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washington — NATO set out Thursday to deepen relations with key Indo-Pacific partners, meeting with leaders from Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea a day after all 32 NATO allies called out China for its support of Russia's illegal war against Ukraine in a sternly worded communique. During a working session, NATO and its Indo-Pacific partners strengthened plans and developed strategies to face growing threats in the Pacific region, including North Korean missile launches and China's steady stream of technology and raw materials to Russia that have allowed President Vladimir Putin to replace his losses on the battlefield. U.S. officials said the Indo-Pacific partners' attendance sent a message to China that democratic alliances will stand up for the rule of law, no matter where an aggressor tries to break it. "NATO also recognizes that threats from the Indo-Pacific, whether it's the DPRK [North Korea] or the PRC [China] supporting Russia in their aggression against Ukraine, we cannot avoid," Jason Israel, National Security Council senior director for defense policy, Israel told VOA. In a final communique signed by all 32 allies, NATO called China a "decisive enabler" of Russia's war and urged Beijing to cease its support.  "The PRC cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation," the leaders wrote. They also expressed concerns about Beijing's space capabilities and nuclear arsenal. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday told reporters that "China is propping up Russia's war economy" and "increas[ing] the threat Russia holds to Europe and NATO security." "China provides dual-use equipment, microelectronics and a lot of other tools which are enabling Russia to build the missiles, to build bombs, to build the aircraft, to build the weapons they're using to attack Ukraine," he added. Asked by VOA whether the statement was a strong enough message to deter China from continuing to support Russia, Stoltenberg replied in the news conference that Wednesday's declaration was "the strongest message that NATO allies have ever sent on China's contributions to Russia's illegal war against Ukraine." Some allies on Thursday cautioned the alliance against using the narrowly worded communique as a springboard to make NATO appear "anti-China." "NATO is a defense alliance. ... We can't organize it into an anti-China bloc," Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told Hungarian state television on the sidelines of the summit. However, defense expert Bradley Bowman, the senior director for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' Center on Military and Political Power, said calling out China was long overdue for the bloc. "Europeans are dying in Europe in a war of aggression from the Kremlin with the support of Iran, North Korea and China, period," he said. U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday said NATO must counter Russia's ramping up of defense production — made possible by help from China, North Korea and Iran — by continuing to invest more in Ukraine's and NATO's own defense production. "We cannot allow the alliance to fall behind," Biden said.  China insists that it does not provide military aid to Russia, despite maintaining strong trade ties with Moscow. On Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian accused NATO of "breaching its boundary, expanding its mandate, reaching beyond its defense zone and stoking confrontation."

HOUSTON — About half a million Houston-area homes and businesses will still be without electricity next week, the city's largest utility said Thursday, stoking the frustration of hot and weary residents and leading a top state official to call the pace of recovery from Hurricane Beryl "not acceptable." Jason Ryan, executive vice president of CenterPoint Energy, said power has been restored to more than 1 million homes and businesses since Beryl made landfall in Texas on Monday. And the company expects to get hundreds of thousands of more customers back online by Sunday. But many more will wait much longer. "We know that we still have a lot of work to do," Ryan said during a meeting of the Texas Public Utility Commission, the state's utility regulation agency. "We will not stop the work until it is done." Ryan said that the prolonged outages into next week would be concentrated along the Gulf Coast, close to where Beryl came ashore. During a news conference Thursday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick pushed CenterPoint to work faster to relieve residents who have been without power for days and have been forced to seek air conditioning in community cooling centers and meals from food and water distribution points. Compounding their discomfort was a new band of rainstorms that swept through the Houston area Thursday. The rain provided brief relief from the heat before temperatures were expected to creep back above 32 Celsius over the weekend. "Folks, that is not acceptable," that half a million customers could still be without power a week after the storm, said Patrick, who is acting governor while Gov. Greg Abbott is in Asia on an economic development trip. Patrick and Abbott have both promised that the state will investigate the storm response. Texas has dealt with several major storms over the past two decades. "We are always going to have big storms in this area. ... We have to be sure they were prepared as they should have been," Patrick said. "It's a terrible situation for people who are in this heat." Patrick and Abbott also sparred with the White House over the timing of requests for federal declarations for the area, whether they would delay help for storm cleanup and other emergency expenses. The Category 1 hurricane — the weakest type — knocked out power to around 2.7 million customers after it made landfall, according to PowerOutage.us. Residents have been frustrated that such a relatively weak storm could cause such disruption at the height of summer. Some have criticized the utility and state and city officials as not ready for the storm, the slow restoration process, and that CenterPoint's online map has been woefully inaccurate, sometimes showing entire neighborhoods as restored when they were still without power. The company acknowledged that most of the 12,000 workers it brought in to help the recovery were not in the Houston area when the storm arrived. Initial forecasts had the storm blowing ashore much farther south along the Gulf Coast, near the Texas-Mexico border, before it headed toward Houston. Ryan said the vast majority of outages were caused by falling trees and tree limbs, and workers had to conduct damage surveys on some 13,700 kilometers of power lines. Beryl has been blamed for at least eight U.S. deaths — one each in Louisiana and Vermont, and six in Texas. Earlier, 11 died in the Caribbean. The storm's lingering impact for many in Texas, however, was the wallop to the power supply that left much of the nation's fourth-largest city sweltering. Mallary Cohee said her duplex in New Caney, about 48 kilometers north of Houston, has been without power since Monday. She said her "little country neighborhood" is a "hot mess" of downed trees, so she's staying at a Houston hotel. Cohee said she initially felt she could withstand the lack of air conditioning because she managed to get by without it in summer while serving a two-year prison sentence. "I thought, 'I can do this. I can ride it. If I can do time with no heat, no AC in there, I could possibly make it,'" Cohee said. "But it's a whole different ballgame when you don't even have a fan to plug in." Clean water was also becoming an issue. More than 160 boil water notices were in effect across the area, and more than 100 wastewater treatment plants were offline Thursday, said Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management. The Texas Hospital Association said a "vast majority" of hospitals in the area are dealing with some kind of issue caused by Beryl, including water and wind damage, power and internet connection problems, staffing shortages or transportation problems. Carrie Kroll, the association's vice president of advocacy, public policy and political strategy, said hospitals are getting an "extremely high" number of people coming to emergency departments with symptoms of heat stroke and injuries from cleaning up debris. By Wednesday night, hospitals had already sent more than 100 patients who couldn't be released to homes with no power to a Houston sports and event complex with an area set up to hold up to 250, Office of Emergency Management spokesman Brent Taylor said. 

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new york — Donald Trump's lawyers on Thursday said Manhattan prosecutors improperly relied on evidence of the former U.S. president's official acts in securing his conviction on criminal charges stemming from hush money paid to a porn star. In a court filing dated July 10 but made public on Thursday, defense lawyers said the guilty verdict should be set aside following the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity. They said evidence of official acts that were improperly shown to the jury included Trump's conversations with former White House aide Hope Hicks and some of his Twitter posts while he was in office. "The use of official-acts evidence was a structural error under the federal Constitution," defense lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote. "The jury's verdicts must be vacated." Justice Juan Merchan this month delayed Trump's sentencing by two months after defense lawyers said the justices' July 1 ruling that presidents cannot face criminal charges over official acts meant prosecutors should not have shown evidence from Trump's time in the White House at trial. They said that meant the Manhattan jury's May 30 guilty verdict in the first-ever criminal trial of a U.S. president could not stand. Prosecutors with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office have until July 24 to respond. They have previously called Trump's arguments meritless but agreed to push back the sentencing. Legal experts said Trump faces steep odds of getting the hush money conviction overturned because much of the case involves conduct before his presidency and the evidence from his time in the White House has more to do with private conduct. The Supreme Court's ruling stemmed from a separate case Trump faces on federal charges involving his efforts to undo his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. It all but ensured Trump would not face trial in that case before the November 5 election. Trump's lawyers are also seeking a pause in a third criminal case on charges of mishandling classified documents because of the ruling. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges. In the hush money case, Trump was found guilty of falsifying business records to cover up his former lawyer's $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels to remain quiet about a sexual encounter she says she had with Trump. Prosecutors say the payment was designed to boost his presidential campaign in 2016, when he defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton. The Supreme Court's decision said evidence of a president's official acts cannot be used in a prosecution on private matters. Merchan has said he will decide on Trump's arguments by September 6. If the conviction is upheld, Trump will be sentenced on September 18, less than seven weeks before the election.

Kampala, Uganda — A group including rights activists and a politician filed an appeal to Uganda's Supreme Court on Thursday, the latest step in a legal challenge to a ruling upholding the controversial anti-gay legislation adopted last year, their lawyer said.  In April, the Constitutional Court threw out a challenge to the Anti-Homosexuality Act, which is considered one of the harshest such laws in the world.   It imposes penalties of up to life in prison for consensual same-sex relations and contains provisions that make "aggravated homosexuality" an offense punishable by death.  The legislation and the April court ruling have been widely condemned by rights groups as well as by Western powers, including the United States.  The group had filed a formal notice of appeal against the court's decision in mid-April, contesting its determination that the law did not violate Uganda's constitution.  "The Constitutional Appeal challenging the Ugandan Constitutional Court's decision to uphold vast sections of the Anti-Homosexuality Act has been filed at the Supreme Court today," lawyer Nicholas Opiyo said on X on Thursday.  "We will wait for the Supreme Court's directions and are optimistic for an expedited hearing of the case," he said.  Opiyo told AFP that Thursday's filing was the latest step in the appeal process, following the lodging of a formal notice of appeal three months earlier.  "It is a process to complete the appeal and set it for the court to start the next step," he said.  The 22 petitioners include MP Fox Odoi-Oywelowo, a member of President Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Movement, and prominent human rights defender Frank Mugisha.  The United States, which restricted visas for Ugandan officials and removed Kampala from a key trade pact after the law was adopted last year, warned after the April 3 ruling that it would take "appropriate measures."  Museveni's government has rejected concerns about the law, accusing the West of trying to pressure Africa into accepting homosexuality.  And the measures have enjoyed broad support in the conservative, predominantly Christian country.  Last August, a 20-year-old man became the first Ugandan to be charged with "aggravated homosexuality" under the contested law.  The World Bank announced the same month that it was suspending new loans to Uganda over the law.  There has been an anti-gay crackdown across Africa, often encouraged by conservative Muslims and Christians.  On Thursday, the government of junta-led Burkina Faso adopted a plan to ban homosexuality, becoming the latest African nation to do so despite international condemnation.  Homosexuality is illegal in around 30 African countries, and some of them like Ghana and Uganda have recently toughened anti-gay laws. 

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The United Nations humanitarian agency says it is struggling to raise enough funds to tackle an alarming rate of food insecurity in Nigeria’s conflict-ridden northeast. Officials say a rising number of global crises are forcing countries that need help to compete for scarce resources. VOA Correspondent Timothy Obiezu reports from Dikwa in Borno state. Warning: The following video includes graphic images that some may find disturbing. View discretion is advised.

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NIAMEY, niger — Niger's interior ministry said it had ordered search units to be on alert after inmates escaped Thursday from the high-security Koutoukale prison, whose inmates include Islamist militants.  The ministry statement did not say how many prisoners had escaped Koutoukale, which lies 50 kilometers northwest of the capital, Niamey, or how they had done so. In 2016 and 2019, attempted jail breaks at the facility were repelled.  The prison's inmates include detainees from the West African country's conflict with armed groups linked to al-Qaida and Islamic State and suspected Boko Haram insurgents.  Local authorities imposed an overnight curfew in the urban commune of Tillaberi, which is in the same region as the prison, but did not give further details.     Niger and its neighbors in the central Sahel region are on the front lines of the battle to contain a jihadist threat that has steadily grown since 2012, when al-Qaida-linked fighters first seized parts of Mali.  Thousands have been killed in the insurgencies and more than 3 million displaced, fueling a deep humanitarian crisis in some of the world's poorest countries.

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washington — First lady Jill Biden is supporting her husband, President Joe Biden, as he tries to salvage his reelection campaign after a debate performance left a growing number of members of his own party questioning his decision to stay in the race. “She’s his biggest supporter and champion, because she believes in him, and she fears for the future of our country if it goes the other way,” Elizabeth Alexander, the first lady's communications director, said this week. “Just as he’s always supported her career, she supports his.” Jill Biden has been campaigning with her husband this week but also on her own at several stops. “For all the talk out there about this race, Joe has made it clear that he’s all in,” she said at each of her solo campaign stops. “That’s the decision he’s made. And just as he has always supported my career, I am all in, too. I know you are, too, or you wouldn’t be here today,” she told crowds in North Carolina, Florida and Georgia. As first lady, Jill Biden has spearheaded initiatives for military members and their families as well as cancer treatment. As a longtime teacher, she also prioritized programs focused on education. She has been involved in Joining Forces, a White House designed initiative to support military and veteran families, caregivers and survivors, according to the White House website. Joining Forces focuses on projects such as improving military spouse employment and military child education. In her first two years as first lady, Biden visited 24 military installations. She has also been a part of Cancer Moonshot, a program rejuvenated by the Bidens. According to its website, the project is committed to “ending cancer as we know it” by preventing more than 4 million cancer deaths by 2047. According to the American Cancer Society, a little more than 600,000 people died of cancer in 2021. The goals of Cancer Moonshot include increasing access to screenings and avoiding harmful environmental exposures. In addition to being the U.S. first lady, Biden is also an educator. Part of her focus while in the White House has been on academic initiatives aimed at recruiting and retaining teachers and lowering education costs. When Joe Biden became vice president under President Barack Obama, Jill Biden became the first-ever second lady to hold a paying job outside the White House. As first lady she has continued to teach writing at Northern Virginia Community College, just south of Washington, where she taught full time while her husband was vice president.    “Many of my students don’t know that I have two jobs,” she said in 2021.   Biden is very familiar with life in Washington, since her husband spent 36 years in the U.S. Senate and eight years as vice president under Obama.   Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory gave Jill Biden the distinction of being the first presidential spouse to have earned a doctorate. Dr. Biden, 73, was born in New Jersey and grew up in the northern suburbs of Philadelphia. She earned her doctorate in education from the University of Delaware.   Life with Joe Biden was complicated from the start. She was going through a divorce. He was grieving, raising two young sons alone after his wife and baby daughter died in a car crash. Jill and Joe married, after Joe asked five times.    “And the fifth time, I finally said to her, 'Jill, my Irish pride has gotten ahold of me. This is the last time I'm gonna ask you,” Biden said on the “Rachael Ray Show.” “I said, ‘You don't have to tell me when you will marry me, just if you'll marry me.’ She said yes.” Four years later, Jill gave birth to a daughter, Ashley. Tragedy would strike again in 2015 when Joe Biden’s 46-year-old son, Beau, died of brain cancer. “This is personal for me and my husband Joe,” she said. She was the author of the 2020 children’s book Joey: The Story of Joe Biden. It was about her husband’s early years, his competitiveness and resilience after being mocked over his stutter.     She displayed that protective streak during a campaign rally in March 2023, using her body on two occasions to block a protester from reaching her husband on stage.   Although they call the tiny Mid-Atlantic state of Delaware their home, Jill Biden has followed her husband through his career as U.S. senator, vice president and president. Now, she hopes to see him in the White House for another four years.

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washington — Iran struggled to arrange absentee voting in the U.S. for the second round of its presidential election Friday, as a VOA investigation found that Tehran’s U.S. ballot stations suffered more setbacks than those it organized for the election’s first round a week prior. Tehran declared relative moderate former Iranian Health Minister Masoud Pezeshkian the winner of the July 5 runoff against ultraconservative former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili. Iran's interests section office in Washington began the absentee voting operation on U.S. soil by setting up ballot stations for the election’s first round on June 28. That first-round operation suffered some setbacks, according to an initial VOA investigation. Three of the 33 ballot station addresses listed online by the interests section office just hours before voting started quickly canceled their voting events under pressure from Iranian American activists and protesters who oppose Iran’s authoritarian Islamist rulers. VOA’s new investigation found that Iran’s U.S.-based agents encountered deeper problems with organizing ballot stations for the July 5 runoff. The findings conflict with Iran’s assertion, published by state news agency IRNA, that those agents were able to “increase” the number of ballot stations for the runoff, thanks to the “welcome” of Iranians living in the U.S. Almost half of the June 28 ballot stations were not relisted for use in the runoff, indicating difficulties for the organizers in rebooking some of the first-round venues. VOA also assessed that for the runoff, the locations where voting was canceled doubled, while ballot stations whose addresses were hidden to keep protesters away increased. Those addresses were accessible only by contacting a listed phone number or email address. A VOA review of the July 5 ballot station list, which was updated multiple times that day, found that it included street addresses of 32 venues. One additional venue near Boston had been exposed by activists online after they apparently accessed its unlisted address via email. The listed addresses included those of 16 hotels, six Islamic centers, and a variety of other venues. VOA assessed that voting events proceeded in at least 17 venues on the July 5 list, based on verbal confirmations from venue staff who answered phone calls that day and on videos of the sites posted by activists on social media and deemed to be credible. Fifteen of the identified July 5 ballot station locations had not been listed for the election’s first round, while 18 locations from the first round were relisted for round two. One of them was the main ballot station, in Iran’s Washington interests section office. That is where a VOA Persian reporter observed about 90 to 100 people entering the venue in a 10-hour period on July 5. Three of them told the reporter that most of the visitors were there filling out passport applications or other paperwork rather than voting. One man was at the office with his wife on July 5 specifically to vote. He told the VOA Persian reporter that voting is a pillar of democracy and could lead to positive change for Iran. Many diaspora Iranians denounced Iran’s presidential election as a sham, while the State Department called it neither free nor fair. The Islamic republic’s ruling clerics permit only loyalists of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to run for offices such as president and parliament, which are subservient to him on key policy issues. Iranian American activists opposed to Tehran's U.S. ballot stations protested peacefully on June 28 outside two venues that canceled voting events, and those activist told VOA they successfully appealed to a third to do the same. None of the three venues were relisted for the July 5 vote. One of them was the Congregational Church of Weston near Boston, Pastoral Resident Megan Strouse told VOA in an interview that those who rented the church on June 28 identified themselves as from Boston’s Iranian American community. "We thought their intention was to hold an election event for their local community, for a board or something of that nature," Strouse said. "That morning, we realized what the event was, and our senior pastor made the call to ask the renters to stop their event, as it did not align with our mission and purpose as a religious organization." VOA emailed the independently owned Biltmore Hotel Oklahoma in Oklahoma City on July 3, requesting confirmation of its use as a June 28 ballot station after Iran had identified it as such, and asking whether the hotel would host a voting event for the runoff. There was no response from the hotel, and it was left off the second-round ballot station list published on July 5. In another sign of the difficulties that Iran faced in its U.S. ballot station operation for July 5, VOA determined that voting was canceled in three of the 33 identified venues. Hotel staff who answered the phones at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Seattle North Lynnwood in Washington and at Marriott’s The Westin Tysons Corner in Virginia confirmed that the runoff voting events were called off following protest activity. Protesters also found the unlisted address of a second-round mobile ballot station that briefly operated out of a police station parking lot in the Boston suburb of Woburn. They posted social media images indicating the event was called off after they showed up at the site. Three additional U.S. cities initially appeared in Iran’s July 5 list as numbered voting precincts, but they were removed in updated versions of the list with no ballot station addresses having been displayed, indicating that voting plans for those locations had been canceled as well. These were Ontario, California; Oklahoma City; and Sterling, Virginia. Iran also hid the addresses of July 5 mobile voting stations that it listed for three parts of Los Angeles and for New York’s Manhattan borough and the Boston area, forcing both prospective voters and protesters to use the listed contact information for those stations to find their addresses. For the June 28 vote, only the mobile station for Manhattan had an unlisted address. U.S. advocacy group National Iranian American Council, which has adopted a positive view of Pezeshkian, Iran’s incoming president, decried what it called the protesters’ intimidation and harassment of Iranian Americans who voted at U.S. ballot stations on June 28. "We cannot be a community that stands for voter suppression and attacks against Iranians who dare to express their political agency," NIAC said in a July 2 statement. Andrew Ghalili, a senior policy analyst with National Union for Democracy in Iran, an Iranian American advocacy group that opposes the Islamic republic, told VOA that those who organized and participated in the U.S. voting events were helping the Iranian government boost its legitimacy at home and abroad. But Ghalili said the boycott of the vote by most diaspora Iranians and protest actions by some of them showed that they have lost faith in the Islamic republic’s ability to reform itself through elections. "Some of the protesters’ goals were accomplished, in terms of making Iran struggle with its election messaging, so I think they should be pleased with their efforts," he said. Soran Khateri of VOA’s Persian service contributed to this report from Washington.

maputo, mozambique — Botswana's President Mokgweetsi Masisi has promised to continue supporting Mozambique in its fight against violent extremism in the oil-and-gas rich province of Cabo Delgado, even after the imminent departure of southern African troops from the troubled region.     Addressing a media conference upon his arrival in the Mozambican capital Maputo late Wednesday, Masisi said the withdrawal of troops from Cabo Delgado does not mark the end of his country's support in combating violent extremism.   Masisi said Botswana remains ready to assist Mozambique.     "In the military and security space, we are going to share our know-how and expertise because we are to you what you are to us," said Masisi. "And just to make it clear, we will stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Mozambique in the quest for peace, so any instability such as we witnessed, we will be ready to intervene."     Botswana is the second country, following Tanzania to pledge continued support for Mozambique after the departure of troops from SADC, the Southern African Development Community.  The SADC troops are due to leave Mozambique on July 15 due to financial issues.    After holding official talks with Masisi at his seaside palace in Maputo late Wednesday, Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi thanked his visitor for Botswana's role in the fight against terrorism in Cabo Delgado.     "Together, we work to combat these attacks and this help does not end,"  said Nyusi. "There are many ways Masisi is supporting Mozambique and that will continue. We are training our officers, our military personnel in Botswana. And the flow will continue because these are the ones who must ensure the continuation of the fight."    The SADC mission consisted of troops from Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia, working in collaboration with the Mozambican defense forces and Rwandan troops to combat acts of terrorism and violent extremism.     The mission, known as SAMIM, has been in Mozambique since July of 2021 and was able to destroy the terrorist bases, reduce the number of attacks, and restore normal functioning to public and private institutions. However, Webster Zambara, a senior project leader of peace-building initiatives at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in South Africa, predicted a long road ahead before terrorism is vanquished in northern Mozambique.   Zambara spoke with VOA Thursday from his base in Cape Town over WhatsApp.     "If you look at Boko Haram in West Africa, it has been there for 15 years now. If you look at al-Shabab in East Africa, it has been there for more than 10 years," said Zambara. "So, anyone who thought that rising extremism in northern Mozambique is going to be a short war would not have looked at how terrorists have operated, not only in Africa, but even globally.  "  The insurgency in northern Mozambique began in 2017 and already has caused close to 6,000 deaths, leading to the displacement of more than 1 million people. Multinational oil and gas firms operating in the region, such as Exxon Mobil and Total, were forced to suspend operations over security concerns.