Superstar Beyonce provided the latest shot of stardust to US Vice President and the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ White House campaign on Friday, as the vice president and her rival, former US president and the Republican Party’s candidate Donald Trump, courted voters with just 11 days to go in a neck-and-neck election.
Taking the stage with her Destiny’s Child costar Kelly Rowland, the Grammy-winning diva introduced Harris to more than 20,000 roaring supporters in the Texas metropolis of Houston, Beyonce’s hometown.
“It’s time for America to sing a new song,” Beyonce said, urging voters to show up.
Photo: AFP
While the superstar did not perform any hits, her presence brought even more attention to Harris’ rally, which focused on abortion restrictions in Republican-led states.
Beyonce said she was not there as a celebrity but as “a mother who cares deeply about the world... A world where we have the freedom to control our bodies.”
Texas is not one of the handful of battlegrounds that are expected to decide the presidential election, or where the Democrat and her rival would normally be campaigning in the home stretch.
Photo: Reuters
However, Harris is banking on her star-studded show — which also featured 91-year-old country legend Willie Nelson — to bring abortion to the forefront of voters’ minds in the final days of campaigning.
“We are 11 days out from an election that will decide the future of America, including the freedom of every woman to make decisions about her own body,” Harris said.
While Harris was in Houston, Trump was in Austin, taping a three-hour interview with The Joe Rogan Experience, the US’ most popular podcast.
The friendly discussion veered around various topics, including UFOs and secret files on the assassination of former US president John F. Kennedy, but rarely got into policy details and wholly avoided the issue of abortion, a video of the chat released Friday evening showed.
Rogan did not say he was backing Trump, and even expressed hope that Harris would also visit.
However, the former US president prodded the comedian to follow in billionaire Elon Musk’s steps and publicly endorse him.
“You cannot be voting for Kamala. Kamala. You’re not a Kamala person,” Trump said.
Harris and Trump locked horns earlier on Friday over accusations that the Republican ex-president has been running as a “fascist.”
The two camps traded barbs over claims by Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, echoed by Harris, that Trump is a “fascist” who cannot be trusted with power again.
Republican leaders in the US Congress attacked her over that characterization, in a statement revealing they had been briefed on “ongoing and persistent” threats to Trump and accused Harris of encouraging “another would-be assassin” after he survived an attempt on his life in July.
Half the country agrees with Harris that Trump is a fascist, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll of registered voters, and she hit back at an impromptu news conference.
“The truth is that some of the people closest to Donald Trump, when he was president ... have been very clear about the danger and the threat that [he] poses to America, and the fact that he is unfit to serve,” Harris said.
Meanwhile, the influential Washington Post newspaper, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, on Friday announced that it would endorse neither Harris nor Trump in the US presidential election.
CEO William Lewis said this was a return “to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
However, the Post editorial board has endorsed candidates for much of the last four decades — all of them Democrats — before deciding to stay on the sidelines in one of the most polarizing elections in US history.
Newspaper editorials have little of their once-powerful political heft. However, the Post — whose slogan is “Democracy dies in darkness” — is one traditional media outlet that retains influence among Washington’s elite.
US media reported that a senior Post figure, editor at large Robert Kagan, had resigned in protest.
According to a report by the Washington Post on its Web site, Bezos likewise intervened to block the board from publishing its editorial in favor of Harris. However, a source close to the Post’s leadership said that this “is inaccurate.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS