BOSTON — Plans to bring back rent control to Massachusetts, roll back the state’s personal income tax, repeal the MBTA Communities Act, ditch the state’s gas tax and require voters to show ID to cast ballots are among a record number of proposed referendums inching toward the 2026 ballot.
On Wednesday, Attorney General Andrea Campbell certified 44 proposed initiatives filed by individuals and groups seeking voter approval for changes in state law.
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1883-1945 – Cochin-China, southern Vietnam, and Annam and Tonkin, central and northern Vietnam, along with Cambodia and Laos make up colonial empire French Indochina.
1946 – Communists in the north begin fighting France for control of the country.
1949 – France establishes the State of Vietnam in the southern half of the country.
1951 – Ho Chi Minh becomes leader of Dang Lao Dong Vietnam, the Vietnam Worker’s Party, in the north.
North Vietnam was communist. South Vietnam was not. North Vietnamese Communists and South Vietnamese Communist rebels, known as the Viet Cong, wanted to overthrow the South Vietnamese government and reunite the country.
1954 – North Vietnamese begin helping South Vietnamese rebels fight South Vietnamese troops, thus BEGINS the Vietnam conflict.
April 30, 1975 – South Vietnam surrenders to North Vietnam as North Vietnamese troops enter Saigon, ENDING the Vietnam conflict.
The war was estimated to cost about $200 billion.
Anti-war opinion increased in the United States from the mid-1960s on, with rallies, teach-ins, and other forms of demonstration.
North Vietnamese guerrilla forces used the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of jungle paths and mountain trails, to send supplies and troops into South Vietnam.
The bombing of North Vietnam surpassed the total tonnage of bombs dropped on Germany, Italy and Japan in World War II.
Today, Vietnam is a communist state.
Source: Dept. of Defense
8,744,000 – Total number of US Troops that served worldwide during Vietnam 3,403,000 served in Southeast Asia 2,594,000 served in South Vietnam
The total of American servicemen listed as POW/MIA at the end of the war was 2,646. As of April 12, 2024, 1,577 soldiers remain unaccounted for.
Battle: 47,434 Non-Battle: 10,786 Total In-Theatre: 58,220
1.3 million – Total military deaths for all countries involved
1 million – Total civilian deaths
September 2, 1945 – Vietnam declares independence from France. Neither France nor the United States recognizes this claim. US President Harry S. Truman aids France with military equipment to fight the rebels known as Viet Minh.
May 1954 – The Battle of Dien Bien Phu results in serious defeat for the French and peace talks in Geneva. The Geneva Accords end the French Indochina War.
July 21, 1954 – Vietnam signs the Geneva Accords and divides into two countries at the 17th parallel, the Communist-led north and US-supported south.
1957-1963 – North Vietnam and the Viet Cong fight South Vietnamese troops. Hoping to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, the United States sends more aid and military advisers to help the South Vietnamese government. The number of US military advisers in Vietnam grows from 900 in 1960 to 11,000 in 1962.
1964-1969 – By 1964, the Viet Cong, the Communist guerrilla force, has 35,000 troops in South Vietnam. The United States sends more and more troops to fight the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, with the number of US troops in Vietnam peaking at 543,000 in April 1969. Anti-war sentiment in the United States grows stronger as the troop numbers increase.
August 2, 1964 – Gulf of Tonkin – The North Vietnamese fire on a US destroyer anchored in the Gulf of Tonkin. After US President Lyndon Johnson falsely claims that there had been a second attack on the destroyer, Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which authorizes full-scale US intervention in the Vietnam War. Johnson orders the bombing of North Vietnam in retaliation for the Tonkin attack.
August 5, 1964 – Johnson asks Congress for the power to go to war against the North Vietnamese and the Communists for violating the Geneva Accords against South Vietnam and Laos. The request is granted August 7, 1964, in a Congressional joint resolution.
January 30, 1968 – Tet Offensive – The North Vietnamese launch a massive surprise attack during the festival of the Vietnamese New Year, called Tet. The attack hits 36 major cities and towns in South Vietnam. Both sides suffer heavy casualties, but the offensive demonstrates that the war will not end soon or easily. American public opinion against the war increases, and the US begins to reduce the number of troops in Vietnam.
March 16, 1968 – My Lai Massacre – About 400 women, children and elderly men are massacred by US forces in the village of My Lai in South Vietnam. Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr. is later court-martialed for leading the raid and sentenced to life in prison for his role but is released in 1974 when a federal court overturns the conviction. Calley is the only soldier ever convicted in connection with the event.
April 1970 – Invasion of Cambodia – US President Richard Nixon orders US and South Vietnamese troops to invade border areas in Cambodia and destroy supply centers set up by the North Vietnamese. The invasion sparks more anti-war protests, and on June 3, 1970, Nixon announces the completion of troop withdrawal.
May 4, 1970 – National Guard units fire into a group of demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio. The shots kill four students and wound nine others. Anti-war demonstrations and riots occur on hundreds of other campuses throughout May.
February 8, 1971 – Invasion of Laos – Under orders from Nixon, US and South Vietnamese ground troops, with the support of B-52 bombers, invade southern Laos in an effort to stop the North Vietnamese supply routes through Laos into South Vietnam. This action is done without consent of Congress and causes more anti-war protests in the United States.
January 27, 1973 –A cease-fire is arranged after peace talks.
March 29, 1973 – The last American ground troops leave. Fighting begins again between North and South Vietnam, but the United States does not return.
The Chinese government has built up the world’s largest known online disinformation operation and is using it to harass US residents, politicians, and businesses—at times threatening its targets with violence, a CNN review of court documents and public disclosures by social media companies has found.
The onslaught of attacks – often of a vile and deeply personal nature – is part of a well-organized, increasingly brazen Chinese government intimidation campaign targeting people in the United States, documents show.
The US State Department says the tactics are part of a broader multi-billion-dollar effort to shape the world’s information environment and silence critics of Beijing that has expanded under President Xi Jinping. On Wednesday, President Biden is due to meet Xi at a summit in San Francisco.
Victims face a barrage of tens of thousands of social media posts that call them traitors, dogs, and racist and homophobic slurs. They say it’s all part of an effort to drive them into a state of constant fear and paranoia.
Often, these victims don’t know where to turn. Some have spoken to law enforcement, including the FBI – but little has been done. While tech and social media companies have shut down thousands of accounts targeting these victims, they’re outpaced by a slew of new accounts emerging virtually every day.
Known as “Spamouflage” or “Dragonbridge,” the network’s hundreds of thousands of accounts spread across every major social media platform have not only harassed Americans who have criticized the Chinese Communist Party, but have also sought to discredit US politicians, disparage American companies at odds with China’s interests and hijack online conversations around the globe that could portray the CCP in a negative light.
Private researchers have tracked the network since its discovery more than four years ago, but only in recent months have federal prosecutors and Facebook’s parent company Meta publicly concluded that the operation has ties to Chinese police.
Meta announced in August it had taken down a cluster of nearly 8,000 accounts attributed to this group in the second quarter of 2023 alone. Google, which owns YouTube, told CNN it had shut down more than 100,000 associated accounts in recent years, while X, formerly known as Twitter, has blocked hundreds of thousands of China “state-backed” or “state-linked” accounts, according to company blogs.
Still, given the relatively low cost of such operations, experts who monitor disinformation warn the Chinese government will continue to use these tactics to try to bend online discussions closer to the CCP’s preferred narrative, which frequently entails trying to undermine the US and democratic values.
“We might think that this is confined to certain chatrooms, or this platform or that platform, but it’s expanding across the board,” Rep. Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP, told CNN. “And it’s only a matter of time before it happens to that average American citizen who doesn’t think it’s their problem right now.”
When trolls disrupted an anti-communism Zoom event organized by New York-based activist Chen Pokong in January 2021, he had little doubt who was responsible. The trolls mocked participants and threatened that one victim would “die miserably.” Their conduct reminded Chen of repression by the government of China, where he spent nearly five years in prison for pro-democracy work.
But his suspicions about who was behind the interruption were solidified when the US Department of Justice charged more than 30 Chinese officials earlier this year with running a sprawling disinformation operation that had targeted dissidents in the US, including those in the Zoom meeting Chen says he hosted in 2021.
It was just one of multiple indictments the Justice Department unsealed in April exposing alleged Chinese government plots to target its perceived critics and enemies, while impugning the sovereignty of the United States. Two alleged Chinese operatives were charged with running an “undeclared police station” in New York City. Last year, another indictment outlined how Chinese agents allegedly tried to derail the congressional campaign of a Chinese dissident.
“They want to deprive my freedom of speech, so I feel like it’s not only an attack on me,” said Chen, who was ejected from his own meeting during the disruption. “They also attack America.”
The DOJ complaint named 34 individual officers with China’s Ministry of Public Security and published photographs of them at computers, allegedly working on the disinformation campaign known as the “912 Special Project Working Group.” The operation, primarily based in Beijing, appears to involve “hundreds” of MPS officers across the country, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit.
The complaint does not refer to the cluster of fake accounts as “Spamouflage,” but private researchers and a spokesperson for Meta told CNN that the social media activity described by the DOJ is part of that network. As part of a mission “to manipulate public perceptions of [China], the Group uses its misattributed social media accounts to threaten, harass and intimidate specific victims,” the complaint states.
When asked about Spamouflage’s reported links to Chinese law enforcement, a spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, denied the allegations.
“China always respects the sovereignty of other countries. The US accusation has no factual evidence or legal basis. It is entirely politically motivated. China firmly opposes it,” Liu said in a statement to CNN. He claimed that the US “invented the weaponizing of the global information space.”
A report released by Meta in August illustrates how the posts from the network often align with the workday hours in China. The report described “bursts of activity in the mid-morning and early afternoon, Beijing time, with breaks for lunch and supper, and then a final burst of activity in the evening.”
And while Meta detected posts from various regions in China, the company and other researchers have found centralized coordination that relentlessly pushed identical messages across multiple social media platforms, sometimes repeatedly insulting the same individuals who have questioned the Chinese government.
One of those individuals is Jiayang Fan, a journalist for The New Yorker who told CNN she began facing harassment by the network when she covered pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019.
Attacks directed at Fan – which ranged from cartoons of her painting her face white as though rejecting her identity to accusations that she killed her mother for profit – carry telltale signs of the Spamouflage network, said Darren Linvill of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University. Linvill’s group found more than 12,000 tweets attacking Fan using the same hashtag, #TraitorJiayangFan.
Although she hasn’t lived in China since she was a child, Fan believes such messages have been levelled against her to spark fear and silence others.
“This is part of a very old Chinese Communist Party playbook to intimidate offenders and aspiring offenders,” said Fan, who questioned what her distant relatives in China may think when they see such content. “It is uncomfortable for me to know that they are seeing these portrayals of me and have no idea what to believe.”
Experts who track online influence campaigns say there are signs of a shift in China’s strategy in recent years. In the past, the Spamouflage network mostly focused on issues domestically relevant to China. However, more recently, accounts tied to the group have been stoking controversy around global issues, including developments in the United States.
Spamouflage accounts – some of which posed as Texas residents – called for protests of plans to build a rare-earths processing facility in Texas and spread negative messages about a separate US manufacturing company, according to a report by cybersecurity firm Mandiant last year. The report also described how the campaign promoted negative content about the Biden administration’s efforts to hasten mineral production that would curb US reliance on China.
Other posts by the network have referenced how “racism is an indelible shame on American democracy” and how the US committed “cultural genocide against the Indians,” according to a Meta report in August. Another post claimed that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “riddled with scandals.”
Chinese government-linked accounts have also posted messages that included a call to “kill” President Biden, a cartoon featuring the so-called QAnon Shaman who rioted at the US Capitol as a symbol of “western style democracy,” and a post that suggested US defense contractors profit off the deaths of innocent people, according to a Department of Homeland Security report in April obtained through a records request.
The DOJ complaint filed against Chinese officials alleged that last year they sought to take advantage of the second anniversary of George Floyd’s death and post on social media about his murder to “reveal the law enforcement brutality” in the US. They also received a task to “work on 2022 US midterm elections and criticize American democracy.”
Spamouflage is “evolving in tactics. It’s evolving in themes,” said Ben Nimmo, the global lead for threat intelligence at Meta. “Our job is to keep on raising our defenses and keep on telling people about it, especially as we get closer to the election year.”
Yet as social media companies race to stop disinformation and the US government files complaints against those allegedly responsible, accountability can be elusive.
“This is the rub with a lot of cybercrimes, that it becomes very, very difficult to actually put the perpetrators in jail,” said Lindsay Gorman, the head of technology and geopolitics at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.
But, Gorman added, that doesn’t mean there are no consequences for China.
“Even if individuals have a degree of impunity because they are never planning on coming to the United States anyway, that doesn’t mean that the party operation has impunity here – certainly not in terms of public opinion, certainly not in terms of US-China relations,” she said.
Meta, Google, and other companies that have published reports outing Spamouflage stress that most of the social media accounts within the network receive little or no engagement, meaning they rarely go viral.
But Linvill of Clemson University argues that the network uses a unique strategy of “flooding” conversations with so many comments that posts from genuine users receive less attention. This includes posting on platforms typically not associated with disinformation, such as Pinterest.
“They are operating thousands of accounts at a time on a given platform, often to drown out conversations, just with sheer volume of messaging,” Linvill said. “When we think of disinformation, we often think of pushing ideas on users and making ideas more salient, whereas what China is doing is the opposite. They are trying to remove conversations from social media.”
When Beijing hosted the 2022 Winter Olympics, for example, human rights groups began promoting the hashtag #GenocideGames to bring attention to accusations that China has detained more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in internment camps.
But then something surprising happened. Accounts that Linvill and his colleagues believed were part of Spamouflage started tweeting the hashtag too.
It might be counterintuitive for a pro-Chinese government group to start spreading a hashtag that brought attention to the Chinese government’s human rights’ abuses, Linvill explained. But by using the hashtag repeatedly in tweets that had nothing to do with the issue itself, Spamouflage was able to reduce views on the legitimate messages.
Jiajun Qiu, whose academic work focused on elections and who fled China in 2016, showed CNN what happens when he types his name into X, formerly known as Twitter. There are sometimes dozens of accounts pretending to be him by using his name and photo.
They are designed by the operators of Spamouflage, Linvill explained, to confuse people and prevent them from finding Qiu’s real account by muddying the waters.
Now living in Virginia, Qiu runs a pro-democracy YouTube channel and has faced an onslaught of homophobic, racist and bizarre insults from social media accounts that Linvill’s team and others have tied to Spamouflage.
Some accounts have posted cartoons that convey Qiu as an insect working on behalf of the US government. Another image depicts him being stomped by a cartoon Jesus. Yet another paints him as a dog on the leash of an American rat.
“I tell people the truth, so they want to do anything possible to insult me,” Qiu said.
Linvill and his team have tracked hundreds of these cartoons across the internet, and said they are a “tell” of Spamouflage. Cartoons, Linvill explained, can be more effective than text because they are “eye-catching” and “you have to stop and look at it.” In addition, these original cartoons can easily be translated into hundreds of languages at a very low cost.
Beyond the online smears, Qiu says he has also faced threats via other online messages and escalatory calls from unidentified sources who he believes have ties to the Chinese government. One anonymous message told him he would be arrested and brought to justice for breaking Chinese law. An email referenced the church he attends in Manassas, Virginia and said, “for his own safety and that of the worshippers, he would do well to find another place to stay.”
Qiu told CNN that the FBI has interviewed him four times regarding these threats, and that he has been instructed to contact local police if he is ever followed.
The assassination of Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio marks a “disturbing moment” for the region and democracy, his successor and former running mate Andrea González Náder has told CNN in an exclusive interview.
“You never have enough time to process something so shocking and so sobering as the assassination of a presidential candidate (on) such a level of violence and so soon – so close to the presidential elections,” Náder told CNN’s Rafael Romo in an interview in the capital Quito on Saturday.
“This is a disturbing moment for the whole region and for the world’s democracy,” she said.
Náder was named as the new presidential candidate for Villavicencio’s Movimiento Construye political party following his death during a campaign rally on Wednesday as violence and crime escalates in the South American country.
She was seen wearing a bulletproof vest at a candidacy acceptance ceremony in the capital on Friday.
“Náder was chosen by Fernando Villavicencio and the Movimiento Construye as the designated successor to step in as president in the event of his absence,” the party said in a statement published online on Saturday.
Villavicencio, 59, an anti-corruption campaigner and lawmaker, was outspoken about violence caused by drug trafficking in Ecuador. His campaign had promised a crackdown on crime and corruption that gripped the country in recent years.
His killing came 10 days before the first round of the presidential elections, scheduled to take place on August 20.
His widow Veronica Sarauz expressed disagreement with Náder’s appointment in the wake of her husband’s passing and blamed the state for his murder, demanding answers as to why it happened.
“The state was in charge of Fernando’s security. The state is directly responsible for the murder of my husband. They did not protect him as they should have protected him,” Sarauz told a news conference on Saturday.
The 59-year-old was laid to rest in a private ceremony at the Monteolivo cemetery in northern Quito on Friday.
“The state still has to give many answers about everything that happened. His personal guards did not do their job,” she said.
Villavicencio’s assassination prompted an outpouring of condemnation from inside Ecuador and around the world.
The suspected shooter died in police custody following an exchange of fire with security personnel, authorities said.
Six others – all Colombian nationals – have also been arrested in connection with the killing, believed to be members of organized criminal groups.
While authorities have not yet announced any confirmed links between gangs to Villavicencio’s assassination, the Ecuadorian Army Command announced the dispatch and deployment of 4,000 personnel – 2,000 military members and 2,000 police officers – to the Zonal 8 Detention Center in Guayas province “to establish control over weapons, ammunition and explosives within the prison.”
A high profile prisoner José Adolfo Macías Villamar, more popularly known by his alias “Fito” and jailed after being convicted of drug trafficking – is currently incarcerated in the prison, sparking concerns by the authorities.
Villavicencio – also a former journalist – had said in a televised interview on July 31 that he had been threatened by Macías and warned against continuing with his campaign against gang violence for the leadership.
Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso announced Saturday that Macías “and other dangerous prisoners” would be relocated to the La Roca maximum security prison after drugs, weapons, ammunition and explosives were found.
Images released by the armed forces on Saturday showed Macías being restrained and searched inside the facility. Macías as well as his gang members have not yet publicly commented on the assassination.
President Joe Biden issued blunt new warnings about ongoing existential threats to US democracy in a major address Thursday, sharpening the central argument in his potential rematch with Donald Trump and asking voters to prioritize the health of American institutions.
“There’s something dangerous happening in America now,” Biden said during his speech in Arizona, where he was also honoring his friend, the late Republican Sen. John McCain. “There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy: The MAGA movement.”
“There’s no question that today’s Republican Party is driven and intimidated by MAGA Republican extremists,” he said, using the acronym for Trump’s political movement. “Their extreme agenda, if carried out, would fundamentally alter the institutions of American democracy as we know it.”
The stark message was Biden’s most forceful attempt at calling out Trump’s antidemocratic behavior since the former president was criminally charged for his attempts to subvert the 2020 election results. It offered a taste of Biden’s forthcoming reelection message, one centered on Trump’s own words and actions as threats to democracy. Biden said his predecessor was guided not by the Constitution or decency, but by “vengeance and vindictiveness.”
As indictments and arrests of the former president piled up over the summer, Biden remained mostly silent on his predecessor, wary of appearing to intervene in Justice Department business. His most substantive comment on Trump’s myriad legal issues was a sarcastic remark about his mugshot in the Fulton County, Georgia, case.
But as Trump’s prohibitive lead in the Republican primary remains unchanged – and as Biden’s own standing remains mired in low approval – the president is sharpening his attacks on his most likely 2024 rival as a danger to democracy. Thursday’s speech served as yet another sign that the days of trying to keep Trump at an arm’s length are long gone.
“Trump says the Constitution gave him the right to do whatever he wants as president,” Biden said, referencing his most likely GOP challenger by name. “I’ve never heard presidents say that in jest.”
He alluded to Trump’s recent suggestion that Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could be executed, and said Republican silence on the comment was “deafening.”
Stopping the erosion of democratic institutions and values was central to Biden’s decision to run for president in 2020, it will again be core to his reelection campaign, officials said, as he looks to energize voters and donors who have otherwise appeared lukewarm about a rematch between the two men.
“We should all remember: Democracies don’t have to die at the end of a rifle. They can die when people are silent, when they fail to stand up,” Biden said.
Senior Biden advisers had mulled over the timing and location of Thursday’s speech for weeks. Previously, Biden has sought to harness the symbolic settings of Independence Hall and Gettysburg to issue warnings about the state of American democracy.
Advisers eyed similar sites pegged to American history on the East Coast before settling on Tempe, Arizona, in part as a way to honor the late Republican Sen. John McCain, whom Biden was friends with for decades and referred to as a “brother.” Biden announced funding to construct the McCain Library, honoring his longtime friend.
Arizona was also a center of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, and a state where voters rejected candidates who denied the results two years later. That effort loomed large in the president’s message.
“I believe in free and fair elections and peaceful transfer of power. I believe there’s no place in America – none, none, none – for political violence,” Biden said.
Biden’s advisers also selected the day after the second Republican primary debate, hoping to insert Biden into a news cycle otherwise dominated by the GOP contest. Trump skipped the debate, delivering a speech in Michigan instead as he looks to cut into Biden’s support among union workers.
The speech came at a moment of political uncertainty for Biden, as he faces persistent questions about his age, disapproval of his handling of the job and an indictment of his son, Hunter. House Republicans held their first hearing in an impeachment inquiry into Biden on Thursday.
Many senior Democrats believe once voters come to see the 2024 election as a contest between Biden and Trump, the stakes will be clearer and the current president’s standing will improve.
At one point in his speech, Biden was interrupted by climate activists as he urged the audience to “put partisanship aside, put country first.” Kai Newkirk, one of the protesters, had stood up and called on Biden to take further action to address fossil fuels.
“I tell you what, if you shush up, I’ll meet with you immediately after this,” Biden said, before resuming remarks.
“Democracy is never easy – as we just demonstrated,” he joked.
Newkirk added in a statement later Thursday that he did not hear the president’s offer to meet with him but that he would have “gladly” accepted.
“I worked hard to elect President Biden, and conscience compelled me to interrupt his speech today to ask why he has yet to declare a climate emergency,” he said in a post on X.
Top Biden donors, many of whom have agitated for more forceful attacks on Trump at this early stage in the campaign, were informed of the plans for Thursday’s speech by senior Biden advisers during a fundraising retreat in Chicago earlier this month. Biden began previewing his address to donors behind closed doors last week.
In those remarks, Biden debuted new warnings about his predecessor’s potential return to the White House, testing the material off-camera as he and his team were preparing for Thursday’s address.
“Let there be no question: Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy. And I will always defend, protect, and fight for our democracy. That’s why I running,” he said at a Broadway theater last week.
Two days later, he amplified his warnings to a group of lawyers – and said he was confident he could defeat Trump for a second time.
“I’m now running again. Because guess what? I think that it’s likely to be the same fellow, and it’s likely that I think I can beat him again,” he said.
Defending democracy is an issue Biden allies believe remains deeply resonant with voters, almost three years after the 2020 contest. The video announcing his reelection opened with footage of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
In the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Biden delivered a resounding message in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, warning of “MAGA forces” that “tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people.” Ahead of the speech, Biden convened his communications staff with a group of academics and historians – including Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham, who has helped draft his highest-profile addresses – to reflect on the fragile state of the union and compile ideas.
The White House remains in touch with several of those historians to continue generating ideas, according to officials.
Democrats say the message worked. The administration and national Democrats have touted the results of the 2022 midterm elections, and the fact that a so-called red wave never materialized as many had predicted, as proof the president’s focus on themes like defending democracy struck a chord.
Thursday’s remarks were billed by the White House as the president’s fourth major speech on the theme of democracy – Biden spoke to the issue last year to mark the one-year anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, as well as days before the midterm elections.
By also honoring McCain during his speech Thursday, Biden hoped to harken to an era of bipartisanship in Washington that has disappeared in recent years. The comparison is amplified given the current battle over government funding, which appears destined to result in a government shutdown by the end of the week.
He was joined at the speech by McCain’s widow Cindy, other members of the McCain family and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.
However, one of the state’s senators, Kyrsten Sinema – who was a Democrat until she left the party last year to become an independent – said Biden should use his visit to Arizona to observe the situation at the southern border.
“It’s well past time for President Biden to see the border crisis first hand and for the administration to do its job, secure the border, and keep Arizona safe. While he’s in Arizona, I’m calling on him to visit the border to actually understand how our communities shoulder the burden of his administration’s failure to address this crisis,” she said in a statement.
McCain’s death was deeply personal and painful for Biden for a number of reasons, including the fact that McCain had been diagnosed with the same cancer that took the life of Biden’s son, Beau. After laying a wreath near the site where McCain’s plane was shot down in Hanoi this month, Biden said he missed his former Senate colleague.
“He was a good friend,” Biden said.
In his eulogy for McCain in the summer of 2018, Biden described his friend as having “lived by a different code – an ancient, antiquated code where honor, courage, integrity, duty were alive.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
A weekend of terror in Israel has sharpened already grave questions about the capacity of the politically fractured United States to lay out a unified and coherent response to a world spinning out of its control.
When the House of Representatives descended into chaos last week, many Republicans, Democrats and independent experts warned that anarchy raging in US politics sent a dangerous message to the outside world. But no one could foresee just how quickly the paralysis in Washington would test the country’s reaction to a major global crisis.
The horrific Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, which have killed hundreds of people and shattered the country’s sense of security, thrust the Middle East to the precipice of a new era of violence and instability. This followed a period of relative calm and after US presidents spent years trying to extricate American forces from the region.
Israel’s response to the carnage caused by a major Iranian proxy raises the possibility of a wider regional war that would further destabilize the global order already rocked by the war in Ukraine and China’s flagrant challenges to Western power.
A situation this dangerous requires a calm, united and thoughtful US response, supported across the political spectrum. But the turmoil in America’s politics – plagued by internal extremism, threats to democracy and the hyperpoliticization of foreign policy – means it will be an impossible task to bring the country together at a perilous moment.
Swift efforts by lawmakers to quickly register support for Israel and to rush extra aid to its government could be hampered by the collapse of the Republican Party’s ability to govern in the House after the ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy last week by his party’s extreme elements.
And the US is also facing an unprecedented election season. A president with low approval ratings confronting questions about his advanced age could go up against a potential Republican nominee who could be an indicted felon by Election Day. This means, at best, the United States will spend the coming months preoccupied by its own political plight. At worst, the world’s superpower guarantor of democracy could actually worsen global disruption and instability.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump rushed to exploit the crisis for his political gain, accusing President Joe Biden of causing the conflict because of “weakness.”
“Joe Biden betrayed Israel, he betrayed our country. As president, I will once again stand with Israel,” Trump said.
Foreign policy issues rarely decide US elections. But the danger for Biden and the opening for Trump is that yet another crisis abroad could foment an idea that the world is in turmoil, American power is weakening and Biden is hapless. At home and abroad, chaos is Trump’s friend as he seeks to foment the classic conditions that benefit aspiring autocrats promising strongman rule.
Fractured American governance doesn’t simply pose a material issue for Israel and for Ukraine, whose US lifeline as it battles Russia’s unprovoked invasion is now in extreme jeopardy due to far-right Republicans. The spectacle also suggests to US enemies – including Iran, the main supporter of Hamas, and Russia and China – that the US is hopelessly divided and may struggle to wield power to safeguard its interests.
“It wasn’t my idea to oust the speaker. I thought it was dangerous,” Rep. Michael McCaul, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “I look at the world and all the threats that are out there, and what kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we can’t govern, when we’re dysfunctional, when we don’t even have a speaker of the House?
“How does Chairman Xi in China look at that when he says democracy doesn’t work?” the Texas Republican added. “How does the Ayatollah look at this, knowing that we cannot function properly? And I think it sends a terrible message.”
US sends a message of chaos and weakness
The shuttered House created a particularly damaging symbol of the US – and the democratic system of governance it promotes around the world – in disarray. The Biden administration has the capacity to send immediate military aid to Israel, whose government has asked Washington for JDAM precision-guided munition kits and more interceptors for the Iron Dome air defense system as Hamas rockets rain down on Israeli cities. But any delay in seating a new speaker and creating a functioning majority in the House could have serious consequence.
Republican Rep. Michael Lawler, who faces a tough reelection in a New York district that Biden would have carried in 2020 under its new lines, warned that the chaos in the House needs to end. “Given the situation in the Middle East with one of our closest allies in the world, it is critical that we bring this to a close expeditiously,” Lawler told CNN’s Dana Bash. “And so, I think it is imperative, frankly, that this nonsense stop, that Kevin McCarthy be reinstated as speaker,” Lawler added.
Republicans left town after ousting McCarthy last week, and are expected to try to choose between Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, who has the backing of Trump, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise this week. But given the demands of extremists in the GOP conference, the complications of a tiny majority and the fact it took McCarthy a marathon 15 rounds of balloting to win the job in January, there is no guarantee that strong, new Republican leadership will quickly emerge.
While there is crossparty consensus over supporting Israel in the House, the US response to another murderous assault on a vulnerable democracy – Ukraine – threatens to be derailed by America’s viciously polarized politics in a way that could seriously erode Washington’s global leadership.
Right-wing Republicans who back Trump are echoing the former president’s opposition to further US aid and ammunition to Ukraine. While there is still a majority in favor of such measures in the House and the Senate, any future Republican speaker will likely have to pass aid packages with the help of Democratic votes – the very scenario that caused McCarthy’s fall as he tried to head off a damaging government shutdown (even though that stopgap funding bill did not include Ukraine aid, as the White House had wanted).
Already, the political showdown over Ukraine is causing deep concern in Kyiv that it will be unable to continue its fight against Russia in the current form without the more than $20 billion in assistance that the Biden administration has requested.
In a broader sense, the possibility that a populist, nationalist wing of the Republican Party under Trump could desert a democracy under attack from Russia – and therefore reward the aggression of an autocrat who shaped his worldview as a member of the KGB – threatens to not just shatter the logic of decades of US foreign policy, but to fundamentally change the US’ role in the world and the values on which its allies believed they could depend.
The politicization of global crises is not just confined to Israel or Ukraine. A Chinese spy balloon that wafted over US soil this year caused an extraordinary outburst of Republican fury toward Biden, which threatened to tie the president’s hands when managing the critical issue of US relations with the Pacific superpower.
A growing sense abroad that America’s political problems are limiting its ability to lead globally could also have a devastating effect on its power. This can only play into the hands of enemies in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran, who have all sought to influence US elections, according to US intelligence agencies, and all have strong geopolitical incentives in seeing American democracy fail.
The extraordinary and sudden Hamas attack on Israel – which has been compared to the September 11 attacks in the United States, and in terms of per capita casualties was far more bloody – falls into the category of tragedies that could change the world.
Aside from the awful human toll – now also being felt by Palestinian civilians in Gaza, where hundreds have perished in the initial Israel reprisal attacks on the infrastructure of Hamas – the onslaught will have far-reaching strategic consequences that will be felt in the US.
If evidence is found that Iran directly plotted the attack with Hamas, there will be huge pressure on the Israelis to respond by directly confronting the Islamic Republic, at the risk of sparking a wider regional conflagration that could draw in the United States.
The attacks and their fallout are also almost certain to disrupt the effort, in which the US is a key player, to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and allied Arab states. Such an agreement would fundamentally reshape the region and further isolate Iran – a logical reason why it could have had an interest in perpetrating the Hamas assault. US officials are still trying to establish how, if at all, Iran was involved.
The horror in Israel presents Biden with another fearsome foreign policy crisis as he contemplates his reelection bid – alongside the war in Ukraine and a rising confrontation with China.
It comes at a moment of political vulnerability for the administration as it seeks to explain why it made a deal to release US prisoners from Iran that resulted in the release of $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds. The Iranian government can use the funds only to buy humanitarian and medical supplies. The deal took place far too recently for such money to be used to finance this attack. But such subtleties don’t count for much in an election year, as multiple Republican presidential candidates accused the president of funding Iranian terror.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday tried to defuse the political impact of the agreement. “Not a single dollar has been spent from that account. And, again, the account is closely regulated by the US Treasury Department, so it can only be used for things like food, medicine, medical equipment,” he insisted on “State of the Union.”
But, in a political sense, it only matters that enough Americans believe what the Republicans are saying is true.
GOP hopeful Nikki Haley, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, for instance, implied Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that funds that Iran may not have to spend on medicine because of the hostage deal could now be spent on terror.
“Secretary Blinken is just wrong to imply that this money is not being moved around as we speak,” Haley said, although her argument is undercut by the fact that Iran’s clerical regime has rarely seemed to prioritize the humanitarian needs of its people while building up a huge state military complex.
Another 2024 candidate, GOP Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, went even further, accusing Biden – who has been one of the strongest Washington supporters of Israel in half a century in politics – of being “complicit” in the attacks.
Hong Kongers living overseas are helping to keep the flame of remembrance alive for the victims of China’s Tiananmen massacre as authorities in a city that once hosted huge annual vigils continue to stamp out dissent.
Until recently Hong Kong was the only place within China where large-scale gatherings each June 4 were tolerated to remember the moment in 1989 when the Communist Party sent tanks in to violently quell peaceful student-led democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
But the annual candlelight vigils have been silenced the last three years in the wake of pandemic restrictions and Beijing’s ongoing political crackdown in Hong Kong, which was upended by its own huge democracy protests in 2019.
This year is set to be no different. Victoria Park, the site that used to hold the vigils, is again open after three years of coronavirus pandemic closures.
But it is hosting a fair put on by pro-Beijing associations whilst many of those who once organized the city’s Tiananmen commemorations languish in jail or have fled abroad.
As a result, it is overseas where the most concerted commemorations were taking place for the 34th anniversary.
Protests, vigils and exhibitions are planned in multiple cities around the world including in Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Europe, the United States and Canada bolstered by a growing cohort of Hong Kongers who have chosen to move overseas.
“I think it’s sad to say that what Beijing and Hong Kong are doing is trying to erase history and the memory,” said Kevin Yam, a former lawyer in Hong Kong, who will be attending a ceremony in Melbourne, Australia, where he now resides.
“For those who can still remember, we have the obligation to let the world know that we have not forgotten,” he told CNN.
A new museum in New York is a vivid example of how Tiananmen commemorations are going global.
On Friday, Zhou Fengsuo and Wang Dan, two former student leaders who took part in the 1989 Tiananmen protests and now live in the United States, unveiled a June 4th Memorial Exhibit on 6th Avenue.
The display includes items collected from those who survived the massacre including newspapers chronicling the event, a blood-stained shirt from a former journalist and a decades-old printer used by protesters that was sneaked out of China.
Zhou said the idea to create a New York exhibition began five years ago but the closure of Hong Kong’s own June 4 museum by authorities in 2021 “added to the urgency”.
“Hong Kong has been carrying the torch for commemorating the Tiananmen massacre, keeping the legacy alive. When the museum was shut down, with the Hong Kong alliance’s leaders in prison, we knew it was a critical moment,” he said.
“We have to continue here in the United States.”
The 2,200-square-feet venue in New York can host up to 100 guests at a time, with schools and universities already reaching to request for a tour, Zhou said, adding they have raised enough funding to keep it running for “many years”.
No official death toll is available, but estimates range from several hundred to thousands, with many more injured.
Authorities in mainland China have always done their best to erase all memory of the Tiananmen massacre: Censoring news reports, scrubbing all mentions from the internet, arresting and chasing into exile the organizers of the protests, and keeping the relatives of those who died under tight surveillance.
The censorship has meant generations of mainland Chinese have grown up without knowledge of the events of June 4.
But Hong Kong was different.
Somber and defiant vigils were an annual political cornerstone, first under colonial British rule and then after the city’s 1997 handover to China. Every June 4, come rain or shine, tens of thousands of people would descend on Victoria Park with speakers demanding accountability from the Chinese Communist Party for ordering the bloody military crackdown.
But Hong Kong’s political culture has changed drastically in the aftermath in 2019’s huge and sometimes violent democracy protests.
Authorities banned the vigil in 2020 and 2021 citing coronavirus health restrictions – though many Hongkongers believe that was just an excuse to clamp down on shows of public dissent.
Last year, the park remained in darkness again, barricaded off on all sides with police stopping and searching passersby to “prevent any unauthorized assemblies which affect public safety and public order, and to prevent the risk of virus transmission due to such gatherings,” according to a government statement.
The Hong Kong Alliance, the group behind the past vigils, has disbanded with three leading figures in jail facing national security charges.
In the run up to this Sunday’s anniversary, authorities made clear commemorating Tiananmen this year would not be tolerated.
Security secretary Chris Tang – a former police chief – said he expected some might use “this very special day” to advocate Hong Kong independence and subvert state power, acts banned by the new national security law.
“But I want to tell these people that if you carry out these acts, we will definitely take decisive action,” he warned, adding: “You will not be lucky.”
Hong Kong police maintained a heavy police presence around the park on the anniversary’s eve, deploying multiple police coaches and even an armored vehicle at one point.
A handful of artists and activists defied warnings and turned up either at the park or surrounding streets on Saturday evening to make private commemorations with floral tributes and banners, only to be quickly intercepted and taken away by officers.
A police spokesman said four people were arrested on suspicion of disorderly behavior in public or carrying out acts with seditious intent as of Saturday. Police said some individuals had protest props bearing allegedly “seditious” wording. Four others were brought in for further investigation, police added.
Richard Tsoi, former secretary for the now-defunct Hong Kong Alliance, said he planned to commemorate the event either at home or at a private location.
“Definitely there will be not be large-scale commemoration activities. Whether one can mourn in public without breaking the law is also a question,” said the ex-organizer, who used attend every vigil in the past.
Throughout Hong Kong physical reminders of the Tiananmen massacre, including a famous “Pillar of Shame” statue that used to stand in the city’s oldest university, have been dismantled in recent years.
Yet last month a replica of the “Pillar of Shame” was erected in Berlin, with the help of its original Danish artist Jens Galschiot and a prominent Hong Kong activist now living in Germany. The artist also provided more than 40 giant banners printed with an image of the pillar to 18 cities for their commemoration events, including Los Angeles and Boston.
“It is true that the commemorations around June 4th have expanded and become more global since it has become impossible to do anything in Hong Kong,” he told CNN.
Hong Kongers, Zhou says, are playing a key role in keeping Tiananmen remembrance alive overseas,
“Since last year, many places have seen record numbers in attendance largely because of Hong Kong immigrants,” he said.
Many Hong Kongers have left for overseas with the city’s population dropping from 7.41 million to 7.29 million last year.
In Britain – where more than 100,000 Hongkongers have since settled after London offered an easier pathway to citizenship two years ago – about a dozen marches and vigils are slated to take place throughout June 4 across the country, from Nottingham and Manchester, a popular destination for Hong Kong immigrants.
In London, marchers will gather at Trafalgar Square before marching to the Chinese embassies, where a vigil will be held.
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London’s Metropolitan Police said it made 52 arrests during the coronation of King Charles III on Saturday, as the force faces growing scrutiny over its attitude toward anti-monarchy demonstrators.
Thousands gathered in central London on Saturday to celebrate the once-in-a-generation occasion. But it also drew demonstrators, with protesters wearing yellow T-shirts booing and shouting “Not My King” throughout the morning.
Republic, Britain’s largest anti-monarchy group, told CNN that police – without providing any reason – arrested organizers of the anti-monarchy protest.
At around 7 a.m. (2 a.m. ET) police stopped six of Republic’s organizers and told them they were detaining and searching them, Republic director Harry Stratton told CNN at the protest.
Graham Smith, the chief executive of Republic, was among those detained, according to a video shared by the Alliance of European Republican Movements.
Stratton said that when the organizers asked police why they were being detained, they were told officers “would figure it out” after they had searched the anti-monarchy protesters. After searching them, police told the six organizers they were arresting them and seizing hundreds of their placards carrying the slogan “Not My King.”
“They didn’t say why they were arresting them. They didn’t tell them or us where they were taking them. It really is like something out of a police state,” Stratton said.
“I think people are quite perturbed by the police reaction. But the crowd reaction to us has been overwhelmingly friendly,” he added.
The group posted on Twitter Saturday, commenting: “So much for the right to peaceful protest.”
Members of environmental activist group Just Stop Oil also appeared to have been arrested on The Mall outside Buckingham Palace, the UK’s PA Media news agency reported, adding that a large group of the protesters were seen in handcuffs.
The Metropolitan Police confirmed several arrests had been made in central London and defended its actions.
“A total of 52 arrests have been made today for offenses including affray, public order offenses, breach of the peace and conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. All of these people remain in custody,” the police said in a press release.
Commander Karen Findlay, who is leading the police operation, said in the release: “We absolutely understand public concern following the arrests we made this morning.
“Protest is lawful and it can be disruptive. We have policed numerous protests without intervention in the build-up to the coronation, and during it.
“Our duty is to do so in a proportionate manner in line with relevant legislation. We also have a duty to intervene when protest becomes criminal and may cause serious disruption.
“This depends on the context. The coronation is a once in a generation event and that is a key consideration in our assessment. A protest involving large numbers has gone ahead today with police knowledge and no intervention.”
Human Rights Watch, a non-profit campaign group, said earlier Saturday that the coronation arrests were “something you would expect to see in Moscow not London,” according to a statement obtained by PA Media.
Republic claimed it was expecting between 1,500 and 2,000 people to join the group at its protest in Trafalgar Square, just south of the royal procession route.
“Instead of a coronation we want an election. Instead of Charles we want a choice. It’s that simple,” the group tweeted on Saturday.
The Metropolitan Police, the UK’s largest police force, has been scrutinized for its tough approach toward protests around the coronation.
“Our tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low,” the force wrote on Twitter this week. “We will deal robustly with anyone intent on undermining this celebration.”
Ahead of the event, the Met said that more than 11,500 police officers would be deployed in London on Saturday, making the coronation the largest one-day deployment in decades.
The operation – labeled Golden Orb – saw officers line the processional route, manage crowds and road closures, protect high-profile individuals and carry out searches with specialist teams.
There are also plans for facial recognition technology to be used in central London, which has sparked criticism from human rights groups.
“We all have the right to go about our lives without being watched and monitored, but everyone at the coronation is at risk of having their faces scanned by oppressive facial recognition technology,” Emmanuelle Andrews of human rights group Liberty, said on Twitter.
The operation comes amid growing concern over the increase in the police’s power to stifle dissent in Britain, following the recent introduction of controversial pieces of legislation.
Last year, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 significantly “broaden[ed] the range of circumstances in which police may impose conditions on a protest.” Under the new Act, it is an offense for protesters to “intentionally or recklessly caus[e] public nuisance” – including causing “serious annoyance.”
In a statement to CNN, Liberty said this Act “has made it much harder for people to stand up for what they believe without facing the risk of criminalization.”
On Tuesday, a new law called the Public Order Act received royal assent from King Charles, which is a formality and the final hurdle before a bill becomes law.
It will “give police the powers to prevent disruption at major sporting and cultural events taking place this summer in England and Wales,” the UK Home Office said in a statement.
Specific measures in the Act were introduced from Wednesday.
Under this law, long-standing protest tactics such as locking on – where protesters physically attach themselves to things like buildings – could lead to a six-month prison sentence or “unlimited fine,” said the Home Office.
Ten policemen and a civilian were killed in blast as they were returning from an operation against insurgents in India’s central Chhattisgarh state, its chief minister said Wednesday.
Rebel Maoist militants are believed to be responsible for the attack, Bhupesh Baghel told reporters, expressing his grief over the deaths.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi “strongly condemned” the attack in a statement Wednesday.
“I pay my tributes to the brave personnel we lost in the attack. Their sacrifice will always be remembered. My condolences to the bereaved families,” he wrote on Twitter.
India’s government has been embroiled in a decades-long conflict with Maoist rebel groups, also known as Naxals, who launch attacks on government forces in an attempt to overthrow the state and usher in a classless society. Maoists are largely active in central India, in remote regions mainly populated by tribal peoples.
According to a 2019 report by India’s Ministry of Home Affairs, 90 districts across 11 states are affected by some form of Naxal or Maoist militancy. More than 2,100 civilians in India have been killed in the Maoist insurgency since 2010.
The government has responded with a security crackdown in areas in which the groups are active – an approach that while appearing to reduce the threat level has been criticized by some observers as heavy-handed and prone to abuse.
Villagers who live in Maoist territory are largely cut off from the country’s rapidly growing economy, and many live in fear both of rebels taking their children as recruits and violent government raids.
Some villagers in Chhattisgarh previously told CNN that they were forced to pay taxes to the Maoists, or face abuse or even torture. But if they did pay up, they risked being labeled Maoist sympathizers by government forces.
At least 22 Indian security force members were killed and 31 injured in 2021 during a four-hour gun battle with Maoist insurgents, officials said. In 2017, 25 police officers were killed and six others injured when hundreds of suspected Maoist rebels attacked a convoy in central India.
Suspected Maoists also struck during India’s elections in 2019, allegedly gunning down a polling supervisor in the eastern state of Odisha. In another incident in the same district that year, alleged Maoists approached a vehicle heading towards a polling center and forced officials to disembark before setting fire to it.
“We don’t need or want a secret police station in our great city,” said Breon Peace, the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York on Monday – expressing the likely feeling of many Americans at the news that the FBI has arrested two alleged agents for the Chinese government accused of working to harass and silence its critics in the US.
The Justice Department also charged 34 officers of China’s national police, all of whom are believed to live in China, with related offenses.
The revelations threaten to pitch already sour US-China relations into further crisis, and had the immediate effect of hardening bipartisan suspicion about Beijing on Capitol Hill in a way that will have serious diplomatic implications.
Prosecutors allege that China opened an “undeclared police station” in New York City that was used at least once to track down a pro-democracy activist of Chinese descent living in California.
The two men Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping — both US citizens — allegedly created the “first known overseas police station in the United States,” on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, according to the Justice Department.
The FBI also accused a group of Chinese officers of flooding an online video conference, screaming at and threatening Chinese dissidents in the US who were discussing democracy.
This is not unsurprising activity by a foreign intelligence agency on foreign soil; Washington’s penchant for engaging democracy activists in totalitarian countries has, for instance, long been seen as meddling by repressive governments.
And the FBI has outposts in many foreign embassies.
The bureau’s work, however, involves fighting organized crime, combating terrorism and drug trafficking, and forging links with local police and law enforcement. It isn’t designed to monitor US expats and police their political activity.
If proven, the two agents’ alleged activities represent an attempt by the Communist Party in Beijing to extend its crackdown on dissent and democracy outside the country and onto the soil of a nation where such freedoms are protected.
“The efforts of the PRC to export authoritarian methods to stifle free expression in the United States is a threat to America’s democracy that we will not abide,” said David Newman, principal deputy assistant attorney general for the National Security Division of the Department of Justice.
There has so far been no comment from Beijing on the charges.
But the notion that Beijing is operating foreign police stations is not new.
According to a new report by Madrid-based human rights group Safeguard Defenders shared with CNN last year, President Xi Jinping’s government set up more than 100 such posts to monitor the activity of large Chinese diasporas, using bilateral security arrangements as a cover.
Beijing has denied such allegations, arguing the offices help expat citizens with services like the issuing of new drivers licenses. Any activity that goes beyond consular services and targets Chinese exiles would infringe international law.
While China has police patrol agreements with several nations, including Italy and South Africa, reports of the undeclared police posts have prompted investigations in at least 13 other countries including Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain.
The revelations by authorities in New York on Monday are already having a detrimental impact on China’s already tarnished reputation in Washington and will further complicate efforts by the Biden administration to defuse spiraling tensions with Xi.
The alleged police station scheme is seen as another example of China’s growing global reach, perceived threat to the United States and its values, and willingness to curtail political enemies wherever they might be.
“This is absolutely absurd that the Chinese Communist Party thinks that they can set up their own police station in a place like New York City,” Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton, a member of the new House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told CNN.
“The story out there that the Americans and Chinese are ratcheting up tensions is really not accurate. This is China ratcheting up tensions. This is the Chinese Communist Party trying to exact their repressive regime all over the globe.”
The arrests contribute to a sense in Washington that China is indulging in increasingly provocative behavior and is ever disdainful of American sovereignty.
They follow the flight of a suspected Chinese spy balloon across the North American mainland earlier this year that was viewed by many Americans as an insult and was a first tangible sign of how a potential new Cold War could unfold with a new superpower foe.
Monday’s developments are also likely to increase uncertainty — some might say paranoia — about the level of clandestine activity China might be conducting on US soil.
Every elevation of the standoff between Beijing and Washington takes a diplomatic toll.
The level of antipathy towards China is so strong on Capitol Hill that it makes it hard for President Joe Biden — who is ultimately in charge of managing this critical diplomatic relationship — not to toughen his stance. This in turn causes diplomatic and political after shocks in Beijing, whipping up more anti-US rhetoric and behavior.
To dispute the idea that the US and China are barreling towards a confrontation increasingly looks like heresy in Washington. This is a dangerous new reality since it narrows the room for sober, strategic reasoning about the implications of a potential generations-long showdown across the Pacific.
Editor’s Note: Justin Lynch is a researcher and analyst in Washington, DC. He is co-author of the book “Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy.” The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.
CNN
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Four years ago, almost to the day, the people of Sudan were celebrating a revolution after overthrowing longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir. Now the East African country faces the possibility of a complete collapse similar to the chaos we see today in Yemen or Libya.
On Saturday, rival military factions began fighting each other in the capital of Khartoum. The two sides battled for control of the nation’s airports, bases and military compounds. Violence quickly spilled into the streets and across the country.
Some 45 million Sudanese effectively are held hostage and are unable to venture out of their homes for fear of being killed in the crossfire. At least 180 peoplehave perished in the fighting, including three World Food Programme humanitarian workers.
The conflict pits two bitter rivals and their powerful armed forces against each other. On one side are the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. On the other side are the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti.
There is no good side in this conflict. Both have been accused of a long litany of human rights violations.
How did Sudan go from casting off despotic rule and creating a fledgling democracy a few years ago to teetering on the brink of state collapse?
On April 11, 2019, Sudan’s longtime dictator, Bashir, was overthrown. The cause of Bashir’s removal was months of protests led by Sudan’s unions, which spurred a military coup from the SAF and RSF. Both Burhan and Hemeti joined forces to remove their former boss.
It was a moment of promise because there was hope for democracy. I remember walking around the “sit-in” — a giant carnival of freedom in the middle of Khartoum that protesters had blocked off to demand change. It was electric.
But social movements such as the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) — the union behind the protest — often struggle to translate the momentum of their demonstrations into real political power.
The reason for this is, in part, structural. Social movements such as the SPA are often based on grassroots activism. A dictator can arrest one or two leaders of an organization but not an entire country.
However, once a dictator is overthrown, these kinds of social movements often struggle to build the leadership hierarchy necessary during political negotiations that take place. Like many other movements, Sudan’s protesters were unable to translate mobilization into political power.
Civilian leaders entered into a negotiation with the military over the future of the country shortly after Bashir fell in April 2019. The two sides were not evenly matched. Because of these leadership challenges, the pro-democracy forces struggled to bargain with the disciplined military.
Any momentum that pro-democracy advocates had during the negotiations was stamped out in June 2019 when RSF soldiers violently dispersed the sit-in. More than 100 people were killed.
After the June massacre and the leadership challenges, a transitional constitution was signed in August 2019 that gave the SAF and RSF most of the power in Sudan. Burhan was the head of state, and Hemeti was placed in an elevated political position. Elections were promised in 2022, but few believed they would actually happen.
The transitional period began in August 2019, and I interviewed Abdalla Hamdok, the civilian prime minister, several times for a book that I co-wrote on Sudan’s revolution. The way that the constitution was written meant that Hamdok had limited power as the prime minister. Burhan was the head of state and wanted to preserve the powers of the SAF.
Hamdok often told me that revolutions come in cycles. The 2019 removal of Bashir was a high point of revolution, and he saw his job as making as many reforms as possible before the low tide of counterrevolution swept him away.
Hamdok found that the legacy of 30 years of dictatorship meant that Sudan’s political and economic models were dilapidated. But Burhan and Hemeti blocked the big reforms that Hamdok wanted to make.
Outside Khartoum violence grew. Parts of Sudan such as Darfur saw a new round of conflict between ethnic groups orchestrated by RSF troops. More than 430,000 people were displaced due to conflict in Sudan, mostly in Darfur.
Soldiers did not hide the atrocities they committed against civilians. I remember drinking tea with a soldier aligned with the RSF at his house in Darfur as he explained why he had recently participated in the burning down of a village from another ethnic group.
The soldier reasoned that a member of his tribe had been killed in an altercation, so the RSF-aligned forces took revenge by torching a village that had been home to 30,000 people. At least 163 people died.
Tensions between the SAF and RSF grew. Burhan viewed Hemeti and his RSF forces as upstart usurpers from Darfur who were undisciplined. Hemeti on the other hand believed that it was time for Darfur to lead Sudan.
Hamdok was on the cusp of beginning to turn the economy around when Burhan and the SAF intervened. As we wrote in the book “Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy,” the potential success of a civilian government was too much for Burhan. In October 2021, Hamdok was removed in a military coup.
After the October 2021 coup, the United States and United Nations pushed a worse version of the transitional constitution in Sudan. They argued that it was the best way to bring democracy.
The idea was to restart the transitional period, but I and many others argued it was shortsighted and wouldn’t work. Returning to a government led by Burhan was clearly not going to usher in democracy. If the plan ended in a coup the first time, why would it work the second time?
Some activists stopped partnering with the US and came to see the UN mission as a roadblock to democracy because of these policies. I felt sorry when I spoke with the best American and foreign diplomats, who also understood the international policy in Sudan wouldn’t work. They saw the flaws but felt powerless to dissent and were forced to carry out decisions made many levels above them.
What preceded this weekend’s outbreak of clashes was a controversial part of the international policy that tried to unify the SAF and RSF. The idea was to make a single army, but neither Hemeti nor Burhan wanted to give up the power they had amassed.
The plan to unify the military hadn’t worked in similar contexts. It was a repeat of the 2013 and 2016 unification processes that took place in South Sudan with similarly bloody results. Instead, the tenuous relationship between Burhan and Hemeti boiled over due to the pressure.
It can be easy to look at the recent history of “revolutions” in countries such as Myanmar, Tunisia, Egypt and Sudan and conclude that they eventually backfire. I don’t agree. I learned from Sudanese activists that a nation’s political fortune is an active battle.
We can one day hope that Sudan sees dreams of democracy come true. But right now, the Sudanese people are just hoping to survive the day.
The lesson from Sudan is that a revolution is only the start of change, not the end.
The federal judge overseeing the trial of five Proud Boys members who are accused of plotting to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, denied a mistrial motion on Thursday after jurors reported being followed and confronted in public.
In late March, several jurors reported two incidents in which they were approached outside the courthouse by members of the public, District Judge Timothy Kelly said in a sealed proceeding Thursday that was inadvertently streamed to a media room in the Washington, DC, federal courthouse. CNN reported last week that one juror believed she was being followed.
Kelly denied a mistrial motion from all five defendants, saying that every member of the jury was questioned about the interactions and confirmed they could still judge the case fairly. Kelly also denied motions from the defendants to strike the jurors who said they had been confronted, adding that “none of the jurors expressed a concern that any of this would affect their jury service.”
Kelly said that he instructed the jury to disregard those interactions, and that “when I read this instruction to the jury, I watched many of them nod as if to say, ‘Okay, let’s get on with the case.’”
The ruling ends a dayslong argument over how to handle the alleged incidents involving a total of four jurors who were approached in public, the latest in a series of mishaps that have plagued the trial.
Kelly described the interactions in detail during the under-seal proceeding, bringing to light additional information about the incidents. A coalition of media outlets, including CNN, previously fought for access to the sealed arguments, but Kelly denied that request.
In one instance, three jurors were walking away from the courthouse when they were approached by a man on a bike, Kelly said. The man began discussing a trial he was watching at the courthouse, and while it is not clear if he mentioned the Proud Boys defendants by name, the man said that the case was interesting and called a recent defense witness “crazy.”
“The individual did not say that he knew they were jurors,” Kelly said.
The three jurors told Kelly that they thought the incident was “odd” and “weird,” but didn’t become concerned until they saw the same man sitting in the courtroom the next day, looking at them and whispering to someone else in the gallery. One juror told Kelly that seeing the man gave her a “weird feeling.”
In another instance, Kelly said that a juror reported seeing the same man at a metro stop on four separate occasions. The first time she saw the man, the juror said that he asked her if she was serving on a jury but did not mention any case specifically.
Kelly said the issue was referred to the US Marshals, who went to the metro station to find him and watched the man walk into a nearby homeless shelter. Kelly also saw two pictures of the man and said that “from my view of the photos, it was certainly plausible he was homeless.”
The juror who was approached at the metro stop told Kelly that she “did not feel intimidated by this,” he added.
After issuing his ruling Thursday, Kelly was informed by a courtroom staff member that video of the proceeding was being streamed elsewhere in the courthouse. Kelly then had the video stream cut, saying that “there is nothing we can do at this point. Let’s have them shut it off now.”
Two Democratic members of the Tennessee House of Representatives were expelled while a third member was spared in an ousting by Republican lawmakers that was decried by the trio as oppressive, vindictive and racially motivated.
Protesters packed the state Capitol on Thursday to denounce the expulsions of Reps. Justin Jones and Rep. Justin Pearson and to advocate for gun reform measures a little over a week after a mass shooting devastated a Nashville school.
Speaking to CNN’s Don Lemon on “CNN This Morning,” Jones decried the actions of House Republicans.
“What happened yesterday was a very sad day for democracy,” Jones said. “The nation was able to see we don’t have democracy in Tennessee.”
Jones confirmed if he is reappointed to the seat by the 40-member Nashville Metro Council, he would serve. “I have no regrets. I will continue to stand up for my constituents.”
Nashville City Council Member Russ Bradford told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota he would be voting to send Jones back to the State House.
“That is who the people of House District 52 elected this last November and so it’s very important that, unlike my state legislature, I will listen to the voice of my constituents and I will do what needs to be done to support democracy in this state,” Bradford said.
Following their expulsion – which House Republicans said was in response to the representatives’ leadership of gun control demonstrations on the chamber floor last week – Jones and Pearson called for protesters to return to the Capitol when the House is back in session on Monday.
Rep. Gloria Johnson, who is White and wasn’t ousted, slammed the votes removing Jones and Pearson, who are Black, as racist. Asked by CNN why she believes she wasn’t expelled, Johnson said the reason is “pretty clear.”
“I am a 60-year-old White woman, and they are two young Black men,” Johnson said. She added that Pearson and Jones were questioned in a “demeaning way” by lawmakers before their expulsion.
President Joe Biden on Thursday called the expulsions “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent,” and criticized Republicans for not taking greater action on gun reform.
Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Nashville Friday to advocate for stricter gun control measures and highlight the importance of protecting Americans from gun violence. She also privately met with Jones, Pearson and Johnson.
“We understand when we took an oath to represent the people who elected us that we speak on behalf of them. It wasn’t about the three of these leaders,” Harris said in remarks after the meeting. “It was about who they were representing. it’s about whose voices they were channeling. Understand that — and is that not what a democracy allows?”
After a shooter killed three 9-year-old students and three adults at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville last week, Jones, Pearson and Johnson staged a demonstration on the House floorcalling for gun reform and leading chants with a bullhorn.
Jones said he and the other lawmakers had been blocked from speaking about gun violence on the House floor that week, saying that their microphones were cut off whenever they raised the topic, according to CNN affiliate WSMV.
Following the three representatives’ demonstrations last Thursday, Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton called their actions “unacceptable” and argued that they broke “several rules of decorum and procedure on the House floor.”
On Monday, three resolutions were filed seeking the expulsions of Jones, Pearson and Johnson. The three members had already been removed from their committee assignments following the protest.
The resolutions, filed by Republican Reps. Bud Hulsey, Gino Bulso and Andrew Farmer, said the lawmakers “did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor” to the House.
Tennessee Republican Caucus Chair Jeremy Faison told CNN that the caucus believed the issue did not need to be considered by an ethics committee and accused Jones and Pearson of having a “history” of disrupting floor proceedings.
“It’s not possible for us to move forward with the way they were behaving in committee and on the House floor,” Faison said.
The chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party, Hendrell Remus, called the move a “direct political attack” on the party.
“Their expulsion sets a dangerous new precedent for political retribution,” a statement from the party said. “The day that a majority can simply expel a member of the opposing party without legitimate cause threatens the fabric of democracy in our state and creates a reckless roadmap for GOP controlled state legislatures across the nation.”
Historically, the Tennessee House had only expelled two other representatives since the Reconstruction, and the move requires a two-thirds majority vote of total members.
Theexpulsions have been criticized by Democratic politicians and civil liberties groups who say voters in Jones’ and Pearson’s districts have been disenfranchised. Others, including Jones, have said the move distracts from the real problem of gun violence.
“Rather than address the issue of banning assault weapons, my former colleagues – a Republican supermajority – are assaulting democracy,” Jones told CNN. “And that should scare all of us across the nation.”
Rep. Sam McKenzie, chair of the Tennessee Black Caucus of State Legislators, said the expulsion of Jones and Pearson overshadowed the issue they were protesting.
“This was not about that kangaroo court that happened yesterday. This was about those three young children and those three guardians, those three adults, whose lives were taken away senselessly,” McKenzie said.
“The world saw what happened yesterday,” McKenzie added, condemning the actions of House GOP leaders. “They ought to be ashamed of themselves.”
The NAACP also condemned the expulsions, calling them “horrific” but “not surprising.”
“It is inexcusable that, while (Jones and Pearson) upheld their oath to serve Tennesseans who are grieving the loss of last week’s mass murder, their colleagues decided to use racial tropes to divert attention from their failure to protect the people they are supposed to serve,” NAACP President & CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement.
“We will continue to stand with these champions of democracy, and are prepared to take whatever legal action is necessary to ensure that this heinous attempt to silence the voice of the people is addressed in a court of law,” Johnson added.
On “CNN This Morning,” Jones said, “I think what happened was a travesty of democracy because they expelled the two youngest Black lawmakers – which is no coincidence – from the Tennessee state legislature because we are outspoken, because we fight for our district.”
Jones described the session as a “toxic, racist work environment,” and said he spoke out because the House speaker ruled him out of order when he brought up the issue of gun violence. “If I didn’t know this happened to me, I would think that this was 1963 instead of 2023,” he added.
Prior to the vote, Pearson publicly shared a letter he sent to House members in which he said he took accountability for “not following decorum” on the House floor but defended his actions.
Following their removal, pictures and profiles of Pearson and Jones have been pulled from the Tennessee General Assembly’s website and their districts have been listedas vacant.
More about the three representatives:
Rep. Justin Pearson:
District: 86
Age: 28
In office: 2023-
Issues: Environmental, racial and economic justice
Of note: Successfully blocked oil pipeline from being built in south Memphis
Recent awards: The Root’s 100 Most Influential Black Americans (2022)Rep. Gloria Johnson:
District: 90
Age: 60
In office: 2013-2015, 2019-
Issues: Education, jobs, health care
Of note: Successfully organized in favor of Insure Tennessee, the state’s version of Medicaid expansion
Recent awards: National Foundation of Women Legislators Women of Excellence (2022)Rep. Justin Jones:
District: 52
Age: 27
In office: 2023-
Issues: Health care, environmental justice
Of note: Wrote “The People’s Plaza: 62 Days of Nonviolent Resistance” after helping to organize a 2022 sit-in
Recent awards: Ubuntu Award for outstanding service, Vanderbilt Organization of Black Graduate and Professional Students (2019)
According to the Tennessee Constitution, since there is more than twelve months until the next general election in November 2024, a special election will be held to fill the seats.
Tennessee law allows for the appointment of interim House members to fill the seats of expelled lawmakers until an election is held by local legislative bodies.
In Jones’ case, the local legislative body is the Metropolitan Council of Davidson County in Nashville. The council has scheduled a special meeting Monday afternoon to address the vacancy of the District 52 seat and possibly vote on an interim successor.
For Pearson’s District 86 seat, the local legislative body is the Shelby County Board of Commissioners in Memphis.
It is unclear if or when a special meeting might be called there.
According to Johnson, Jones and Pearson could be reappointed to their seats.
“I think we might have these two young men back very soon,” Johnson said Thursday. “It is my promise to fight like hell to get both of them back.”
Pearson said he hopes to “get reappointed to serve in the state legislature by the Shelby County Commissioners, and a lot of them, I know, are upset about the anti-democratic behavior of this White supremacist-led state legislature.”
Speaking to a crowd following their expulsion, Pearson and Jones insisted they would persist in advocating for gun control measures and encouraged protesters to continue showing up to the Capitol.
The House has only expelled two state representatives in the last 157 years. The first expulsion, in 1980, was of a representative found guilty of accepting a bribe while in office, and the most recent came in 2016 when another member was expelled over allegations of sexual harassment.
Democratic Rep. Joe Towns called the move a “nuclear option.”
“You never use a sledgehammer to kill a gnat,” Towns said. “We should not go to the extreme of expelling our members for fighting for what many of the citizens want to happen, whether you agree with it or not.”
The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, Kathy Sinback, called the move in a statement a “targeted expulsion of two Black legislators without due process.”
She continued, “It raises questions about the disparate treatment of Black representatives, while continuing the shameful legacy of disenfranchising and silencing the voices of marginalized communities and the Black lawmakers they elect.”
Tennessee Republicans’ ruthless use of their state House supermajority to expel two young Black lawmakers for breaching decorum exposed a torrent of political forces that are transforming American politics at the grassroots.
The GOP action, after the lawmakers had led a gun control protest from the House floor in response to last week’s Nashville school shooting, created a snapshot of how two halves of a diversifying and increasingly self-estranged nation are being pulled apart.
A day of soaring tensions inside and outside the state House chamber thrust the Volunteer State into the national spotlight in an extraordinary political coda to the mass shooting in which six people, including three 9-year-olds, were gunned down.
The drama laid bare intense frustration among some voters at the failure to pass firearms reform – and the growing clash between Democrats from liberal cities and a Republican Party that is willing to use its rural conservative power base to curtail democracy. Given the national attention, the showdown could backfire on the GOP with voters who balk at its extremist turn. And it turned two lawmakers – whom most Americans had never heard of – into overnight heroes of the progressive movement.
The Democrats – Justin Pearson and Justin Jones – were thrown out of their seats in a move that effectively canceled out the votes of their tens of thousands of constituents, simply for infringing the rules of the chamber – an almost unheard of sanction across the country.
But a third Democrat – Gloria Johnson, a White woman who also joined the gun control protest – escaped expulsion after Republicans failed to muster the required two-thirds majority. The discrepancy raised suggestions of racial discrimination and made an acrimonious day even uglier.
Republicans said that the Democrats had interrupted the people’s business with their protest, arguing that democracy couldn’t work if lawmakers refused to abide by the rules. But the Democrats have long warned their voices are being silenced by the hardline GOP supermajority and accused Republicans of infringing their rights to free expression and dissent.
“We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy,” Jones told Republican legislators on Thursday as he spoke before the House in his own defense.
At its most basic level, the clash underscored the utter polarization between Republicans and Democrats about how to respond to mass shootings, which pass with little or no significant action to prevent the endless sequence of such tragedies.
Although it did pass a measure intended to enhance school security, the Tennessee state House essentially decided to use its near unchecked power to protect its behavioral rules rather than take any action to make it harder for mass killers to get deadly weapons. In a deep-red state like Tennessee, this is not a surprise. But the fury and even desperation of lawmakers like Pearson and Jones and the hundreds of protesters at the state capitol on Thursday reflect increasing anger among the majority of Americans who want tougher gun restrictions but find their hopes dashed by Republican legislatures.
In Tennessee, that frustration over the endless deaths of innocents erupted into activism.
One protester, teacher Kevin Foster, said the aftermath of the Nashville school shooting had been “deeply, deeply painful.”
And he tearfully called on Tennessee legislators to do something to stop more school shootings. “Just listen to us, there is absolutely no reason you should have assault rifles available to citizens in the public. It serves absolutely no purpose and it brings death and destruction on children,” Foster told CNN’s Ryan Young.
The severe penalties meted out by the legislature for a rules infraction, which did not involve violence or incitement, also underscored another increasing trend – the radicalization of the Donald Trump-era Republican Party. Critics see the way the GOP is using its legislative majorities as an abuse of power that threatens the democratic rights of millions of Americans.
The Tennessee House has only rarely expelled members – and when it has, it’s for offenses like bribery or sexual infractions – so the treatment of Pearson and Jones, who had already had their committee assignments taken away, was regarded by Democrats as disproportionately harsh.
The expulsions looked like a party dispensing with opponents and positions it didn’t agree with – a perspective Pearson voiced when he accused the GOP of acting to suppress ideas it would prefer not to listen to and questions it wouldn’t answer.
“You just expelled a member for exercising their First Amendment rights!” he said.
Tennessee Republican Caucus Chair Jeremy Faison told CNN his members were always firm in wanting the Democratic lawmakers expelled and rejected an alternative route through the House ethics committee. “The overwhelming majority, the heartbeat of this caucus, says ‘not on this House floor, not this way,’” he said. Faison added: “It is not possible for us to move forward with the way they were behaving in committee and on the House floor. There’s got to be some peace.”
Democrats did break the rules last week – they admitted to doing so and their actions, if adopted by every legislator, would make it impossible to maintain order and free debate. Jones, for instance, used a bullhorn to lead chants of protesters in the public gallery. But the question at issue is the appropriateness of the punishments and whether the GOP majority overreached.
One Republican, state Rep. Gino Bulso, said that Jones – with his dramatic self-defense in the well of the chamber on Thursday – had made the case for his ejection because he accused the House of acting dishonorably.
“He and two other representatives effectively conducted a mutiny on March the 30th of 2023 in this very chamber,” Bulso said. State House Speaker Cameron Sexton had previously compared the gun control protest to the mob attack by Trump’s supporters on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
But this appeared an absurd analogy. While the protest in the Tennessee chamber did disrupt regular order, it wasn’t anti-democratic, nor was it designed to interrupt the transfer of power from one president to the next, like the Capitol riot briefly did. And the behavior of the three Democratic lawmakers, while irregular, was not that unusual in a riotous political age. US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and other Republicans, for instance, heckled President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address this year. And Trump this week attacked a New York judge as biased and singled out his family after becoming the first ex-president to be charged with a crime.
The racial backdrop of Thursday’s vote could not be ignored after Johnson was reprieved by a single vote. She told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota that she believed race helped explain the differing outcomes.
“I think it is pretty clear. I am a 60-year-old White woman, and they are two young Black men,” Johnson said, adding that she thought the Republicans questioned Jones and Pearson in a demeaning way.
US Rep. Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, didn’t rule out the possibility that discrimination was behind the expulsion of Jones and Pearson but not Johnson.
“I am not saying race wasn’t (the reason) – but I haven’t looked at the numbers to see if gender might not have had a play in it, and also maybe some seniority, and also some folks that were on a committee with her,” Cohen told CNN’s Bianna Golodryga.
The question is especially acute since Pearson and Jones were arguing that their voices – and those of hundreds of thousands of Black Americans in the state’s diverse cities – were being silenced by a largely White Republican majority.
“I represent 78,000 people, and when I came to the well that day, I was not standing for myself,” Jones said. “I was standing for those young people … many of whom can’t even vote yet, many of whom are disenfranchised. But all of whom are terrified by the continued trend of mass shooting plaguing our state and plaguing this nation.”
Jones, from Nashville, and Pearson, from Memphis, are representative of a new generation of politically active Americans. Their background in activism and compelling rhetorical styles speak to a kind of politics that is more confrontational than the outwardly genteel but hardball power plays preferred by some of their older Republican colleagues in the legislature.
At times, the speeches by both lawmakers invoked the atmospherics of the civil rights movement and may augur a new brand of urgent activism by younger citizens – like the multi-racial crowd of protesters who greeted Pearson and Jones as heroes after they left the chamber.
The topic of the showdown – over infringements of the decorum of the state House – also had uncomfortable racial echoes as they implied, deliberately or not, that the two young Black Americans did not understand the proper way to behave in public life.
“It’s very scary for the nation to see what’s happening here. If I didn’t know that it was happening to me, I would think this was 1963 instead of 2023,” Jones told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
More broadly, Pearson and Jones also represent a cementing reality of the American political map in which growing liberal and racially diverse cities and suburbs are increasingly clashing with legislatures dominated by Republicans from more rural areas.
This dynamic is playing out on multiple issues – including abortion, crime and voting rights – in states like Georgia and Texas. In Florida, meanwhile, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is using his big reelection win and GOP control of both chambers of the state legislature to drive home a radical America First-style conservative agenda that he’s using as a platform for a possible presidential campaign. Some Republicans see similar trends in Democratic-majority California.
In Tennessee, as Democratic state House Rep. Joe Towns put it, the GOP used a nuclear option by deploying their supermajority to suppress the ability of minority Democrats to speak.
“You never use a sledgehammer to kill a gnat,” Towns said. “We should not go to the extreme of expelling our members for fighting for what many of the citizens want to happen, whether you agree with it or not.”
Pearson was specific in viewing his expulsion as being about far more than a thwarted gun control protest.
“We are losing our democracy to White supremacy, we are losing our democracy to patriarchy, we are losing our democracy to people who want to keep a status quo that is damning to the rest of us and damning to our children and unborn people,” he said.
The political crisis in Tennessee quickly got national attention.
Biden described the expulsions as “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent” and lambasted Republicans for not doing more to prevent school shootings.
“Americans want lawmakers to act on commonsense gun safety reforms that we know will save lives. But instead, we’ve continued to see Republican officials across America double down on dangerous bills that make our schools, places of worship, and communities less safe,” he said in a statement.
Republicans in Tennessee had their own political reasons for acting against the trio of Democratic lawmakers. But by making national figures of Pearson and Jones and by handing the White House a new example of GOP extremism, their efforts may have badly backfired.
President Joe Biden is co-hosting the second Summit for Democracy on Wednesday, expanding on the diplomatic initiatives he established in 2021 to bolster democracies around the world in the face of autocracies’ growing global influence.
This year’s multi-day summit is being co-hosted by Biden, as well as the leaders of Costa Rica, the Netherlands, South Korea and Zambia. After a morning introduction on Wednesday, Biden will lead a virtual summit event in Washington that’s focused on democracy delivering on global challenges.
During the summit, the Biden administration will announce new steps to counter the abuse and misuse of technology, including a “joint commitment” with foreign partners “to counter the proliferation and misuse of commercial spyware,” according to an administration official.
The announcement is coming days after the president issued an executive order banning US government agencies from using spyware that is deemed a threat to US national security or are implicated in human rights abuses. On Monday, CNN reported at least 50 US government officials are suspected or confirmed to have been targeted by invasive commercial spyware designed to hack mobile phones, revealing a far bigger number than previously known.
As part of Wednesday’s announcement, the official told reporters on a call Tuesday, the administration and its partners will release a set of “guiding principles on how rights-respecting governments should use surveillance technology more broadly,” noting that while surveillance and spyware technologies may, “of course, have lawful applications,” they “have been shown to be heavily misused by authoritarian states.”
Each host nation is focusing on a separate so-called “pillar” of democracy during plenary sessions throughout the summit: supporting free and independent media, combating corruption, bolstering democratic reforms and supporting human rights, advancing technology for democracy, and defending free and fair elections. Biden is expected to announce $690 million in funding through USAID and State Department programs to further efforts to protect all five “pillars,” the official said.
National Security Council strategic communications coordinator John Kirby told reporters on Tuesday that the US will be announcing a number of new initiatives over the coming days tied to the summit, including “significant additional investment in the Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal,” which was launched at the first summit in 2021.
Ukraine is taking part in the summit, with President Volodymyr Zelensky participating in a Tuesday session virtually with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Zelensky is also expected to speak during Biden’s plenary summit Wednesday. In addition, Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is scheduled to address the summit.
Taiwan has also been invited to participate in the summit “in a manner that is consistent with our long standing policy,” the administration official said, with remarks scheduled from Taiwan’s minister of digital affairs on the agenda.
Biden hosted the first Summit for Democracy in December 2021, bringing together more than 100 participants representing governments, civil society and private-sector leaders virtually amid continued precautions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The 2021 summit focused on combating corruption, defending against authoritarianism and promoting human rights.
The establishment of the summit, led by Biden, was largely seen as a show of force in opposition to autocracies – a broad theme he’s reinforced throughout his time in office.
Proud Boys member Fernando Alonso, who was with members of the group in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, testified on Monday that text messages about “stacking bodies” on the White House lawn were akin to locker-room banter and that members of the group were simply “knuckleheads.”
During his testimony in the trial against five members of the Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy for their alleged actions around the US Capitol attack, Alonso testified that the idea Proud Boys wanted to take over the government was “offensive.”
But then prosecutors pressed him about text messages he sent weeks earlier.
In one message, an individual named Al messaged Alonso on December 24, 2020, asking: “When do we start stacking bodies on the White House Lawn?”
“Jan 7th,” Alonso wrote back, according to evidence presented at the trial.
Al responded: “The RINOs first, make the Democrats watch…”
Alonso answered: “yes.”
When asked about the message, Alonso testified it was all “‘locker room talk,’ if you will.”
The Proud Boy also testified that defendant Enrique Tarrio – chairman of the group – never wanted violence. Alonso said the idea that they wanted to overtake the government “is insulting” and “ridiculous.”
The five defendants – Tarrio, Zachary Rehl, Ethan Nordean, Dominic Pezzola and Joseph Biggs – have pleaded not guilty.
Alonso said that, around the time of January 6, Proud Boys were irritated by police who, in his view, didn’t do enough to stop violence perpetrated by the left-wing group Antifa, calling them “coptifa.”
“Antifa did a lot of things, and I don’t see any trials for them,” he said.
Alonso testified that on January 6, he followed Proud Boys leaders around the Capitol but said he never went inside. Alonso has not been charged in connection with his actions on January 6.
“I wasn’t going to go in when there’s armed police pointing guns at us,” Alonso said, adding that it “was pretty extreme” to go inside.
For months hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been taking to the streets across the country to regularly protest far-reaching changes to the Israel’s legal system some say threaten the country’s democratic foundations.
At its core, the judicial overhaul would give the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, and therefore the parties in power, more control over Israel’s judiciary.
From how judges are selected, to what laws the Supreme Court can rule on, to even giving parliament power to overturn Supreme Court decisions, the changes would be the most significant shakeups to Israel’s judiciary since its founding in 1948.
The proposed reforms do not come out of nowhere.
Figures from across the political spectrum have in the past called for changes to Israel’s judiciary.
Israel has no written constitution, only a set of quasi-constitutional basic laws, making the Supreme Court even more powerful. But Israel also has no check on the power of the Knesset other than the Supreme Court.
Here’s what you need to know.
The judicial overhaul is a package of bills, all of which need to pass three votes in the Knesset before they become law.
One of the most important elements for the Netanyahu government is the bill that changes the makeup of the nine-member committee that selects judges, in order to give the government a majority of the seats on the committee.
Netanyahu and his supporters argue that the Supreme Court has become an insular, elitist group that does not represent the Israeli people. They argue the Supreme Court has overstepped its role, getting into issues it should not rule on.
Defending his plans, the prime minister has pointed to countries like the United States, where politicians control which federal judges are appointed and approved.
Another significant element of the changes is known as the override clause, which would give the Israeli parliament the power to pass laws previously ruled invalid by the court, essentially overriding Supreme Court decisions.
Supporters say the Supreme Court should not interfere in the will of the people, who vote the politicians into power.
“We go to the polls, vote, and time after time, people we did not elect decide for us,” Justice Minister Yariv Levin said while unveiling the reforms at the beginning of January.
Although several bills could affect Netanyahu it is the one about declaring a prime minister “unfit for office” that has the biggest implication for the Israeli prime minister.
Critics say Netanyahu is pushing the overhaul forward because of his own ongoing corruption trial, where he faces charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust. He denies any wrongdoing.
That bill is largely seen by opposition leaders as a way to protect Netanyahu from being declared unfit for office as a result of the trial.
As part of a deal with the court to serve as a prime minister despite being on trial, Netanyahu accepted a conflict of interest declaration. The Attorney General determined that the declaration meant Netanyahu could not be involved in the policy-making of the judicial overhaul. A petition is currently in front of the Israeli Supreme Court to declare Netanyahu unfit for office on the grounds he has violated that conflict of interest declaration and the attorney general has written an open letter to Netanyahu saying he is in breach of the deal and the law.
Critics also argue that if the government has a greater say in which judges are appointed, Netanyahu’s allies will appoint judges they know will rule in Netanyahu’s favor.
Netanyahu, it should be said, has completely denied this and has claimed his trial is “unraveling” on its own.
In the past, Netanyahu has publicly expressed strong support for an independent judiciary. Asked why he’s supporting such an overhaul despite those public proclamations, Netanyahu told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “I haven’t changed my view. I think we need a strong, independent judiciary. But an independent judiciary doesn’t mean an unbridled judiciary, which is what has happened here, I mean, over the last 25 years.”
Weakening the judicial branch could limit both Israelis and Palestinians in seeking the court’s defense of their rights if they believe they are compromised by the government.
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank could be affected, and of course Palestinian citizens of Israel or those who hold residency cards would be directly affected. Israel’s Supreme Court has no influence on what happens in Gaza, which is ruled by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Critics of the changes worry that if the politicians have more control, the rights of minorities in Israel, especially Palestinians living in Israel, would be impacted.
Last year, for example, the court halted the evictions of Palestinian families in the flashpoint neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, where Jewish groups have claimed ownership of land the families have lived on for decades.
At the same time, Palestinian activists have argued that the high court has further entrenched Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, having never considered the legality of Israeli settlements there, even though they’re considered illegal by most of the international community.
The high court has also been the subject of complaints from Israel’s far right and settlers, who say it isbiased against settlers; they have condemned the court’s involvement in approving the eviction of settlers from Gaza and the Northern West Bank in 2005.
The overhaul has caused concern across Israel’s financial, business, security and academic sectors.
Critics say the overhaul goes too far, and will completely destroy the only avenue available to provide checks and balances to the Israeli legislative branch.
They warn it will harm the independence of the Israeli judiciary, and will hurt rights not enshrined in Israel’s quasi-constitutional basic laws, like minority rights and freedom of expression.
According to polling released in February by the Israel Democracy Institute, only a minority of Israelis support the reforms. The vast majority – 72% – want a compromise to be reached and, even then, 66% think the Supreme Court should have the power to strike down lawa and 63% of Israelis think the current method of appointing judges should stay as it is.
Members of the typically apolitical high-tech sector have also spoken out against the reforms. Assaf Rappaport, CEO of cybersecurity firm Wiz, has said the firm won’t be moving any of the $300 million capital it recently raised to Israel because of the unrest over the overhaul.
Israel’s Central Bank Governor Amir Yaron told CNN’s Richard Quest that the reforms are too “hasty” and risk harming the economy.
Several former Mossad chiefs have also spoken out against the reforms, warning division over the issue is harming Israeli security. Hundreds of reservists in Israel’s army have warned they will not answer the call to serve if the reforms pass, saying they believe Israel will no longer be a full democracy under the changes.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said the government’s legislation was “misguided, brutal and undermines our democratic foundations,” and warned Israel was potentially on the brink of a “civil war.” Although the Israeli presidency is largely a ceremonial role, Herzog has been actively speaking with all parties calling for negotiations.
And on the international front, Israel’s allies, including the United States, have also expressed concern about the overhaul.
According to the White House, US President Joe Biden told Netanyahu in a mid-March phone call “democratic societies are strengthened by genuine checks and balances, and that fundamental changes should be pursued with the broadest possible base of popular support.”
Protest organizers say they plan to intensify their demonstrations until the legislation is halted. But the government says it received a mandate from voters to pass the reform when it was elected last November.
But in mid-March, the coalition government softened its plans for the first time, announcing that it had amended the bill that would reform the committee that selects judges. Instead of having the vast majority of the appointed seats on the committee, the government-appointed members would have a one-seat majority.
On March 23, even after his own defense minister nearly gave a speech calling for the legislation to be halted out of concern for how it would affect Israeli national security, Netanyahu vowed to keep advancing the reforms.
He called for opposition politicians to meet with him to negotiate, something they have said they will only do if the legislative process is halted.
Complicating matters further, should the bills pass parliament the Supreme Court must then potentially decide on laws curbing its own power. This raises the possibility of a constitutional standoff. Would the Supreme Court strike down the laws, and if so, how would the government respond?
India imposed the highest number of internet shutdowns globally in 2022, a new report has revealed, in what critics say is yet another blow to country’s commitment to freedom of speech and access to information.
Of 187 internet shutdowns recorded worldwide, 84 took place in India, according to the report published Tuesday by Access Now, a New York based advocacy group that tracks internet freedom.
This is the fifth consecutive year the world’s largest democracy of more than 1.3 billion people has topped the list, the group said, raising concerns about India’s commitment to internet freedom under its current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“The responsibility of Indian states for the majority of shutdowns globally is impossible to ignore and a deep problem on its own,” the report said. “Authorities in regions across the country are increasingly resorting to this repressive measure, inflicting shutdowns on more people in more places.”
Nearly 60% of India’s internet shutdowns last year occurred in Indian-administered Kashmir, where authorities disrupted access due to “political instability and violence,” according to the report.
In August 2019, the BJP revoked the autonomy of the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir and split it into two federally administered territories, bringing the region under greater control of New Delhi. The unprecedented decision sparked protests and the government has frequently restricted communication lines since, a move rights groups say is aimed at quashing dissent.
Apart from Jammu and Kashmir, authorities in the states of West Bengal and Rajasthan imposed more shutdowns than other Indian regions in response to “protests, communal violence and exams,” according to the report.
India has the world’s second largest digital population, following China, with more than 800 million internet users. The internet has become a vital social and economic lifeline for large swathes of the population and connects the country’s isolated rural pockets, with its growing cities.
The disruptions “impacted the daily lives of millions of people for hundreds of hours in 2022,” the report said.
The Access Now report comes at a time when India’s commitment to freedom of speech and expression is under increasing scrutiny.
In January, the country banned a documentary from the BBC that was critical of Modi’s alleged role in deadly riots more than 20 years ago. Indian tax authorities raided the BBC’s offices in New Delhi and Mumbai in the weeks that followed citing “irregularities and discrepancies” in the broadcaster’s taxes.
But critics of the government were not convinced, instead calling the raids “a clear cut case of vendetta” and accused the BJP of intimidating the media.
Last week, police in New Delhi arrested a senior opposition politician for allegedly “disturbing harmony” after he misstated the Prime Minister’s middle name, a move Modi’s critics likened to “dictatorial behavior.”
In recent years, the government has repeatedly justified blocking internet access on the grounds of preserving public safety amid widespread fears of mob violence.
While the country was in the middle of its general election in 2019, with more than 900 million people eligible to vote, some Indians were denied access to the internet for days at a time as they prepared to cast their ballots.
Authorities said the blocking was “a precautionary measure to maintain law and order,” leading many critics to question India’s grand exercise in political freedom during the world’s largest election.
During a nearly year-long protest by angry farmers in 2021 over controversial new pricing laws, the Indian government blocked internet access in several districts after violent skirmishes broke out between demonstrators and police.
Some individual shutdowns have been challenged in the courts, and there is an effort to change the country’s laws to make such blackouts more difficult to impose.
Last year saw more internet shutdowns worldwide than ever before, Access Now said, prompting the group to raise fears of “digital authoritarianism” as governments continue the trend.
Apart from India, other countries that saw internet shutdowns last year include Ukraine, Iran and Myanmar.
During Russia’s invasion of it neighbor Ukraine, the Kremlin cut internet access at least 22 times, according to Access Now, engaging in “cyberattacks and deliberately destroying telecommunications infrastructure.”
The Iranian regime responded to protests ignited by the death in custody of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini by imposing 18 shutdowns – a move Access Now called “a further escalation of its repressive tactics.”
Myanmar, which in 2021 saw the junta remove its democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, saw seven internet blackouts, according to the report. The Southeast Asian country continues to be rocked by violence and instability, while many are grappling with shortages of fuel, food and basic supplies
The “military persisted in keeping people in the dark for extended periods, targeting areas where coup resistance is strongest,” the report said.
The sole Proud Boy to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy in connection to the US Capitol riot testified on Wednesday that members of the far-right organization believed the country was barreling toward revolution and that they were the “tip of the spear.”
Jeremy Bertino, a top lieutenant to Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio, testified as part of a cooperation deal that he struck with prosecutors against Tarrio and four other members of the Proud Boys charged with conspiring to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
“We had a big fight on our hands. It was going to be an uphill battle, and everyone had turned against us,” Bertino testified. “My belief was that we had to take the reins and pretty much be the leaders that we had been building ourselves up to be.”
His testimony allowed prosecutors to show jurors how the events of January 6, 2021, unfolded in the mind of a top member of the organization as he watched it online from his North Carolina home, sending messages to his “brothers” about targeting then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and assuring them that members of the far-left group Antifa weren’t there to stop them.
Some of the messages featured in court were from defendants in the case, whom Bertino said he would “take a bullet for.” But Bertino and the five defendants – Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, Joseph Biggs and Dominic Pezzola – rarely made eye contact during the testimony.
There was not a premeditated or specific plan to storm the Capitol, Bertino testified, adding that getting the Proud Boys to communicate and work together was like “herding cats.” The Proud Boys had several group messages from the days before the riot where members mentioned descending on the Capitol building, according to exhibits shown by prosecutors.
As court challenges to the 2020 election failed, members of the Proud Boys – who saw themselves as the “foot soldiers of the right” – began to believe the country was headed toward an “all-out revolution,” Bertino testified.
“I felt it coming,” he said.
The Proud Boys believed that the government was controlled by “commies,” he testified, and they began to turn against the police, whom the group increasingly saw as their enemy. Everybody in the organization felt “desperate,” including Tarrio, Bertino told the jury.
“His tones were calculated,” Bertino said of Tarrio. “Cold, but very determined. He felt the exact same way that I did.”
Members also were inspired by then-President Donald Trump’s reference to their organization in a 2020 presidential debate, where he told the group to “stand back and stand by.” Bertino testified that there were “nonstop requests for membership” after the debate, specifically from people who wanted to attend rallies, and that the group did less vetting of new members to keep up with applications.
During cross examination, Bertino said that he thought the Proud Boys had a goal to stop the 2020 election but had no knowledge of how that goal would be achieved.
“I didn’t have a direct idea of where they were going, how they were going to get there.”
Bertino was not in Washington, DC, on the day of the riot because he was at home recovering from a stab wound he suffered during a previous pro-Trump rally, but he testified that he watched on a livestream video. He saw the mob as starting the “next American revolution,” and told others Proud Boys he was brought to tears during the attack.
“I was happy, excited, in awe and disbelief that people were doing what they said they would do,” Bertino told the jury. When the crowd descended on the Capitol building, “it meant that we influenced people, the normies, enough to make them stand for themselves and take back their country and take back their freedom,” he said.
In chats to other Proud Boys, Bertino encouraged members to move forward, telling them that he could see the Capitol building on a livestream and that no members of Antifa would be at the building to stop the pro-Trump mob.
Bertino also messaged: “They need to get peloton” – which he testified was a misspelled reference to Pelosi. “She was the talking head of the opposition and they needed to remove her from power,” he said.
By the evening of January 6, Bertino grew angry at Trump supporters for leaving the Capitol building, he told the jury.
“The way I felt at the moment, if we give that building up, we were giving up our country,” Bertino testified. He sent encrypted messages to other Proud Boys members, saying that “we failed,” and “Half measures mean nothing,” and, referring to lawmakers inside the Capitol, “Fuck fear: They need to be hung.”
“Once they took that step, there was no coming back from it,” Bertino testified Wednesday. “And they decided basically to balk and walk away after creating all that chaos down there.”
“The revolution had failed,” he continued, “because the House was still going to go on and certify the election.”
Bertino told the jury that after January 6, he tried to delete what he saw as incriminating messages on his phone and he wasn’t fully truthful with FBI agents when they asked him about the Capitol attack.
“I guess it’s a natural instinct to protect yourself and protect those you love,” Bertino testified.
“I love them,” he said of the five defendants. “I didn’t want to see anything bad happen to them. Still don’t.”
