Jill Biden sees East Africa drought up close

LOSITETI, Kenya — First lady Jill Biden got an up-close look Sunday at the historic East Africa drought as she walked along arid land and listened as some Maasai women described how their children and livestock are going hungry. She appealed for more countries to join the United States to help alleviate the suffering.

Some areas of the Horn of Africa have endured five consecutive failed rainy seasons, meaning there was no rainfall or an insufficient amount to help farmers with their crops and livestock. An upcoming sixth rainy season, beginning in March, is expected to be about the same or worse.

Biden, who was on the final day of a five-day visit to Africa, toured an outreach center in the town operated by World Vision with support from UNICEF and the World Food Program. She chatted with people who had brought their children to be screened for malnutrition and she participated in a discussion with a group of women, including a mother of 10 children, who shared their stories.

“They talked about how their livestock are dying. Obviously, you can see the drought here, how bad it is,” the first lady told reporters afterward. “The one source of water here feeds 12 villages and each village has approximately a thousand to 1,200 people.”

“So they are coming here, the people are coming to get water, they’re bringing their livestock to get water. But unfortunately, for many of them, the way they make their living is from their livestock and for most of them, the livestock are dying, so they’re having a hard time,” she said.

Biden noted that the United States has provided 70% of the money sent to the region to help alleviate the suffering, “but we cannot be the only ones.”

“We need to have other countries join us in this global effort to help these people of the region,” she said, adding that the drought was competing with humanitarian efforts tied to Russian’s war in Ukraine and an earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people in Turkey and Syria.

“I mean, there are a lot of competing interests but, obviously here, people are actually, livestock, people are starving,” she said.

Meg Whitman, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, who accompanied Biden, said people know intellectually what’s going on in the region but “it’s different when you just see it.”

Underscoring Biden, Whitman said that “everyone needs to help as best we can here because this is going to continue for the foreseeable future.”

Members of the Maasai community, who are predominantly herders, live in Kajiado county where Biden visited.

Nearly 23 million people in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya are thought to be highly food insecure, which means they do not know where they will find their next meal, according to a food security working group chaired by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development.

A Maasai elder, Mingati Samanya, 69, said he lost 10 cows during the recent prolonged dry season and struggled to find hay for the rest of his herd.

“The short rains last year were insufficient and right now we are back to struggling for pasture. We hope the long rains will be enough,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Biden sought to use her stature to help focus the world’s attention on the worsening humanitarian crisis in East Africa by touring the drought-stricken area near Kenya’s border with Tanzania.

On the nearly three-hour drive south of Nairobi, the capital, Biden’s lengthy motorcade passed over dry river and creek beds. Numerous cows were walking alongside the highway — many so thin that their ribs were showing.

Throngs of people lined both sides of the motorcade route at various points, waving or using their cellphones to record the event.

Some 4.4 million people in Kenya are facing high levels of food insecurity, with the number projected to rise to 5.4 million in March, according to an analysis by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.

Already, 11 million livestock that are essential to many families’ health and livelihood have died. Many of the people affected are farmers who have watched their crops wither and die, and their water sources run dry.

Northern Kenya, which is arid and semi-arid and is where pastoralist communities live, is most affected.

The country’s agriculture sector heavily relies on rainfall, and the meteorological department is predicting delayed rains in the upcoming short rainy season that should begin in March.

President William Ruto announced last October that his cabinet had lifted a decade-old ban on openly cultivating and importing genetically modified crops. The decision came amid pressure from the U.S. government, which had argued that the ban affected U.S. agricultural exports and food aid.

Last week, Ruto led the country in praying for rain.

The first lady has been highlighting the drought along with women and youth empowerment since arriving in Namibia last Wednesday.

Biden had visited Kenya in 2011, when her husband, Joe Biden, was serving as vice president, to help raise awareness about what then was considered a severe famine. U.S. officials and aid organizations say the current drought is far worse.

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Jimmy Carter still a model for candidates asking, ‘Why not me?’

ATLANTA — As the 2024 campaign season begins, political players are looking in the mirror and deciding whether they see an American president staring back.

It was no different for Jimmy Carter in the early 1970s. And it took meeting several presidential candidates and then encouragement from an esteemed elder statesman before the young governor of Georgia, who had never met a president himself, saw himself as something bigger.

He announced his White House bid on Dec. 12, 1974, amid fallout from the Vietnam War and President Richard Nixon’s resignation. Then he leveraged his unknown — and politically untainted — status to become the 39th president. That whirlwind path has been a model, explicit and otherwise, for would-be contenders ever since.

“Jimmy Carter’s example absolutely created a 50-year window of people saying, ‘Why not me?’” said Steve Schale, who worked on President Barack Obama’s campaigns and is a longtime supporter of President Joe Biden.

Carter’s climb has gotten new attention since it was announced the 98-year-old was receiving end-of-life care at home in Plains, Georgia.

David Axelrod, who helped engineer Obama’s four-year ascent from state senator to the Oval Office, said Carter’s model is about more than how his grassroots strategy turned the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary into his springboard.

“There was a moral stain on the country, and this was a guy of deep faith,” Axelrod said. “He seemed like a fresh start, and I think he understood that he could offer something different that might be able to meet the moment.”

Donna Brazile, who managed Democrat Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, got her start on Carter’s two national campaigns. “In 1976, it was just Jimmy Carter’s time,” she said.

Of course, the seeds of his presidential run sprouted even before Nixon won a second term and certainly before his resignation in August 1974.

In Carter’s telling, he did not run for governor in 1966 — he lost — or in 1970 thinking about Washington. Even when announced his presidential bid, neither he nor those closest to him were completely confident.

“President of what?” his mother, Lillian, replied when he told her his plans.

But soon after he became governor in 1971, Carter’s team envisioned him as a national player. They were encouraged in part by the May 31 Time magazine cover depicting Carter alongside the headline “Dixie Whistles a Different Tune.” Inside, a flattering profile framed Carter as a model “New South” governor.

In October 1971, Carter ally Dr. Peter Bourne, an Atlanta physician who would become U.S. drug czar, sent his politician friend an unsolicited memo outlining how he could be elected president. On Oct. 17, a wider circle of advisers sat with Carter at the Governor’s Mansion to discuss it. Carter, then 47, wore blue jeans and a T-shirt, according to biographer Jonathan Alter.

The team, including Carter’s wife Rosalynn, now 95, began considering the idea seriously.

“We never used the word ‘president,’” Carter recalled upon his 90th birthday, “but just referred to ‘national office.’”

Carter invited high-profile Democrats — Washington players who were running or considering running in 1972 — to one-on-one meetings at the mansion. He would later jump at the chance to lead the Democratic National Committee’s national campaign. The position allowed him to travel the country helping candidates up and down the ballot.

He was among the Southern governors who angled to be McGovern’s running mate in 1972. Alter said Carter was never seriously considered.

Still, Carter got to know, among others, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Sens. Henry Jackson of Washington, Eugene McCarthy of Maine and George McGovern of South Dakota, the eventual nominee who lost a landslide to Nixon.

Carter later explained that he had previously defined the nation’s highest office by its occupants immortalized with monuments.

“For the first time,” Carter told The New York Times, “I started comparing my own experiences and knowledge of government with the candidates, not against ‘the presidency’ and not against Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. It made it a whole lot easier.”

Adviser Hamilton Jordan crafted a detailed campaign plan calling for matching Carter’s outsider, good-government credentials to voters’ general disillusionment, even before Watergate. But the team still spoke and wrote in code, as if the “higher office” weren’t obvious.

It was reported during his campaign that Carter told family members around Christmas 1972 that he would run in 1976. Carter later wrote in a memoir that a visit from former Secretary of State Dean Rusk in early 1973 affirmed his leanings.

Carter described Rusk in adoring terms. “Our most distinguished Georgian,” Carter called the man who led the State Department during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

During another private confab in Atlanta, Rusk told Carter plainly: “Governor, I think you should run for president in 1976.” That, Carter wrote, “removed our remaining doubts.”

Schale said the process is not always so involved.

“These are intensely competitive people already,” he said of governors, senators and others in high office. “If you’re wired in that capacity, it’s hard to step away from it.”

But Schale and Axelrod emphasized that circumstances matter.

“We judged what people felt was missing in our politics,” Axelrod said of Obama and his “Hope and Change” theme.

“He seemed uniquely positioned to answer that call ... where others were not,” Axelrod explained, alluding to Hillary Clinton’s long resume as a liability given voters’ anger over the Iraq war and other matters by the end of George W. Bush’s presidency.

Republican Donald Trump countered in 2016, riding a populist wave of discontent after two Obama terms. Schale noted that Biden, then vice president, passed on 2016 in part because Obama privately backed Clinton’s reprisal bid.

In 2020, though, a 77-year-old Biden came out of retirement specifically to hammer Trump as a threat to the “soul of the nation.” Biden won.

“Does he even run if it’s anybody but Trump in office? No way,” Schale said.

Now 80, the president appears to be running again. So is 76-year-old Trump. That’s drawn new messengers to the stage with what they hope is the right message.

“We’re ready — ready to move past the stale ideas and faded names of the past,” said Nikki Haley, the 51-year-old former U.N. ambassador, as she declared her underdog candidacy on Feb. 15.

The South Carolina Republican’s call for “a new generation to lead us” echoed as a potential 2024 equivalent of the Georgia Democrat who told voters in his 1976 opening argument that “our trust has been betrayed.”

“Jimmy Carter showed us that you can go from a no-name to president in the span of 18 or 24 months,” said Jared Leopold, a top aide in Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s unsuccessful bid for Democrats’ 2020 nomination.

“For people deciding whether to get in, it’s a real inspiration,” Leopold continued, “and that’s a real success of American democracy.”

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Leaders of House China panel condemn attack on Rep. Judy Chu

The leaders of the House's new select committee on China on Sunday defended Rep. Judy Chu after another lawmaker questioned her loyalty to the United States because of her Chinese heritage.

"One of my colleagues, unfortunately, attacked Judy Chu, the first Chinese American Congresswoman in the United States Congress, saying that somehow she's not loyal to the United States. I find that offensive as an Asian American myself," Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) said of criticism last week of the California Democrat by Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas).

Joining Krishnamoorthi on "Face the Nation," Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) agreed with him: "We should not question anybody's loyalty to the United States. I think that is out of bounds."

Speaking last week on Fox News, Gooden said of Chu: "I question her either loyalty or competence." Gooden, who was responding to her defense of Biden appointee Dominic Ng, also told host Jesse Watters that Chu should be barred from access to classified information.

Chu, who was born in Los Angeles, called Gooden's statements "racist." “It is based on false information spread by an extreme, right-wing website,” Chu said. “Furthermore, it is racist. I very much doubt that he would be spreading these lies were I not of Chinese American descent.”

Gallagher is the chair of a new House select committee focused on China's ruling Communist Party and Krishnamoorthi is the panel's ranking Democrat. Both discussed the criticism of Chu in light of their committee's mission.

"Absolutely, we shouldn't question anybody's loyalty," Gallagher added. "And going forward, I think what's critical and the reason we actually got the committee renamed to focus on the Chinese Communist Party, is to constantly make that distinction between the party and the people."

Krishnamoorthi concurred.

"The Chinese Communist Party loves it when we are internally fractious and they like it when we are stereotyping. We have to avoid that," he said.

As for the work of the committee, which is designed to examine possible threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party, Gallagher said he expects to find a certain amount of bipartisan support for its efforts.

"I want both sides in some way to look to the committee as the area for the most forward-leaning, innovative, and bipartisan policy and legislation on China," he said.

Host Margaret Brennan asked Gallagher how the American people can be sure the panel doesn't end up as being seen as persecuting people, as in the 1950s loyalty hearings led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.).

"Joseph McCarthy's from my district, he's buried in my district; we need not exhume his body and reanimate it," Gallagher said, adding: "We must constantly be aware of going overboard as we try and win this competition with China."

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Top leaders to meet as Brexit deal edges closer

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will hold face-to-face talks with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

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Russian nuclear fuel: The habit Europe just can't break

The EU managed to quickly cut down on Russian coal, gas and oil supplies, but can't seem to do the same for nuclear.

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British prime minister: 'We’re giving it everything we’ve got' on Brexit deal

Rishi Sunak says he's hopeful of "positive outcome" in negotiations.

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Media drop Dilbert after creator’s Black ‘hate group’ remark

The creator of the Dilbert comic strip faced a backlash of cancellations Saturday while defending remarks describing people who are Black as members of “a hate group” from which white people should “get away.”

Various media publishers across the U.S. denounced the comments by Dilbert creator Scott Adams as racist, hateful and discriminatory while saying they would no longer provide a platform for his work.

Andrews McMeel Syndication, which distributes Dilbert, did not immediately respond Saturday to requests for comment. But Adams defended himself on social media against those whom he said “hate me and are canceling me.”

Dilbert is a long-running comic that pokes fun at office-place culture.

The backlash began following an episode this past week of the YouTube show called “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.” Among other topics, Adams referenced a Rasmussen Reports survey that had asked whether people agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.”

Most agreed, but Adams noted that 26% of Black respondents disagreed and others weren’t sure.

The Anti-Defamation League says the phrase was popularized in 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the discussion forum 4chan but then began being used by some white supremacists.

Adams, who is white, repeatedly referred to people who are Black as members of a “hate group” or a “racist hate group” and said he would no longer “help Black Americans.”

“Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people,” Adams said on his Wednesday show.

In another episode of his online show Saturday, Adams said he had been making a point that “everyone should be treated as an individual” without discrimination.

“But you should also avoid any group that doesn’t respect you, even if there are people within the group who are fine,” Adams said.

The Los Angeles Times cited Adams’ “racist comments” while announcing Saturday that Dilbert will be discontinued Monday in most editions and that its final run in the Sunday comics — which are printed in advance — will be March 12.

The San Antonio Express-News, which is part of Hearst Newspapers, said Saturday that it will drop the Dilbert comic strip, effective Monday, “because of hateful and discriminatory public comments by its creator.”

The USA Today Network tweeted Friday that it also will stop publishing Dilbert “due to recent discriminatory comments by its creator.”

The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and other publications that are part of Advance Local media also announced that they are dropping Dilbert.

“This is a decision based on the principles of this news organization and the community we serve,” wrote Chris Quinn, editor of The Plain Dealer. ”We are not a home for those who espouse racism. We certainly do not want to provide them with financial support.”

Christopher Kelly, vice president of content for NJ Advance Media, wrote that the news organization believes in “the free and fair exchange of ideas.”

“But when those ideas cross into hate speech, a line must be drawn,” Kelly wrote.

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