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Biden vows to respect guilty verdict in son's gun trial

US President Joe Biden has said he will respect a jury’s decision to find his son guilty of gun crimes, after a week-long trial that laid bare a tumultuous time for the family. The 12-person jury found Hunter Biden, 54, guilty of lying about his drug use on a form while purchasing a handgun in 2018. He faces possible jail time following the verdict, which marked the first criminal prosecution of a sitting president’s child. His conviction on all three felony counts comes as President Biden campaigns for re-election in November, and less than two weeks after his...

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Hunter Biden convicted of 3 felonies in federal gun trial

WILMINGTON, DEL: Hunter Biden has been convicted of all three felony charges related to the purchase of a revolver in 2018 when, prosecutors argued, the president’s son lied on a mandatory gun-purchase form by saying he was not illegally using or addicted to drugs. Jurors found Hunter Biden guilty of lying to a federally licensed […]

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President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, is convicted of all 3 felonies in federal gun trial

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Five key takeaways from the Capitol riot hearing

JUNE 10: It was an unprecedented evening affair. Even Watergate, which may have set the benchmark for modern high-profile and politically potent congressional hearings, conducted all their work during the day. Democrats - and the two Republicans - on the committee insisted that it was important to present their work before a large American audience, both for history's sake and to set up legislative action to protect US democracy from future attacks. The rest of the Republican Party, on the other hand, viewed the proceedings as a partisan show trial, one-sided and illegitimate. With the three major networks, as well as every major cable news channel except Fox News, broadcasting the Thursday hearing in its entirety, the American public will have ample opportunity to make their own judgement. A case against Donald Trump If there were a question as to whether committee chairman Bennie Thompson holds Donald Trump personally responsible for the attack on the US Capitol, he put that to rest early in his opening statement. The then-president, he said, "was trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power". "Donald Trump was at the centre of this conspiracy," he added. Those are strong words. Now the committee has to present evidence to back that up. It raises the question of whether, if this is what Mr Thompson and others truly believe, the committee will recommend that the former president himself be charged with a crime. Within minutes of Thursday night's opening hearing, the chairman essentially accused Mr Trump of committing one. Baseless election allegations Before the 6 January committee can prove that Mr Trump intentionally subverted the peaceful and proper transfer of power to Joe Biden, it had to prove that the then-president was knowingly spreading false information. To do so, committee vice-chair Liz Cheney didn't try to refute all the specific claims the president and his supporters have advanced. Instead she simply recounted and played video testimony of the president's own advisors confirming that the election results were valid. In one key clip, Bill Barr - the president's attorney general - recounted how he used a dismissive expletive to tell the president that his of widespread election fraud were baseless. She was, in effect, damning the former president with his own team's words. The power of video The primetime hearing was billed as something other than an ordinary congressional event. Instead of members of Congress hogging the microphone, it would be a slickly produced undertaking that would use video clips and documentary evidence to tell a powerful story. It didn't exactly begin that way. Although Mr Thompson kept his remarks fairly brief, Ms Cheney - the apostate Republican who has gone to war with her own party - spoke in a monotone for nearly half an hour. While the allegations she made were serious, the words bogged down in lengthy paragraphs, numbered lists and "we will show you" expository statements. It wasn't until the committee ran an extended video of the attack - comprised largely of security and police body camera footage, interspersed with Trump's speech excerpts and tweets - that the drama of the day's events became visceral, not cerebral. As the video ended, the hearing room fell into silence - with many members of Congress watching as guests in the back of the room sat in stunned quiet and family of police officers who died after the attacks choking back tears. Ivanka and Jared speak The panel has conducted more than 1,000 interviews as part of its investigation so far, but three of those interviews - with Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump, son Donald Trump Jr and son-in-law Jared Kushner - have been of particular interest. On Thursday night, the public got its first look, albeit a brief one, at what two of them had to say. Ms Trump spoke about how she had no reason to doubt then-Attorney General Bill Barr when he said her father had lost the election. Kushner dismissed the threats of members of Trump's legal team quitting in protest against what they viewed as his illegal and unfounded election challenges as "whining". The elder Trump son, on the other hand, was entirely absent. There may be more video presented in future hearings, but if viewers were hoping for juicy familial conflict, the hearings didn't deliver. First-person emotion The committee only had two individuals appear for in-person testimony during the evening's hearing - documentary filmmaker Nick Quested and Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards. While the former offered some insight into the preparations the far-right group the Proud Boys made before the Capitol attack, it was Officer Edwards whose personal account lent the second half of the proceedings its power. She spoke about the crowd turning on the police officers at the Capitol and how she saw leaders of the Proud Boys seemingly conferring before they launched their assault. he recounted losing consciousness as she was knocked over, hitting her head on a concrete step. After she recovered, she continued to try to defend the Capitol, before she and Officer Brian Sicknick - who later died - were assaulted with chemical spray. "What I saw was a war scene, like something I had seen out of the movies," she said. "I couldn't believe my eyes. Officers on the ground bleeding and throwing up... It was carnage. It was chaos." With inputs from BBC

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Egypt tries prominent activist for critical elections tweet

CAIRO, September 7: Egypt is set to start Tuesday trial proceedings against Hossam Bahgat, one of the country's most prominent human rights advocates, for a tweet criticising alleged electoral fraud. Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), is already banned from travelling and his assets have been frozen due to another case in which he remains indicted. Authorities have in recent years particularly targeted the group he founded. Three EIPR staff members were jailed last year, sparking an international campaign supported by celebrities including Scarlett Johansson that resulted in their release. Another EIPR researcher, Patrick Zaki, remains in detention since February 2020 facing charges of "spreading false news" after he returned to Egypt for a visit from Italy, where he was studying at Bologna University. In July, the US State Department condemned Cairo for specifically indicting Bahgat saying dissidents "should not be targeted for expressing their views peacefully". Bahgat is accused of "insulting" Egypt's electoral commission, after he alleged that incidents of electoral fraud and vote rigging took place during last year's parliamentary elections. Parliament is mostly comprised of loyalists of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and is viewed by critics as a "rubber-stamp" body. Bahgat is also being prosecuted for "spreading false news", which can carry hefty fines and jail time. "We will present evidence to the court of reports and information published by people involved in the elections," to support his allegations, Hoda Nasralla, one of Baghat's lawyers, told AFP. Tuesday's hearing is the first and a verdict is not expected to come immediately. Sisi, a former army chief, took power in 2014 and has launched a sweeping crackdown on dissent, with rights groups estimating that Egypt holds about 60,000 political prisoners. Former US president Donald Trump forged a particularly strong relationship with Sisi. His successor, President Joe Biden, vowed on the campaign trail that there would be no more "blank checks" for Egypt's president. But Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May visited and praised Sisi for helping bring a truce that halted bloodshed between Israel and Palestinian militants Hamas.

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Biden calls 'systemic racism' a 'stain on our nation's soul'

WASHINGTON, April 21: US President Joe Biden called systemic racism a "stain on our nation's soul" in a televised address to the nation Tuesday after a white former police officer was convicted of murdering a Black man during an arrest. Biden spoke out after a jury in the Midwestern city of Minneapolis found Derek Chauvin guilty of intentionally suffocating handcuffed George Floyd as he lay defenseless, with the officer's knee pressing on his neck for more than nine minutes. The president called for "confronting head on systemic racism and the racial disparities that exist in policing and our criminal justice system" -- but pleaded for protesters to steer clear of violence. "There are those who will seek to exploit the raw emotions in the moment -- agitators and extremists who have no interest in social justice," he warned. "We can't let them succeed." A jury deliberated less than 11 hours before finding the 45-year-old Chauvin guilty of all three charges against him -- second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter. The unanimous verdict came after a racially charged three week trial that was seen as a pivotal test of police accountability in the United States. Appearing alongside Biden, Kamala Harris, America's first Black vice president, spoke first to articulate the "relief" the nation was feeling over justice being served but acknowledged that the result couldn't "take away the pain" of Floyd's murder. "A measure of justice is not the same as equal justice. This verdict brings us a step closer. We still have work to do. We still have to reform the system," she said. She vowed to work with Biden to urge the Senate to pass "long overdue" legislation on police accountability, saying Black men had been treated as "less than humans" throughout US history. "Here is the truth about racial injustice: It is not just a Black America problem or a 'people of color' problem. It is a problem for every American," she said.

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