Hyderabad: In a heartbreaking incident, Aishwarya Thatikonda, a 27-year-old girl from Hyderabad, lost her life in a shooting incident that occurred at the Allen Premium Outlets Mall in Texas. Alongside other victims, Aishwarya’s promising life was cut short, leaving her family and friends in deep sorrow.
Aishwarya Thatikonda, a talented engineer from Osmania University in Hyderabad, embarked on a journey to the United States in 2020 to pursue her master’s degree at Eastern Michigan University. After completing her studies, she settled in the Dallas suburb of McKinney, Texas, where she started working for a construction firm in Frisco.
Texas shooting
On the ill-fated day of May 6, 2023, Aishwarya went to the Allen Premium Outlets Mall in Texas accompanied by a friend. As they stood outside the mall, an assailant stepped out of his car and indiscriminately opened fire, targeting innocent bystanders.
Reports indicate that Aishwarya received a hail of bullets to her face, tragically losing her life.
Her life was brutally taken away just 10 days before she was set to celebrate her 28th birthday. She had dreams and aspirations, including plans to return to Hyderabad in December.
Her family had begun searching for a groom for her. Additionally, Aishwarya was in the process of obtaining an H1B visa, further demonstrating her ambitions and determination.
Efforts to bring Hyderabad girl home
Following the incident, the Consulate General of India in Houston provided updates on the situation, stating that they are facilitating the completion of formalities to repatriate Aishwarya’s mortal remains to India. The Consulate has also been in constant contact with local authorities, hospitals, the injured victims’ relatives, and community leaders.
External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar is closely tracking the situation and the consulate is ensuring that the bereaved family receives all necessary assistance.
Though efforts are being made to bring the mortal remains of the Hyderabad girl, the shooting incident has left her family members and friends in grief.
SRINAGAR: Sara Ali Khan, the popular Bollywood actress, recently embarked on a trip to the highlands of Kashmir with her mother, Amrita Singh, after wrapping up shooting for her upcoming film, Ae Watan Mere Watan. The actress shared several photos from her journey on Instagram, where she was also accompanied by her friends.
Sara Ali Khan with her family and friends in Kashmir in May 2023
In the first shot, Sara donned a saffron jumper and a woolly hat, posing for a selfie with the night sky and the moon in the backdrop while pouting. The next photo showed her sitting outside in comfortable clothing, closing her eyes and leaning on her companion, who stood behind her.
The following shot showed Sara dressed differently, hugging her pal. In the last photo, Sara, her friends, and Amrita Singh sat around an indoor fireplace. Sara, donning a saffron jumper and beige trousers, gazed at the fire with her hands close to it, while Amrita, dressed in all black, sat behind her daughter.
Sara spent her time in the pool with one of her pals, writer Jehan Handa. Both of them were engaged in a conversation in the candid photograph. The star also shared a solo photo of her in the pool. Sara sat in a garden, enjoying the sun, wearing a shawl over her olive-colored jumper and grey trousers in one of the photos. The actress also wore a woolly hat while posing with her face up and her eyes closed.
Sara and her pals stood for the camera outside in the dusk in the last photo. As she smiled for the camera, she was dressed in a white jacket, beige trousers, a woollen cap and shoes. “Hello Full Moon Phase, Snow clad Mountains with Sunny Rays, Sitting by the Fire enjoying the Flame, the Haze,” Sara captioned the image. The nights are pleasant, and the days are sun-kissed, so it’s time to hear what Sara says.” She also mentioned Purnima and the full moon.
Sara posted one of the photos with her pals on Instagram Stories and tagged her. She labelled the site Jannat-e-Kashmir. Sara also used the background music from her debut film Kedarnath, Qaafirana. The original song was included in the 2018 film Sara with the late actor Sushant Singh Rajput.
Sara Ali Khan seemed to have fallen in love with Kashmir ever since she found it. She is a frequent traveller to Kashmir; she was here in 2021 and 2022 also for different projects. Her love for Kashmir can be seen through her Instagram posts.
Sara Khan explains the mesmerising beauty she has fallen in love with through her frequent visits to Kashmir. As a result, she is gradually emerging as a brand spokesperson for Kashmir with no additional expense.
“When you’re here, you wonder why anyone would ever want to leave,” Biden marveled soon after his arrival at the Windsor Bar and Restaurant. A capacity crowd had waited for hours to see him in the rustic pub. “Coming here feels like coming home.”
When presidents travel abroad, they are traditionally tight, focused affairs calibrated with a specific goal in mind: To advance the White House’s interests and shape the place they will soon leave behind. But for three days in Ireland, as Biden roamed the countryside by motorcade with his sister Valerie and son Hunter in tow, the president seemed content to exist within it.
He met dignitaries and townspeople. He toasted his Irish ancestors, the Irish people, Irish Americans and even the “quite a few,” he said, “who wish they were lucky enough to be Irish.”
He took a selfie with nationalist politician and alleged former Irish Republican Army member Gerry Adams, as well as with an Irish reporter and nearly anyone else who wanted one. He kissed babies and had a close encounter with a sliotar.
He butchered the name of New Zealand’s famed rugby team — badly. At one point he tried, unsuccessfully, to make friends with the Irish president’s dog. In a surprise to nobody, he quoted at least three different Irish poets but may have quoted his Grandpa Finnegan even more.
And all that came before Friday evening, when Biden traveled west across the country to County Mayo, where he recalled “the history and hope and the heartbreak” of his ancestors in front of an estimated 20,000 gathered at a 19th-century cathedral on the banks of the River Moy.
“Family is the beginning, the middle and the end,” Biden said. “That’s the Irish of it: the beginning, middle and the end.”
Just hours earlier, Biden had visited the Knock Shrine, a pilgrimage site for Catholics made all the more significant by a chance meeting with the priest who administered last rites to his late son, Beau. The encounter reportedly brought Biden to tears.
Biden had come to Ireland to reaffirm its close relationship with the U.S. — and to reaffirm his own personal relationship with a place he credits for shaping him. It was here that the criticisms he faces at home seemed to fade away: His age didn’t make him old, it provided him wisdom. His gaffes didn’t make him shaky, they gave him charm.
Biden has made no secret of his deep fascination with his ancestral origins. And since visiting Ireland as vice president to trace his lineage, he’d eagerly sought a reason to come back. The White House found its justification in the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement that largely ended sectarian violence in Northern Ireland — a U.S. brokered deal that’s served as an integral element of the island’s tight relationship with America.
Yet Biden spent only a handful of hours in Northern Ireland before jetting off to his ancestral homeland. Combined with the dearth of policy announcements or apparent progress on political priorities, the move raised questions over whether the trip was, as one reporter put it, “a taxpayer-funded family reunion.”
The White House rejected the characterization, pointing to his speeches and meetings with Irish and U.K. leaders. Biden, though, appeared otherwise determined not to let thorny political demands intrude too much on his mutual lovefest with the people of Ireland.
The president has answered only a single question unrelated to his visit, on the search for the Pentagon document leaker. The most substantive answer he gave all week to any query came in response to the child who had asked about the key to success — prompting Biden to launch into a winding and often-told anecdote about the late conservative Sen. Jesse Helms and the importance of not judging people’s motives.
“That’s a long answer to a real quick question,” he conceded, well after the child had lost interest.
At times, it was tough to tell where Biden as president ended and Biden as tourist began. His tour through the country was sentimental and joyful. During a visit to Carlingford Castle, he peered across the water through gathering fog, chatting quietly with a local guide enlisted to bring him through the last Irish landmark Biden’s great-great-grandfather saw before embarking for America over 170 years ago.
“It feels wonderful,” Biden said of his emotions upon visiting the site, as a bagpipe and drum ensemble prepared to strike up an original piece entitled: “A Biden Return.”
In Dundalk, a short ride from the castle through the County Louth where his Finnegan ancestors once lived, Biden bantered with workers at a local market, debating which food and souvenirs to buy. (He left, the town paper later reported, with a bounty: Lemon meringue, chocolate eclairs, bread and butter pudding, pear and almond cake, and a mug with an image of a dog on it.)
And on Thursday, as he became the fourth U.S. president to address a joint session of Ireland’s Parliament, Biden paused to recognize the familial significance of what he would term “one of the great honors of my career.”
“Well mom,” he said, looking skyward, “you said it would happen.”
In between speeches and state dinners, the scenes at times bordered on chaos. Throngs of well-wishers lined Biden’s routes, some stationing themselves mere inches off the road as the motorcade whipped by. Others gathered on highway overpasses in the driving rain, waving Irish and American flags.
As Biden stopped in local towns and businesses, the tight spaces and swelling crowds caused visible alarm among his Secret Service detail. “A security nightmare,” one agent muttered at one point.
But Biden, basking in the middle of it all, seemed unconcerned.
“I wish our mom, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, were here today. She’d be so damn proud,” he said in the Windsor Bar, surrounded by a mix of relatives, Irish officials and local residents. “Louth held such a special place in her heart, it really did.”
As the trip wore on and the outside world fell away, Biden appeared to feel increasingly at home — a sentiment he expressed so frequently that some reporters and aides joked he might actually stay.
“I don’t know why the hell my ancestors left here. It’s beautiful,” he said on Wednesday.
“I only wish I could stay longer,” he told Irish lawmakers on Thursday.
“I’m not going home,” he said, admiring the Irish president’s residence.
Biden, however reluctantly, would eventually have to head home, set as he was to depart the Irish coast late Friday for his family’s adopted shores of Delaware. But well before then, he made permanent his intention to return.
“Your feet will bring you to where your heart is,” Biden wrote in the guestbook at the Irish president’s residence, in reference to a line he attributed to William Butler Yeats that he said his grandfather often quoted.
It was a slightly more poetic way of reiterating a pledge that he’d already made at the Windsor Bar, before striding back into the cold, where the crowds stood eager and waiting: “The bad news for all of you is, we’ll be back,” Biden said. “There’s no way to keep us out.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The 2019 road trip was a lollapalooza: Nine reporters took turns at the wheel and covered a total of 8,000 miles. We drove a counterclockwise arc around the contiguous U.S., starting in Houston and ending in Los Angeles. Over the better part of two months, we blogged, posted videos and maintained a real-time dashboard of key data.
The occasion for the new trip in November 2022 was an offer from Ford Motor Co. to borrow an F-150 Lightning for a week.
I got behind the wheel of Ford’s new electric truck and drove from my home in Seattle to visit family in Denver, and then headed back. This 2,888-mile trek across the intermountain West took nine days. The 2019 and 2022 routes covered different territory, except for a portion of Washington state.
Starting from Seattle, I followed Interstate 90 and I-82 to navigate Washington and plied I-84 across Oregon, Idaho and Utah. Then I took I-80 across Wyoming and turned south on I-25 into metro Denver. On the way back, I drove west on I-70 through Colorado and took I-15 north into Salt Lake City. From Utah, I rejoined I-84 and retraced our route back.
The F-150 Lightning deserves some comment. Ford supplied us with its second-most deluxe ride, a 2022 four-wheel-drive, dual-motor, extended-range model with 320 miles of range.
The truck’s handling was powerful and authoritative, smooth enough on the highway that my 9-year-old daughter could not only read but write in a journal in the backseat. Outside Denver I did a speed test, mashing the pedal to the metal from a dead stop. In energy-conserving eco mode and burdened with four passengers, the Lightning sped from zero to 60 in an impressive 4.3 seconds.
Here are eight lessons the trip provided on what’s changed, and what hasn’t, with EVs and EV charging in the last three years:
1. Despite billions of dollars, the charging system is largely the same
On the 2019 road trip, the spotty state of the charging network forced the driving team into certain patterns. We stuck with the big highways because they were the only ones with fast chargers that allowed for midday refueling. The decision on where to stay overnight was almost always determined by which cities had hotels with chargers — and those cities were rare. And we never passed up a fast-charging station, because the next station might disappoint.
On the new trip, all those rules still applied.
That was so despite the huge cash infusion for EV infrastructure in the past three years.
Between the end of 2019 and the end of 2022, U.S. spending included $600 million by federal, state and local governments; more than $4.3 billion by private companies; and more than $1.7 billion by electric utilities, according to data from Atlas Public Policy, an EV data consultancy. Much of that hasn’t yet resulted in chargers in the ground because the permitting and construction of chargers can take 18 months or more. Nonetheless, Atlas calculates that the number of U.S. public EV fast-charging ports nationwide has more than doubled, from about 14,000 to almost 30,000.
Our route included states like Washington and Colorado, which have lots of EVs and EV charging investments, and states that don’t, like Idaho and Wyoming. Both sets of states have seen strong growth in the number of charging networks. According to station counts from the Department of Energy, Utah and Washington have more than doubled charging stalls since 2019, and Colorado has tripled. Idaho increased its number by 35 percent and Wyoming by 45 percent.
But it doesn’t feel that way.
The rare, watering-hole-in-the-desert infrequency of charging stations still sets the rhythm of an EV road trip. Where the stations are determines where you stop and where you sleep. The prospect of the next station — and its quality — decides which direction you go at every fork in the road. Overall, they add a layer of anxiety to a journey that would be carefree in a gasoline-powered car.
Of the 21 commercial charging points used on the 2019 trip — including both highway fast chargers and overnight slow, or Level 2, chargers — only five had been installed in the last three years. Several had been upgraded.
It’s possible all this will soon start to change.
The Biden administration is funding charging stations every 50 miles along the interstate highway system as a result of the bipartisan infrastructure law that put $7.5 billion toward EV charging infrastructure. However, because it takes so long to permit and construct them, many may not come online until 2024 — shortly before President Joe Biden could be on the ballot again.
The funding has galvanized a wave of promised corporate investment. In the last half-year, businesses near highways — gas stations, truck stops and coffee shops — have announced plans to provide over 700 charging stations near highways. Last month, Tesla Inc. said it would open 3,500 highway charging points on its Supercharger network to non-Teslas.
However, the second road trip demonstrated that even an upgrade that looks big on paper can seem to vanish in a country as big and sprawling as the U.S. Its thousands of miles of roads can absorb hundreds of chargers without creating an atmosphere of complete coverage.
2. The players haven’t changed either
It is also noteworthy how the names on the chargers haven’t budged.
New aspirants are entering the EV charging space all the time and promise to shake things up, but there are few new brands on the roadways.
Electrify America — the charging network that Volkswagen AG was forced to create as part of a legal settlement for cheating on its diesel emissions — is still dominant. In the cities, charging station brands also mirror 2019: EVgo Inc.; Chargepoint Holdings Inc.; and Shell Recharge, which was called Greenlots before it was acquired by the oil company Shell PLC. At hotels, chargers had the same names as in the past, like SemaConnect and ClipperCreek.
Alongside these names is a network that has grown in size but essentially remained the same: Tesla. We used it only occasionally on our 2019 trip, when we were piloting Teslas, and tapped it not at all on this trip because F-150s were not yet welcome. Tesla’s network is divided into Superchargers, which deliver a flood of electrons on highways and at city nodes, and destination chargers, at places like hotels and tourist spots. Tesla’s charging network is far larger than the others, a reflection of the fact that most EVs sold in the U.S. are Teslas.
3. The variety and capability of EVs is changing fast
The 2019 electric road trip was unusual because we drove such a wide variety of EVs, including the Tesla Model 3 and Model S, the Chevrolet Bolt, the Kia Niro, the BMW i3, and the Nissan Leaf. That roster represented most of the new mass-market EVs that one could buy at the time.
Our 2022 adventure had its own variety, but of a different sort. I drove just one vehicle, but around me I saw a menagerie of EV models that didn’t exist three years ago.
Along with the familiar Bolts and Leafs, I spotted the Volkswagen ID.4, Ford Mach-E, Polestar 2, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 at charging stations, along with some luxury high-end rides, like the BMW iX, Mercedes EQS and Lucid Air.
The newbies included the F-150 Lightning. In 2019, road-ready electric trucks were just a dream. Now, our electric pickup sometimes charged alongside another, the Rivian R1T.
The F-150’s listed range — 320 miles — highlighted another shift: EVs are capable of traveling much farther than before. In 2019, there were three EV models with 300 miles or more of range. As of last year there were 14, according to DOE.
However, the vehicle fell short of its promise. My battery never exceeded 240 miles of range, even when full, according to the Lightning’s dashboard estimator. Range is often hindered by low temperatures. However, the November trip had spells that were not especially cold — temperatures in the desert West in November ranged from the low 20s to the low 50s Fahrenheit.
Another difference: In 2019, only one type of vehicle we drove, the Tesla, had a “frunk,” the area under the hood that in an electric vehicle can be converted to storage space if the automaker designs it that way.
Now frunks are becoming more common with more capability. On Thanksgiving Day in Denver, the frunk allowed for the cooking of dinner rolls and green beans in the driveway, with a steamer and toaster oven plugged into its electrical outlets.
4. Chargers are more reliable but have a long way to go
On the 2019 road trip, malfunctioning charging stations often thwarted our daily plans. This time, we experienced fewer chargers that were flat-out broken because of neglect or vandalism, but still found many that malfunctioned in nearly every way possible.
In metro Denver, a bank of chargers simply refused to recognize my F-150, no matter how many times I plugged in or fiddled with the app. In Ellensburg, Wash., the Shell Recharge station kept booting me off after just a few seconds.
Electrify America stations would, quite regularly, display the “spinning wheel of death” as it’s sometimes called — the spiraling icon that tells you a computer is struggling for unknown reasons. Sometimes the wheel would stop after 30 seconds or a couple of minutes, and the charging session would begin. Other times it wouldn’t.
There was almost always another charger at the plaza to try as a backup, but that usually involved the inconvenience of maneuvering to a different parking space.
At this stage in the technology’s evolution, getting a station to work means making an old-fashioned phone call to customer service. Often — but not always — the provider finds a solution. “Like your phone, sometimes you just need to restart it,” said Octavio Navarro, a spokesperson for Electrify America.
Even when a charger is working, the rate at which it refills the battery can vary widely — and mysteriously.
Take, again, the example of Electrify America. Its charging stations are designed to deliver power at two different power levels, 150 kilowatts and 350 kW. In session after session, the actual charging rate varied widely, and even at its peak often bore little relationship to the kiosk’s power rating. In Loveland, Colo., for example, a 350-kW station delivered to the Ford at a pokey 88 kW. Meanwhile, a neighboring Kia plugged into a 150 kW got close to its max, at 138 kW.
There are reasons for this variability, though “it’s hard to pinpoint what the issue is,” Navarro said.
Charging rates can vary depending on the outside temperature, how full or warm the battery is, what charging level the vehicle is designed to accept and whether another car is sharing the electric current. After reaching a certain state of charge, often 80 percent, the rate of charging drops dramatically, a measure taken to preserve the battery’s longevity.
Nearly everywhere the Lightning fast-charged, the charging rate would oscillate up and down. Electrons are finicky, which can be difficult to accept when one is used to the predictable output of a gasoline pump.
On our November trip, in every case but one, the charger eventually delivered. But erratic performance is not what Americans are striving for as they get into their expensive new EVs. They inevitably compare the experience with the gas pump, which typically operates without a hint of drama.
The Biden administration is seeking to address reliability problems by requiring chargers funded under the bipartisan infrastructure law to function 97 percent of the time.
Numerous studies, and my driving trek, suggest we are nowhere close to that goal.
Last year, the data analytics firm J.D. Power surveyed more than 11,500 EV drivers and found that one out of five visitors to an EV charging station came away without a charge. Almost three-quarters of those said it was because of a malfunctioning station.
5. Some stations are getting crowded, or will be soon
Traffic jams at charging kiosks used to be rare. In 2019, we experienced only one, at a Tesla station in Los Angeles. Elsewhere, the Nissan Leafs and Chevy Bolts were so infrequent that charging was a lonely endeavor.
In 2022, more often than not, we had company. A plaza with four or six outlets would typically play host to at least one other car. Economically that’s a good thing — in order for charging stations to make money and thrive, they need lots of usage. A busier plaza can also be a social forum, creating the opportunity for the still-rare EV drivers on the road to discuss their vehicles or charging problems, or engage in small talk about life on the road.
The shift was apparent in Perry, Utah, outside Salt Lake City, while a light snow fell across the Wasatch Range. The Electrify America station had four parking spaces, and four EVs — a Ford Mach-E, a Rivian, a Kia EV6 and a Mercedes — occupied each one.
The wait for the charging space was only a few minutes until the Rivian cleared out. But while waiting, it wasn’t difficult to imagine that a modest increase in the number of EVs could make that wait uncomfortably long. That could be a trying experience for drivers used to a quick gas station stop.
That prospect is becoming a worry in numerous quarters.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group of U.S. auto manufacturers, pointed out in a blog post last month that while the U.S. added 652,000 EVs since the start of 2022, it had added just 20,300 charging ports during the same period.
That equates to 32 EVs for each public port. The alliance pointed out that California, the nation’s leading EV state, has estimated that its charging network in 2030 will require roughly seven charge points for every EV.
“We need more of it,” John Bozzella, the CEO of AAI, wrote about charging infrastructure. “Much more.”
6. Finding stations is simpler
While the number of stations lags far behind the number of cars, in recent years chargers at least have become easier to find.
In 2019, planning an EV road trip in a non-Tesla meant getting cozy with PlugShare, the only viable app for finding charging stations. It was a little clunky, but its map held information on just about every U.S. charging station, along with crowdsourced reviews and a route-planning tool.
It didn’t have the features that Tesla had been offering for years through its smartphone app and onboard display. Tesla takes the additional steps of planning for its drivers a route on its extensive network, suggesting where to stop, how long to charge and how many plugs are available at that station.
Companies that aren’t Tesla — both automakers and charging networks — have strived to re-create that kind of simplicity and insight. It’s difficult because unlike Tesla, which owns and operates its network, the other “networks” are actually amalgams. They are coalitions of automakers, equipment providers, electric utilities and payment systems that share only fragmentary data with one another.
PlugShare hasn’t changed much since 2019, but a variety of other services are starting to offer better options. For example, two smartphone apps, A Better Routeplanner and Chargeway, offer real-time data on some charging networks.
So do automakers. From the dash of the F-150 and on the Ford app, real-time information was available on three charging networks — ChargePoint, EV Connect and Electrify America — and Tesla-like recommendations for where to charge and how long you need to dwell.
Such navigation systems aren’t flawless, however. Once late at night in Rock Springs, Wyo., the Ford dashboard navigator overrode my instructions to head to the address of a public charging station downtown and instead directed me to what seemed like a random parking lot. Turns out it was the local Ford dealership, which was closed and dark at that hour.
7. Payment is easier
In 2019, the charging network was just emerging from its subscription model. Drivers from that era needed membership cards for each of the networks they visited.
Today, those membership cards have receded into the background, and it’s often easy to pay for a charging session with a credit card or by authorizing a payment through a network app.
In fact, some charging networks are beginning to one-up the gas station in terms of convenience.
The “plug and charge” protocol, as it is known, is a virtual handshake between car and charger. If a particular EV is registered on the network and is linked to a form of payment, then charging starts immediately, no card or app required. Ford, because it owned the vehicle for the road trip and has a “plug and charge” relationship with Electrify America, paid for all of my sessions on that network.
8. There’s still not much to do while you wait
On both trips, another thing held true: Highway charging means wandering through a lot of Walmarts.
Electrify America is the most common plug near the highway, and Walmart is home to most of those plugs. The drill is almost always the same: Pull off the highway and look for Walmart’s blue sign. Seek out the neon-green glow of Electrify America’s boxy charger in the parking lot.
A lot of retailers are starting to think about how to make the 15 to 30 minutes of a charging session into experiences that are engaging for the customer and lucrative for business. Our road trip showed that these experiments are barely underway.
Besides Walmart, the F-150 also fast-charged at a Target, a Taco Bell, three gas stations, a downtown city parking lot, a traditional supermarket and a couple of cafes with varying levels of charm.
While the car gets its electron allotment, the options to pass the time are limited outside the walls of a big-box store. You may find a restaurant via a longish walk across a vast parking lot or across a busy intersection. Or there may be no sit-down dining options at all. Want a restroom break or a snack? Venture into the Walmart to dodge the shoppers and their carts.
It’s not an experience that’s tailored to the EV driver. Along with the paucity of roadside chargers and the frustrations at the charging screen, it is another piece of evidence that the electric road trip isn’t debugged, scaled up or ready for mass adoption in America.
A version of this report first ran in E&E News’ Energywire. Get access to more comprehensive and in-depth reporting on the energy transition, natural resources, climate change and more in E&E News.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
BELFAST — He came, he saw … and he got the hell out as fast as he could.
But Joe Biden’s brief visit to Northern Ireland across Tuesday night and Wednesday — 18 hours total, about half of them in bed — featured none of the gaffes that have previously blotted his diplomatic copybook. (That would change, however, after he headed south to the Republic of Ireland a few hours later.)
Indeed, the U.S. president successfully navigated Northern Ireland’s famously choppy political waters, avoided throwing a spotlight on the failure of its unity government — and even revealed an often-hidden and more hopeful reality: Off-camera, these supposedly warring politicians actually get on well.
Wednesday’s gathering at Ulster University in Belfast brought Northern Ireland’s opposing political leaders — including the key figure blocking the revival of power-sharing, Democratic Unionist chief Jeffrey Donaldson — side by side at last, along with a selfie-shooting Biden.
The president carefully avoided confronting Donaldson directly about his party’s yearlong blockade of the Northern Ireland Assembly, while dangling the prospect of billions of dollars of U.S. business investment if powersharing is restored.
And instead of extolling his famous Irish Catholic roots, Biden’s speech noted the English and Protestant elements of his family tree, and the disproportionate contribution of Ulster Scots immigrants to the foundation of the United States.
“The family ties, the pride, those Ulster Scots immigrants who helped found and build my country, they run very deep,” Biden told the audience.
“Men born in Ulster were among those who signed the Declaration of Independence in the United States, pledging their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for freedom’s cause … Your history is our history.”
If Biden had punches to throw in the Democratic Unionists’ direction, he pulled them.
Speaking to POLITICO, a visibly relieved Donaldson said afterward that he’d appreciated the president’s “measured and balanced remarks” — and distanced himself from his unionist colleagues’ pointed criticisms of Biden as a poodle to Irish nationalism and even the outlawed IRA.
He also rebuffed a claim by his predecessor as DUP leader, Arlene Foster, that Biden “hates the United Kingdom,” stating: “The United Kingdom and the United States have a strong alliance and we want to build on that.”
Donaldson added that he had been reassured by the president during a brief backstage conversation “that he respects the integrity of Northern Ireland, that he respects our ability to restore the [power-sharing] institutions on the basis that we respect what the Belfast Agreement said — that Northern Ireland remains an integral part of the United Kingdom, and there should be no barrier to trade within the United Kingdom.”
The backdrop to the speech had been one of surprising unity, with unionists and Irish nationalists chatting amicably in the audience against background music of soft jazz.
Sinn Féin’s Conor Murphy — the Irish republican party’s finance minister in the five-party government that collapsed in October because of DUP obstruction — laughed heartily alongside former Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt as the two discussed the ins and outs of power-sharing.
“The parties do work well together when they get the opportunity,” Murphy told POLITICO afterward.
He noted that Biden’s speech diplomatically avoided assigning blame for the Stormont impasse and focused on making a better Northern Ireland for today’s Ulster University students, who are too young to remember the three decades of bloodshed that ended following paramilitary cease-fires in the mid-1990s.
But Murphy added: “Biden’s pitch is about the future. The DUP don’t get that. If they think they somehow got off the hook here because they didn’t get a slap from an American president. Well, the rest of this society’s moving on with or without them.”
US President Joe Biden delivers a speech at the Windsor Bar in Dundalk, Ireland | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Most of those present agreed that, even though some leaders had wanted Biden to visit the Stormont parliament building overlooking Belfast, the president’s decision not to do so meant their failure to form a new government hadn’t become the central image of the visit.
“Of course it’s a missed opportunity. We don’t have an assembly and an executive,” said Naomi Long, leader of the center-ground Alliance Party and justice minister in the failed government.
“But to have gone to Stormont today when it isn’t operating would have been farcical,” she said.
The assembly’s caretaker speaker, Alex Maskey, also from Sinn Féin, agreed that in hindsight, Biden was probably right to have declined his own invitation to visit what is essentially Ground Zero of Northern Ireland’s political dysfunction.
“It ran the risk of underlining the problem,” Maskey said. “It’s just as well he didn’t go there because you’d be spending the next two or three days trying to repair negative media.”
While Biden strikingly spent less than a day in Belfast before crossing the border to spend the rest of the week touring the Republic of Ireland, he left behind his new envoy to Northern Ireland, Joe Kennedy III, who will spend the next 10 days building business and political contacts across the U.K. region.
Kennedy, making his first trip here, chatted and joked with DUP politicians, particularly Emma Little-Pengelly, a close Donaldson ally and former special adviser to previous party leaders Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson.
They discussed tourist highlights of Northern Ireland’s glorious Giant’s Causeway coast and the best ice cream parlors in its resort towns. (Kennedy made a note of Little-Pengelly’s favorite: Morelli’s of Portstewart.)
Kennedy insisted Biden hadn’t needed to spend too much time in Belfast talking to local leaders this week — because he’d just had all of them, including Donaldson, as guests to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day.
His own mission, Kennedy added, “is not about the United States government coming in to tell the people of Northern Ireland what they need to do.”
“They’ve got a vision of what that future can be,” he said. “We can support them.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Europe as a whole faces a host of rising political and security threats, alongside the constant demands of a grinding war in Ukraine with no clear end in sight and with newfound complications owing to leaks of strategic documents.
And as Biden departs for his first overseas trip since February, the challenges at home are multiplying: Deepening divides over the rise in gun violence, a court ruling aimed at further restricting abortion access, and lingering questions about his own political future.
The White House has scrambled to respond, spending recent days doing diplomatic damage control over the document leak, gaming out its legal response on abortion and seeking new ways to pressure the GOP on guns. Those efforts have taken increasing priority across various parts of the administration, officials said, adding that Biden will remain briefed as he travels abroad.
But those gathering storm clouds risk overshadowing a trip that Biden has looked forward to more than all others since winning the White House — and one that aides envisioned as an opportunity for the Irish Catholic president to play up his personal bond with Ireland and celebrate political progress there.
Biden on Wednesday will mark the 25th anniversary of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday Agreement that mostly ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. He then will travel to the Irish Republic for the first time since he traced his lineage through the countryside as vice president in 2016.
“This is something you can sense he’s hoping will go well,” said Robert Savage, an Irish history scholar at Boston College. “He loves Ireland, and he wants to bask in the limelight of an American success story.”
But that gauzy depiction may be at odds with what awaits Biden on the ground. When he lands Tuesday night in Belfast, he’ll arrive in a region that hasn’t had a working legislature for the past year, and whose leaders are deadlocked over Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit future. The U.K.’s exit from the European Union has complicated Ireland’s trade with Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K. That’s caused larger political dysfunction and fears of the collapse of the Good Friday accord and a return to bloody conflict.
The U.K. and EU have sought to resolve the issue with a proposed settlement called the Windsor Framework. But Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party, the Democratic Unionists, have opposed the framework in defiance of the U.K. It’s protesting the proposal by refusing to form a government in Northern Ireland under power-sharing rules that require it to jointly run the legislature with the Irish nationalist party Sinn Féin.
The terror threat is now considered “severe,” after the British government upgraded its assessment in late March. And there appears no imminent end to the political standoff that has already dented Northern Ireland’s finances and social services.
“No one wants to return to the period of the Troubles,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former senior State Department official. “But it’s not completely settled, there are still huge challenges, and you don’t want to play with fire here. And in some ways, that’s what Brexit has done.”
Biden has endorsed the Windsor Framework as an even-handed compromise. In a further show of support, he’s slated to meet Wednesday with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who clinched the deal in February but has struggled to sell it to Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party.
Yet even in a region where many fondly regard Biden as the most Irish U.S. president since John F. Kennedy, aides and experts say Biden is likely to avoid wading too deeply into the details of the ongoing dispute. Even as it coaxed the U.K. toward a post-Brexit compromise that kept the Good Friday Agreement intact, the White House held off on confirming that Biden would visit Northern Ireland until it was clear an agreement had been reached.
In a speech scheduled for Wednesday, Biden is expected to broadly hail the Windsor Framework while delicately skirting the underlying stalemate that’s paralyzed its government. In a further sign of the administration’s desire to limit the chance of any diplomatic blunders, Biden will steer clear of Northern Ireland’s parliament building and spend less than a day in Belfast before skipping south across the border. Even his meeting with Sunak has been scaled back, from the typical bilateral session to just a morning coffee.
“Biden’s role is to provide encouragement to all the parties in Northern Ireland to move forward,” said Daniel Mulhall, a longtime diplomat and Ireland’s former ambassador to the U.S. “I have no doubt that his speeches, when he appears in Belfast and Dublin and around the country, will be well attuned to the sensitivities.”
The trip could have served as a reprieve of sorts from domestic matters, ahead of Biden’s anticipated announcement that he will seek reelection. Instead, a pileup of high-profile issues is likely to follow him overseas.
Biden has yet to weigh in on the unprecedented arrest of Donald Trump, his former and possibly future chief rival for the presidency. His administration faces another adverse court ruling over abortion access, which Biden has vowed to protect despite his own complicated feelings on the issue. And the day before his departure came news of another mass shooting — this time in Kentucky, hours north of the Tennessee state capital where Republicans just finished expelling two Black lawmakers over their participation in gun violence protests.
Those developments could make it impossible for Biden to keep the focus on the imagery and sentimentality of his surroundings.
Biden is expected to make stops in Ireland’s County Louth and County Mayo, where he has distant relatives and had previously traced his family tree. He’s also slated to meet with Ireland’s president as part of a stay in Dublin highlighted by a speech to the country’s parliament.
A descendant of Irish immigrants mostly on his mother’s side, Biden frequently invokes his heritage as shaping his beliefs and setting him on his career path — accompanied as well by a sizable chip on his shoulder he’s acknowledged is tied to his upbringing in “an Irish Catholic neighborhood where it wasn’t viewed as being such a great thing.”
“Their values have been passed down, generation to generation,” Biden said of his ancestors during a St. Patrick’s Day event alongside Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar last month. “Growing up Irish American gave me the pride that spoke to both sides of the Atlantic, heart and soul that drew from the old and new.”
Though Biden has long been invested in Ireland’s politics — and the image of him as a departed but not forgotten son — he is relatively new to direct diplomacy with the country. Biden was not a central player in the talks leading up to the 1998 Good Friday agreement and has made only one prior trip to Belfast, in 1991.
He was an early member of the Friends of Ireland caucus that was founded in Congress more than 40 years ago to support peace efforts in Northern Ireland. His most prominent involvement came in the 1980s, when Biden helped lead opposition to a Reagan administration effort to make it easier for Britain to extradite members of the Irish Republican Army from the U.S.
Savage, who has written extensively about Irish political dynamics, said there’s no expectation Biden’s personal affection for Ireland will tilt America’s studied neutrality when it comes to the fraught U.K.-Ireland relationship. But in a nation that traditionally holds special admiration for American presidents, Biden represents a particularly welcome return to normal in the wake of the more turbulent, Brexit-sympathetic years of the Trump era.
“Biden’s seen as a stalwart, somebody that’s stuck by Ireland over the difficult years,” Savage said. “There’s a feeling that sanity has returned in Washington.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
DUBLIN — U.S. President Joe Biden will pay a five-day visit to both parts of Ireland next month to mark the 25th anniversary of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday peace accord, according to a provisional Irish government itinerary seen by POLITICO.
The plans, still being finalized with the White House, have the president arriving in Northern Ireland on April 11. That’s one day after the official quarter-century mark for the Good Friday Agreement, the peace deal designed to end decades of conflict that claimed more than 3,600 lives.
With Irish roots on both sides of his family tree, Biden has long taken an interest in brokering and maintaining peace in Northern Ireland. He has welcomed the recent U.K.-EU agreement on making post-Brexit trade rules work in the region — a breakthrough that has yet to revive local power-sharing at the heart of the 1998 accord.
According to two Irish government officials involved in planning the Biden visit itinerary, the president will start his stay overnight at Hillsborough Castle, southwest of Belfast, the official residence for visiting British royalty, as a guest of the U.K.’s Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris.
Then he’s scheduled to visit Stormont, the parliamentary complex overlooking Belfast, at the invitation of its caretaker speaker, Alex Maskey of the Irish republican Sinn Féin party.
That could prove controversial given that, barring a diplomatic miracle, the Northern Ireland Assembly and its cross-community government — a core achievement of the 1998 agreement — won’t be functioning due to a long-running boycott by the Democratic Unionists. That party has not yet accepted the U.K.-EU compromise deal on offer because it keeps Northern Ireland, unlike the rest of the U.K., subject to EU goods rules and able to trade more easily with the rest of Ireland than with Britain. Nonetheless, assembly members from all parties including the DUP will be invited to meet Biden there.
The president is booked to officiate the official ribbon-cutting of the new downtown Belfast campus of Ulster University. During his stay in Northern Ireland he also is expected to pay a visit to Queen’s University Belfast, where former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton serves as chancellor.
Next, the Irish government expects the presidential entourage to cross the border into the Republic of Ireland, potentially by motorcade, the approach last adopted by Bill Clinton during his third and final visit to Ireland as president in 2000.
This would allow Biden to pay a visit to one side of his Irish family tree, the Finnegans, in County Louth. Louth is midway between Belfast and Dublin. Biden previously toured the area in 2016 as vice president, when he met distant relatives for the first time and visited the local graveyard.
In Dublin, it is not yet confirmed whether Biden will deliver a speech at College Green outside the entrance of Trinity College. That’s the spot where Barack Obama delivered his own main speech during a one-day visit as president in 2011.
A White House advance team is expected in Dublin this weekend to scout that and other potential locations for a speech and walkabout. He isn’t expected to hold any functions at the Irish parliament, which begins a two-week Easter recess Friday.
Members of Ireland’s national police force, An Garda Síochána, have been told by commanders they cannot go on leave during the week of April 10-16 in anticipation of Biden’s arrival. The Irish expect U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to accompany the president and take part in more detailed talks with Northern Ireland’s leaders.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar plans to host the president and Blinken at Farmleigh House, a state-owned mansion previously owned by the Guinness brewing dynasty, inside Dublin’s vast Phoenix Park.
The final two days of Biden’s visit will focus on the other side of his Irish roots, the Blewitts of County Mayo, on Ireland’s west coast, which he also visited in 2016. Distant cousins he first met on that trip have since been repeated guests of the White House, most recently on St. Patrick’s Day.
White House officials declined to discuss specific dates or any events planned, but did confirm that Biden would travel to Ireland “right after Easter.” This suggests an April 11 arrival in line with the Irish itinerary. Easter Sunday falls this year on April 9 and, in both parts of Ireland, the Christian holiday is a two-day affair ending in Easter Monday.
Jonathan Lemire contributed reporting.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
A provocative Vladimir Putin made a surprise weekend visit to Russian-occupied Mariupol, one of the symbols of Ukrainian resistance.
Mariupol, a port city on the Sea of Azov, is located in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast and this is the Russian president’s first trip in the region since the start of his war against Ukraine in February 2022.
Mariupol fell to Russia last May, after the Kremlin failed to seize Kyiv. The battle for Mariupol was one of the war’s longest and bloodiest, as Moscow’s troops carried out some of their most notorious strikes. The Russian assaults included an attack on a maternity ward, which the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said was a war crime, and the bombing of a theater that was clearly marked as housing children.
It is the closest to the front lines Putin has been since the yearlong war began. The move is likely to be seen as particularly provoking to Ukrainians. The trip to Mariupol came after Putin travelled to Crimea on Saturday in an unannounced visit to mark the ninth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of the peninsula from Ukraine, the Kremlin said in a statement.
Putin’s visits come just after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for the Russian leader and top Russian official Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova over the forced transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia.
So far during Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin has largely remained inside the Kremlin, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made a number of trips to the battlefield to boost the morale of Kyiv’s troops.
Putin flew by helicopter to Mariupol, Russian new agencies reported, citing the Kremlin. Then he travelled around several parts of the city, driving a car and making stops to talk to residents.
The Kremlin said Putin also examined the coastline of Mariupol, visiting a yacht club and theater building. In the Nevsky district of Mariupol, Putin visited a family in their home. The new residential neighborhood has been built by Russian military with the first people moving in last September, according to media reports.
Residents have been “actively” returning, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin, who accompanied Putin, was cited as saying by Russian agencies. “The downtown has been badly damaged,” Khusnullin was reported as saying. “We want to finish [reconstruction] of the center by the end of the year, at least the facade part. The center is very beautiful.”
There were no immediate reaction from Kyiv to the visit.
The Kremlin has not commented yet on the ICC arrest warrant. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said: “The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin. No need to explain WHERE this paper should be used … ” concluding with a toilet paper emoji.
Moscow has previously said it did not recognize the court’s authority.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
