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Joe Biden says Gaza hospital blast appears to have been done ‘by the other team’

US President Joe Biden is greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after arriving at Ben Gurion International Airport on Oct. 18, 2023 in Tel Aviv. (AP)
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Updated 18 October 2023
Agencies
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Joe Biden says Gaza hospital blast appears to have been done ‘by the other team’

  • Biden says Washington would provide Israel with everything it needs to defend itself
  • Israeli PM Netanyahu says Israel would try to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza war
Updated 18 October 2023
Agencies

TEL AVIV: President Joe Biden said Wednesday that an explosion at a Gaza Strip hospital appears to not have been caused by Israel.

“Based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you,” Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting. But Biden said there were “a lot of people out there” who weren't sure what caused the blast.

He added that Washington would provide Israel with everything it needed to defend itself as it wages war against the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Biden said Hamas was worse than Daesh for its killings of Israeli civilians in a surprise attack on Oct. 7 which sparked the latest Israel-Palestinian violence.

The US president said he was “sad and outraged” by an explosion at a hospital in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday which Hamas said killed hundreds of people.

Biden said 31 Americans were among the more than 1,300 Israelis killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.

Netanyahu told Biden that Israel would try to avoid civilian casualties in its Gaza war, which he described as challenging due to the tactics of Hamas.

“This will be a different kind of war because Hamas is a different kind of enemy,” Netanyahu said in televised remarks. “As we proceed in this war, Israel will do everything it can to keep civilians out of harm's way.”

Biden touched down in Israel on Wednesday for a diplomatic scramble to prevent the war with Hamas from spiraling into an even larger conflict, a challenge that became more difficult as outrage swept through the Middle East over an explosion that killed hundreds in a Gaza Strip hospital.

Netanyahu personally welcomed Biden on the tarmac, putting his arms around the US president who then clasped his hands around Netanyahu in a sign of the newfound bond between the two leaders.

Biden was originally scheduled to visit Jordan as well, but his meetings with Arab leaders were called off as he was leaving Washington, costing him an opportunity for the face-to-face conversations that he views as crucial for navigating this fraught moment.

Now Biden’s only stop is Tel Aviv, where he’s expected to push for allowing critical humanitarian aid into Gaza during meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel has been preparing for a potential ground invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, which killed 1,400 Israelis.

John Kirby, a White House national security spokesman, told reporters aboard Air Force One that Biden “wants to get a sense from the Israelis on the situation on the ground” and will “ask some tough questions.”

“He’ll be asking them as a friend,” Kirby added.

The president also planned to meet Israeli first responders and the families of victims killed and hostages taken when Hamas made its incursion into Israel.

Roughly 2,800 Palestinians have been reported killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza. Another 1,200 people are believed to be buried under the rubble, alive or dead, health authorities said.

Those numbers predate the explosion at the Al-Ahli hospital on Tuesday. No clear cause has been established for the blast.

The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said an Israeli airstrike caused the destruction. The Israeli military denied involvement and blamed a misfired rocket from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group. However, that organization also rejected responsibility.

Biden said in a statement that he was “outraged and deeply saddened by the explosion at the Al Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza, and the terrible loss of life that resulted.” He also said he “directed my national security team to continue gathering information about what exactly happened.”

Protests swept through the region after the deaths at the hospital, which had been treating wounded Palestinians and sheltering many more who were seeking a refuge from the fighting.

Hundreds of Palestinians flooded the streets of major West Bank cities including Ramallah. More people joined protests that erupted in Beirut, Lebanon and Amman, Jordan, where an angry crowd gathered outside the Israeli Embassy.

Outrage over the hospital explosion scuttled Biden’s plans to visit Jordan, where King Abdullah II had planned to host meetings with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. But Abbas withdrew in protest, and the summit was subsequently canceled outright.

Kirby said Jordan had declared three days of mourning after the hospital explosion and that Biden understood the move and was part of a “mutual” decision to call off the Jordan portion of his trip. He said Biden would have an opportunity to speak to the Arab leaders by phone as he returned to Washington.

Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister, told a state-run television network that the war is “pushing the region to the brink.”

There are also fears that a new front could erupt along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah operates. The Iran-backed organization has been skirmishing with Israeli forces.

The visit to Israel coincides with rising humanitarian concerns in Gaza, where Israel has cut off the flow of food, fuel and water. Mediators have been struggling to break a deadlock over providing supplies to desperate civilians, aid groups and hospitals.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, bouncing back and forth between Arab and Israeli leadership ahead of Biden’s visit, spent seven and a half hours meeting Monday in Tel Aviv in an effort to broker some kind of aid agreement and emerged with a green light to develop a plan on how aid can enter Gaza and be distributed to civilians.

“We’re optimistic that we’ll be able to get some humanitarian assistance in,” Kirby said.

Although only a modest accomplishment on the surface, US officials stressed that Blinken’s talks led to a significant change in Israel’s position going in — that Gaza would remain cut off from fuel, electricity, water and other essential supplies.

US officials said it has become clear that already limited Arab tolerance of Israel’s military operations would evaporate entirely if conditions in Gaza worsened.

Their analysis projected that outright condemnation of Israel by Arab leaders would not only be a boon to Hamas but would likely encourage Iran to step up its anti-Israel activity, adding to fears that a regional conflagration might erupt, according to four officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration thinking.

Topics: Biden War on Gaza Israel

Trump’s threat to impose tariffs could raise prices for consumers, colliding with promise for relief

Updated 5 sec ago
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Trump’s threat to impose tariffs could raise prices for consumers, colliding with promise for relief

  • The US is the largest importer of goods in the world, with Mexico, China and Canada its top three suppliers, according to the most recent US Census data
Updated 5 sec ago
AP

DETROIT: If Donald Trump makes good on his threat to slap 25 percent tariffs on everything imported from Mexico and Canada, the price increases that could follow will collide with his campaign promise to give American families a break from inflation.
Economists say companies would have little choice but to pass along the added costs, dramatically raising prices for food, clothing, automobiles, booze and other goods.
The president-elect floated the tariff idea, including additional 10 percent taxes on goods from China, as a way to force the countries to halt the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs into the US But his posts Monday on Truth Social threatening the tariffs on his first day in office could just be a negotiating ploy to get the countries to change behavior.
High food prices were a major issue in voters picking Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris, but tariffs almost certainly would push those costs up even further.
For instance, the Produce Distributors Association, a Washington trade group, said Tuesday that tariffs will raise prices for fresh fruit and vegetables and hurt US farmers when other countries retaliate.
“Tariffs distort the marketplace and will raise prices along the supply chain, resulting in the consumer paying more at the checkout line,” said Alan Siger, association president.
Mexico and Canada are two of the biggest exporters of fresh fruit and vegetables to the US In 2022, Mexico supplied 51 percent of fresh fruit and 69 percent of fresh vegetables imported by value into the US, while Canada supplied 2 percent of fresh fruit and 20 percent of fresh vegetables.
Before the election, about 7 in 10 voters said they were very concerned about the cost of food, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters.
“We’ll get them down,” Trump told shoppers during a September visit to a Pennsylvania grocery store.
The US is the largest importer of goods in the world, with Mexico, China and Canada its top three suppliers, according to the most recent US Census data.
People looking to buy a new vehicle likely would see big price increases as well, at a time when costs have gone up so much they are out of reach for many. The average price of a new vehicle now runs around $48,000.
About 15 percent of the 15.6 million new vehicles sold in the US last year came from Mexico, while 8 percent crossed the border from Canada, according to Global Data.
Much of the tariffs would get passed along to consumers, unless automakers can somehow quickly find productivity improvements to offset them, said C.J. Finn, US automotive sector leader for PwC. That means even more consumers “would potentially get priced out,” Finn said.
Hardest hit would be Volkswagen, Stellantis, General Motors and Ford, Bernstein analyst Daniel Roeska wrote Tuesday in a note to investors. “A 25 percent tariff on Mexico and Canada would severely cripple the US auto industry,” he said.
The tariffs would hurt US industrial production so much that “we expect this is unlikely to happen in practice,” Roeska said.
The tariff threat hit auto stocks on Tuesday, particularly shares of GM, which imports about 30 percent of the vehicles it sells in the US from Canada and Mexico, and Stellantis, which imports about 40 percent from the two countries. For both, about 55 percent of their lucrative pickup trucks come from Mexico and Canada. GM stock lost almost 9 percent of its value, while Stellantis dropped nearly 6 percent.
It’s not clear how long the tariffs would last if implemented, but they could force auto executives to move production to the US, which could create more jobs in the long run. However, Morningstar analyst David Whiston said automakers probably won’t make any immediate moves because they can’t quickly change where they build vehicles.
Millions of dollars worth of auto parts flow across the borders with Mexico and Canada, and that could raise prices for already costly automobile repairs, Finn said.
The Distilled Spirits Council of the US said tariffs on tequila or Canadian whisky won’t boost American jobs because they are distinctive products that can only be made in their country of origin. In 2023, the US imported $4.6 billion worth of tequila and $108 million worth of mezcal from Mexico and $537 million worth of spirits from Canada, it said.
“Tariffs on spirits products from our neighbors to the north and south are going to hurt US consumers and lead to job losses across the US hospitality industry,” it added.
Electronics retailer Best Buy said on its third-quarter earnings conference call that it runs on thin profit margins, so while vendors and the company will shoulder some increases, Best Buy will have to pass tariffs to customers. “These are goods that people need, and higher prices are not helpful,” CEO Corie Barry said.
Walmart also warned last week that tariffs could force it to raise prices.
Tariffs could trigger supply chain disruptions as people buy goods before they are imposed and companies seek alternate sources of parts, said Rob Handfield, a professor of supply chain management at North Carolina State University. Some businesses might not be able to pass on the costs.
“It could actually shut down a lot of industries in the United States. It could actually put a lot of US businesses out of business,” he said.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who talked with Trump after his call for tariffs, said they had a good conversation about working together. “This is a relationship that we know takes a certain amount of working on and that’s what we’ll do,” Trudeau said.
Trump’s threats come as arrests for illegally crossing the border from Mexico have been falling. But arrests for illegally crossing the border from Canada have been rising over the past two years. Much of America’s fentanyl is smuggled from Mexico, and seizures have increased.
Trump has sound legal justification to impose tariffs, even though they conflict with a 2020 trade deal brokered in large part by Trump with Canada and Mexico, said William Reinsch, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Clinton administration trade official. The treaty, known as the USMCA, is up for review in 2026.
In China’s case, he could simply declare Beijing hasn’t met obligations under an agreement he negotiated in his first term. For Canada and Mexico, he could say the influx of migrants and drugs are a national security threat, and turn to a section of trade law he used in his first term to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum.
The law he would most likely use for Canada and Mexico has a legal process that often takes up to nine months, giving Trump time to seek a deal.
If talks failed and the duties were imposed, all three countries would likely retaliate with tariffs on US exports, said Reinsch, who believes Trump’s tariffs threat is a negotiating ploy.
US companies would lobby intensively against tariffs, and would seek to have products exempted. Some of the biggest exporters from Mexico are US firms that make parts there, Reinsch said.
Longer term, Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the threat of tariffs could make the US an “unstable partner” in international trade. “It is an incentive to move activity outside the United States to avoid all this uncertainty,” she said.
Trump transition team officials did not immediately respond to questions about what he would need to see to prevent the tariffs from being implemented and how they would impact prices in the US
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum suggested Tuesday that Mexico could retaliate with tariffs of its own. Sheinbaum said she was willing to talk about the issues, but said drugs were a US problem.

Topics: Trump Returns US tariffs Mexico Canada

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US appeals court grants dismissal of Trump documents case

Updated 9 min 24 sec ago
AFP
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US appeals court grants dismissal of Trump documents case

  • The appeals court granted Smith’s request to dismiss the case without comment
Updated 9 min 24 sec ago
AFP

WASHINGTON: An appeals court on Tuesday granted a request by prosecutors to drop the case against US President-elect Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents.
Special Counsel Jack Smith had asked the court on Monday to dismiss the case because of a long-standing Justice Department policy of not prosecuting a sitting president.
A Trump-appointed district court judge in Florida threw out the documents case earlier this year, but Smith had appealed the ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The appeals court granted Smith’s request to dismiss the case without comment.
Smith is continuing, however, to pursue the case against Trump’s two co-defendants, his valet, Walt Nauta, and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira.
Trump, 78, was accused of removing large quantities of top secret documents after leaving the White House at the end of his first term and obstructing efforts to retrieve them.
The former president was also accused by the special counsel of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election won by Joe Biden. A judge on Monday granted a request by Smith to drop that case.
The special counsel paused both federal cases this month after Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the November 5 presidential election.
The former and incoming president also faces two state cases — in New York and Georgia.
He was convicted in New York in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election to stop her from revealing an alleged 2006 sexual encounter.
Judge Juan Merchan has postponed sentencing while he considers a request from Trump’s lawyers that the conviction be thrown out in light of the Supreme Court ruling in July that an ex-president has broad immunity from prosecution.
In Georgia, Trump faces racketeering charges over his efforts to subvert the 2020 election results in the southern state, but that case will likely be frozen while he is in office.

Topics: Trump Returns US court Special counsel Jack Smith

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Trump won about 2.5M more votes this year than he did in 2020. This is where he did it

Updated 26 November 2024
AP
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Trump won about 2.5M more votes this year than he did in 2020. This is where he did it

  • Trump’s team and outside groups supporting him knew from their data that he was making inroads with Black voters, particularly Black men younger than 50, more concentrated in these urban areas that have been key to Democratic victories
Updated 26 November 2024
AP

WASHINGTON: It’s a daunting reality for Democrats: Republican Donald Trump’s support has grown broadly since he last sought the presidency.
In his defeat of Democrat Kamala Harris, Trump won a bigger percentage of the vote in each one of the 50 states, and Washington, D.C., than he did four years ago. He won more actual votes than in 2020 in 40 states, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Certainly, Harris’ more than 7 million vote decline from President Joe Biden’s 2020 total was a factor in her loss, especially in swing-state metropolitan areas that have been the party’s winning electoral strongholds.
But, despite national turnout that was lower than in the high-enthusiasm 2020 election, Trump received 2.5 million more votes than he did four years ago. He swept the seven most competitive states to win a convincing Electoral College victory, becoming the first Republican nominee in 20 years to win a majority of the popular vote.
Trump cut into places where Harris needed to overperform to win a close election. Now Democrats are weighing how to regain traction ahead of the midterm elections in two years, when control of Congress will again be up for grabs and dozens of governors elected.
There were some notable pieces to how Trump’s victory came together:
Trump took a bite in Northern metros
Though Trump improved across the map, his gains were particularly noteworthy in urban counties home to the cities of Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, electoral engines that stalled for Harris in industrial swing states Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Harris fell more than 50,000 votes — and 5 percentage points — short of Biden’s total in Wayne County, Michigan, which makes up the lion’s share of the Detroit metro area. She was almost 36,000 votes off Biden’s mark in Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, and about 1,000 short in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin.
It wasn’t only Harris’ shortfall that helped Trump carry the states, a trio that Democrats had collectively carried in six of the seven previous elections before Nov. 5.
Trump added to his 2020 totals in all three metro counties, netting more than 24,000 votes in Wayne County, more than 11,000 in Philadelphia County and almost 4,000 in Milwaukee County.
It’s not yet possible to determine whether Harris fell short of Biden’s performance because Biden voters stayed home or switched their vote to Trump — or how some combination of the two produced the rightward drift evident in each of these states.
Harris advertised heavily and campaigned regularly in each, and made Milwaukee County her first stop as a candidate with a rally in July. These swings alone were not the difference in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but her weaker performance than Biden across the three metros helped Trump, who held on to big 2020 margins in the three states’ broad rural areas and improved or held steady in populous suburbs.
Trump’s team and outside groups supporting him knew from their data that he was making inroads with Black voters, particularly Black men younger than 50, more concentrated in these urban areas that have been key to Democratic victories.
When James Blair, Trump’s political director, saw results coming in from Philadelphia on election night, he knew Trump had cut into the more predominantly Black precincts, a gain that would echo in Wayne and Milwaukee counties.
“The data made clear there was an opportunity there,” Blair said.
AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 120,000 voters, found Trump won a larger share of Black and Latino voters than he did in 2020, and most notably among men under age 45.
Democrats won Senate races in Michigan and Wisconsin but lost in Pennsylvania. In 2026, they will be defending governorships in all three states and a Senate seat in Michigan.
Trump gained more than Harris in battlegrounds
Despite the burst of enthusiasm Harris’ candidacy created among the Democratic base when she entered the race in July, she ended up receiving fewer votes than Biden in three of the seven states where she campaigned almost exclusively.
In Arizona, she received about 90,000 fewer votes than Biden. She received about 67,000 fewer in Michigan and 39,000 fewer in Pennsylvania.
In four others — Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin — Harris won more votes than Biden did. But Trump’s support grew by more — in some states, significantly more.
That dynamic is glaring in Georgia, where Harris received almost 73,000 more votes than Biden did when he very narrowly carried the state. But Trump added more than 200,000 to his 2020 total, en route to winning Georgia by roughly 2 percentage points.
In Wisconsin, Trump’s team reacted to slippage it saw in GOP-leaning counties in suburban Milwaukee by targeting once-Democratic-leaning, working-class areas, where Trump made notable gains.
In the three largest suburban Milwaukee counties — Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha — which have formed the backbone of GOP victories for decades, Harris performed better than Biden did in 2020. She also gained more votes than Trump gained over 2020, though he still won the counties.
That made Trump’s focus on Rock County, a blue-collar area in south central Wisconsin, critical. Trump received 3,084 more votes in Rock County, home of the former automotive manufacturing city of Janesville, than he did in 2020, while Harris underperformed Biden’s 2020 total by seven votes. That helped Trump offset Harris’ improvement in Milwaukee’s suburbs.
The focus speaks to the strength Trump has had and continued to grow with middle-income, non-college educated voters, the Trump campaign’s senior data analyst Tim Saler said.
“If you’re going to have to lean into working-class voters, they are particularly strong in Wisconsin,” Saler said. “We saw huge shifts from 2020 to 2024 in our favor.”
Trump boosted 2020 totals as Arizona turnout dipped
Of the seven most competitive states, Arizona saw the smallest increase in the number of votes cast in the presidential contest — slightly more than 4,000 votes, in a state with more than 3.3 million ballots cast.
That was despite nearly 30 campaign visits to Arizona by Trump, Harris and their running mates and more than $432 million spent on advertising by the campaigns and allied outside groups, according to the ad-monitoring firm AdImpact.
Arizona, alone of the seven swing states, saw Harris fall short of Biden across small, midsize and large counties. In the other six states, she was able to hold on in at least one of these categories.
Even more telling, it is also the only swing state where Trump improved his margin in every single county.
While turnout in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous as the home to Phoenix, dipped slightly from 2020 — by 14,199 votes, a tiny change in a county where more than 2 million people voted — Trump gained almost 56,000 more votes than four years ago.
Meanwhile, Harris fell more than 60,000 votes short of Biden’s total, contributing to a shift significant enough to swing the county and state to Trump, who lost Arizona by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2020.
Rightward shift even in heavily Democratic areas
The biggest leaps to the right weren’t taking place exclusively among Republican-leaning counties, but also among the most Democratic-leaning counties in the states. Michigan’s Wayne County swung 9 points toward Trump, tying the more Republican-leaning Antrim County for the largest movement in the state.
AP VoteCast found that voters were most likely to say the economy was the most important issue facing the country in 2024, followed by immigration. Trump supporters were more motivated by economic issues and immigration than Harris’, the survey showed.
“It’s still all about the economy,” said North Carolina Democratic strategist Morgan Jackson, a senior adviser to Democrat Josh Stein, who won North Carolina’s governorship on Nov. 5 as Trump also carried the state.
“Democrats have to embrace an economic message that actually works for real people and talk about it in the kind of terms that people get, rather than giving them a dissertation of economic policy,” he said.
Governor’s elections in 2026 give Democrats a chance to test their understanding and messaging on the issue, said Democratic pollster Margie Omero, whose firm has advised Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in the past and winning Arizona Senate candidate Ruben Gallego this year.
“So there’s an opportunity to really make sure people, who governors have a connection to, are feeling some specificity and clarity with the Democratic economic message,” Omero said.

 

Topics: Trump Returns U.S. President-elect Donald Trump

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Teen who lied about beheaded French teacher’s class says ‘sorry’

Samuel Paty. (Photo credit: @Ch_Capuano)
Updated 26 November 2024
AFP
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Teen who lied about beheaded French teacher’s class says ‘sorry’

  • Paty had used the Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and cartoons mocking religious figures have a long history
Updated 26 November 2024
AFP

PARIS: A teenager whose lies about her teacher are accused of contributing to the educator’s murder by an Islamist radical apologized to his family in a French court on Tuesday.
Eight people have been on trial since early November, charged with contributing to the climate of hatred that led to an 18-year-old of Chechen origin beheading teacher Samuel Paty outside Paris in 2020.
They include Brahim Chnina, the 52-year-old Moroccan father of the adolescent testifying Tuesday.
Then aged 13, the adolescent falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing caricatures of the prophet Mohammed.
She was not in the classroom at the time.
“I would like to apologize to the family,” the 17-year-old, who has not been named, told the court. “I destroyed your lives, I am sorry.”
Also on trial is Abdelhakim Sefrioui, a 65-year-old French-Moroccan Islamist activist.
He and Chnina spread the teenager’s lies on social networks with the aim, according to the prosecution, of “designating a target,” “provoking a feeling of hatred” and “thus preparing several crimes.”
Both men have been in pre-trial detention for the past four years.
The teenager told the court that she lied to her mother to justify why she had been suspended from school for two days over her behavior and repeated absences.
“I was in panic and stress,” she said. “I told her I had been in class and that I wasn’t happy with what went on there and that the teacher excluded me. That we looked at cartoons.”

Sefrioui posted a video describing Paty as a “teaching thug.”
He also staged an “interview” with the teenager outside the school, whispering to her what to answer. The adolescent dutifully reiterated the falsehoods.
“I thought somebody would stop me in my lying, but nobody ever said that I wasn’t in class,” she told the court Tuesday.
She stuck to her story even after Paty’s death. Only following her arrest and 30 hours of interrogation did she admit to investigators that she had made it all up.
The teenager, whose delivery in court was matter-of-fact, showed emotion only when she talked about her father.
“Without my lies, none of us would be here,” she said, sobbing. “I used my father’s naivete and kindness.”
She added that “my father says you must always respect teachers,” a remark that prompted an astonished “really?” interjected by the court’s presiding judge.
The teenager was sentenced to 18 months of probation in December 2023 after being convicted of slander.
Paty had used the Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and cartoons mocking religious figures have a long history.
His killing took place just weeks after Charlie Hebdo republished the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.
After the magazine used the images in 2015, Islamist gunmen stormed its offices, killing 12 people.
 

Topics: France Islamophobia

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After long wrangling, Blinken to testify in Congress on Afghanistan

Updated 26 November 2024
Reuters
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After long wrangling, Blinken to testify in Congress on Afghanistan

  • Donald Trump drew criticism for shooting video for his campaign at Arlington National Cemetery where he appeared at a ceremony honoring troops killed in the evacuation
  • Democrats have insisted some blame for the messy end of the war should be laid at the feet of Trump, who began the withdrawal process by signing a deal with the Taliban in 2020
Updated 26 November 2024
Reuters

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has agreed to testify publicly at a House of Representatives committee hearing on the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, the panel said on Tuesday, after a long dispute with the Republican-led committee.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said Blinken had committed to appear at a public hearing on Dec. 11 to discuss the committee’s investigation of the withdrawal three years ago.
The committee and the State Department have been wrangling over Blinken’s appearance for months. Panel Republicans voted in September to recommend Blinken be held in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena.
The State Department had contended that the panel was provided with large amounts of information, with Blinken testifying before Congress on Afghanistan more than 14 times and the department providing nearly 20,000 pages of records, multiple high-level briefings and transcribed interviews.
McCaul released a report on Sept. 8 on the committee Republicans’ investigation of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, blasting Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration for failures surrounding the evacuation.
The issue had become intensely politicized before the presidential election on Nov. 5. In his successful bid for a second term, Republican former President Donald Trump drew criticism for shooting video for his campaign at Arlington National Cemetery where he appeared at a ceremony honoring troops killed in the evacuation.
Trump also sought to pin blame for the withdrawal on Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent.
Democrats have insisted some blame for the messy end of the war — less than seven months into Biden’s presidency — should be laid at the feet of Trump, who began the withdrawal process by signing a deal with the Taliban in 2020.
The issue could become even more politicized after Trump returns to the White House on Jan. 20, after he spoke during his campaign of firing those responsible for the pullout from Afghanistan.

Topics: United States of America (USA) Afghanistan Antony Blinken

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