US President Joe Biden was yesterday to meet French President Emmanuel Macron on a state visit to France, after warning of the need to preserve US democracy and live up to the example of World War II heroes.
Biden was due to meet Macron for talks at the Elysee Palace in Paris followed by a state banquet given in his honor, with Ukraine’s battle against the Russian invasion the dominant topic.
In a speech on a clifftop in northern France that was the scene of a bloody confrontation between US troops and occupying Germans on June 6, 1944, Biden on Friday had drawn parallels between D-Day and the present.
Photo: AP
Biden is set to face his Republican rival, former US president Donald Trump, later this year in presidential elections that commentators expect to severely test US democracy.
Biden invoked the ghosts of the heroes of the assault on the Pointe du Hoc, a clifftop promontory where German bunkers were attacked by US troops. No surviving veterans remain alive.
“They [the veterans] are summoning us,” Biden said. “They ask us, what will we do? They’re not asking us to scale these cliffs. They’re asking us to stay true to what America stands for.”
Biden’s speech also came under the shadow of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which has left war again raging in Europe eight decades after the end of World War II. There are also fears Trump will scale down US participation in international alliances such as NATO and lessen support for Ukraine if he wins.
“American democracy asks the hardest of things: to believe that we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves. So democracy begins with each of us,” Biden said.
Biden, a Democrat, was unmistakably invoking the memory of a famous speech given by late Republican president Ronald Reagan at the Normandy clifftop in 1984 where he saluted the American “boys” of the Pointe du Hoc.
“The rangers who scaled this cliff did not know they would change the world but they did,” Biden said. “They came, they did their job, they fulfilled their mission... They were part of something greater than themselves.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had earlier urged the West to do more to achieve a fair peace as Ukraine battles the Russian invasion, telling Biden that Kyiv is counting on “shoulder-to-shoulder” support.
Meeting Zelenskiy in Paris after the speech, Biden pledged his support for Ukraine and announced another US$225 million in aid to Kyiv.
Zelenskiy thanked him for the “tremendous support,” comparing it to the US coming to Europe’s aid during World War II.
After his own talks with Zelenskiy in Paris on Friday evening, Macron said he wanted to “finalize” the creation of a coalition of military instructors to train Ukrainian troops in the coming days.
He said he hoped for Kyiv’s EU accession talks to start “by the end of the month.”
Macron also lashed out at what he called a “camp of pacifists” and the “spirit of defeat” over Ukraine’s fight against Russia, vowing Ukrainian resistance would not end with capitulation.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
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
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
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,
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