Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump works behind the counter during a visit to McDonalds in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania, U.S. October 20, 2024.
Doug Mills | Via Reuters
Though President Donald Trump visited a Pennsylvania McDonald’s location on Sunday, the fast-food giant is trying to stay neutral in the presidential race.
“As we’ve seen, our brand has been a fixture of conversation in this election cycle. While we’ve not sought this, it’s a testament to how much McDonald’s resonates with so many Americans. McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next President,” the company said in an internal message viewed by CNBC and confirmed by a source familiar with the matter.
Trump learned how to operate a fry cooker and work the drive-thru line during his short shift at a Feasterville, Pennsylvania, restaurant. He used the stunt as an opportunity to take more shots at his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump often accuses Harris of lying about working at McDonald’s for a summer in her 20s, but has offered no proof backing up the claim. Harris has denied the accusation. McDonald’s and its franchisees don’t have all of their employment records for workers dating back to the early 1980s, when the 60-year-old Harris would have worked there, the company said in the Sunday memo.
“Though we are not a political brand, we’ve been proud to hear former President Trump’s love for McDonald’s and Vice President Harris’s fond memories working under the Arches,” McDonald’s said.
Both McDonald’s and the franchisee who operates the location emphasized that the chain opens its doors to “everyone.”
The photo shows a letter outside the McDonald’s verifying it was closed to the public at the time of Trump’s visit.
Lauren Mayk | NBC Philadelphia
“As a small, independent business owner, it is a fundamental value of my organization that we proudly open our doors to everyone who visits the Feasterville community,” franchisee Derek Giacomantonio said in a statement. “That’s why I accepted former President Trump’s request to observe the transformative working experience that 1 in 8 Americans have had: a job at McDonald’s.”
Although McDonald’s publicly supported the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, it has tried to portray itself as an apolitical brand to avoid alienating customers. It follows a broader shift in Corporate America away from politics or initiatives perceived as ideological.
A number of companies, including Ford, Lowe’s and Harley-Davidson, have walked back their diversity, equity and inclusion policies and practices this year.
And that’s a change that many Americans want; only 38% of U.S. adults believe that businesses should take public stances, down from 48% in 2022, according to a Gallup-University of Bentley study conducted this spring.
But McDonald’s has already been involved with another controversy this election cycle.
In late May, several viral social media posts criticized the burger giant’s affordability, citing everything from an $18 Big Mac meal at a Connecticut location to charts that alleged the chain’s prices had more than doubled over the last five years. Republicans latched onto the controversy, tying a jump inMcDonald’s menu prices to Biden’s economic policy in a bid to win over voters fed up with inflation.
To quell the controversy, McDonald’s U.S. President Joe Erlinger wrote an open letter and released fact sheets about the company’s pricing.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea on Monday demanded the immediate pullout of North Korean troops allegedly deployed in Russia as it summoned the Russian ambassador to protest deepening military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow.
South Korea’s spy agency said Friday it had confirmed that North Korea sent 1,500 special operation forces to Russia this month to support Moscow’s war against Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier said his government had intelligence that 10,000 North Korea soldiers were being prepared to join invading Russian forces.
During a meeting with Russian Ambassador Georgy Zinoviev, Vice South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Hong Kyun “condemned in the strongest terms” North Korea’s troop dispatch that he said poses “a grave security threat” to South Korea and the international community, the South Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Kim said that South Korea in collaboration with the international community will mobilize all available means to deal with an act that threatens its vital national security interests, according to the statement. The Russian Embassy quoted Zinoviev as saying that the Russian-North Korean cooperation is not aimed against the security interests of South Korea.
In a telephone call with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Monday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said that Seoul won’t sit idly by “reckless” military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow. Yoon said South Korea will soon send a delegation to NATO to exchange information about Russian-North Korean cooperation, according to Yoon’s office. Rutte wrote on X that North Korea possibly fighting alongside Russia would “mark a significant escalation.”
The U.S. and NATO haven’t confirmed that North Korean troops were sent to Russia. But the reports of their presence have already stoked concerns in South Korea that Russia might provide North Korea with sophisticated technologies that can sharply enhance the North’s nuclear and missile programs in return for its troop dispatch.
North Korea’s advancing nuclear arsenal is a major security threat to South Korea. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un recently took steps to permanently terminate all relations with South Korea and threatened to use nuclear weapons preemptively. Some observers say South Korea will likely consider supplying weapons to Ukraine if Russian transfers of high-tech nuclear and missile technologies to North Korea are verified.
South Korea has joined U.S.-led sanctions against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But South Korea hasn’t directly provided arms to Kyiv, citing its longstanding policy of not supplying weapons to countries actively engaged in conflicts.
Russia has earlier denied using North Korean troops in its war with Ukraine. North Korea’s state media hasn’t commented on the matter. Ukrainian officials released a video allegedly showing North Korean soldiers lining up to collect Russian military clothes and bags at an unknown location. The Associated Press couldn’t verify the footage independently.
Asked about the North Korean troops during a conference call with reporters Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “we are seeing a lot of contradictory information.”
“South Koreans say one thing, then the Pentagon says it has no confirmation of such statements. There is a lot of contradictory information,” Peskov said. ”It must be treated as such.”
At a U.N. Security Council meeting Monday on Ukraine, Western ambassadors raised the South Korean intelligence, but none confirmed it.
U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood said that if true, it marks “a dangerous and highly concerning development” and noted that the U.S. was “consulting with our allies and partners on such a dramatic move.”
Britain’s U.N. Ambassador Barbara Woodward said it’s “highly likely” North Korea agreed to send troops in support of Russia’s war.
Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia dismissed the South Korean assertion as well as Western allegations of Iran supplying Russia with missiles and China providing arms components. He accused the West of “circulating scaremongering with Iranian, Chinese and Korean bogeymen, each one of which is more absurd than the one before.”
North Korea’s troop deployment to Russia would be its first participation in a major war since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. Many experts question how much North Korean troops would help Russia on the battlefield, citing their lack of combat experience.
Cooperation between North Korea and Russia has flourished over the past two years. The U.S., South Korea and their partners have accused North Korea of supplying conventional arms to Russia in return for economic and military assistance. In June, Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a pact stipulating mutual military assistance if either country is attacked.
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Associated Press writers Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
FEASTERVILLE-TREVOSE, Pa. — FEASTERVILLE-TREVOSE, Pa. (AP) — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump manned the fry station at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania on Sunday before staging an impromptu news conference, answering questions through the drive-thru window.
As reporters and aides watched, an employee showed Trump how to dunk baskets of fries in oil, salt the fries and put them into boxes using a scoop. Trump, a well-known fan of fast food and a notorious germophobe, expressed amazement that he didn’t have to touch the fries with his hands.
“It requires great expertise, actually, to do it right and to do it fast,” Trump said with a grin, putting away his suit jacket and wearing an apron over his shirt and tie.
The visit came as he’s tried to counter Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ accounts on the campaign of working at the fast-food chain while in college, an experience that Trump has claimed — without offering evidence — never happened.
A large crowd lined the street outside the restaurant in Feasterville-Trevose, which is part of Bucks County, a key swing voter area north of Philadelphia. The restaurant itself was closed to the public for Trump’s visit. The former president later attended an evening town hall in Lancaster and the Pittsburgh Steelers home game against the New York Jets.
After serving bags of takeout to people in the drive-thru lane, Trump leaned out of the window, still wearing the apron, to take questions from the media staged outside. The former president, who has constantly promoted falsehoods about his 2020 election loss, said he would respect the results of next month’s vote “if it’s a fair election.”
He joked about getting one reporter ice cream and when another asked what message he had for Harris on her 60th birthday on Sunday, Trump said, “I would say, ‘Happy Birthday, Kamala,’” adding, “I think I’ll get her some flowers.”
Trump did not directly answer a question of whether he might support increased minimum wages after seeing McDonald’s employees in action but said, “These people work hard. They’re great.”
He added that “I just saw something … a process that’s beautiful.”
When aides finally urged him to wrap things up so he could hit the road to his next event, Trump offered, “Wasn’t that a strange place to do a news conference?”
Trump has fixated in recent weeks on the summer job Harris said she held in college, working the cash register and making fries at McDonald’s while in college. Trump says the vice president has “lied about working” there, but not offered evidence for claiming that.
Representatives for McDonald’s did not respond to a message about whether the company had employment records for one of its restaurants 40 years ago. But Harris spokesman Joseph Costello said the former president’s McDonald’s visit “showed exactly what we would see in a second Trump term: exploiting working people for his own personal gain.”
“Trump doesn’t understand what it’s like to work for a living, no matter how many staged photo ops he does, and his entire second term plan is to give himself, his wealthy buddies, and giant corporations another massive tax cut,” Costello said in a statement.
In an interview last month on MSNBC, the vice president pushed back on Trump’s claims, saying she did work at the fast-food chain four decades ago when she was in college.
“Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family,” she said. “I worked there as a student.”
Harris also said: “I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility, then, is to meet those needs.”
Trump has long spread groundless claims about his opponents based on their personal history, particularly women and racial minorities.
Before he ran for president, Trump was a leading voice of the “birther” conspiracy that baselessly claimed President Barack Obama was from Africa, was not an American citizen and therefore was ineligible to be president. Trump used it to raise his own political profile, demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate and five years after Obama did so, Trump finally admitted that Obama was born in the United States.
During his first run for president, Trump repeated a tabloid’s claims that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, who was born in Cuba, had links to President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Cruz and Trump competed for the party’s 2016 nomination.
In January of this year, when Trump was facing Nikki Haley, his former U.N. ambassador, in the Republican primary, he shared on his social media network a post with false claims that Haley’s parents were not citizens when she was born, therefore making her ineligible to be president.
Haley is the South Carolina-born daughter of Indian immigrants, making her automatically a native-born citizen and meeting the constitutional requirement to run for president.
And Trump has continued to promote baseless claims during this campaign. Trump said during his presidential debate with Harris that immigrants who had settled in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets — a claim he suggested in an interview Saturday was still true even though he could provide no confirmation.
“It is a fundamental value of my organization that we proudly open our doors to everyone who visits the Feasterville community,” the McDonald’s location’s owner, Derek Giacomantonio, said in a statement. “That’s why I accepted former President Trump’s request to observe the transformative working experience that 1 in 8 Americans have had: a job at McDonald’s.”
Police closed the busy streets around the McDonald’s during Trump’s visit. Authorities cordoned off the restaurant as a crowd a couple blocks long gathered, sometimes 10- to 15-deep, across the street straining to catch a glimpse of Trump. Horns honked and music blared as Trump supporters waved flags, held signs and took pictures.
John Waters, of nearby Fairless Hills, had never been to a Trump rally and had hoped to see the former president so close to his house after missing other nearby rallies.
“When I drove up, all the cars, unbelievable, I was like, ‘He’s here’s, he’s coming, he’s definitely coming with this all traffic,’” Waters said.
Trump is especially partial to McDonald’s Big Macs and Filet-o-Fish sandwiches. He’s talked often about how he trusts big chains more than smaller restaurants since they have big reputations to maintain, and the former president’s staff often pick up McDonald’s and serve it on his plane.
Jim Worthington, a Trump supporter and fundraiser who owns a nearby athletic complex and chaired Pennsylvania’s delegation to the Republican National Convention, said he arranged Trump’s visit to the locally owned McDonald’s franchise.
The campaign contacted him looking for a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania and Worthington started looking for one. He got in touch with Giacomantonio through a friend and talked the franchise owner through some initial nervousness.
Giacomantonio needed to know that McDonald’s corporate offices would be OK with it, first. Second, he was concerned that being seen as a Trump supporter would hurt his business or a spark boycott, Worthington said.
“He certainly had concerns, but I eased his mind, and talked to him about the benefits,” Worthington said.
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Associated Press writer Will Weissert in Washington contributed to this report.
SAYLORSBURG, Pa. (AP) — Fethullah Gülen, a reclusive U.S.-based Islamic cleric who inspired a global social movement while facing unproven accusations that he masterminded a failed 2016 coup in his native Turkey, has died.
The Alliance for Shared Values, a New York-based group that promotes Gülen’s work in the U.S., said that Gülen died Sunday night at a hospital near his home in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. Monroe County Coroner Thomas Yanac Jr. said he was informed that Gülen, who was in his eighties and had long been in ill health, died of natural causes.
The group called him a “towering figure of faith, wisdom, intellectual and spiritual leadership” whose “impact will be felt for generations.”
Gülen spent the last decades of his life in self-exile, living in a gated compound and wielding influence among his millions of followers. He espoused a philosophy that blended Sufism — a mystical form of Islam — with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.
Gülen had not played an active role in his movement in recent years. A group of close friends who have advised him for decades will carry on the work, according to the Alliance for Shared Values.
The religious leader began as an ally of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan but became a foe. He called Erdogan an authoritarian bent on accumulating power and crushing dissent. Erdogan cast Gülen as a terrorist, accusing him of orchestrating the attempted military coup on July 15, 2016, when factions within the military used tanks, warplanes and helicopters to try to overthrow the government.
Heeding a call from the president, thousands took to the streets to oppose the takeover attempt. The coup plotters fired at crowds and bombed parliament and other government buildings. A total of 251 people were killed and around 2,200 others were wounded. Around 35 alleged coup plotters were killed.
Gülen adamantly denied involvement, and his supporters dismissed the charges as ridiculous and politically motivated. Turkey put Gülen on its most-wanted list and demanded his extradition, but the United States showed little inclination to send him back, saying it needed more evidence. He was never charged with a crime in the U.S., and he consistently denounced terrorism as well as the coup plotters.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Monday that Gülen’s death “will not make us complacent or relaxed. This organization has been a threat rarely seen in the history of our nation.” He called on Gülen’s followers to turn away from “this treasonous wrong path.”
In Turkey, Gülen’s movement — sometimes known as Hizmet, Turkish for “service” — has been subjected to a broad crackdown. The government arrested tens of thousands of people for their alleged link to the coup plot, sacked more than 130,000 suspected supporters from civil service jobs and more than 23,000 from the military, and closed hundreds of businesses, schools and media organizations tied to Gülen.
Gülen called the crackdown a witch hunt and denounced Turkey’s leaders as “tyrants.”
“The last year has taken a toll on me as hundreds of thousands of innocent Turkish citizens are being punished simply because the government decides they are somehow ‘connected’ to me or the Hizmet movement and treats that alleged connection as a crime,” he said on the first anniversary of the failed coup.
Ozgur Ozel, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party, said Gülen’s vast network remained a threat to Turkey.
“The founder is dead but the organization remains. No one should think that this danger has passed or is over. Everyone should be on guard against this organization,” Ozel said.
On Monday, Turkey’s broadcasting regulator warned against content praising Gulen, saying no broadcaster can honor a “terrorist.” Meanwhile, prosecutors in the northwestern province of Bursa launched an investigation into a journalist on possible charges of engaging in terrorist propaganda, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported, after she said she hoped he would rest in heaven.
Abdulhamit Bilici, who was editor of the Gulen-affiliated Zaman newspaper when Erdogan shut it down in early 2016, said Monday that Gulen was subjected to decades of persecution in Turkey, and that Turkey is the only nation that claims Gülen’s peaceful Hizmet movement is a terror group.
“He was a source of inspiration for millions of people, not just in Turkey, but around the world,” Bilici said in an interview at the Pennsylvania retreat center where Gulen lived. “So this is a very sad day and a day of reflection, mourning and thinking and prayer.”
Fethullah Gülen was born in Erzurum, in eastern Turkey. His official birth date was April 27, 1941, but that has long been in dispute. Y. Alp Aslandogan, who leads a New York-based group that promotes Gülen’s ideas and work, said Gülen was actually born sometime in 1938.
Trained as an imam, or prayer leader, Gülen gained notice in Turkey some 50 years ago. He preached tolerance and dialogue between faiths — meeting with Pope John Paul II in 1998 — and he believed religion and science could go hand in hand. His belief in merging Islam with Western values and Turkish nationalism struck a chord with Turks, earning him millions of followers.
Gülen’s acolytes built a loosely affiliated global network of charitable foundations, professional associations, businesses and schools in more than 100 countries, including 150 taxpayer-funded charter schools throughout the United States. In Turkey, supporters ran universities, hospitals, charities, a bank and a large media empire with newspapers and radio and TV stations.
But Gülen was viewed with suspicion by some in his homeland, a deeply polarized country split between those loyal to its fiercely secular traditions and supporters of the Islamic-based party associated with Erdogan that came to power in 2002.
Gülen had long refrained from openly supporting any political party, but his movement forged a de facto alliance with Erdogan against the country’s old guard of staunch, military-backed secularists, and Gülen’s media empire threw its weight behind Erdogan’s Islamic-oriented government.
Gülenists helped the governing party win multiple elections. But the Erdogan-Gülen alliance began to crumble after the movement criticized government policy and exposed alleged corruption among Erdogan’s inner circle. Erdogan, who denied the allegations, grew weary of the growing influence of Gülen’s movement.
The Turkish leader accused Gülen’s followers of infiltrating the country’s police and judiciary and setting up a parallel state and began agitating for Gülen’s extradition to Turkey even before the failed 2016 coup.
The cleric had lived in the United States since 1999 when he came to seek medical treatment.
In 2000, with Gülen still in the U.S., Turkish authorities charged him with leading an Islamist plot to overthrow the country’s secular form of government and establish a religious state.
Some of the accusations against him were based on a tape recording on which Gülen was alleged to have told supporters of an Islamic state to bide their time: “If they come out too early, the world will quash their heads.” Gülen said his comments were taken out of context.
The cleric was tried in absentia and acquitted but never returned to his homeland. He won a lengthy legal battle against the administration of then-President George W. Bush to obtain permanent residency in the U.S.
Rarely seen in public, Gülen lived quietly on the grounds of an Islamic retreat center. He left mostly only to see doctors for ailments that included heart disease and diabetes, spending much of his time in prayer and meditation and receiving visitors from around the world.
Gülen never married and did not have children.
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Associated Press writer Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.
BEIRUT (AP) — Yahya Sinwar masterminded an attack on Israel that shocked the world, unleashing a still-widening catastrophe with no end in sight.
In Gaza, no figure loomed larger in determining the war’s trajectory than the 61-year-old Hamas leader. Obsessive, disciplined and dictatorial, he was a rarely seen veteran militant who learned Hebrew over years spent in Israeli prisons and who carefully studied his enemy.
On Thursday, Israel said troops in Gaza had killed Sinwar. A top Hamas political official confirmed the death Friday.
FILE – Yahya Sinwar speaks to foreign correspondents in his office in Gaza City on May 10, 2018. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra, File)
The secretive figure feared on both sides of the battle lines engineered the surprise Oct. 7, 2023, attack into southern Israel, along with the even more shadowy Mohammed Deif, head of Hamas’ armed wing. Israel said that it killed Deif in a July airstrike in southern Gaza that killed more than 70 Palestinians.
Soon after, Hamas’ leader in exile, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed while visiting Iran in an explosion that was blamed on Israel. Sinwar was then chosen to take his place as Hamas’ top leader, though he was in hiding in Gaza.
Palestinian militants who carried out the October 2023 attack killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 others, catching Israel’s military and intelligence establishment off guard and shattering the image of Israeli invincibility.
Israel’s retaliation was crushing. The conflict has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, who do not distinguish combatants from civilians. It also has caused widespread destruction in Gaza, and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and many on the verge of starvation.
Sinwar has held indirect negotiations with Israel to try to end the war. One of his goals was to win the release of thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, much like the deal that got him released more than a decade ago.
He worked on bringing Hamas closer to Iran and its other allies across the region. The war he ignited drew in Hezbollah, eventually leading to another Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and led Iran and Israel to trade fire directly for the first time, raising fears of an even more expansive conflict.
To Israelis, Sinwar was a nightmarish figure. The Israeli army’s chief spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, called him a murderer “who proved to the whole world that Hamas is worse than ISIS,” referring to the Islamic State group.
Always defiant, Sinwar ended one of his few public speeches by inviting Israel to assassinate him, proclaiming in Gaza, “I will walk back home after this meeting.” He then did so, shaking hands and taking selfies with people in the streets.
Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas in Gaza, greets his supporters upon his arrival at a meeting on the seaside of Gaza City, on April 30, 2022. (AP Photo/Adel Hana, File)
Among Palestinians, he was respected for standing up to Israel and remaining in impoverished Gaza, in contrast to other Hamas leaders living more comfortably abroad.
But he was also deeply feared for his iron grip in Gaza, where public dissent is suppressed.
In contrast to the media-friendly personas cultivated by some of Hamas’ political leadership, Sinwar never sought to build a public image. He was known as the “Butcher of Khan Younis” for his brutal approach to Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel.
Sinwar was born in 1962 in Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp to a family that was among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven from what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding its creation.
He was an early member of Hamas, which emerged from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987, when the coastal enclave was under Israeli military occupation.
Sinwar convinced the group’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, that to succeed as a resistance organization, Hamas needed to be purged of informants for Israel. They founded a security arm, then known as Majd, which Sinwar led.
Arrested by Israel in the late 1980s, he admitted under interrogation to having killed 12 suspected collaborators. He was eventually sentenced to four life terms for offenses that included the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers.
Michael Koubi, a former director of the investigations department at Israel’s Shin Bet security agency who interrogated Sinwar, recalled the confession that stood out to him the most: Sinwar recounted forcing a man to bury his own brother alive because he was suspected of working for Israel.
“His eyes were full of happiness when he told us this story,” Koubi said.
But to fellow prisoners, Sinwar was charismatic, sociable and shrewd, open to detainees from all political factions.
FILE – Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas in Gaza, delivers a speech during at a hall on the seaside of Gaza City, on April 30, 2022. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)
He became the leader of the hundreds of imprisoned Hamas members. He organized strikes to improve conditions. He learned Hebrew and studied Israeli society. He was known for feeding fellow inmates, making kunafa, a treat of shredded dough stuffed with cheese.
“Being a leader inside prison gave him experience in negotiations and dialogue, and he understood the mentality of the enemy and how to affect it,” said Anwar Yassine, a Lebanese citizen who spent about 17 years in Israeli jails, much of the time with Sinwar.
Yassine noted how Sinwar always treated him with respect even though he belonged to the Lebanese Communist Party, whose secular principles conflicted with Hamas’ ideology.
During his years in detention, Sinwar wrote a 240-page novel, “Thistle and the Cloves.” It tells the story of Palestinian society from the 1967 Mideast war until 2000, when the second intifada began.
“This is not my personal story, nor is it the story of a specific person, despite the fact that all the incidents are true,” Sinwar wrote in the novel’s opening.
In 2008, Sinwar survived an aggressive form of brain cancer after treatment at a Tel Aviv hospital.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released him in 2011 along with about 1,000 other prisoners in exchange for Gilad Schalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid. Netanyahu was harshly criticized for releasing dozens of prisoners held for involvement in deadly attacks.
Back in Gaza, Sinwar closely coordinated between Hamas’ political leadership and its military wing, the Qassam Brigades. He also cultivated a reputation for ruthlessness. He is widely believed to be behind the unprecedented 2016 killing of another top Hamas commander, Mahmoud Ishtewi, in an internal power struggle.
He also married after his release.
In 2017, he was elected head of Hamas’ political bureau in Gaza. Sinwar worked with Haniyeh to realign the group with Iran and its allies, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah. He also focused on building Hamas’ military power.
From the earliest days of her candidacy, one topic has loomed over Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid: her track record with criminal justice reform in the United States.
On Tuesday, Harris — the Democratic nominee for the presidency — had a chance to address some of the criticisms, in a town hall-style interview with radio host Charlamagne tha God.
It was also an opportunity for Harris, the former attorney general of California, to bolster support among the Black community.
While the vast majority of Black voters identify with the Democratic Party, recent polls show their backing for Harris is not as strong as in 2020, when fellow Democrat Joe Biden was running for president.
Harris took the offensive on Tuesday, very quickly steering the conversation towards correcting the record about her candidacy.
“Folks say you come off as very scripted,” Charlamagne began, in the first minute of their conversation. “They say you like to stick to your talking points —”
The vice president immediately jumped in. “That would be called discipline,” she quipped.
It was an apparent effort to draw a distinction between herself and her Republican rival Donald Trump, whose public appearances are often described as rambling.
Harris continued to give sharp rebuttals to criticisms of her public appearance as buttoned-up.
“What do you say to people who say you stay on the talking points?” Charlamagne asked.
“I would say, ‘You’re welcome,’” she replied.
Charlamagne tha God, co-host of iHeartMedia’s morning show The Breakfast Club, speaks to Kamala Harris in Detroit for a radio town hall [Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo]
Prosecutor past under spotlight
A former prosecutor who became district attorney of San Francisco and then attorney general of California, Harris has long faced scrutiny for her approach to criminal justice.
On the campaign trail this election cycle, Harris’s allies have sought to leverage her background to the Democrat’s advantage, framing the race as a battle between “the prosecutor” and “the felon”.
Trump, after all, has 34 felony convictions to his name, after he was found guilty in May of falsifying business records in relation to a hush-money payment to an adult film actor.
Harris herself has leaned into that framing. On July 23, shortly after she launched her presidential campaign, Harris struck a contrast between herself and Trump, who faces a total of four criminal indictments.
“Before I was elected vice president, before I was elected United States senator, I was elected attorney general of the state of California, and I was a courtroom prosecutor before then,” Harris told a rally in Wisconsin.
“And in those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
But critics have blasted Harris for that same history as a prosecutor, with members of both the right and left slamming her policies.
Progressives, on one hand, have criticised her hard-handed approach to issues like student truancy: Harris famously championed a state law that would make parents eligible for a misdemeanour if their child were chronically absent from school without an excuse.
In 2014, Harris also opposed calls to implement an independent system to review the fatal use of force by police.
Critics at the time argued that local prosecutors work closely with police and are therefore unable to be objective when deciding whether to bring charges. Harris, however, said, “I don’t think it would be good public policy to take the discretion from elected district attorneys.”
Her opponents on the right, meanwhile, have accused Harris of being lax on crime and failing to adequately support law enforcement.
Decriminalising marijuana
In her interview with Charlamagne, Harris sought to tamp down on the criticism against her by branding it the product of right-wing misinformation.
“One of the biggest challenges that I face is mis- and dis-information,” Harris told the radio host. “And it’s purposeful. Because it is meant to convince people that they somehow should not believe that the work I have done has occurred and has meaning.”
Charlamagne, for his part, called on Harris to answer several rumours swirling around her campaign.
“One of the biggest allegations against you is that you targeted and locked up thousands of Black men in San Francisco for weed. Some said you did it to boost your career. Some said you did it out of pure hate for Black men,” he said, asking: “What are the facts of that situation?”
Harris refuted the allegations, replying, “It’s just simply not true.”
She then pivoted to her work on lowering penalties for marijuana possession, an issue that disproportionately affects Black men.
A 2020 analysis from the American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, found that Black people are 3.64 times more likely to be arrested for possessing the drug, compared to white people. The report, however, found no significant difference in marijuana use between the two populations.
That difference in arrest rates contributes to higher incarceration rates overall for Black men in the US. The Pew Research Center found that, in 2020, Black adults faced five times the rate of imprisonment as their white counterparts.
Referencing this discrepancy, Harris told Charlamagne that she would decriminalise marijuana on the federal level if elected president.
“My pledge is, as president, I will work on decriminalising it, because I know exactly how those laws have been used to disproportionately impact certain populations and specifically Black men,” she said on Tuesday.
Approximately 24 states have already taken steps to legalise small quantities of marijuana for recreational use. But on the federal level, the drug remains illegal, though the Biden administration has taken steps to lower penalties.
In May, for instance, Biden’s Justice Department initiated a new rule reclassifying marijuana as a “schedule III drug”, down from the highest rank under the Controlled Substances Act’s five-tier system.
That reclassification made the drug acceptable for medical use. It also indicated a shift in the government’s position, to acknowledge that marijuana is not as dangerous as the other drugs in its previous category, like heroin.
“As vice president, [I] have been a champion for bringing marijuana down on the schedule,” Harris told Charlamagne. “So instead of it being ranked up there with heroin, we bring it down.”
Charlamagne tha God pressed Vice President Harris about her commitment to the Black community in the US [Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo]
Attacking Trump on ‘stop and frisk’
Harris not only defended her criminal justice work as “progressive”, but she also actively attacked her Republican rival Trump for policies she warned would be detrimental to the Black community.
Throughout his campaign, Trump has championed a crackdown on crime in the US, proposing policies that critics warn could increase the use of excessive force among law enforcement officers — and cause the violation of civil liberties.
Last month, for instance, Trump floated the idea of having “one real rough, nasty day” for law enforcement to address property crime without restraint.
He has also pledged to strengthen police immunity from prosecution and push for increased use of “stop and frisk” policies.
“You have to do a policy of stop and frisk,” Trump told the TV show Fox and Friends in August, envisioning a situation where a police officer recognises a suspect on the street. “Stop and frisk and take their gun away.”
While the US Constitution protects people from “unreasonable search and seizure”, advocates say “stop and frisk” policies allow the police to search suspects in an un-intrusive manner if they have a “reasonable suspicion” they may be armed or dangerous.
But critics warn that “stop and frisk” has been used to racially profile people and harass them without warrant or cause. Some “stop and frisk” policies have therefore been struck down as unconstitutional.
Harris zeroed in on Trump’s support for “stop and frisk” in Tuesday’s interview.
“My opponent”, she said, would have “a formalised stop and frisk policy, for which he has said, if a police department does not do it, they should be defunded”.
“There is so much at stake” this election, she added, pointing to the potential risks for the Black community, which has been disproportionately targeted by such policies.
Pressure on Harris
Harris’s appearance on the radio town hall with Charlamagne came one day after the Democratic candidate made another major overture to Black voters, releasing an “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men“.
That agenda outlined plans for decriminalising marijuana, promoting cryptocurrency and providing one million “forgivable” loans for Black entrepreneurs.
If elected, Harris would be the first woman — and the first person of mixed Black and South Asian descent — to win the White House.
But while she carries a majority of support among Black Americans, some pollsters see concern in how her numbers compare to the 2020 election. In that race, President Joe Biden carried 90 percent of Black votes, according to a survey from The New York Times and Siena College.
By contrast, only 76 percent of the Black electorate plan to vote for Harris, Biden’s vice president, in this year’s election. That’s a significant drop — and the poll showed even lower numbers among Black men.
Only 69 percent backed Harris, compared to 81 percent of Black women.
Trump has tried to make gains in that demographic — and he has even publicly questioned Harris’s identity as a Black woman.
During her town hall on Tuesday, Harris faced questions about her commitment to the Black community. One caller asked her about her “lack of engagement” with the Black church.
Harris refuted that claim too. She replied that she had grown up in the Black church.
“So first of all, that allegation is of course coming from the Trump team, because they are full of mis- and dis-information,” she said. “They are trying to disconnect me from the people I have worked with and that I am from, so they can try to have some advantage in this election.”
NEW YORK — A group of Democrats in Congress appealed to the largest U.S. companies Tuesday to hold onto their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, saying such efforts give everyone a fair chance at achieving the American dream.
The 49 House members, led by U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia of California, shared their views in a letter emailed to the leaders of the Fortune 1000. The move follows several major corporations saying in recent months that they would end or curtail their DEI initiatives.
“Inclusion is a core American value, and a great business practice,” the lawmakers wrote. “By embracing this value, you create safer and fairer workplaces without sacrificing quality or financial success.”
A handful of U.S. companies, including Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Lowes and Molson Coors, dialed back their DEI initiatives over the summer. The retreats came in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court outlawing affirmative action in college admissions and after conservative activists targeted the prominent American brands over their diversity policies and programs.
DEI policies typically are intended as a counterweight to discriminatory practices. Critics argue that education, government and business programs which single out participants based on factors such as race, gender and sexual orientation are unfair and the same opportunities should be afforded to everyone.
“They create toxic environments. They divide people,” Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, said of diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives.
The opponents have had several legislative and legal victories, and dozens more cases are working their way through the courts.
“These efforts to roll back rights are happening everywhere. They’re happening at the workplace. They’re happening in state legislatures,” Garcia told The Associated Press. “And it needs to stop. And we’ve got to push back and be vocal. We can’t just sit by and allow this to happen.”
The lawmakers’ letter states that growing numbers of American consumers spend their money with businesses that champion inclusion and are unlikely to continue supporting companies that they see backing down on commitments to bring people together.
“Continual progress towards more equal policies and benefits decreases the risk that anyone – employees and consumers – will experience discrimination, bias, and other threats to their safety and well-being,” the letter says.
The letter comes on the heels of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announcing that it filed 110 lawsuits in the past year alleging that employers sexually harassed teenagers, discriminated against workers based on sexual orientation and gender identity, engaged in patterns of discrimination and violated the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, among other violations.
The lawsuits represent a small fraction of the complaints lodged with the EEOC. The agency received more than 81,000 charges of workplace discrimination in fiscal year 2023, which was a 10% increase over 2022, EEOC Chair Charlotte Burrows said.
For every complaint, the EEOC notified the employer and launched an investigation. Many involved allegations of racial harassment or religious discrimination, Burrows said.
“Most people don’t even report internally, much less to the federal government, when they experience discrimination, so unfortunately, it’s the tip of the iceberg,” Burrows told the AP.
She and other commissioners strongly support diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs “because it is in so many ways an antidote to the kinds of practices that lead us to have to go to court,” Burrows said.
The Manhattan Institute’s Shapiro counters that DEI programs have little to do with civil rights law.
“The pushback against it is not a pushback against anti-discrimination laws or anything that existed really before 10 years ago or so,” he said. “DEI is divisive. It views people and issues through lenses of identity, classifies people based on privilege hierarchies and intersectional matrices, and is antithetical to a productive working environment.”
Meanwhile, lawsuits claiming reverse discrimination may be gaining momentum. The U.S. Supreme Court recently decided it would hear a lawsuit filed by Marlean Ames, who claims she was discriminated against in her job at the Ohio Department of Youth Services because she was straight.
“It’s a case that people are expecting will open the courthouse doors to more reverse discrimination suits,” said Jason Schwartz, co-chairman of the labor & employment practice group at Gibson Dunn.
Circuit courts have disagreed over whether to hold reverse discrimination cases to a higher standard. Some have ruled that if a person from a majority group brings a discrimination case, they have to show more evidence of discrimination than a person from a minority group who files a similar case.
“The Supreme Court’s interest in that case signals some potential that they’re going to lower the bar,” Schwartz said. “We already see a really massive uptick in these reverse discrimination cases.”
Groups such as the American Alliance for Equal Rights have pushed back on affirmative action policies at universities and diversity, equity and inclusion policies run by corporations.
Recently, the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund had to shut down a grant contest for Black women business owners as part of a settlement with the American Alliance for Equal Rights, which argued that race-based programs should be open to everyone, regardless of race.
“There’s been such an intense focus on all of the risk emanating from the anti-DEI side,” said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at the NYU School of Law. “But I do worry sometimes that organizations may be over-correcting for that or worrying a little bit too much about that at the expense of the other side of the equation.”
Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy, and give us feedback.
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DALLAS — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, sparred Tuesday over immigration, abortion and transgender rights in a feisty debate that is expected to be the only onstage face-off between the two candidates ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
Throughout the one-hour debate, Cruz cast Allred as “radical and extreme,” repeatedly urging the audience to consider Allred’s voting record over his efforts to portray himself as a moderate. He sought to tie Allred to Vice President Kamala Harris, alleging the two “voted in favor of open borders over and over” and were both responsible for fueling a surge in inflation under the Biden administration.
“We’re doing an awful lot right in the state of Texas,” Cruz opened the debate. “Colin Allred wants to change that. I want to keep Texas, Texas.”
Allred countered by attacking Cruz as a partisan bomb-thrower with few legislative accomplishments to show for his nearly 12 years in office. He blasted Cruz for helping spike a bipartisan border package earlier this year and said the GOP senator was “only focused on himself,” invoking Cruz’s trip to Cancún in 2021 as Texas was paralyzed by a historic winter storm.
“He’s never there for us when we need him,” Allred said. “When the lights went out in the energy capital of the world, he went to Cancún. When a mob was storming the Capitol, he was hiding in a supply closet. And when the toughest border security bill in a generation came up in the United States Senate, he took it down.”
The debate, held at WFAA-TV’s studio in downtown Dallas, proved combative from start to finish, with Cruz and Allred trading barbs on nearly every issue that came up. In his opening statement, Allred called Cruz “maybe the most extreme” member of the Senate in the last 30 years. Cruz closed with the message that Allred “wants to destroy what we’ve got in Texas because he shares Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris’ values.”
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks during a debate with U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Dallas, on Oct. 15.
Credit:
Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune via POOL
The debate began with a focus on Texas’ abortion ban, which does not exempt cases of rape and incest. Allred has made restoring abortion access a key part of his campaign, while Cruz has largely avoided the issue. Pressed Tuesday on where he stands on the question of rape and incest exceptions, Cruz said the matter should be settled at the state level and declined to stake out a position. He went on to criticize Allred for pinning the issue on him in his TV ads.
“You know, Congressman Allred is running all sorts of ads saying that I made this decision,” Cruz said. “I don’t serve in the state Legislature. I’m not the governor.”
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Allred has leaned into the state abortion ban in the homestretch of the election, running ads that highlight the stories of women who were forced to leave the state after being denied emergency medical care for pregnancy complications. He brought up the issue again Tuesday evening, disputing Cruz’s characterization of himself as “pro-life.”
“You’re not pro-life,” Allred said, turning to address Cruz. “It’s not pro-life to deny women care so long that they can’t have children anymore. It’s not pro-life to force a victim of rape to carry their rapist’s baby. … Understand that when Ted Cruz says he’s pro-life, he doesn’t mean yours.”
Allred was put on the defensive later when he was asked about a series of ads run by Cruz and his allies accusing the Dallas Democrat of supporting legislation that would allow men to use women’s restrooms and boys to play in girls’ sports.
The ads cite Allred’s vote against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023, a GOP bill that would cut off federal funds for athletic programs that allow men, “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth,” to compete in women’s or girls’ sports.
Allred characterized the attacks as a “Hail Mary” and a “desperate” attempt to deflect from Cruz’s stance on abortion, calling it “laughable” for the GOP senator to say he wants to protect women.
“What I think is that folks should not be discriminated against,” Allred said. “What Senator Cruz should try to explain to you is why he thinks they should.”
U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Dallas, speaks during a debate with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz on Oct. 15.
Credit:
Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune via POOL
Cruz dug into Allred for supporting a 2021 bill called the Equality Act, which would have barred gender discrimination in public places, including based on if a person is transgender. He also blasted Allred for recently signing onto a letter, along with dozens of other House Democrats, that urged GOP lawmakers to strike from an annual defense policy bill provisions that include “restricting medically necessary care for transgender service members” and restricting the use of pride flags on bases.
“You know what he argued for? Military bases should have drag shows and should be able to fly a transgender flag above it,” Cruz said. “Call me old-fashioned — I think the only flag that should fly above our military base should be the American flag.”
Cruz also faced questions at the debate over his comments regarding the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Cruz at first called the events a “violent terrorist attack,” before walking back the comment, calling it “sloppy” and “frankly dumb.” Cruz, asked about his changing stance, turned the issue around on Allred.
“Congressman Allred is happy to talk about those who committed acts of violence on Jan. 6, but you don’t hear him talking about the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots that burned cities across this country,” Cruz said, referring to protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. “If you commit an act of violence, you should go to jail, and there should be no political favoritism in that regard.”
Allred sought to refocus the discussion on Cruz’s role surrounding certification of the 2020 election, in which he urged colleagues to object to the certification of results in some states and called for a 10-day audit to probe unsubstantiated voter fraud claims in the disputed states. Allred said Cruz was “a threat to democracy” and recalled the harrowing events of the day, when members of Congress were told to “look under our feet for gas masks.”
Both candidates have portrayed themselves as moderates willing to work across the aisle, each touting crossover support from politicians in the opposing party. Allred’s GOP supporters include former U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both of whom are among their party’s leading critics of former President Donald Trump. Cruz, meanwhile, has garnered the endorsement of Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, who was defeated in the Democratic primary earlier this year. Ogg is the most prominent member of the “Democrats for Cruz” coalition assembled by the GOP senator to soften his reputation as a partisan bomb-thrower.
Cruz likened Allred’s answers to Harris and his voting record to that of former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In response, Allred accused Cruz of making a “recent transition to trying to be someone who wants to actually get things done.”
Allred noted that he is a past recipient of the Jefferson-Hamilton Award for bipartisanship from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which Cruz noted has endorsed him in the Senate race.
After the debate, Glen Whitley, a Republican and former Tarrant County judge who recently announced his support for Allred, said Cruz’s approach to the 2020 election was part of why he is supporting the Democratic nominee. He argued that Allred performed especially well on the topic of Jan. 6, and on immigration.
“It’s a heck of a thing when you see the Democrat winning the discussion on the border over a Republican,” Whitley said.
Cruz strategist Sam Cooper said his candidate “pushed forward a positive vision for the state of Texas,” citing Cruz’s arguments in favor of a limited regulatory environment for oil and gas and other industries, and his “record of bringing jobs” to the state.
“Congressman Allred is Kamala Harris. Their record is no different,” Cooper said. “When the congressman was pressed on his record, time and time again he refused to answer.”
Most recent polling has shown Cruz leading Allred by around 3 to 5 percentage points, though a few surveys have found the race to be even tighter. Allred is hoping to close the gap in the final weeks after campaign finance reports showed he had outpaced Cruz in fundraising over the last few months.
WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris will be interviewed by Fox News anchor Bret Baier on Wednesday in Pennsylvania as she steps up her travel and conversations with media outlets in the closing stretch of the presidential campaign.
It will be her first sit down with the network, and her first interview with a news outlet outside of her ideological comfort zone since becoming the Democratic nominee.
Harris has previously granted interviews to CNN and CBS’ “60 Minutes,” as well as friendly venues including ABC’s “The View” and Howard Stern’s radio show.
Most of the interviews came within the past two weeks, representing a shift from her decision not to talk more with the media earlier in her campaign.
The Fox News interview is slated to air at 6 p.m. ET on Wednesday. Baier is Fox News’ chief political anchor and one of the few prominent people on the network whose identity isn’t associated with conservative commentary.
After facing criticism earlier in her candidacy about avoiding interviews, Harris has tried to turn the tables on Republican nominee Donald Trump. On Sunday in Greenville, N.C., Harris criticized him for not releasing his medical records and for refusing a “60 Minutes” interview.
“It makes you wonder: Why does his staff want him to hide away?” she said. “One must question: Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on?”
Trump attacked Harris and Fox News on social media Monday, saying the network “has grown so weak and soft on the Democrats.”
Fox News announced on Monday that Vice President Kamala Harris would sit down for an interview with its chief political anchor, Bret Baier, on Wednesday, Oct. 16, at 6 p.m. ET.
This will be the Democratic presidential candidate’s first formal interview on the network and will be conducted in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. The interview will be pre-recorded on Wednesday afternoon and air during Special Report with Bret Baier, anchored from Philadelphia on that day.
In the past few weeks, the Harris campaign has availed the presidential candidate and her vice president candidate, Tim Walz, to more media appearances. During the week of Oct. 7, Harris’s 60 Minutes interview aired on Monday night, she appeared on ABC News’ The View and CBS’ The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday, and participated in a Univision-hosted town hall moderated by Enrique Acevedo on Thursday.
Harris also called into CNN and The Weather Channel on Wednesday as Hurricane Milton approached the Florida coastline.
Meanwhile, Walz already has a presence in the Fox News Media ecosystem, appearing on Fox News Sunday with Shannon Bream for two consecutive Sundays. Other planned cable news appearances for Harris in the final weeks of the campaign season include a town hall hosted by CNN on Oct. 23 in Delaware County, PA.
Her opponent, former president Donald Trump, will also participate in a Fox News town hall moderated by Harris Faulkner on Tuesday, Oct. 15, at 11 a.m. ET on the Faulkner Focus.
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