https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/05/politics/donald-trump-joe-biden-women/index.html
2019-04-05 14:44:00Z
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Biden, who is expected to announce a presidential campaign in the coming weeks, has been at the center of controversy in recent days after multiple women said he touched them inappropriately.
Trump shared a doctored video on Thursday that mocked Biden over the allegations. The 14-second clip showed an image of the former vice president rubbing Biden's shoulders as he addressed the allegations of inappropriate behavior.
The president defended the video on Friday, saying he believes people "got a kick" out of it.
Trump, who himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen women, downplayed a question about whether he's the right person to speak out about Biden, telling reporters he believes he's a "very good messenger."
"He’s going through a situation and let’s see what happens," Trump said of Biden. "But people got a kick. We’ve got to sort of smile a little bit."
Several women have gone public in recent days to describe accounts of past interactions with Biden in which they said he touched them inappropriately or behaved in ways that made them uncomfortable.
Biden addressed the women's stories in a video message posted Wednesday. He did not directly apologize to his accusers, but acknowledged that times have changed and that he would adjust his behavior.
“Social norms have begun to change, they’ve shifted, and the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset, and I get it,” he said. “I hear what they’re saying. I understand it. I’ll be much more mindful. That’s my responsibility, and I’ll meet it.”
Trump has seized on the allegations, at times aggressively.
In addition to the parody video, the president took multiple shots at Biden during a House GOP fundraising dinner this week.
Trump's attacks on Biden have drawn criticism given his own history with allegations of misconduct.
More than a dozen women accused Trump during the 2016 campaign of sexual misconduct. The president has denied the allegations.
Trump was widely criticized during the campaign after audio from a 2005 "Access Hollywood" appearance emerged in which he bragged about groping and kissing women without their consent. He later described his comments as "locker room talk."
British police are prepared to arrest WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange if he is ousted from his sanctuary at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
Officers with London's metropolitan police department were stationed outside the embassy Friday morning following messages from WikiLeaks claiming that Assange would be moved out of the facility within hours or days, The Associated Press reported.
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Police told reporters that Assange faces a warrant for his arrest in the United Kingdom, which he has been avoiding for years by living in the Ecuadorian diplomatic compound, and officers said that they are “obliged to execute that warrant should he leave the Embassy," according to the AP.
The news comes hours after a Twitter account representing WikiLeaks cited a high-level source in the Ecuadorian government who said that Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno, himself at the center of a corruption scandal triggered by leaked documents, was seeking to oust Assange from the embassy.
"BREAKING: A high level source within the Ecuadorian state has told @WikiLeaks that Julian Assange will be expelled within 'hours to days' using the #INAPapers offshore scandal as a pretext--and that it already has an agreement with the UK for his arrest," WikiLeaks tweeted from its verified account.
BREAKING: A high level source within the Ecuadorian state has told @WikiLeaks that Julian Assange will be expelled within "hours to days" using the #INAPapers offshore scandal as a pretext--and that it already has an agreement with the UK for his arrest.https://t.co/adnJph79wq
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 4, 2019
In a post on the organization's legal defense blog, WikiLeaks claimed that the move was punishment for Assange's alleged involvement in the leak of the INA Papes, which implicated Moreno in corruption schemes.
"The leak has sparked a congressional investigation into President Moreno for corruption. Moreno can’t be summoned for a criminal probe while he remains president. He is currently being investigated and risks impeachment," the blog post read.
Assange's lawyers have maintained that he had nothing to do with the leak. If he is ousted from the embassy, he could be arrested by British authorities and possibly extradited to the U.S., where he faces charges under seal.
“Remember that WikiLeaks has an internal organization and Mr. Assange is no longer in the editor," Assange's lawyer said, according to the legal defense blog.
South Korea is using its military to gain control of a large forest fire that spread quickly after igniting in Gangwon Province, along the country's east coast. Strong winds moved the blaze from city to city, prompting President Moon Jae-in to declare a national emergency.
It's being called the worst wildfire to hit South Korea in years, forcing thousands to evacuate and ravaging rural towns. Fire officials are reporting two deaths, according to the Associated Press.
The main fire is now nearly under control, said Moon, who visited the area Friday. Taking note of the hundreds of homes and buildings that have reportedly been destroyed, Moon urged government officials to "take extra care of displaced victims who – after having lost their homes in an instant – may now find time to catch their breath."
The fire started early Thursday night in Goseong, a mountainous county just below the border with North Korea.
"Moon's office said he would cooperate with North Korea on fighting the fire if it spread northward," NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports from Seoul. "But as it happened, the winds were blowing to the south."
The fire struck an area where a line of mountains bracket towns and cities along the coast — including Gangneung, the city that hosted events in last year's Winter Olympics.
In Gangwon's national forests and other woodlands, fires are common in the spring — but they usually don't spread so quickly, and they're usually confined to unpopulated areas, residents tell the Korea Herald.
Among those caught off-guard was Kim Tae-gi, 69, a volunteer fire lookout who received a text alert warning of imminent danger less than an hour after he finished his shift. Kim told the Herald that he immediately rushed to his home in the town of Toseong-myeon, to make sure his dog was safe.
"I escaped from the burning house right after I brought out my dog. I couldn't bring anything else with me, and all I have now are these clothes that I was wearing last night. I had to watch my house burn from my car," Kim said.
As he spoke, he was holding his dog, the newspaper says.
With firefighters gaining control of the main blaze, many of the residents who spent last night in temporary shelters had started to return home by early evening Friday local time, according to Arirang News. But smaller fires were still burning elsewhere.
Overall, the flames burned some 529 hectares (1,307 acres), the Yonhap news agency reports, citing fire control officials in Gangwon.
The firefighting effort includes more than 13,000 rescue workers, according to Yonhap, which adds that 16,500 military troops are also part of the push to bring the fire under control.
From nearly the moment they roared down the runway and took off in their new Boeing jetliner, pilots of an Ethiopian Airlines flight encountered problems with the plane.
Almost immediately, a device called a stick shaker began vibrating the captain’s control column, warning him that the plane might be about to stall and fall from the sky.
For six minutes, the pilots were bombarded by alarms as they fought to fly the plane, at times pulling back in unison on their control columns in a desperate attempt to keep the huge jet aloft.
Ethiopian authorities issued a preliminary report Thursday on the March 10 crash that killed 157 people. They found that a malfunctioning sensor sent faulty data to the Boeing 737 Max 8’s anti-stall system and triggered a chain of events that ended in a crash so violent it reduced the plane to shards and pieces. The pilots’ struggle, and the tragic ending, mirrored an Oct. 29 crash of a Lion Air Max 8 off the coast of Indonesia, which killed 189 people.
The anti-stall system, called MCAS, automatically lowers the plane’s nose under some circumstances to prevent an aerodynamic stall. Boeing acknowledged that a sensor in the Ethiopian Airlines jet malfunctioned, triggering MCAS when it was not needed. The company repeated that it is working on a software upgrade to fix the problem in its best-selling plane.
‘‘It’s our responsibility to eliminate this risk,’’ CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in a video. ‘‘We own it, and we know how to do it.’’
Jim Hall, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the preliminary findings add urgency to re-examine the way that the Federal Aviation Administration uses employees of aircraft manufacturers to conduct safety-related tasks, including tests and inspections — a decades-old policy that raises questions about the agency’s independence and is now under review by the U.S. Justice Department, the Transportation Department’s inspector general and congressional committees.
‘‘It is clear now that the process itself failed to produce a safe aircraft,’’ Hall said. ‘‘The focus now is to see if there were steps that were skipped or tests that were not properly done.’’
The 33-page preliminary report, which is subject to change in the coming months, is based on information from the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders, the so-called black boxes. It includes a minute-by-minute narrative of a gripping and confusing scene in the cockpit.
Just one minute into Flight 302 from Addis Ababa to Nairobi in neighboring Kenya, the captain, Yared Getachew, reported that they were having flight-control problems.
Then the anti-stall system kicked in and pushed the nose of the plane down for nine seconds. Instead of climbing, the plane descended slightly. Audible warnings — ‘‘Don’t Sink’’ — sounded in the cockpit. The pilots fought to turn the nose of the plane up, and briefly they were able to resume climbing.
But the automatic anti-stall system pushed the nose down again, triggering more squawks of ‘‘Don’t Sink’’ from the plane’s ground-proximity warning system.
Following a procedure that Boeing reiterated after the Lion Air crash, the Ethiopian pilots flipped two switches and disconnected the anti-stall system, then tried to regain control. They asked to return to the Addis Ababa airport, but were continuing to struggle getting the plane to gain altitude.
Then they broke with Boeing procedure and returned power to controls including the anti-stall system, perhaps hoping to use power to adjust a tail surface that controls the pitch up or down of a plane, or maybe out of sheer desperation.
One final time, the automated system kicked in, pushing the plane into a nose dive, according to the report.
A half-minute later, the cockpit voice recording ended, the plane crashed, and all 157 people on board were killed. The plane’s impact left a crater 10 meters deep.
The Max is Boeing’s newest version of its workhorse single-aisle jetliner, the 737, which dates to the 1960s. Fewer than 400 Max jets have been sent to airlines around the world, but Boeing has taken orders for 4,600 more.
Boeing delivered this particular plane, tail number ET-AVJ, to Ethiopian Airlines in November. By the day of Flight 302, it had made nearly 400 flights and been in the air for 1,330 hours — still very new by airline standards.
The pilots were young, too, and between them they had a scant 159 hours of flying time on the Max.
The captain, Getachew, was just 29 but had accumulated more than 8,000 hours of flying since completing work at the airline’s training academy in 2010. He had flown more than 1,400 hours on Boeing 737s but just 103 hours on the Max. That may not be surprising, given that Ethiopian Airlines had just five of the planes, including ET-AVJ.
The co-pilot, Ahmed Nur Mohammod Nur, was only 25 and was granted a license to fly the 737 and the Max on Dec. 12 of last year. He had logged just 361 flight hours — not enough to be hired as a pilot at a U.S. airline. Of those hours, 207 were on 737s, including 56 hours on Max jets.
Thursday’s preliminary report found that both pilots performed all the procedures recommended by Boeing on the March 10 flight but still could not control the jet.
While Boeing continues to work on its software update, Max jets remain grounded worldwide. The CEO said the company is taking ‘‘a comprehensive, disciplined approach’’ to fixing the flight-control software.
But some critics, including Hall, the former NTSB chairman, question why the work has taken so long.
‘‘Don’t you think if Boeing knew what the fix was, we would have the fix by now?’’ he said. ‘‘They said after the Lion Air accident there was going to be a fix, yet there was a second accident with no fix. Now, in response to the worldwide reaction, the plane is grounded and there is still not a fix.’’
LONDON — British police stationed armed officers outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Friday after tweets from WikiLeaks quoted what it said were high-level sources saying that Julian Assange could be kicked out of the building within ‘‘hours to days.’’
The red-brick embassy building with white window frames and balconies was quiet. No embassy official or any British authorities commented on the WikiLeaks founder’s status.
Asked about the presence of armed officers outside the Ecuadorian Embassy, London’s Metropolitan Police force said there had been no change in police procedure.
Police said in a statement there is an active warrant for Assange’s arrest and that the police are ‘‘obliged to execute that warrant should he leave the Embassy.’’
Police withdrew the round-the-clock guard outside the embassy in October 2015 after more than three years in favor of what the service called a ‘‘covert’’ approach.
Assange hasn’t left the embassy since August 2012, fearing if he steps off Ecuador’s diplomatic soil he will be arrested and extradited to the U.S. for publishing thousands of classified military and diplomatic cables through WikiLeaks.
Ecuador’s foreign ministry issued a statement late Thursday saying it wouldn’t comment on what it called ‘‘rumors, theories or conjectures.’’
Later, a senior official told The Associated Press that no decision had been taken to expel Assange from the embassy.
A small group of protesters and supporters of WikiLeaks’ founder gathered Thursday outside the London embassy. On Friday morning, a van appeared outside the building showing a placard that said ‘‘Free Speech’’ and featured images of Assange and convicted classified document leaker Chelsea Manning. Police moved it on.
WikiLeaks on Thursday tweeted: ‘‘BREAKING: A high level source within the Ecuadorian state has told @WikiLeaks that Julian Assange will be expelled within ‘‘hours to days’’ using the #INAPapers offshore scandal as a pretext--and that it already has an agreement with the UK for his arrest.’’
Another tweet said it had received a secondary confirmation from another high-level source.
But a top official said while Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno was angered by the apparent hacking of his personal communications, he denied WikiLeaks’ claim and said no decision had been taken to expel Assange from the Embassy. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter.
On Tuesday, Moreno blamed WikiLeaks for recent allegations of offshore corruption that in appeared in local media outlets and the publication of family photos to social media.
Moreno accused WikiLeaks of intercepting phone calls and private conversations as well as ‘‘photos of my bedroom, what I eat, and how my wife and daughters and friends dance.’’
Moreno provided no evidence, but the speech reflected ongoing tension between Assange and his hosts at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
WikiLeaks in a statement called Moreno’s charges ‘‘completely bogus,’’ saying it reported on the accusations of corruption against the president only after Ecuador’s legislature investigated the issue.
Assange’s defense team suggested on Twitter that Moreno was trying to use the scandal to pressure the WikiLeaks founder.