Former U.S. President Donald Trump hit the campaign trail on Saturday for the first time since announcing his bid to reclaim the White House in 2024, visiting two early-voting states and brushing aside criticism that his run was off to a slow start.

“I’m more angry now, and I’m more committed now, than I ever was,” Trump told a small crowd at the New Hampshire Republican Party’s annual meeting in Salem, before heading to Columbia, South Carolina, for an appearance alongside his leadership team in the state.

In contrast to the raucous rallies in front of thousands of devotees that Trump often holds, Saturday’s events were notably muted. In Columbia, Trump spoke to about 200 people in the state’s capitol building, with Governor Henry McMaster and U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina flanking him.

Once the undisputed center of gravity in the Republican Party, an increasing number of elected officials have expressed concerns about Trump’s ability to beat Democratic President Joe Biden, if he decides to run again as is widely expected.

Numerous Republicans are considering whether to launch their own White House bids, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, widely seen as the biggest threat to Trump. Top Republicans in both states that the former president visited – including New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley – are among those weighing bids of their own.

There were several conspicuous absences in South Carolina, including the state party chairman, five Republican U.S. representatives from the state and South Carolina U.S. Senator Tim Scott, who has himself been floated as a potential Republican presidential candidate.

Trump attempted to allay those concerns, telling the crowd that he expected a wave of additional endorsements from South Carolina’s state and federal lawmakers within days.

Several Republican state lawmakers decided against attending after failing to gain assurances from Trump’s team that doing so would not be considered an endorsement, according to a person with knowledge of the planning.

William Oden, the chair of the Republican Party in Sumter County, South Carolina, said he was a fan of the former president, but was keeping his options open.

“I haven’t decided,” Oden said. “We’re waiting until everybody comes out. And like I’d do in business, I make no choices until we hear all the candidates.”

At both stops on Saturday, Trump echoed some of the themes that animated his 2016 campaign, including sharply criticizing illegal immigration and China.

But he also emphasized social issues, perhaps in response to DeSantis, whose relentless focus on culture wars has helped build his national profile.

In Columbia, the former president railed against transgender rights and the teaching of critical race theory, a once-obscure academic concept that has sparked school board protests and classroom bans in some states.

“We’re going to stop the left-wing radical racists and perverts who are trying to indoctrinate our youth, and we’re going to get their Marxist hands off our children,” Trump said.

“We’re going to defeat the cult of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders: men and women. We’re not going to allow men to play women’s sports.”

Trump did not spend much time on his grievances about the 2020 election, though he made allusions to his false claim that the election was stolen from him, calling the election “ridiculous.”

Since launching his campaign in November, Trump has maintained a relatively low profile. He called multiple conservative Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives in early January to persuade them to vote for Kevin McCarthy, an ally, as the new speaker.

Most brushed off his entreaties, though McCarthy was elected to the position after a bruising battle.

Trump retains a significant base of support, particularly among the grassroots. While he loses in some head-to-head polls against DeSantis, he wins by significant margins when poll respondents are presented with a broader field of options.

Related Galleries:

The specialized police unit that included at least some of the Memphis officers involved in the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols was disbanded on Saturday as more protests took place in U.S. cities a day after harrowing video of the attack was released.

In a statement, the police department said it was permanently deactivating the SCORPION unit after the police chief spoke with members of Nichols’ family, community leaders and other officers.

Video recordings from police body-worn cameras and a camera mounted on a utility pole showed Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, repeatedly screaming “Mom!” as officers kicked, punched and struck him with a baton in his mother’s neighborhood after a Jan. 7 traffic stop. He was hospitalized and died of his injuries three days later.

Five officers involved in the beating, all Black, were charged on Thursday with murder, assault, kidnapping and other charges. All have been dismissed from the department.

Nichols’ family and officials expressed outrage and sorrow but urged protesters to remain peaceful. That request was largely heeded on Friday when scattered protests broke out in Memphis – where marchers briefly blocked an interstate highway – and elsewhere.

Several cities saw renewed demonstrations on Saturday. In Memphis, protesters chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” angrily catcalled a police car that was monitoring the march, with several making obscene gestures. Some cheered loudly when they learned of the disbandment of SCORPION.

Hundreds of protesters gathered in New York’s Washington Square Park before marching through downtown Manhattan, as columns of police officers walked alongside them.

Taken together, the four video clips released Friday showed police pummeling Nichols even though he appeared to pose no threat. The initial traffic stop was for reckless driving, though the police chief has said the cause for the stop has not been substantiated.

The SCORPION unit, short for the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in our Neighborhoods, had been formed in October 2021 to concentrate on crime hot spots. Critics say such specialized teams can be prone to abusive tactics.

Friends and family say Nichols was an affable, talented skateboarder who grew up in Sacramento, California, and moved to Memphis before the coronavirus pandemic. The father of a 4-year-old child, Nichols worked at FedEx and had recently enrolled in a photography class.

Nate Spates Jr., 42, was part of a circle of friends, including Nichols, who met up at a local Starbucks.

“He liked what he liked, and he marched to the beat of his own drum,” Spates said, remembering that Nichols would go to a park called Shelby Farms to watch the sunset when he wasn’t working a late shift.

Nichols’ death is the latest high-profile example of police using excessive force against Black people and other minorities. The 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a white Minneapolis officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes, galvanized worldwide protests over racial injustice.

Related Galleries:

I want to talk about Donald Trump and his voyage of the damned. And I’m not just speaking of Trump being damned. I am speaking about everyone ELSE he comes in contact with. Have you noticed it? Normal individuals — with good, clean reputations — somehow, some way intercept with Trump on their life’s journey, and all of a sudden, they become unhinged.

Time and time again, we’ve seen it. I cannot even begin to count how many people — otherwise sane at one time — have become enmeshed with Donald Trump and suffered an extreme personality makeover at the umpteenth degree.

There is a name for this. It’s called the chameleon effect. This is when people pick up the traits of friends or family members. Such traits include physical mannerisms, voice inflection, and behavioral changes. However, with the chameleon effect, it is unconscious — the person doing it usually has no idea that they have begun to mirror their friend. And it IS seen as entirely normal unless, of course, it goes too far.

And it certainly has gone way too far with the Trump crowd. Time and again, people who get close to Trump get stupider. And given what we have heard about special prosecutor John Durham he is right up there as one of the MOST afflicted.

Durham once had a good reputation. He was known as a quality attorney and a truly quality man. He was known as that until he got entangled with Donald John Trump and threw his life away. The recent revelations about Durham and how he misled the American people were not shocking to me simply because the Trump effect seems indiscriminate in whom it strikes. Rich or poor, tall or short, it doesn’t matter.

Throw Trump in the mix with you, and you will become stupider. It’s almost guaranteed. Thanks to his lousy decision-making and Trump’s influence, John Durham, once an ethical and reputable individual, will now have a footnote in history as a joke. He will always be seen as a biased, ridiculous, Trump henchman. This should serve as yet another warning to anyone thinking of letting the traitor into their life.

The post Voyage of the damned appeared first on Palmer Report.

Expedited talks are under way among Kyiv and its allies about Ukraine’s requests for long-range missiles that it says are needed to prevent Russia from destroying Ukrainian cities, a top aide to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday.

Ukraine has won promises of Western battle tanks and is seeking fighter jets to push back against Russian and pro-Moscow forces, which are slowly advancing along part of the front line.

“To drastically reduce the Russian army’s key weapon – the artillery they use today on the front lines – we need missiles that will destroy their depots,” presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak told Ukraine’s Freedom television network. He said on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula there were more than 100 artillery warehouses.

“Therefore, firstly, negotiations are already under way. Secondly, negotiations are proceeding at an accelerated pace,” he said without giving details.

Zelenskiy, speaking separately, said Ukraine wanted to preempt Russian attacks on Ukrainian urban areas and civilians.

“Ukraine needs long-range missiles … to deprive the occupier of the opportunity to place its missile launchers somewhere far from the front line and destroy Ukrainian cities,” he said in an evening video address.

Zelenskiy said Ukraine needed the U.S.-made ATACMS missile, which has a range of 185 miles (297km). Washington has so far declined to provide the weapon.

Earlier in the day, the Ukrainian air force denied a newspaper report that it intended to get 24 fighter jets from allies, saying talks were continuing, Ukraine’s Babel online outlet said.

Spain’s El Pais newspaper, citing Ukrainian air force spokesperson Yuri Ihnat, said Ukraine initially wanted two squadrons of 12 planes each, preferably Lockheed Martin F-16 jets.

But in a statement to Babel, Ihnat said his comments to a media briefing on Friday had been misinterpreted.

“Ukraine is only at the stage of negotiations regarding aircraft. Aircraft models and their number are currently being determined,” he said.

Ihnat told the Friday briefing that F-16s might be the best option for a multi-role fighter to replace the country’s current fleet of ageing Soviet-era warplanes.

He also told Ukrainian national television that allied nations did not like public speculation about jets, Interfax Ukraine news agency said.

Deputy White House national security adviser Jon Finer on Thursday said United States would be discussing the idea of supplying jets “very carefully” with Kyiv and its allies.

Germany’s defence minister this week ruled out the idea of sending jets to Ukraine.

(This story has been corrected to change the maker of the F-16 fighter to Lockheed Martin from Boeing in paragraph 9.)

Related Galleries:

North Korea on Sunday criticized for a second day a U.S. decision to send tanks to Ukraine, calling it a “criminal act against humanity” aimed at perpetuating an unstable international situation.

Washington’s allegations that North Korea has provided arms to Russia are a “baseless” effort to justify its own military aid to Ukraine, Kwon Chung-keun, director of U.S. affairs at North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a statement carried by state news agency KCNA.

“The United States’ attempt to slam offensive armed equipment such as the main tank, into Ukraine, ignoring the legitimate concerns and condemnation of the international community, is a criminal act against humanity aimed at perpetuating the unstable international situation,” the statement said.

The baseless claims of North Korea-Russia arms deals are an “unacceptable and a grave provocation that must be responded to,” Kwon added.

On Saturday North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister, Kim Yo Jong, denounced U.S. pledges of battle tanks to Ukraine, claiming Washington was “further crossing the red line” to win hegemony by proxy war, KCNA reported.

Nuclear-armed North Korea launched an unprecedented number of missiles last year, including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. U.S. and South Korean officials have also warned the North could be preparing for its first test of a nuclear device since 2017.

The White House said in December that North Korea completed an initial arms delivery of infantry rockets and missiles to a private Russian military company, the Wagner Group, to shore up Russian forces in Ukraine.

Less than a month after its creation, the new government has found itself at the threshold of a severe security crisis.

Although this current wave of terrorism began last March, under the previous government’s watch, and never really subsided, the attack in Jerusalem’s Neveh Yaakov neighborhood on Friday was the deadliest that Israel has experienced in around 15 years .

After the seven dead and five wounded Israelis on Friday night, we can now add a father and son who were shot and seriously wounded on Saturday in the City of David area in the city. The attacker was a 13-year-old Palestinian.

As has happened many times before, this pair of attacks is expected to be followed by a wave of copycat attempts. The atmosphere in Jerusalem has already been tense, in light of the relatively large number of incidents involving Palestinians and police, controversy over events at the Temple Mount, and a general sense that the Temple Mount could be the source of another eruption ahead of March and April, which will see Ramadan and Passover beginning and overlapping.

On Friday, the police announced that they were going to their highest alert level, and the military mobilized two battalions of paratroopers to the West Bank, where nine Palestinians were killed a day earlier during an arrest operation in Jenin that escalated into an exchange of fire with armed Palestinians, most of them members of Islamic Jihad.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in such situations many times before, is well-aware that security and calm isn’t achieved by ranting. If it’s even possible to put this violent genie back into the bottle, even for a little while, this would require the reinforcement and proper deployment of forces, based on the latest intelligence provided by the Shin Bet and carefully managing the crisis without being guided by the widespread calls for revenge.

But these aren’t normal times. Netanyahu began his current term with a legislative blitz aimed at altering the judicial system. A broad public opposition is forming before his eyes, and he’s increasingly dependent on his new political partners to pass his legislation.

If the circumstances weren’t so tragic, one could even find comedy in National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s embarrassing wriggling when he, like many times in the past, visited at the scene of the attack on Friday This time, he seemed surprised to discover that the residents of Neveh Yaakov considered him responsible for the situation and for solving it.

The security cabinet is scheduled to meet Saturday evening to discuss the situation in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Netanyahu will have to gather all his experience and intelligence to prevent the leaders of some of the factions in his coalition from dragging him into a wider military conflict, which would probably not lead to a better outcome. The leaders of the defense establishment will present concrete operational options in the hope that those ministers will be satisfied and don’t call for drastic measures in the name of national honor.

Meanwhile, amid public and political pressure, futile moves are already being made. The police proudly announced that it had arrested 42 neighbors and relatives of the assailant in the Neveh Yaakov attack. It’s obvious to all that there’s no connection between this number and deciphering further details about the attack, like who knew about his plans and who was an accomplice.

The immediate risks

The ongoing series of events began on Thursday morning with the operation in Jenin, which was based on a general state of alertness about plans for a terror attack and wasn’t intended, as reported in some media outlets, to stop an imminent one from occurring.

After the deaths of its people, it was clear that Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip would see itself obligated to have an appropriate response. They didn’t time their rockets to coincide with evening news and didn’t target the center of the country, but rather fired at midnight at Ashkelon and the communities near the Gaza border area. There were no casualties thanks to the interception capabilities of the Iron Dome.

Hamas, which authorized Islamic Jihad’s response, found a way to participate in the attack when it fired anti-aircraft missiles at Israel Air Force aircraft, which engaged Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip in response. Eventually, Hamas prevented a more drastic response by Islamic Jihad for the same familiar explanations.

It seems that, at least at the moment, Hamas has no interest in another military clash with Israel. It continues to build its military abilities and is happy to benefit from the taxes on the salaries of some 17,000 Gazan workers who have been allowed to work in Israel since the Bennet-Lapid government.

And still, it should be noted that the Shin Bet consistently uncovers Hamas’ attempts to attack Israelis through its members in the West Bank and the entry of Gazan workers into Israel. According to sources in the Shin Bet, concerns can be heard in the security establishment that warn of a potential growing misconception, according to which Hamas is interested in long-term calm.

While Gaza may join the next military clash with Israel, if and when it happens, the immediate risks lie in the terror attacks coming out of the West Bank and in the growing religious tensions around the complex situation at the Temple Mount.

The attacker from the Neveh Yaakov shooting is already being hailed as a national hero in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In many Palestinian cities, there were celebrations over the massacre of defenseless civilians who were shot near a synagogue. These will inspire more young people to do the same, and the next few days are exceptionally critical.

Even more so than in recent years, the security establishment is operating under the possibility of a major turn of events, a possible dramatic incident leading to an all-out explosion in the form of a third intifada. This hasn’t happened yet mainly because the hundreds of young people carrying out the attacks weren’t joined by a large mass of supporters who came out to the streets looking to clash with Israelis.

Now it seems that the necessary ingredients for the next explosion are gradually accumulating. It’s no surprise that the Biden administration is sending over his senior officials. Along with the justified concern in Washington about the new government’s attempts to change the rules of democracy, the Americans are extremely disturbed by the prospect of a widespread flare-up in the Palestinian arena.

Michael Milshtein, a researcher of Palestinian studies at Tel Aviv University and Reichmann University, told Haaretz that Israel should try to take advantage of U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s visit to the region early next week to convince the Palestinian Authority to cancel its suspension of security coordination. The authority’s decision, which was essentially declarative, was made on Thursday in protest of the operation in Jenin.

Milshtein described Netanyahu’s visit to Jordan earlier last week as an appropriate step and recommended trying to court more moderate Arab countries, such as Egypt and Morocco, in an effort to calm the atmosphere ahead of Ramadan.

This story originally appeared in Ha’aretz.

The post With Jerusalem on the verge of erupting, Netanyahu must rein in his own coalition appeared first on The Forward.

Colombia seized more cocaine in 2022 than any other year on record, the South American country’s defense ministry reported Saturday.

Security forces seized 671 tonnes of the drug last year, surpassing the 2021 total by about 1.7 tonnes.

“It is necessary to combat the illicit income that comes from drug trafficking, which generates evil in our country,” said Defense Minister Ivan Velasquez, quoted in the ministry’s statement. He credited authorities for the “great results.”

The data showed that Narino, Bolivar and Valle del Cauca provinces were the site of the most seizures last year.

Cocaine production and trafficking are considered the main driver of an almost six-decade armed conflict in Colombia that has left more than 450,000 dead and millions displaced.

The guerilla group National Liberation Army, dissidents from the FARC rebel group and criminal gangs made up of former right-wing paramilitaries have all been implicated in drug trafficking.

Cocaine seizures were 505 tonnes in 2020 and 428 tonnes in 2019.