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The White House; Paris — U.S. President Joe Biden landed Wednesday in France to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy invasion — and plans to use the occasion to underscore the need for a strong transatlantic alliance in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. Biden will meet Ukraine’s president, and with surviving American veterans of the 1944 beach invasion, said national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Biden will use the events, Sullivan said, to “talk about, against the backdrop of war in Europe today, the sacrifices that those heroes and those veterans made 80 years ago and how it’s our obligation to continue their mission to fight for freedom.” Sullivan, who spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Paris, said Biden will also deliver a speech on Friday at Normandy that will cover “the existential fight between dictatorship and freedom” — all while overlooking a 30-meter tall cliff that Army Rangers had to scale under enemy gunfire to win the battle that eventually led to France’s liberation and the demise of Nazi Germany. "And he’ll talk about the dangers of isolationism and how, if we bow to dictators, fail to stand up to them, they keep going and ultimately America and the world pays a greater price,” he said. Biden will also attend a state visit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, in addition to face-to-face talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has been invited to the somber ceremonies marking this decisive battle that led to the end of World War II. American presidents have regularly made the journey for this critical anniversary, and Biden is no exception. “The president is very much looking forward to going to Normandy over the course of the next two days of this week to commemorate the service and the sacrifice, the bravery of the soldiers, Allied and American alike, who fought in D-Day in that invasion, conducted Operation Overlord and really spelled through that operation, the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany, and the beginning of something even more impactful, and that's this rules-based international order that we all still continue to enjoy today,” John Kirby, White House national security communications adviser, told VOA at the White House. Here, analysts say, history offers lessons. “The D-Day landings were the Western Allies’ military statement that authoritarian regimes could not change boundaries by force,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ”That countries could not just be invaded, and that authoritarian regimes of the type that Nazi Germany constituted — particularly with its terrible oppression of subjugated peoples, particularly the Jews — were not acceptable and not just not acceptable, but would be destroyed.” Analysts say Biden’s Ukraine goals will be overshadowed by his increasingly unpopular support of another conflict. “Even though obviously Ukraine is the top priority for the Europeans, they are seeing how the Biden administration's policy on Gaza is undermining European security in two different ways,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. “First of all, it is really destroying Western credibility in the broader international community and in the Global South — any talk about the rules-based international order at this point, will get laughed at, given what the Biden administration has done.” This trip to France, a close ally, comes at the start of six weeks of high-level U.S. involvement in high-stakes summits — including a peace summit on Ukraine, a summit of leaders of the Group of Seven, or G7, leading industrialized countries, and a summit of NATO members. VOA asked Sullivan what this set of diplomatic events could mean for peace in Europe, and beyond. “I think we need to send a clear message to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin that he cannot outlast us, and that he cannot divide us,” he replied. “And we have been very good at holding the line on those two messages, and this is going to be a great opportunity over the coming weeks to not just put a period at the end of that sentence, but an exclamation point.” Patsy Widakuswara contributed from the White House.

FLORENCE — An Italian court re-convicted Amanda Knox of slander on Wednesday, even after she was exonerated in the brutal 2007 murder of her British roommate while the two were exchange students in Italy. The court found that Knox had wrongly accused an innocent man, the Congolese owner of the bar where she worked part time, of the killing. But she will not serve any more jail time, given the three-year sentence counts as time already served. Knox, who had returned to Italy for only the second time since she was freed in 2011 to participate in the trial, showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read aloud. But her lawyer, Carlo della Vedova, said shortly afterward that “Amanda is very embittered.” Knox had written on social media ahead of the hearing that she hoped to "clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me. Wish me luck.” The slaying of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the idyllic hilltop town of Perugia fueled global headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend of just a week, Raffaele Sollecito. Flip-flop verdicts over nearly eight years of legal proceedings polarized trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic as the case was vociferously argued on social media, then in its infancy. Knox’s retrial was set by a European court ruling that Italy violated her human rights during a long night of questioning days after Kercher’s murder, deprived of both a lawyer and a competent translator.  Earlier in the hearing, Knox had asked the eight Italian judges and civil jury members to clear her of the slander charge. In a soft and sometimes breaking voice, Knox had told the court that she wrongly accused Patrick Lumumba under intense police pressure.  “I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police,'' Knox told the panel in a 9-minute prepared statement, sitting alongside them on the jury bench. She told them: ”I didn't know who the murderer was. I had no way to know." The case continues to draw intense media attention, with photographers massing around Knox, her husband Christopher Robinson and their legal team as they entered the courtroom about an hour before the hearing. A camera knocked her on the left temple, her lawyer Luca Luparia Donati said. Knox's husband examined a small bump on her head as they sat in the front row of the court. Despite Knox’s exoneration and the conviction of an Ivorian man whose footprints and DNA were found at the scene, doubts about her role persisted, particularly in Italy. That is largely due to the accusation she made against Lumumba. Knox is now a 36-year-old mother of two small children. She returned to Italy for only the second time since she was freed in October 2011, after four years in jail, by a Perugia appeals court that overturned the initial guilty verdict in the murder case against both Knox and Sollecito. She remained in the United States through two more flip-flop verdicts before Italy’s highest court definitively exonerated the pair of the murder in March 2015, stating flatly that they had not committed the crime. In the fall, Italy’s highest Cassation Court threw out the slander conviction that had withstood five trials, ordering a new trial, thanks to a 2022 Italian judicial reform allowing cases that have reached a definitive verdict to be reopened if human rights violations are found.  This time, the court has been ordered to disregard two damaging statements typed by police and signed by Knox at 1:45 a.m. and 5:45 a.m. as she was held for questioning overnight into the small hours of Nov. 6, 2007. In the statements, Knox said she remembered hearing Kercher scream, and pointed to Lumumba for the killing. Hours later, still in custody at about 1 p.m., she asked for pen and paper and wrote her own statement in English, questioning the version that she had signed. “In regards to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressure of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion," she wrote. 

AMMAN — Jordan has foiled two plots to smuggle millions of captagon pills through a border post to Saudi Arabia, the biggest seizure in years of drugs bound for lucrative Gulf markets from what Jordanian security officials say are Syria-based gangs with ties to Iran. The haul was discovered hidden in a shipment of construction vehicles at the Omari crossing in Jordan's eastern desert before it was due to enter Saudi Arabia, officials told Reuters on Wednesday. Law enforcement authorities had for weeks tracked two separate operations bringing the consignment of drugs into Jordan across the northern border with Syria. Unlike in previous busts that were carried out as drugs entered Jordan, the authorities waited to make the seizure until the drugs transited through the country and were due to leave. War-ravaged Syria has become the region's main site for the mass production of the addictive, amphetamine-type stimulant known as captagon, with Jordan a key transit route to the oil-rich Gulf states, Western anti-narcotics officials say. Jordanian officials, like their Western allies, say that Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah group and pro-Iranian militias who control much of southern Syria are behind a surge in the multi-billion-dollar drugs and weapons trade. Iran and Hezbollah deny the allegations. U.N. experts and U.S. and European officials say the illicit drug trade finances a proliferation of pro-Iranian militias and Syrian pro-government paramilitary forces, after more than a decade of conflict in Syria. Since last year, Jordan's army has conducted several pre-emptive airstrikes inside Syria that Jordanian officials say targeted militias linked to the drug trade and their facilities, in a bid to stem a rise in cross-border incursions. Jordanian officials say they were forced to take matters into their own hands following meetings with their Syrian counterparts at which they expressed frustration that Damascus was not firmly acting to stem the smuggling. Amman says it has provided names of key drug dealers and locations of manufacturing facilities and smuggling routes to Syrian authorities. Jordan's King Abdullah called last month on Arab states to confront what the U.S. ally has called an alarming rise in incursions of drugs and weapons smugglers linked to Iranian militias operating in southern Syria. "They seek to exploit the regional tensions to target Jordan and its neighbors. They are trying to flood the region with drugs to amass profits and harm the security and stability of our countries," said a senior Jordanian official who requested anonymity. Jordan has also received extra U.S. military aid to improve security on its 375 km (230 mile) Syrian border. Jordanian officials say Washington has poured in hundreds of millions of dollars to establish border posts since the Syrian conflict began in 2011.  

Yangon — Hundreds of mourners turned out Wednesday to pay their respects to a former Myanmar general turned democracy activist and confidant of Aung San Suu Kyi, in a rare sanctioned public gathering in the junta-controlled commercial capital. Foreign ambassadors and senior figures in Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party were among those who attended the funeral in Yangon for Tin Oo, who died on Saturday aged 97. Suu Kyi is serving a 27-year prison sentence imposed by a junta court.    Tin Oo served as commander of the army under former strongman Ne Win, before being forced out for allegedly withholding information over a failed coup plot. He co-founded the NLD with Suu Kyi in the aftermath of mass protests against a former junta in 1988, and went on to become one of her closest confidants. The ambassadors of India and Singapore joined hundreds of other people paying their respects to Tin Oo, whose body was displayed in a glass-topped coffin draped with the NLD's peacock flag. A cortege of cars, one decked with wreaths and bearing Tin Oo's portrait, carried the coffin slowly through the rain-washed streets to the Yay Way cemetery, where hundreds more mourners were waiting and soldiers kept watch. While Suu Kyi was not allowed to attend, there was a bouquet of white roses at Tin Oo's house with a card that said "from Daw Aung San Suu Kyi." The cemetery is also home to the remains of Sein Lwin, a former home minister accused of leading a bloody crackdown on the 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations. Tin Oo was detained by the military in that crackdown, before being released. He was arrested again along with Suu Kyi in 2003 after a pro-junta mob attacked their motorcade, killing dozens of people. In 2017, the NLD stalwart suffered a stroke and in recent years receded from the political arena due to old age and poor health. He avoided arrest in the sweeping crackdown that accompanied the 2021 coup, likely due to his advanced age, analysts say. The NLD has been targeted in the junta's bloody crackdown on dissent following its coup, with one former lawmaker executed in Myanmar's first use of capital punishment in decades. The junta dissolved the NLD in 2023 for failing to re-register under a tough new military-drafted electoral law, removing the party from polls it has indicated it may hold in 2025. Suu Kyi's closed-door trial in the military-built capital Naypyidaw was condemned by rights groups as a sham to shut her out of politics. The Nobel laureate, 78, has largely been hidden from view since the coup and has reportedly suffered health problems. 

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Nairobi — South Africans say they are excited and eager to see what a coalition government is going to look like days after elections show no party won an outright majority. "I'm excited because the ANC is finally going to be in a position where they have to reconsider how they've been approaching running the country, governing the country," 30-year-old architect Simphiwe Malambo tells VOA. “This is going to be a very challenging era for South Africans' politics," especially for the ruling party, 40-year old Pafana Zempe, an artist and educator said to VOA, adding the ANC will now have to think “which coalition they should do because with the DA it's something else, with EFF it's something else, with the latest MK, it's also something else,” he said. "Depending on the coalitions, if it's the DA/ANC coalition together, the DA can actually get in and do some good where the ANC has failed," Mark Fleming, an animator who didn’t share his age, told VOA. Possible coalitions: The African National Congress secured 40% of the vote, followed by the Democratic Alliance with about 22%. A coalition between the two could reconcile the country, says Tendai Mbanje, election analyst from the African Center for Governance. "The DA/ANC coalition promotes non-racialism. The DA/ANC coalition promotes unity in the country among two races. It could also strike a balance between competing differences in terms of addressing issues of poverty...economic issues affecting the country." Other coalitions could be with the newly formed party led by former president Jacob Zuma, uMkhonto We Sizwe or MK, which won about 15% or the Economic Freedom Party (EFF), which won about 10% of the final vote tally. Edgar Githua is a professor at Strathmore University in Kenya. "Unfortunately, Zuma has already… said he will only have a coalition with the ANC on conditions that Cyril Ramaphosa is not going to be the president… it looks like ANC EFF, and they need one of the other tiny ones to help them pretty much get to 50-51% to be able to form a government comfortably." The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) grabbed about 4% of the vote while the Patriotic Alliance took 2% according to the country’s Independent Electoral Commission. The ANC says its leader will not resign following election results but is open to working with everyone to form a government that will serve South Africa’s people. "At this stage in time, Cyril Ramaphosa is the best foot forward for the ANC, simply because of his reputation within and globally," Mbanje noted. Effects of coalitions internally and globally While internally, the economy and governance could improve with a coalition government, South Africa's stance on global issues could face some opposition. For example, Mbanje said there could be “contradictions or fights within the coalition government in regards… to South Africa's positions regarding certain countries for example, Israel Palestine issue, issue of Zimbabwe within the SADC [Southern African Development Community], Ukraine Russia issues among others." Views echoed by Githua. "These are some of the things that will now have to be renegotiated within the coalition government because all the political parties have their manifestos, have how they want to project themselves." South Africa has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza in a case they brought to the International Court of Justice. Israel argues that its ground offensive which the Gaza health ministry says has killed about 36 thousand Palestinians is in response to Hamas militants' attack on Israel last year that killed 1,200 people according to Israeli tallies.

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.

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SYDNEY — The Australian government will introduce legislation Wednesday that will make it a criminal offense to create and share deepfake pornographic images of people without their consent. Attorney General Mark Dreyfus said sharing such images is a damaging and deeply distressing form of abuse. A deepfake is an image or video in which a person's face or body has been altered to make it appear they are doing or saying something that never happened. Deepfake pornography overwhelmingly affects women and girls.  Increasingly, it is being generated by artificial intelligence. The Australian government said it will not tolerate such “insidious criminal behavior.”  Attorney General Mark Dreyfus said it’s a crime that can “inflict deep, long-lasting harm on victims.” New laws being introduced Wednesday in Federal Parliament in Canberra create a new criminal offense that will ban the creation or sharing of digitally altered sexually explicit images without consent. Offenders could be sent to prison for up to seven years. Katina Michael is an honorary professor at the Faculty of Business and Law in the School of Business at the University of Wollongong. She told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that technology, including artificial intelligence, can help detect deepfake material. “In essence, what we can do is detect deepfake videos," she said. "They are literally special effects videos where the images have been manipulated frame-by-frame and, so, we can run videos through analyzers and digital platform providers can do that, social media providers can do that." She said while artificial intelligence facilitates the creation of deepfake pornography, it can also can be used as a deterrent. Often celebrities are the victims of digitally altered material, but it is a crime that has affected many other people. Earlier this year, fake images of the American singer Taylor Swift flooded the internet, with one sexually explicit image of the singer reportedly being viewed almost 50 million times. The new legislation in Australia will only apply to deepfake sexual material depicting adults, with child abuse material continuing to be dealt with under dedicated and separate laws. In April, Britain said it would bring in similar legislation to ban deepfake pornography. In Australia, the new deepfake laws are part of a range of measures aimed at reducing violence against women and addressing the role that technology, including social media, plays in propagating degrading and misogynistic attitudes.

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Seoul, South Korea — Nearly 50 deals and agreements have been signed during South Korea's first summit with leaders from 48 African countries to cooperate in areas such as mining, energy and manufacturing, South Korea's industry ministry said Wednesday. Hyosung Corp, a South Korean conglomerate, signed a contract to supply electric transformers to Mozambique worth $30 million, the ministry said in a statement The industry ministry also signed agreements to cooperate on critical minerals with Madagascar and Tanzania in order to secure supplies for industries such as batteries, it said.  The 47 agreements with 23 African countries were made during the summit as Asia's fourth-largest economy seeks to tap the minerals and the vast export market in Africa. "Despite its enormous potential, Africa still accounts for only 1-2% of South Korea's trade and investment," South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol told a gathering of about 200 political and industry leaders from African countries and South Korea at a business summit Wednesday. "My hope is that mutually beneficial resource cooperation will be expanded," Yoon said. Yoon pledged on Tuesday that South Korea would increase development aid for Africa to $10 billion over the next six years, and said will offer $14 billion in export financing to promote trade and investment for South Korean companies in Africa.

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Taipei, Taiwan — China hardened its position on contentious security issues in the Indo-Pacific region at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last weekend, as Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun criticized some external forces for offering military support to Taiwan while accusing the Philippines of endangering stability in the South China Sea.  While Dong said Beijing had exercised constraint in response to what it described as “infringements and provocations” carried out by a certain country, without directly naming the Philippines, delegates from some countries say his speech was “full of veiled threats.”  “There were a number of threats to the region in his speech, including warning that ‘Taiwan separatists’ would be nailed to the pillar of shame in history and that countries interfering with Beijing’s efforts to reunify with Taiwan would face self-destruction,” said Jennifer Parker, a defense expert at the Australian National University and a delegate at the Shangri-La Dialogue.  In addition to threats about Taiwan, Parker said Dong’s speech also reflects Beijing’s disregard for the Philippines’ agency in the two countries’ ongoing territorial dispute in the South China Sea. “There was a clear level of disrespect towards the Philippines [in Dong’s speech,]” she told VOA by phone.  During his 40-minute-long keynote address, Dong accused some external forces, an indirect mention of the United States, of “undermining” the centrality of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and bringing “unstable factors to regional peace and development.” Some Shangri-La delegates from the Philippines said some Southeast Asian countries view China’s attempt to “speak on behalf of ASEAN” as a “blatant attempt to hijack ASEAN.”  “China’s use of ‘ASEAN centrality’ argument rings hollow because it is not a member of ASEAN but it also claims to speak on behalf of ASEAN,” Justin Baquisal, a Manila-based geopolitical analyst and a delegate at the Shangri-La Dialogue, told VOA in a written response.  During the question-and-answer session of his speech, Dong refused to address questions about China’s stance on the war in Ukraine and spent almost 10 minutes reiterating Beijing’s warning toward Taiwan’s new government under President Lai Ching-te, whom the Chinese government views as a separatist. Parker in Australia said while previous Chinese defense ministers tried to ensure their speeches resonated to some level with the audience during Shangri-La Dialogues, Dong Jun didn’t seem to care how his speech was received. “I interpret the message from his speech as ‘we don’t care about what you think,’” she told VOA. Washington’s commitment to regional partnership  Compared to the blunt warning reflected in Dong’s speech, some analysts say United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s keynote speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue was well-received by representatives from several countries.  During his 30-minute address, Austin said like-minded countries across the Indo-Pacific region have deepened engagements and delivered results that benefited people over the last three years.  “A new model of convergence in this region is not a single alliance or coalition, [but] a set of overlapping and complementary initiatives and institutions, propelled by both a shared vision and a shared sense of mutual obligation,” he told a room of hundreds of international delegates.  He highlighted 13 different agreements or initiatives Washington has rolled out with allies in the region, including South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and India, while emphasizing that the U.S. is “deeply committed to the Indo-Pacific.”  “The United States and this region are more secure and more prosperous when we work together,” Austin said, adding that Washington is “all in” and “not going anywhere.”  Parker says the focus on partnership in Austin’s speech is viewed positively by some countries in the Indo-Pacific region, including traditional allies like Japan and Australia.  “Australia featured heavily in the speech, both through referencing to Richard Marles and through referencing of our partnership several times,” she told VOA, adding that Austin’s speech would play well with other allies such as Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.  While the U.S. Defense Secretary reaffirmed Washington’s support for Manila, Baquisal thinks his speech was “too plain to please anybody.”  His speech "was too weak to deter China, who was notably more bellicose toward the Philippines in its language during the Shangri-La Dialogue, and too strong for the comfort of some Southeast Asian states in attendance, who prefer that both the U.S. and China not go into a war of words in the summit,” he told VOA.  Security environment in Indo-Pacific may deteriorate   Despite Washington and Beijing’s attempt to de-escalate tension between them through the talks between Austin and Dong, some regional analysts say their respective speeches show the two superpowers still hold “very different views.”  Dong and Austin "met but didn’t have a meaningful dialogue, [so] other countries will have to accept that the U.S.-China rivalry is a long-term trend and they need to figure out how to navigate in this environment,” Bich Tran, a postdoctoral fellow at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore and a Shangri-La Dialogue delegate, told VOA in a written response.  Parker from Australia said there are no signs that tensions in the Indo-Pacific region are easing following an eventful weekend in Singapore. “I didn’t get any sentiment from Dong’s speech that China is keen to resolve any of these issues, [and] I think the current trajectory in the region will continue,” she told VOA.  In her view, the security environment in the Indo-Pacific region will “continue to deteriorate” in the near future, judging from the recent Chinese military exercise around Taiwan and Beijing’s sharp language towards the Philippines.  “It’ll be difficult for regional countries who are economically dependent on China to [adjust to this dynamic,]” Parker said.   

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