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Blinken’s Talks in Bangkok to Focus on Myanmar

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Bangkok, where Myanmar is expected to feature prominently in meetings Sunday with Thailand’s leaders.

The main topic of their discussions will likely be the crisis in Myanmar, said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Kritenbrink, adding the U.S. would continue to “condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the Burmese military regime’s brutal actions since the coup d’état, the killing of nearly 2,000 people and displacing more than 700,000 others.” Myanmar is also known as Burma.

Blinken is to meet with Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai. Expanding health and climate cooperation are also on the agenda, as is next year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation annual meeting, which the U.S. will host, according to the State Department.

The State Department announced Sunday that Blinken will travel to Tokyo on Monday to offer condolences to the Japanese people on the death of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and to meet with senior Japanese officials.

Blinken arrived in Thailand a few days after his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who was on his own tour of Southeast Asia. Over the weekend, Wang visited Myanmar, his first visit to the country since the military seized power last year.

Blinken and Wang met Saturday at the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, and spoke for several hours.

The top U.S. diplomat told his Chinese counterpart during those meetings that China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine is complicating U.S.-Chinese relations at a time when they are already beset by rifts and enmity over numerous other issues.

Wang blamed the U.S. for the downturn in relations and said American policy has been derailed by what he called a misperception of China as a threat.

“Many people believe that the United States is suffering from a China-phobia,” the Chinese foreign minister said, according to a Chinese statement. “If such threat-expansion is allowed to grow, U.S. policy toward China will be a dead end with no way out.”

Blinken said he conveyed “the deep concerns of the United States regarding Beijing’s increasingly provocative rhetoric and activity toward Taiwan.”

Blinken also noted he addressed U.S. concerns over Beijing’s use of the strategic South China Sea, the repression of freedom in Hong Kong, forced labor, the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities in Tibet, and the genocide in Xinjiang.

Additionally, the U.S. secretary of state said that he and Wang discussed ways in which there could be more cooperation between the two countries in areas such as climate crisis, food security, global health and counternarcotics.

For his part, Wang said China and the United States need to work together to ensure that their relationship will continue to move forward along the right track.

Blinken’s meeting with the Chinese foreign minister was their first in-person since the chief U.S. diplomat unveiled the Biden administration’s strategy to outcompete the rival superpower. In his remarks at the time, Blinken said the U.S. was not seeking to decouple from China and the relationship between the world’s two largest economies was not a zero-sum game.

On Friday, the G-20 talks were dominated by discussion of the war in Ukraine and its impact on energy and food supplies.

Indonesia, as the meeting’s host country, called on ministers to “find a way forward” in discussing the war and its impact on rising food and energy prices.

“It is our responsibility to end the war sooner rather than later and settle our differences at the negotiating table, not at the battlefield,” Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said at the opening of the meeting, invoking the U.N. Charter to urge multilateralism and trust.

Foreign ministers shared concerns about getting grain shipments out of Ukraine and avoiding devastating food shortages in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. But talks were marked by sharp tension: Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sat at the same table but did not speak directly.
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No Saudi-Israel Normalization While Biden Visits, but It’s Getting Closer

In a visit to Saudi Arabia, Israel and the West Bank next week, President Joe Biden is expected to nudge Riyadh toward diplomatic normalization with Israel. This would be a huge expansion of the Abraham Accords, the Trump-era Middle East peace plan. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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Former Trump White House Counsel Meets With January 6 Panel

Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone met for a private interview with the January 6 committee for about eight hours Friday regarding his role in trying to prevent then-President Donald Trump from challenging the 2020 presidential election and joining the violent mob that laid siege to the Capitol.

Cipollone, once a staunch presidential confidant who had defended Trump during his first impeachment trial, had been reluctant to appear formally for an on-record interview. Like other former White House officials, it is possible he claimed his counsel to the Republican president as privileged information he was unwilling to share with the committee.

It remained unclear after he left Capitol Hill Friday afternoon whether he had remained within those parameters during the hourslong interview.

Cipollone has been a sought-after witness after bombshell testimony revealed his apparently desperate and last-ditch efforts to prevent Trump’s actions. The panel was told he had warned that the defeated president would be charged with “every crime imaginable” if he went to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, trying to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election. Cipollone was subpoenaed for his testimony.

The panel said Cipollone was “uniquely positioned to testify” in a letter accompanying the subpoena issued last week.

“Mr. Cipollone repeatedly raised legal and other concerns about President Trump’s activities on January 6th and in the days that preceded,” Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Democrat, said in a statement. “While the Select Committee appreciates Mr. Cipollone’s earlier informal engagement with our investigation, the committee needs to hear from him on the record, as other former White House counsels have done in other congressional investigations.”

Cipollone’s central role came into focus during a surprise committee hearing last week, when former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson described his repeated efforts to stop Trump from joining the mob at the Capitol.

Hutchinson said Cipollone urged her to persuade her boss, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, not to let Trump go to the Capitol.

Hutchinson testified that she had been told Trump was irate when he was ultimately prevented by his security team from going to the Capitol that day.

On the Sunday before the January 6 attack, Cipollone was also part of a key meeting with Justice Department officials at the White House who threatened to resign if Trump went ahead with plans to install a new acting attorney general who would pursue his false claims of voter fraud.

One witness testified to the committee that during that meeting, Cipollone referred to a proposed letter making false claims about voter fraud as a “murder-suicide pact.”

Cipollone and his attorney, Michael Purpura, who also worked at the Trump White House, did not respond to requests for comment.

Earlier this week, Trump responded to news of Cipollone’s cooperation on his social media platform, Truth Social, calling it bad for the country.
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Native American News Roundup, July 3 – 9, 2022

Here is a summary of Native American-related news around the U.S. this week:

Cherokee veteran receives highest military honor

President Joe Biden awarded Cherokee Nation citizen Dwight Birdwell America’s highest military decoration during a White House ceremony Tuesday. Birdwell, 74, was awarded the Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism during the Tet Offensive, a series of shock and awe attacks by North Vietnamese forces in January 1968.

“I’m grateful for all you have given our country and that at long last your story is being honored as it should have been always,” Biden told Birdwell (see video below), noting that Native Americans serve in U.S. armed forces at a higher percentage rate than “any other cohort.”

More than 42,000 Native Americans and Alaska Natives served in the Vietnam War, 90% of them voluntarily. Two-hundred-twenty-six lost their lives.

Nevada county removes barriers to Shoshone vote

Native Americans face a number of obstacles to participating in national elections, including access to polling sites and language access for those who aren’t proficient in English. Nye County, Nevada, this week became the first county in America to provide Shoshone language assistance to Native American voters — in this case, the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe of the Duckwater Reservation. The 1975 Voting Rights Act requires certain states and local governments to provide voter registration forms, ballots and other election materials where 5% or more of eligible voters are “minority language speakers.” U.S. Census data from 2021 show the tribe now meets that standard. Nye County first in nation to offer voting in Shoshone language

Blackfeet tribe using dogs to nose out disease

Researchers on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana are running a yearlong study to see whether dogs can be trained to sniff out chronic wasting disease (CWD) and other toxins in wild game and plants that are consumed or used in traditional cultural practices. While CWD hasn’t infected humans yet, scientists worry about the health risk of eating or handling infected wild game such as deer, moose or elk.

Dogs could help sniff out chronic wasting disease on a reservation in Montana

Works by ‘father of modern Native art’ on display

New Yorker magazine this week highlights the art of Oscar Howe (Mazuha Hokshina, or Trader Boy), a Yanktonai Dakota artist from the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota (1915-1983), whose work merged traditional tribal art with contemporary abstract styles and earned him regard as the father of the Native American fine art movement. His work is on display until September 11, 2022, at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York; the exhibition will be on view at the Portland Art Museum, October 29, 2022–May 14, 2023, and at the South Dakota Art Museum at South Dakota State University, June 10, 2023–September 17, 2023.

A Frequently Misunderstood American Master

Google honors noted Native comedian

Google Doodle this week marked what would have been the 71st birthday of Charlie Hill, the first Native American comedian to appear on U.S. national television. A citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, Howe used humor to shed light on many of the grim realities of the Native American experience, poking fun at stereotypes about Natives and non-Natives.

Hill’s portrait/Doodle is the work of Alanah Astehtsi Otsistohkwa (Morningstar) Jewell, a French-Haudenosaunee artist from the Oneida Nation of the Thames in Ontario, Canada.

Charlie Hill’s 71st Birthday

 
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Biden Seeks to Balance Interests, Ideology in Mideast Trip

In his visit to the Middle East next week, President Joe Biden is set to push for Israel’s deeper integration in the region and urge Gulf countries to pump more oil to alleviate pressure on the global energy market. Observers will watch how Biden balances these U.S. interests with American values of human rights, in light of the killings of journalists Jamal Khashoggi and Shereen Abu Akleh. VOA White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has the story.
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