PLYMOUTH,
N.H. (AP) — In a perfect world, Susan Stepp, a 73-year-old retiree,
would be voting vote for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren in New
Hampshire’s Democratic presidential primary Tuesday, she says. But that
won’t be happening.
“I
am not sure a woman is the best candidate to go up against Trump,”
Stepp said recently as she stood in the back of a conference room
listening to tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang as part of her hunt for the
best candidate to challenge the Republican incumbent.
Stepp’s concern has coursed through the Democratic primary for months, registering in polling, interviews
and, now, the first votes cast. In Iowa’s caucuses last Monday, many
Democrats did not prioritize breaking the gender barrier to the Oval
Office and they viewed being a woman as a hindrance rather than an
advantage in the race.
Only
about one-third of Iowa caucusgoers backed a female candidate. Topping
the caucus field were two men, former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete
Buttigieg and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders,. Women were only slightly
more likely than men to back one of the three women in the race,
according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 3,000 Iowa voters.
Most
Iowa Democrats said it was important for a woman to be president in
their lifetimes. But many voters, including about half of all women,
said a female nominee would have a harder time beating Donald Trump in
November.
“He
will just use that against her, like he did Hillary,” Stepp said,
looking back to Trump’s 2016 race against Hillary Clinton in 2016. “He
doesn’t debate. He just insults. I don’t think he would have that same
effect if he went up against a strong man.” Stepp said she plans to vote
for Sanders.
Those perceptions present an undeniable headwind for the women in the race, who have spent months making the case that a woman can win.
As they seek success in New Hampshire, both Warren and Minnesota Sen.
Amy Klobuchar must work to energize voters about the chance to make
history and persuade them it is possible this year, in this race against
this president.
“In
2020, we can and should have a woman for president,” Warren said at a
CNN town hall this past week, days after taking third in Iowa. Klobuchar
came in fifth. The Associated Press has not called a winner in the Iowa
caucus because the race is too close to call.
Iowans
appeared open to that message. Most Democratic voters in the state,
72%, said they thought it is important for the U.S. to elect a woman
president in their lifetimes, and that included roughly two-thirds of
men.
But most
were resolved to put it off for another election. That was true of men
and women. The survey found 34% of women voted for Warren, Klobuchar or
the longshot candidacy of Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, compared with 28%
of men.
Overall,
many Democratic voters thought it would be harder for a woman to beat
Trump. About half of women said they thought a female nominee would have
a harder time, compared with about 4 in 10 men. Men who harbored that
concern were significantly less likely to vote for a woman than a man.
Experts
say the findings are in line with traditional patterns in voting by
gender — women usually don’t coalesce around one of their own. “Nobody’s
going to win an election by unifying women because women are not a
unified bloc,” said Kathy Dolan, a political scientist at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “There’s no evidence that suggests for us that
women candidates vote much more for women candidates than men.”
Analysts
say it’s no surprise that women express more anxiety about a woman
defeating Trump, given that through personal experience, they’re
familiar with the barriers of sexism.
“Women
are more likely to have experienced or observed gender discrimination
or sexism,” said Jill Lawless, a political scientist at the University
of Virginia.
Notably,
experts said, there’s no data showing that women underperform or
outperform men in general elections. But Lawless noted that having to
fight that perception that a woman cannot win may actually work against
the female candidates in this race.
“Anytime
they’re trying to convince voters that a woman can beat Donald Trump,
they’re not talking about health care or foreign affairs,” she said.
Warren
spent months trying to avoid the gender issue, seeing questions about
pervasive sexism in politics as a lose-lose proposition. Either she
acknowledged that being a woman created all kinds of challenges because
of inherent bias, and appeared to be whining about it, or she said it
wasn’t a problem and would therefore seem out of touch, she told aides.
But,
since the New Year, Warren has shifted her strategy dramatically,
taking the issue head on. She raised it directly in asserting that Sanders had suggested a woman couldn’t win the White House, and, after they clashed about it during a debate in Iowa, refused to shake his hand on national television.
In
the final days before Iowa, Warren began talking about a woman’s
electability. She now repeats at every campaign stop that women have
performed better in recent elections than men, underscoring the role of
female candidates who helped Democrats retake control of the House in
2018.
“The
world has changed since 2016,” Warren said during a rally this past week
in Keene, New Hampshire. “Women have been outperforming men in
competitive races. Can women win? You bet women can win.”
Pushpa
Mudan, a 68-year-old retired physician, is one of those anxious women
who’s sticking to her guns. She attended a Warren rally on Wednesday at a
community college in Nashua, New Hampshire.
She
said she’s seen Warren three times in recent months, and also attended a
recent Klobuchar rally, and is still deciding between the two, though
she’ll likely pick Warren in the primary. Mudan said electing a woman as
president is a top issue for her, but she’s afraid that none will be
able to compete with Trump.
“I
think this country, for considering itself an advanced country, is very
far behind the rest of the world by not having a woman at the highest
position,” she said. “Places like Pakistan, Turkey have had a female
president. Not here. But the way Trump puts them down, it is hard for
any to make it, I think. It’s going to be very hard.”
__
Associated Press writers Will Weissert and Kathleen Ronayne in Manchester, New Hampshire, contributed to this report.
FILE
- In this Aug. 19, 2019, file photo, a man waves an Afghan flag during
Independence Day celebrations in Kabul, Afghanistan. An Afghan official
Sunday, Feb. 9, 2020, said multiple U.S. military deaths have been
reported in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province after an insider attack by a
man wearing an Afghan army uniform. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool, File)
KABUL,
Afghanistan (AP) — Two U.S. soldiers were killed and six wounded in a
so-called insider attack in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province
late Saturday when an Afghan dressed in an Afghan army uniform opened
fire, the U.S. military said.
A
member of Nangarhar’s provincial council, Ajmal Omer, told The
Associated Press that the gunman was killed. There have been numerous
attacks by Afghan national army soldiers on their allied partners during
18 years of America’s protracted war in Afghanistan.
Six
U.S. service members have been killed in Afghanistan since the start of
2020, including Saturday’s casualties. Last year, 22 U.S. service
personnel died in combat there.
An
Afghan defense ministry official, who was not identified because he was
not authorized to speak to the media, said the shooter was an Afghan
soldier who had argued with the U.S. forces before opening fire. He was
not a Taliban infiltrator, the official said.
In
a statement, the U.S. military said “an individual in an Afghan uniform
opened fire on the combined U.S. and Afghan force with a machine gun.
We are still collecting information and the cause or motive behind the
attack is unknown at this time.”
Omer,
the provincial council member, is from Nangarhar province’s Sherzad
district, where he said the incident took place. An Afghan soldier was
also wounded, Omer said.
The U.S. military said American and Afghan military personnel were fired on while conducting an operation in Nangarhar province.
Last
July, two U.S. service members were killed by an Afghan soldier in the
southern Kandahar province. The shooter was wounded and arrested. In
September, three U.S. military personnel were wounded when an member of
the Afghan Civil Order Police fired on a military convoy, also in
Kandahar.
The incident came as Washington has sought to find an end to the war in Afghanistan.
Washington’s
peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has been meeting with Taliban
representatives in the Middle Eastern state of Qatar in recent weeks.
He’s seeking an agreement to reduce hostilities to get a peace deal
signed that would start negotiations among Afghans on both sides of the
conflict.
In
his State of the Union Address on Tuesday, President Donald Trump
referenced the peace talks, saying U.S. soldiers were not meant to serve
as “law enforcement agencies” for other nations.
“In
Afghanistan, the determination and valor of our war fighters has
allowed us to make tremendous progress, and peace talks are now
underway,” he said.
___
Gannon contributed from Islamabad. Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.
MANCHESTER,
N.H. (AP) — Scrambling to salvage his presidential campaign, Joe Biden
escalated his criticism of Pete Buttigieg on Saturday, mocking
Buttigieg’s experience as a small city mayor and cutting down the
comparisons Buttigieg has drawn to the last Democratic president,
declaring: “This guy’s not a Barack Obama.”
Biden’s
biting attacks on Buttigieg’s relatively thin resume mark a new, more
aggressive attempt to slow the momentum of the youngest candidate in the
Democratic field. The 38-year-old emerged from Iowa in an effective tie
with Sen. Bernie Sanders, but faces questions about whether his eight
years as mayor of South Bend, Indiana — a city of about 100,000 people —
prepared him for the presidency.
“I
do not believe we’re a party at risk if I’m the nominee,” Biden told
voters in Manchester. “I do believe we’re a party at risk if we nominate
someone who has never held a higher office than the mayor of South
Bend, Indiana.”
Buttigieg also faced criticism from Sanders, who said he had billionaires “by the dozens” contributing to his campaign.
“If
you’re serious about political change in America, change is not going
to be coming from somebody who gets a lot of money from the CEOs of the
pharmaceutical industry,” Sanders said.
Both
Sanders and Buttigieg appear in strong position in New Hampshire ahead
of Tuesday’s primary, while Biden has conceded he expects to take a
“hit” in the state.
Biden’s
campaign is urgently trying to recalibrate, shaking up its senior
leadership and signaling that the former vice president won’t go down
without a fight. On Saturday morning, the campaign posted an online
video attacking Buttigieg that was one of the harshest intraparty
broadsides of the Democratic primary.
The
90-second video compares Biden’s record as vice president with
Buttigieg’s service as mayor. While Biden helped President Barack Obama
pass sweeping health care legislation and orchestrate a bailout of the
auto industry, the ad says, Buttigieg was installing decorative lights
on bridges and repairing sidewalks.
Buttigieg’s
inexperience is among his chief vulnerabilities as he pitches voters on
his preparedness for the Oval Office. He’s argued that his tenure as
mayor, particularly of a Rust Belt city, gives him a better feel for the
concerns of voters Democrats need to win back in 2020. But he has not
yet had to defend the substance of his record against the kind of
specific attack Biden launched.
His
campaign accused Biden of trivializing the work that goes on in small
cities across the country, and of political desperation. The campaign
also highlighted criticism from other mayors around the country who said
Biden was denigrating the importance of small cities.
Buttigieg
himself also issued a sharp retort Saturday night at a Democratic Party
dinner in Manchester: “Americans in small rural towns in industrial
communities and in pockets of our country’s biggest cities are tired of
being reduced to a punchline by Washington politicians and ready for
somebody to take their voice to the American capital.”
Buttigieg’s
calls for generational change and his criticism of Washington has irked
some of his rivals, including Biden, who has accused the former mayor
of undercutting the work of the Obama administration.
Buttigieg
has argued that while the Obama administration had successes, the
country is in a different place than it was four years ago and requires
new leadership. He’s also tried to draw comparisons to Obama,
highlighting his ability to overcome questions about his own
inexperience during the 2008 campaign.
The former vice president made clear on Saturday that he sees the comparison as ill-fitting.
“This
guy’s not a Barack Obama,” he told reporters. “Barack Obama had laid
out a clear vision of what he thought the international society should
look like and what the order should be. Barack Obama had laid out in
detail what he thought should happen with regard to the economy.”
Biden’s
advisers are well-aware that two weak performances will chip away at
Biden’s core argument: that he’s the most electable candidate in a
general election faceoff against President Donald Trump. The former vice
president hopes to stay viable through South Carolina, which votes at
the end of the month and is the first state on the primary calendar with
a large black population. Biden has polled significantly better than
his rivals with black voters throughout the campaign.
Buttigieg,
meanwhile, has struggled to build support with black voters, raising
questions about whether his early momentum will be blunted when the
campaign heads south.
“This is a diverse party,” Biden said. “It’s the reason why we’re strong. Our nominee has to reflect that strength.”
It’s
not just Buttigieg who is blocking Biden’s path. Sanders also appears
poised for a strong showing in New Hampshire, a state he won by more
than 20 percentage points in 2016.
Sanders,
a self-described democratic socialist, still faces questions from some
Democrats about whether he would damage the party in the general
election. Biden and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar have led that charge,
with Klobuchar being the only candidate to raise a hand in Friday’s
debate when moderators asked if anyone was worried about having Sanders
at the top of the ticket.
“People
know I’m straightforward and I tell them the truth,” Klobuchar said of
the moment on Saturday. She also announced to voters that her campaign
had raised $1.5 million since the debate.
Sen.
Elizabeth Warren, who represents neighboring Massachusetts in the
Senate, also needs a strong finish in New Hampshire to prove her
campaign viability in the primary. As she spoke to supporters before
they headed out to knock on doors, she noted that it had been three
years since Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., admonished
her on the Senate floor with the phrase “nevertheless, she persisted” —
an expression that Warren has turned into a motto for her campaign.
“I’ve been winning unwinnable fights pretty much all my life,” she said.
___
Associated
Press writers Holly Ramer in Durham, New Hampshire; Kathleen Ronayne in
Manchester; and Will Weissert in Rochester, New Hampshire, contributed
to this report.
SHANGHAI
(AP) — For weeks after the first reports of a mysterious new virus in
Wuhan, millions of people poured out of the central Chinese city,
cramming onto buses, trains and planes as the first wave of China’s
great Lunar New Year migration broke across the nation. Some carried
with them the new virus that has since claimed over 800 lives and
sickened more than 37,000 people.
Officials
finally began to seal the borders on Jan. 23. But it was too late.
Speaking to reporters a few days after the the city was put under
quarantine, the mayor estimated that 5 million people had already left.
Where did they go?
An
Associated Press analysis of domestic travel patterns using map
location data from Chinese tech giant Baidu shows that in the two weeks
before Wuhan’s lockdown, nearly 70% of trips out of the central Chinese
city were within Hubei province. Baidu has a map app that is similar to
Google Maps, which is blocked in China.
Another
14% of the trips went to the neighboring provinces of Henan, Hunan,
Anhui and Jiangxi. Nearly 2% slipped down to Guangdong province, the
coastal manufacturing powerhouse across from Hong Kong, and the rest
fanned out across China. The cities outside Hubei province that were top
destinations for trips from Wuhan between Jan. 10 and Jan. 24 were
Chongqing, a municipality next to Hubei province, Beijing and Shanghai.
The
travel patterns broadly track with the early spread of the virus. The
majority of confirmed cases and deaths have occurred in China, within
Hubei province, followed by high numbers of cases in central China, with
pockets of infections in Chongqing, Shanghai and Beijing as well.
“It’s
definitely too late,” said Jin Dong-Yan, a molecular virologist at Hong
Kong University’s School of Biomedical Sciences. “Five million out.
That’s a big challenge. Many of them may not come back to Wuhan but hang
around somewhere else. To control this outbreak, we have to deal with
this. On one hand, we need to identify them. On the other hand, we need
to address the issue of stigma and discrimination.”
He
added that the initial spread of travelers to provinces in central
China with large pools of migrant workers and relatively weaker health
care systems “puts a big burden on the hospitals ... of these
resource-limited provinces.”
Baidu
gathers travel data based on more than 120 billion daily location
requests from its map app and other apps that use Baidu’s location
services. Only data from users who agree to share their location is
recorded and the company says data is masked to protect privacy. Baidu’s
publicly available data
shows proportional travel, not absolute numbers of recorded trips, and
does not include trips by people who don’t use mobile phones or apps
that rely on Baidu’s popular location services.
Public
health officials and academics have been using this kind of mapping
data for years to track the potential spread of disease.
A
group of researchers from Southampton University’s WorldPop research
group, which studies population dynamics, used 2013-2015 data from
Baidu’s location services and international flight itineraries to make a
predictive global risk map for the likely spread of the virus from
Wuhan.
It’s
important to understand the population movements out of Wuhan before the
city’s lock down, said Lai Shengjie, a WorldPop researcher who used to
work at China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Maybe
they hadn’t developed symptoms but could transmit the virus. We need to
look at destinations across China and the world and focus on the main
destinations and try to prepare for disease control and prevention,” he
said.
The last
trains left Wuhan the morning of Jan. 23, cutting off a surge of
outbound travel that had begun three days earlier, Baidu data shows.
Nearby cities rushed to impose travel restrictions of their own. From
Jan. 23 to Jan. 26, the 15 cities that Baidu data shows received the
most travelers from Wuhan — a combined 70% — all imposed some level of
travel restrictions.
Other
nations soon followed suit, including the United States, Australia,
Singapore, New Zealand and the Philippines, all of which have sharply
restricted entry for people coming from China. Others, like Italy and
Indonesia, have barred flights.
WorldPop
researchers found that travel out of Wuhan has historically ramped up
in the weeks before Lunar New Year’s Day. Based on historical travel
patterns, they identified 18 high-risk cities within China that received
the most travelers from Wuhan during this period. They then used 2018
flight itineraries from the International Air Transport Association to
map the global connectivity of those cities.
They
note that travel patterns after restrictions started rolling out on
Jan. 23 will not match historical norms and that the cities they
identified are initial ports of landing; travelers could have
subsequently moved elsewhere.
The
top 10 global destinations for travelers from high-risk Chinese cities
around Lunar New Year, according to their analysis, were Thailand,
Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, the United States, Malaysia,
Singapore, Vietnam and Australia.
In Africa, Egypt, South Africa, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria and Kenya topped the list.
The
African continent is particularly vulnerable because of the weaker
health infrastructure in many countries, and the longer cases go
undetected, the more likely they are to spread.
“Capacity
is quite weak in many African health services,” Dr. Michel Yao,
emergency operations manager for the World Health Organization in
Africa, told the AP. This new virus “could overwhelm health systems we
have in Africa.”
The
Africa Centers for Disease Control, formed three years ago in response
to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, said screening has been stepped up
at ports of entry across Africa. Egypt began screening passengers from
affected areas in China on Jan. 16. Over the next eight days, Nigeria,
Ethiopia, South Africa, Mauritius and Kenya all put screening systems in
place. No confirmed cases have been reported.
Lai
and his colleagues said they found a “high correlation” between the
early spread of coronavirus cases and the geographical risk patterns
they identified.
The
first case of the virus outside China was reported on Jan. 13 in
Thailand, followed two days later by Japan, the countries with the
highest connectivity risk, according to WorldPop’s analysis. Within 10
days of Wuhan’s quarantine, the virus had spread to more than two dozen
countries; nine of the 10 countries with the most flight connections to
at-risk mainland cities also had the highest numbers of confirmed cases,
mostly afflicting people who had been in China.
The
pattern isn’t perfect; Zhejiang province, for example, was not a top
destination from Wuhan this year, according to Baidu data, but now has
among the highest numbers of confirmed cases.
“Our
aim was to help guide some of the surveillance and thinking around the
control measures,” said Andrew Tatem, the director of WorldPop, adding
that his group plans to update their analysis.
“There
was a huge amount of movement out of the Wuhan region before the
controls came into place,” he said. “Now we’re getting to stage of
having data from multiple places on the scale of outbreaks elsewhere.”
Scientists
have identified the new virus as a coronavirus, a family of viruses
that includes ones that can cause the common cold, as well as others
that cause more serious illnesses, like SARS, or severe acute
respiratory syndrome.
Many
are now focused on what will happen after the second wave of the Lunar
New Year rush as people once again crowd onto trains, buses and planes
to head back to work. The Chinese government extended the holiday, which
was supposed to end on Jan. 30, to Feb. 2. Shanghai, Beijing and
several Chinese provinces ordered businesses to remain shut through
Sunday, leaving the nation’s great megalopolises feeling like ghost
towns.
“It’s in
cities where people interact much more,” Tatem said. “That’s
potentially the worry of lots of people coming back in. A few people
seeding that could result in a bigger problem.”
___
Associated Press writers Cara Anna in Johannesburg and Samy Magdy in Cairo contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON
(AP) — Exacting swift punishment against those who crossed him, an
emboldened President Donald Trump ousted two government officials who
had delivered damaging testimony against him during his impeachment
hearings. The president took retribution just two days after his
acquittal by the Senate.
First
came news Friday that Trump had ousted Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the
decorated soldier and national security aide who played a central role
in the Democrats’ impeachment case. Vindman’s lawyer said his client was
escorted out of the White House complex Friday, told to leave in
retaliation for “telling the truth.”
“The
truth has cost Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman his job, his career, and his
privacy,” attorney David Pressman said in a statement. Vindman’s twin
brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, also was asked to leave his job as a
White House lawyer on Friday, the Army said in a statement. Both men
were reassigned to the Army.
Next came word that Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, also was out.
“I
was advised today that the President intends to recall me effective
immediately as United States Ambassador to the European Union,” Sondland
said in a statement.
The
White House had not been coy about whether Trump would retaliate
against those he viewed as foes in the impeachment drama. White House
press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Thursday that Trump was glad it
was over and “maybe people should pay for that.”
House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement that Vindman’s ouster was “a
clear and brazen act of retaliation that showcases the President’s fear
of the truth. The President’s vindictiveness is precisely what led
Republican Senators to be accomplices to his cover-up.”
Rep.
Jackie Speier, D-Calif., called it “the Friday Night Massacre,”
likening the situation to President Richard Nixon’s so-called Saturday
night massacre, when top Justice Department officials resigned after
refusing to do his bidding by firing a special prosecutor investigating
the Watergate scandal. (The prosecutor himself was fired anyway.)
Speier added in her tweet, “I’m sure Trump is fuming that he can’t fire Pelosi.”
Senate
Republicans, who just two days prior acquitted Trump of charges he
abused his office, were silent Friday evening. Many of them had reacted
with indignation during the Senate trial when Democratic Rep. Adam
Schiff, the lead prosecutor, suggested Trump would be out for revenge
against the lawmakers who crossed him during impeachment.
Since
his acquittal, Trump has held nothing back in lashing out at his
critics, including Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, the only Republican to vote
against him. On Friday, he also took after Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate
Democrat from West Virginia whom Trump had hoped would vote with the
Republicans for his acquittal but who ended up voting to convict.
Trump
tweeted that he was “very surprised & disappointed” with Manchin’s
votes, claiming no president had done more for his state. He added that
Manchin was “just a puppet” for the Democratic leaders in the House and
Senate.
It was
Alexander Vindman who first told the House that in America “right
matters” — a phrase repeated in the impeachment trial by lead prosecutor
Schiff.
Sondland,
too, was a crucial witness in the House impeachment inquiry, telling
investigators that “Everyone was in the loop” on Trump’s desire to
press Ukraine for politically charged investigations. He told lawmakers
how he came to understand that there was a “quid pro quo” connecting a
desired White House visit for Ukraine’s leader and an announcement that
the country would conduct the investigations the president wanted.
Sondland
“chose to be terminated rather than resign,” according to a U.S.
official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not been
authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Alexander Vindman’s lawyer issued a one-page statement that accused Trump of taking revenge on his client.
“He
did what any member of our military is charged with doing every day: he
followed orders, he obeyed his oath, and he served his country, even
when doing so was fraught with danger and personal peril,” Pressman
said. “And for that, the most powerful man in the world — buoyed by the
silent, the pliable, and the complicit — has decided to exact revenge.”
The
White House did not respond to Pressman’s accusation. “We do not
comment on personnel matters,” said John Ullyot, spokesman for the
National Security Council, the foreign policy arm of the White House
where Vindman was an expert on Ukraine.
The
Democrats angling to replace Trump took notice of Vindman’s ouster
during their evening debate in Manchester, New Hampshire. Former Vice
President Joe Biden asked the audience to stand and applaud the
lieutenant colonel.
Vindman’s
status had been uncertain since he testified that he didn’t think it
was “proper” for Trump to “demand that a foreign government investigate”
former Vice President Joe Biden and his son’s dealings with the energy
company Burisma in Ukraine. Vindman’s ouster, however, seemed imminent
after Trump mocked him Thursday during his post-acquittal celebration
with Republican supporters in the East Room and said Friday that he was
not happy with him.
“You
think I’m supposed to be happy with him?” Trump told reporters on the
South Lawn of the White House. “I’m not. ... They are going to be making
that decision.”
Vindman,
a 20-year Army veteran, wore his uniform full of medals, including a
purple heart, when he appeared late last year for what turned out to be a
testy televised impeachment hearing. Trump supporters raised questions
about the immigrant’s allegiance to the United States — his parents fled
the Soviet Union when he was a child —and noted that he had received
offers to work for the government of Ukraine, offers Vindman said he
swiftly dismissed.
In gripping testimony, Vindman told the House of his family’s story, his father bringing them to the U.S. some 40 years ago.
“Dad,
my sitting here today in the U.S. Capitol, talking to our elected
officials, is proof that you made the right decision 40 years ago to
leave the Soviet Union and come here to United States of America in
search of a better life for our family,” he testified. “Do not worry, I
will be fine for telling the truth.”’
Hillary
Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, recalled Vindman’s
testimony that he would be fine and tweeted, “It’s appalling that this
administration may prove him wrong.”
Some of Trump’s backers cheered Vindman’s removal.
Rep.
Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., tweeted that Vindman “should not be inside the
National Security Council any longer. It’s not about retaliation. It’s
because he cannot be trusted, he disagrees with the President’s
policies, & his term there is coming to an end regardless.”
News
that both Vindman twins had been ousted led Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.,
to tweet, “The White House is running a two for one special today on
deep state leakers.”
Defense
Secretary Mark Esper was asked what the Pentagon would do to ensure
that Vindman faces no retribution. “We protect all of our service
members from retribution or anything like that,” Esper said. “We’ve
already addressed that in policy and other means.”
Alexander
Vindman is scheduled to enter a military college in Washington, D.C.,
this summer, and his brother is to be assigned to the Army General
Counsel’s Office, according to two officials who were not authorized to
discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity.
___
AP writers Lisa Mascaro, Matthew Lee, Zeke Miller, Eric Tucker and Bob Burns contributed to this report.
The drumbeat for Democratic National Committee boss Tom Perez to be “held accountable” for recent party failures appears to be getting louder. The latest Democrats to criticize Perez include U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., all backers of 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Recent
party setbacks have included the vote-count fiasco at Monday’s Iowa
caucuses and Tuesday night’s disclosure that two officials on the host
committee of the party’s upcoming national convention in Milwaukee had
been fired over non-specified allegations that they oversaw a work
environment where staff members were not being “respected.” IOWA MESS HAS PEREZ FACING DEM PARTY STORM, RESIGNATION CALLS Previously,
Democrats such as former Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Rep.
Marcia Fudge of Ohio, Washington state Democratic chairwoman Tina
Podlodowski and party strategist Neil Sroka spoke out against Perez’s
leadership. “He doesn’t lead on anything,” Fudge told Politico. On Friday, Ocasio-Cortez, Omar and Jayapal shared their views on the party chairman. “What’s
happened in Iowa is a complete disgrace and someone needs to be held
responsible,” Ocasio-Cortez said outside the U.S. Capitol, according to
the outlet. “I think there’s a conversation needed around taking
responsibility for Iowa and ensuring that this bungled process never
happens again.”
“What’s happened in Iowa is a complete disgrace and someone needs to be held responsible.” — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
Queen Snake
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is seen in New York City, April 5, 2019. (Getty Images)
Omar mentioned Perez by name in her remarks. “I
would say Tom Perez should be held accountable for this failure,” Omar
told The Hill. “I believe it all starts from the top. These are things
that Tom should do and should have done. If this was happening in my
home state, we would be having a very serious conversation about what
accountability would look like for our own chair."
“I believe it all starts from the top. These are things that Tom should do and should have done." — Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.
Princess Snake
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 6, 2019. (Associated Press)
Omar noted that the DNC had years to prepare for the
Iowa caucuses and said it was “devastating” that more precautions
weren’t in place to prevent this week’s vote-count situation. Jayapal called the Iowa caucuses a “national embarrassment,” and said others deserved blame in addition to Perez. “I’m sure there is shared blame to go around,” Jayapal told The Hill.
“But Tom Perez is the head of the DNC, and I do think that there
clearly was not the process in place to make sure all these [protocols]
were going to be followed.”
"Tom Perez is the head of
the DNC, and I do think that there clearly was not the process in place
to make sure all these [protocols] were going to be followed." — Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.
Mommy Snake
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash, speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 30, 2019. (Associated Press)
The criticism of Perez followed a Twitter message the
DNC leader posted Thursday, in which he blamed Iowa’s state-level
Democratic Party for the caucus problems. “Enough is enough,”
Perez wrote. “In light of the problems that have emerged in the
implementation of the delegate selection plan and in order to assure
public confidence in the results, I am calling on the Iowa Democratic
Party to immediately begin a recanvass.” Podlodowski accused Perez
of throwing Iowa officials “under the bus” after a long silence from
the national DNC amid the vote-counting problems. Neither news
organizations nor the Iowa Democratic Party have been able to call a
winner in Monday's Iowa caucuses while Pete Buttigieg and Sanders are
both claiming victory in the state. As of late Friday, Buttigieg
held a narrow lead in state delegate equivalents (SDEs), which help
decide how many delegates a candidate gets to bring to the Democratic
National Convention in Milwaukee later this year Sanders, on the
other hand, led in the popular vote from both the "first alignment" and
the "second alignment" phases of the caucuses. Those numbers could
change, however, as the IDP has noted many irregularities in its vote
count and it is highly likely candidates will call for reexaminations of
the numbers, as Perez already has. Meanwhile, DNC convention host
committee members Liz Gilbert and Adam Alonso were fired Tuesday
evening after initially being placed on leave following allegations made
in a Jan. 30 letter signed by committee staffers, Wisconsin Public Radio reported. “Every
employee has a right to feel respected in their workplace,” the host
committee said in a statement, the outlet reported. “Based on the
information we have learned to date, we believe the work environment did
not meet the ideals and expectations of the Milwaukee 2020 Host
Committee Board of Directors. Accordingly, Liz Gilbert and Adam Alonso
are no longer employed by the organization, effective immediately.” The staffers alleged that Alonso “consistently bullied and intimidated staff members,” in particular the women, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, and accused Gilbert of allowing “a culture that coddles male senior advisers and consultants.” Fox News’ Brooke Singman and Tyler Olson contributed to this story.
A Wisconsin public school teacher was reportedly placed on leave this week after he allegedly called Rush Limbaugh's advanced cancer diagnosis "awesome" and said he hopes the radio host's death is painful. "limbaugh
absolutely should have to suffer from cancer. it's awesome that he's
dying, and hopefully it is as quick as it is painful,” Travis Sarandos,
who teaches in Milwaukee, allegedly tweeted Monday, according to the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. RUSH LIMBAUGH ECHOES LOU GEHRIG IN RETURN TO RADIO, SAYS HE'S ‘ONE OF THE LUCKIEST PEOPLE ALIVE’ Sarandos
was replying to another tweet whose author said they hoped Limbaugh
recovered quickly and would advocate for affordable health care for
everyone, the newspaper reported. The teacher's tweet sparked a backlash after local radio host Mark Belling posted it on his blog Tuesday. Milwaukee Public Schools first said Sarandos did not speak for the district but later confirmed he had been placed on leave. Limbaugh announced on his radio show Monday that he has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. On
Tuesday night, President Trump awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, during the State of the
Union address at the U.S. Capitol. Limbaugh returned to his show
Friday after missing three shows for treatments. He said those
supporting him since disclosing his diagnosis have made him feel like
"one of the luckiest people alive." Sarandos has since deleted his Twitter account, the Journal Sentinel reported.
And people wonder what the hell's wrong with the kids now a days?
A 60-year-old diagnosed with coronavirus in Wuhan, China, has reportedly become the first U.S. citizen to die of the novel virus. The patient died at Jinyintian Hospital in Wuhan on Thursday, The New York Times reported. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing confirmed the patient’s death Friday night but gave few other details. CORONAVIRUS IN CHINA GROW TO 722, MORE THAN 34,500 CASES REPORTED “We offer our sincerest condolences to the family on their loss,” a spokesman for the embassy said, according to the Times. “Out of respect for the family’s privacy, we have no further comment.” On Friday, the Chinese government reported 86 fatalities on the mainland in the viruses' deadliest day so far, the Washington Post reported. The fast-spreading virus has killed more than 700 and infected more than 34,500 in China as of Friday. A Japanese citizen "highly suspected" of having coronavirus has also died, Japan's foreign ministry reported, according to NBC News. Chinese
officials are still trying to stem the flow of infections in the
mainland as the virus continues to spread globally. The country's
ruling Communist Party is also dealing with public anger over the death of a doctor who was detained and threatened by authorities for spreading early warnings of the illness in December. As of Friday, 72 countries have implemented travel restrictions, according to the World Health Organization. So far 12 patients have been diagnosed with the virus in the U.S., but some have already been released from the hospital. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP President
Trump on Friday tweeted that he had a “good conversation by phone with
President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on
leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus. He feels they are doing
very well, even building hospitals in a matter of only days. Nothing is
easy, but he will be successful.” Fox News' Louis Casiano contributed to this report.
