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Biden hails Harris as their party’s future in DNC speech

Democrats gather for the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on August 19, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. Delegates, politicians, and Democratic party supporters are in Chicago for the convention, concluding with current Vice President Kamala Harris accepting her party's presidential nomination. The DNC takes place from August 19-22. (AFP)
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Updated 20 August 2024
Reuters
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Biden hails Harris as their party’s future in DNC speech

  • The Democratic National Convention that began Monday in Chicago holds particularly high stakes for the party one month after an unprecedented mid-campaign switch from Biden to Harris
Updated 20 August 2024
Reuters

CHICAGO: President Joe Biden cemented the Democratic Party’s embrace of Kamala Harris as its leader in the fight for the White House against Republican Donald Trump with a convention speech on Monday that hailed his vice president as the party’s future.
Biden took center stage on opening night of the Democratic National Convention, drawing an extended standing ovation from the party faithful, who have swiftly moved on without him.
Wiping away tears after being introduced by his daughter Ashley and waving to the crowd that held signs saying, “We (heart) Biden,” a smiling Biden said: “I love you.”
“Are you ready to vote for freedom? Are you ready to vote for democracy and for America? Let me ask you, are you ready to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz?” Biden said.
Biden’s address in Chicago kicked off a four-day event fueled by enthusiasm for Harris and relief that Biden abandoned his own reelection bid and endorsed her to replace him.
The president’s reluctant decision to step aside on July 21 came after heavy pressure from party leaders who worried the 81-year-old incumbent was too old to win or serve another four years.
Biden, who served as No. 2 to the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, is now urging Democrats to unite behind a candidate who, if triumphant on Nov. 5, would become the first woman, who is also Black and South Asian, to be elected US president.
The party’s chances of winning have improved dramatically with Harris’ candidacy, based on opinion polls, fundraising and the sizable crowds she has attracted.
Instead of his hoped-for high-profile speech on Thursday to accept the Democratic nomination for another four-year term, Biden was the main event at the start of the Chicago convention on Monday before traveling to California for a vacation.
In his speech, Biden touted his administration’s accomplishments — boosting the US economy and strengthening US alliances abroad — and made the case for Americans to elect Harris as his White House successor.
He condemned the racism and white supremacy that continue to plague America, saying they had no place in the nation.
Earlier in the evening, Harris made a surprise appearance, drawing cheers from the crowd as she vowed to defeat her Republican rival Donald Trump, 78, in the Nov. 5 election.
Harris, 59, will formally accept the nomination on Thursday.
“Let us fight for the ideals we hold dear and let us always remember, when we fight we win!” Harris said to the roar of the crowd.

Hillary clinton draws a standing ovation
Democrats also cheered their failed 2016 presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, whose loss to Trump in 2016 dashed hopes of installing the first woman in the White House.
Clinton, who became the first woman to secure a major US party’s presidential nomination, drew a standing ovation as she took the stage on Monday.
“The story of my life and the history of our country is that progress is possible, but not guaranteed,” said Clinton, who also lost her bid for the 2008 nomination to Obama.
She praised Biden for bringing decency, dignity and competency to the White House.
“And now, we are writing a new chapter in America’s story,” Clinton said. “Kamala has the character, experience and vision to lead us forward.”
Clinton took several shots at her former nemesis. “Donald Trump fell asleep at his own trial, and when he woke up, he made his own kind of history, the first person to run for president with 34 felony convictions,” she said to laughter.
While Democrats gathered for their national nominating convention, thousands of protesters assembled at a nearby park to pressure delegates to drop the party’s military support for Israel’s Gaza offensive.
The pro-Palestinian protesters were fewer than the tens of thousands that organizers had predicted, but a splinter group left the main march and breached a security perimeter near the convention center, drawing riot police who detained four people.

Harris challenges Trump
Harris is riding a historic whirlwind into the convention: her campaign has broken fundraising records, packed arenas with supporters, and turned opinion polls in some battleground states in Democrats’ favor.
Biden dropped his reelection bid after his disastrous debate performance against Trump on June 27 prompted longtime allies, major donors and other party supporters to demand he step aside.
Polls a month ago showed Trump with a clear lead over Biden, but Harris has closed the gap both nationally and in many of the highly competitive states, including Pennsylvania, that will play a decisive role in the election.

Topics: Trump Returns Democrats Joe Biden Kamala Harris

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Vatican unveils last of restored Raphael Rooms after 10-year cleaning that yielded new discoveries

Updated 4 sec ago
AP
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Vatican unveils last of restored Raphael Rooms after 10-year cleaning that yielded new discoveries

  • “With this restoration, we rewrite a part of the history of art,” Vatican Museums director Barbara Jatta said
Updated 4 sec ago
AP
VATICAN CITY: The Vatican Museums on Thursday unveiled the last and most important of the restored Raphael Rooms, the spectacularly frescoed reception rooms of the Apostolic Palace that in some ways rival the Sistine Chapel as the peak of high Renaissance artistry.
A decadelong project to clean and restore the largest of the four Raphael Rooms uncovered a novel mural painting technique that the superstar Renaissance painter and architect began but never completed. Raphael used oil paint directly on the wall, and arranged a grid of nails embedded in the walls to hold in place the resin surface onto which he painted.
Vatican Museums officials recounted the discoveries in inaugurating the hall, known as the Room of Constantine, after the last scaffolding came down. The reception room, which was painted by Raphael and his students starting in the first quarter-century of the 1500s, is dedicated to the fourth-century Roman emperor Constantine, whose embrace of Christianity helped spread the faith throughout the Roman Empire.
“With this restoration, we rewrite a part of the history of art,” Vatican Museums director Barbara Jatta said.
Pope Julius II summoned the young Raphael Sanzio from Florence to Rome in 1508 to decorate a new private apartment for himself in the Apostolic Palace, giving the then-25-year-old a major commission at the height of his artistic output.
Even at the time, there were reports that Raphael had wanted to decorate the rooms not with frescoes but with oil paint directly on the wall, to give the images greater brilliance. The 10-year restoration of the Room of Constantine proved those reports correct, said Fabio Piacentini, one of the chief restorers.
Vatican technicians discovered that two female figures on opposite corners of the hall, Justice and Courtesy, were actually oil-on-wall paintings, not frescoes in which paint is applied to wet plaster. They were therefore clearly the work of Raphael himself, he said.
But Raphael died on April 6, 1520, at the age of 37, and before the hall could be completed. The rest of the paintings in the room were frescoes completed by his students who couldn’t master the oil technique Raphael had used, Jatta said.
During the cleaning, restorers discovered that Raphael had clearly intended to do more with oil paints: Under the plaster frescoes, they found a series of metal nails they believed had been drilled into the wall to hold in place the natural resin surface that Raphael had intended to paint on, Piacentini said.
“From a historical and critical point of view, and also technical, it was truly a discovery,” he said. “The technique used and planned by Raphael was truly experimental for the time, and has never been found in any other mural made with oil paint.”
The final part of the restoration of the room was the ceiling, painted by Tommaso Laureti and featuring a remarkable example of Renaissance perspective with his fresco of a fake tapestry “Triumph of Christianity over Paganism.”
The Raphael Rooms were never fully closed off to the public during their long restoration, but they are now free of scaffolding for the many visitors flocking to the Vatican Museums for the 2025 Jubilee.

S. Korea arrests Americans trying to send Bibles to North

Updated 41 sec ago
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S. Korea arrests Americans trying to send Bibles to North

Updated 41 sec ago
SEOUL: South Korean police on Friday arrested six US nationals attempting to send plastic bottles packed with rice and Bibles to North Korea, the head of the investigation team said.
Local police said the six were trying to send thousands of plastic bottles, filled with rice, one-dollar bills and Bibles, into the sea off Ganghwa Island at 1:03 am on Friday when they were caught.
“We have arrested and are questioning six American nationals in their 20s to 50s on suspicion of violating the Framework Act on the Management of Disasters and Safety,” the head of the investigation team at Ganghwa Police Station in Incheon told AFP.
The Americans could not speak Korean, so “an interpreter was provided for them and we have since started the questioning,” he added.
Located northwest of Seoul, Ganghwa Island is one of the closest South Korean territories to North Korea, with some parts of the surrounding sea lying just 10 kilometers (six miles) from the maritime border between the two countries.
The island has long been a popular site for non-profit organizations and anti-North Korean groups to launch plastic bottles filled with rice, as well as USB sticks containing K-pop and South Korean dramas.
The area was designated a danger zone last November, along with other border regions where activists launch balloons carrying leaflets.
At the time, the government said such activities could be perceived by the North as provocative.
Last year, the two Koreas were in a tit-for-tat propaganda war, as the North sent thousands of trash-filled balloons southwards, saying they were retaliation for propaganda balloons launched by South Korean activists.
In response, Seoul turned on border loudspeaker broadcasts — including K-pop tunes and international news — and North Korea started transmitting bizarre, unsettling noises along the frontier that had been a major nuisance for South Korean residents in the area.
South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung, who took office this month, has vowed a more dovish approach toward Pyongyang and has halted the loudspeaker broadcasts, which North Korea, in return, stopped the following day.

India accused of illegal deportations targeting Muslims

Updated 1 min 57 sec ago
AFP
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India accused of illegal deportations targeting Muslims

  • Deportations spark fear among India’s estimated 200 million Muslims
  • Many of those targeted in the campaign are low-wage laborers in states governed by Bharatiya Janata Party
Updated 1 min 57 sec ago
AFP
NEW DELHI: India has deported without trial to Bangladesh hundreds of people, officials from both sides said, drawing condemnation from activists and lawyers who call the recent expulsions illegal and based on ethnic profiling.
New Delhi says the people deported are undocumented migrants.
The Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has long taken a hard-line stance on immigration – particularly those from neighboring Muslim-majority Bangladesh – with top officials referring to them as “termites” and “infiltrators.”
It has also sparked fear among India’s estimated 200 million Muslims, especially among speakers of Bengali, a widely spoken language in both eastern India and Bangladesh.
“Muslims, particularly from the eastern part of the country, are terrified,” said veteran Indian rights activist Harsh Mander.
“You have thrown millions into this existential fear.”
Bangladesh, largely encircled by land by India, has seen relations with New Delhi turn icy since a mass uprising in 2024 toppled Dhaka’s government, a former friend of India.
But India also ramped up operations against migrants after a wider security crackdown in the wake of an attack in the west – the April 22 killing of 26 people, mainly Hindu tourists, in Indian-administered Kashmir.
New Delhi blamed that attack on Pakistan, claims Islamabad rejected, with arguments culminating in a four-day conflict that left more than 70 dead.
Indian authorities launched an unprecedented countrywide security drive that has seen many thousands detained – and many of them eventually pushed across the border to Bangladesh at gunpoint.
Rahima Begum, from India’s eastern Assam state, said police detained her for several days in late May before taking her to the Bangladesh frontier.
She said she and her family had spent their life in India.
“I have lived all my life here – my parents, my grandparents, they are all from here,” she said. “I don’t know why they would do this to me.”
Indian police took Begum, along with five other people, all Muslims, and forced them into swampland in the dark.
“They showed us a village in the distance and told us to crawl there,” she said.
“They said: ‘Do not dare to stand and walk, or we will shoot you.’”
Bangladeshi locals who found the group then handed them to border police who “thrashed” them and ordered they return to India, Begum said.
“As we approached the border, there was firing from the other side,” said the 50-year-old.
“We thought: ‘This is the end. We are all going to die.’”
She survived, and, a week after she was first picked up, she was dropped back home in Assam with a warning to keep quiet.
Rights activists and lawyers criticized India’s drive as “lawless.”
“You cannot deport people unless there is a country to accept them,” said New Delhi-based civil rights lawyer Sanjay Hegde.
Indian law does not allow for people to be deported without due process, he added.
Bangladesh has said India has pushed more than 1,600 people across its border since May.
Indian media suggests the number could be as high as 2,500.
The Bangladesh Border Guards said it has sent back 100 of those pushed across – because they were Indian citizens.
India has been accused of forcibly deporting Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, with navy ships dropping them off the coast of the war-torn nation.
Many of those targeted in the campaign are low-wage laborers in states governed by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), according to rights activists.
Indian authorities did not respond to questions about the number of people detained and deported.
But Assam state’s chief minister has said that more than 300 people have been deported to Bangladesh.
Separately, Gujarat’s police chief said more than 6,500 people have been rounded up in the western state, home to both Modi and interior minister Amit Shah.
Many of those were reported to be Bengali-speaking Indians and later released.
“People of Muslim identity who happen to be Bengali speaking are being targeted as part of an ideological hate campaign,” said Mander, the activist.
Nazimuddin Mondal, a 35-year-old mason, said he was picked up by police in the financial hub of Mumbai, flown on a military aircraft to the border state of Tripura and pushed into Bangladesh.
He managed to cross back, and is now back in India’s West Bengal state, where he said he was born.
“The Indian security forces beat us with batons when we insisted we were Indians,” said Mondal, adding he is now scared to even go out to seek work.
“I showed them my government-issued ID, but they just would not listen.”

Ketamine ‘epidemic’ among UK youth raises alarm

Updated 23 min 1 sec ago
AFP
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Ketamine ‘epidemic’ among UK youth raises alarm

  • The first time Barney Casserly used ketamine at a UK music festival he thought he had found “nirvana“
Updated 23 min 1 sec ago
AFP

LONDON: The first time Barney Casserly used ketamine at a UK music festival he thought he had found “nirvana.” Five years later he died in agony, leaving behind devastated parents and friends.
“I would never, ever have imagined that this would happen to us as a family,” said his mother, Deborah Casserly, still grieving for Barney who died in April 2018, aged 21.
Ketamine, an affordable recreational drug that induces a sense of detachment from reality, has reached unprecedented levels of popularity among young people in the UK, with some experts even calling it an “epidemic.”
The extent of the crisis prompted the government in January to seek advice from an official advisory body on whether to reclassify ketamine as a Class A substance.
That would bring it in line with other drugs such as heroin, cocaine and ecstasy, meaning supplying ketamine could carry terms of up to life imprisonment.
In the consulting room of doctor Niall Campbell, a leading specialist in addiction treatment at Priory Hospital, Roehampton, Casserly, 64, showed pictures of her son — a smiling young man with dark hair and bright eyes.
Tearfully, she recalled how her son’s life fell apart as his ketamine addiction took hold.
Barney was just 16 when he went to the Reading music festival in southern England and used ketamine for the first time, writing about it in ecstatic terms in his journal.
But he swiftly became addicted to the drug, a white crystalline powder that is crushed and then sniffed. Alternatively it can be swallowed in liquid form.
“His usage moved from being used in a party context to being used at home alone... a tragic, sad, desperately lonely experience,” said his mother.
His family sent him to private rehabs but he relapsed, would use every day, and was in an “excruciating amount of pain.”
“He would spend long parts of the day in the bath, in hot water... because the cramps were so bad. He was not able to sleep properly at night because he was constantly getting up to urinate,” said his mother.
Barney suffered from ulcerative cystitis, also known as “ketamine bladder,” which is when “the breakdown products of ketamine basically cause the bladder to rot,” said Campbell.
“Mum, if this is living, I don’t want it,” said Barney on April 7, 2018. The next morning his mother found him dead in his bed.
An anaesthetic drug invented in 1962, ketamine is used for both human and veterinary medicine often as a horse tranquillizer.
“Some people love that dissociative, detached from reality, kind of effect” the drug brings, said Campbell.
Users “go right down into what we call a K hole, which is just to the point of collapsing and being unconscious.”
In the year ending March 2024, an estimated 269,000 people aged 16 to 59 had reported using ketamine, a government minister said.
And among young people aged 16-24 “the misuse of ketamine... has grown in the last decade” by 231 percent, said junior interior minister Diana Johnson, in her letter asking for advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.
There were 53 deaths in England and Wales in 2023, according to the Office for National Statistics.
“It’s really commonplace now, it’s everywhere,” said Laiden, a London drug dealer using an assumed name.
“It’s a cheap drug with a strong effect on people and people aren’t concerned about selling it to youngsters,” added Laiden.
Ketamine costs between £20 and £30 ($27.50 and $41) a gram while cocaine, which remains his top seller, is around £100 a gram, he said.
“This epidemic is having a huge effect on the nation,” said Campbell.
Ketamine is very addictive and “by the time they get to see us, the party’s over. They’re not out in the nightclubs. They’re sitting on their own at home, secretly doing this stuff, killing themselves,” he added.
But others argue that ketamine can have healing benefits.
Married therapists Lucy and Alex da Silva run a psychedelic therapy wellness center in London, and use ketamine prescribed by doctors in lozenge form to treat depression and trauma.
“We want people to see what the healing benefits of ketamine, when it’s controlled in the right way, can do,” said Lucy da Silva.
But she agreed there was “a need for education around the dangers of street ketamine and the lives that it’s taking.”

Topics: UK drugs

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Renters struggle to survive in Portugal housing crisis

Updated 39 min 58 sec ago
AFP
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Renters struggle to survive in Portugal housing crisis

  • Housing prices in Portugal have jumped 124 percent since 2015, well above the EU average of 53 percent, according to Eurostat
  • The current government has made tackling the crisis a priority
Updated 39 min 58 sec ago
AFP

LISBON: With sky-high rents beyond his modest pension, Antonio Lemos has no choice but to live in an abandoned house in Lisbon without electricity or running water as Portugal’s perennial housing crisis spirals.
The former kitchen assistant, 80, has never found a stable home since foreign investors bought his apartment and has placed his hopes on a charitable institution to find a solution.
“How can you pay a rent of 400 or 500 euros for a room?,” asked Lemos, whose monthly pension barely amounts to 500 euros ($580). “Age is catching up, and I’m scared.”
Successive governments of all political stripes have tried and failed to solve the problem, according to Luis Mendes, a researcher at the University of Lisbon’s Institute for Geography and Territorial Organization.
“Year after year, real estate breaks new records,” Mendes told AFP.
The market spike began during the eurozone financial crisis in 2011, when the country attempted to resuscitate its stricken economy by attracting foreign capital through so-called “golden visas.”
The scheme offered visas to foreigners who invested in real estate and tax advantages to retirees or globe-trotting digital nomads but is viewed as having contributed to the problem.
Housing prices in Portugal have jumped 124 percent since 2015, well above the EU average of 53 percent, according to Eurostat.
The current center-right government has made tackling the crisis a priority, but in the first three months of 2025 prices spiked by more than 16 percent, according to the Portuguese national statistics institute.
Falling interest rates and public guarantees for young people’s mortgages, a measure introduced by the government last year, has driven the latest increase.
A group campaigning for the right to housing has called for protests this weekend in a dozen cities.


Similar to neighboring Spain, public housing only represents two percent of households and many properties are converted into short-term holiday lets in the popular tourist destination.
Renters like Carlos are bearing the brunt.
The municipal gardener, who declined to give his surname, has been living for five years in a freight container surrounded by building sites in the Portuguese capital.
A basic mattress, a handful of personal belongings and some birds in a cage to keep him company make up the interior of his humble abode.
The 55-year-old used to live with his mother, but after her death the lease was canceled and he found himself homeless overnight.
“I have found nothing at less than 800 euros. To have a salary and not be able to pay rent is unacceptable!” Carlos, whose income reaches around 1,000 euros, told AFP.
In a country where more than 70 percent of the population own their home, the new center-right government that emerged victorious from May’s snap election intends to build almost 60,000 new social homes.
It also plans to simplify public aid for renters, convert vacant public buildings and offer fiscal advantages in a bid to accelerate renovation and construction.
But for Mendes, “it is not with more homes that this crisis will be solved” because it risks “overheating the market.”
The Lisbon renters’ association has criticized “the illusion of supply as the only solution” and singled out a “lack of regulation and political courage.”
The European Commission has suggested Portugal regulate rents to protect the most affected groups of people or introduce more controls for short-term tourist lets.

Topics: Portugal

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Vatican unveils last of restored Raphael Rooms after 10-year cleaning that yielded new discoveries
S. Korea arrests Americans trying to send Bibles to North
Pakistan army chief urges civil servants to uphold integrity in state governance structure
India accused of illegal deportations targeting Muslims
Ketamine ‘epidemic’ among UK youth raises alarm

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