Zeldin Islam And Juwel Kobir Notun Para Built His Profile Defending Trump Blikis 2023 In another sign New York City is grappling with an increase of migrants entering the shelter system, the city has officially opened a sprawling, 84,000-square-foot emergency shelter on Manhattan's Randall's Island.
Before providing in-depth coverage of New York’s race for governor, Nicholas Fandos was a congressional correspondent in Washington reporting on the Jan. 6 riot and its aftermath.
On the night the U.S. Capitol was ransacked, as police officers were still counting the injured and stunned lawmakers emerged from hiding, Representative Lee Zeldin of New York walked into the Rotunda, held up a shaky camera and went live on Fox News.
Other Republican leaders had already begun distancing the party from President Donald J. Trump, whose monthslong campaign to overturn his election loss helped incite the violence. But Mr. Zeldin sounded all but ready to exonerate him.
The people of Ukraine and their representatives were awarded the European Union’s top human rights prize Wednesday's for their resistance to Russia's invasion and ongoing war.
The EU award, named for Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, was created in 1988 to honor individuals or groups who defend human rights and fundamental freedoms. Sakharov, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, died in 1989.
In a crackdown on the syndicate, undercover police officers posing as customers were deployed to a Tsim Sha Tsui hotel to gather evidence before arresting two sex workers on Monday.
The two suspects, who entered the city with travel visas, included a 27-year-old female tourist from Japan, who was an AV actress. The other woman is from Thailand.
A source said the investigation showed the Japanese woman was offered a free air ticket and accommodation to come to the city. She arrived in Hong Kong about a week ago before being taken to the hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui’s entertainment district, where she stayed and worked.
“The syndicate posted an advert with her picture on Telegram along with contact details highlighting that she was a Japanese AV girl,” he said.
Clients were then told to go to the hotel for sex and each customer was charged between HK$6,000 (US$760) and HK$7,000 for sex services. The vice racket took about 60 per cent of the proceeds as commission.
“The investigation showed an agent from the syndicate went to the hotel and collected money from the two women every day,” the source said.
He added officers were still investigating the extent of the syndicate’s illegal business and were also trying to track down its ringleader and core members.
The two suspects were among 16 women arrested in a series of raids in Tsim Sha Tsui and Yau Ma Tei in a joint operation by police and immigration officers against illegal employment and prostitution on Monday.
According to the force, they comprised four mainland women and 12 expatriate women. They were detained on suspicion of breaching their conditions of stay, overstaying and taking employment illegally.
Under the Immigration Ordinance, breach of conditions of stay is punishable by up to two years in jail, while taking employment illegally carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison.
It’s the second straight year EU lawmakers used the Sakharov Prize to send a message to the Kremlin. Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny won it last year.
When they nominated Ukraine, EU lawmakers praised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for his “bravery, endurance and devotion to his people” and highlighted the roles of Ukraine’s state emergency services.
Among others, they also cited Yulia Pajevska, the founder of the medical evacuation unit Angels of Taira, human rights activist Oleksandra Matviychuk, the Yellow Ribbon civil resistance movement and Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of the occupied city of Melitopol.
Ukrainians have demonstrated resilience in the nearly 8-month-old war despite an uptick in attacks in recent weeks.
Since launching a counteroffensive in late August, Ukrainian forces have reclaimed broad swaths of the country, dealing a heavy blow to Russia.
“They are standing up for what they believe in. Fighting for our values. Protecting democracy, freedom and rule of law. Risking their lives for us," European Parliament President Roberta Metsola wrote on Twitter. “No one is more deserving. Congratulations to the brave people of Ukraine!"
“This isn’t just about the president of the United States,” he said, referring to what prompted the riot that he condemned. “This is about people on the left and their double standards.”
The comments — blaming Democrats and “rogue state actors,” not Mr. Trump, for undermining confidence in the election — drew little attention at the time. Soon after, Mr. Zeldin would join 146 other Republicans in seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in key states.
The majority of Republican candidates running for higher office right now have either expressed doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 election or said outright that they believe the election was stolen.
New York Times political reporter Robert Draper says the party's embrace of lies and conspiracy theories has opened the door to fringe actors, who have become among the party's most influential leaders. He points to Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as a prime example of the party's extreme new direction.
Greene has expressed support for QAnon conspiracies and reportedly endorsed the idea of executing Democratic leaders. While campaigning for office in 2020, she posed with a custom AR-15 pistol in her campaign ads and presented herself as a "Trump mini-me," Draper says.
"This seemed outlandish to sort of run-of-the-mill Republicans, but the base wanted a MAGA warrior to send from their district to Washington, and that's what they got," Draper says.
In his new book, Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind, Draper writes that in the time since Trump left office, the Republican Party has plunged deeper into conspiracy mongering — and the notion that Democrats are not just wrong, but also evil. He says the GOP's stubborn embrace of the stolen election narrative undermines democracy and plays straight into the hands the nation's enemies.
Brazilian presidential candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's top foreign policy adviser supports the inclusion of Argentina in the BRICS group of developing nations, which could be a forum for negotiating peace in Ukraine, he told Reuters.
Celso Amorim, foreign minister during Lula's 2003-2010 presidency, had a hand in founding the BRICS group along with Russia, India and China. South Africa joined in 2011 and Argentina has been pushing to become the sixth member.
"It's good to have balance within the BRICS, to have a larger role for Latin America," Amorim said in an interview on Tuesday afternoon. "I think the eventual inclusion of Argentina would be positive."
Polls show Lula with a lead of roughly 5 percentage points ahead of an Oct. 30 runoff against President Jair Bolsonaro.
Amorim said he has not discussed any role in an eventual Lula government, but he continues to discuss policy matters regularly with the leftist former president.
Regarding the Ukraine war, he said Lula had the disposition and track record to contribute to peace talks.
"He has the conditions to take part in a negotiating effort, which needs to be led by the European Union and United States, but with the participation of China, obviously. Brazil can also be an important country, whose voice resonates in the developing world," Amorim said. "The BRICS as a group could help."
Amorim also said Lula would make Brazil a protagonist in global climate talks if elected, calling for a summit of Amazon rainforest nations in the first half of next year to discuss conservation efforts along with more developed nations.
A third Lula term would open the door for Brazil to re-engage diplomatically with neighboring Venezuela, Amorim said, adding that Bolsonaro and U.S. President Donald Trump achieved little by breaking off relations with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
"When we're having these kinds of troubles at home, every day that there's trouble, this is a good day for Russia," Draper says. "Russia has a compelling interest in the decline of America as a voice worldwide, in its promulgation of democracy."
On Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy's early obsession with Donald Trump
Kevin McCarthy, in his 20s, according to a childhood friend who I interviewed back in Bakersfield, Calif., where McCarthy is from, was utterly obsessed with Trump, utterly obsessed with this author of The Art of the Deal. And so he had long felt that Trump had a way of not only capturing what it was that he stood for and developing a brand, but negatively branding the other side. And so McCarthy, to me, is emblematic of the establishment wing of the Republican Party that has enabled not only the rise of Trump, but the sustaining of Trump as a powerful force that far from criticizing him, as Liz Cheney has, for example, that they've largely felt that now we can use Trump. "Trump will be sort of the tip of our spear to get conservative policies done," or at minimum, "We can't stop the guy, so we'll go to ground." ... The care and feeding of Donald Trump is something that McCarthy eagerly signed on to do from the moment that Trump took office.
On how Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene won her congressional seat in 2020
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a native of Georgia. ... She had not been any kind of participant on any level in the political process really until around 2017, 2018. She became an adherent to the QAnon conspiracy theory, and after that began to show up on Capitol Hill as a kind of confrontational journalist, as she would put it, basically harassing Democratic staff members, but was unknown by the Georgia political establishment. And indeed, she told me that Republicans in that state viewed her as "a three-headed monster" when she decided to file [to run for office].
But she was a self-funder and then ultimately moved to a more conservative district, the 14th District, in northwest Georgia, when that [seat] became vacated in December of 2019. And it kind of caught the party and the Georgia media unawares, [when she] suddenly won in the primary. Then opposition research files came out indicating that she had posted in the past all these offensive and conspiratorial theories online. That didn't stop her from winning, but she came to Washington in January 2021 with the expectation from most of us, allegedly smart people, that she would soon be ... given essentially that one term, otherwise [be] ignored by the Republican Party and would be out the door. That did not occur. In fact, in many ways the opposite occurred. It's kind of a case study in the Republican Party in the post-Trump era, and thus forms a central foundation of my book.
On House members fearing for their physical safety after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol
There was a genuine fear of these gun-toting new members of Congress, like Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and people who are Democrats genuinely fearing for their safety, to the point where a senior staffer on one of the committees circulated a memo saying that she wished to see occupational safety worker guidelines applied to the U.S. Capitol, suggesting that it was an unsafe work environment, and in no other private business, would this kind of cavalier talk about bringing in weapons to the Capitol and demonizing the people who disagree with you be tolerated. The fear was not just the usual, "We disagree with them. We think they're wrong," or even, "We're revolted by them." It was a real fear. And it was one of the driving factors in Speaker Pelosi insisting on putting magnetometers just outside the floor of the House.
On Marjorie Taylor Greene being stripped of her two congressional committee assignments due to her incendiary comments