https://arab.news/89b3v
WASHINGTON: Democratic Senator Peter Welch said President Joe Biden should end his bid for re-election.
“For the good of the country, I’m calling on President Biden to withdraw from the race,” Welch said in an op-ed column published on Wednesday in the Washington Post.
WASHINGTON: Former President Donald Trump said he would sit for an interview with the FBI, as the bureau continues to investigate what motivated 20-year-old Thomas Crooks to try and assassinate Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
“They’re coming in on Thursday to see me,” Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview on Fox News that aired on Monday.
Police noticed the man who tried to assassinate Trump more than an hour before the July 13 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, and took a photo to share with other law enforcement officers, an FBI official said on Monday.
“The shooter was identified by law enforcement as a suspicious person,” Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, told reporters at a briefing on the agency’s investigation into the assassination attempt.
He said a local officer took a photo of Crooks and sent it to other law enforcement officials at the scene of Trump’s rally that day. Some 30 minutes later, Rojek said, SWAT team operators saw Crooks using a rangefinder and browsing news sites.
Crooks was seen carrying a backpack around 5:56 p.m., less than 20 minutes before the shooting took place, and at 6:08 p.m. he was caught on a police dashboard camera walking on the roof from where he ultimately fired the shots, Rojek said.
Although the FBI is not the agency responsible for investigating any lapses in Trump’s security, FBI personnel are putting together a timeline of events, he said.
FBI officials said they had yet to identify a motive for Crooks, who was shot dead by a Secret Service agent after opening fire.
But they said he had conducted online searches on prior mass shooting events, on improvised explosive devices and on the attempted assassination of the Slovakian prime minister in May.
Trump, who has been highly critical of the FBI, agreed to sit for a standard victim’s interview, which “will be consistent with any victim interview we do,” Rojek said. “We want to get his perspective.”
Rojek confirmed Trump was struck by a bullet, whether “whole or fragmented into smaller pieces.”
FBI officials have described Crooks as a loner who had no close friends or acquaintances, with his social circle limited primarily to immediate family members.
Using encrypted applications, Crooks made 25 firearm-related purchases and six chemical precursors used to make explosive devices, FBI officials told reporters.
Crooks’ longtime interest in science and doing science experiments did not rouse any suspicion by his parents, whom the FBI said have been cooperative with the investigation.
Peru’s foreign ministry on Monday ordered Venezuelan diplomats accredited in the Andean nation to leave the country within 72 hours, after Venzuela’s ruling party declared an election victory that the Venezuelan opposition and independent pollsters called implausible.
The ministry made the announcement in a statement citing the “serious and arbitrary decisions made today by the Venezuelan regime.”
Peru had said earlier on Monday it would not accept a violation of Venezuelans’ popular will and that it had recalled its ambassador.
WASHINGTON: US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday called the Olympics opening ceremony in Paris a “disgrace,” after its creators came under fire for what some said was a show gone too far.
“I’m very open-minded but I thought what they did was a disgrace,” Trump told Fox News, following condemnation from Catholic groups and French bishops of a scene involving dancers, drag queens and a DJ in poses that appeared to recall depictions of the Last Supper, although creators have said it was not meant to represent the religious setting.
ABUJA, Nigeria: Dozens of Wagner mercenaries were killed by terrorists and rebels over the weekend in northern Mali in what one analyst described on Monday as the largest battleground blow to the shadowy Russian group in years. At least two others were taken captive.
Approximately 50 Wagner fighters in a convoy were killed in an Al-Qaeda ambush, which was joined by rebels who were in pursuit, along the border with Algeria, said Wassim Nasr, a Sahel specialist and senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, a security think tank, who said he counted bodies in a video of the aftermath. The mercenaries had been fighting mostly Tuareg rebels alongside Mali’s army when their convoy was forced to retreat into terrorist territory and ambushed south of the commune of Tinzaouaten, Nasr said.
Wagner confirmed in a Telegram statement on Monday that some of its fighters as well as Malian troops were killed in a battle with hundreds of militants. The mercenary group did not say how many of its fighters were killed. Mali’s army said it lost two soldiers and 20 rebels were killed.
In a statement over the weekend, Al-Qaeda asserted that 50 Wagner fighters were killed in its attack meant to “avenge the massacres committed in the center and north” of Mali in the yearslong battle against the extremists. The Tuareg rebels said an unspecified number of the mercenaries and Malian soldiers surrendered to them.
The Associated Press was not immediately able to verify the video Nasr cited.
“This is really important. It’s never happened before on African soil and it will change the dynamics,” Nasr said. “They (Wagner) won’t be sending any more wild expeditions like this near the border with Algeria. They had been bragging about how well they were doing and how strong they are, but they don’t have the manpower to do this for long or to hold on territory to secure deployments.”
Russia has capitalized on the deteriorating relations between the West and coup-affected Sahel nations in West Africa to send fighters and assert its influence. Wagner has been active in the Sahel — the vast expanse south of the Sahara Desert — as the mercenaries profit from seized mineral riches in exchange for their security services.
Wagner has been present in Mali since late 2021 following a military coup, replacing French troops and international peacekeepers in helping to fight militants who have threatened communities in the central and northern regions for more than a decade. At the same time, Wagner has been accused of helping to carry out raids and drone strikes that have killed civilians.
The group has had an estimated 1,000 fighters in Mali.
Since helping Mali’s forces to regain control of the key northern town of Kidal, Wagner mercenaries have been overconfident and overstretched, said independent analyst John Lechner.
He said failures like the weekend ambush are the reason why the Wagner brand was retained in Mali. “Large losses or setbacks are attributed to private military companies,” he said. “Victories to the (Russian) ministry of defense.”
AUSTIN: Joe Biden unveiled plans Monday for sweeping US Supreme Court reforms, as he seeks to cement his legacy in the twilight of his presidency despite Republicans branding the proposals dead on arrival.
Stung by shock rulings on abortion and other topics and by a series of scandals involving the conservative-dominated court, Biden called for 18-year term limits for justices and an enforceable ethics code.
“Extremism is undermining public confidence in the court’s decisions,” Biden said in a speech outlining the “bold” plans at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.
Making his first speech on the road since dropping out of the 2024 election, Biden also proposed a constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Court’s recent ruling backing Donald Trump’s claims of presidential immunity.
“There are no kings in America,” he said at the library — which celebrates the legacy of Johnson, or LBJ, the last incumbent US president not to seek a second term back in 1968.
Biden’s move follows a series of shock Supreme Court decisions, especially the 2022 repeal of the nationwide right to abortion, an issue which has become crucial in November’s election.
Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said in a statement that she and Biden both called on Congress to support the plans.
“These popular reforms will help to restore confidence in the court, strengthen our democracy, and ensure no one is above the law,” she said.
But Biden’s proposals have almost no hope of getting through a deeply divided US Congress, with Republicans holding a majority in the House of Representatives.
Republican Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement that the “dangerous gambit of the Biden-Harris administration is dead on arrival in the House.”
Biden however retorted in his speech that Johnson’s “thinking is dead on arrival.”
The plans would see justices serve terms of 18 years with new justice appointed every two years. The ethics code would meanwhile force judges to declare gifts and possible conflicts of interest.
The US Supreme Court plays an outsize role in determining the lives of ordinary Americans, with justices appointed for life deciding on almost every key issue from reproductive health to the environment.
It currently has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three right-leaning justices appointed by Trump while he was president.
But public opinion has recently turned against an institution once seen as the last impartial arm of the US government, with a recent poll showing nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that the court’s decisions are mainly political.
As well as the abortion judgment, the court has also rolled back the power of federal agencies and blocked Biden’s signature student debt forgiveness plan.
It then partially ruled in early July in favor of Trump’s claims that he had immunity from prosecution for acts committed while president.
Trump is now using that ruling to challenge his recent criminal conviction in a porn star hush-money case and a series of other prosecutions.
Meanwhile the Supreme Court has been rocked by ethics scandals involving arch-conservative justices.
Justice Clarence Thomas recently admitted that two luxury vacations he took in 2019 were paid for by a billionaire Republican political donor.
Thomas, the longest-serving justice on the court, has also ignored calls to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election, after his wife took part in the drive to keep Trump in power despite his electoral loss.
And Justice Samuel Alito has rejected calls to recuse himself from some Trump-related cases after flags linked to the former president’s false election fraud claims were discovered to have been flown outside his home and vacation property.
Legal expert Steven Schwinn warned that Biden had a “close to zero” chance of getting the plan through Congress.
But Biden was probably trying to “raise public consciousness” and “introduce the Supreme Court as an election issue,” Schwinn, a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, told AFP.
