US President Joe Biden on Thursday delivered a defiant argument for a second term in his state of the union speech, vowing to “not back down” in Washington’s opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Freedom and democracy are under attack both at home and overseas at the very same time,” Biden said as he appealed for the US Congress to support Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself against Russia’s two-year-old invasion. “History is watching.”
Biden has been held up by the US House of Representatives, which is struggling to approve funding bills and has been deadlocked for months on foreign assistance bills to help Ukraine and to support Israel’s fight against Hamas.
Photo: Bloomberg
In Moscow yesterday, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev called Biden a “mad” disgrace to the US shortly after the US leader had finished speaking and said he had no right to compare himself to former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Biden opened his address with a reference to a 1941 speech to the US Congress in which Roosevelt said the union faced an unprecedented turning point in history.
Biden also accused former US president Donald Trump — his apparent Republican opponent in November’s election — of kowtowing to Russia and, just over two weeks after calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “crazy SOB,” said he had a message for the Russian president on Ukraine: “We will not walk away.”
“Even though Roosevelt was an infirm man in a wheelchair, he raised America from the depression; Biden, on the other hand, is a mad, mentally disabled individual who set his mind on dragging humanity to hell,” Medvedev wrote on X.
“Roosevelt together with allies including the USSR, was fighting for peace; yet, Biden is actively and persistently trying to start WWIII,” he wrote, referring to the former Soviet Union and the possibility of another world war.
“Roosevelt was fighting against fascists, but Biden is fighting for them,” Medvedev wrote in English. “He is the United States’ disgrace!”
The war in Ukraine has triggered a deep crisis in Russia’s relations with the West, and Biden angered Russian officials with his “crazy SOB” comment.
Putin said that the remark showed why the Kremlin felt Biden was a preferable future president to Trump.
Biden made that remark in a sentence about threats to the world including “that guy Putin and others,” the risk of nuclear conflict and the existential threat to humanity from climate change.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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