Former US Vice President Joe Biden secured enough delegates to formally clinch the Democratic presidential nomination on Friday, setting the stage for a challenge to President Donald Trump in the November election.

A candidate needs at least 1,991 delegates to secure the nomination. Biden crossed the threshold when results came late on Friday after seven states and the District of Columbia held presidential primaries earlier in the week.

The achievement was a formality after Biden became the presumptive nominee when his main rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, quit the race in April.

“It was an honor to compete alongside one of the most talented groups of candidates the Democratic party has ever fielded — and I am proud to say that we are going into this general election a united party,” Biden said on Friday.

At one point, the field had more than 20 candidates, with contenders dropping out as their chances faded.

Biden had a slow start and recorded his first win in South Carolina at the end of February. After that, some other candidates seen as centrist or moderate dropped out before Super Tuesday votes on March 3, when the highest number of delegates were up for grabs and Biden won key contests.

It then became a two-horse race with Sanders, who was seen as a progressive candidate challenging incumbent Democrats.

While Sanders was a front-runner after early races, Biden carried his Super Tuesday momentum into subsequent contests and increased his lead.

Sanders quit the race upon seeing no path to the nomination as the novel coronavirus outbreak made campaigning and outreach difficult.

A US senator and then vice president under President Barack Obama, Biden has promised to choose a woman as his running mate, with several black candidates likely in the running.

(Source: Reuters) 

The killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25 has sparked global criticism not only from America’s allies but also its many political adversaries, for whom American police brutality and racial injustice could be a valuable propaganda tool.

“They want to suffocate us as they suffocated this young African American,” said Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, on Monday. “They want to suffocate us here in the jugular,” he added in a national televised address as he pointed to his neck.

The same day, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi joined the chorus of condemnation, pointedly making his remarks in English.

“To the American people, the world has heard your outcry over this state oppression, the world is standing with you. The American regime is pursuing violence and bullying at home and abroad,” he said.

Both countries have fractious relations with the US and Donald Trump’s administration in particular while also having been the subject of American criticism because of their own human rights records.

“America’s adversaries are having a field day with developments in the United States. I think they have taken advantage of this and the Trump administration is vulnerable to the criticism,” Peter Trubowitz, director of the United States Centre at the London School of Economics, told FRANCE 24.

“Clearly the focus is not on a domestic audience but rather this is an opportunity to score points internationally to highlight what they believe is hypocrisy in the American position.”

Trump’s reaction to the protests, which has included controversial tweets and threats to deploy the army, has been the focus of much of the international condemnation.

On Monday China, which has been criticised by the US and others over the violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, accused the US and Trump of double standards.

“Why is the US depicting the so-called Hong Kong independence movement and violence as beautiful and heroic while calling its own people who are protesting against racial discrimination ‘rioters’?” Said China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian.

“Why is the US making groundless accusations against the Hong Kong police, who exercise restraint and civilised law enforcement, while threatening to shoot and even use the national guard against protesters in the US? This action by the US is the most typical example of double standards.”

But are such statements merely political point scoring or could they have a real impact on US foreign policy goals in China and elsewhere?

“I think the administration is going to find itself in a very difficult position. It is the anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square and normally the US is in a position to really make… and I think it will, it will remind international audiences of what happened then, especially in light of what’s going on in Hong Kong right now,” said Trubowitz.

“But the problem is that given Trump’s own language and responses at home in the United States, they don’t ring true, for many people they won’t have the same kind of credibility.

“Can Trump lead in a very kind of commanding way on these issues? Let’s just put it this way: he can’t lead as forcefully today as he could have say maybe a week ago.”

Source: France 24

After long refusing to explicitly criticize a sitting president, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis accused President Donald Trump on Wednesday of trying to divide America and roundly denounced a militarization of the U.S. response to civil unrest.

Protests have erupted around the United States since the death on May 25 of unarmed black man George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis, who resigned as Trump’s defense secretary in 2018, wrote in a statement published by The Atlantic.

“Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.”

He drew a comparison to the U.S. war against Nazi Germany, saying U.S. troops were reminded before the Normandy invasion: ‘The Nazi slogan for destroying us … was ‘Divide and Conquer.'”

Mattis, a retired Marine general who denies political ambitions, also took a swipe at current U.S. military leadership for participating in a Monday photo-op led by Trump after law enforcement — including National Guard — cleared away peaceful protesters.

He criticized use of the word “battlespace” by Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to describe protest sites in the United States.

“We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace,'” Mattis wrote.

Trump’s threats to deploy active duty troops — even in states that oppose their use — has stirred alarm within the U.S. military and in Congress, where a top Republican warned it could make troops “political pawns.”

“Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict — a false conflict — between the military and civilian society,” Mattis wrote.

Source: REUTERS

More Americans say they think President Donald Trump is doing a “bad job” handling the coronavirus pandemic and don’t trust him to provide accurate data about the outbreak, according to a new poll.

The CBS News poll found that 57 percent of respondents said they believe Trump is doing a “bad job” handling the public health crisis and 43 percent said the president is doing a “good job.”

Views of Trump’s handling of the outbreak are now 10 points lower than in March, the lowest rating he has received.

The poll also shows 62 percent Americans don’t trust Trump to provide accurate information about the coronavirus or what to do during the outbreak.

Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the White House coronavirus task force, receives similar numbers.

Trump worsening approval rating comes as the number of confirmed infections and deaths from COVID-19 mount.

The pandemic has infected over 1.4 million people in the United States, killed more than 85,000 and devastated the economy.

A whistleblower told a congressional hearing on Thursday that the United States could face “the darkest winter” of recent times if it does not improve its response to the pandemic.

Rick Bright says he was removed by the White House as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) for raising concerns about the government’s coronavirus preparedness.

BARDA is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services responsible for developing drugs to fight the coronavirus.

Trump, who has been pushing for the US economy to reopen quickly, dismissed Bright as a “disgruntled employee” on Twitter on Thursday morning before the hearing begun.

Source: Presstv

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro keeps saying coronavirus fears are overblown. Other officials at the federal, state and local levels insist the danger is all too real.

Brazil is torn by a deep political divide over how to respond to the pandemic, and it is taking a heavy human toll.

On Saturday, even as the death toll in Brazil crossed the threshold of 10,000, Bolsonaro continued pressing to get the country back to work.

“The army of unemployed keeps growing,” he tweeted.

“Is chaos coming?” added the far-right leader, who has compared the virus to a “little flu” and condemned the “hysteria” surrounding it.

Some argue the “chaos” is already here — at least as far as the Brazilian government’s response goes.

Bolsonaro’s criticism of stay-at-home measures to fight the virus has put him at odds with state and local authorities across Brazil, not to mention his own former health minister.

The president sacked the latter, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, last month after a long series of public spats.

Meanwhile, Brazil has emerged as the epicenter of the pandemic in Latin America, with 11,519 deaths so far.

Experts say under-testing means the real figure is likely far higher, and that things stand to get a lot worse.

“We know from history that anytime there’s such a cacophony in a situation like this, such huge disagreement on public policy among leaders, tragedy ensues,” said Brazilian historian Sidney Chalhoub, a professor at Harvard University.

As an example, he cited the last major cholera outbreak in Europe, in the late 19th century, that killed more than 10,000 people in Hamburg, Germany.

“It was largely caused by divisions between the local political elite and dominant economic interests, which trumped public health concerns. And the result was an even bigger economic catastrophe,” he said.

– Polarizing disease –

Bolsonaro supporters have held a series of anti-confinement protests in recent weeks.

Sometimes the president himself has joined in, hitting the street, shaking hands and giving fiery speeches, all while refusing to wear a face mask.

The protests have included virulent attacks on Congress and the Supreme Court, which have moved to counter Bolsonaro’s anti-confinement measures.

At times, they have erupted into violence, including against journalists and even nurses.

But a recent poll by the Datafolha institute found that 67 percent of Brazilians believe stay-at-home measures are needed to contain the virus, even if they hurt the economy.

Even in his own camp, Bolsonaro’s support is far from universal.

Another poll found that while 56 percent of those who call themselves right-wing or center-right supported the president’s handling of the pandemic, 40 percent did not.

“The more closely related people are to someone who has been infected or died, the more they distance themselves from Bolsonaro,” said political scientist Carlos Pereira of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, who conducted the latter poll.

– ‘Anti-knowledge’ –

Like his US counterpart Donald Trump, whom he admires, Bolsonaro has touted the medication chloroquine as a wonder drug against COVID-19.

Scientists at Brazil’s leading public health research institute, Fiocruz, have stated that preliminary studies do not indicate chloroquine is an effective treatment for the disease.

Perceived to be attacking the president, they have received threats on social media in response.

“We’re talking about a far-right, anti-democratic government,” some of whose supporters have “fascist” tendencies, said sociologist Debora Messenberg, of the University of Brasilia.

“We can’t even talk about society being ‘polarized’ in the usual sense. It’s not a democratic polarization. Right now, the debate is between democracy and authoritarianism,” she said.

Brazil, like the United States, is facing the pandemic “with a government that is anti-knowledge,” said Chalhoub.

The Bolsonaro administration “is depicting this as a public health catastrophe versus an economic catastrophe. But that’s a harmful view that will drive us toward both,” he said.

 Source: AFP

The United States on Friday stunned other members of the UN Security Council by preventing a vote on a resolution for a ceasefire in various conflicts around the world to help troubled nations better fight the coronavirus pandemic, diplomats said.

Washington’s reversal came a day after it agreed to the text, negotiators said under cover of anonymity.

“The United States cannot support the current draft,” the country’s delegation declared, without further detail, to the 14 other Security Council members, after nearly two months of difficult negotiation over the text.

The latest stalemate continues to leave the global peace and security body largely mute in the face of a once-in-a-century pandemic that has killed more than 270,000 people and raised further fears for the world’s most vulnerable.

When asked for an explanation of the US move, a State Department official told AFP that China had “repeatedly blocked compromises that would have allowed the Council to move forward.”

Diplomats told AFP that the language used in the draft to describe the World Health Organization was behind the US move to prevent the vote.

But other sources said Washington wanted the Council to return to an initial draft of the resolution which highlighted the need for “transparency” in global cooperation in tackling the pandemic.

“In our view, the Council should either proceed with a resolution limited to support for a ceasefire, or a broadened resolution that fully addresses the need for renewed member state commitment to transparency and accountability in the context of COVID-19,” the State Department official said.

Compromise had implicit WHO reference

US President Donald Trump has accused the WHO of downplaying the seriousness of the outbreak in China.

The procedure blocked by the United States would have allowed the sponsors of the resolution, France and Tunisia, to put it to a vote.

The latest version of the text — obtained by AFP — called for a cessation of hostilities in conflict zones and a 90-day “humanitarian pause” to allow governments to better address the pandemic among those most suffering.

It called on all nations to “enhance coordination” in the virus fight and highlighted the “urgent need to support all countries, as well as all relevant entities of the United Nations system, including specialized health agencies, and other relevant international, regional, and sub-regional organization.”

This wording, which implicitly refers to the WHO without explicitly mentioning it, was the compromise obtained from US and China on Thursday night, according to diplomats

‘Very bad news’

Washington had threatened to use its veto if there were any explicit reference to the WHO, while Beijing brandished its own veto if the global health body were not mentioned, before in the end accepting that it would not be.

Diplomats said the US had let go more than a week ago of its demand for mention of transparency in the French-Tunisian text. The “ball was in the Chinese camp” now, one of them said previously.

The US turnaround “is a very, very bad news for United Nations, the Security Council and multilateralism,” said one ambassador from a Security Council member.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has been pushing for a cessation of hostilities around the world since March 23, urging all sides in conflict to lay down arms and allow war-torn nations to combat the coronavirus.

French Ambassador Nicolas de Riviere told AFP that he would like “of course to continue to try to reach an agreement, if there is room for that.”

His Tunisian counterpart Kais Kabtani said discussions are continuing “to convince the Americans.” He vowed that the procedure for going to a vote would be taken up again.

Ironically, the Security Council was also engaged Friday in a major videoconference organized by Estonia, which holds the body’s rotating presidency this month, on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.

More than 50 ministers from around the world participated, most of them issuing a “plea for multilateralism.”

Source: AFP

President Donald Trump relaunched his election campaign Sunday with a live television event inside the iconic Lincoln Memorial, promising an early coronavirus vaccine and urging Americans to put the pandemic behind them to embrace an “incredible” future.

With the two-hour long Fox News “town hall,” Trump sought to wrap himself in the mantle of America’s arguably greatest president — and to persuade a nation battered by death and mass unemployment to look ahead.

“We can’t stay closed as a country, we’re not going to have a country left,” he said on the show, where two moderators, as well as ordinary citizens via video, put questions to him in front of the monument.

“We’re going to have an incredible following year,” he said.

To a woman who called in expressing fear of financial ruin and eviction, Trump said her job would come back.

“You get a job where you make more money,” he said.

Saying Americans should start going back to beaches this summer and recommending that shuttered schools need to reopen in September, Trump forecast good news on the hunt for a vaccine.

“We are very confident that we’re going to have a vaccine… by the end of the year,” he said, admitting he was getting ahead of his own advisors with the prediction. “I’ll say what I think,” he said.

Saving his reelection

The businessman Republican is doing poorly in most polls ahead of the November presidential contest against Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who remains shuttered in his Delaware home.

Trump faces criticism for his bruising, divisive style during a time of national calamity. He is also accused by some of botching the early response to the COVID-19 virus.

Worse, the previously booming US economy, which was seen as a golden ticket to his second term, is now in dire straits due to the nationwide lockdown.

With officials saying the viral spread has begun to taper, Trump is itching to return to the campaign trail.

However he faces new criticism that he is trying to declare premature victory, even as the illness continues to kill thousands of Americans every week.

Having repeatedly minimized the death toll, claiming it will end at around 60,000, Trump conceded that now “I’m saying 80 or 90 and it goes up.”

His emphasis, however, was not on the dead, but on resurrecting his image as a can-do leader who can end the skyrocketing unemployment caused by the lockdown.

That audacious shift began Sunday at possibly the most hallowed monument in the country — the statue of Abraham Lincoln, who led the country through civil war, urged reconciliation, and was assassinated in his moment of triumph.

Trump, who calls himself a “wartime president” denied that the election will turn into a referendum on his handling of the crisis.

But he added: “I hope it does because we’ve done a great job.”

In the next few days, Trump will follow up by breaking months of self-quarantine with long-distance trips to the key electoral states of Arizona and Ohio.

It’s a play that will emphasise Trump’s massive visibility advantage over Biden and, the White House hopes, rewrite the public relations script after gaffes including the president’s suggestion that coronavirus patients ingest disinfectant.

Greater than Lincoln?

Lincoln gambled in 1861 that only war could preserve the United States by ending slavery and restoring the nation’s ideals of freedom. He won, becoming a national hero.

But Lincoln is remembered as much for reaching out to former foes — something Trump did not seek to emulate as he spoke at the foot of the iconic statue.

Previous presidents, he said, were “stupid” to allow reliance on foreign manufacturers for US medicines.

The Democrats, he said, are “radical,” claiming they would prefer to see people get sick than see him succeed.

Trump pronounced that he had “done more than any president in the history our our country in the first three years.”

His self-declared greatness is questioned by many Americans.

FiveThirtyEight’s latest tracking poll showing only 43.4 percent approving Trump’s performance and 50.7 percent disapproving.

Trump even got in an online tussle with former president George W. Bush earlier Sunday, after the fellow Republican posted a video filled with the kind of empathy and solidarity that many accuse the current White House occupant of failing to show.

Trump responded by complaining that Bush was “nowhere to be found” when he was battling off an impeachment attempt in Congress last year.

(AFP)

US presidential candidate Joe Biden on Friday emphatically denied sexually assaulting a former staffer, saying the incident she claims occurred 27 years ago “never happened.”

“They aren’t true. This never happened,” Biden said in a statement regarding the accusations made by Tara Reade, a former staffer in his US Senate office.

Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, broke a month of silence on the accusations with his statement.

The 77-year-old said Reade’s then-supervisor and former senior staffers in his office “have said, unequivocally, that she never came to them and complained or raised issues.”

Read, now 56, said on a podcast in March that the former senator and vice president put his hands “down my skirt” and violated her.

She has since recounted her story to other media outlets, and filed an incident report with the Washington police in early April — seen by AFP — in which she did not name Biden.

Other women have accused Biden of touching them inappropriately in the past, and Reade’s initial claims were similar — and less severe than her most recent allegations

Biden also went on a morning news show to proclaim his innocence.

“It is not true. I’m saying unequivocally it never happened, and it didn’t,” Biden told MSNBC.

“I don’t know why after 27 years all of this gets raised,” Biden added. “But I’m not going to question her motive. I’m not going to attack her.”

But he stressed that “I have a right to say, look at the facts. Check it out.”

Reade has not produced a copy of the complaint that she allegedly filed in 1993 after the incident, and Biden said he has asked officials to search the National Archives, where he says any such document would now reside.

He also said his papers, held at the University of Delaware, “do not contain personnel files.”

Biden, who has pledged to pick a woman to be his vice president, has stressed he has worked his entire political career to improve conditions for women, including authoring the Violence Against Women Act.

“Women are to be believed, given the benefit of the doubt, if they come forward and say something happened to them,” he told MSNBC.

“Then you have to look at the circumstances and the facts.” “The truth matters,” he said. “These claims are not true.”

(AFP)

US President Donald Trump has called his Democratic rival Joe Biden “incompetent,” rejecting polls which show the former vice president was leading in the race for the White House.

“I don’t believe the polls,” Trump told Reuters on Wednesday. “I believe the people of this country are smart. And I don’t think that they will put a man in who’s incompetent.”

“And I don’t mean incompetent because of a condition that he’s got now. I mean he’s incompetent for 30 years. Everything he ever did was bad. His foreign policy was a disaster,” he continued.

He also touched on Biden’s victory over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, saying the Vermont Senator should have won the race.

Trump placed the blame on Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for Sander’s loss, saying she stayed in the race and prevented Sanders from forming a coalition that could defeat Biden.

“He (Biden) should never have won the primary, ever in a million years, because those votes were taken away. They were taken away from Bernie Sanders. And I think I’m going to get a lot of Bernie Sanders voters,” Trump said.

Trump to launch nationwide advertising blitz targeting Biden

Trump’s re-election campaign plans to roll out a new advertising blitz targeting Biden’s record on China in must-win states for the 2020 election.

The move is seen as part of a bid by the president to reverse a dangerous slide six months out from the election.

Last week, Trump’s political advisers told him about internal polling which showed the Republican president trailing Biden in battleground states.

The polling also indicated that an initial surge in support for Trump over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic has weakened.

This comes as Biden and his campaign have been unloading ads accusing Trump of weakness on China, where the coronavirus originally spread. They have also spoken during a series of local television interviews in swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, criticizing the president for his mishandling of the virus crisis.

Speaking with Reuters, TJ Ducklo, Biden’s campaign spokesman, asked, “How does the Trump campaign defend the worst failure of presidential leadership in modern history that costs thousands of Americans their lives?”

The Trump campaign’s new video highlights the president’s decisions to ban most travel from China and Europe during the coronavirus outbreak, which has so far affected more than 1,089,000 and killed over 63,500 in the US.

The ad, seen by Reuters ahead of its release, also targets Biden for earlier remarks that travel restrictions were ineffective and for calling Trump “xenophobic” and “fear-mongering.”

Sex assault allegation poses challenge for Biden’s presidential campaign

Biden’s presidential campaign is currently grappling with sexual assault allegations against him after his former Senate staffer Tara Reade accused him of assaulting her in the basement of a Capitol Hill office building in the 1990s.

Although his campaign has denied the allegation first made more than a month ago, the story attracted fresh attention this week after two of Reade’s associates said she had previously told them about elements of her allegations.

The story also has fueled attacks by Republicans, who are concerned about Trump’s political standing, but now are taking advantage of the allegation, trying to depict Democrats as hypocrites who only defend women who allege wrongdoing against conservatives.

Meanwhile, top Democrats have come out in support of Biden against allegations, saying that women have the right to be heard but that they do not believe the allegations.

Two powerful Democratic women — Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), a former rival to Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Stacey Abrams, a top candidate to be Biden’s running mate — have come to Biden’s defense.

“I know Joe Biden, and I think he’s telling the truth and this did not happen,” Abrams said on CNN.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has also backed Biden over the allegation, telling reporters that there was never any record of the assault.

“The happiest day for me this week was to support Joe Biden for President of the United States,” she said in her first in-person press conference at the Capitol in weeks.

Several other women accused Biden last year of inappropriate touching. Biden apologized to them, saying he would adjust his behavior.

Source: Presstv

US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday endorsed Joe Biden for president, joining a list of top Democrats, who have thrown their support behind the former vice president.

“Today I am proud to endorse Joe Biden for president of the United States because he will be an extraordinary president,” said Pelosi in the pre-recorded message.

Her endorsement of the Democratic presidential candidate follows that of US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, former president Barack Obama and former vice president Al Gore, who all threw their weight behind Biden earlier this month.

In her video statement, Pelosi cited Biden’s experience in government, including his role in passing the Affordable Care Act, as evidence of his leadership qualities. She said Biden is well-positioned to lead the country amid the ongoing coronanvirus outbreak.

“As we face coronavirus, Joe has been a voice of reason and resilience, with a clear path to lead us out of this crisis,” Pelosi said in her endorsement.

A boost during pandemic campaign lull

The endorsement comes at an opportune time for Biden, who has struggled to maintain a high profile during the Covid-19 pandemic and sustain the momentum he had built up in his lightning-quick run toward becoming the Democratic nominee.

Besides current and past Democratic leaders, Biden has also won endorsements from some other key stakeholders such as Washington state Governor Jay Inslee, a prominent climate change campaigner, and the 400,000-member United Auto Workers union.

The endorsements have given Biden a series of headlines at a time when his campaign is effectively on hold due to the coronavirus outbreak, and when US President Donald Trump has dominated media attention with his combative White House briefings.

The Democrats are eager to project unity heading into the presidential race against Trump for the November 3 general elections.

In recent weeks, the more moderate Biden has made attempts to win the support of the liberal backers of Sanders and Warren.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)