US President Joe Biden has postponed his trip to Germany where he was scheduled to meet with Western leaders at the Ukraine Defense Contact group this weekend, as a series of hurricanes has battered the American South.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday that Biden has decided to reschedule his upcoming trips to both Germany and Angola because of Hurricane Milton, which is expected to make landfall in Florida late Wednesday night.
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Biden will instead “oversee preparations for and the response to Hurricane Milton, in addition to the ongoing response to the impacts of Hurricane Helene across the Southeast,” Jean-Pierre said.
The first of the two hurricanes hit Florida’s Gulf of Mexico coast on Sept. 27, battering the Tampa Bay area with winds of about 130 mph (about 210 kmph) and flood waters that destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses. It continued its northbound trajectory of destruction into North Carolina and Tennessee, causing more than 220 deaths in all. It was the deadliest hurricane in the US in 19 years.
Hurricane Milton is expected to do much the same as its projected path brings it to the same coastal metropolis by Wednesday evening.
(After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, then-president George W Bush and his Republican Party were politically skewered for being conspicuously absent during the clean-up, and that wasn’t an election year. Bush was on a month-long vacation at his ranch in Texas, just one state away from the devastation in Louisiana.)
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President Volodymyr Zelensky is slated to present his updated “Victory Plan” to the Ramstein group on Oct 12, marking the first time that the regular meeting of defense officials will be attended by the heads of their respective governments. This edition is expected to see significant steps made toward Ukraine’s integration into NATO.
“Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history,” Bob Woodward writes in a new book that reveals Trump-Putin conversations
A new book by a famous American journalist will reveal insights into then-US President Donald Trump’s many conversations with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and accounts of US Vice President Kamala Harris’ private discussions with President Zelensky.
Among the bombshells that author Bob Woodward dropped in his upcoming release “War”: Trump secretly sent Putin a package of Covid test kits during a shortage in the US, and Harris asked Zelensky to give the White House the name of a possible successor should something happen to him during Russia’s full-scale invasion.
An editor at the Washington Post and prolific chronicler of US presidencies, Woodward is best known, alongside Post colleague Carl Bernstein, for breaking Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal that led to his resignation. So when Woodward writes in “War” that “Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history,” early readers have taken note.
The new book (slated for release Oct. 15) alleges that Trump spoke roughly seven times privately with Putin even as Russia had illegally annexed Crimea and was planning its full-scale invasion of the US ally.
In one of those calls, Trump told the Kremlin leader that he was sending him a set of Covid tests that were in desperately short supply in the US.
Putin reportedly told the US President to keep that news under wraps, as “people will get mad at you, not me,” according to CNN, which received an early copy of the book.
Harris features prominently in Woodward’s book as well, with anecdotes of how the now-presidential candidate approached Zelensky to urge that he develop a plan of succession in the event he was kidnapped or killed by Russian operatives. Still, the Post writer describes her role in foreign affairs as minimal at best.
The Trump campaign, clearly furious with the book’s release in the final month before the US presidential election, told AFP that it was the work of a “truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Zelensky’s office announces return of Ukrainian children from Russian control
Seven Ukrainian children have been brought back from Russian- occupied parts of the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Luhansk regions, the Head of the President’s Office, Andrii Yermak, reported.
“Today, another seven Ukrainian children were returned home as part of the President of Ukraine's Bring Kids Back UA initiative. Their ages range from 3 to 17. These children and their families spent a long time in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. Families faced persecution: adults were repeatedly forced to undergo interrogations, and children had to attend 'patriotic education lessons' and other public events aimed at spreading Russian propaganda narratives among the young people,” Yermak posted to social media.
He gave the example of 17-year-old “Daniil” from the Luhansk region who, for his own safety, had to hide the fact that he continued to study remotely at his Ukrainian school.
Ukrainians who refuse to obtain Russian passports have been denied access to medical services among other punishments. Ukraine estimates that some 20,000 children have been relocated to Russia since the start of the Kremlin’s invasion in 2022.
On Sept. 26, Moscow and Kyiv announced the exchange of 13 children after negotiations in Qatar.
The latest children to return home will need the government’s help with placement back in schools, psychological evaluation and possibly treatment, and assistance in reintegrating them to Ukrainian society in general, said Ukraine’s Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets.
“They returned to Ukraine — to their native land, where their native language is heard and children can be just children again. They were met by my Representatives in the regions to help with the closure of priority needs upon return,” Lubinets wrote.
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