Zelenskyy says Russia aims to erase Ukraine history, Kharkiv attack escalates | Main | Spanish edition

Russian paratroopers have landed in Kharkiv where deadly street battles erupted, while Russian troops made advances in the south on the seventh day of an invasion that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday aimed to erase his country’s history.

Russian military attacks on Ukraine’s second-largest city, near the Russian border, killed 21 civilians and injured 112 others overnight, the regional governor Oleh Synyehubov said in a Telegram post, adding that Russian forces had attacked a military hospital.

Renewed Russian shelling on Wednesday morning struck several buildings, including a university, and killed four people, emergency services said.

Kharkiv, a largely Russian-speaking city, has a population of around 1.4 million.

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US Aims to Counter China by Opening Solomon Islands Embassy

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — 

The U.S. says it will open an embassy in the Solomon Islands, laying out in unusually blunt terms a plan to increase its influence in the South Pacific nation before China becomes “strongly embedded.”

The reasoning was explained in a State Department notification to Congress that was obtained by The Associated Press.

The plan was confirmed by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a visit to Fiji Saturday on a Pacific tour that began in Australia.

Blinken left Fiji late in the evening bound for Hawaii, where he will host the foreign ministers from Japan and South Korea to discuss the threat posed by North Korea, amid rising concerns over its recent missile tests.

The State Department said Solomon Islanders cherished their history with Americans on the battlefields of World War II, but that the U.S. was in danger of losing its preferential ties as China “aggressively seeks to engage” elite politicians and business people in the Solomon Islands.

The move comes after rioting rocked the nation of 700,000 in November. The riots grew from a peaceful protest and highlighted long-simmering regional rivalries, economic problems and concerns about the country’s increasing links with China after it switched allegiance from the self-ruled island of Taiwan to Beijing three years ago. Rioters set fire to buildings and looted stores.

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare survived a no-confidence vote the following month, telling lawmakers in a fiery 90-minute speech that he’d done nothing wrong and would not bow to “the forces of evil” or to “Taiwan’s agents.”

The U.S. previously operated an embassy in the Solomons for five years before closing it in 1993. Since then, U.S. diplomats from neighboring Papua New Guinea have been accredited to the Solomons, which has a U.S. consular agency.

The embassy announcement fits with a new Biden administration strategy for the Indo-Pacific that was announced Friday and emphasizes building partnerships with allies in the region as a way to counter China’s growing influence and ambitions.

In its notification to Congress, the State Department said China had been “utilizing a familiar pattern of extravagant promises, prospective costly infrastructure loans, and potentially dangerous debt levels,” when engaging with political and business leaders from the Solomon Islands.

“The United States has a strategic interest in enhancing our political, economic, and commercial relationship with Solomon Islands, the largest Pacific Island nation without a U.S. Embassy,” the State Department wrote.

The State Department said it didn’t expect to build a new embassy immediately but would at first lease space at an initial set-up cost of $12.4 million. The embassy would be located in the capital, Honiara, and would start small, with two U.S. employees and about five local staff.

The State Department said the Peace Corps was planning to reopen an office in the Solomon Islands and have its volunteers serve there, and that several U.S. agencies were establishing government positions with portfolios in the Solomons.

“The Department needs to be part of this increased U.S. presence, rather than remaining a remote player,” it wrote.

During his visit to Fiji, Blinken met with Acting Prime Minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum and other Pacific leaders to talk about regional issues, especially the existential risk posed by climate change. It was the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state to Fiji since 1985.

Sayed-Khaiyum said he welcomed the renewed U.S. engagement in the region and President Joe Biden’s move last year to rejoin the Paris Agreement. He said that in the past, Pacific island nations had sometimes felt overlooked by larger nations as “flyover” countries.

“Small dots spotted from plane windows of leaders, en route to meetings where they spoke about us rather than with us, if they spoke of us at all,” he said.

Blinken and the Pacific leaders also spoke about the coronavirus pandemic and disaster assistance. But looming over the visit were the increasing tensions in Ukraine.

“We continue to see very, very troubling signs of Russian escalation, including new forces arriving around Ukraine’s borders,” Blinken said.

Blinken visited Fiji after leaving the Australian city of Melbourne, where he had a meeting with his counterparts from Australia, India and Japan. The four nations form the so-called “Quad,” a bloc of Indo-Pacific democracies that was created to counter China’s regional influence.

Biden Aims to Reduce Cancer Deaths by 50% Over Next 25 Years

President Joe Biden is committing to reduce the cancer death rate by 50% — a new goal for the “moonshot” initiative against the disease that was announced in 2016 when he was vice president.

Biden has set a 25-year timeline for achieving that goal, part of his broader effort to end cancer as we know it, according to senior administration officials who previewed Wednesday’s announcement on the condition of anonymity.

The issue is deeply personal for Biden: He lost his elder son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015. Yet the rollout comes without any new funding elements at a time when the gains from new research can be uneven, such that Biden is setting an aspiration for the country more than 50 years after President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act and launched a war on the disease. The benefits of that act were seen recently in areas outside of cancer as well as vaccines that were developed for the coronavirus.

The pain experienced by Biden is shared by many Americans. The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be 1,918,030 new cancer cases and 609,360 cancer deaths this year. What the president is aiming to do is essentially save more than 300,000 lives annually from the disease, something the administration believes is possible because the age-adjusted death rate has already fallen by roughly 25% over the past two decades. The cancer death rate is currently 146 per 100,000 people, down from nearly 200 in 2000.

“The progress in cancer research is slow — some of the fruits of Nixon’s 1971 declaration were only harvested with the development of the COVID mRNA vaccine,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, a professor of oncology and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University and former chief medical and scientific officer for the American Cancer Society. The research progress that has occurred has led to a “better understanding of the biology of cancer and will do even more for us in the future.”

Better public health practices, reducing cancer risks such as smoking and informing people about the best cancer research could reduce deaths. Brawley said that one of his studies found that 130,000 people die annually from cancer because they do not benefit from known science.

Dr. Barron Lerner, a professor of medicine and population health at New York University Langone Health, said that “hyperbolic goals” can be needed to attract public attention but achieving the 50% reduction is “extremely unlikely.”

“Similar past efforts like the ‘War on Cancer’ have made gains, but they have been more modest,” said Lerner, the author “The Breast Cancer Wars.” “Cancer is many diseases and requires very complicated research. Translating these advances to the clinical setting is never easy either.”

Biden was scheduled to give remarks Wednesday from the East Room of the White House, along with his wife, Jill, and Vice President Kamala Harris. Also scheduled to attend the speech: members of Congress and the administration and about 100 members of the cancer community including patients, survivors, caregivers, families, advocacy groups and research organizations.

As part of the effort, Biden will assemble a “cancer Cabinet” that includes 18 federal departments, agencies and offices, including leaders from the Departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Defense, Energy and Agriculture.

There were no plans to announce new funding commitments on Wednesday, though the administration will outline why it believes it can curb cancer through efforts such as increased screening and removing inequities in treatment. The coronavirus pandemic has consumed health care resources and caused people to miss more than 9.5 million cancer screenings.

The White House also will host a summit on the cancer initiative and continue a roundtable discussion series on the subject. The goal is to improve the quality of treatment and people’s lives, something with deep economic resonance as well. The National Cancer Institute reported in October that the economic burden of treatment was more than $21 billion in 2019, including $16.22 billion in patient out-of-pocket costs.

President Barack Obama announced the cancer program during his final full year in office and secured $1.8 billion over seven years to fund research. Obama designated Biden, then his vice president, as “mission control,” a recognition of Biden’s grief as a parent and desire to do something about it. Biden wrote in his memoir “Promise Me, Dad” that he chose not to run for president in 2016 primarily because of Beau’s death.

When Biden announced he wasn’t seeking the Democratic nomination in 2016, he said he regretted not being president because “I would have wanted to have been the president who ended cancer, because it’s possible.”

The effort fell somewhat out of the public focus when Donald Trump became president, though Trump, a Republican, proposed $500 million over 10 years for pediatric cancer research in his 2019 State of the Union address.

Biden continued the work as a private citizen by establishing the Biden Cancer Initiative to help organize resources to improve cancer care. When Biden did seek the presidency in 2020, he had tears in his eyes as he said in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that “Beau should be running for president, not me.”