Harris assails Trump for saying Liz Cheney should have rifles ‘shooting at her’

Harris assails Trump for saying Liz Cheney should have rifles ‘shooting at her’
Former US Rep. Liz Cheney campaigns for Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris in Malvern, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 21, 2024. (REUTERS/File Photo)
Short Url
Updated 02 November 2024
Follow

Harris assails Trump for saying Liz Cheney should have rifles ‘shooting at her’

Harris assails Trump for saying Liz Cheney should have rifles ‘shooting at her’
  • Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, have thrown their support behind Democrat Harris
  • Trump has been using increasingly threatening rhetoric against his adversaries and talked of “enemies from within” undermining the country

MADISON, Wisconsin: Kamala Harris said Friday it was “disqualifying” for Donald Trump to say former Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the former president’s most prominent Republican critics, should have rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.
The Democratic vice president has campaigned extensively with Cheney, especially in the “blue wall” battleground states that make up her strongest path to victory on Tuesday, while Trump has been going after the former Wyoming congresswoman and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, over the Iraq war and US military interventions abroad.
Speaking to reporters after arriving in Madison, Wisconsin, Harris asked voters to consider who they’d prefer sitting in the Oval Office, driving the message she’s been emphasizing in the campaign’s closing week. Harris called Cheney “a true patriot” and said Trump “has increased his violent rhetoric.”
“His enemies list has grown longer. His rhetoric has grown more extreme,” Harris said. “And he is even less focused than before on the needs and the concerns and the challenges facing the American people.”
Trump and his allies say his comments are being misconstrued. They say he was arguing that Cheney is a “war hawk” but would be less supportive of using the military if she had to fight in wars herself.
He doubled down Friday, repeating the same imagery that drove the backlash.
“If you gave Liz Cheney a gun and put her into battle, facing the other side with the guns pointing at her, she wouldn’t have the courage and the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said during a rally in Warren, Michigan.
The Republican presidential candidate has been using increasingly threatening rhetoric against his adversaries and talked of “enemies from within” undermining the country. Some of his former senior aides and Harris have labeled him a fascist in response.
Cheney, who broke with Trump after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, on Friday called the former president a “cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
Trump has ramped up his critiques of the Cheneys in swing state Michigan, where he is competing with Harris for the votes of Arab Americans opposed to US backing of Israel’s offensive in Gaza after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and its subsequent invasion of Lebanon.
At an event late Thursday in Arizona with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Trump was asked whether it was strange to see Cheney campaign against him. The former congresswoman has vocally opposed Trump since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and endorsed Harris, joining the vice president at recent stops as they try to win over Republicans disaffected with Trump.
Trump called Cheney “a deranged person” and added: “But the reason she couldn’t stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. If it were up to her we’d be in 50 different countries.”
The former president continued: “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with the rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK, let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.
“You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, oh gee, well, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy,” Trump said.
Cheney responded Friday in a post on X: “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
One prominent Trump critic, former Republican congressman Joe Walsh, argued the former president’s comment had been taken out of context and that Trump was “NOT calling for Liz Cheney to be executed in front of a firing line.”
“In Trump’s typically stupid, ugly fashion, he’s trying to make a point about Cheney’s stance on war,” Walsh said on X.
Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, suggested that Trump was “talking about sending a prominent Republican to the firing squad, and you have Vice President Harris talking about sending one to her Cabinet. This is the difference in this race.”
Trump said he was making a point about Cheney’s foreign policy record.
“She wanted to ... go to war with everybody because she, like Kamala, is a stupid person,” Trump said of Cheney in Michigan. “It’s easy for her to say she wants to start wars from the comfort of her nice home.”
Earlier, during a stop at a restaurant in nearby Dearborn, he called Cheney a “coward” and said “she’d be the first one to chicken out” if put on a battlefield. Women were not allowed to serve in direct combat roles until 2013, when Cheney was 47.
His spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, said his comments were being taken out of context, calling the controversy “the latest fake media outrage.”
Throughout his campaign, Trump has been fixated on the Americans he believes have wronged or betrayed him. He has portrayed them as worse than the United States’ foreign adversaries, referring to them as “enemies from within.”
He’s threatened to use the federal government, including the military, to go after them. And he has repeatedly threatened “long term prison sentences” for those “involved in unscrupulous behavior” this election, including political operatives, donors and elected officials.
He said people he labeled as “the enemy from within” should be “very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
Some of Trump’s supporters have said his talk of vengeance is either justified or hyperbole.
 


Six dead, 30 injured in hospital fire in India 

Six dead, 30 injured in hospital fire in India 
Updated 16 min 23 sec ago
Follow

Six dead, 30 injured in hospital fire in India 

Six dead, 30 injured in hospital fire in India 
  • Fire broke out late Thursday night in the southern state of Tamil Nadu and its cause is still being investigated
  • Building fires are common in India due to lack of firefighting equipment, routine disregard for regulations

NEW DELHI: A fire at a private hospital in southern India killed at least six people, police said Friday, with more than two dozen others injured in the blaze.

Building fires are common in India due to a lack of firefighting equipment and a routine disregard for safety regulations.

The fire broke out late Thursday night in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and its cause is still being investigated.

All six victims were found unconscious inside a lift at the hospital in the city of Dindigul, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

Police superintendent A. Pradeep told AFP that around 30 people had been injured but all were “stable.”

The fire started at the reception area on the ground floor and rapidly spread to the other floors, the Times of India newspaper reported.

The blaze came just weeks after 10 newborns were killed when a fire engulfed a hospital in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

Earlier this year, a similar fire broke out at a children’s hospital in New Delhi that killed six infants.

At least 27 people were killed, including several children, when a fire broke out at a packed amusement park arcade in May in the western state of Gujarat.


Russia says strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure in retaliation for ATACMS attack

Russia says strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure in retaliation for ATACMS attack
Updated 14 min 50 sec ago
Follow

Russia says strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure in retaliation for ATACMS attack

Russia says strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure in retaliation for ATACMS attack
  • Russian defense ministry says air- and sea-based long-range precision weapons and drones were used

MOSCOW: Russia has carried out a massive attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in retaliation for Kyiv’s use of US-supplied ATACMS missiles, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Friday.
The ministry said that air- and sea-based long-range precision weapons and drones were used against “critical facilities of Ukraine’s fuel and energy infrastructure that support the military-industrial complex.”
Earlier on Friday Ukraine said that Russia had launched a large-scale missile attack on Ukrainian energy facilities during the morning rush hour on Friday.


Indian police say probing bomb threat to central bank in Mumbai

Indian police say probing bomb threat to central bank in Mumbai
Updated 21 min 23 sec ago
Follow

Indian police say probing bomb threat to central bank in Mumbai

Indian police say probing bomb threat to central bank in Mumbai
  • Warning was sent to official email address of newly appointed RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra
  • Schools, railway stations, airports, airlines have been subject this year to hundreds of hoax bomb threats

MUMBAI: Police in India’s financial capital Mumbai said on Friday that they were investigating a bomb threat to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) after it received an email in Russian warning of an explosive attack.

The warning was sent to the official email address of newly appointed RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra, a senior Mumbai police officer said.

“We have registered a case, and the investigation is ongoing,” the officer said.

Schools, railway stations, airports and airlines in India have been subject this year to hundreds of bomb threats that have turned out to be hoaxes.

At least 40 schools in Delhi received a bomb threat by email on Monday, while airlines and airports in India got nearly 1,000 hoax threats until November this year, nearly ten times more than in the whole of 2023.


Huge and rare Mekong catfish spotted in Cambodia, raising conservation hopes

Huge and rare Mekong catfish spotted in Cambodia, raising conservation hopes
Updated 20 min 49 sec ago
Follow

Huge and rare Mekong catfish spotted in Cambodia, raising conservation hopes

Huge and rare Mekong catfish spotted in Cambodia, raising conservation hopes
  • Few of the millions of people who depend on the Mekong for their livelihoods have ever seen a giant catfish
  • The species’ population has plummeted by 80% due to rising pressures from overfishing, dams and other disruptions

HANOI: Six critically endangered Mekong giant catfish — one of the largest and rarest freshwater fish in the world — were caught and released recently in Cambodia, reviving hopes for the survival of the species.
The underwater giants can grow up to 3 meters long and weigh up to 300 kilograms, or as heavy as a grand piano. They now are only found in Southeast Asia’s Mekong River but in the past inhabited the length of the 4,900-kilometer-long river, all the way from its outlet in Vietnam to its northern reaches in China’s Yunnan province.
The species’ population has plummeted by 80 percent in recent decades due to rising pressures from overfishing, dams that block the migratory path the fish follow to spawn and other disruptions.
Few of the millions of people who depend on the Mekong for their livelihoods have ever seen a giant catfish. To find six of the giants, which were caught and released within 5 days, is unprecedented.
The first two were on the Tonle Sap river, a tributary of the Mekong not far from Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. They were given identification tags and released. On Tuesday, fishermen caught four more giant catfish including two longer than 2 meters that weighed 120 kilograms and 131 kilograms, respectively. The captured fish were apparently migrating from their floodplain habitats near Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake northward along the Mekong River, likely to spawning grounds in northern Cambodia, Laos or Thailand.
“It’s a hopeful sign that the species is not in imminent, like in the next few years, risk of extinction, which gives conservation activities time to be implemented and to continue to bend the curve away from decline and toward recovery,” said Dr. Zeb Hogan, a University of Nevada Reno research biologist who leads the US Agency for International Development-funded Wonders of the Mekong project.
Much is still unknown about the giant fish, but over the past two decades a joint conservation program by the Wonders of the Mekong and the Cambodian Fisheries Administration has caught, tagged and released around 100 of them, gaining insights into how the catfish migrate, where they live and the health of the species.
“This information is used to establish migration corridors and protect habitats to try to help these fish survive in the future,” said Hogan.
The Mekong giant catfish is woven into the region’s cultural fabric, depicted in 3,000-year-old cave paintings, revered in folklore and considered a symbol of the river, whose fisheries feed millions and are valued at $10 billion annually.
Local communities play a crucial role in conservation. Fishermen now know about the importance of reporting accidental catches of rare and endangered species to officials, enabling researchers to reach places where fish have been captured and measure and tag them before releasing them.
“Their cooperation is essential for our research and conservation efforts,” Heng Kong, director of Cambodia’s Inland Fisheries Research and Development Institute, said in a statement.
Apart from the Mekong giant catfish, the river is also home to other large fish including the salmon carp, which was thought to be extinct until it was spotted earlier this year, and the giant sting ray.
That four of these fish were caught and tagged in a single day is likely the “big fish story of the century for the Mekong”, said Brian Eyler, director of the Washington-based Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia Program. He said that seeing them confirms that the annual fish migration was still robust despite all the pressures facing the environment along the Mekong.
“Hopefully what happened this week will show the Mekong countries and the world that the Mekong’s mighty fish population is uniquely special and needs to be conserved,” he said.


Kremlin says ‘fully’ agrees with Trump’s opposition to Ukraine firing US missiles

Kremlin says ‘fully’ agrees with Trump’s opposition to Ukraine firing US missiles
Updated 33 sec ago
Follow

Kremlin says ‘fully’ agrees with Trump’s opposition to Ukraine firing US missiles

Kremlin says ‘fully’ agrees with Trump’s opposition to Ukraine firing US missiles
  • US President-elect Donald Trump said he disagrees ‘vehemently’ with Ukraine firing American-supplied missiles deep into Russia

NEW YORK/MOSCOW: The Kremlin said Friday that US President-elect Donald Trump’s opposition to Ukraine firing US-supplied weapons deep into Russia “fully aligned” with Moscow’s position.

“The statement fully aligns with our position, with our view on the reasons for escalation. It is obvious that Trump understands exactly what is escalating the situation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

Trump said in an interview published Thursday that he disagrees “very vehemently” with Ukraine firing American-supplied missiles deep into Russia.

But Trump insisted he would not abandon Ukraine as US support for Kyiv would be key leverage in efforts to bring the war to a close.

Outgoing President Joe Biden’s administration has supplied long-range ATACMS missiles to Ukraine which can penetrate inside Russia, provoking angry retaliation from Moscow which has responded with its new hypersonic missile.

“I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia. Why are we doing that?” Trump said in an interview with Time Magazine which named him its “person of the year” on Thursday.

“I think it’s a foolish decision.”

ATACMS missiles have a maximum range of 300 kilometers, according to publicly available data.

The interview was conducted before Thanksgiving and Trump’s high-profile meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky brokered by France’s president on the sidelines of the reopening of Notre Dame cathedral.

“We’re just escalating this war and making it worse,” he added.

Pressed on his support for Ukraine, which has been lukewarm with the Republican questioning the cost of backing Kyiv, Trump said he would use Washington’s backing as leverage to bring the war to a close.

“I want to reach an agreement and the only way you’re going to reach an agreement is not to abandon.”

Russian news agencies have jumped on Trump’s comments, drawing attention to the Republican’s apparent criticism of Kyiv’s approach.

White House spokesman John Kirby said he was “not going to get into a back and forth” with Trump’s incoming administration over the remarks.

“All I can do is reiterate what President Biden’s policy and guidance has been, and that is to do everything we can... so that if and when this comes to some sort of negotiation, that President Zelensky is in the best possible position,” he told reporters.