The already challenging path to bringing home Americans jailed in Russia and Ukraine is likely even more complicated now with a war overwhelming the region and increasingly hostile relations between the United States and the Kremlin.
Marine veteran Trevor Reed and corporate security executive Paul Whelan are each serving lengthy prison sentences in Russia, but their families have long held out hope for some sort of deal — including a possible prisoner exchange — that could get their loved ones home.
Now, though, that seems a much harder ask.
“I can’t help but think that this is not going to help Trevor get released sooner, obviously,” Reed’s mother, Paula Reed, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
The war with Ukraine has not only occupied global attention, but it has also led to punishing economic sanctions by the U.S. and escalating Russian aggression in the face of international condemnation over its invasion. Though the conflict has not closed off avenues for bringing home Reed and Whelan, the prospect of concessions by either side anytime soon is eclipsed by the likelihood of continued antagonism by Russia.
“If this becomes long and drawn out, and they take over Ukraine, then the Western countries and the United States are going to be at odds with Russia for a long time,” said Reed’s father, Joey Reed. “That could lead to additional charges against our son, if he lives, and keep him there indefinitely, which is not uncommon in Russia.”
He said he was particularly concerned about a loss of communications between the two superpowers that could foreclose any possibility of the U.S. government getting him home.
“We’ve been told that even during the Cold War, they kept channels open. Even Kennedy was able to talk to Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis,” Reed said. “Anyone that’s advocating for closing embassies and cutting them off, that’s a gigantic mistake when two major nuclear powers are not speaking and are at odds with each other.”
State Department principal deputy press spokeswoman Jalina Porter, asked by the AP Thursday about how the war affected the cases of all three men, said only that the administration’s top priority is the “safety and security of all Americans,” including Reed and Whelan.
“This is something that the secretary works on day in and day out,” she said.
FILE – Joey and Paula Reed pose for a photo with a portrait of their son Marine veteran and Russian prisoner Trevor Reed at their home in Fort Worth, Texas, Feb. 15, 2022.
Reed, who is from Texas, was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2020 on charges that he assaulted police officers who were driving him to a police station after picking him up following a night of heavy drinking at a party. He has struggled with health issues behind bars, most recently coughing up blood this week, his father said.
He is regarded by the U.S. government as a wrongful detainee, as is Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive sentenced in 2020 to 16 years in prison on espionage-related charges that his family says are entirely bogus.
Whelan’s sister, Elizabeth, said she’s been “doom-scrolling” news about the war on Twitter like everyone else, concerned about the impact of the war on her brother and the possibility of another “Iron Curtain” falling in the region.
She said the U.S. could use the conflict as a fresh opportunity to press for the release of Reed and Whelan by making it a condition of any lifting of the sanctions against Russia, though it is not clear that that would happen.
“I can’t imagine that all of these oligarchs whose families are now being affected, whose assets and goods are now being affected, wouldn’t consider the release of Paul and Trevor a very small price to pay in order to get some relief themselves,” Whelan said.
Ukraine, meanwhile, is holding North Dakota farmer Kurt Groszhans, accused in a plot to assassinate a current member of the country’s political cabinet. His family and supporters say the charges are trumped up, and were designed to silence Groszhan’s own allegations of government corruption in Ukraine.
Kristi Magnusson, Groszhan’s sister, said in a statement provided to AP that she was concerned that the State Department was not “advocating for his release because it would be inferring that Ukraine is engaged in corrupt activities right at a time when State is focused on being as supportive as possible of Ukraine against the Russians.
“We support the Ukrainian people against Russia as well, but our brother is a sitting duck in that prison and we need him to be released so at least he can try to survive on his own,” she added.
Unlike Reed and Whelan, the U.S. has not designated Groszhans as a wrongful detainee.
WNBA All-Star Brittney Griner was arrested last month at a Moscow airport after Russian authorities said a search of her luggage revealed vape cartridges.
The Russian Customs Service said Saturday that the cartridges were identified as containing oil derived from cannabis, which could carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. The customs service identified the person arrested as a player for the U.S. women’s team and did not specify the date of her arrest. Russian media reported the player was Griner, and her agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, did not dispute those reports.
“We are aware of the situation with Brittney Griner in Russia and are in close contact with her, her legal representation in Russia, her family, her teams, and the WNBA and NBA,” Kagawa Colas said Saturday. “As this is an ongoing legal matter, we are not able to comment further on the specifics of her case but can confirm that as we work to get her home, her mental and physical health remain our primary concern.”
On Saturday, the State Department issued a “do not travel” advisory for Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine and urged all U.S. citizens to depart immediately, citing factors including “the potential for harassment against U.S. citizens by Russian government security officials” and “the Embassy’s limited ability to assist” Americans in Russia.
Griner, who plays for the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury, has played in Russia for the last seven years in the winter, earning over $1 million per season — more than quadruple her WNBA salary. She last played for her Russian team UMMC Ekaterinburg on Jan. 29 before the league took a two-week break in early February for the FIBA World Cup qualifying tournaments.
More than a dozen WNBA players were playing in Russia and Ukraine this winter, including league MVP Jonquel Jones and Courtney Vandersloot and Allie Quigley of the champion Chicago Sky. The WNBA confirmed Saturday that all players besides Griner had left both countries.
The 31-year-old Griner has won two Olympic gold medals with the U.S., a WNBA championship with the Mercury and a national championship at Baylor. She is a seven-time All-Star.
“Brittney Griner has the WNBA’s full support and our main priority is her swift and safe return to the United States,” the league said in a statement.
When one U.S. soldier heard that Russian forces had invaded Ukraine, he thought about a Ukrainian-American soldier who had served alongside him with U.S. forces in Iraq and decided he wanted to help the Ukrainians defend their homeland.
“I had a soldier in Iraq with me who was from Ukraine,” Mathew told VOA of his decision to join what he sees as a fight about justice and friendship. He is using only his first name for safety reasons. “He became an American citizen, joined the Army, and he told me about his home. He told me about his family and how proud they were. I remember him telling me about his little sister.
“Now … I’d like to think that by going to Ukraine, maybe I protect his mother, or his little sister or his home. Maybe in some small way, I say thank you to him for serving by doing something like this.”
Mathew, who spent 22 years in the U.S. Army and fought battles in Bosnia and Iraq, is not alone.
A representative of the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington told VOA that 3,000 U.S. volunteers have responded to the nation’s appeal for people to serve in an international battalion that will help resist Russia’s invading forces.
Many more have stepped forward from other countries, most from other post-Soviet states such as Georgia and Belarus.
Appeal from Zelenskyy
In an emotional video posted to his Telegram channel on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy referred to an “international legion” of 16,000 foreign volunteers who, he said, were being asked to “join the defense of Ukraine, Europe and the world.”
“We have nothing to lose but our own freedom,” the president said.
Zelenskyy’s appeal was echoed in a Facebook posting by Ukraine’s armed forces, which emphasized that they were looking for people with combat experience who “are standing with Ukraine against [the] Russian invasion.” The government has already temporarily lifted visa requirements for the volunteers.
For Mathew, a gray-haired father with four adult children, the decision to go and fight in Ukraine came even before Zelenskyy’s appeal.
Initially, he and 12 veterans, men he served with over the years, planned to board a plane to Poland, get to the Ukrainian border and register for territorial defense units along with other Ukrainian volunteers.
However, the path forward became much clearer after Zelenskyy called for the formation of the international legion and the Ukrainian government laid out a procedure for people who want to help.
“When we did not have the procedure, it would have been a process of showing up at the border. Maybe not knowing how to speak the language and trying to convince somebody. This way, they know our experience. They know our training. They can send us to places where they need us,” he said.
Instructor, fighter
Mathew, a native of the U.S. state of South Carolina, said in his years with the U.S. Army he has been an instructor as well as a combat leader.
“They can place me where they need me,” he said. “Or they can only leave me as an instructor with the legion to teach Ukrainians how to use different weapons systems. So now they have a choice — they can put me in combat or use me as an instructor, but we’re happy to help in whatever.”
For Mathew, the fight in Ukraine is about more than the defense of one central European country that has been subjected to an unprovoked attack by a larger neighbor. Like many of the volunteers, he feels that Americans’ own democratic rights will be threatened if Russia is able to prevail.
“What Ukrainians are fighting is a bully. They are facing someone who does not honor international law, who does not care about women and children, and we fought this type of people before,” Mathew said.
“We’re stopping a bully from hurting women and children.”
Objective: Stop Putin
Another of Mathew’s former combat friends was from Georgia, where Russia staged a similar war to break off two regions in 2008.
“They served next to me, soldiers from Georgia in Iraq. And I know how it felt being around them while their country was being attacked. Now we have another free country similar to Georgia that’s being attacked,” he said.
Mathew said he was leaving his security training business in South Carolina, his family and three dogs, and would be heading to Ukraine as soon as next week.
Russian President Vladimir Putin “has already taken the Crimea,” he said, “which should have never been allowed. That was a weakness by the international body. He can’t be allowed to take the rest of Ukraine.”
It’s a story as old as America, immigrants who have made their home in the United States, reaching out to help those who come after them. This is the case of an Afghan American mother and daughter in Jacksonville, Florida, who are helping with the resettlement of Afghan refugees. VOA’s Zheela Noori reports.
It’s a story as old as America, immigrants who have made their home in the United States, reaching out to help those who come after them. This is the case of an Afghan American mother and daughter in Jacksonville, Florida, who are helping with the resettlement of Afghan refugees. VOA’s Zheela Noori reports.
The young mother had behaved erratically for months, hitchhiking and wandering naked through two Native American reservations and a small town clustered along Northern California’s rugged Lost Coast.
But things escalated when Emmilee Risling was charged with arson for igniting a fire in a cemetery. Her family hoped the case would force her into mental health and addiction services. Instead, she was released over the pleas of loved ones and a tribal police chief.
The 33-year-old college graduate — an accomplished traditional dancer with ancestry from three area tribes — was last seen soon after, walking across a bridge near a place marked End of Road, a far corner of the Yurok Reservation where the rutted pavement dissolves into thick woods.
In this aerial image taken from a drone, a pedestrian walks near End of Road on Jan. 19, 2022, where Emmilee Risling was last seen before going missing in October 2021, in Klamath, Calif.
Her disappearance is one of five instances in the past 18 months where Indigenous women have gone missing or been killed in this isolated expanse of Pacific coastline between San Francisco and Oregon, a region where the Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, Tolowa and Wiyot people have coexisted for millennia. Two other women died from what authorities say were overdoses despite relatives’ questions about severe bruises.
The crisis has spurred the Yurok Tribe to issue an emergency declaration and brought increased urgency to efforts to build California’s first database of such cases and regain sovereignty over key services.
“I came to this issue as both a researcher and a learner, but just in this last year, I knew three of the women who have gone missing or were murdered — and we shared so much in common,” said Blythe George, a Yurok tribal member who consults on a project documenting the problem. “You can’t help but see yourself in those people.”
Yurok Tribal Police Chief Greg O’Rourke visits the last confirmed location on Jan. 19, 2022, where Emmilee Risling was seen before going missing in October 2021, in Klamath, Calif.
The recent cases spotlight an epidemic that is difficult to quantify but has long disproportionately plagued Native Americans.
A 2021 report by a government watchdog found the true number of missing and murdered Indigenous women is unknown due to reporting problems, distrust of law enforcement and jurisdictional conflicts. But Native women face murder rates almost three times those of white women overall — and up to 10 times the national average in certain locations, according to a 2021 summary of the existing research by the National Congress of American Indians. More than 80% have experienced violence.
In this area peppered with illegal marijuana farms and defined by wilderness, almost everyone knows someone who has vanished.
Missing person posters flutter from gas station doors and road signs. Even the tribal police chief isn’t untouched: He took in the daughter of one missing woman, and Emmilee — an enrolled Hoopa Valley tribal member with Yurok and Karuk blood — babysat his children.
In California alone, the Yurok Tribe and the Sovereign Bodies Institute, an Indigenous-run research and advocacy group, uncovered 18 cases of missing or slain Native American women in roughly the past year — a number they consider a vast undercount. An estimated 62% of those cases are not listed in state or federal databases for missing persons.
Hupa citizen Brandice Davis attended school with the daughters of a woman who disappeared in 1991 and now has daughters of her own, ages 9 and 13.
“Here, we’re all related, in a sense,” she said of the place where many families are connected by marriage or community ties.
She cautions her daughters about what it means to be female, Native American and growing up on a reservation: “You’re a statistic. But we have to keep going. We have to show people we’re still here.”
Maile Kane, 13, walks with her grandmother’s dog, Charlie, outside her family’s home on Jan. 20, 2022, in Hoopa, Calif. The girl’s mother, Brandice Davis, said she grew up with Emmilee Risling and worries about the safety of her own daughters.
Like countless cases involving Indigenous women, Emmilee’s disappearance has gotten no attention from the outside world.
But many here see in her story the ugly intersection of generations of trauma inflicted on Native Americans by their white colonizers, the marginalization of Native peoples and tribal law enforcement’s lack of authority over many crimes committed on their land.
Virtually all of the area’s Indigenous residents, including Emmilee, have ancestors who were shipped to boarding schools as children and forced to give up their language and culture as part of a federal assimilation campaign. Further back, Yurok people spent years away from home as indentured servants for colonizers, said Judge Abby Abinanti, the tribe’s chief judge.
The trauma caused by those removals echoes among the Yurok in the form of drug abuse and domestic violence, which trickles down to the youth, she said. About 110 Yurok children are in foster care.
“You say, ‘OK, how did we get to this situation where we’re losing our children?'” said Abinanti. “There were big gaps in knowledge, including parenting, and generationally those play out.”
An analysis of cases by the Yurok and Sovereign Bodies found most of the region’s missing women had either been in foster care themselves or had children taken from them by the state. An analysis of jail bookings also showed Yurok citizens in the two-county region are 11 times more likely to go to jail in a given year — and half those arrested are female, usually for low-level crimes. That’s an arrest rate for Yurok women roughly five times the rate of female incarcerations nationwide, said George, the University of California, Merced sociologist consulting with the tribe.
The Yurok run a tribal wellness court for addiction and operate one of the country’s only state-certified tribal domestic violence perpetrator programs. They also recently hired a tribal prosecutor, another step toward building an Indigenous justice system that would ultimately handle all but the most serious felonies.
The Yurok also are working to reclaim supervision over foster care and hope to transfer their first foster family from state court within months, said Jessica Carter, the Yurok Tribal Court director. A tribal-run guardianship court follows another 50 children who live with relatives.
The long-term plan — mostly funded by grants — is a massive undertaking that will take years to accomplish, but the Yurok see regaining sovereignty over these systems as the only way to end the cycle of loss that’s taken the greatest toll on their women.
“If we are successful, we can use that as a gift to other tribes to say, ‘Here’s the steps we took,'” said Rosemary Deck, the newly hired tribal prosecutor. “‘You can take this as a blueprint and assert your own sovereignty.'”
Mary Risling looks at dancing regalia that had been used by her missing sister Emmilee Risling at their family home on Jan. 21, 2022, in McKinleyville, Calif.
Emmilee was born into a prominent Native family, and a bright future beckoned.
Starting at a young age, she was groomed to one day lead the intricate dances that knit the modern-day people to generations of tradition nearly broken by colonization. Her family, a “dance family,” has the rare distinction of owning enough regalia that it can outfit the brush, jump and flower dances without borrowing a single piece.
At 15, Emmilee paraded down the National Mall with other tribal members at the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. The Washington Post published a front-page photo of her in a Karuk dress of dried bear grass, a woven basket cap and a white leather sash adorned with Pileated woodpecker scalps.
In this 2014 photo provided by Gary Risling, Emmilee Risling, right, poses after her graduation from the University of Oregon in Eugene, Ore., with her great-aunt and adoptive grandmother Viola Risling-Ryerson.
The straight-A student earned a scholarship to the University of Oregon, where she helped lead a prominent Native students’ group. Her success, however, was darkened by the first sign of trouble: an abusive relationship with a Native man whom, her mother believes, she felt she could save through her positive influence.
Later, Emmilee dated another man, became pregnant and returned home to have the baby before finishing her degree.
She then worked with disadvantaged Native families and eventually got accepted into a master’s program. She helped coach her son’s T-ball team and signed him up for swim lessons.
But over time, her family says, they noticed changes.
Emmilee was uncharacteristically tardy for work and grew more combative. She often dropped off her son with family, and she fell in with another abusive boyfriend. Her son was removed from her care when he was 5; a girl born in 2020 was taken away as a newborn as Emmilee’s behavior deteriorated.
Her parents remain bewildered by her rapid decline and think she developed a mental illness — possibly postpartum psychosis — compounded by drugs and the trauma of domestic abuse. At first, she would see a doctor or therapist at her family’s insistence but eventually rebuffed all help.
In this Dec. 2020, photo provided by Mary Risling, missing woman Emmilee Risling is seen holding her infant daughter at a home in California. The 33-year-old college graduate with ancestry from three tribes was last seen more than four months ago on the
After her daughter’s birth, Emmilee spiraled rapidly, “like a light switched,” and she began to let go of the Native identity that had been her defining force, said her sister, Mary.
“That was her life, and when you let that go, when you don’t have your kids … what are you?” she said.
In the months before she vanished, Emmilee was frequently seen walking naked in public, talking to herself. She was picked up many times by sheriff’s deputies and tribal police but never charged.
The only in-patient psychiatric facility within 300 miles (480 kilometers) was always too full to admit her. Once, she was taken to the emergency room and fled barefoot in her hospital gown.
“People tended to look the other way. They didn’t really help her. In less than 24 hours, she was just back on the street, literally on the street,” said Judy Risling, her mother. “There were just no services for her.”
In September, Emmilee was arrested after she was found dancing around a small fire in the Hoopa Valley Reservation cemetery.
Then-Hoopa Valley Tribal Police Chief Bob Kane appeared in a Humboldt County court by video and explained her repeated police contacts and mental health problems. Emmilee mumbled during the hearing then shouted out that she didn’t set the fire.
She was released with an order to appear again in 12 days after her public defender argued she had no criminal convictions and the court couldn’t hold her on the basis of her mental health.
Then, Emmilee disappeared.
“We had predicted that something like this may … happen in the future,” said Kane. “And you know, now we’re here.”
If Emmilee fell through the cracks before she went missing, she has become even more invisible in her absence.
One of the biggest hurdles in Indian Country once a woman is reported missing is unraveling a confusing jumble of federal, state, local and tribal agencies that must coordinate. Poor communication and oversights can result in overlooked evidence or delayed investigations.
The problem is more acute in rural regions like the one where Emmilee disappeared, said Abigail Echo-Hawk, citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and director of the Urban Indian Health Institute in Seattle.
“Particularly in reservations and in village areas, there is a maze of jurisdictions, of policies, of procedures of who investigates what,” she said.
Moreover, many cases aren’t logged in federal missing persons databases, and medical examiners sometimes misclassify Native women as white or Asian, said Gretta Goodwin, of the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s homeland security and justice team.
Recent efforts at the state and federal level seek to address what advocates say have been decades of neglect regarding missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Former President Donald Trump signed a bill that required federal, state, tribal and local law enforcement agencies to create or update their protocols for handling such cases. And in November, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to set up guidelines between the federal government and tribal police that would help track, solve and prevent crimes against all Native Americans.
A number of states, including California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona, are also taking on the crisis with greater funding to tribes, studies of the problem or proposals to create Amber Alert-style notifications.
Emmilee’s case illustrates some of the challenges. She was a citizen of the Hoopa Valley Tribe and was arrested on its reservation, but she is presumed missing on the neighboring Yurok Tribe’s reservation.
The Yurok police are in charge of the missing persons probe, but the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office will decide when to declare the case cold, which could trigger federal help.
The remote terrain where Emmilee was last seen — two hours from the nearest town — created hurdles common on reservations.
A dog walks along End of Road on Jan. 19, 2022, where police received and investigated reports of Emmilee Risling staying before her disappearance in October 2021, on the Yurok Reservation, Calif.
Law enforcement determined there wasn’t enough information to launch a formal search and rescue operation in such a vast, mountainous area. The Yurok police opted to forgo their own search because of liability concerns and a lack of training, said Yurok Tribal Police Chief Greg O’Rourke.
Instead, Yurok and Hoopa Valley police and sheriff’s deputies plied the rain-swollen Klamath River by boat and drove back roads.
Emmilee’s father, Gary Risling, says the sheriff’s office failed to act on anonymous tips, was slow to follow up on possible sightings and focused more resources on other missing person’s cases, including a wayward hunter and a kayaker lost at sea.
“I don’t want to seem like I’m picking on them, but that effort is sure not put forward when it becomes a missing Indian woman,” he said.
Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal declined interview requests, saying the Yurok are in charge and there are no signs of foul play. O’Rourke said the tips aren’t enough for a search warrant and there’s nothing further the tribal police can do.
The police chief, who knew Emmilee well, says his work is frequently stymied by a broader system that discounts tribal sovereignty.
“The role of police is protect the vulnerable. As tribal police, we’re doing that in a system that’s broken,” he said. “I think that is the reason that Native women get all but dismissed.”
Emmilee’s family, meanwhile, is struggling to shield her children, now 10 and almost 2, from the trauma of their mother’s disappearance — trauma they worry could trigger another generational cycle of loss.
The boy has been having nightmares and recently spoke everyone’s worst fear.
“It’s real difficult when you deal with the grandkids, and the grandkid says, ‘Grandpa, can you take me down the river and can we look for my mama?’ What do you tell him? ‘We’re looking, we’re looking every day,'” said Gary Risling, choking back tears.
“And then he says, ‘What happens if we can’t find her?'”
U.S. women soccer players reached a landmark agreement with the sport’s American governing body to end a six-year legal battle over equal pay, a deal in which they are promised $24 million plus bonuses that match those of the men.
The U.S. Soccer Federation and the women announced a deal Tuesday that will have players split $22 million, about one-third of what they had sought in damages. The USSF also agreed to establish a fund with $2 million to benefit the players in their post-soccer careers and charitable efforts aimed at growing the sport for women.
The USSF committed to providing an equal rate of pay for the women’s and men’s national teams — including World Cup bonuses — subject to collective bargaining agreements with the unions that separately represent the women and men.
“For our generation, knowing that we’re going to leave the game in an exponentially better place than when we found it is everything,” 36-year-old midfielder Megan Rapinoe said during a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “That’s what it’s all about because, to be honest, there is no justice in all of this if we don’t make sure it never happens again.”
FILE – United States Soccer Women’s National Team member Megan Rapinoe speaks during an event to mark Equal Pay Day in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House Campus, March 24, 2021.
The settlement was a victory for the players, who sparked fans to chant “Equal Pay!” when they won their second straight title in France in 2019. And it was a success for USSF President Cindy Parlow Cone, a former player who became head of the federation in March 2020.
Cone replaced Carlos Cordeiro, who quit after the federation made a legal filing that claimed women had less physical ability and responsibility than male counterparts.
“This is just one step towards rebuilding the relationship with the women’s team. I think this is a great accomplishment and I’m excited about the future and working together with them,” Cone said. “Now we can shift the focus to other things, most importantly, growing the game at all levels and increasing opportunities for girls and women.”
U.S. women have won four World Cups since the program’s start in 1985, while the men haven’t reached a semifinal since 1930.
FILE – US players celebrate with the trophy after the France 2019 Women’s World Cup football final match between USA and the Netherlands, July 7, 2019, at the Lyon Stadium in Lyon, central-eastern France.
Five American stars led by Morgan and Rapinoe began the challenge with a complaint to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in April 2016. Women sued three years later, seeking damages under the federal Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The sides settled the working conditions portion in December 2020, dealing with issues such as charter flights, accommodations and playing surfaces. They were scheduled to argue on March 7 before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in an attempt to reinstate the equal pay portion thrown out by a U.S. District Court.
“The settlement announced today is an important step in righting the many wrongs of the past,” the union for the women’s team said in a statement.
While a labor contract remains to be reached and ratified to replace the deal that expires March 31, the settlement was an enormous step.
“It’s so gratifying to feel like we can start to mend a relationship with U.S. Soccer that has been severed for so many years because of the discrimination that we faced,” said Morgan, a 32-year-old forward. “To finally get to this moment feels like we can almost sigh a breath of relief.”
Players were able to put off the legal distractions to continue on-field success.
“The additional hours and stress and outside pressures and discriminations we face, I mean sometimes you think why the hell was I born a female?” Morgan posed. “And then sometimes you think how incredible is it to be able to fight for something that you actually believe in and stand alongside these women. … There was something more than stepping on the field and wanting to be a starter or wanting to score goals or wanting to win or wanting to have the glory.”
The $22 million will be split into individual amounts proposed by the players, subject to the District Court’s approval.
Cone said the federation’s method of equalizing World Cup bonuses is yet to be determined. The federation has until now based bonuses on payments from FIFA, which earmarked $400 million for the 2018 men’s tournament, including $38 million to champion France, and $30 million for the 2019 women’s tournament, including $4 million to the champion U.S.
American men have been playing under the terms of a CBA that expired in December 2018.
Rapinoe was critical of both Cordeiro and his predecessor, Sunil Gulati, who headed the USSF from 2006-18. Cordeiro is seeking to regain the job from Cone when the USSF National Council meets on March 5 to vote on a four-year term.
“The thing that Cindy did was acknowledge the wrongdoing and apologize for the wrongdoing,” Rapinoe said. “It was well within Sunil’s ability to not discriminate and to pay us fairly and equally. It was well within Carlos’ ability to do that, and they made choices not to. … I think Cindy has shown a lot of strength in that, and I think the other two, frankly, just showed a ton of weakness and showed really their true colors in allowing this to happen for so long.”
The head of the yet-to-be-built National Museum of the American Latino says construction could begin in Washington within the next five years. Jorge Zamanillo, who was recently named as the museum’s director, spoke with reporter Jose Pernalete — who filed this story for VOA.
you have created your account in EL TIEMPO. Know and personalize your profile.
The verification email will be sent to
Check your inbox and if not, in your spam folder.
NO, CHANGE MAIL YES, SEND
We want you to find the news that interests you the most
Follow your favorite topics in a place exclusive to you.
Remember that to see your songs on all your devices, you must update the El Tiempo App.
discover “my news”
an exclusive place, where you can follow your favorite subjects . choose them!
hello!
Here you can also find “My News” and follow the topics you chose in the APP.
Find out how it works!
the last
The fastest way to get up to date.
my news
An exclusive section where you can follow your songs.
edit favorites
Whenever you want, change the themes you chose.
Your favorite themes have been saved!
you are now following 4 TOPICS
We tell you how it works
THE LAST
The fastest way to get up to date.
MY NEWS
An exclusive section where you can follow your songs.
EDIT FAVORITES
Whenever you want, change the themes you chose.
SEE MY NEWS
I will do it later
Remember that to see your songs on all your devices, you must update the El Tiempo App.
More Galleries
Vanessa Romero
Vanessa Romero
Jaiver Nieto Alvarez / ETCE
With more than 20,000 visitors, Expofitness, the exhibition that brings together the sports industry, innovation and healthy lifestyles, ended in Medellin.
Jaiver Nieto Alvarez / ETCE
The fair was carried out through business and marketing that had physical experiences, a commercial sample, relationship of concepts and healthy lifestyles supported by the academy and the power of training.
Jaiver Nieto Alvarez / ETCE
In the El Poblado Park in Medellín, exponents of poledance showed some of the exercises that they later transferred to the pavilions of Plaza Mayor.
Jaiver Nieto Alvarez / ETCE
Pole dance is considered a sport since 2003 when the first federation was created in Europe.
Jaiver Nieto Alvarez / ETCE
The size of Expofitness positions it as the most important exhibition in Latin America for the numbers it has generated for 10 years.
Jaiver Nieto Alvarez / ETCE
During the Expofitness weekend, 20,000 people came to enjoy the different activities.
Jaiver Nieto Alvarez / ETCE
According to experts, being a fitness person refers to a state of general well-being of physical and mental health achieved through the development of a healthy life, practicing exercise at least three times a week.
Jaiver Nieto Alvarez / ETCE
As a novelty of the fair, this year the Wellcon Token was launched, it is the first exhibition in Colombia to use a token as a means of payment.
Jaiver Nieto Alvarez / ETCE
During the various activities, the participants demonstrated their strength and the public enjoyed the programming.
Jaiver Nieto Alvarez / ETCE
Those attending Plaza Mayor had the opportunity to enjoy group classes led by experts in the world of fit.
More than 20 thousand people came to Expofitness to enjoy everything related to this industry.
you arrived at content limit of the month
Enjoy the content to the fullest DIGITAL WEATHER unlimited. Sign up now!
* COP $900 / month for the first two months
We know that you like to always be informed.
Create an account and you can enjoy:
Access to newsletters with the best current news.
Comment the news that interests you.
Keep your favorite items.
Create an account and you can enjoy our content from any device.
When relatives of American oil executives jailed in Venezuela met virtually with a senior Justice Department official this month, it didn’t take long for their frustrations to surface.
They pressed the official on the prospects of a prisoner exchange that could get their loved ones home but were told that was ultimately a White House decision and not something the U.S. government was generally inclined to do anyway. And they vented about the extradition to the U.S. of an associate of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, an action that inflamed tensions with Caracas and resulted in the American captives being returned to jail from house arrest that day.
The meeting, not previously reported and described by a person who participated in it, ended without firm commitments. But it underscored the simmering frustrations directed by some hostage and detainee families toward the Justice Department, an agency they see as unwilling to think creatively about ways to bring their relatives home from abroad and stubbornly resistant to the possibility of exchanging prisoners.
“The question remains of how to get the Department of Justice to fully engage in the process of recovering hostages and wrongful detainees,” said Everett Rutherford, whose nephew, Matthew Heath, is being held in Venezuela on what the Tennessee man’s family says are bogus weapons charges. “And there hasn’t yet been an answer given to that yet — except for the fact that we’ve been told that the president himself can direct them to do so.”
The Justice Department isn’t typically thought of as a lead agency in hostage matters. The State Department, after all, has diplomatic tools at its disposal and is home to the government’s chief hostage negotiator, while the Pentagon has authority to launch military raids to free hostages from captivity. The three agencies’ interests aren’t always necessarily in sync on hostage issues, which can be overshadowed by broader national security or diplomatic concerns — or, in the case of the Justice Department, what the government thinks is best for holding criminals accountable.
The Justice Department said in a statement that it “recognizes that families are put in an extraordinarily difficult circumstance, with unimaginable pain” when Americans are wrongfully detained and that it works with other federal agencies to bring them home in a manner consistent with the government’s “no-concessions” policy in hostage matters.
From the U.S. government’s perspective, a prisoner swap risks creating a false equivalency between a wrongfully detained American and a justly convicted felon, and could also encourage additional captures by foreign countries.
Mickey Bergman, who as vice president of the Richardson Center for Global Engagement has worked on hostage cases, said he’s heard that argument but thinks “the framing is wrong.”
“Because it’s not about the guilty people that get released, it’s about the innocent Americans that come back home,” Bergman said. “And so I reverse the question and say: Is leaving … innocent Americans to rot in prisons around the world worth the insistence of us having criminals, foreign criminals, serve their full time in the American system?”
The issue is newly relevant as several countries or groups holding Americans, including Russia and the Taliban, have floated the names of prisoners in the U.S. they want released.
The families’ frustration is less with current political leadership of the Justice Department than with the nature of the institution itself, an agency that across administrations has prioritized its independence and its prerogative to make prosecutorial decisions and sentencing recommendations free from political considerations. The instinct is crucial for democracy, but it can also result in actions that hostage families see as dismissive of their interests.
The October extradition to Miami of Colombian businessman Alex Saab, presented by U.S. officials as a close Maduro associate, agitated relatives of six Citgo executives who’ve been jailed for years in Venezuela over a never-executed plan to refinance billions in the oil company’s bonds. It was a tension point in this month’s Justice Department call and in a December meeting between hostage families and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, though the situation may be complicated by the revelation this week that Saab was signed up by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as a source in 2018.
The reticence to swaps predates the Biden administration, and some of the deals the families seek didn’t gain traction under former President Donald Trump, either. Even so, there is a precedent for arrangements that serve a diplomatic purpose.
FILE – In this image provided by the U.S. State Department, Michael White holds an American flag as he poses for a photo June 4, 2020, with U.S. special envoy for Iran Brian Hook at the Zurich, Switzerland, airport after White’s release from Iran.
The Trump administration, seen as more willing to flout convention in hostage affairs, brought home Navy veteran Michael White in 2020 in an agreement that spared an American-Iranian doctor prosecuted by the Justice Department any more time behind bars and that permitted him to return to Iran. Even before then, the Obama administration pardoned or dropped charges against seven Iranians in a prisoner exchange tied to the nuclear deal with Tehran. Three jailed Cubans were sent home in 2014 as Havana released American Alan Gross after five years’ imprisonment.
There are roughly 60 Americans known to be held hostage or wrongfully detained, a definition that covers Americans believed innocent or jailed for the purpose of exacting concessions from the U.S.
Families of at least some see fresh opportunities to cut deals.
This 2018 image provided by the Reed family shows Trevor Reed at Red Square in Moscow, Russia. Russia is holding Marine veteran Reed, who was sentenced to nine years on charges he assaulted a police officer.
The Taliban, whose Haqqani network is believed to be holding hostage Navy veteran Mark Frerichs of Illinois, has told the U.S. it seeks the release of imprisoned drug lord Bashir Noorzai. Russia has locked up Marine veteran Trevor Reed, sentenced to nine years on charges he assaulted police officers in Moscow, and Michigan corporate security executive Paul Whelan, imprisoned on espionage charges. Officials there have floated at various times the names of citizens it would like home, including international arms dealer Viktor Bout and drug smuggler Konstantin Yaroshenko, both imprisoned in the U.S.
The U.S. considers Whelan and Reed to be wrongfully detained.
Nine Americans, including Heath and the so-called Citgo 6, are detained in Venezuela at a time when the U.S. is holding two nephews of Venezuela’s first lady on drug charges.
Some hostage and detainee families say they’re heartened by the access they’ve had to senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sullivan. But the resistance to a trade has remained constant.
Charlene Cakora, Frerichs’ sister, met with White House and Justice Department officials last August and says she was told that Noorzai, a convicted Afghan drug lord, was a “bad guy.” She said in an interview that if the government won’t “trade for my brother, then I want to know what other ideas are out there.”
Joey Reed holds photos of his son Marine veteran and Russian prisoner Trevor Reed at his home in Fort Worth, Texas, Feb. 15, 2022.
Paula Reed and Joey Reed, Trevor’s parents, say U.S. officials have told them that they’d seek the same outcome if they were their shoes. But though the Granbury, Texas, couple has urged Justice Department officials during meetings to seek a deal now, the officials have said only that they’re “considering everything,” said Paula Reed.
“They didn’t say: ‘Oh, we agree with you, that’s a great deal. That’s a good point.’ They didn’t say anything like that. They just said: ‘We hear you. Thank you very much,”‘ she said. “They didn’t give us indication one way or the other.”
Elizabeth Whelan, Paul’s sister, said she’s been grateful for the U.S. government’s attention. She said she’s not entirely sure what Russia wants for her brother and said demands by it and other countries seem “stupid” and “over the top.”
“But,” she added, “I feel my brother is worth whatever Russia is asking for.”
U.S. President Joe Biden cautioned American citizens about staying in Ukraine on Thursday, urging them to leave the country immediately and warning of a potential major conflict with Russia should a clash erupts between U.S. and Russian troops.
Speaking in a televised interview on the U.S.-based television network NBC News, Biden said “American citizens should leave, should leave now.”
“We’re dealing with one of the largest armies in the world. This is a very different situation, and things could go crazy quickly,” Biden said.
The U.S. president said he would not send troops to Ukraine, even to rescue Americans in case of a Russian invasion.
“That’s a world war. When Americans and Russians start shooting one another, we’re in a very different world,” he said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking to reporters in Australia where he is meeting Friday with his counterparts from Australia, Japan and India, the so-called QUAD, reiterated Biden’s warning, saying Russia could invade Ukraine during the Beijing Winter Olympics, which end on Feb. 20.
“We’re in a window when an invasion could begin at any time and, to be clear, that includes during the Olympics,” Blinken said.
Russia opened 10 days of massive military drills in Belarus on Thursday and docked six of its ships at a strategic Black Sea port, drawing a sharp rebuke from Ukrainian officials, who characterized Moscow’s actions as further escalating tensions in the region.
The Russian maneuvers in Belarus involved thousands of troops and sophisticated weapons systems, such as S-400 surface-to-air missiles, Pantsir air defense systems and Su-35 fighter jets, with some of the training just 210 kilometers north of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the six ships arrived at the port of Sevastopol in Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014. They had been on a 13,000-kilometer journey from the Baltic Sea to begin what officials described as naval exercises. The Russian landing ships are designed for unloading troops, vehicles and material onto land.
Officials in Moscow and Minsk have said Russian troops will withdraw from Belarus sometime after the drills end February 20. But Western officials remain fearful they could be deployed in a Russian invasion of Ukraine, a onetime Soviet republic, along with 100,000 troops Moscow has massed along Ukraine’s eastern flank.
Ukrainian officials, who launched their own drills on Thursday, assailed the impending naval drills, characterizing them as “destructive activity to destabilize the security situation.” Kyiv accused Russia of violating international law by restricting wide swaths of open waters to conduct missile and artillery fire training.
“These actions pose another threat to Ukraine’s sovereignty in its territorial sea area and in its sovereign rights in the exclusive maritime economic zone,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in a statement. “By blocking the recommended sea lanes, the Russian Federation has made it literally impossible to navigate in these areas and allow ships to enter Ukrainian seaports, especially in the Sea of Azov.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, in a call with reporters, denied that the drills would affect seagoing commercial operations.
Map: Russian troop locations near Ukraine
Peskov said Russia was staging the joint exercises with Belarus, its largest ever, to combat “unprecedented security threats … the nature and, perhaps, concentration of which are, unfortunately, much larger and much more dangerous than before.”
Russian officials have denied they plan to invade Ukraine, but diplomatic talks with Western officials have led to a standoff. Russia has demanded that the United States and its allies reject Ukraine’s bid for membership in NATO.
The West has rejected that as a non-starter but has said it is willing to negotiate with Moscow over missile deployment and troop exercises in Eastern European countries closest to Russia.
A day of talks between Ukraine and Russia ended Thursday without progress. These talks are an attempt to end the eight-year conflict between Ukraine forces and pro-Russian separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
The failure to reconcile each side’s interpretations of the Minsk accords, a 2015 agreement that attempted to end fighting in eastern Ukraine, was seen as a setback to defusing the wider crisis.
“I hope that we will meet again very soon and continue these negotiations. Everyone is determined to achieve a result,” Ukraine envoy Andriy Yermak said, adding that both sides agreed to keep talking.
Britain on Thursday urged Russia to take a “diplomatic route that avoids conflict and bloodshed” while warning against any Russian moves that undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.
“Fundamentally, a war in Ukraine would be disastrous for the Russian and Ukrainian people and for European security. And together, NATO has made it clear that any incursion into Ukraine would have massive consequences and carry severe costs,” British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said as she met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Western governments have been calling on Russia to take steps to de-escalate the crisis and vowed to impose swift and severe economic sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine.
Lavrov said Thursday that only “mutually respectful dialogue” can lead to normalized relations.
“Ideological approaches, ultimatums, threats — this is the road to nowhere,” Lavrov said.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled Thursday to Brussels to discuss the crisis with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg before heading for more meetings with leaders in Poland.
Johnson called the situation the “biggest security crisis that Europe has faced for decades” as he urged solidarity with NATO allies. He told reporters he does not think that Russian President Vladimir Putin has yet decided whether to invade Ukraine, but added, “Our intelligence remains grim.”
Stoltenberg told reporters he sent a letter to Lavrov inviting Russia for more rounds of meetings to “find a diplomatic way forward.”
“We are prepared to listen to Russia’s concerns and ready to discuss ways to uphold and strengthen the fundamental principles of European security that we all have signed up to,” Stoltenberg said.
He added, “Renewed Russian aggression will lead to more NATO presence, not less.”
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters.
American Nathan Chen won the gold medal Thursday in the men’s figure skating competition at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, becoming the first U.S. man to win the event since 2010.
Chen came into the day leading the competition after earning the highest score in the short program. He gave an even more dominant performance Thursday in the longer free skate to beat out second-place Japanese skater Yuma Kagiyama.
The bronze medal in the event went to Japan’s Shoma Uno.
The two-time defending champion, Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu, placed fourth and on Thursday came up just short in his attempt to become the first skater to land a quadruple axel in competition.
Chen was one of the favorites in the event at the 2018 Olympics, but a disappointing performance in the short program led him to a fifth-place finish.
“It means the world,” he said after Thursday’s victory. “I’m just so happy.”
In snowboarding, American Chloe Kim defended her 2018 gold medal in the women’s halfpipe with another win Thursday. Kim needed only the first of her three runs to set a score no other competitor could match.
Spain’s Queralt Castellet took the silver medal in the event as she competed in her fifth Olympics. Japan’s Sena Tomita won the bronze medal.
Austrian skier Johannes Strolz won gold in the Alpine combine race Thursday. He can compare medals with his father, Hubert, who won the same event at the 1988 Calgary Olympics.
The Alpine combined brings together downhill skiing and slalom, and Strolz was able to overcome a fourth-place finish in the downhill by posting the best time in the slalom Thursday on his way to an overall victory.
Norway’s Aleksander Aamodt Kilde won the silver medal, while Canada’s Jack Crawford took the bronze.
In men’s snowboardcross, Austrian Alessandro Haemmerle barely edged out Canada’s Eliot Grondin in a photo finish to win gold. Italy’s Omar Visintin won the bronze.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
The first question posed to Mikaela Shiffrin as she met with reporters after her second consecutive quick exit from an Alpine skiing race at the Beijing Games was short, simple and to the point: What happened?
The complicated, thought-out, talked-out answers that followed entailed little analysis of her actual performance on skis — which lasted all of five seconds before things went awry in Wednesday’s first run of the two-leg slalom, about half as long as the American stayed on course in Monday’s first run of the two-leg giant slalom — and, in the end, boiled down to this: Shiffrin herself was not exactly sure what brought her to this point or where she goes from here.
“I’ve never been in this position before,” the two-time Olympic gold medalist said, tears dampening her cheeks, “and I don’t know how to handle it.”
What the shaken Shiffrin was certain of: “It feels like a really big letdown.”
The 26-year-old from Colorado, who won the slalom at the 2014 Sochi Games and the giant slalom at the 2018 Pyeonchgang Games, was the seventh racer out of the starting hut Wednesday on a course set by her coach, Mike Day.
She began losing her balance and teetering out of control just four seconds and four gates in, swerving too far as she veered to her right. The neon yellow handle of her right ski pole scraped along the snow as she ended up way wide of the fifth gate.
Mikaela Shiffrin, of the United States skis out in the first run of the women’s slalom at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Feb. 9, 2022.
Shiffrin went over to the side of the course, clicked out of her skis and plopped herself down on the ground, shaking her head, then resting it on her arms atop her bent knees. That will be the lasting image of this day — back in the U.S., NBC’s coverage lingered on that shot of Shiffrin, drawing anger on social media from some viewers — and, perhaps, of these Olympics for someone who arrived in China as one of the biggest stars of any Winter Games sport.
“GS and slalom, those were my biggest focuses,” she said. “So it really feels like a lot of work for nothing.”
Other racers said the top was not particularly slippery or difficult. Indeed, reigning slalom world champion Katharina Liensberger of Austria — who took the silver behind Wednesday’s gold medalist Petra Vlhova of Slovakia — called it “a really easy course.”
Vlhova, Shiffrin’s top World Cup rival this season, soared from eighth place after the opening run to the victory with a combined time of 1 minute, 44.98 seconds. She claimed Slovakia’s first Olympic Alpine medal ever.
In the closest Shiffrin came to offering an explanation for what went awry, she said was trying to attack too much.
“I was pushing,” she said, “and maybe it was past my limit.”
Shiffrin arrived with plans to enter all five individual races at the Yanqing Alpine Skiing Center, and another gold would make her only the second woman to win at least one from Alpine at three Olympics in a row.
So far, though, Shiffrin is 0 for 2.
It is not stunning that she hasn’t won a medal, let alone a gold this week. As Shiffrin so often reminds everyone, anything can happen on any given day. What is truly surprising is that she has been so off her game, so immediately, in each of her two trips along the course known as the Ice River.
Mikaela Shiffrin of United States loses control and skis off course during the first run of the women’s giant slalom at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Feb. 7, 2022.
“It’s really sad. It’s never fun to go out,” said Swedish skier Anna Swenn Larsson, 11th in the first run. “I know the feeling.”
Shiffrin’s next opportunity to compete could come Friday in the super-G, although she made it sound as if she might consider skipping that one, saying: “It would be a pleasure to ski. But I also have some teammates who are really fast, and we have the athletes who can fill the spaces. So if I’m going to ski out on the fifth gate, like, what’s the point?”
She never has competed in a super-G at an Olympics but did win it at the 2019 world championships.
What also is noteworthy about all of this is that Shiffrin is known for being so consistently sound on the slopes, like a metronome that never misses a beat. She might be slower than other athletes on a given day, sure — no one is perfect — but what she so rarely does is flub a maneuver in such a manner as to not even make it all the way down the hill. The “Did Not Finish” on Monday was her first in a giant slalom since Jan. 23, 2018.
Her 47 career World Cup wins in the slalom are more than anyone else has won in any single event.
“My entire career has taught me to trust in my skiing if it’s good skiing and that’s all that I have to rely on. … Of course the pressure is high, but that didn’t feel like the biggest issue today,” she said. “So it’s not the end of the world, and it’s so stupid to care this much, but I feel that I have to question a lot now.”
Shiffrin has shared much about her innermost thoughts over the past several months, via social media and traditional media. She discussed the ways in which she empathized when athletes at the Tokyo Olympics such as gymnast Simone Biles and swimmer Caeleb Dressel shared their feelings about pressure and expectations.
And Shiffrin has been open about the difficult task of carrying on after the accidental death of her father, Jeff, in February 2020.
“Right now, I would really like to call him, so that doesn’t make it easier,” Shiffrin said Monday, pausing between words, her voice shaking.
Then, with a laugh, she continued: “And he would probably tell me to just get over it. But he’s not here to say that. So on top of everything else, I’m pretty angry at him, too.”
President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced that an Australian company that makes chargers for electric vehicles will build a manufacturing facility in Tennessee, while reiterating his commitment to make the U.S. government’s fleet of cars electric.
The new plant will produce up to 30,000 electric vehicle chargers per year and create 500 local jobs, according to Biden and the Brisbane-based company, Tritium. State officials said production is scheduled to start in the third quarter of 2022.
Biden touted “an American manufacturing comeback.” Tritium’s chargers will “use American parts, American iron, American steel,” and will be installed by union workers, Biden said. He said the federal government’s fleet of 600,000 vehicles will “end up being electric vehicles.”
“The benefits are going to ripple through thousands of miles in every direction and these jobs will multiply,” Biden said, adding the manufacturing plants will lead to a growth in steel mills, small parts suppliers and construction sites throughout the country.
A Tritium electric vehicle charger is seen during an event with President Joe Biden in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex, Feb. 8, 2022.
Tritium CEO Jane Hunter appeared alongside Biden at the White House and said Biden’s policies “have contributed to enormous demand” for Tritium products in the United States. This “directly led us to pivot and change our global manufacturing strategy.”
Biden also announced that this week, the White House will roll out a state-by-state allocation of $5 billion in funding for electric vehicle chargers. He used the speech to highlight contributions by U.S. companies involved in manufacturing electric vehicles including Tesla, a company Biden has refrained from naming in the past.
Biden has made rebuilding American manufacturing a key of his economic agenda, including pushing for billions of dollars of public and private investments in the electric vehicle industry. The bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last year provided money for a sprawling network of electric vehicle charging stations across the country.
Biden has said electric cars will be more climate-friendly and affordable for American families, and the White House has set a target of half the vehicles sold in the United States to be electric or plug-in hybrids by 2030.
The Tritium announcement is the latest in recent weeks by major companies announcing investments in U.S. manufacturing and jobs, including Intel, General Motors and Boeing. More than $200 billion in investments in domestic manufacturing of semiconductors, electric vehicles, aircraft, and batteries have been announced since 2021.
U.S. President Joe Biden on Sunday called on Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to release a U.S. civil engineer who was abducted two years ago and is believed to be the last American hostage held by the Taliban.
Mark Frerichs is a 59-year-old U.S. Navy veteran from Lombard, Illinois, who worked in Afghanistan for a decade on development projects. He was kidnapped a month before the February 2020 U.S. troop pullout deal was signed and was transferred to the Haqqani network, a brutal Taliban faction accused of some of the deadliest attacks of the war.
Monday marks his second year in captivity.
“Threatening the safety of Americans or any innocent civilians is always unacceptable, and hostage-taking is an act of particular cruelty and cowardice,” Biden said in a statement.
“The Taliban must immediately release Mark before it can expect any consideration of its aspirations for legitimacy. This is not negotiable.”
Biden pulled U.S. troops out of Afghanistan in August in a chaotic withdrawal that drew sharp criticism from Republicans and his own Democrats as well as foreign allies and punctured his approval ratings.
Frerichs’ family has criticized the U.S. government for not pressing harder to secure his release. Last week, his sister, Charlene Cakora, made a personal plea to Biden in a Washington Post opinion piece titled, “President Biden, please bring home my brother, the last American held hostage in Afghanistan.”
The United States has raised Frerich’s case in every meeting with the Taliban, the State Department said in a statement. “We call on the Taliban to release him. We will continue working to bring him home,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken added in a Twitter post.
U.S. and Taliban officials met for the first time since the pullout in October in Doha, Qatar, which had hosted talks on Afghanistan that led to the troop withdrawal.
The Qatari emir was due to visit the White House on Monday on a range of issues that will include global energy security, the White House said last week. Qatar represents U.S. interests in Kabul.
De acuerdo a lo señalado por la revista, gracias a la flexibilización de las normas sanitarias el país ha evidenciado un fuerte aumento de casos de COVID-19 durante el último mes.
24Horas.cl Tvn
06.05.2021
La jornada de este miércoles la revista estadounidense Scientific American, publicó un artículo relacionado al manejo de la crisis sanitaria en Chile, manifestado que «la imprudente prisa» por reabrir lasescuelas y la reanudación de ciertas actividades durante el pasado mes de marzo, «amenaza la ejemplar estrategia de vacunación».
De acuerdo a lo señalado por la revista, gracias a la flexibilización de las normas sanitarias el país ha evidenciado un fuerte aumento de casos de COVID-19 durante el último mes.
«En marzo se reabrieron las escuelas y se permitió la reanudación de actividades de alto riesgo, como deportes de interior, gimnasios y casinos. Sin embargo, la reapertura fue prematura«, indicaron.
Si bien destacaron el rápido proceso de inoculación, donde uno de cada tres chilenos ha recibido ambas dosis, señalaron que «Chile también ha servido como advertencia sobre los peligros de la complacencia de las vacunas».
Asimismo, analizaron que el Gobierno ha eliminado sin problemas las restricciones a medida que se implementan los fármacos, lo que fue calificado como «un giro de 180 grados».
«Comenzamos a relajar los encierros y las medidas de distanciamiento social antes de que un porcentaje significativo de la población estuviera efectivamente inmunizado contra el COVID-19», declaró a la revista Juan Carlos Said, especialista en medicina interna del Complejo de Atención Sótero del Río en Santiago, Chile.
«Ahora nos encontramos en una situación en la que, aunque hemos vacunado a mucha gente, todavía no tenemos la pandemia bajo control», agregó.
