats, are under surveillance, the USDA said.

Pigs and poultry on the farm were culled to prevent the spread of the virus and enable additional testing of the swine, the USDA said. Tests are still pending for two of the pigs, the agency said.

The swine case originated with wild birds and not from a poultry or dairy farm, a USDA spokesperson said. Wild bird migration has carried bird flu to poultry flocks and cattle herds.

The case was one factor that prompted the USDA to broaden its bird flu surveillance to include nationwide bulk milk testing, which the agency announced on Wednesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told Reuters in an interview.

“While it’s a different variation of the virus and it is tied to wild birds, it is a factor to make sure that we understand and appreciate exactly where the virus is in dairy and in bovine,” he said.

The pigs on the Oregon farm were not intended for the commercial food supply, the USDA said.

The agency said that poultry and swine on the backyard farm shared water sources, housing and equipment, which have all served as pathways for transmitting the virus between animals in other states.

The detection is a warning for pig farmers to be on the lookout for further infections, said Marie Culhane, a professor of veterinary population medicine at the University of Minnesota who has researched flu viruses in swine.

“People need to start increasing their plans to deal with it if it should happen in another herd and another herd,” Culhane said. “Pigs are just really good at picking up influenza viruses.”

This year, 36 people have tested positive for bird flu as the virus has spread to nearly 400 dairy herds. All but one of the people were farm workers who had known contact with infected animals.

Since 2022, the virus has wiped out more than 100 million poultry birds in the nation’s worst-ever bird flu outbreak.
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У місті все залишається 11900 жителів
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Полухін зазначив, що людей на вулицях майже немає
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WASHINGTON — Reports that billionaire Elon Musk has been talking on a consistent basis with Russian President Vladimir Putin are still reverberating among current and former U.S. officials, almost a week after news of the conversations first surfaced.

Musk, who owns electric car maker Tesla and the X social media platform, also owns SpaceX, a commercial spaceflight company that has numerous contracts with the U.S. government, doing work for the Department of Defense and U.S. space agency NASA.

Some of that work is so sensitive that the United States has given Musk high-level security clearances due to his knowledge of the programs, raising concerns among some that top secret U.S. information and capabilities could be at risk.

According to current and former U.S., European and Russian officials who spoke to The Wall Street Journal, such concerns may be warranted.

During one conversation, those officials said, Putin allegedly asked Musk not to activate Starlink, a SpaceX subsidiary that provides satellite internet services, over Taiwan as a favor to China.

“I think it should be investigated,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson told the Semafor World Economy Summit on Friday, a day after The Journal published its report.

“I don’t know that that story is true,” Nelson said, adding, if it is, “I think that would be concerning, particularly for NASA, for the Department of Defense, for some of the intelligence agencies.”

Russia and Musk deny frequent calls

Musk has previously denied frequent calls with Putin. In 2022, Musk said he had spoken to the Russian leader just once, but The Journal said there have been repeated conversations since then.

Musk has not commented or responded to the Journal article on X. Russia has also denied there have been frequent conversations between Putin and Musk.

The Pentagon has so far declined to refute or confirm the allegations.

“We have seen the reporting from The Wall Street Journal but cannot corroborate the veracity of those reports,” Defense Department spokesperson Sue Gough told VOA in an email late Friday.

“[We] would refer you to Mr. Musk to speak to his private communications,” Gough said, adding that, by law, the department does not comment on the details or status of anyone’s security clearance.

“We expect everyone who has been granted a security clearance, including contractors, to follow the prescribed procedures for reporting foreign contacts,” she said.

Former U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to VOA said the reported conversations, since confirmed by other U.S. news organizations citing their own confidential sources, raise significant questions.

“There is no doubt that Russia is cultivating many possible channels of influence in the United States and other Western countries,” said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA officer who now teaches at Georgetown University.

“Russia would regard a wealthy and influential business mogul such as Musk as potentially a highly useful channel and thus a relationship worth nurturing,” he said.

Larry Pfeiffer, a former CIA chief of staff and former senior director of the White House Situation Room, is also wary.

“It does get the spider-sense tingling,” he told VOA.

“If the reports of Musk’s repeated conversations with Vladimir Putin are true, I would definitely have some concerns,” Pfeiffer said. “Russia under Putin will cultivate support wherever it can be bought, cajoled or coerced.

“Putin has equal opportunity security services that will take advantage of any opportunity to get foreign business leaders to influence their governments to align with Russian interests,” he said.

Concerns don’t equal wrongdoing

Former officials like Pillar and Pfeiffer, though, caution there is a difference between concerns and actual wrongdoing.

Other former officials note that even if Musk engaged in conversations that could make some in government uncomfortable, just having those conversations is not necessarily illegal.

“Americans are allowed to talk to essentially whomever they want,” said a former national security prosecutor, who spoke to VOA on the condition of anonymity. “There’s no inherent limitation.”

And in the case of a high-profile individual who oversees companies with global reach, conversations with foreign officials could be unavoidable.

“For a businessman, there may be commercially legitimate reasons to have those communications,” the former prosecutor said. “It’s when a businessman is having those communications, perhaps for political reasons or even proto-diplomatic reasons, that it gets probably more concerning from a counterintelligence perspective.”

There also may not be any legal issues with a potential failure by someone like Musk to voluntarily disclose conversations with foreign leaders. Hiding such conversations when asked about them, however, could wade into criminal territory.

Still, given the value the U.S. gets from Musk’s companies, U.S. officials may feel like they have little recourse.

“It is one of those unfair things in life that if the government has a unique need for you, you can get away with more and still get a security clearance,” the former prosecutor said. “Someone who has unique value is going to get more accommodation.”
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In the U.S. presidential campaign, there is little to agree on between supporters of Kamala Harris and supporters of Donald Trump. From California, Genia Dulot brings us the story of two people selling rival campaign merchandise who are trying to lower the political temperature of their customers.
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У листі з погрозами щодо «мінувань» згадувалися журналістки Радіо Свобода Ірина Сисак та Валерія Єгошина, а також фрілансерка Юлія Химерик
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За даними служби, він передавав розробки генеральному директору одного із російських машинобудівних заводів
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Washington — The U.S. economy grew at a healthy 2.8% annual rate from July through September, with consumers helping drive growth despite the weight of still-high interest rates. 

Wednesday’s report from the Commerce Department said the gross domestic product — the economy’s total output of goods and services — did slow slightly from its 3% growth rate in the April-June quarter. But the latest figures still reflect surprising durability just as Americans assess the state of the economy in the final stretch of the presidential race. 

Consumer spending, which accounts for about 70% of U.S. economic activity, accelerated to a 3.7% annual pace last quarter, up from 2.8% in the April-June period. Exports also contributed to the third quarter’s growth, increasing at an 8.9% rate. 

On the other hand, growth in business investment slowed sharply on a drop in investment in housing and in nonresidential buildings such as offices and warehouses. But spending on equipment surged. 

The report is the first of three estimates the government will make of GDP growth for the third quarter of the year. The U.S. economy has continued to expand in the face of the much higher borrowing rates the Federal Reserve imposed in 2022 and 2023 in its drive to curb inflation. Despite widespread predictions that the economy would succumb to a recession, it has kept growing, with employers still hiring and consumers still spending. 

In a sign that the nation’s households, whose purchases drive most of the economy, will continue spending, the Conference Board said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index posted its biggest monthly gain since March 2021. The proportion of consumers who expect a recession in the next 12 months dropped to its lowest point since the board first posed that question in July 2022. 

At the same time, the nation’s once-sizzling job market has lost some momentum. On Tuesday, the government reported that the number of job openings in the United States fell in September to its lowest level since January 2021. And employers have added an average of 200,000 jobs a month so far this year — a healthy number but down from a record 604,000 in 2021 as the economy rebounded from the pandemic recession, 377,000 in 2022 and 251,000 in 2023. 

On Friday, the Labor Department is expected to report that the economy added 120,000 jobs in October. That gain, though, will probably have been significantly held down by the effects of Hurricanes Helene and Milton and by a strike at Boeing, the aviation giant, all of which temporarily knocked thousands of people off payrolls. 

Wednesday’s report contained some encouraging news on inflation. The Fed’s favored inflation gauge — called the personal consumption expenditures index, or PCE — rose at just a 1.5% annual pace last quarter, down from 2.5% in the second quarter and the lowest figure in more than four years. Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core PCE inflation was 2.2%, down from 2.8% in the April-June quarter. 

Despite the continued progress on inflation, average prices still far exceed their pre-pandemic levels, which has exasperated many Americans and posed a challenge to Vice President Kamala Harris’ prospects in her race against former President Donald Trump. Most mainstream economists have suggested, though, that Trump’s policy proposals, unlike Harris’, would worsen inflation. 

At its most recent meeting last month, the Fed was satisfied enough with its progress against inflation — and concerned enough by the slowing job market — to slash its benchmark rate by a hefty half percentage point, its first and largest rate cut in more than four years. When it meets next week, the Fed is expected to announce another rate cut, this one by a more typical quarter-point. 

The central bank’s policymakers have also signaled that they expect to cut their key rate again at their final two meetings this year, in November and December. And they envision four more rate cuts in 2025 and two in 2026. The cumulative result of the Fed’s rate cuts, over time, will likely be lower borrowing rates for consumers and businesses. 
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New York — On a drizzly day in New York’s Chinatown, journalist April Xu suggested stopping at a bakery for a snack. 

“But not Fay Da,” she said, referring to a bakery on the nearby corner. 

Xu doesn’t go to Fay Da Bakery anymore. Not since she reported on how New York’s largest Chinese bakery chain had allegedly stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages from its employees. 

Many people feel connected to the famous bakery, Xu told VOA. “When they saw the news, they were shocked,” she said. 

In April, the bakery agreed to a $940,000 settlement to resolve claims by former and current employees.

It was a big story — the kind that the nonprofit media outlet Documented, where she works, likes to tell. Under-covered stories on issues such as wage theft and housing are the focus of this immigrant-focused news outlet.

With immigration a polarizing issue in the U.S. presidential election, the news outlet finds itself balancing its typical coverage with debunking false claims. As racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric is pushed by the far-right, Documented’s team sees their local coverage of immigration as crucial.

The inspiration for Documented came from dissatisfaction with how mainstream media often covered immigration, said co-founder Mazin Sidahmed.

Born in Sudan, Sidahmed worked for The Guardian in New York and other media before helping set up his own outlet in 2018.

“No one was really covering how those big federal policy shifts were playing out at the local level in big cities like New York, where most immigrants actually live,” Sidahmed told VOA at the outlet’s office in the Financial District. 

“There was a real hole and a need for a site that was covering how federal immigration policy was playing out locally,” he said.

A commitment to meeting the audience’s needs has been central to Documented’s success, Sidahmed said. 

Early on, the outlet launched a needs assessment focused on Spanish-speaking audiences. It was hugely successful in figuring out how to best serve that community, according to Sidahmed.

They found that respondents felt that they were typically portrayed in the media as either criminals or victims, and they wanted news that would help them navigate government resources. 

When Documented learned that the community got most of its news from WhatsApp groups, it started a Spanish-language news service on the app.

“Over the past five years, it has really grown into an engine that’s driving a lot of our most powerful journalism,” Sidahmed said. “But getting it to that point was incredibly hard and challenging, and it involved building a lot of trust.” 

In addition to English and Spanish, Documented publishes in Mandarin and Haitian Creole. To better serve the Chinese community, Documented operates a news account on WeChat. For the Caribbean community, it uses the platform NextDoor. 

“We feel that we can’t ask people to go to our website to consume news every day. We should deliver the news to them,” Xu said.

Platforms like WhatsApp and WeChat are two-way streets. Documented delivers news, and audiences can directly contact reporters with story tips or questions. 

That way, said Sidahmed, Documented can produce content that is in service of their needs.

It also publishes content that helps audiences navigate government bureaucracy or access resources. 

“I don’t think there’s any mainstream news outlet that is really working with immigrants directly in that way, to serve them, as opposed to just covering them,” said Fisayo Okare. Originally from Nigeria, she writes the outlet’s newsletter.

In 2022, New York City was home to about 3.1 million immigrants — accounting for 38% of the city’s total population — according to a report from the mayor’s office. 

Many of Documented’s staffers count themselves among that population. Okare thinks their work is enhanced by the team’s background.

“As an immigrant myself, I tend to understand what other immigrants are going through,” she said. “We pride ourselves on not just writing about immigrants but writing for them.” 

More recently, that has included correcting baseless claims about illegal immigration, including conspiracy theories that candidate Donald Trump repeated about Haitians in Ohio.

“Our role during this time has been to put out the right information whenever just completely wrong or inaccurate information is shared,” Okare said. 

Documented has also bucked trends in the U.S., where the local news industry has been struggling for years.

Over the past two decades, the U.S. has lost more than one-third of its newspapers, according to a 2024 report by Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. Almost 55 million people across the country have limited to no access to local news, the report found. 

“When a city loses a local news institution, it has all of these other catastrophic effects on the city. People start to see their local issues in this nationalized lens and don’t feel as tethered and connected to their communities,” Sidahmed said.

The journalist is optimistic about the future. Documented is aiming to become the leading news source for the communities it is covering in New York, he said. 

“We see an opportunity to rebuild local news and rewrite that contract between local news outlets and the communities that have typically had bad relationships with local news,” he said. 
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WASHINGTON — Powered by consumer spending, the U.S. economy likely kept expanding at a healthy pace from July through September despite the pressure of still-high interest rates.

The Commerce Department is expected to report Wednesday that the gross domestic product — the economy’s total output of goods and services — grew at a 2.6% annual pace last quarter, according to a survey of forecasters by the data firm FactSet. That would be down from a 3% annual rate in the April-June period. But it would still amount to a solid pace as Americans ponder the state of the economy in the final stretch of the presidential race.

Wednesday’s report is the first of three estimates the government will make of GDP growth for the third quarter of the year. The U.S. economy, the world’s biggest, has shown surprising resilience in the face of the much higher borrowing rates the Federal Reserve imposed in 2022 and 2023 in its drive to curb inflation. Despite widespread predictions that the economy would succumb to a recession, it has kept growing, with employers still hiring and consumers still spending.

In a sign that the nation’s households, whose purchases drive most of the economy, will continue spending, the Conference Board said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index posted its biggest monthly gain since March 2021. The proportion of consumers who expect a recession in the next 12 months dropped to its lowest point since the board first posed that question in July 2022.

At the same time, the nation’s once-sizzling job market has lost some momentum. On Tuesday, the government reported that the number of job openings in the United States fell in September to its lowest level since January 2021. And employers have added an average of 200,000 jobs a month so far this year — a healthy number but down from a record 604,000 in 2021 as the economy rebounded from the pandemic recession, 377,000 in 2022 and 251,000 in 2023.

On Friday, the Labor Department is expected to report that the economy added 120,000 jobs in October. That gain, though, will probably have been significantly held down by the effects of Hurricanes Helene and Milton and by a strike at Boeing, the aviation giant, all of which temporarily knocked thousands of people off payrolls.

At its most recent meeting last month, the Fed was satisfied enough with its progress against inflation — and concerned enough by the slowing job market — to slash its benchmark rate by a hefty half percentage point, its first and largest rate cut in more than four years. When it meets next week, the Fed is expected to announce another rate cut, this one by a more typical quarter-point.

The policymakers have also signaled that they expect to cut their key rate again at their final two meetings this year, in November and December. And they envision four more rate cuts in 2025 and two in 2026. The cumulative result of the Fed’s rate cuts, over time, will likely be lower borrowing rates for consumers and businesses.

Inflation, which reached a four-decade high of 9.1% in June 2022, has tumbled to 2.4%, barely above the Fed’s 2% target. But average prices still far exceed their pre-pandemic levels, which has exasperated many Americans and posed a challenge to Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential prospects in her race against former President Donald Trump.

Most mainstream economists have suggested, though, that Trump’s policy proposals, unlike Harris’, would worsen inflation.

 
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«Спальники, каремати, фляги та інші речі залишатимуться у бійців. Їм більше не доведеться думати про їх здачу»
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У регіоні зафіксували 31 вибух у Хотінській, Юнаківській, Миропільській, Андріяшівській громаді
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CAMP VERDE, Ariz. — U.S. forest managers have finalized a land exchange with the Yavapai-Apache Nation that has been decades in the making and will significantly expand the size of the tribe’s reservation in Arizona’s Verde Valley, tribal leaders announced Tuesday.

As part of the arrangement, six parcels of private land acquired over the years by the tribe will be traded to the U.S. Forest Service in exchange for the tribe gaining ownership of 12.95 square kilometers of national forest land that is part of the tribe’s ancestral homelands. The tribe will host a signing ceremony next week to celebrate the exchange, which was first proposed in 1996.

“This is a critical step in our history and vital to the nation’s cultural and economic recovery and future prosperity,” Yavapai-Apache Chairwoman Tanya Lewis said in a post on the tribe’s website.

Prescott National Forest Supervisor Sarah Clawson said in a statement that there had been many delays and changes to the proposal over the years, but the tribe and the Forest Service never lost sight of developing an agreement that would benefit both public and tribal lands.

The federal government has made strides over recent years to protect more lands held sacred by Native American tribes, to develop more arrangements for incorporating Indigenous knowledge into management of public lands and to streamline regulations for putting land into trust for tribes.

The Yavapai-Apache Nation is made up of two distinct groups of people — the Wipuhk’a’bah and the Dil’zhe’e. Their homelands spanned more than 41,440 square kilometers of what is now central Arizona. After the discovery of gold in the 1860s near Prescott, the federal government carved out only a fraction to establish a reservation. The inhabitants eventually were forced from the land, and it wasn’t until the early 1900s that they were able to resettle a tiny portion of the area.

In the Verde Valley, the Yavapai-Apache Nation’s reservation lands are currently comprised of less than 7.77 square kilometers near Camp Verde. The small land base hasn’t been enough to develop economic opportunities or to meet housing needs, Lewis said, pointing to dozens of families who are on a waiting list for new homes.

Lewis said that in acknowledgment of the past removal of the Yavapai-Apache people from their homelands, the preamble to the tribal constitution recognizes that land acquisition is among the Yavapai-Apache Nation’s responsibilities.

Aside from growing the reservation, the exchange will bolster efforts by federal land managers to protect the headwaters of the Verde River and ensure the historic Yavapai Ranch is not sold for development. The agreement also will improve recreational access to portions of four national forests in Arizona.
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The outcome of the U.S. election and the possible changes in Washington’s foreign policy are of special significance to the 3 million American expatriates eligible to vote in next week’s U.S. presidential elections. In few places is that outcome more tangible than in Ukraine, where a few thousand Americans have, for various reasons, chosen to live after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. Lesia Bakalets speaks to several expatriates in Ukraine and sends this report from Kyiv.
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