John McCain and Barack Obama were to observe a truce yesterday in their increasingly bitter White House contest with a joint appearance at Ground Zero on the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Their visit to the site of the former World Trade Center in Manhattan promised a rare break from hostilities in the frenzied last two months of the presidential race.
“There will be no speeches,” Democrat Obama’s spokeswoman Linda Douglass said. “This is going to be a moment when politics are set aside.”
PHOTO: AFP
NO CAMPAIGN ADS
Both Obama and his Republican rival McCain were to suspend campaign advertising for the day.
Heavy security was in place well ahead, with streets near Ground Zero closed and buses re-routed before ceremonies starting at 8:40am.
Two separate minutes of silence were to mark the moments when the two hijacked airliners struck on Sept. 11, 2001, destroying each of the Twin Towers and killing some 3,000 people — at 8:46am and at 9:03am.
Ceremonies included additional minutes of silence commemorating the collapse of each tower, as well as the traditional reading out of all the victims’ names.
McCain and Obama — expected by staff to be arriving later in the day, after the official ceremonies — have promised to bury the hatchet in honor of the anniversary.
Obama set the tone for the Ground Zero event, saying on Wednesday that Sept. 11 showed “that here in America, we all have a stake in each other. I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper and we rise and fall as one nation.”
Although they will want to avoid politicking at Ground Zero, temperatures could rise later in the day when the two candidates participate in a televised forum.
The forum, organized by a coalition of civic groups named ServiceNation, is not a debate and the two rivals will appear separately, with Obama going second — a line-up his aides said was decided by flipping a coin.
BEST BEHAVIOR
Analysts said the antagonists would likely be on best behavior.
“The campaign’s likely to get pretty nasty, but tomorrow they’ll want to be above the battle,” said John Mueller, a politics professor at Ohio State University. “Bashing the opponent is bad politics at that moment.”
The Sept. 11 attacks remain a deeply emotional issue in the US, even if polls show that pocketbook concerns, particularly the parlous state of the housing market, now top terrorism fears.
OPEN WOUND
Because of continued delays in erecting the World Trade Center’s replacement and a memorial, the memory of the attacks remain literally an open wound.
On the eve of the anniversary, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg lambasted bureaucratic hurdles for what he said was “frustratingly slow” progress in redeveloping the site.
But don’t expect the bipartisan approach in Manhattan to last long, warned New York University politics professor Steven Brams.
“They’ll obviously want to unify the country, to commemorate this occasion. There’ll be no harsh words exchanged if they meet face to face,” Brams said. “But this is just an interlude.”
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS