Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri took to the stage today at the Conservative Political Action Conference and gave what amounted to their most extensive public remarks since Jan. 6, when both were seen by critics as having helped incite a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. Cruz spoke on Friday morning, while Hawley addressed the audience in a less enviable afternoon spot. As they have in appearances on Fox News and other outlets in recent weeks, they cast themselves as victims of Democratic “cancel culture” — an ill-defined concept that encompasses social and corporate disapproval — while taking no responsibility for inciting the white supremacists and other supporters of former President Donald Trump who stormed the Capitol in hopes of keeping Joe Biden from assuming the Oval Office.
When the Biden administration began transporting migrant children to a Trump-era emergency influx shelter in Texas this week, it faced fierce criticism from some on the left, particularly Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who tweeted: “This is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay — no matter the administration or party.” “From our perspective, influx facilities are certainly not ideal, but it is so much better than a child sitting in a camp in Matamoros or a child being cramped in a Border Patrol facility,” said Jennifer Podkul, vice president of policy and advocacy at Kids in Need of Defense, a pro bono legal service provider for migrant and refugee children.
A woman who ran away from London as a teenager to join the Islamic State group lost her bid Friday to return to the U.K. to fight for the restoration of her citizenship, which was revoked on national security grounds. Shamima Begum was one of three east London schoolgirls who traveled to Syria in 2015. She resurfaced at a refugee camp in Syria and told reporters she wanted to come home, but was denied the chance after former Home Secretary Sajid Javid revoked her citizenship.
China is expected to reveal a robust increase in defence spending at the March 5 annual opening of parliament, as its economy rebounds from the COVID-19 pandemic and military tensions rise, Chinese and Western security experts said. With the coronavirus hammering its economy, China last year announced a 6.6 per cent boost in defence spending to $178 billion, the lowest rate of increase in three decades. The new administration of President Joe Biden has moved quickly to remind Beijing that the United States intends to compete with China's growing influence and military strength in the Asia-Pacific.
Mobster Peter Gotti, the brother of notorious Gambino crime boss John Gotti, has died while serving a federal prison sentence, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press Thursday.
U.S. Attorney John Durham said Friday that he will resign from his position as the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut but is remaining as a special counsel to oversee the Justice Department's investigation into the origins of the Russia probe that shadowed Donald Trump's presidency. Durham will resign from his post as U.S. attorney for Connecticut on Monday. But Durham, who was appointed in October by then-Attorney General William Barr as a special counsel to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, will remain in that capacity.
France should impose a national lockdown given the increase in COVID-19 cases and the longer it waits, the higher the death toll will be, the head of the emergencies unit at a hospital in Paris said on Friday. The government said on Thursday that a new lockdown was not on the agenda and it would see next week if local weekend lockdowns would be needed in 20 areas considered very worrying, including Paris and the surrounding region. "I do not understand what we are waiting for," Philippe Juvin from the Georges Pompidou European Hospital in the capital told BFM TV, adding that the situation at hospitals in the Paris area was very tense.
The GOP hasn't represented a majority of Americans in the Senate in 25 years but has wielded enormous power, confirming judicial nominees that will change the nature of the federal bench for decades to come and blocking progressive priorities despite representing fewer people than the Democrats since 1996. The Republican Party was in charge of the chamber between 1995 and 2007, with a brief interlude in 2001-2002 as Vermont Republican Jim Jeffords became an Independent and started caucusing with the Democrats. The Republicans also controlled the Senate from 2015 until 2021.
An explosion struck an Israeli-owned cargo ship sailing out of the Middle East on Friday, an unexplained blast renewing concerns about ship security in the region amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and Iran. The crew and vessel were safe, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, which is run by the British navy. The explosion in the Gulf of Oman forced the vessel to head to the nearest port.
The violence came after Myanmar's U.N. envoy, saying he was speaking for the ousted civilian government, urged the United Nations to use "any means necessary" to reverse the Feb. 1 coup. Myanmar has been in turmoil since the army seized power and detained elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and much of her party leadership, alleging fraud in a November election her party won in a landslide. The coup, which stalled Myanmar's progress toward democracy, has brought hundreds of thousands of protesters onto the streets and drawn condemnation from Western countries, with some imposing limited sanctions.
Two out of Texas' top three Republican officials will meet with President Joe Biden during his Friday trip to Houston following the state's winter storm and power outages last week. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, plan to join Biden and first lady Jill Biden as they survey storm and power grid damage, visit an emergency operations center and food bank and stop by NRG Stadium, a mass vaccination site. The state's other senator, Ted Cruz, won't be joining them.
Only reachable by canoe, this Xigera hideaway is centered along lush riverbeds and a rich concentration of wildlife. Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
Militant attacks are on the rise in Pakistan amid a growing religiosity that has brought greater intolerance, prompting one expert to voice concern the country could be overwhelmed by religious extremism. Pakistani authorities are embracing strengthening religious belief among the population to bring the country closer together. But it's doing just the opposite, creating intolerance and opening up space for a creeping resurgence in militancy, said Mohammad Amir Rana, executive director of the independent Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies.
The nation's largest right-wing summit has devoted at least seven panels to relitigating or amplifying false claims about the 2020 presidential election, not counting the speeches from high-profile Republicans and right-wing figures raising questions about “election integrity” after Donald Trump's loss and a persistent lie that the election was “stolen” from his supporters. Matt Schlapp, chair of the CPAC-hosting American Conservative Union, told CNN ahead of the conference that “we're going to spend a lot of time going through what happened in the states” despite the Trump campaign's spurious legal big and admission from his own Justice Department and nationwide election officials that no such fraud occurred. Speakers have said their concerns are about “protecting elections” and ensuring “election integrity” but they have promoted the same baseless, legally dubious complaints that the former president and his campaign have argued for months leading up to the deadly riot at the Capitol on 6 January, as his supporters stormed into the halls of Congress to stop the certification of the votes.
President Joe Biden said Friday that Iran should view his decision to authorize U.S. airstrikes in Syria as a warning that it can expect consequences for its support of militia groups that threaten U.S. interests or personnel. You can't act with impunity. Be careful,” Biden said when a reporter asked what message he had intended to send with the airstrikes, which the Pentagon said destroyed several buildings in eastern Syria but were not intended to eradicate the militia groups that used them to facilitate attacks inside Iraq.
President Biden's top economic adviser described Bitcoin as "an extremely inefficient way to conduct transactions," saying "the amount of energy consumed in processing those transactions is staggering". From buying a Bentley to losing it all Bitcoin keeps hitting new highs after Tesla backing Bitcoin hits new record of $50,000 It's unclear exactly how much energy Bitcoin uses. Cryptocurrencies are - by design - hard to track.
A white van drove through the slums of Bhopal in central India advertising a COVID-19 vaccine. The van reportedly said that anyone who got one would receive 750 rupees. It seemed like a win-win for residents in the slums of Bhopal in central India when a white van drove through the streets advertising, "Come and take the coronavirus vaccine and get 750 rupees!" from its speaker system.
AG Jason Ravnsborg was charged with three misdemeanors in connection to a fatal car crash. New details have since emerged with the victim's glasses found in Ravnsborg's car. Ravnsborg was charged with three misdemeanors last week after initially saying he thought he hit a deer, not a person.
President Joe Biden's choices in Afghanistan boil down to this: withdraw all troops by May, as promised by his predecessor, and risk a resurgence of extremist dangers, or stay and possibly prolong the war in hopes of compelling the Taliban to make peace with a weak and fractured government. Afghanistan presents one of the new administration's tougher and more urgent decisions. The U.S. public is weary of a war nearly 20 years old, but pulling out now could be seen as giving the Taliban too much leverage and casting a shadow over the sacrifices made by U.S. and coalition troops and Afghan civilians.
Brazil's COVID-19 death toll, which surpassed 250,000 on Thursday, is the world's second-highest for the same reason its second wave has yet to fade: Prevention was never made a priority, experts say. Since the pandemic's start, Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro scoffed at the “little flu” and lambasted local leaders for imposing restrictions on activity; he said the economy must keep humming along to prevent worse hardship.
Many dispirited Republicans, still struggling to accept Donald Trump's decisive and legitimate defeat in last November's election, have begun pondering what they might have done differently to have produced a different result. After all, their nominee needed to draw only an additional 65,013 votes, distributed strategically in four close races — Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and the second Congressional district of Nebraska — to have eked out another Electoral College victory (270-268) while still losing the popular vote by a margin of 7,000,000. — that would have all-but-guaranteed a comfortable GOP victory.
An aspiring actor from Texas, who said he was almost “gassed to death like… a Jew” during the Capitol insurrection, has been charged with using a crutch to bash a cop in the Jan. 6 riot. Luke Coffee, a 41-year-old from Dallas, has been charged with a slew of crimes, including assault of a federal law enforcement officer with a dangerous weapon and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. In a newly unsealed criminal complaint, prosecutors said Coffee is seen in photos and videos using a crutch to assault D.C. Police officers who were trying to protect the Capitol.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she won't take AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine. The vaccine has been approved for only people under 65 in Germany, and Merkel is 66. Recent trials have linked AstraZeneca's vaccine with a dramatic drop in hospitalization risk.
The early ambitions of Joe Biden's presidency are quickly running into the guardrails of archaic Senate rules, testing his willingness to remake an institution he reveres to fulfill many of the promises he has made to Americans. It will also shape Biden's ability to keep two restive wings of the Democratic Party united: swing state moderates wary of the appearance of effectively giving up on bipartisanship and more progressive Democrats who argue that Republicans aren't coming along anyway. Biden — who spent four decades as a senator and speaks of the institution with veneration, as well as some revisionist history about the good old days of cross-party cooperation — is so far trying to find the middle ground.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she won't take AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine because she is too old, a comment that comes as millions of Germans refuse to take the vaccine because they do not trust it.
“How about we skip ‘he won’t win’ cycle and not do 2016 all over again. Trump can absolutely win another presidential election.”
“With independents deserting him, there is simply no path for Trump to get back into the White House — except as a tourist.”
“They might as well cancel the 2024 primaries...because there is no way he can lose.”
“The next Republican presidential primary will be heavily shaped by Trump — whether or not he decides to run again.”
“Donald Trump will not be running for president again. He will, however, continue to tease the possibility of a 2024 run.”