Voice of America’s immigration news

In the United States, the two major political parties have been illustrated by a donkey, symbolizing the Democratic Party, or an elephant, symbolizing the Republican Party. The images are used on campaign-related materials. But why were these two beasts chosen?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that a date has been set for an Israeli invasion of Rafah, Gaza's last refuge for displaced Palestinians, without disclosing that date. He made his statement as a new round of cease-fire talks was ongoing in Cairo. A Hamas official told Reuters on Monday that no progress was made at a new round of Gaza ceasefire talks in Cairo also attended by delegations from Israel, Qatar and the United States. We talk with Laurie Brand, professor emerita of political science and international relations and Middle East studies at the University of Southern California. She says the two-state solution is dead. And millions of people watch the sky go dark in the middle of the afternoon as a total solar eclipse cut a diagonal path across North America from Mexico to Canada.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti — Haitian leaders have finalized a deal for a temporary government to steer their Caribbean nation out of gang-fueled chaos, but the details must first be approved by the outgoing authorities, Agence France Presse confirmed Monday. Members of the transition council sent their plan to the regional Caribbean body CARICOM late Sunday. The accord establishes a nine-member council — seven voting members and two observers — representing political parties, the private sector and civil society, that will pave the way for presidential elections by early 2026. Its mandate "will end on February 7, 2026," according to the agreement seen Monday by AFP. The impoverished country's new authorities will replace outgoing Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who announced his resignation on March 11 after Haiti plunged into deadly gang violence. A political official said the accord was presented late Sunday to CARICOM, which has been instrumental in negotiations over the island nation's latest crisis. A final step awaits: the formal approval and acceptance of the deal by Haiti's outgoing government. The council's first task will be to elect a prime minister who, in collaboration with the nine-member team, will form a government charged with leading the country until "democratic, free and credible elections" can be held, the agreement states. No members of the council or the soon-to-be-formed government will be allowed to run in the elections. Haiti has suffered years of political instability and crime, and no elections have been held since 2016. The situation has worsened since late February when armed gangs attacked police stations, prisons and government headquarters, and forced the shutdown of the port and airport in a spasm of anti-Henry violence. With the airport in Port-au-Prince closed, the prime minister has not been able to return to the country since he traveled to Kenya seeking to secure Nairobi's lead in an international security mission to Haiti sponsored by the United Nations. The weekend breakthrough follows negotiations to succeed Henry that have been delayed by internal disagreements and legal wrangling. CARICOM will now have to transmit the accord — and a decree confirming its entry into force — to the outgoing Henry government to confirm the investiture of the new council. The transitional body establishes priorities or "security, constitutional and institutional reforms, and elections." The accord announces creation of a national security council of Haitian experts who will oversee agreements on international security assistance, including on dispatch of the U.N.-backed mission.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Washington; Flagstaff, Arizona — President Joe Biden on Monday announced a $6.6 billion grant to Taiwan’s top chip manufacturer to produce semiconductors in the southwestern U.S. state of Arizona, which includes a third facility that will bring the foreign tech giant’s investment in the state to $65 billion. Biden said the move aims to perk up a decades-old slump in American chip manufacturing. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which is based in the Chinese-claimed island, claims more than half of the global market share in chip manufacturing. The new facility, Biden said, will put the U.S. on track to produce 20% of the world’s leading-edge semiconductors by 2030. “I was determined to turn that around, and thanks to my CHIPS and Science Act — a key part of my Investing in America agenda — semiconductor manufacturing and jobs are making a comeback,” Biden said in a statement. U.S. production of this American-born technology has fallen steeply in recent decades, said Andy Wang, dean of engineering at Northern Arizona University. “As a nation, we used to produce 40% of microchips for the whole world,” he told VOA. “Now, we produce less than 10%.” A single semiconductor transistor is smaller than a grain of sand. But billions of them, packed neatly together, can connect the world through a mobile phone, control sophisticated weapons of war and satellites that orbit the Earth, and someday may even drive a car. The immense value of these tiny chips has fueled fierce competition between the U.S. and China. The U.S. Department of Commerce has taken several steps to hamper China’s efforts to build its own chip industry. Those include export controls and new rules to prevent “foreign countries of concern” — which it said includes China, Iran, North Korea and Russia — from benefiting from funding from the CHIPS and Science Act. While analysts are divided over whether Taiwan’s dominance of this critical industry makes it more or less vulnerable to Chinese aggression, they agree it confers the island significant global status. “It is debatable what, if any, role Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing prowess plays in deterrence,” said David Sacks, an analyst who focuses on U.S.-China relations at the Council on Foreign Relations. “What is not debatable is how devastating an attack on Taiwan would be for the global economy.” Biden did not mention U.S. adversaries in his statement, but he noted the impact of Monday’s announcement, saying it “represent(s) a broader story for semiconductor manufacturing that’s made in America and with the strong support of America’s leading technology firms to build the products we rely on every day.” VOA met with engineers in the new technological hub state, who said the legislation addresses a key weakness in American chip manufacturing. “We’ve just gotten in the cycle of the last 15 to 20 years, where innovation has slowed down,” said Todd Achilles, who teaches innovation, strategy and policy analysis at the University of California-Berkeley. “It’s all about financial results, investor payouts and stock buybacks. And we’ve lost that innovation muscle. And the CHIPS Act — pulling that together with the CHIPS Act — is the perfect opportunity to restore that.” The White House says this new investment could create 25,000 construction and manufacturing jobs. Academics say they’re churning out workers at a rapid pace, but that still, America lacks talent. “Our engineering college is the largest in the country, with over 33,000 enrolled students, and still we’re hearing from companies across the semiconductor industry that they’re not able to get the talent they need in time,” Zachary Holman, vice dean for research and innovation at Arizona State University, told VOA. And as the American industry stretches to keep pace, it races a technical trend known as t: that the number of transistors in a computer chip doubles about every two years. As a result, cutting-edge chips get ever smaller as they grow in computing power. TSMC in 2022 broke ground on a facility that makes the smallest chip currently available, coming in at 3 nanometers — that’s just wider than a strand of DNA. Reporter Levi Stallings contributed to this report from Flagstaff, Arizona.

President Joe Biden on Monday announced a $6.6 billion grant to Taiwan’s top chip manufacturer for semiconductor manufacturing in Arizona, which includes a third facility that will bring the tech giant’s investment in the state to $65 billion. VOA’s White House correspondent Anita Powell reports from Washington, with reporter Levi Stallings in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Millions of people in the United States from Texas to Maine looked to the sky to witness a rare total solar eclipse. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh attended a viewing event hosted by NASA and Purdue University at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and has more.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Haiti's National Police agency says that it has recovered a hijacked cargo ship laden with rice following a gunbattle with gangs that lasted more than five hours. Two police officers were injured and an undetermined number of gang members were killed in the shootout that occurred Saturday off the coast of the capital, Port-au-Prince, authorities said in a statement. It was a rare victory for an underfunded police department that has struggled to quell gang violence following a spate of attacks that began Feb. 29. Police said in the statement Sunday that those responsible for the hijacking were members of two gangs, named the 5 Seconds and the Taliban gang. They said gunmen seized the transport ship Magalie on Thursday as it departed the port of Varreux. Radio Télé Métronome reported that the gangs kidnapped everyone aboard the ship and stole some 10,000 sacks of rice out of the 60,000 sacks it was carrying. The ship was headed to the northern coastal city of Cap-Haitien. Also on Sunday, online news site Radio graphie reported that the Taliban gang used a front loader to demolish a police station in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Canaan where at least four police officers were killed in a recent attack. The station was no longer operational. Gang violence continued on Monday, with police using megaphones to order the evacuation of the Champ de Mars area near the National Palace in downtown Port-au-Prince as heavy gunfire erupted nearby. The most recent gunbattle between police and gangs comes more than a month after gunmen began targeting key government infrastructure. They have burned down multiple police stations, opened fire on the main international airport that remains closed and stormed Haiti's two biggest prisons, releasing more than 4,000 inmates. The ongoing violence forced Prime Minister Ariel Henry to announce he would resign once a transitional presidential council is formed. Henry was in Kenya to push for the U.N.-backed deployment of a police force from the East African country when the attacks began and remains locked out of Haiti.

bogota, colombia — Colombia's capital will start rationing water this week to alleviate droughts wrought by the El Nino weather pattern, which has exacerbated the Andean country's dry season and caused reservoir levels to fall, Bogota Mayor Carlos Galan said Monday.  The restrictions will also apply to 11 municipalities close to the capital, affecting at least 9 million people.  The El Nino phenomenon arrived in Colombia at the end of 2023, causing high temperatures and droughts that led to forest fires throughout the Andean country and pushed reservoirs to their lowest levels in decades.  The three reservoirs that make up the Chingaza water system, which supplies Bogota with 70% of its water needs, are at just 16.9% capacity, Galan said, their lowest level in 40 years.  "Let's not waste a drop of water in Bogota at this time," Galan said in a news conference, adding, "That will help us so that these restrictions can be lifted more quickly or reduced."  Bogota joins Mexico's capital, Mexico City, and its surrounding areas — home to 21 million — which has faced water shortages for years because of low rainfall that has been attributed to climate change, as well as a growing population and antiquated infrastructure.  Under the rationing plan, Bogota will be divided into zones where cuts to water services will last 24 hours in nine areas throughout the city, Galan said, adding the first suspensions will begin Thursday.  The rationing plan — shared by the nine regions in Bogota — will restart every 10 days and authorities will reevaluate the measure every two weeks, Galan added. 

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Security Council began reviewing the Palestinians’ renewed bid for full United Nations membership on Monday, despite long-standing U.S. policy that would likely lead to a veto in the council. “Our position is a position that is known; it hasn’t changed,” U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters following a meeting of the Security Council committee that is considering the Palestinian application.  For decades, Washington has said Palestinian statehood — and, thus, full U.N. membership — is a final status issue that should be negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinians as part of a two-state solution.  Thomas-Greenfield said the U.S. is engaging “actively and cooperatively” with the admissions committee, adding that Washington wants to find a path to a two-state solution that would provide peace for the Israelis and a state for the Palestinians. U.N. membership goes through the Security Council, where Washington holds a veto. It is up to the 15-nation council to recommend admission to the General Assembly, which would then vote on it. A two-thirds majority vote is necessary in the General Assembly for admission of a new state. In September 2011, the Palestinian Authority submitted its initial application for full membership, but the application never made it to a vote in the U.N. Security Council. After that bid stalled, the Palestinians sought and received an upgrade in status the following year at the General Assembly to “non-member state.” They still cannot vote, but it allowed them to become a party to treaties that are deposited with the U.N. secretary-general and join U.N. bodies like the World Health Organization and the International Criminal Court. In a letter to the U.N. last week, the Palestinian Authority requested that the 2011 application be given renewed consideration this month. “We sincerely hope, after 12 years since we changed our status to an observer state, that the Security Council will elevate itself to implementing the global consensus on the two-state solution by admitting the state of Palestine for full membership,” Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour told reporters. The council’s committee on the admission of new members took up the issue Monday afternoon behind closed doors. The committee is tasked with deciding whether the territory known as Palestine meets the criteria for statehood, including possession of a defined territory and a recognized government. Under the U.N. Charter, a new member must also be “peace-loving.” “The Palestinian Authority is the exact opposite of a peace-loving entity,” Israel’s U.N. envoy, Gilad Erdan, told reporters. He said an agreement on a Palestinian state could only be reached at the negotiating table, not forced unilaterally on Israel at the United Nations. Following the committee meeting, council president Ambassador Vanessa Frazier of Malta told reporters that the initial discussions were “very frank,” and a second meeting is tentatively planned for Thursday. Khaled Elgindy, senior fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute and director of the Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs, told VOA that the Palestinian move is unlikely to be successful. “I think the outcome is already known — the U.S. will veto it — if it even comes to a vote,” he said. “They will do whatever they can to even prevent a vote from happening in the Security Council. But a U.S. veto is virtually assured.” There is also U.S. legislation from the 1990s that would require Washington to stop funding the United Nations if they “grant full membership as a state to a group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood.” Loss of U.S. funding would be catastrophic for the world body. “At the end of the day, it’s a big nothing burger, because it changes nothing. It will go nowhere, and it just points to the kind of growing irrelevance and bankruptcy of the leadership of [PA President] Mahmoud Abbas,” Elgindy said. Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are under growing U.S. pressure to reform. Last month, Abbas appointed his long-time economic adviser, Mohammed Mustafa, to be the next prime minister. He will need to put together a government that will be able to reunite Palestinian factions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and help rebuild and govern Gaza after the war between Israel and Hamas ends.

phoenix — As ranchera music filled the Phoenix recording studio at Radio Campesina, a station personality spoke in Spanish into the microphone.  “Friends of Campesina, in these elections, truth and unity are more important than ever,” said morning show host Tony Arias. “Don’t let yourself be trapped by disinformation.” The audio was recorded as a promo for Radio Campesina’s new campaign aiming to empower Latino voters ahead of the 2024 elections. That effort includes discussing election-related misinformation narratives and fact-checking conspiracy theories on air. “We are at the front lines of fighting misinformation in our communities,” said Maria Barquin, program director of Chavez Radio Group, the nonprofit that runs Radio Campesina, a network of Spanish-language stations in Arizona, California and Nevada.  “There’s a lot at stake in 2024 for our communities. And so, we need to amp up these efforts now more than ever.” Latinos have grown at the second-fastest rate, behind Asian Americans, of any major racial or ethnic group in the U.S. since the last presidential election, according to a Pew Research Center analysis, and are projected to account for 14.7%, or 36.2 million, of all eligible voters in November, a new high. They are a growing share of the electorate in several presidential and congressional battleground states, including Arizona, California and Nevada, and are being heavily courted by Republicans and Democrats. Democratic President Joe Biden has credited Latino voters as a key reason he defeated Republican Donald Trump in 2020 and is urging them to help him do it again in November. Given the high stakes of a presidential election year, experts expect a surge of misinformation, especially through audio and video, targeting Spanish-speaking voters. In addition to radio, much of the news and information Latinos consume is audio-based through podcasts or social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube. Content moderation efforts in Spanish are limited on these platforms, which are seeing a rising number of right-wing influencers peddling election falsehoods and QAnon conspiracy theories. The types of misinformation overlap with falsehoods found in other conservative media and many corners of the internet — conspiracy theories about mail voting, dead people casting ballots, rigged voting machines and threats at polling sites. Other narratives are more closely tailored to Latino communities, including false information about immigration, inflation and abortion rights, often exploiting the traumas and fears of specific communities. For example, Spanish speakers who have come from countries with recent histories of authoritarianism, socialism, high inflation and election fraud may be more vulnerable to misinformation about those topics. Misinformation on the airwaves also is particularly difficult to track and combat compared with more traditional, text-based misinformation, said Daiquiri Ryan Mercado, strategic legal adviser and policy counsel for the National Hispanic Media Coalition, which runs the Spanish Language Disinformation Coalition. While misinformation researchers can more easily code programs to categorize and track text-based misinformation, audio often requires manual listening. Radio stations that air only in certain areas at certain times also can be difficult to track.  “When we have such limited representation, Spanish speakers feel like they can connect to these people, and they become trusted messengers,” Mercado said. “But some people may take advantage of that trust.” Mercado and others said that's why trusted messengers, such as Radio Campesina, are so important. The station was founded by Mexican American labor and civil rights leader Cesar Chavez and has built a loyal listening base over decades. At any given moment, as many as 750,000 people are listening to the Chavez Radio Network on the air and online, Barquin said. “They will come and listen to us because of the music, but our main focus is to empower and educate through information,” she said. “The music is just a tactic to bring them in.” Radio Campesina’s on-air talent and musical guests often discuss misinformation on air, answering listeners’ questions about voting, teaching them about spotting misinformation and doing tutorials on election processes, such as how to submit mail-in ballots. The station also has hosted rodeos and music events to register new voters and talk about misinformation. They allow listeners to call or text questions on WhatsApp, a social media platform especially popular with immigrant communities but where much of the misinformation they see festers. In March, the station partnered with Mi Familia Vota, a Latino advocacy group, for an on-air show and voter phone bank event to answer voter questions. “We know that there are many people who are unmotivated because sometimes we come from countries where, when it comes to elections, we don’t trust the vote,” said Carolina Rodriguez-Greer, Arizona director of Mi Familia Vota, before she shared information on the show about how voters can track their ballots. The organization began working with Spanish media outlets to dispel misinformation after seeing candidates such as former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake spread election lies in 2022, Rodriguez-Greer said. Lake is now running for the U.S. Senate with Trump's endorsement. “One way to combat this misinformation is to fill the airways with good information,” said Angelica Razo, national deputy director of campaigns and programs for Mi Familia Vota. A variety of other community and media groups also are prioritizing the seemingly never-ending fight against misinformation. Maritza Felix often fact-checked misinformation for her mother, whom she calls the “Queen of WhatsApp.” This led to Felix doing the same for family and friends in a WhatsApp group that grew into the Spanish news nonprofit Conecta Arizona. It now runs a radio show and newsletter that debunks false claims about election processes, health, immigration and border politics. Conecta Arizona also combats misinformation about the upcoming Mexican presidential election that Felix said has been seeping over the border. The Spanish-language fact-checking group Factchequeado is building partnerships with dozens of media outlets across the country to provide training and free Spanish fact-checking content. “Disinformation is at the same time a global phenomenon and a hyperlocal phenomenon," said Factchequeado co-founder Laura Zommer. “So, we have to address it with local and national groups uniting together.”

Political violence in Sudan is forcing thousands of refugees, many of them children, to neighboring South Sudan for safety. There, they face a different threat — a collapsing health care system. Sheila Ponnie reports from Renk, Upper Nile State, South Sudan.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.