This week the Thursday quiz is flush with success, having been part of a team that won a pub quiz at the weekend. The quiz didn’t feature Kate Bush or Sparks, but there was a Doctor Who question, so victory had clearly been written in the stars. Will you be so lucky? You face 15 questions of varying degrees of topicality, stupidity and impossibility. Unlike at the weekend, when the Thursday quiz walked out of the pub an entire £9.50 richer, there are no prizes because this is just for fun. But let us know how you got on in the comments.
The Thursday quiz, No 105
If you think there has been an egregious error in one of the questions or answers, please feel free to email martin.belam@theguardian.com but remember the quiz master’s word is final, and this week he is a quiz champion and his team have won the league and he will have no truck with your nonsense.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Hovig Shehrian said that during the worst of the war in Aleppo, in 2014, he and his parents fled their home in a front-line area because of the shelling and sniper fire. For years, they moved from neighborhood to neighborhood to avoid the fighting.
“It was part of our daily routine. Whenever we heard a sound, we left, we knew who to call and what to do,” the 24-year-old said.
“But … we didn’t know what to do with the earthquake. I was worried we were going to die.”
Monday’s pre-dawn 7.8-magnitude quake, centered about 70 miles away in Turkey, jolted Aleppans awake and sent them fleeing into the street under a cold winter rain. Dozens of buildings across the city collapsed. More than 360 people were killed in the city and hundreds of others were injured. Workers were still digging three days later through the rubble, looking for the dead and the survivors. Across southern Turkey and northern Syria, more than 11,000 were killed.
Even those whose buildings still stood remain afraid to return. Many are now sheltering in schools. A Maronite Christian monastery took in more than 800 people, particularly women, children and the elderly, crammed into every room.
“Until now we are not sleeping in our homes. Some people are sleeping in their cars,” said Imad al-Khal, the secretary-general of Christian denominations in Aleppo, who was helping organize shelters.
For many, the earthquake was a new sort of terror — a shock even after what they endured during the war.
For Aleppo, the war was a long and brutal siege. Rebels captured the eastern part of the city in 2012, soon after Syria’s civil war began. For the next years, Russian-backed government forces battled to uproot them.
Syrian and Russian airstrikes and shelling flattened entire blocks. Bodies were found in the river dividing the two parts of the city. On the government-held western side, residents faced regular mortar and rocket fire from opposition fighters.
A final offensive led to months of urban fighting, finally ending in December 2016 with government victory. Opposition fighters and supporters were evacuated, and government control imposed over the entire city. Activist groups estimate some 31,000 people were killed in the four years of fighting, and almost the entire population of the eastern sector was displaced.
Aleppo became a symbol of how President Bashar Assad succeeded in clawing back most opposition-held territory around Syria’s heartland with backing from Russia and Iran at the cost of horrific destruction. The opposition holds a last, small enclave in the northwest, centered on Idlib province and parts of Aleppo province, which was also devastated by Monday’s quake.
But Aleppo never recovered. Any reconstruction has been by individuals. The city’s current population, no higher than 4 million, remains below its pre-2011 population of 4.5 million. Much of the eastern sector remains in ruins and empty.
Buildings damaged during the war or built shoddily during the fighting regularly collapse. One collapse, on Jan. 22, left 16 people dead. Another in September killed 11 people, including three children.
Aleppo was once the industrial powerhouse of Syria, said Armenak Tokmajyan, a non-resident fellow at Carnegie Middle East who is originally from the city. Now, he said, it’s economically marginalized, basic infrastructure in gas and electricity is lacking, and its population – which had hoped for improvements after fighting ended – only saw things get worse.
They have also now experienced the physical — and psychological — blow of the earthquake, Tokmajyan said. “It left them wondering, do they really deserve this fate or not? I think the trauma is big and it will take some time until they swallow this really bitter pill after (more than) 10 years of war.”
Rodin Allouch, an Aleppo native, covered the war for a Syrian TV station.
“I used to be on the front line, getting video shots, getting scoops. I was never scared. Rockets and shells were falling and everything, but my morale was high,” he recalled.
The earthquake was different. “I don’t know what the earthquake did to us exactly. We felt we were going to join God. It was the first time in my life I got scared.”
During the war, he had to leave his neighborhood in the eastern sector and rent an apartment on the western side. But the quake has displaced him yet again. As their building shook, he, his wife and four children fled to a nearby garden. Allouch said he won’t return until the building is inspected and repaired. It still stands, but has many cracks. The family will instead stay in a ground-floor store front nearby that he rented.
“It is safer to be down (on ground floor) if there is an earthquake,” he said, but complained that there is no fuel for heating. “Life is so miserable.”
Many others in Aleppo have been displaced more than once.
Farouk al-Abdullah fled his farm south of Aleppo city during the war. Since then, he has been living with his two wives, 11 children and 70-year-old mother in Jenderis, an opposition-held town in Aleppo province.
Their building there collapsed completely in the earthquake, though the entire family was able to escape.
He said the earthquake, with its destruction everywhere and its aftermath — watching rescue crews pull bodies out of the rubble — “are much more horrible than during the war.”
And while war may be senseless, those in it often have a cause they are sacrificing for and wrest some meaning out of the death and destruction.
The war’s devastation in Aleppo at least “is somehow a proof that we weren’t defeated easily,” said Wissam Zarqa, an opposition supporter from the city who was there throughout the siege and now lives in the Turkish capital Ankara.
“But the destruction of natural disasters is all pain and nothing else but pain.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“I have confronted death and defied it several times in the past because destiny and fate have always smiled on me,” Musharraf once wrote. “I only pray that I have more than the proverbial nine lives of a cat.”
Musharraf’s family announced in June 2022 that he had been hospitalized for weeks in Dubai while suffering from amyloidosis, an incurable condition that sees proteins build up in the body’s organs.
“Going through a difficult stage where recovery is not possible and organs are malfunctioning,” the family said. They later said he also needed access to the drug daratumumab, which is used to treat multiple myeloma. That bone marrow cancer can cause amyloidosis.
Shazia Siraj, a spokeswoman for the Pakistani Consulate in Dubai, confirmed his death and said diplomats were providing support to his family. The Pakistani military also offered its condolences.
“May Allah bless the departed soul and give strength to bereaved family,” a military statement said.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif similarly offered his condolences in a short statement.
“May God give his family the courage to bear this loss,” Sharif said.
Pakistan, a nation nearly twice the size of California along the Arabian Sea, is now home to 220 million people. But it would be its border with Afghanistan that would soon draw the U.S.′s attention and dominate Musharraf’s life a little under two years after he seized power.
Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden launched the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks from Afghanistan, sheltered by the country’s Taliban rulers. Musharraf knew what would come next.
“America was sure to react violently, like a wounded bear,” he wrote in his autobiography. “If the perpetrator turned out to be al-Qaida, then that wounded bear would come charging straight toward us.”
By Sept. 12, then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told Musharraf that Pakistan would either be “with us or against us.” Musharraf said another American official threatened to bomb Pakistan ”back into the Stone Age” if it chose the latter.
Musharraf chose the former. A month later, he stood by then-President George W. Bush at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to declare Pakistan’s unwavering support to fight with the United States against “terrorism in all its forms wherever it exists.”
Pakistan became a crucial transit point for NATO supplies headed to landlocked Afghanistan. That was the case even though Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency had backed the Taliban after it swept into power in Afghanistan in 1994. Prior to that, the CIA and others funneled money and arms through the ISI to Islamic fighters battling the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
The U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan saw Taliban fighters flee over the border back into Pakistan, including bin Laden, whom the U.S. would kill in 2011 at a compound in Abbottabad. They regrouped and the offshoot Pakistani Taliban emerged, beginning a yearslong insurgency in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The CIA began flying armed Predator drones from Pakistan with Musharraf’s blessing, using an airstrip built by the founding president of the United Arab Emirates for falconing in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. The program helped beat back the militants but saw over 400 strikes in Pakistan alone kill at least 2,366 people — including 245 civilians, according to the Washington-based New America Foundation think tank.
Though Pakistan under Musharraf launched these operations, the militants still thrived as billions of American dollars flowed into the nation. That led to suspicion that still plagues the U.S. relationship with Pakistan.
“After 9/11, then President Musharraf made a strategic shift to abandon the Taliban and support the U.S. in the war on terror, but neither side believes the other has lived up to expectations flowing from that decision,” a 2009 U.S. cable from then-Ambassador Anne Patterson published by WikiLeaks said, describing what had become the diplomatic equivalent of a loveless marriage.
“The relationship is one of co-dependency we grudgingly admit — Pakistan knows the U.S. cannot afford to walk away; the U.S. knows Pakistan cannot survive without our support.”
But it would be Musharraf’s life on the line. Militants tried to assassinate him twice in 2003 by targeting his convoy, first with a bomb planted on a bridge and then with car bombs. That second attack saw Musharraf’s vehicle lifted into the air by the blast before touching the ground again. It raced to safety on just its rims, Musharraf pulling a Glock pistol in case he needed to fight his way out.
It wasn’t until his wife, Sehba, saw the car covered in gore that the scale of the attack dawned on him.
“She is always calm in the face of danger,” he recounted. But then, “she was screaming uncontrollably, hysterically.”
Born Aug. 11, 1943, in New Delhi, India, Musharraf was the middle son of a diplomat. His family joined millions of other Muslims in fleeing westward when predominantly Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan split during independence from Britain in 1947. The partition saw hundreds of thousands of people killed in riots and fighting.
Musharraf entered the Pakistani army at age 18 and made his career there as Islamabad fought three wars against India. He’d launch his own attempt at seizing territory in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir in 1999 just before seizing power from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
Sharif had ordered Musharraf’s dismissal as the army chief flew home from a visit to Sri Lanka and denied his plane landing rights in Pakistan, even as it ran low on fuel. On the ground, the army seized control and after he landed Musharraf took charge.
Yet as ruler, Musharraf nearly reached a deal with India on Kashmir, according to U.S. diplomats at the time. He also worked toward a rapprochement with Pakistan’s longtime rival.
Another major scandal emerged under his rule when the world discovered that famed Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, long associated with the country’s atomic bomb, had been selling centrifuge designs and other secrets to countries including Iran, Libya and North Korea, making tens of millions of dollars. Those designs helped Pyongyang to arm itself with a nuclear weapon, while centrifuges from Khan’s designs still spin in Iran amid the collapse of Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.
Musharraf said he suspected Khan but it wasn’t until 2003 when then-CIA director George Tenet showed him detailed plans for a Pakistani centrifuge that the scientist had been selling that he realized the severity of what happened.
Khan would confess on state television in 2004 and Musharraf would pardon him, though he’d be confined to house arrest after that.
“For years, A.Q.’s lavish lifestyle and tales of his wealth, properties, corrupt practices and financial magnanimity at state expense were generally all too well known in Islamabad’s social and government circles,” Musharraf later wrote. “However, these were largely ignored. … In hindsight that neglect was apparently a serious mistake.”
Musharraf’s domestic support eventually eroded. He held flawed elections in late 2002 — only after changing the constitution to give himself sweeping powers to sack the prime minister and parliament. He then reneged on a promise to stand down as army chief by the end of 2004.
Militant anger toward Musharraf increased in 2007 when he ordered a raid against the Red Mosque in downtown Islamabad. It had become a sanctuary for militants opposed to Pakistan’s support of the Afghan war. The weeklong operation killed over 100 people.
The incident severely damaged Musharraf’s reputation among everyday citizens and earned him the undying hatred of militants who launched a series of punishing attacks following the raid.
Fearing the judiciary would block his continued rule, Musharraf fired the chief justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court. That triggered mass demonstrations.
Under pressure at home and abroad to restore civilian rule, Musharraf stepped down as army chief. Though he won another five-year presidential term, Musharraf faced a major crisis following former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in December 2007 at a campaign rally as she sought to become prime minister for the third time.
The public suspected Musharraf’s hand in the killing, which he denied. A later United Nations report acknowledged the Pakistani Taliban was a main suspect in her slaying but warned that elements of Pakistan’s intelligence services may have been involved.
Musharraf resigned as president in August 2008 after ruling coalition officials threatened to have him impeached for imposing emergency rule and firing judges.
“I hope the nation and the people will forgive my mistakes,” Musharraf, struggling with his emotions, said in an hourlong televised address.
Afterward, he lived abroad in Dubai and London, attempting a political comeback in 2012. But Pakistan instead arrested the former general and put him under house arrest. He faced treason allegations over the Supreme Court debacle and other charges stemming from the Red Mosque raid and Bhutto’s assassination.
The image of Musharraf being treated as a criminal suspect shocked Pakistan, where military generals long have been considered above the law. Pakistan allowed him to leave the country on bail to Dubai in 2016 for medical treatment and he remained there after facing a later-overturned death sentence.
But it suggested Pakistan may be ready to turn a corner in its history of military rule.
“Musharraf’s resignation is a sad yet familiar story of hubris, this time in a soldier who never became a good politician,” wrote Patterson, the U.S. ambassador, at the time.
“The good news is that the demonstrated strength of institutions that brought Musharraf down — the media, free elections and civil society — also provide some hope for Pakistan’s future. It was these institutions that ironically became much stronger under his government.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Islamabad: Pakistan’s former military dictator General Pervez Musharraf, the architect of the Kargil War, toppled the democratically-elected government in a bloodless military coup in 1999 and ruled the country for nine years during which he survived numerous assassination bids.
Born in a middle-class family of Urdu-speaking Mohajir parents in Delhi in 1943, Musharraf migrated to Pakistan with his family after the Partition in 1947.
Pakistan’s last military dictator died on Sunday as a forgotten man in politics after spending his final years in self-exile in the UAE to avoid criminal charges against him in his country.
He died in the Gulf country after a prolonged illness.
During his stint as the head of the Pakistan government, Musharraf allied with America in the war against terror after the 9/11 attacks on the US and cracked down on Islamist groups and banned dozens of radical outfits, a move that angered radicals. He even escaped assassination attempts in later years.
Musharraf, who was appointed the chief of army staff by the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif in 1998, engineered the Kargil War that took place months after Sharif signed a historic peace accord with his Indian counterpart Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Lahore.
After his failed misadventure in Kargil, Musharraf deposed Sharif in a bloodless coup and ruled Pakistan from 1999 to 2008 in various positions first as the chief executive of Pakistan and later as the President.
“‘Pervez Musharraf, Former Pakistani President, Dies of Rare Disease’: once an implacable foe of India, he became a real force for peace 2002-2007,” former minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor said in a tweet.
“I met him annually in those days at the @UN & found him smart, engaging & clear in his strategic thinking. RIP,” Tharoor said.
Musharraf, who announced elections in 2008 under domestic and international pressure, was forced to resign as president following the polls and went into self-imposed exile in Dubai.
In 2010, he formed his own party, the All Pakistan Muslim League and declared himself the party president. He voiced his opinion of actively taking part in Pakistan’s politics sometime in the future.
He returned to Pakistan in March 2013 to contest polls after living in self-exile for about five years but was hauled to court in different cases – including the 2007 assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto, treason under article 6 of Pakistan Constitution and murder of Bugti tribe chief Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti.
In 2006, on the orders of Gen Musharraf, the Pakistan Army killed the former junior interior minister and Governor of Balochistan Bugti and over two dozen of his tribesmen, leading to widespread unrest in the area and a surge in the Baloch nationalist sentiment in the province.
In 2019, Musharraf was sentenced to death in absentia by a special court which found him guilty of high treason, for imposing a state of emergency on November 3, 2007, by keeping the country’s constitution in abeyance.
The judgement angered the country’s powerful Army which has ruled over Pakistan for most of the period since its existence. It was the first time a former top military official had faced such a sentence for treason in Pakistan. The death sentence was later annulled by the Lahore High Court.
Musharraf, who was living in Dubai since March 2016, was also declared a fugitive in the Benazir Bhutto murder case and Red Mosque cleric killing case.
During his tenure, Pakistan saw some structural reforms – ranging from the economic and social sectors to administrative and political restructuring.
Musharraf visited India for the failed Agra summit in 2001 and made two more visits in 2005 as President to watch an India-Pakistan One-day Cricket match and in 2009 to attend a media event after shedding power.
Musharraf, the second of three brothers, spent his early years in Turkey, from 1949 to 1956, as his father Syed Musharrafu-ud-din was posted in Ankara.
On his return from Turkey, Musharraf studied at Saint Patrick’s High School, Karachi, and then at FC College, Lahore. He joined the Pakistan Military Academy in 1961 and was commissioned into the Artillery Regiment in 1964.
He fought in the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965 as a young officer, and also participated in the Indo-Pak War of 1971 as a Company Commander in the Commando Battalion.
Musharraf rose to the rank of General and was appointed as the Chief of Army Staff on October 7, 1998, by then prime minister Sharif.
He was given additional charge of the Chairman Joint Chiefs Staff Committee on April 9, 1999. Six months later, he toppled the Sharif government and became the head of the state designated as Chief Executive.
Musharraf got married in 1968 and has two children-a son and a daughter.
LONDON — Whisper it softly, but the Brexit endgame has arrived.
Eighteen months after Brussels and London reopened talks on the contentious Northern Ireland protocol — and more than three years after Britain actually left the EU — panicked officials on both sides of the English Channel are frantically trying to manage expectations as reports of a technical-level deal between the two sides emerge.
“They’re still in calls with the EU, but it’s literally just lawyers tidying up bits of text,” one senior British government official said Wednesday, in reference to the U.K. negotiating team. “We’re done.”
Multiple reports suggest U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak now has a draft technical deal on his desk to consider, despite a wave of both official and unofficial denials from politicians and diplomats on all sides.
“I suspect it is more the technical shape of a deal than a deal per se,” said a second person close to the talks on the U.K. side, “which might be giving them wriggle room to deny it.”
Denials of an outright agreement were still coming thick and fast Wednesday night after the Times reported that London and Brussels had indeed reached a deal on the key customs and governance disputes that have dogged talks over the protocol. Crucially — and most contentiously — its front page story suggested the EU has given ground on the role its top court will play in resolving future disputes.
That followed earlier reporting late last week by Bloomberg News that technical-level solutions on customs, state aid and checks were indeed within touching distance.
Talks on smoothing the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol have been ongoing since the summer of 2021, with negotiators long targeting a deal this month, ahead of an expected visit to Ireland by U.S. President Joe Biden in April.
The protocol arrangement, agreed as part of the Brexit divorce deal, sees Northern Ireland continue to follow the EU’s customs union and single market rules, in an effort to avoid a politically-sensitive hard border with the neighboring Republic of Ireland, which remains an EU member state.
Yet Northern Ireland’s unionist politicians have long objected to the protocol, with the Democratic Unionist Party boycotting power-sharing and arguing that checks on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland effectively separate the region from the rest of the U.K. They’re backed by critics in Sunak’s governing Conservative Party who resent the Court of Justice of the European Union’s place in protocol governance.
Selling a deal to those domestic audiences represents an almighty political challenge for a prime minister already battling to keep his fractured party together.
The official line
Officially, both sides are sticking to the script and insisting that talks continue.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters Wednesday: “I’m very sorry, but I cannot give partial elements — because you never know in the very end how the package looks like.”
In Downing Street, Sunak’s official spokesperson tried to steer journalists away from what he called “speculative” reporting.
“No deal has been agreed, there is still lots of work to do on all areas, with significant gaps remaining between the U.K. and EU positions,” the spokesperson said. “Talks are ongoing on potential solutions including on goods.”
But the senior U.K. official quoted before said the message from No. 10 that negotiations are ongoing only applied at a political level.
They added: “It’s now up to politicians to decide ‘yay’ or ‘nay.’ Rishi could have further technical talks with Ursula von der Leyen and [EU Brexit point-man] Maroš Šefčovič and stuff like that, but officials are done. It’s plain as day.”
According to the second person close to the talks, Sunak has been receiving regular updates on the evolving technical shape of the deal.
“As far as I know, he hasn’t given it the green light yet,” they said. “But it is all being quite ‘secret squirrel’ in the [U.K.] Cabinet Office. So I don’t think many people will be fully in the loop.”
In Brussels and in London, EU diplomats were busy rubbishing reports of an imminent resolution, while acknowledging that information on the state of play is being kept tight. European ambassadors were briefed on Wednesday morning that a breakthrough is yet to be reached, and that the CJEU issue remains particularly tricky.
Even inside the U.K., claim and counter-claim were flying. Another British official close to the talks said it was “just wrong [that a deal] is close,” with “fundamental” issues outstanding “including making sure there isn’t a border.” They would not, the person added, “expect anything in the short term.”
One EU diplomat summed up the mood: “If somebody tells you they know what’s happening, they’re lying.”
In truth, a final agreement on Brexit has never looked so close.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Love Star Wars? Hate Vladimir Putin? Then there’s good news as Luke Skywalker is to start selling signed posters to raise cash for maintaining the Ukrainian army’s drone supply.
“We decided to sign Star Wars posters, a limited amount,” Mark Hamill, the actor who played Skywalker in the iconic movies, told POLITICO in an exclusive interview. “For real hardcore collectors — especially those that have disposable income — you can get way more money … than you would imagine.”
Exactly how the posters will be put up for sale is yet to be finalized, but the idea of “having hundreds and thousands of people enter [a competition or auction], that’s smart,” Hamill said.
The poster sale is expected to start next week and comes ahead of the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine on February 24, with Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov saying Russia is planning a major offensive.
This really is the return of the Jedi — Hamill revealed he hasn’t sold autographed items since 2017, when “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” came out. “It’s just not something I do,” he said, adding that he is happy to do it to support Ukraine, whose ongoing fight against Russia is “nothing short of inspirational.”
Hamill said that something he learned from the world(s) of Star Wars is doing the “right thing for the good of everyone, rather than being all about self-interest,” adding that comparing the two worlds shouldn’t trivialize “the true horrors of what Ukrainians face.”
“One is really a fairy tale for children, originally that’s what Star Wars was. And the reality, the stark reality of what’s going on in Ukraine, is harrowing.”
Ukrainian servicemen fly a drone on the outskirts of Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine | Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images
The money raised from the sale of the posters will go to the Ukrainian fundraising platform United24. Hamill became an ambassador for the platform’s “Army of Drones” project in September after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy personally asked him to join the fight against “the empire of evil,” as he labeled Russia — a reference to the Galactic Empire, the brutal dictatorship led by evil Palpatine in the Star Wars saga.
The actor says he is “thrilled” that the fundraising project has evolved to this “massive, worldwide event,” saying that “anything I can do, however small it is, is something I feel obligated to do.”
The “Army of Drones” involves drone procurement, maintenance and training, as the drones are used to monitor the frontline, according to the project’s website. “Drones are so vital in this conflict. They are the eyes in the sky. They protect the border, they monitor,” Hamill said.
The project is a joint venture between the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Ministry of Digital Transformation and United24. The latter was set up by Zelenskyy and has so far raised more than €252 million.
Other celebrities — including the band Imagine Dragons and the singer and actress Barbra Streisand — have also been named ambassadors for the platform.
“The light will win over darkness. I believe in this, our people believe in this,” Zelenskyy told Hamill during a video call last year, thanking him for supporting the Ukrainian people.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the amount of money raised by United24.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
It’ll be Harris’ second go in front of the conference, taking place Feb. 17-19.
Just ahead of the one-year anniversary of the invasion, Harris will get a chance to update transatlantic-minded officials and experts on the progress the U.S.-led Western resistance has made and potentially preview further steps. Ukraine, for instance, has made no secret about its desire to field fighter jets, including F-16s, from the United States.
Last year, the vice president gave a well-received speech just five days before Vladimir Putin sent his forces across the border into Ukraine. Harris, echoing her boss’ sentiments, vowed that the United States would stand up for Kyiv and the broader transatlantic alliance under such dire circumstances.
“If Russia further invades Ukraine, the United States, together with our Allies and partners, will impose significant and unprecedented economic costs,” she said.
A White House official said there’s no travel to announce for the vice president.
The news of Harris’ involvement in the event comes as rumors grow that Biden might make a visit to Europe in commemoration of the one-year mark of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The White House has yet to confirm any discussions of such a trip, let alone say that a flight over the Atlantic is officially on the schedule.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
In a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO, the House’s former top attorney described his tenure battling a former president who tested the limits of executive power at every turn, resisting efforts at accountability in ways that previous chief executives had not. But he has faith that his work helped to stem future presidential attempts to push constitutional boundaries, lending more power to lawmakers.
“I just feel like the Biden administration and future administrations are not going to act like the Trump administration,” Letter said. “They’re not going to show such ignorance of our system and think that the executive branch can ignore the legislative branch. That’s not the way it works.”
Until the Capitol attack, Letter was convinced that his role in Trump’s first impeachment would’ve been the pinnacle of a job already marked by extraordinary legal confrontations. That changed on Jan. 6.
Letter was returning to the House floor from some basement vending machines when he ran into Speaker Nancy Pelosi being whisked from the Capitol under heavy guard. Don’t go back up there, one official told him. An angry mob had breached the building.
But Letter, in a panic, said he had to retrieve several giant binders that were full of sensitive strategy and scripts for the day’s proceedings. He opted to forgo evacuating with Pelosi and instead raced back to the chamber.
“I was the last person in before they locked the doors,” Letter recalled.
The attack on the Capitol led to the Jan. 6 select committee, where the House’s then-top attorney charted a legal strategy that Letter now describes as one of the hallmarks of his tenure.
Through his work on that panel, Letter secured at least two streams of information that became a core element of the committee’s voluminous findings: Trump’s confidential White House records and the Chapman University emails of attorney John Eastman, an architect of the then-president’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.
Letter also won court fights to obtain telephone records from Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward, who took part in Trump world’s plan to send false electors to Congress. And he helped direct the House’s strategy to hold certain Trump advisers in contempt of Congress, which resulted in prosecutions of Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon.
“We had a whole enormous number of people that, as we now know, were putting together this massive, not just a conspiracy, but a whole bunch of conspiracies, to attack our democracy,” Letter said.
Additionally, Letter played a role in the select committee’s decision to subpoena five sitting Republican members of Congress to testify before the Jan. 6 select committee, including now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
He has moved on now that Republicans have gained the House majority, taking a new job as chief legal officer for Brady: United Against Gun Violence. That role bears a more significant connection to his Jan. 6 committee work than it may appear, in his view. Brady, he noted, had previously written a report that credited D.C.’s strict gun laws with limiting the damage rioters caused; if they had been able to stockpile firearms closer to the Capitol, it could’ve been much worse, the report said.
And he still remembers the Capitol attack vividly. Letter said he was one of the last to leave the House chamber on Jan. 6, recalling the scene in which Capitol Police officers aimed their firearms at a rear door that the pro-Trump mob had attempted to breach. He finally evacuated at around the same moment one rioter, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer.
Letter doesn’t remember hearing the shot. But that same evening, as he was processing his own trauma, he was still acting as an attorney — representing a sergeant-at-arms official who had attempted to administer medical aid to Babbitt and faced questions about the incident from Washington-area law enforcement.
He’d kept doing his job right after being evacuated from the chamber, too. Letter joined lawmakers at a safe location in the Capitol complex, where he continued to draft scripts to rebut potential challenges, should the House reconvene and continue the session (as it did later that night). But he noticed something else that bothered him — a group of House Republicans were crowded 10 feet away and refusing to wear masks, despite the raging pandemic and the limited availability of vaccines at the time.
“I’m not going to get killed by insurrectionists,” he remembers thinking. “I’m going to die of Covid.”
One of the most interesting challenges for the House counsel, Letter said, is having to technically be the lawyer for every member of the chamber — even those who would later battle the Jan. 6 select committee.
Though the position is filled by the speaker, the House general counsel is often called upon to represent individual members in legal disputes. Letter remembers successfully representing Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) in a First Amendment case, even though she had also been considered one of Trump’s enablers in the election gambit.
But when lawmakers aim legal disputes at each other — as when McCarthy sued to block Pelosi from implementing a system of “proxy voting” amid the pandemic, or when Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) sued to overturn House fines for refusing to wear masks on the floor — Letter defaulted to representing the speaker and the institution as a whole.
Overall, Letter says he believes his efforts helped empower the institution of the House by putting teeth behind its subpoenas and earning court rulings that reinforced Congress’ power to obtain information to support potential legislation.
Republicans, who now hold the gavels of powerful investigative committees that Letter had previously aided, have fretted that some of the rulings during Letter’s tenure could cut against the House’s authority. One example the GOP notes is Democrats’ pursuit of Trump’s financial information through his accounting firm, which resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that established a test for the type of private information Congress could request from a sitting president.
While Letter acknowledged the criticism, he said he considered that case a “major victory” for Congress. The Supreme Court endorsed lawmakers’ sweeping power to demand information, he argued, and agreed they could obtain a president’s private information under specific circumstances, which the House ultimately met in that instance.
Mostly, he said, the rulings he pursued all the way to the Supreme Court were a function of Trump’s willingness to battle Congress more aggressively than any of his predecessors. But Letter hopes that marked a unique moment in history.
“I would hope that we’ll go back to a system where there are nowhere near as many fights in court,” he said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
