Nation & World Glance
Trump slams global climate agreement Biden intends to rejoin
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump railed against the Paris climate accord on Sunday, telling world leaders at a virtual summit that the agreement was designed to cripple the U.S. economy, not save the planet.
“To protect American workers, I withdrew the United States from the unfair and one-sided Paris climate accord, a very unfair act for the United States,” Trump said in a video statement from the White House to the Group of 20 summit hosted by Saudi Arabia. His comments came during a discussion among the world’s largest economies on safeguarding the Earth.
President-elect Joe Biden, who takes office in January, has said he will rejoin the global pact that the U.S. helped forge five years ago.
Trump contended the international accord was “not designed to save the environment. It was designed to kill the American economy.”
Trump, who has worked to undo most of President Barack Obama’s efforts to fight climate change, said that since withdrawing from the climate agreement, the U.S. has reduced carbon emissions more than any nation.
Michigan leader: Trump didn’t ask for election interference
LANSING, Mich. — President Donald Trump did not ask Michigan Republican lawmakers to “break the law” or “interfere” with the election during a meeting at the White House, a legislative leader said Sunday, a day before canvassers plan to meet about whether to certify Joe Biden’s 154,000-vote victory in the battleground state.
House Speaker Lee Chatfield was among seven GOP legislators who met with Trump for about an hour on Friday, amid his longshot efforts to block Biden’s win.
“There was this outrage that the president was going to ask us to break the law, he was going to ask us to interfere, and that just simply didn’t happen,” he told Fox News of the highly unusual meeting. He did not elaborate on what was discussed, except to say the delegation asked for additional federal aid to help Michigan’s coronavirus response.
Michigan’s elections agency has recommended that the Nov. 3 results — including Biden’s 2.8-percentage point victory — be certified by the Board of State Canvassers, which has two Democrats and two Republicans. The Republican National Committee and the state Republican Party want the board to adjourn for 14 days to investigate alleged irregularities in Wayne County, the state’s largest and home to Detroit.
Staff for the state elections bureau said that claimed irregularities, even if verified, would not significantly affect the outcome. The Michigan Democratic Party said the total number of Detroit votes implicated by imbalanced precincts — where the number of ballots does not equal the number of names on the pollbook — is at most 450, or “0.029% of the margin” separating Biden from Trump.
“The certification process must not be manipulated to serve as some sort of retroactive referendum on the expressed will of the voters. That is simply not how democracy works,” chairwoman Lavora Barnes wrote to the board on Sunday.
Suspect in car wash killing found dead in home
LAS VEGAS — A man suspected in the killing of a man gunned down at a car wash on Tuesday was found dead from a self-inflicted wound in a home after police called on him to surrender, the police department said Saturday.
Detectives found the man’s body Friday after another person came out of the house and told police he had just heard a loud noise inside the home, a police statement said.
The suspect’s identity was not released.
Police said the victim of the shooting Tuesday was vacuuming his vehicle when a car pulled up next to him and the suspect fired several shots at the victim before driving off.
The victim was identified by the Clark County coroner’s office as Elio Saucedo, 40.
Saucedo’s wife was with him. Police said the Saucedo knew his killer.
Ethiopia warns civilians of ‘no mercy’ in Tigray offensive
NAIROBI, Kenya – Ethiopia’s military is warning civilians in the besieged Tigray regional capital that there will be “no mercy” if they don’t “save themselves” before a final offensive to flush out defiant regional leaders – a threat that Human Rights Watch on Sunday said could violate international law.
“From now on, the fighting will be a tank battle,” spokesman Col. Dejene Tsegaye said late Saturday, asserting that the army was marching on the Tigray capital, Mekele, and would encircle it with tanks. “Our people in Mekele should be notified that they should protect themselves from heavy artillery.”
He accused the Tigray leaders of hiding among the population of the city of roughly a half-million people and warned civilians to “steer away” from them.
But “treating a whole city as a military target would not only unlawful, it could also be considered a form of collective punishment,” Human Rights Watch researcher Laetitia Bader tweeted Sunday.
“In other words, war crimes,” former U.S. national security adviser Susan Rice tweeted.