Kamala Harris pledged Thursday to get a Gaza ceasefire and said as US president, she would stand with Ukraine and not “cosy up” to dictators like her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.
“Now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done,” the vice president told supporters at the Democratic National Convention as she accepted the party’s presidential nomination.
Harris said that she and President Joe Biden “are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”
US support for its ally Israel in the conflict against Hamas in Gaza has become one of the most divisive issues in the Democratic Party, and at times has threatened to overshadow the party’s attempt to unite against Trump.
Harris said Hamas had caused “unspeakable” violence in its surprise attack on Israel on October 7, triggering the Israeli offensive. At the same time, she said the devastation in Gaza was “heartbreaking.”
“I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure that Israel has the ability to defend itself,” she said.
Attacking Trump for his frequent denigration of NATO and Ukraine, she said, “As president, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.”
And she called out Trump’s public praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, saying, “I will not cosy up to tyrants and dictators.”
Tyrants are “rooting for Trump because, you know, they know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favours. They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat himself.”
Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in Chicago on Thursday before a rapturous crowd, pledging a “new way forward” and warning that Donald Trump will take America backwards if he wins November’s blockbuster election.
The 59-year-old sought to strike a presidential tone as she delivered a message of unity and patriotism for Americans after one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in US political history.
“With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past — a chance to chart a new way forward,” Harris said to huge cheers from tens of thousands of pumped-up supporters.
“And I want you to know: I promise to be a president for all Americans.”
The convention became a giant party to celebrate Harris’s astonishing ascent from something of a political afterthought to Democratic standard bearer upon President Joe Biden’s surprise decision to end his reelection bid.
A sea of waving Stars and Stripes flags and chants of “USA” filled the arena as jubilant Democrats anointed Harris.
She was later joined on stage by her running mate Tim Walz and their families, as they held their arms aloft while 100,000 red, white and blue balloons tumbled from the ceiling.
Country act The Chicks sang a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” while pop star Pink also performed as the Democrats rolled out a list of celebrity backers.
‘President who unites us’
But it was Harris’s time to shine on the biggest night of her political life, after becoming the first Black woman to be nominated by a major US party.
She reached out to voters across America’s bitter political divide, promising to bring economic opportunity and protect their personal freedoms on key issues like abortion.
“I will be a president who unites us around our highest aspirations,” she vowed.
Harris then launched a broadside at 78-year-old Trump, whose campaign has been upended by having to face a woman two decades younger, rather than the increasingly frail Biden, 81.
“We know what a second Trump term would look like,” she said, saying he wanted to “pull our country back to the past.”
She laid out her personal story as a child of a single working mother, and her career as a prosecutor, saying she has the background and experience to serve the country in contrast to Trump who she said only works for himself and “his billionaire friends.”
Turning to foreign policy, she accused Trump of trying to “cozy up” to foreign autocrats like Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Harris pledged instead to “stand strong” with Ukraine as it fights Russia’s invasion and support NATO allies — again all in stark contrast to Trump’s isolationist stance.
On the hugely divisive issue of Israel’s war in Gaza, Harris went further than the rhetoric of her boss Biden by calling the scale of suffering in the Palestinian enclave “heartbreaking”.
She vowed to get a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, and cheers erupted when she vowed “self-determination” for the Palestinian people.
Pro-Palestinian protesters have demonstrated throughout the Democratic convention, with several thousands rallying outside it again on Thursday.
‘Ready on day one’
The Democrats have been riding a wave of energy and enthusiasm since Harris stepped up. She has wiped out former president Trump’s lead in the polls, drawn enormous crowds and raised record funds.
The torch having well and truly been passed, Biden gave a farewell speech on the first day of the convention and said he had called Harris to wish her luck.
“I am proud to watch my partner Kamala Harris accept our nomination for president. She will be an outstanding president because she is fighting for our future,” Biden, who is on holiday in California, said on X.
Barack Obama, who along with his wife Michelle delivered rousing support for Harris at the convention on Tuesday, said Harris had “showed the world what I have known to be true.
“She is ready on day one to be President and represents the best of America. Let’s get to work.”
Yet Democrats will also be trying to temper their hopes.
Harris told reporters after her speech that the Democrats were the “underdogs” in the election, with a nail-biting sprint to November against a combative opponent.
As he struggles to recalibrate his own campaign, Trump is increasingly resorting to personal insults, racially charged attacks, and dark rhetoric.
He gave a play-by-play commentary on Harris’s speech on his Truth social platform, accusing her of making the United States a “failing nation” while part of the Biden administration.
“She’s done nothing for three and a half years but talk, and that’s what she’s doing tonight, she’s complaining about everything but doing nothing!” he wrote.
BANGKOK: Rescuers scoured the Thai jungle on Friday (Aug 23) for nine missing people after a turboprop plane crashed southeast of the capital, Bangkok, though authorities expected no survivors.
The aircraft went down in the jungle of Chacheongsao province on Thursday, and all on board were believed dead, Thai officials said.
Nine people – including two pilots and seven passengers – were travelling from Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport to Trat province, an area on the Gulf of Thailand known for its beaches, when the plane went down.
“It happened at around 3:10 pm (4:10 pm, Singapore time). We are trying to find those missing, but we believe that they are all dead,” Chacheongsao governor Chonlatee Yangtrong told reporters at the scene on Thursday.
According to local media, the passengers comprised four Thais and five Chinese, including two children aged 12 and 13.
More than 300 military personnel and volunteers have been deployed in the search, and authorities have launched an investigation to identify the cause of the crash.
They have found some body parts, as well as pieces of the aircraft, authorities said.
But heavy rainfall is hampering the search.
“We are not planning to stop until we find them, although there are some waterlogged areas,” Chonlatee said.
A six-year-old boy missing for four days was found alive in a forest in a mountainous part of northern Vietnam, police said Thursday.
The child was reported missing on Saturday after he failed to return home with his siblings from a celebration at a relative’s house in Yen Bai province.
Police in Lam Giang commune launched a search for the boy and “even dried up a pond as they were afraid he had fallen,” an officer, who declined to give his name, told AFP.
Over the past four days, more than 200 people joined a search for the boy, according to state media.
He was finally found on Wednesday, the police official said.
“We were told that the boy was tired. They gave him things to eat and checked his health. He is ok now,” the police official told AFP.
State media reported that a man had heard crying and discovered the exhausted boy covered in mud, sitting in a cassava bush in the forest.
Lam’s mother, Ly Thi Phai, told the VietnamNet news site of her relief.
“I was so happy that my child had returned alive,” she said.
“I cried because he looked thinner and weaker than before he disappeared.”
According to state media, the boy said he had become lost in the forest and the more he walked, the more disorientated he became.
To survive, he said he drank water from a stream and picked leaves and wild fruits he recognised.
Indian authorities in Assam state have introduced a bill that would require Muslims to register their marriages and divorces, with the chief minister claiming the measure will help stop child marriage.
The bill is seen as a state-level step towards the government’s proposed common civil code of law, which Muslim activists bitterly oppose as an attack on their faith.
India’s 1.4 billion people are subject to a common criminal law. Still, personal matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance are governed by varying rules based on the traditions of different communities and faiths.
In Assam, it is already mandatory for other religions to register marriages with civil authorities.
Assam’s state government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said the bill would be tabled during the next state assembly.
“Our basic intention is to stop child marriages,” Himanta Biswa Sarma, chief minister of the northeastern state, told reporters Wednesday.
Sarma said the Assam Compulsory Registration of Muslim Marriages and Divorces Bill would not restrict religious rituals, but only ensure marriages and divorces were registered.
The bill will “provide safeguards and benefits… especially to women and prevent the menace of child marriages,” he said.
Modi said this month he wanted to press ahead with a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) to standardise laws for personal matters across faiths and religious communities.
Many communities, particularly Muslims, fear a UCC would encroach on their religious laws.
Modi maintains it would serve as an equaliser.
“Those laws that divide the country on the basis of religion, that become reason for inequality, should have no place in a modern society,” Modi said during an Independence Day address on August 15.
“That is why I say: the times demand that there is a secular civil code in the country.”
Modi won a third successive term in office in June but was forced into a coalition government for the first time in a decade.
The BJP’s Hindu nationalist rhetoric has left India’s Muslim population of more than 220 million increasingly anxious about their future.
Once dubbed Britain’s “Bill Gates”, tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, whose body has been recovered from his sunken superyacht off Sicily, had only recently been cleared of fraud charges in the US.
The 59-year-old businessman was acquitted in June by a San Francisco court after a decade-long legal battle with US firm Hewlett-Packard, but the allegations tarnished his image as a UK tech success story.
Since returning home, Lynch — an advisor to two British prime ministers — had criticised the government for allowing his extradition to the US in the first place.
“I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field,” he said following his acquittal.
But in a tragic twist, he would perish on the Mediterranean celebrating his victory on a cruise with his family and the friends who had helped him through the ordeal.
‘Second life’
Born to working-class Irish parents in Essex, east of London, in 1965, the academically bright Lynch won a scholarship to a private school.
He went on to study natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he got a doctorate.
Lynch had described the fraud trial in the United States as a life-altering moment for him in an interview with the Times newspaper last month.
“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?” he said.
Lynch and his family were aboard his luxury yacht Bayesian near Palermo with friends and colleagues when it was struck by a sudden storm in the early hours of Monday.
His wife, Angela Bacares, was among the 15 people rescued, but his daughter Hannah, 18, is still missing.
Italian rescuers have now recovered five bodies, and her fate remains unconfirmed.
Rise and fall
Lynch and his wife, who also had an older daughter aged 21, had a combined fortune of £500 million ($648 million) according to the latest Sunday Times “Rich List”.
He owed much of that wealth to his software firm Autonomy, which he founded in 1996 in Cambridge and turned into a leading British tech company.
Autonomy’s search software was informed by Bayesian learning frameworks, inspiring the name of the ill-fated yacht.
Lynch sold Autonomy to HP for $11 billion in 2011 in a mega-deal which raised eyebrows at the time.
Just one year later, HP reported a write-down of $8.8 billion — including more than $5 billion it attributed to alleged inflated data from Autonomy — plunging Lynch into the fraud case he spent over a decade fighting.
Scapegoat?
US prosecutors accused him of taking part in a massive scheme as Autonomy’s chief executive to deceive HP by pumping the value of the company.
Lynch was extradited last year and spent a year under house arrest before being cleared.
He could have faced two decades in jail, an ordeal the entrepreneur said he would not have survived due to various medical conditions.
Lynch — who made around $815 million from the Autonomy sale — always denied the fraud charges, accusing HP of making him a scapegoat for its own failings.
A dog lover, he owned two dachshunds and four sheepdogs, and had homes in both London and Suffolk where he had a farm.
He was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II in 2006 with an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to enterprise and appointed to the board of the BBC the same year.
‘Beating the odds’
After the Autonomy sale, he founded venture capital firm Invoke Capital, which was an early investor in cyber security firm Darktrace.
However, despite the US acquittal this year, the legal saga was not over for Lynch.
In 2022, London’s High Court ruled in a civil fraud case that HP had been duped and had overpaid for Autonomy.
The court has yet to rule on the billions of dollars in damages claimed by the US group.
David Yelland, a reputation management advisor who described Lynch as a client and friend, said in an X post it was “devastating” to think he had lost his life just as he had began to rebuild it.
“His entire life is one of beating the odds in the most extraordinary of situations,” Yelland added.
Pop megastar Taylor Swift on Wednesday broke her silence about the cancellation of three Vienna concerts over an alleged suicide attack plot, saying the incident filled her with “fear” and “guilt.”
“Having our Vienna shows cancelled was devastating. The reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many had planned on coming to those shows,” the American said in a post on social media platform Instagram.
The Vienna shows, part of the European leg of Swift’s record-breaking “Eras” tour, were cancelled after authorities warned of a terror plot by sympathizers of the Islamic State armed group.
Police have detained three suspects over the alleged attack threat, with the United States saying it shared intelligence to assist in the investigation.
The main suspect, a 19-year-old Austrian with North Macedonian roots, had allegedly confessed, saying he “intended to carry out an attack using explosives and knives,” according to Austrian domestic intelligence agency (DSN) head Omar Haijawi-Pirchner.
In the social media post Wednesday, Swift thanked the authorities.
“I was also so grateful to the authorities because thanks to them, we were grieving concerts and not lives. I was heartened by the love and unity I saw in the fans who banded together,” she said.
The European leg of Swift’s sold-out tour began in Paris in May and has taken in Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Poland.
It concluded on Tuesday with five shows at London’s Wembley stadium.
Authorities in central Iran executed a male fortune-teller for raping and sexually assaulting his clients, the judiciary said on Wednesday.
“A fortune-teller, who assaulted women and girls was executed in Yazd prison,” said Hossein Tahmasebi, chief justice of the central province, according to the Iranian judiciary’s Mizan Online website.
“The sentence of this rapist fortune-teller was carried out after being issued by the Revolutionary Court of Yazd and confirmed by the supreme judicial authority”.
According to Tahmasebi, the man had “assaulted and raped women and girls under false pretences”, using his fortune-telling services to deceive his clients.
Mizan reported that the convict was arrested sometime between March 2020 and March 2021 and that his request for amnesty was rejected because of “the number of complaints” against him.
The Islamic republic maintains the death penalty for several crimes, including rape and sexual assault.
In July 2023, Iran executed three men after they were convicted of raping women they had lured to a fake cosmetic surgery clinic and injected with anaesthetic drugs.
They were found guilty of conspiring in 12 cases of sexual assault in late 2021 in the southern province of Hormozgan.
Iran executes more people per year than any other nation except China, according to human rights groups including Amnesty.
At least 28 Pakistani pilgrims travelling to Iraq for a Shiite Muslim ritual were killed as their bus crashed in central Iran, state media reported early Wednesday.
“A bus carrying 51 Pakistani pilgrims overturned and caught fire in front of Dehshir-Taft checkpoint in the central province of Yazd on Tuesday night,” state television reported.
“28 people have been killed and 23 injured so far with the possibility of the death toll increasing,” it added.
Yazd province crisis management chief Ali Malek-zadeh told the broadcaster that some of the injured were in critical condition.
“Of the 23 injured, six have already been discharged from hospital, while the condition of seven others is critical,” Malek-zadeh said.
“The dead consisted of 11 women and 17 men,” he added.
The Pakistani pilgrims were headed through Iran to Iraq to attend the Arbaeen commemoration, one of the biggest events of the Shiite calendar which marks the 40th day of mourning for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed.
Last year, some 22 million pilgrims attended the commemoration in the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala, where Hussein and his brother Abbas are buried, according to official figures.
An emotional US President Joe Biden passed the torch to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris with a hug on Monday, saying he gave everything for his country in a bittersweet farewell speech at the party’s convention in Chicago.
“America, America, I gave my best to you,” the 81-year-old Biden said, quoting a patriotic hymn during a nearly hour-long address that ran through his achievements while urging voters to back his vice president against Donald Trump in November.
Harris joined him on stage after the speech and the pair embraced, as the crowd gave Biden a rapturous reception following his stunning decision less than a month ago to drop out of the 2024 White House race.
In a remarkable turnaround, Harris has reenergized the party and wiped out Republican rival Trump’s lead in the polls, but Biden insisted that he was not bitter about stepping aside.
Instead, as he contemplates the imminent end of a five-decade political career, he said that he had done what he thought best to ensure that his nemesis, Trump, does not return to the Oval Office.
“I love the job, but I love my country more. I love my country more,” said Biden. “And all this talk about how I’m angry at all those people who said I should step down — that’s not true.”
Both Biden and Harris appeared to wipe away a tear as the US leader won a huge four-minute ovation when he first took to the stage, following an introduction by First Lady Jill Biden and his daughter Ashley.
Several members of the audience were also in tears as Biden made his farewell speech, before leaving the stage to the strains of the song “Higher Love.”
And Harris had earlier made a surprise appearance — Democratic nominees don’t normally speak until the final day of the convention — to heap lavish tribute on her boss.
“I want to kick us off by celebrating our incredible president Joe Biden,” said Harris, who was wearing a tan suit and took to the stage to Beyonce’s “Freedom.”
It was undoubtedly a difficult swan song for Biden, but he insisted he would be the “best volunteer” for Harris’s campaign — knowing perhaps that his legacy depends on her beating Trump.
But he couldn’t quite let go of the presidency, with his speech focusing more on his own record in office than the future under a President Harris.
Biden listed his proudest achievements including on the economy and health care, but above all for healing the “soul of America” after Trump’s time in office and the pro-Trump January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
“Donald Trump calls America a failing nation… He says we’re losing. He’s the loser,” he said, also referring to Trump as a “convicted felon” after the Republican was found guilty of doctoring business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star.
Despite his low popularity ratings and the debate debacle against Trump that led him to step aside, Biden again insisted he’d given his all.
“I made a lot of mistakes in my career, but I gave my best to you,” he said.
As he has been so often in his five-decade-long political journey, Biden was surrounded by family at the end of his speech.
“Joe and I have been together for almost 50 years. And still, there are moments when I fall in love with him all over again,” the first lady said in a speech introducing him.
Monday’s first night of the convention was an emotional one on many levels, and for many of the key players.
Hillary Clinton, who lost against Trump in 2016 in her own bid to become America’s first woman president, backed Harris to finally break the glass ceiling.
“Something is happening in America, you can feel it — something we’ve worked for and dreamed of for a long time,” the former secretary of state and first lady said.
Biden addressed pro-Palestine protestors
US President Joe Biden said Monday that protesters against Israel’s war in Gaza who demonstrated outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago “have a point”.
“Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed, on both sides,” Biden said in his farewell speech to the convention, adding that it was time to “end this war.”
Earlier, protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza had shadowed the opening of the convention, underscoring what remains a potential vote-loser for Democrats among left-wingers and Arab Americans.
A group of demonstrators broke through the outer security fence of the convention after splitting off from a larger protest of thousands of people.
Police in blue helmets with shields and carrying black batons prevented them from getting to the inner cordon.
Trump, meanwhile, has been sent into a tailspin by the sudden change at the top of the Democratic ticket.
While Democrats are in Chicago, the Republicans will spend the week crisscrossing the country.
In the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Monday, he highlighted what he called Harris’s “craziness” and said she “has no idea what the hell she’s doing” on the economy.
