Trump makes triumphant return to Washington, meets with Biden
Donald Trump made a victor’s return to Washington on Wednesday, visiting the White House for an Oval Office meeting with President Joe Biden and committing to a smooth transition of power as the president-elect moves quickly to build out his new administration.
Sitting in front of a crackling fire, the rivals shook hands as reporters looked on.
Biden called Trump “Mr. president-elect and former president” before settling on “Donald.”
“Congratulations,” the Democrat told the Republican. “I look forward to having, like they said, a smooth transition,” Biden said.
Trump replied, “Thank you very much,” saying that “politics is tough. And it’s, in many cases, not a very nice world. But it is a nice world today, and I appreciate it very much.”
Neither man answered questions shouted by the media. Each was joined by his chief of staff for the private meeting that is a traditional part of the peaceful handoff of power, but a ritual that Trump declined to participate in four years ago after losing to Biden.
Trump’s win in last week’s election completes a political comeback that has seen him once again become the unchallenged head of the Republican Party.
Republicans wrested the Senate majority from Democrats and are on the cusp of keeping control of the House, with just two more seats needed to win, according to projections from The Associated Press.
Transition papers not signed
Back in Washington for the first time since his election victory, Trump received a standing ovation from House Republican members, many of whom took cellphone videos as the 78-year-old president-elect ran through their party’s victories up and down the ballot.
It’s a stunning return to the seat of America’s government for Trump, who departed Washington in January 2021 a diminished, politically defeated leader after the attack on the Capitol perpetrated by many of his supporters. He was impeached by the House an unprecedented second time as a result, though he was acquitted at a Senate trial.
“He is the comeback king,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican representing Louisiana, before Trump’s arrival. “We owe him a great debt of gratitude.”
While Trump was heralded, Republican senators met for a closed-door leadership election in the three-way race to replace longtime leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota prevailed over Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas.
Thune, who is 63 and in his fourth Senate term, has promised to work closely with Trump despite differences the two have had over the years. Thune will be a crucial part of the incoming president’s efforts to push through his policy agenda.
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After his election win in 2016, Trump met with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office and called it “a great honour.” But he soon was back to heaping insults on Obama, including accusing his predecessor — without evidence — of having wire-tapped him during the 2016 campaign.
Four years later, Trump disputed his election loss to Biden, and he has continued to make false claims about widespread voter fraud. He didn’t invite Biden, then the president-elect, to the White House and he left Washington without attending Biden’s inauguration. It was the first time that had happened since Andrew Johnson skipped Ulysses S. Grant’s swearing-in 155 years ago.
The Biden administration did not receive as substantial a transition process as other incoming teams in the past, even as the U.S. was ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic before vaccines were available.
This transition now appears partially stalled. Trump’s team, which has already announced some members of the incoming president’s cabinet, has yet to sign agreements that would lead to office space and government equipment as well as access to government officials, facilities and information, according to the White House.
Biden insists that he’ll do everything he can to make the transition to the next Trump administration go smoothly.
Published at Fri, 01 Nov 2024 08:11:21 +0000
Israeli aid agency says it has allowed supplies into Gaza, blaming delays on humanitarian groups
An Israeli government agency tasked with co-ordinating aid deliveries to Gaza is rejecting figures reported by international organizations on the number of supply trucks entering the war-torn enclave, a day after Israel failed to meet the United States’ deadline to allow in more humanitarian assistance.
Shimon Friedman, a spokesperson for the agency, said COGAT oversees and co-ordinates with each aid truck entering any of the five crossings into the Gaza Strip, including the Kissufim crossing that opened Tuesday.
“The only organization really with a full view of what is coming into the Gaza Strip is COGAT, and the numbers are not what they are representing,” he told CBC News Wednesday, referring to international organizations.
Instead, Friedman placed the blame on those same organizations, saying they aren’t “doing enough to pick up that aid and distribute it.”
The Biden administration had set a minimum requirement of 350 supply trucks being allowed entry into Gaza each day, something that a 19-page report published Tuesday by eight aid groups, including Oxfam, Save the Children and the Norwegian Refugee Council, alleges Israel has failed to do.
The report said just over 1,000 total trucks had crossed into Gaza, an average of just 42 trucks a day, according to figures reported during the last week of the 30-day U.S. review period, which ended on Tuesday.
Israel says more aid trucks entering Gaza
But Friedman denied the figures, saying COGAT sees around 50 trucks entering the north and between 100 to 150 trucks entering the southern enclave each day. He told CBC News that there are between 700 and 900 aid trucks waiting on the Gazan side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing.
“That means aid that has come in through Israel, gone through security inspection,” he said. “The international organizations need to pick it up and distribute it — and it’s just sitting there.”
He noted that Israel has placed restrictions on closed trucks entering Gaza, asking international groups to use “open” trucks and accusing Hamas and other militant groups of using closed trucks to move people rather than supplies.
COGAT said humanitarian organizations involved in the report had not co-ordinated with, or sought information from, the military before filing the report and thus had produced a conclusion based on “partial information.”
The U.S. deadline expired just days after global food security experts said there was a “strong likelihood that famine is imminent” in parts of northern Gaza.
“Israel not only failed to meet the U.S. criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in northern Gaza,” aid groups said in the Tuesday report. “That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago.”
The IDF rejected that assertion as it pressed its military offensive against Hamas militants in the area. It said Tuesday it had allowed hundreds of packages of food and water into Jabalia and Beit Hanoun, two areas under siege in the far north of Gaza. The Palestinian civil defence agency said three trucks carrying flour, canned food and water reached Beit Hanoun.
It was only the second delivery allowed into the area since the beginning of October. A smaller shipment was let in last week, though not all of it reached shelters in the north, according to the UN.
Ceasefire efforts stall
Efforts by Arab mediators, Qatar and Egypt, backed by the United States, have so far failed to end the war in Gaza, with Hamas and Israel trading the blame for the lack of progress.
Speaking on Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Israel “has accomplished the goals that it set for itself” by taking out Hamas’s leadership and ensuring the group is unable to launch another massive attack. “This should be a time to end the war,” he said.
“We also need to make sure we have a plan for what follows,” he said, “so that if Israel decides to end the war and we find a way to get the hostages out, we also have a clear plan so that Israel can get out of Gaza and we make sure that Hamas is not going back in.”
Meanwhile, Israeli military strikes killed at least 22 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, as Israeli forces deepened their incursion into Beit Hanoun town in the north, forcing most remaining residents to leave.
Residents said Israeli forces besieged shelters housing displaced families and the remaining population, which some estimated at a few thousand, ordering them to head south through a checkpoint separating two towns and a refugee camp in the north from Gaza City.
Men were held for questioning, while women and children were allowed to continue toward Gaza City, residents and Palestinian medics said.
Northern Gaza incursion deepens
Israel’s campaign in the north of Gaza, and the evacuation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the area, has fuelled claims from Palestinians that it is clearing the area for use as a buffer zone and potentially for a return of Jewish settlers.
“The scenes of the 1948 catastrophe are being repeated. Israel is repeating its massacres, displacement and destruction,” said Saed, 48, a resident of Beit Lahiya, who arrived in Gaza City on Wednesday.
“North Gaza is being turned into a large buffer zone, Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing under the sight and hearing of the impotent world,” he told Reuters via a chat app.
Saed was referring to the 1948 Middle East Arab-Israeli war which gave birth to the state of Israel and saw the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their home towns and villages in what is now Israel.
The Israeli military has denied any such intention, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he does not want to reverse the 2005 withdrawal of settlers from Gaza. Hardliners in his government have talked openly about going back.
It said forces have killed hundreds of Hamas militants in Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun during its new military offensive, which began more than a month ago. Hamas and the Islamic Jihad armed wing claimed killing several Israeli soldiers during ambushes and anti-tank rocket fire.
Attacks across Gaza Strip continue
Medics said five people were killed in an Israeli strike that hit a group of people outside Kamal Adwan Hospital near Beit Lahiya, while five others were killed in two separate strikes in Nuseirat in central Gaza Strip where the army began a limited raid two days ago.
In Rafah, near the border with Egypt, one man was killed and several others were wounded in an Israeli airstrike, while three Palestinians were killed in two separate Israeli airstrikes in Shejaia suburb of Gaza City, medics added.
Later on Wednesday, an Israeli strike on a house in western Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip killed eight people, medics said.
Hamas-led gunmen attacked Israel last October, killing some 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
More than 43,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year, Palestinian health officials say, and much of Gaza has been reduced to a wasteland of wrecked buildings and piles of rubble, where more than two million Gazans are seeking shelter in makeshift tents and facing shortages of food and medicines.
Published at Wed, 13 Nov 2024 14:28:21 +0000