WASHINGTON: Cheering Democrats returned Nancy Pelosi to the House speaker’s post Thursday as the 116th Congress took office and ushered in a historically diverse class of freshmen ready to confront President Donald Trump in a new era of divided government.
Trump congratulated Pelosi during a rare appearance in the White House briefing room.
The president, who has tangled with Pelosi and is sure to do so again, called her election by House colleagues “a tremendous, tremendous achievement.”
Pelosi, elected speaker 220-192, took the gavel saying US voters “demanded a new dawn” in the November election and are looking to “the beauty of our Constitution” to provide checks and balances on power. She invited scores of lawmakers’ kids to join her on the dais as she was sworn in, calling the House to order “on behalf of all of America’s children.” She faced 15 dissenting votes from fellow Democrats.
The new Congress is like none other. There are more women than ever before, and a new generation of Muslims, Latinos, Native Americans and African-Americans in the House is creating what academics call a reflective democracy, more aligned with the population of the United States. The Republican side in the House is still made up mostly of white men, and in the Senate Republicans bolstered their ranks in the majority.
In a nod to the moment, Pelosi, the first female speaker, was broadly pledging to make Congress work for all Americans — addressing kitchen table issues at a time of deep economic churn — even as her party is ready to challenge Trump with investigations and subpoena powers that threaten the White House agenda. It’s the first new Congress to convene amid a partial government shutdown, now in its 13th day over Trump’s demands for money for a wall along the U.S-Mexico border.
The House will be “for the people,” Pelosi said. She promised to “restore integrity to government” and outlined an agenda “to lower health costs and prescription drugs prices, and protect people with pre-existing medical conditions; to increase paychecks by rebuilding America with green and modern infrastructure from sea to shining sea.”
The day was unfolding as one of both celebration and impatience. Newly elected lawmakers arrived, often with friends and families in tow, to take the oath of office and pose for ceremonial photos. The Democrats promised quick passage of legislation to re-open the government, but without the funding Trump is demanding for his promised border wall.
Vice President Mike Pence swore in newly-elected senators, but Senate Republicans under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had no plans to consider the House bills to fund the government unless Trump agrees to sign them into law. That ensures the shutdown will continue, clouding the first days of the new session.
McConnell said that Republicans have shown the Senate is “fertile soil for big, bipartisan accomplishments,” but that the question is whether House Democrats will engage in “good governance or political performance art.”
It’s a time of stark national political division that some analysts say is on par with the Civil War era. Battle lines are drawn not just between Democrats and Republicans but within the parties themselves, splintered by their left and right flanks.
Pelosi defied history in returning to the speaker’s office after eight years in the minority, overcoming internal opposition from Democrats demanding a new generation of leaders. She will be the first to regain the gavel since legendary Sam Rayburn of Texas in 1955.
Putting Pelosi’s name forward for nomination, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the incoming Democratic caucus chair, recounted her previous accomplishments — passing the Affordable Care Act, helping the country out of the Great Recession — as preludes to her next ones. He called her leadership “unparalleled in modern American history.”
One Democrat, Rep. Brenda Lawrence of Michigan, cast her vote for Pelosi “on the shoulders of women who marched 100 years ago” for women’s suffrage. Newly elected Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia, an anti-gun violence advocate, dedicated hers to her slain teenage son, Jordan Davis.
As speaker, Pelosi will face an early challenge from the party’s robust wing of liberal newcomers, including 29-year-old New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has risen to such prominence she is already known around the Capitol — and on her prolific social media accounts — by the nickname “AOC.” She said she’d cast a no vote on a new package of rules to govern the House.
Ocasio-Cortez and other liberals oppose the pay-as-you-go budget provisions in the rules package that would allow restrictive objections to any legislation that would add to federal deficits. They say such restraints would hamstring Democratic efforts to invest in health care, education and develop a Green New Deal of renewable energy infrastructure projects to fight climate change.
Republicans face their own internal battles beyond just the conservative House Freedom Caucus, but as they decide how closely to tie their political fortunes to Trump. GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s name was put into nomination by his party’s caucus chair, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the daughter of the former vice president. He faced six “no” votes from his now-shrunken GOP minority.
McCarthy told the lawmakers that voters often wonder if Congress is “still capable” of solving problems, and as he passed the gavel to Pelosi he said this period of divided government is “no excuse for gridlock.”
One office remains disputed as the House refused to seat Republican Mark Harris of North Carolina amid an investigation by state election officials of irregularities in absentee ballots from the November election.
Many GOP senators are up for re-election in 2020 in states, including Colorado and Maine, where voters have mixed views of Trump’s performance in the White House.
Trump, whose own bid for 2020 already is underway, faces potential challenges from the ranks of Senate Democrats under Chuck Schumer. Trump had little to say early Thursday as the new Congress was convening, but he did tweet an attack on one of his likely presidential challengers, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, mocking her claim to Native American ancestry.
The halls of the Capitol were bustling with arrivals, children in the arms of many new lawmakers. Visitor galleries included crooner Tony Bennett and rock legend Mickey Hart, both guests of Pelosi. Incoming White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman, sat with Republican leaders.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Missouri, opened the House prayer asking at “a time fraught with tribalism at home and turbulence abroad” that lawmakers “become the architects of a kindlier nation.”
Overnight, Democratic Rep-elect Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted a picture with her family at the airport. The House rules were being changed to allow her to wear a head scarf on the chamber floor. She wrote, “23 years ago, from a refugee camp in Kenya, my father and I arrived at an airport in Washington DC. Today, we return to that same airport on the eve of my swearing in as the first Somali-American in Congress.”
Pelosi sees ‘new dawn’ as diverse 116th Congress begins
Pelosi sees ‘new dawn’ as diverse 116th Congress begins
- Pelosi, elected speaker 220-192, took the gavel saying US voters “demanded a new dawn”
Pentagon chief warns China ‘preparing’ to use military force in Asia
- US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth makes the remarks at an annual security forum in Singapore
- Since taking office in January, Donald Trump has launched a trade war with China, sought to curb its access to key AI technologies and deepened security ties with allies
SINGAPORE: US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth warned Saturday that China was “credibly preparing” to use military force to upend the balance of power in Asia, vowing the United States was “here to stay” in the Indo-Pacific region.
The Pentagon chief made the remarks at an annual security forum in Singapore as the administration of US President Donald Trump spars with Beijing on trade, technology, and influence over strategic corners of the globe.
Since taking office in January, Trump has launched a trade war with China, sought to curb its access to key AI technologies and deepened security ties with allies such as the Philippines, which is engaged in escalating territorial disputes with Beijing.
“The threat China poses is real and it could be imminent,” Hegseth said at the Shangri-La Dialogue attended by defense officials from around the world.
Beijing is “credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific,” he added.
Hegseth warned the Chinese military was building the capabilities to invade Taiwan and “rehearsing for the real deal.”
Beijing has ramped up military pressure on Taiwan and held multiple large-scale exercises around the island, often described as preparations for a blockade or invasion.
The United States was “reorienting toward deterring aggression by communist China,” Hegseth said, calling on US allies and partners in Asia to swiftly upgrade their defenses in the face of mounting threats.
Hegseth described China’s conduct as a “wake-up call,” accusing Beijing of endangering lives with cyberattacks, harassing its neighbors, and “illegally seizing and militarizing lands” in the South China Sea.
Beijing claims almost the entire disputed waterway, through which more than 60 percent of global maritime trade passes, despite an international ruling that its assertion has no merit.
It has clashed repeatedly with the Philippines in the strategic waters in recent months, with the flashpoint set to dominate discussions at the Singapore defense forum, according to US officials.
As Hegseth spoke in Singapore, China’s military announced that its navy and air force were carrying out routine “combat readiness patrols” around the Scarborough Shoal, a chain of reefs and rocks Beijing disputes with the Philippines.
“China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea has only increased in recent years,” Casey Mace, charge d’affaires at the US embassy in Singapore, told journalists ahead of the meeting.
“I think that this type of forum is exactly the type of forum where we need to have an exchange on that.”
Beijing has not sent any top defense ministry officials to the summit, dispatching a delegation from the People’s Liberation Army National Defense University instead.
Hegseth’s hard-hitting address drew a critical reaction from Chinese analysts at the conference.
Da Wei, director of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University told reporters the speech was “very unfriendly” and “very confrontational,” accusing Washington of double standards in demanding Beijing respect its neighbors while bullying its own – including Canada and Greenland.
Former Senior Col. Zhou Bo, from the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University said that training drills did not mean China would invade Taiwan, saying the government wanted “peaceful reunification.”
Hegseth’s comments came after Trump stoked new trade tensions with China, arguing that Beijing had “violated” a deal to de-escalate tariffs as the two sides appeared deadlocked in negotiations.
The world’s two biggest economies had agreed to temporarily lower eye-watering tariffs they had imposed on each other, pausing them for 90 days.
Reassuring US allies on Saturday, Hegseth said the Indo-Pacific was “America’s priority theater,” pledging to ensure “China cannot dominate us – or our allies and partners.”
He said the United States had stepped up cooperation with allies including the Philippines and Japan, and reiterated Trump’s vow that “China will not invade (Taiwan) on his watch.”
But he called on US partners in the region to ramp up spending on their militaries and “quickly upgrade their own defenses.”
“Asian allies should look to countries in Europe for a newfound example,” Hegseth said, citing pledges by NATO members including Germany to move toward Trump’s spending target of five percent of GDP.
“Deterrence doesn’t come on the cheap.”
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, also in Singapore, said the Trump administration’s “tough love” had helped push the continent to beef up its defenses.
“It’s love nonetheless, so it’s better than no love,” Kallas quipped when asked about Hegseth’s speech.
India monsoon floods kill five in northeast
- India’s annual monsoon season from June to September offers respite from intense summer heat and is crucial for replenishing water supplies, but also brings widespread death and destruction
GUWAHATI: Torrential monsoon rains in India’s northeast triggered landslides and floods that swept away and killed at least five people in Assam, disaster officials said Saturday.
India’s annual monsoon season from June to September offers respite from intense summer heat and is crucial for replenishing water supplies, but also brings widespread death and destruction.
The deaths recorded are among the first of this season, with scores often killed over the course of the rains across India, a country of 1.4 billion people.
The monsoon is a colossal sea breeze that brings South Asia 70-80 percent of its annual rainfall.
Rivers swollen by the lashing rain — including the mighty Brahmaputra and its tributaries — broke their banks across the region.
But the intensity of rain and floods has increased in recent years, with experts saying climate change is exacerbating the problem.
Assam State Disaster Management Authority officials on Saturday confirmed five deaths in the last 24 hours.
A red alert warning had been issued for 12 districts of Assam after non-stop rains over the last three days led to flooding in many urban areas.
The situation was particularly bad in the state capital Guwahati.
City authorities have disconnected the electricity in several districts to cut the risk of electrocution.
Several low-lying areas of Guwahati were flooded, with hundreds of families forced to abandon homes to seek shelter elsewhere.
Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said his government had deployed rescue teams.
“We have been reviewing the impending situation for the last three days,” he said in a statement, saying that supplies of rice had been dispatched as food aid.
South Asia is getting hotter and in recent years has seen shifting weather patterns, but scientists are unclear on how exactly a warming planet is affecting the highly complex monsoon.
On Monday, lashing rains swamped India’s financial capital Mumbai, where the monsoon rains arrived some two weeks earlier than usual, the earliest for nearly a quarter century, according to weather forecasters.
Swiss glacier collapse offers global warning of wider impact
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan: The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts say.
Footage of the May 28 collapse showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside, into the hamlet of Blatten.
Ali Neumann, disaster risk reduction adviser to the Swiss Development Cooperation, noted that while the role of climate change in the specific case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water.
“Climate change and its impact on the cryosphere will have growing repercussions on human societies that live near glaciers, near the cryosphere, and depend on glaciers somehow and live with them,” he said.
The barrage largely destroyed Blatten, but the evacuation of its 300 residents last week averted mass casualties, although one person remains missing.
“It also showed that with the right skills and observation and management of an emergency, you can significantly reduce the magnitude of this type of disaster,” Neumann said at an international UN-backed glacier conference in Tajikistan.
Stefan Uhlenbrook, Director for Hydrology, Water and Cryosphere at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said it showed the need for vulnerable regions like the Himalayas and other parts of Asia to prepare.
“From monitoring, to data sharing, to numerical simulation models, to hazard assessment and to communicating that, the whole chain needs to be strengthened,” Uhlenbrook said.
“But in many Asian countries, this is weak, the data is not sufficiently connected.”
Swiss geologists use various methods, including sensors and satellite images, to monitor their glaciers.
Asia was the world’s most disaster-hit region from climate and weather hazards in 2023, the United Nations said last year, with floods and storms the chief cause of casualties and economic losses.
But many Asian nations, particularly in the Himalayas, lack the resources to monitor their vast glaciers to the same degree as the Swiss.
According to a 2024 UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction report, two-thirds of countries in the Asia and Pacific region have early warning systems.
But the least developed countries, many of whom are in the frontlines of climate change, have the worst coverage.
“Monitoring is not absent, but it is not enough,” said geologist Sudan Bikash Maharjan of the Nepal-based International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).
“Our terrains and climatic conditions are challenging, but also we lack that level of resources for intensive data generation.”
That gap is reflected in the number of disaster-related fatalities for each event.
While the average number of fatalities per disaster was 189 globally, in Asia and the Pacific it was much higher at 338, according to the Belgium-based Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters’ Emergency Events Database.
Geoscientist Jakob Steiner, who works in climate adaptation in Nepal and Bhutan, said it is not as simple as just exporting the Swiss technological solutions.
“These are complex disasters, working together with the communities is actually just as, if not much more, important,” he said.
Himalayan glaciers, providing critical water to nearly two billion people, are melting faster than ever before due to climate change, exposing communities to unpredictable and costly disasters, scientists warn.
Hundreds of lakes formed from glacial meltwater have appeared in recent decades. They can be deadly when they burst and rush down the valley.
The softening of permafrost increases the chances of landslides.
Declan Magee, from the Asian Development Bank’s Climate Change and Sustainable Development Department, said that monitoring and early warnings alone are not enough.
“We have to think... about where we build, where people build infrastructure and homes, and how we can decrease their vulnerability if it is exposed,” he said.
Nepali climate activist and filmmaker Tashi Lhazom described how the village of Til, near to her home, was devastated by a landslide earlier in May.
The 21 families escaped — but only just.
“In Switzerland they were evacuated days before, here we did not even get seconds,” said Lhazom.
“The disparity makes me sad but also angry. This has to change.”
Russian attacks kill two in Ukraine
- Diplomatic efforts to end the war have accelerated in recent weeks, with both sides meeting earlier this month for their first round of direct talks in more than three years
KYIV: Russian shelling and air strikes on southern Ukraine overnight killed a man and a nine-year-old girl in separate attacks, Ukrainian officials said on Saturday.
In the Zaporizhzhia region, “Russians hit a residential area with guided aerial bombs,” killing the girl and wounding a 16-year-old boy, Ivan Fedorov, head of the regional military administration, said on the Telegram platform.
One house was destroyed and several others damaged by the blast, he added.
In a separate assault on the city of Kherson, a “66-year-old man sustained fatal injuries” from Russian shelling, Oleksandr Prokudin, Kherson region’s governor, wrote on Telegram.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, tens of thousands of people have been killed, swaths of eastern and southern Ukraine destroyed, and millions forced to flee their homes.
One person was wounded in a Russian drone strike in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, its mayor said.
In Russia, Ukrainian drone attacks wounded 10 people in the Kursk region overnight, acting governor Alexander Khinshtein said.
Diplomatic efforts to end the war have accelerated in recent weeks, with both sides meeting earlier this month for their first round of direct talks in more than three years.
But the negotiations in Istanbul yielded only a prisoner exchange and promises to stay in touch.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that his government did not expect results from further talks with Russia unless Moscow provided its peace terms in advance, accusing the Kremlin of doing “everything” it could to sabotage a potential meeting.
“There must be a ceasefire to continue moving toward peace. We need to stop the killing of people,” Zelensky added in a statement on Telegram.
The Ukrainian leader also said he had discussed with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “a possible next meeting in Istanbul and under what conditions Ukraine is ready to participate,” with both agreeing that the next round of talks with Moscow “cannot and should not be a waste of time.”
Russia has said it will send a team of negotiators to Istanbul for a second round of talks on Monday, but Kyiv has yet to confirm if it will attend.
Australia’s defense minister urges greater military openness from China
- Richard Marles says that while China remains an important strategic partner to Australia, more open communication between the two nations is key for a "productive" relationship
SINGAPORE: Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles on Saturday urged greater transparency from China over its military modernization and deployments as Pacific nations brace for a more assertive Chinese presence.
Speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue defense meeting in Singapore, Marles said that while China remains an important strategic partner to Australia, more open communication between the two nations is key for a “productive” relationship.
“When you look at the growth in the Chinese military that has happened without a strategic reassurance, or a strategic transparency....we would like to have a greater transparency in what China is seeking to do in not only its build up, but in the exercises that it undertakes,” said Marles.
“We want to have the most productive relationship with China that we can have ... we hope that in the context of that productive relationship, we can see greater transparency and greater communication between our two countries in respect of our defense.”
Both Australia and New Zealand raised concerns in February after three Chinese warships conducted unprecedented live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea.
Both nations complained of late notice over the drills by China, which led to the diversion of 49 commercial flights.
Marles said that while the drills were in accordance with international law, China should have been less disruptive.
He also said Australia was able to closely scrutinize the Chinese task-force.
“It’s fair to say that this was done in a bigger way than they have done before, but equally, that was meant from our point of view, by a much greater degree of surveillance than we’ve ever done,” he said.
“From the moment that Chinese warships came within the vicinity of Australia, they were being tailed and tracked by Australian assets ... we were very clear about what exercises China was undertaking and what capability they were seeking to exercise and to build.”
Chinese officials have signalled that more such exercises could be expected as it was routine naval activity in international waters. Defense analysts say the exercises underscore Beijing’s ambition to develop a global navy that will be able to project power into the region more frequently.
Australia has in recent times pledged to boost its missile defense capability amid China’s nuclear weapons buildup and its blue-water naval expansion, as the country targets to increase its defense spending from roughly 2 percent of GDP currently to 2.4 percent by the early 2030s.
The nation is scheduled to pay the United States $2 billion by the end of 2025 to assist its submarine shipyards, in order to buy three Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines starting in 2032 — its biggest ever defense project.
