ЦІКАВЕ

Severe storms that tore through the U.S. state of Tennessee killed six people Saturday and sent about two dozen to the hospital as homes and businesses were damaged in multiple cities.

Three people, including a child, were killed after an apparent tornado struck Montgomery County north of Nashville near the Kentucky state line, county officials said in a news release. And the Nashville Emergency Operation Center said in a post on a social media account that three people were killed by severe storms there. Montgomery County officials said another 23 there were treated for injuries at hospitals.

Photos posted by the Clarksvillle fire department on social media showed damaged houses with debris strewn in the lawns, a tractor trailer flipped on its side on a highway and insulation ripped out of building walls.

“This is devastating news and our hearts are broken for the families of those who lost loved ones,” said Clarksville Mayor Joe Pitts in a statement. “The city stands ready to help them in their time of grief.”

No other information about the victims was immediately available Saturday.

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that a tornado touched down around 2 p.m. A shelter was set up at a local high school.

Residents were asked to stay at home while first responders evaluated the situation. In a briefing shared on social media, Clarksville Mayor Joe Pitts said there was extensive damage.

“So please, if you need help, call 911 and help will be on the way immediately. But if you can, please stay home. Do not get out on the roads. Our first responders need time and space,” he said.

Allie Phillips, who lives in Clarksville, said she was grabbing lunch when she began receiving notifications of the tornado that was quickly approaching her neighborhood.

“It was excruciating watching the live stream and not knowing if my house was still there,” she said. “When we finally decided to leave, the road to my home was shut down because so many power lines were on the road and we had to take a detour.”

Phillips said her home survived with minimal damage – noting that her daughter’s toys were banged up and that a neighbor’s dog kennel hit the back of her home – but she was saddened to see that her neighbor’s house was missing a roof and a home up the block had all but completely disappeared.

“This doesn’t happen enough that you’re ever prepared for it,” she said.

The National Weather Service issued multiple tornado warnings in Tennessee, and said it planned to survey an area where an apparent tornado hit in Kentucky.

About 85,000 electricity customers were without power in Tennessee on Saturday night, according to PowerOutage.us.

The storm came nearly two years to the day after the National Weather Service recorded 41 tornadoes through a handful of states, including 16 in Tennessee and eight in Kentucky. A total of 81 people died in Kentucky alone.
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Russian police have put prominent Russian American journalist and author Masha Gessen on a wanted list after opening a criminal case against them on charges of spreading false information about the Russian army.

It is the latest step in an unrelenting crackdown against dissent in Russia that has intensified since the Kremlin invaded Ukraine more than 21 months ago, on Feb. 24, 2022.

The independent Russian news outlet Mediazona was the first to report Friday that Gessen’s profile has appeared on the online wanted list of Russia’s Interior Ministry, and The Associated Press was able to confirm that it was. It wasn’t clear from the profile when exactly Gessen was added to the list.

Russian media reported last month that a criminal case against Gessen, an award-winning author and an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, was launched over an interview they did with the prominent Russian journalist Yury Dud. 

In the interview, which was released on YouTube in September 2022 and has since been viewed more than 6.5 million times, the two among other things discussed atrocities by Russian armed forces in Bucha, a Ukrainian town near Kyiv that was briefly occupied by the Russian forces.

After Ukrainian troops retook it, they found the bodies of men, women and children on the streets, in yards and homes, and in mass graves, with some showing signs of torture. Russian officials have vehemently denied their forces were responsible and have prosecuted a number of Russian public figures for speaking out about Bucha, handing some lengthy prison terms.

Those prosecutions were carried out under a new law Moscow adopted days after sending troops to Ukraine that effectively criminalized any public expression about the war deviating from the official narrative. The Kremlin has insisted on calling it a “special military operation” and maintains that its troops in Ukraine only strike military targets, not civilians.

Between late February 2022 and early this month, 19,844 people have been detained for speaking out or protesting against the war while 776 people have been implicated in criminal cases over their anti-war stance, according to the OVD-Info rights group, which tracks political arrests and provides legal aid.

Gessen, who holds dual Russian and American citizenships and lives in the U.S., is unlikely to be arrested, unless they travel to a country with an extradition treaty with Russia. But Russian court could still try them in absentia and hand them a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

Pressure is also mounting on dissidents imprisoned in Russia. On Friday, supporters of Alexei Gorinov, a former member of a Moscow municipal council sentenced to seven years in prison for speaking out against the war, reported that his health significantly deteriorated in prison, and he is not being given the treatment he needs.

Gorinov was sentenced last year and is currently serving time at a penal colony in the Vladimir region east of Moscow. In a post on the messaging app Telegram, his supporters said his lawyer visited him on Friday and said Gorinov “doesn’t have the strength to sit up on a chair or even speak.” He told the lawyer that he has bronchitis and fever, but prison doctors claim he doesn’t need treatment, the post said.

The 62-year-old Gorinov has a chronic lung condition, and several years ago had part of a lung removed, the post said.

Allies of imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny were also concerned about his well-being on Friday.

Navalny is serving a 19-year prison term on the charges of extremism in the same region as Gorinov, and for the last three days his lawyers have not allowed to visit him, the politician’s spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said on X, formerly known as Twitter. Yarmysh said that letters to Navalny were also not being delivered to him.

“The fact that we can’t find Alexey is particularly concerning because last week he felt unwell in the cell: he felt dizzy and lay down on the floor. Prison officials rushed to him, unfolded the bed, put Alexey on it and gave him an IV drip. We don’t know what caused it, but given that he’s being deprived of food, kept in a cell without ventilation and has been offered minimal outdoor time, it looks like fainting out of hunger,” Yarmysh wrote.

She added that the lawyers visited him after the incident, and he looked “more or less fine.”

Navalny is due to be transferred to a “special security” penal colony, a facility with the highest security level in the Russian penitentiary system. Russian prison transfers are notorious for taking a long time, sometimes weeks, during which there’s no access to prisoners, and information about their whereabouts is limited, or unavailable at all.

Navalny, 47, has been behind bars since January 2021. As President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, he campaigned against official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests. His 2021 arrest came upon his return to Moscow from Germany, where he recuperated from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.

Navalny has since been handed three prison terms and spent months in isolation in prison for alleged minor infractions. He has rejected all charges against him as politically motivated.
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A man with dual U.S.-Russian nationality has been placed in pre-trial custody in St. Petersburg for “rehabilitating Nazism” in posts on social media, the city’s court service said Saturday. 

Yuri Malev was charged over posts in which he was alleged to have denigrated the St. George’s ribbon, a symbol of Russian military valor. One contained obscene language and the other showed a picture of a corpse wearing the ribbon. 

The court service said this showed disrespect for society and insulted the memory of the Great Patriotic War, as Russians refer to World War II. 

The U.S. State Department said it was aware of the reported detention but had no further comment on the case. Representatives for Malev could not be immediately reached. 

‘Partially admitted guilt’

The court service statement said Malev, who was detained in St. Petersburg on Friday, had “partially admitted guilt,” but did not elaborate. He was placed in custody until February 7. 

Several Americans and dual citizens are being held in Russia, including former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich. Earlier this week, the State Department said Russia had rejected a substantial proposal to release both men, who have been charged with spying, an allegation the United States has denied. 

Last week, a Russian court extended the pre-trial detention of Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, charged with failing to register as a “foreign agent,” an offense that carries up to five years in prison. 
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Fox News pushed back Friday against a former reporter’s lawsuit saying he was targeted and fired for challenging false claims about the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

The network argued that Jason Donner had not shown he faced illegal discrimination. The nation’s capital bans discrimination based on political party membership or endorsement, but Donner hasn’t shown he joined a political party, nor that his bosses knew and fired him for it, Fox lawyers said. 

“That law does not protect employees of news media organizations based on their differences of opinion over reporting and commentary on matters of public concern,” Fox attorneys wrote. 

Donner said in his lawsuit he was a longtime Republican who affiliated with Democrats more recently. 

The network also questioned whether he had properly informed managers when taking sick time after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, and whether he filed the lawsuit within the time allowed by the law. 

Donner’s lawsuit said he was fired in 2022 as part of a “purge” of employees who refused to only report information that would “appease” former U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters. He had been inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and called to scream at the control room when he learned Fox News referred to the rioters as peaceful, he wrote in his suit. 
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Afghanistan’s Taliban government denounced the United States Saturday for imposing fresh sanctions against two of its leaders for human rights abuses, saying that pressure and restrictive measures do not help solve problems.

The response came a day after the U.S. Treasury Department placed sanctions against 20 people in nine countries, including China, Iran and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, to mark International Human Rights Day on December 10.

Friday’s Afghan-related designations listed Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, head of the Taliban’s vice and virtue ministry, and Fariduddin Mahmood, a member of the group’s male-only cabinet and the head of the Afghanistan Academy of Sciences.

The U.S. said the two Taliban men were responsible for “the repression of rights for women and girls based solely on their gender.”

The Taliban ban girls from receiving an education beyond the sixth grade in Afghanistan and women from most workplaces. The Islamist group reclaimed power from an American-backed government two years ago, declaring its male-only administration as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, or IEA.

“We condemn the restrictions imposed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury on IEA’s two officials,” Zabihullah Mujahid, the chief Taliban spokesman, said in an English-language statement on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

He urged Washington to desist from “imposing pressure and restrictions” on his government, alleging the United States “should not repeat its failed experiences” of the past.

“While America itself is among the biggest violators of human rights due to its support for Israel, it is unjustified and illogical to accuse other people of violating human rights and then ban them,” Mujahid said.

Education bans

The U.S. announcement Friday identified Mahmood as a supporter of the education-related bans on women and girls. It said that members of Hanafi’s ministry “have engaged in serious human rights abuse, including abductions, whippings and beatings.” They also have assaulted Afghans protesting the restrictions on women’s activity, including access to education, the statement noted.

“Khalid Hanafi and Fariduddin Mahmood are complicit in serious human rights abuses against women and girls in #Afghanistan. We hold them accountable for denying half the #Afghan population their rights,” Karen Decker, the chargé d’affaires of the U.S. diplomatic mission to Afghanistan, said Saturday on X.

The Taliban returned to power in August 2021 when the U.S.-led international forces withdrew from Afghanistan after two decades of involvement in the war with the then-insurgent Taliban.

“Since August 2021, the Taliban has implemented expansive policies of targeted discrimination against women and girls that impede their enjoyment of a wide range of rights, including those related to education, employment, peaceful assembly and movement, among others,” said the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in its Friday statement.

It added that the Taliban’s restrictions have turned Afghanistan into the world’s only nation where women and girls are prohibited from pursuing secondary education.

Friday’s sanctions freeze all property and interests of the designated people in the United States and prohibit them from conducting business with Americans.

De facto Taliban rulers defend their policies, saying they are aligned with Afghan culture and Islamic law. Scholars and governments across the rest of Muslim-majority countries, however, dispute their claims.

No foreign government has recognized the Taliban as legitimate rulers of the country, mainly over human rights concerns and their harsh treatment of Afghan women.
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The future of fossil fuels is at the center of the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, where many activists, experts and nations are calling for an agreement to phase out the oil, gas and coal responsible for warming the planet. On the other side: energy companies and oil-rich nations with plans to keep drilling well into the future.

In the background of those discussions are carbon capture and carbon removal, technologies most, if not all, producers are counting on to meet their pledges to get to net-zero emissions. Skeptics worry the technology is being oversold to allow the industry to maintain the status quo.

“The industry needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals — which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution,” International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol said before the start of talks.

What is carbon capture?

Many industrial facilities such as coal-fired power plants and ethanol plants produce carbon dioxide. To stop those planet-warming emissions from reaching the atmosphere, businesses can install equipment to separate that gas from all the other gases coming out of the smokestack and transport it to where it can be permanently stored underground. And even for industries trying to reduce emissions, some are likely to always produce some carbon, such as cement manufacturers that use a chemical process that releases CO2.

“We call that a mitigation technology, a way to stop the increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere,” said Karl Hausker, an expert on getting to net-zero emissions at World Resources Institute, a climate-focused nonprofit that supports sharp fossil fuel reductions along with a limited role for carbon capture.

The captured carbon is concentrated into a form that can be transported in a vehicle or through a pipeline to a place where it can be injected underground for long-term storage.

What is carbon removal?

Then there’s carbon removal. Instead of capturing carbon from a single, concentrated source, the objective is to remove carbon that’s already in the atmosphere. This already happens when forests are restored, for example, but there’s a push to deploy technology, too. One type directly captures it from the air, using chemicals to pull out carbon dioxide as air passes through.

For some, carbon removal is essential during a global transition to clean energy that will take years. For example, despite notable gains for electric vehicles in some countries, gas-fired cars will be operating well into the future. And some industries, like shipping and aviation, are challenging to fully decarbonize.

“We have to remove some of what’s in the atmosphere in addition to stopping the emissions,” said Jennifer Pett-Ridge, who leads the federally supported Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s carbon initiative in the United States, the world’s second-leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

 

How is it going?

Many experts say the technology to capture carbon and store it works, but it’s expensive, and it’s still in the early days of deployment.

There are about 40 large-scale carbon capture projects in operation around the world capturing roughly 45 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, according to the International Energy Agency, or IEA. That’s a tiny amount — roughly 0.1% — of the 36.8 billion metric tons emitted globally as tallied by the Global Carbon Project.

The IEA says the history of carbon capture “has largely been one of unmet expectations.” The group analyzed how the world can achieve net zero emissions, and its guide path relies heavily on lowering emissions by slashing fossil fuel use. Carbon capture is just a sliver of the solution — less than 10% — but despite its comparatively small role, its expansion is still behind schedule.

The pace of new projects is picking up, but they face significant obstacles. In the United States, there’s opposition to CO2 pipelines that move carbon to storage sites. Safety is one concern; in 2020, a CO2 pipeline in Mississippi ruptured, releasing carbon dioxide that displaced breathable air near the ground and sent dozens of people to hospitals.

The federal government is working on improving safety standards.

Who supports carbon capture?

The American Petroleum Institute says oil and gas will remain a critical energy source for decades, meaning that for the world to reduce its carbon emissions, rapidly expanding carbon capture technology is “key to cleaner energy use across the economy.” A check of most oil companies’ plans to get to net-zero emissions also finds most of them relying on carbon capture in some way.

The Biden administration wants more investment in carbon capture and removal, too, building off America’s comparatively large spending compared with the rest of the world.

But it’s an industry that needs subsidies to attract private financing. The Inflation Reduction Act makes tax benefits much more generous. Investors can get a $180-per-ton credit for removing carbon from the air and storing it underground, for example. And the Department of Energy has billions to support new projects.

“What we are talking about now is taking a technology that has been proven and has been tested but applying it much more broadly and also applying it in sectors where there is a higher cost to deploy,” said Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, an industry advocacy group.

Investment is picking up. The EPA is considering dozens of applications for wells that can store carbon. And in places such as Louisiana and North Dakota, local leaders are fighting to attract projects and investment.

Who is against it?

Some environmentalists argue that fossil fuel companies are holding up carbon capture to distract from the need to quickly phase out oil, gas and coal.

“The fossil fuel industry has proven itself to be dangerous and deceptive,” said Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

There are other problems. Some projects haven’t met their carbon removal targets. A 2021 U.S. government accountability report said that of eight demonstration projects aimed at capturing and storing carbon from coal plants, just one had started operating at the time the report was published despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.

Opponents also note that carbon capture can serve to prolong the life of a polluting plant that would otherwise shut down sooner. That can especially hurt poorer, minority communities that have long lived near heavily polluting facilities.
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Wyoming’s governor and other top leaders decided Thursday to hold off on auctioning a big chunk of state-owned land within Grand Teton National Park, choosing instead to continue negotiations with the U.S. government on a purchase or land swap for the pristine and valuable property.

Depending on how those talks go, the state Board of Land Commissioners made up of Governor Mark Gordon and the state’s other four statewide elected officials, all of whom are Republicans, might revisit the unpopular proposal next fall.

“Thank you very much,” Grand Teton Superintendent Palmer “Chip” Jenkins Jr. told the board members after their 5-0 vote against auction for now.

Park employees understand that revenue from such state lands funds education — they, too, have kids in Wyoming’s public schools — but are concerned about development in “inappropriate places,” Jenkins added.

An auction, recommended by State Lands Director Jenifer Scoggin to comply with a legal mandate to raise as much money for schools as possible, would have happened as soon as January. The land is appraised at $62.4 million.

Scoggin had suggested a minimum $80 million bid, investment of which would yield millions of dollars a year compared with the $2,800 a year now realized from grazing leases and recreation permits.

State lands staff speculated in a report for the board that a luxury home developer who subdivided the property into lots no smaller than 35 acres (14 hectares) would pay the most at auction.

Even compared with Wyoming officials’ previous threats to auction state-owned parcels within the park to prod the U.S. government to step in and pay millions to conserve the properties, the reaction was noteworthy for the lack of support for the proposal. In public hearings and letters since October, thousands of people opposed an auction.

“This area should not be destroyed by the construction of luxury houses and other development,” read a form statement for submission to the state on the National Wildlife Federation Action Fund website. “Too much development has already encroached on critical winter habitat near the park.”

As of Thursday, a counter showed more than 12,500 submissions of the form.

Located on the park’s eastern edge, the square-mile (2.6 square-kilometer) Kelly Parcel is undeveloped except for a road through it and offers an unobstructed, head-on view of the famously spectacular Teton Range. The land is prime habitat for moose, elk, deer and other wildlife typical of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Wyoming has owned the land since statehood and it has existed within — but is technically not part of — Grand Teton since a park expansion in 1950.

Previous sales of state mineral rights and 86 acres (34.8 hectares) of state land in the park in 2012, followed by the sale of a different square-mile (2.6 square-kilometer) parcel in 2016, have netted Wyoming over $62 million. State officials and the Interior Department originally agreed the federal government would buy the Kelly Parcel for $46 million no later than early 2015, but negotiations broke down and have dragged on ever since.

Gordon raised the issue with Interior officials in a meeting of the Western Governors Association in Jackson Hole last month, according to spokesman Michael Pearlman.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder, a member of the state land board, made Thursday’s motion to delay a possible auction, saying that $2,800 a year is “not an acceptable rate of return” but lands like the Kelly Parcel are essential to Wyoming’s character. Other options, such as a land swap, should be attainable through negotiations, she said.

“However, I do not think the answer is a sweetheart deal with the federal government,” Degenfelder said. “Our land and our education are worth more than that.”
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Following a five-year legal battle, the settlement of a class action lawsuit concerning the practice of separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border has been approved, and, importantly, it bars the use of a similar policy for the next eight years.

The American Civil Liberties Union brought the lawsuit in 2018 to stop the forcible separation of children from their parents after they illegally crossed the border into the United States.

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in the Southern District of California approved the settlement Friday.

“When we brought this lawsuit, no one thought it would involve thousands of children, take us to so many countries searching for families, or last for years,” Lee Gelernt, the lead ACLU attorney on the case, wrote in a statement.

“While no one would ever claim that this settlement can wholly fix the harm intentionally caused to these little children, it is an essential beginning,” the statement continued.

The policy resulted in immigration agents separating more than 4,000 children from their parents and only became known after audio of scores of sobbing children screaming for their parents emerged from a U.S. federal detention facility.

About 4,500-5,000 children and their parents will be covered under this settlement. The government is expected to continue to identify families that were separated.

Though news of the separations came to light in 2018, a pilot program began in 2017 in the El Paso, Texas, area.

The policy sparked widespread bipartisan outrage and eventually pushed then-President Donald Trump to sign an executive order ending the practice. Many of the parents were deported from the United States without their children, some of whom were in foster care or with relatives they had never known before.

The settlement offers resources to help families address the trauma they suffered under the policy, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an October statement.

“The Department of Homeland Security has taken steps to ensure that the prior practice of separating families does not happen again, and we are continuing the work of reuniting children with their parents,” his statement said.

However, former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has said he could reinstitute the family separation policy if he’s reelected.

“If a family hears that they’re going to be separated — they love their family — they don’t come. I know it sounds harsh,” Trump said during a town hall in May.

But Gelernt, the ACLU attorney who represented the separated families, told VOA in an email that, “If a future administration tries to reinstate the family separation practice, the settlement allows us to go back to court to get an order stopping it.”

The order

The 46-page settlement does not offer money to families who were separated, but it does allow them to apply for temporary legal status for three years and a work permit. They can receive some help finding housing, and aid for initial rent payments such as first and last month’s rent. And the federal government must cover co-payments for medical and behavioral health services.

Families can also apply for asylum, even if they were denied it during their time in the U.S.

It also prohibits U.S. immigration officials from using the accusation that migrants entered the U.S. illegally as a reason to separate parents and their children. Agents at the border must prove child abuse or serious crimes before separating families and also record the charges, evidence and where each child is sent in a shared government database. Under the settlement, if families are separated, the ACLU lawyers must be informed so they can dispute the separations.

The Biden administration created a task force to continue to reunite separated families. According to a September report by the task force, 3,126 children have been reunited with their parents or legal guardians. The task force is still working with nonprofit and nongovernment organizations to reunite 1,073 children with their parents.

Of those, 81 children have no valid contact information for their parents or other relatives.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, child psychology experts, and other child welfare groups have spoken out against separating children from their parents. They say it can have long-lasting effects on children’s emotional growth and cognitive development.

The ACLU has settled hundreds of lawsuits in its 103-year history, its executive director, Anthony D. Romero, wrote in an email to the media.

“None more important than this one … but as welcomed as it is, the damage inflicted on these families will forever be tragic and irreversible,” he added.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping will pay a state visit to Vietnam next week, his third to Hanoi after a six-year break and as Beijing and Washington jostle for influence.

The visit, on Tuesday and Wednesday, will coincide with the 15th anniversary of the establishment of a “comprehensive strategic partnership” between the nominally communist one-party, authoritarian states.

It also will come just three months after Vietnam upgraded its relationship with the United States to that same partnership level. U.S. President Joe Biden’s September visit to Vietnam put Washington on an equal footing with Beijing in Hanoi’s diplomatic hierarchy.

But unlike their relationships with the U.S., China and Vietnam share a high degree of ideological convergence, with leaders of both countries often describing their bilateral relationship as “comrades and brothers.”

Since Xi became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, his Vietnamese counterpart, Nguyen Phu Trong, has visited China three times, in 2015, 2017 and 2022. He was the first foreign dignitary to visit after Xi secured his unprecedented third term as leader.

Xi also visited Vietnam in 2015 and 2017 but stopped traveling for three years during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trade

Over the past decade, economic and trade relations between China and Vietnam have become increasingly close. China is Vietnam’s largest trading partner and second-largest export market, and it is now a major source of foreign investment in Vietnam. Vietnam is China’s top trading partner among countries in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

China’s General Administration of Customs says trade between China and Vietnam exceeded $200 billion for the first time in 2021, reaching $230.2 billion — a year-on-year increase of 19.7%.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative says trade between the U.S. and Vietnam in 2022 totaled $142 billion, with U.S. exports since 2021 up 3% and imports up 25%.

Despite close political and economic ties between China and Vietnam, the two countries have a decades-long sovereignty dispute over large parts of the South China Sea. Beijing’s aggressive assertion of its claims has pushed Hanoi closer to Washington.

China’s placement of an oil rig near the Paracel Islands in 2014 led to a standoff and collision with a Vietnamese fishing vessel that sparked anti-Chinese riots in Vietnam.

Tensions flared again in 2020 after a Vietnamese fishing boat and Chinese vessel collided near the Paracel Islands, sinking the Vietnamese one.

China’s militarization over the past decade of the Spratly Islands, where it has deployed anti-ship cruise missiles and long-range surface-to-air missiles, has also triggered serious concern in Vietnam.

Vietnam has responded with reclamation and expansion projects on islands under its control.

Popular perception

While most Vietnamese have come to terms with the Vietnam War that ended when the U.S. withdrew its troops in 1975, many still look warily at China — a giant neighbor with whom they fought a brief war in 1979. Beijing launched a three-week attack on Vietnam to punish Hanoi for invading Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge, and the two sides had occasional border skirmishes in the years that followed.

A survey published in February by Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute showed that while a majority of Vietnamese views on U.S. influence were positive, a growing majority saw Chinese influence as negative.

The survey showed most Vietnamese were not confident that China would do the right thing in terms of global peace, security, prosperity and governance, while 65% believed that Beijing’s economic and military power could be used to threaten their own country’s interests and sovereignty.
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A federal appeals court in Washington largely upheld a gag order on Donald Trump in his 2020 election interference case on Friday, but narrowed the restrictions on his speech to allow the former president to criticize the special counsel who brought the case.

The three-judge panel’s ruling modifies the gag order, permitting the Republican 2024 presidential front-runner to make disparaging comments about special counsel Jack Smith, but it reimposes limits on what he can say about known or reasonably foreseeable witnesses in the case and about court staff and other lawyers.

The unanimous ruling is mostly a win for Smith’s team, with the judges agreeing with prosecutors that Trump’s often-incendiary comments about participants in the case can have a damaging practical impact and rejecting claims by defense attorneys that restrictions on the ex-president’s speech amount to an unconstitutional muzzling. It lays out fresh parameters about what Trump can and cannot say about the case as he both prepares for a March trial and campaigns to reclaim the White House.

“Mr. Trump’s documented pattern of speech and its demonstrated real-time, real-world consequences pose a significant and imminent threat to the functioning of the criminal trial process in this case,” Judge Patricia Millett wrote for the court. She noted that many of the targets of Trump’s verbal jabs “have been subjected to a torrent of threats and intimidation from his supporters.”

The case accuses Trump of plotting with his Republican allies to subvert the will of voters in a desperate bid to stay in power in the run-up to the Capitol riot by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. It is scheduled to go to trial in March in Washington’s federal court, just blocks away from the Capitol.

Friday’s opinion says that though Trump has a constitutional right to free speech and is a former president and current candidate, “he is also an indicted criminal defendant, and he must stand trial in a courtroom under the same procedures that govern all other criminal defendants.”

The appeals court also said that a comment on court staff, other lawyers or their family members was off-limits “to the extent it is made with either the intent to materially interfere with their work or the knowledge that such interference is highly likely to result.”

In a social media post responding to the ruling, Trump said his team would appeal, and he complained anew about restrictions on his speech.

“In other words, people can speak violently and viciously against me, or attack me in any form, but I am not allowed to respond, in kind,” he said. “What is becoming of our First Amendment, what is becoming of our Country?”

The special counsel has separately charged Trump in Florida with illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left the White House following his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. That case is set for trial next May, though the judge has signaled that the date might be postponed.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing and has claimed the cases against him are part of a politically motivated effort to keep him from returning to the White House.
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