US, Vietnamese leaders meet, seek deeper ties

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Washington — U.S. President Joe Biden says Washington is committed to a strong, prosperous, resilient, and independent Vietnam and discussed a broad range of ways the two countries can cooperate during a meeting with this Vietnamese counterpart, To Lam.

Since coming to office in May, Vietnam’s new president has been actively reaching out, meeting with the leaders of China and Russia. Washington is seeking to counter those advances and strengthen ties with Hanoi as well.

Lam, who is also head of the ruling Communist Party, met with Biden on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York Wednesday. According to a White House statement, the two talked about “building secure and resilient semiconductor supply chains” and strengthening their tech relationship as well as progress in cybersecurity cooperation and Vietnam’s efforts to increase its digital connectivity.

Vietnam is looking to the United States and China to triple its number of subsea cables by 2030. Biden and Lam also focused on ways the two could deepen a comprehensive strategic partnership they entered last year.

Biden said Washington wants to cooperate with Vietnam to uphold a free and open Indo-Pacific and discussed the importance of maintaining peace and stability — especially in the South China Sea, according to the White House statement.

During the meeting, which lasted a little more than an hour, Lam assured Biden that the United States is “a partner of strategic importance,” while Biden told Lam that Vietnam is “a top partner of the U.S. in the region,” Vietnam News Agency reported.

Analysts say that while the meeting did not take place in the White House, it did highlight the high level of trust between Hanoi and Washington and the growing importance of bilateral ties.

Nguyen Hong Hai, a lecturer of international relations at Hanoi-based VinUni, told VOA in an email that the way Washington and Hanoi are talking about one another and the high importance they attach to bilateral relations is significant. It is also a sign of deepening trust, Hai added.

“Vietnam falls short of a U.S. ally. But as a partner, it is a top of its kind,” Hai said.

Hai said that Hanoi fits perfectly into Washington’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy since it supports the rules-based order and is playing an increasingly bigger role in the U.S.-led global supply chain. On the other hand, Hanoi needs Washington as a regional security guarantor while its goal of becoming a developed economy with high income by 2045 is contingent on access to the U.S. market as well as its capital and technology.

Ha Hoang Hop, chair of the Hanoi-based Think Tank Viet Know, said it was significant that both leaders reaffirmed the importance of their comprehensive strategic partnership. So, too, was Biden’s commitment to support Vietnam’s tech-driven growth and encouragement for Hanoi to play an active role in regional security.

“The momentum of U.S.-Vietnam comprehensive strategic partnership will be maintained far beyond Biden’s and To Lam’s presidencies no matter who will succeed Biden next year or who will take the helm of the Vietnamese Communist Party in 2026,” Hop told VOA in an email.

The two countries recently marked the first anniversary of the comprehensive strategic partnership Biden signed with Nguyen Phu Trong, Lam’s predecessor, during a visit to Hanoi last year.

At that time, Lam was the country’s security czar. He became president following the forced resignation of President Vo Van Thuong in March and replaced Nguyen Phu Trong as party chief after Trong unexpectedly died in late July.

Lam’s first foreign trip after becoming Vietnam’s top leader took him to Beijing in August, when he and Chinese President Xi Jinping reaffirmed their commitment to bilateral ties. He also hosted Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Hanoi in late June.

Although readouts of Wednesday’s meeting gave no indication that China was discussed, Beijing was watching the meeting closely, Hai said.

China became Vietnam’s first comprehensive strategic partner in 2008, and the two countries agreed late last year to build what they call a “community of shared future” following the upgrade in U.S.-Vietnam ties.

“Any progress in U.S.-Vietnam ties is unwelcome in Beijing. However, Bejing should understand that Hanoi’s deepening ties with the U.S. is not targeted at any country but just serves its own security,” Hai said.

Think Tank Viet Know’s Ha Hoang Hop said that Beijing is “fully aware of Hanoi’s strategic position in the Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy” and is trying to capitalize on this to serve its interests.

“For its part, Hanoi is proactively navigating between the two superpowers,” he said.
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Міноборони пропонує дозволити ставати на військовий облік онлайн без медогляду

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Планується ліквідувати комісії для взяття на такий облік та скасувати проходження медичного огляду під час взяття громадян на військовий облік
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FBI seizes New York City mayor’s phone ahead of expected unsealing of indictment

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New York — FBI agents entered the official residence of New York City Mayor Eric Adams and seized his phone early Thursday morning, hours before an indictment detailing criminal charges against the Democrat was expected to be made public.

Adams was indicted by a grand jury on federal criminal charges that remain sealed, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

“Federal agents appeared this morning at Gracie Mansion in an effort to create a spectacle (again) and take Mayor Adams phone (again),” Adams’ lawyer, Alex Spiro, said in a statement, adding that the mayor had not been arrested. “They send a dozen agents to pick up a phone when we would have happily turned it in.”

Federal law enforcement agents were seen entering the mayor’s Manhattan residence at dawn Wednesday, with several vehicles bearing federal law enforcement placards parked outside.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan has declined to comment on the investigation. An FBI spokesperson declined to comment. A spokesperson for the mayor did not immediately respond to questions Thursday morning.

In a video speech released Wednesday night, Adams vowed to fight any charges against him, claiming he had been made a “target” in a case “based on lies.”

“I will fight these injustices with every ounce of my strength and my spirit,” he said.

It was not immediately clear what laws Adams is accused of breaking or when he might have to appear in court.

The indictment caps off an extraordinary few weeks in New York City, as federal investigators have homed in on members of Adams’ inner circle, producing a drumbeat of raids, subpoenas and high-level resignations.

Federal prosecutors are believed to be leading multiple, separate inquiries involving Adams and his senior aides, relatives of those aides, campaign fundraising and possible influence peddling of the police and fire departments.

In the last two weeks alone, the city’s police commissioner and head of the school’s system have announced their resignations.

FBI agents had seized Adams’ electronic devices nearly a year ago as part of an investigation focused, at least partly, on campaign contributions and Adams’ interactions with the Turkish government. Because the charges were sealed, it was unknown whether they dealt with those same matters.

In early September, federal investigators seized devices from his police commissioner, schools chancellor, two deputy mayors and other trusted confidantes both in and out of City Hall.

All have denied wrongdoing.
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Oxfam: ‘Oligarchy’ of super-rich undermining cooperation to tackle poverty, climate change

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London — As world leaders gather for the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, the charity Oxfam says they are being undermined by what it calls a “global oligarchy” of the super-rich who exert considerable control over the global economy – and who it blames for exacerbating problems like extreme inequality and climate change.  

“Today, the world’s richest 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity. The immense concentration of wealth, driven significantly by increased monopolistic corporate power, has allowed large corporations and the ultrarich who exercise control over them to use their vast resources to shape global rules in their favor, often at the expense of everyone else,” the Oxfam report says.

The charity says international cooperation on issues like climate change and poverty is failing due to extreme economic inequality.

“The wealth of the world’s five richest men has doubled since the start of this decade. And nearly five billion people have got poorer,” said Nabil Ahmed, the director of economic and racial justice at Oxfam America, in an interview with VOA.

Fair taxes

The report urges fairer taxation of large corporations and the ultra-wealthy.

“We live in a world in which mega-corporations… are paying next to or little to no tax basically. Not like the small businesses, not like the rest of us,” Ahmed said.

“It’s such a phenomenal lost opportunity because we know governments, rich and poor, across the world need to claw back these revenues to be able to invest in their people, to be able to meet their rights,” he added.

Oxfam praises a campaign led by Brazil, which currently holds the presidency of the G20, to impose a 2% minimum tax on the world’s richest billionaires. Brazil’s government claims it would raise up to $250 billion from about 3,000 individuals, to pay for healthcare, education and tackling climate change.  

A report by the French economist Gabriel Zucman, commissioned by Brazil, suggests billionaires currently pay the equivalent of 0.3% of their wealth in taxes.

The plan is backed by other members including South Africa, Spain and France. However, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen spoke against the move at a G20 meeting in July.  

“Tax policy is very difficult to coordinate globally and we don’t see a need or really think it’s desirable to try to negotiate a global agreement on that. We think that all countries should make sure that their taxation systems are fair and progressive,” Yellen told reporters.

Private debt

Oxfam says tax revenues in the global south meanwhile are increasingly spent on servicing debt to private creditors like banks and hedge funds.

“This shift has exacerbated the debt crisis, further entrenching “debtocracy.” Compared with official creditors, private entities issue debt with shorter maturities and higher, more volatile interest rates,” the Oxfam report says.

Vaccines

The charity also accuses large pharmaceutical companies of shaping rules over intellectual property rights to benefit their shareholders. Oxfam says that during the COVID-19 pandemic, this meant poorer nations struggled to access coronavirus vaccines, such as the mRNA vaccine made by Pfizer.

“Its negative impacts are most harshly felt by countries in the Global South, which bear the brunt of “artificial rationing,” where pharmaceutical corporations keep drug costs — and thus profits — high by limiting generic manufacturing, while simultaneously failing to invest in research and development for priority diseases in the Global South deemed less profitable,” Oxfam said.

Responding to VOA, Pfizer highlighted an open letter written by the company’s chairman Albert Bourla in 2021, in which he said the company had created a tiered pricing structure and had offered its mRNA coronavirus vaccine at cost price or for free to poorer nations. However, Bourla said that many richer countries moved faster to purchase the available doses.

“When we developed our tiered pricing policy, we reached out to all nations asking them to place orders so we could allocate doses for them. In reality, the high-income countries reserved most of the doses,” Bourla wrote.

Pfizer’s chairman also warned that losing intellectual property rights could “disincentivize” anyone else from taking a big financial risk in developing such vaccines, a view echoed by other large pharmaceutical giants.
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Harris promises tax breaks, investments for US manufacturers

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PITTSBURGH — U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said on Wednesday she would offer tax credits to domestic manufacturers and invest in sectors that will “define the next century,” as she detailed her economic plan to boost the U.S. middle class.

Speaking at the Economic Club of Pittsburgh in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, the Democratic candidate in the November 5 presidential election said she would give tax credits to U.S. manufacturers for retooling or rebuilding existing factories and expanding “good union jobs,” and double the number of registered apprenticeships during her first term.

Harris also promised new investments in industries like bio-manufacturing, aerospace, artificial intelligence and clean energy.

Harris’ speech, which lasted just under 40 minutes, did not detail how these policies would work. She highlighted her upbringing by a single mother, in contrast with former President Donald Trump, the wealthy son of a New York real estate developer.

“I have pledged that building a strong middle class will be the defining goal of my presidency,” Harris said, adding that she sees the election as a moment of choice between two “fundamentally different” visions of the U.S. economy held by her and her Republican opponent, Trump.

The vice president and Trump are focusing their campaign messaging on the economy, which Reuters/Ipsos polling shows is voters’ top concern, as the election approaches.

The divide between rich and poor has grown in recent decades. The share of American households in the middle class, defined as those with two-thirds to double that of median household income, has dropped from around 62% in 1970 to 51% in 2023, Pew Research shows. These households’ income has also not grown as fast as those in the top tier.

Harris said she was committed to working with the private sector and entrepreneurs to help grow the middle class. She told the audience that she is “a capitalist” who believes in “free and fair markets,” and described her policies as pragmatic rather than rooted in ideology.

Harris in recent months has blunted Trump’s advantage on the economy, with a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Tuesday showing the Republican candidate with a marginal advantage of 2 percentage points on “the economy, unemployment and jobs,” down from an 11-point lead in late July.

Trump discussed his economic plan in North Carolina on Wednesday and said Harris’ role as vice president gave her the chance now to improve the economic record of the Biden administration.

“Families are suffering now. So if she has a plan, she should stop grandstanding and do it,” he said. While Trump has proposed across-the-board tariffs on foreign-made goods — a proposal backed by a slim majority of voters — Harris is focusing on providing incentives for businesses to keep their operations in the U.S.

Boosting American manufacturing in industries such as semiconductors and bringing back jobs that have moved overseas in recent decades have also been major goals for Biden. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act — all passed in 2021 and 2022 — fund a range of subsidies and tax incentives that encourage companies to place projects in disadvantaged regions.
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US House Speaker wants Ukraine’s ambassador fired over Zelenskyy ammunition plant visit

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Washington — The Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives demanded on Wednesday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fire his ambassador to the United States over Zelenskyy’s trip this week to a factory in Pennsylvania.

“I demand that you immediately fire Ukraine’s Ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova,” Speaker Mike Johnson wrote in a letter to Zelenskyy.

Johnson released the letter a day before Zelenskyy was due to visit the U.S. Capitol in Washington for meetings with lawmakers. Johnson was not expected to meet with the Ukrainian leader.

The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some Republicans have been fuming over Zelenskyy’s visit earlier in his weeklong trip to the United States to an ammunition plant in President Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is one of the swing states seen as crucial to victory in the November 5 presidential election.

During the trip, Zelenskyy also met with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Senator Bob Casey and U.S. Representative Matt Cartwright, who are all Democrats.

Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, is the Democratic candidate running against Republican former President Donald Trump in the race for the White House.

“The facility was in a politically contested battleground state, was led by a top political surrogate for Kamala Harris, and failed to include a single Republican because — on purpose — no Republicans were invited,” Johnson wrote.

“The tour was clearly a partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats and is clearly election interference,” he said.

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee had already announced that it would investigate whether Zelenskyy’s trip was an attempt to use a foreign leader to benefit Harris’ campaign.

It is common practice for governors to meet with foreign leaders who travel to their states. In July, Zelenskyy visited a factory in Utah and was hosted by that state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox.
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CrowdStrike executive apologizes to Congress for July global tech outage

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WASHINGTON — An executive at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike apologized in testimony to Congress for sparking a global technology outage over the summer. 

“We let our customers down,” said Adam Meyers, who leads CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence division, in a hearing before a U.S. House cybersecurity subcommittee Tuesday. 

Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike has blamed a bug in an update that allowed its cybersecurity systems to push bad data out to millions of customer computers, setting off a global tech outage in July that grounded flights, took TV broadcasts off air and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers. 

“Everywhere Americans turned, basic societal functions were unavailable,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green said. “We cannot allow a mistake of this magnitude to happen again.” 

The Tennessee Republican likened the impact of the outage to an attack “we would expect to be carefully executed by a malicious and sophisticated nation-state actor.” 

“We’re deeply sorry and we are determined to prevent this from ever happening again,” Meyers told lawmakers while laying out the technical missteps that led to the outage of about 8.5 million computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. 

Meyers said he wanted to “underscore that this was not a cyberattack” but was, instead, caused by a faulty “rapid-response content update” focused on addressing new threats. The company has since bolstered its content update procedures, he said. 

The company still faces a number of lawsuits from people and businesses that were caught up in July’s mass outage. 
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Secret Service failures before Trump rally shooting were ‘preventable,’ Senate panel finds 

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Washington — Multiple Secret Service failures ahead of the July rally for former President Donald Trump where a gunman opened fire were “foreseeable, preventable, and directly related to the events resulting in the assassination attempt that day,” according to a bipartisan Senate investigation released Wednesday. 

Similar to the agency’s own internal investigation and an ongoing bipartisan House probe, the interim report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee found multiple failures on almost every level ahead of the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting, including in planning, communications, security and allocation of resources. 

“The consequences of those failures were dire,” said Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the Democratic chairman of the Homeland panel. 

Investigators found that there was no clear chain of command among the Secret Service and other security agencies and no plan for coverage of the building where the shooter climbed up to fire the shots. Officials were operating on multiple, separate radio channels, leading to missed communications, and an inexperienced drone operator was stuck on a help line after his equipment wasn’t working correctly. 

Communications among security officials were a “multi-step game of telephone,” Peters said. 

The report found the Secret Service was notified about an individual on the roof of the building approximately two minutes before shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire, firing eight rounds in Trump’s direction less than 150 yards from where the former president was speaking. Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, was struck in the ear by a bullet or a bullet fragment in the assassination attempt, one rallygoer was killed and two others were injured before the gunman was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper. 

Approximately 22 seconds before Crooks fired, the report found, a local officer sent a radio alert that there was an armed individual on the building. But that information was not relayed to key Secret Service personnel who were interviewed by Senate investigators. 

The panel also interviewed a Secret Service counter-sniper who reported seeing officers with their guns drawn running toward the building where the shooter was perched, but the person said they did not think to notify anyone to get Trump off the stage. 

The Senate report comes just days after the Secret Service released a five-page document summarizing the key conclusions of a yet-to-be finalized Secret Service report on what went wrong, and ahead of a Thursday hearing that will be held by a bipartisan House task force investigating the shooting. The House panel is also investigating a second assassination attempt on Trump earlier this month when Secret Service agents arrested a man with a rifle hiding on the golf course at Trump’s Florida club. 

Each investigation has found new details that reflect a massive breakdown in the former president’s security, and lawmakers say there is much more they want to find out as they try to prevent it from happening again. 

“This was the result of multiple human failures of the Secret Service,” said Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, the top Republican on the panel. 

The senators recommended that the Secret Service better define roles and responsibilities before any protective event, including by designating a single individual in charge of approving all the security plans. Investigators found that many of the people in charge denied that they had responsibility for planning or security failures, and deflected blame. 

Advance agents interviewed by the committee said “that planning and security decisions were made jointly, with no specific individual responsible for approval,” the report said. 

Communication with local authorities was also poor. Local law enforcement had raised concern two days earlier about security coverage of the building where the shooter perched, telling Secret Service agents during a walk through that they did not have the manpower to lock it down. Secret Service agents then gave investigators conflicting accounts about who was responsible for that security coverage, the report said. 

The internal review released last week by the Secret Service also detailed multiple communications breakdowns, including an absence of clear guidance to local law enforcement and the failure to fix line-of-sight vulnerabilities at the rally grounds that left Trump open to sniper fire and “complacency” among some agents. 

“This was a failure on the part of the United States Secret Service. It’s important that we hold ourselves to account for the failures of July 13th and that we use the lessons learned to make sure that we do not have another failure like this again,” said Ronald Rowe Jr., the agency’s acting director, after the report was released. 

In addition to better defining responsibility for events, the senators recommended that the agency completely overhaul its communications operations at protective events and improve intelligence sharing. They also recommended that Congress evaluate whether more resources are needed. 

Democrats and Republicans have disagreed on whether to give the Secret Service more money in the wake of its failures. A spending bill on track to pass before the end of the month includes an additional $231 million for the agency, but many Republicans have said that an internal overhaul is needed first. 

“This is a management problem plain and simple,” said Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the top Republican on the Homeland panel’s investigations subcommittee. 
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Ярослав Базилевич і УКУ відкрили стипендіальний фонд пам’яті загиблих від ракетного обстрілу у Львові доньок і дружини

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18-річна Дарія Базилевич була студенткою УКУ, вона загинула на сходовому майданчику будинку разом із мамою Євгенією (43 роки) і двома сестрами Яриною (21 рік) та Емілією (7 років)
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