The White House isn’t ruling out a potential commutation for Hunter Biden after his conviction
By: Colleen Long
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (AP) — The White House is not ruling out a potential commutation for Hunter Biden, the president’s son who was convicted on three federal gun crimes.
“As we all know, the sentencing hasn’t even been scheduled yet,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Wednesday on Air Force One as President Joe Biden traveled to the Group of Seven summit in Italy.
She said she has not spoken to the president about the issue since the verdict was delivered Tuesday.
Biden definitively ruled out pardoning his son during an ABC News interview last week.
“He was very clear, very upfront, obviously very definitive,” Jean-Pierre said of the president’s remarks about a potential pardon. But on a commutation, “I just don’t have anything beyond that.”
A pardon is an expression of forgiveness of a criminal offence that restores some rights, such as voting, that a person loses upon conviction. Meanwhile, a commutation reduces a sentence but leaves the conviction intact.
The position from the White House is a shift from what it said in September, when Jean-Pierre was asked whether the president would “pardon or commute his son if he’s convicted.” The press secretary responded at the time that “I’ve answered this question before. It was asked of me not too long ago, a couple of weeks ago. And I was very clear, and I said no.”
Russia fires more missiles and drones at Ukraine ahead of diplomatic efforts to stop the war
By: Hanna Arhirova
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian forces fired missiles and drones at the Kyiv region and five other areas of Ukraine in a nighttime attack, officials said Wednesday, ahead of several days of intense diplomatic activity around the war that is now in its third year.
Ukraine’s air force said it shot down more than two dozen air targets, including cruise missiles, a Kinzhal ballistic missile and Shahed drones. Several people were injured, authorities said.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised the air force’s response, saying it could be a “daily achievement” if the country had the tools to successfully repel Russian attacks. He has repeatedly appealed to Ukraine’s Western partners to provide more air defence systems, and the United States has agreed to send another Patriot missile system, two U.S. officials said late Tuesday.
How best to support Ukraine’s efforts to stop Russia’s invasion will be a central issue in international meetings in coming days.
Kyiv’s outgunned and outnumbered forces are battling to hold back the bigger Russian army, which is trying to exploit Ukrainian vulnerabilities. Ukraine has been short of troops, ammunition and air defences in recent months as the Kremlin’s forces try to cripple the national power supply and punch through the front line in eastern parts of the country.
Ukraine will need to weather the Russian onslaught through the summer, military analysts say, and in the meantime train more soldiers, build fortifications and hope that the provision of Western military aid picks up speed so that in 2025 Kyiv may be able to mount its own offensive.
Republicans hope to hold Garland in contempt of Congress
By: Farnoush Amiri
WASHINGTON (AP) — Merrick Garland is at risk of becoming the third attorney general in U.S. history to be held in contempt of Congress as Republicans move to punish the Justice Department for refusing to turn over audio related to President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents.
Contempt is one of U.S. lawmakers’ politically messiest and, until recent years, least-used powers. It is a tool that the House and the Senate can employ either to coerce compliance with a subpoena or to remove any obstruction from an ongoing investigation.
By approving a contempt resolution, the House would effectively be recommending that Garland be prosecuted. And recent cases against allies of former President Donald Trump including Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro have proved that a contempt resolution is far from symbolic, creating the basis for a case that can sometimes hold up in court.
The push to hold Garland in contempt is just the latest broadside by Republicans against the Justice Department.
GOP lawmakers — led by Reps. Jim Jordan and James Comer — moved ahead with holding Garland in contempt for refusing to fully comply with a congressional subpoena issued as part of their probe into special counsel Robert Hur’s decision not to charge the Democratic president with any crimes. Hur investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents.
The House Judiciary and Oversight & Accountability committees’ chairmen had ordered the Justice Department to turn over audio of Hur’s interviews with Biden by early April. But officials provided only some of the records, leaving out the audio of the Biden interview and warning of the precedent that would be set for future investigations if the audio was provided.
At least 41 die in a fire at a building housing foreign workers in Kuwait
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A fire swept through a building that housed foreign workers in Kuwait early Wednesday, killing at least 41 people. Officials said the blaze appeared to be linked to code violations.
Interior Minister Sheikh Fahad Al-Yousuf Al-Sabah confirmed the toll and ordered the arrest of the building’s owner during a visit to the site, local media reported.
“We will address the issue of labour overcrowding,” he said. “I’m now going to see what violations were committed here and I will deal with the owner of the property.”
Local media said scores of workers were living in the building in the southern Mangaf district, without giving their nationality.
Col. Sayed Hassan al-Mousawi, head of the firefighters’ Accident Investigation Department, said there were dozens of casualties and that the final death toll may be higher.
India’s ambassador to Kuwait, Adarsh Swaika, said over 30 Indian workers injured in the blaze were admitted to a hospital. Swaika shared the information on X but did not specify whether any Indian nationals had died.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi offered condolences to the victims and said the Indian Embassy is “closely monitoring the situation and working with the authorities there to assist the affected.”
More than 1.5 million foreign pilgrims arrive in Mecca for annual Hajj pilgrimage
By: Samy Magdy
MECCA, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Muslim pilgrims have been streaming into Saudi Arabia’s holy city of Mecca ahead of the start of the Hajj later this week, as the annual pilgrimage returns to its monumental scale.
Saudi officials say more than 1.5 million foreign pilgrims have arrived in the country by Tuesday, the vast majority by air, from across the world. More are expected, and hundreds of thousands of Saudis and others living in Saudi Arabia will also join them when the pilgrimage officially begins on Friday.
Saudi officials have said they expect the number of pilgrims this year to exceed 2023, when more than 1.8 million people performed Hajj, approaching pre-pandemic levels. In 2019, more than 2.4 million Muslims made the pilgrimage. Saudi authorities control the flow of pilgrims through quotas, allowing each country one pilgrim for every thousand Muslim citizens.
The pilgrims included 4,200 Palestinians from the occupied West Bank who arrived in Mecca earlier this month, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were not able to travel to Saudi Arabia for Hajj this year, because of the 8-month war between Israel and Hamas.
“We are praying for Palestine to be free and (for Palestinians) to liberate their land and to be like other nations, to live in peace and not always to have war,” said Ibrahim al-Hadhari, an Algerian pilgrim, as he was standing in the Grand Mosque court waiting for evening prayers.
On Tuesday, pilgrims thronged the Grand Mosque in Mecca, performing a ritual circuit walking seven times around the Kaaba, the cube-shaped structure inside the mosque that is considered Islam’s holiest site. They wore ihrams, two unstitched sheets of white cloth that resemble a shroud.
Indonesian police arrest 6 suspected poachers over the killing of 26 endangered Javan rhinos
By: Niniek Karmini
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesian authorities said Wednesday they have arrested six suspects in an international poaching ring targeting the Javan rhinoceros, a critically endangered species.
The suspects are part of a network that used homemade firearms to kill at least 26 Javan rhinos since 2018 to get their horns. The horns are in high demand in Asia where they’re predominantly used in traditional Chinese medicine and increasingly for making ornaments, said Banten provincial police chief Abdul Karim.
He said the six men were arrested in a joint operation by police and the Forestry and Environment Ministry last month. One of the leaders of the syndicate, Sunendi, was arrested last year and sentenced to 12 years in prison and a 100-million rupiah ($6,135) fine.
Police and a team of rangers from Banten’s Ujung Kulon National Park were searching for eight other members of the syndicate, officials said.
Karim said an investigation found that Sunendi, who uses a single name like many Indonesians, and nine others had killed 22 Javan rhinos since 2018, while another group had killed four more since 2021. They sold the horns to Chinese buyers through a local handler, who is currently on trial.
Police seized homemade firearms, bullets, gun powder, a steel sling noose and other equipment used to poach rhinos.
