The 67-year-old gunman who killed three faculty members and wounded a fourth in a roughly 10-minute rampage at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, had a list of targets at the school and more than 150 rounds of ammunition, police said Thursday. 

Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill identified the suspect, who was killed in a shootout with police, as Anthony Polito, a longtime business professor who was living in nearby Henderson, Nevada. The sheriff said at a news conference that investigators were still looking into a motive but noted that Polito had applied for several jobs at various colleges and universities in Nevada but was denied the job each time. 

However, Roseman University of Health Sciences in Henderson said Polito had an adjunct faculty contract and taught two courses in the school’s Master of Business Administration program from October 2018 to June 2022. He left when the program was discontinued, said Jason Roth, a spokesperson for the school. 

McMahill said targets on Polito’s list also included faculty members at East Carolina University in North Carolina, where Polito was a professor at the university’s business school from 2001 to 2017. 

“None of the individuals on the target list became a victim,” McMahill said, adding that police have contacted everyone on the suspect’s list, except for one person who is on a flight.

Before the shooting, Polito also mailed 22 letters to university faculty members across the U.S., according to footage reviewed by detectives from a dashcam in Polito’s vehicle, McMahill said. 

Some envelopes contained an unknown white powder that was later found to be harmless, police said. 

Terrified students and professors cowered in classrooms and offices as the gunman roamed the top three floors of UNLV’s five-story Lee Business School around lunchtime Wednesday.

Polito arrived at UNLV about 15 minutes before the shooting in a 2007 Lexus, McMahill said. He exited his car, placed items in his waistband and then entered the business school just after 11:30 a.m. The first reports of gunfire came about 15 minutes later, McMahill said.

The sheriff said the rampage ended around 11:55 a.m., when Polito left the business school and was confronted by police outside the building.

The suspect’s weapon, a 9 mm handgun, was purchased legally last year, McMahill said.

Police were still investigating how many rounds were fired during the attack. But the sheriff said that due to the sheer amount of ammunition in the gunman’s possession, he believed Polito may have been headed to the student union, which is next to the business school, when university police officers found him, and he was killed in the shootout. 

McMahill said the shooter brought 11 magazines with him to the campus, and police found nine of them on the shooter after he was killed.

It wasn’t immediately clear how many of the school’s 30,000 students were on campus at the time, but McMahill said students had been gathered outside the building and the student union to eat and play games. If police hadn’t killed the attacker, “it could have been countless additional lives taken,” he said. 

The victims

UNLV President Keith E. Whitfield identified two of the victims who were killed as business school professors Patricia Navarro-Velez and Cha Jan “Jerry” Chang. Whitfield said the name of the third victim will be released after relatives have been notified of the death. 

In a letter to students and staff, Whitfield said that the shooting “was the most difficult day in the history of our university.” 

The wounded man, a 38-year-old visiting professor, was still hospitalized Thursday. McMahill said his condition had been “downgraded to life-threatening” from critical. 

Navarro-Velez, 39, was an accounting professor who held a Ph.D. and was currently focused on research in cybersecurity disclosures and data analytics, according to the school’s website.

Chang, 64, was an associate professor in the business school’s Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology department and had been teaching at UNLV since 2001. He held degrees from Taiwan, Central Michigan University and Texas A&M University, according to his online resume. He earned a Ph.D. in management information systems from the University of Pittsburgh.

The attack at UNLV terrified a city that experienced the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history in October 2017, when a gunman killed 60 people and wounded more than 400 after opening fire from the window of a high-rise suite at Mandalay Bay on the Las Vegas Strip, just miles from the UNLV campus.

The suspect

Authorities on Thursday said Polito appeared to be struggling financially. When they arrived at his apartment Wednesday night to search the property, McMahill said, they found an eviction notice taped to his front door. Inside the apartment, detectives found a chair with an arrow pointing down to a document “similar to a last will and testament,” McMahill said, though the sheriff did not provide specifics on the contents of that document.

It wasn’t immediately clear how long Polito had been living in the Las Vegas area. He resigned from East Carolina University as a tenured associate professor, according to a statement Thursday from the university.

One of Polito’s former students at East Carolina, Paul Whittington, said Polito seemed obsessive over anonymous student reviews at the end of each semester.

Polito told Whittington’s class that he remembered the faces of students who gave him bad reviews and would express that he was sure who they were and where they sat, pointing at seats in the classroom, Whittington said.

“He always talked about the negative feedback he got,” said Whittington, now 33, who took Polito’s intro to operations management class in 2014. “He didn’t get a lot of it, but there would always be one student every semester, or at least one student every class, that would give a negative review. And he fixated on those.”

Classes at UNLV were canceled through Friday, and the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo canceled events that were scheduled Thursday night at the Thomas & Mack Center at UNLV. 
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Javier Vrox, the host of a political program on a YouTube channel in Chile who constantly monitors social networks in his country, recently noticed an uptick in pro-Russian political messaging, which had already been common in the country.

“They copy and paste the same messages on social media — that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy is an actor, that he is a funny president; they copy those videos of Zelensky’s past TV series, making the point that he is an actor and a liar.”

According to Vrox, such reports aim to convince Chileans that Ukrainians only pretend to be victims of Russian aggression but are themselves a regional threat, and that NATO and the United States, by that logic, are its partners and equally hostile to Chile while Russia is a reliable ally.

“I think they’re doing a great job of tagging influencers, people from Twitter, now X, to share video messages and posts … to create the idea that if you’re a friend of the U.S., you’re an enemy to Chile,” said Vrox, who added that some posts referred to Ukrainian leaders as “Nazis,” even though Zelenskyy himself is Jewish.

These sentiments are not shared by Chilean President Gabriel Boric, who has publicly condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine and met with Zelenskyy in September 2023 during the U.N. General Assembly in New York to discuss a possible Ukraine-Latin America summit.

“Chileans don’t really support Ukraine; they think that Ukrainians are trying to manipulate the media to look like victims,” said Vrox. But “Boric supports Zelenskyy’s government, so a weird situation has developed.”

Well-funded network

James Rubin, the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center special envoy and coordinator, agreed in an interview with VOA last month that Russia is “covertly co-opting local media and influencers to spread disinformation and propaganda” in Latin America.

In a public statement issued on November 7, the State Department said Russia “is currently financing an ongoing, well-funded disinformation campaign across Latin America,” spanning at least 13 countries, from Argentina and Chile in the south all the way to Mexico in the north.

“A cultivated group of editorial staff would be organized in a Latin American country, most likely in Chile, with several local individuals and representatives — journalists and public opinion leaders — of various countries in the region,” the statement said.

“A team in Russia would then create content and send the material to the editorial staff in Latin America for review, editing, and ultimately publication in local mass media.”

Christopher Hernandez-Roy of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS, said Russia has a “legacy of propaganda” in the region going back to the Cold War.

Hernandez-Roy is a CSIS Americas Program deputy director and senior fellow.

The Soviets, he said, were “supporting revolutionary movements throughout the region, including military support in the case of Cuba, Nicaragua and other places, Central America in general, in the 70s and 80s.”

The annexation of Crimea in 2014, he said, became the starting point of a new wave of disinformation in the region.

“It’s around then that you start to see maybe an uptick in Russia’s influence or trying to influence narratives in the Western Hemisphere,” he told VOA. “In those three years — 2014, 2015 and 2016 — you start to see, for instance, ‘Russia Today’ coming online in Chile and Mexico, and I think in Argentina, as well.”

According to an October report by the United States Institute of Peace, Actualidad RT (Russia Today in Spanish) and Sputnik Mundo are the key purveyors of Russian state media in the region. Hernandez-Roy said these two media organizations have about 32 million regular listeners in Latin America, which has 667 million inhabitants.

“So, [even] 30 million is quite significant, and those are [merely] the overt ways,” he said. “Russia has a much more sophisticated apparatus than just simply its visible media outlets, [such as] using social media, sympathetic journalists, sympathetic influencers and Russian automated bots on social media. It can amplify its messages, which then are picked up by other sympathetic mechanisms.”

“We know [Actualidad RT] have offices in Havana, Buenos Aires and Caracas,” said Armando Daniel Armas, a Venezuelan opposition politician currently living in Europe. “We know that [Actualidad RT] have over 200 Spanish-speaking, let’s say, journalists working in Moscow … who allocate resources to find professional people, good people with content” to perpetuate Russian narratives on the ground in Latin American.

The object, according to U.S. officials, is to have Russian public relations and internet companies recruit and cultivate Latin American journalists, influencers and public opinion leaders to seed their publications and broadcasts with content favorable to Moscow while hiding any links to the Kremlin.

“They’ve been somewhat successful in using RT and Sputnik in Latin America,” Rubin told VOA in November. “The difference here is they’re trying to operate surreptitiously. They’re trying to create content in Russia and launder it through Latin American journalists. They are covertly co-opting local media and influencers to spread disinformation and propaganda.”

U.S. officials said it is unclear how many of the journalists and opinion leaders are aware they are being fed Russian disinformation, although a senior State Department official told VOA, “There are definitely some willing participants.”

Others involved in the network may be sympathetic to the Russian viewpoints but unaware that the directions are coming from Moscow.

Russia’s ultimate objective, said Hernandez-Roy, is to convince people in Latin America that Moscow is not the only one to blame — that there’s blame on both sides in a war caused by the U.S. and NATO.

“Essentially, what they’re trying to do is to make sure that the region is neutral,” said Hernandez-Roy. “We’re not talking about Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, which, of course, are completely on the Russian side.”

Soft diplomacy

Yuriy Polyukhovych, Ukraine’s ambassador to Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, points to another asset utilized to influence opinions in Latin American that Moscow has used since Soviet times: its diplomatic corps.

“Russian ambassadors, Russian embassies here are a part of Russia’s propaganda machine,” he told VOA. “They’ve been doing their work for many years. These are not embassies of four or five persons. These embassies have 60, 70, 80 people each. Imagine what can be done with such a group of people! According to our information, some work for the intelligence service.”

At the same time, said Ukrainian Ambassador to Argentina Yuriy Klymenko, the Russian war against Ukraine at least somewhat undermined Russia’s standing in Latin America, presenting a diplomatic opportunity for the United States and its allies.

“From my experience, it is now considered bad manners to invite representatives of Russia to diplomatic or other public events,” he told VOA.

Yuriy Polyukhovych once called Latin America a region of “contact diplomacy,” emphasizing the need to work directly with local populations to counteract Russian influence. Hernandez-Roy suggested the U.S. project more soft power in the region.

“The U.S. used to project much more soft power decades ago than today,” he said. “Soft power means people-to-people exchanges, more high-level visits, cultural interchanges.”

Kyiv, he said, should allocate more resources to the region and conduct active diplomacy with high-level visits and ambassadors to counter Russian narratives.

This story originated in VOA’s Ukrainian Service. VOA National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed reporting.
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The U.S. Commerce Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Friday $1 million in funding to improve the collection of Arctic climate data.

In a statement, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the U.S. Arctic region — which consists of the state of Alaska — is warming faster than any region in the United States and demands immediate action.

She said the new funding — part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included money for clean energy development — will provide “data and tools that can build climate resilience and strengthen our economy and national security.”

The $1 million in funding will be used to solicit grant ideas from institutions of higher education, other nonprofits or commercial organizations to help improve climate and data collection, with a focus on Alaskan communities.

In the same statement, NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said, the call for grant proposals is designed to both gather data and help Alaskan rural and Indigenous communities.

“Providing communities with environmental information that allows them to make informed decisions in the face of a changing climate is the foundation of creating a more climate resilient nation,” he said.

The most recent NOAA National Climate Assessment indicates Alaska is warming at a rate that is two to three times faster than the lower 48 states, and the Arctic as a whole is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the global average.
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The emergence of a Middle Corridor — a transit network linking Asia with European markets by way of Central Asia, the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus — is rapidly gaining momentum as an alternative to Russia-controlled routes.

While the Trans-Caspian routes, also sometimes referred to as the China-Central Asia-West Asia Corridor, have come into their own over the past 30 years, Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has prompted a significant increase in traffic over the routes.

Gaidar Abdikerimov, who heads the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR) association, reports that his network now comprises 25 transport and logistics companies including ports, vessels, railways and terminals. Its members also include 11 countries: Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, China and Singapore.

“This all means that there is a high interest in our route,” Abdikerimov said in a recent forum at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute (CACI) in Washington. He told the audience that over the past 10 months, more than 2.256 million tons of cargo have been transported over the route.

Abdikerimov’s office is based in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. The oil-rich republic stretches from China’s northwestern frontier to the Caspian Sea, where cargo can be offloaded onto ships and carried to Azerbaijan in the Caucasus.

“We have decreased the estimated delivery time of transit container trains from 38 days to 19 days,” he said.

The World Bank stressed the “catalyzing potential” of the Middle Corridor in a November 27 report that focused on its beneficial impact on Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia – Azerbaijan’s western neighbor providing access to the Black Sea.

“There was indeed a spike in the volume of traffic in 2022,” said Charles Kunaka, a lead transport specialist at the World Bank. “We see the Middle Corridor as adding to the resilience of the transport networks across the region, and especially connectivity between Europe, Central Asia, and East Asia.”

The World Bank foresees two major types of commerce flowing through the Middle Corridor, the first being trade between China and Europe.

“We see this type of trade as being relatively elastic. And we saw this in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that most of this trade initially switched to the Middle Corridor,” Kunaka said in a presentation to the CACI forum.

“But after some time, because of the constraints that still affect the performance of the Middle Corridor, we see some of this trade switching to maritime transport, for instance.”

The second flow is within the region itself, which the World Bank sees as a “more solid foundation for the development of the Middle Corridor.” Much of the traffic in this category involves fertilizers, minerals and grains.

Kunaka underscored the importance of collaboration among governments, the private sector, development banks and other relevant institutions if the route is to overcome several obstacles to its continued growth, including logistical and bureaucratic bottlenecks.

Grievances expressed by stakeholders in the project include high costs, unreliability, bottlenecks, poor service quality and a lack of transparency and traceability, he said.

Digitalization and the use of electronic documents by both the railways and on the Caspian Sea would ease the process, Kanaka suggested.

“A combination of investments and efficiency measures can reduce travel times along the corridor by half and triple trade flows by 2030,” said the World Bank report. “A fully functioning corridor would help to shield China-Europe trade and supply chains from shocks.”

Abdikerimov agreed, stressing that the Trans-Caspian routes must also connect with the Black Sea ports.

“Speed, quality service, sustainability and safety. We are systematically going towards these goals,” he said at the CACI forum.

Brenda Shaffer of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, believes the World Bank study is an indication that “the Middle Corridor is increasingly of interest to multiple stakeholders.”

Speaking on the same virtual panel as Abdikerimov, Shaffer described an emerging alliance among Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, pointing to a growing convergence in the messaging of these countries’ diplomats in Washington and other capitals.

She thinks the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “created a security threat to the region, especially to those that border Russia, such as Kazakhstan.”

For Shaffer, Turkey is a unique player, steadily boosting its role in the Caspian region.

By backing Azerbaijan during its invasion to reconquer the unrecognized republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, which had been under the de facto control of ethnic Armenians since the early 1990s, Ankara demonstrated “that cooperation with Turkey can have meaningful security benefits.”

She also expects Turkmenistan’s gas exports — currently directed mainly toward China — to shift westward.

“Increasing volumes of oil are going across the Caspian in various forms of small tankers,” she said, adding that all sides find it in their interests to increase those volumes significantly.

“Turkmenistan is dealing with potential demand destruction or lack of reliability of demand from China, surprisingly, for gas. As Russia increases its gas exports to China, they’re cheaper,” Shaffer said.

CACI’s Mamuka Tsereteli urges the U.S. government to focus on the value of increasing connectivity across the Black and Caspian seas through Central Asia and beyond.

“For Central and Eastern European states with a decades-long dependency on Russian resources in Russia-linked infrastructure, South Caucasus and Central Asia are major potential alternatives,” Tsereteli said.

Tsereteli hopes the United States and the EU will help in the development of the Middle Corridor, pointing out that Central Asia is also a large market for Western goods and services.

Kazakhstan’s Abdikerimov underlined that “Russia is definitely not fond of this Middle Corridor,” even though the goal has never been to avoid or exclude it. He said the Trans-Caspian transport network he oversees has always had its eyes on Turkey, North Africa and Southern Europe.
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…

The French oil company TotalEnergies coerces and intimidates communities affected by the $5 billion East African Crude Oil Pipeline project in Tanzania and Uganda, a human rights organization said this week.

Residents along the 1,443-kilometer (870-mile) pipeline route are forced to accept inadequate compensation for their land, according to Global Witness, a human rights and environmental organization.

Global Witness accused TotalEnergies of collaborating with Tanzanian and Ugandan authorities to suppress efforts by communities seeking accurate compensation for land taken for the oil pipeline.

The pipeline route stretches from Tanzania’s port city of Tanga to Lake Albert in Uganda.

TotalEnergies has denied the allegations.

Neither country has commented on the report, but previous criticism, including that from Human Rights Watch and court cases against the displacement and abuses, has not stopped or affected the project.

The Global Witness report

Hanna Hindstrom, a senior investigator in the Global Witness land and environmental defender campaign, told VOA that TotalEnergies is directly involved in human rights violations.

“We found evidence suggesting that TotalEnergies, through its subsidiary, its contractors and partners, has been party to intimidation and bullying of community members affected by the project,” Hindstrom said. “Many people we spoke to say they were pressured into accepting compensation for their land and their property that they felt was too low as a result of a climate of fear in both countries.”

She said the company benefits from the authoritarian political environment in Tanzania and Uganda in which environmental defenders find it “all but impossible to speak up against fossil fuel development.”

Global Witness said it spoke to activists, experts, journalists and more than 200 people affected by the multibillion-dollar project.

Farmer Jealousy Mugisha, 51, is one of many people who said they are losing their land to pave the way for the pipeline.

The father of seven told VOA he lost his land twice. First, in 2017, when more than a dozen hectares were taken for a processing plant used as an oil collection point. Then, in 2019, he lost 2½ hectares in the pipeline route.

He refused any compensation offered to him, saying it was not enough.

“Our target is not that we want to sabotage a government program or oil project program,” Mugisha said, “but … we need them to respect our rights. … [People’s] land was taken, and now they are suffering.”

He said, “We need to get fair compensation, adequate compensation and promotive compensation. That is the only thing we are claiming.”

Land use and compensation

According to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline project, in the first phase of land acquisition, landowners could continue to use their land. The landowners said they were allowed to plant seasonal agricultural produce such as corn and sweet potatoes.

Further into the project, compensation to the evicted owners was calculated with a “disturbance allowance” and an increase to reflect the time elapsed since original surveys of the land, according to project documents.

Some landowners filed cases challenging the evictions and low compensation in a local court and a French court.

TotalEnergies has denied allegations they have intimidated anyone affected by the project. The oil firm says it has instituted numerous support mechanisms to ensure that those affected sign agreements only of their own free will.

The company also said it treats the people’s concerns with the utmost seriousness.

Harassment and intimidation reported

Maxwell Atuhura, head of Tasha Research Institute in Uganda and an environmental activist, said he came under attack for challenging the pipeline project.

“My field office was closed … and [I was] given two hours to leave the place, to leave my own district, my own area,” he said. “The security man working for an oil company is telling me that ‘I’m giving you a few hours to leave the district.’ Where do you want me to go?”

Atuhura said he also has been harassed.

“Since then, they started trailing me, and my phone is surveilled,” he said. “I started seeing the experience of my house being broken into.”

About 80% of the project will be in Tanzania, with the rest in Uganda. Global Witness said the oil pipeline, for which construction began this year after years of delay, will cut across wildlife habitats, protected areas and Indigenous land.

The pipeline project said that Tanzania and Uganda regulators have approved the environmental and societal impacts, and that the project seeks to avoid populated and environmentally sensitive areas.

Global Witness has called for an official investigation of the alleged rights abuses.
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Approximately 7 mortar rounds landed in the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad during an attack early on Friday, a U.S. military official told Reuters, disclosing a far larger attack than previously known. 

The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, left open the possibility that more projectiles were fired at the embassy compound but did not land within it. 

The official said the attack caused very minor damage but no injuries. 
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Funding to counter China in the Pacific is now caught in the congressional battle in Washington over foreign aid and border security. The White House calls the package a “critical component” of its national security. And as VOA’s Jessica Stone reports, time is running out to lock in an economic and security relationship between the United States and three strategic Pacific Island nations. Camera: Yu Chen, Jessica Stone, Saqib Ul Islam
…

As part of his campaign for a second term as U.S. president, Donald Trump and his allies say the former president — if he wins — would use federal law enforcement to punish his political enemies and restructure the federal government to streamline implementation of his policies.

While Democrats have been virtually unanimous in their concerns about a second Trump presidency, warning that it would be tantamount to a “dictatorship,” the reaction among Republicans has been sharply divergent. Some in the Republican Party are raising an alarm, while others downplay Trump’s rhetoric, suggesting that concerns about it are overblown.

A key distinction, though, is that most of the Republicans expressing concerns about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are either no longer in office or have announced their retirement, which suggests that resistance to the former president’s expressed preferences may not be a tenable position in the modern-day Republican Party.

Revenge and retribution

In recent weeks, Trump has promised his supporters that he will be their “retribution” if he retakes the White House, and has used language reminiscent of the worst of European fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, calling his political opponents “vermin” and warning that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States.

Trump has also expressed interest in reclassifying broad swaths of the federal workforce — tens of thousands of career civil servants — as “Schedule F” employees whom he could fire at will. A coalition of conservative think tanks, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, is currently “vetting” thousands of Trump supporters who are interested in serving in a second Trump administration and who could be expected to faithfully carry out his wishes.

Trump has also promised to take specific steps, including “going after” President Joe Biden and his family with a “special prosecutor,” and has suggested that news outlets critical of him should be silenced.

Trump’s closest supporters have echoed his threats. In an interview with former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon this week, Kash Patel, a former Defense Department official during the Trump administration, said that in a second Trump term, “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media …

“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

“This is just not rhetoric,” Bannon added. “We’re absolutely dead serious.”

A one-day dictator?

As recently as Tuesday in a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity, Trump was given the opportunity to allay concerns that he would behave like a dictator if reelected.

“To be clear, do you in any way have any plans whatsoever if reelected president, to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people?” Hannity asked.

“You mean like they’re using right now?” Trump replied, and did not answer the question.

A few minutes later, Hannity tried again, “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?”

“We love this guy,” Trump replied. “He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said, ‘No, no, no. Other than Day One. We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator. OK?”

The Trump campaign did not respond to an emailed request asking for clarification of his remarks.

Republicans issue warnings

In the Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie painted a dire picture of what he thinks another Trump presidency would look like.

“This is an angry, bitter man who now wants to be back as president because he wants to exact retribution on anyone who has disagreed with him, anyone who has tried to hold him to account for his own conduct, and every one of these policies that he’s talking about are about pursuing a plan of retribution,” Christie said.

“Do I think he was kidding when he said he was a dictator?” Christie continued. “All you have to do is look at the history, and that’s why failing to speak out against him, making excuses for him, pretending that somehow he’s a victim empowers him. …

“Let me make it clear: His conduct is unacceptable. He’s unfit. And be careful of what you’re going to get if you ever got another Donald Trump term. He’s letting you know, ‘I am your retribution.'”

Trump was not on the stage, having declined to participate in any of the primary debates. The other three Republicans on the debate stage, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, avoided any sharp criticism of the former president, who retains a commanding lead in polls of likely primary voters.

‘Sleepwalking into a dictatorship’

Christie’s concerns have been echoed by other Republicans such as Utah Senator and 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who told The Washington Post this week that Trump’s base seems to want him to behave like an authoritarian.

“His base loves the authoritarian streak,” Romney said. “I think they love the idea that he may use the military in domestic matters, and that he will seek revenge and retribution. That’s why he’s saying it and has the lock, nearly, on the Republican nomination.” In September, Romney announced that he will not be running for reelection next year.

Former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, who has been a vocal critic of Trump and served on the House panel that investigated the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, told CBS News last weekend that she has no doubts about what a second Trump presidency would look like.

“One of the things that we see happening today is sort of sleepwalking into a dictatorship in the United States,” she said.

Not a serious threat

Current Republican officeholders who are supportive of the former president often downplay his suggestion that he will use the levers of governmental power to punish his critics.

During Wednesday’s debate, for example, DeSantis dismissed concerns about Trump behaving as an authoritarian during a second term.

“Look, the media’s making a big deal about what he said about some of these comments,” he said. “I would just remind people that is not how he governed.”

Senator Lindsey Graham has said publicly he believes Trump’s comments to Hannity were meant to be “funny.” In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Graham disputed Cheney’s assertions about how Trump will behave in office, saying they stem from her personal animosity toward the former president.

“I think a continuation of the Biden presidency would be a disaster for peace and prosperity at home and abroad,” Graham said. “Our border is broken. The only person who is really going to fix a broken border is Donald Trump. When he was president, none of this stuff was going on in Ukraine. Hamas and all these other terrorist groups were afraid of Trump.”

Asked to comment on Trump’s statement that he would be a one-day dictator, Republican Senator Thom Tillis said, “He said he would do two things: He would close the border and drill. Everybody could say that’s abusing power. I think that’s a righteous use of power, and President Biden’s failed on it.”

‘Autocrats always tell you who they are’

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor at New York University and author of “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present,” warned against the danger of dismissing Trump’s rhetoric as unserious or flippant.

“Everything Donald Trump says should be taken seriously,” she wrote in an email exchange with VOA. “Autocrats always tell you who they are and what they are going to do. In this case, Trump is saying clearly he has aspirations to be a dictator, which is unsurprising given his incitement of a coup to stay in office illegally and given his open adulation of others of his tribe such as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping].”

Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of Communications at American University who studies the connection between political language and violence, said that downplaying Trump’s rhetoric allows much of what the former president says to become “normalized” with the general public.

“They’ve been saying he’s ‘just joking’ for seven years now,” Braddock told VOA. “And whether he’s just joking or not is immaterial as far as I’m concerned. People interpret it, or some segment of the population interprets it, as being truthful.”

“When there’s a population that admires somebody as much as some individuals admire Trump, the normalization of this kind of language promotes positive attitudes about the kinds of things it implies,” Braddock said.

“So if he jokes about being a dictator, or jokes about implied violence against political enemies, the more he does that the more it kind of becomes part of our normal vocabulary.”
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Western foreign policy experts are welcoming recent U.S. agreements to jointly tackle foreign disinformation with Seoul and Tokyo, saying they are needed to counter Chinese efforts to undermine liberal democracies through the spread of fake news.

The U.S. signed a Memorandum of Cooperation with Japan in Tokyo on Wednesday “to identify and counter foreign information manipulation,” according to a State Department statement.

The agreement follows a Memorandum of Understanding signed with South Korea in Seoul on Friday to cooperate in their efforts to tackle foreign disinformation. The agreements, the first designed to fight disinformation, were made during an Asia trip by Liz Allen, the U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.

They are designed to “demonstrate the seriousness with which the United States is working with its partners to defend the information space,” according to the State Department’s Wednesday statement, which did not specify any nations as threats.

In response, Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA on Tuesday that he wants to stress that “China always opposes the creation and spread of disinformation.”

He said, “What I have seen is that there is a lot of disinformation about China on social media in the U.S. Some U.S. officials, lawmakers, media and organizations have produced and spread a large amount of false information against China without any evidence, ignoring basic facts.”

The agreements the U.S. made with its allies are “a deliberate acknowledgment of the threats posed by China,” said David Maxwell, vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy.

“Disinformation is part of a deliberate long-term political warfare campaign by China to subvert the democracies of the U.S., the ROK and Japan as well as to undermine the alliance relationships to prevent unified action against China,” Maxwell said, using the acronym for South Korea’s official name, Republic of Korea.

China is seemingly accelerating its social media operation aimed at influencing the U.S. election in 2024.

Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced on Nov. 30 that it took down 4,789 Facebook accounts based in China that were impersonating Americans, including politicians, and posting messages about U.S. politics and U.S.-China relations.

In the report on adversarial threats, Meta said China is the third-most-common source of foreign disinformation after Russia and Iran.

Dennis Wilder, a senior fellow for the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University, said, “The Chinese, Russians, and others seek to disrupt the normal give and take of our political discourse.”

Wilder, formerly National Security Council director for China in 2004-05 during the George W. Bush administration, continued to say the agreements Washington made with Seoul and Tokyo are “a significant step forward” as “democracies must work together” to offset “disinformation designed to influence electorate and sow overall dissent within our open political systems.”

Beijing appears to be spreading anti-U.S. and pro-China messages in South Korea as well.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) announced Nov. 13 it had identified and taken down 38 fake Korean-language news sites operated by two Chinese public relations firms, Haimai and Haixun.

South Korea’s National Cyber Security Center, which is overseen by NIS, released a report on the same day describing the kind of propaganda that the firms disseminated through the fake news sites by posing as members of the Korean Digital News Association. The organization oversees the copyrights of news articles posted by its members.

Using news site names such as Seoul Press with the corresponding domain name as seoulpr.com and Busan Online with busanonline.com, Haimai has been disseminating disinformation and operating the sites from China, according to the report. Busan is South Korea’s second-largest city.

An article on Daegu Journal, another illicit site Haimai was running, stated in June that nuclear wastewater released from Japan would affect the South Korean food supply chain.

The National Cyber Security Center report also noted that U.S.-based cybersecurity firm Mandiant, owned by Google, released a report in July accusing Haimai of operating 72 fraudulent websites to spread anti-U.S. messages.

Cho Han-Bum, a senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification, told VOA’s Korean Service on Tuesday that “China and North Korea have been attempting in various ways to influence South Korea’s public opinion.”

He said the influence campaign could affect South Korean politics and therefore Seoul’s relations with Beijing or its stance on Pyongyang.

Kim Hyungjin in Seoul contributed to this report.
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Japan has pledged $4.5 billion to Ukraine for its war against Russia, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced Thursday, $1 billion of which is designated for humanitarian aid.

“Japan is consistent and very principled in its support of our country and our people, and I am grateful for this assistance,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his daily address Thursday.  He said Japan’s decision to support Ukraine was “very timely and much-needed.”

A Russian drone attack killed one person and damaged port infrastructure in Ukraine’s Odesa region, the regional governor said Thursday.

Oleh Kiper said Odesa was under attack for two hours, and that while air defenses shot down most of the Russian drones involved, some of them made it through.

He identified the victim as a truck driver, and said the drone attack damaged a warehouse, elevator and trucks near the Danube River.

Ukraine’s military said Russia’s aerial attack involved a total of 18 drones targeting Odesa in southern Ukraine and the Khmelnytskyi region in the western part of the country.

Ukrainian air defenses shot down 15 of the 18 drones, the military said.

U.S. aid

Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday blocked $110 billion in aid for Ukraine and Israel, as well as some security measures for the U.S. southern border.

U.S. President Joe Biden had asked Congress for almost $106 billion to fund the wars and border needs.

The vote Wednesday was 49 votes in favor and 51 against, leaving the measure short of the 60 votes needed in order to proceed.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who supports Ukraine aid, told his party members to reject the aid package because it did not include policy changes, something lawmakers have fought over for years.

Earlier Wednesday, Biden implored Congress to approve more arms aid for Ukraine, saying that failing to pass the assistance would be the “greatest gift” the United States could hand Russian President Vladimir Putin in Putin’s nearly two-year war against the neighboring country.

At the same time, the U.S. Defense Department announced new security assistance for Ukraine that is the Biden administration’s 52nd allotment of equipment for Ukraine since August 2021. It contains air defense capabilities, artillery ammunition, anti-tank weapons and other equipment.

The $175 million military aid package includes guided missiles for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, anti-armor systems, and high-speed anti-radiation missiles, according to the Pentagon and State Department.

Speaking briefly at the White House, the U.S. leader said that if Putin defeats Ukraine, “it won’t stop there,” and Moscow would invade neighboring NATO countries the U.S. is legally bound to defend.

“If NATO is attacked,” Biden said, “We’ll have American troops fighting Russian troops. We can’t let Putin win.”

With the new tranche of aid, Biden emphasized in a statement that “security assistance for Ukraine is a smart investment in our national security. It helps to prevent a larger war in the region and deter potential aggression elsewhere.”

Some Republican lawmakers in both the Senate and House of Representatives say they will not approve the additional Ukraine assistance without adopting much stricter U.S.-Mexico border controls, such as blocking all illegal migration.

Biden said, “I support real solutions at the border … to fix the broken immigration system,” but called for a compromise with opposition Republicans, not blanket acceptance of shutting the border, one of the demands of some Republicans.

The president said Republicans “have to decide whether they want a political solution or a real solution. This has to be a compromise.”

Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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