Trump: Response to toxic train derailment in Ohio is a ‘betrayal’
EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday criticized the federal response to the toxic train derailment in East Palestine as a “betrayal” during a visit to the village where residents and local leaders are increasingly frustrated nearly three weeks after the disaster.
Trump, wearing a red “Make America Great Again” cap, said the community needs “answers and results.”
He spoke at a firehouse roughly a half-mile from where more than three dozen freight cars — including 11 carrying hazardous materials — came off the tracks Feb. 3 near the Pennsylvania state line.
“In too many cases, your goodness and perseverance were met with indifference and betrayal,” Trump said. He appeared with Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, Mayor Trent Conaway and other state and local leaders, giving the visit the look of an official trip.
The former president and other Republicans have intensified criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of the derailment, which led to evacuations and fears of air and water contamination after a controlled burning of toxic chemicals aboard the cars.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, has blasted Trump and other Republicans for loosening rail safety measures and environmental protections when the GOP was in charge in Washington. However, there is no evidence that having them in place now would have prevented what happened in East Palestine.
Trump, who is running for the White House in 2024, said he would donate cleaning supplies along with pallets of what he said was
Trump-branded bottled water to affected residents.
The Biden White House has defended its response, saying officials from the Environmental Protection Agency, National Transportation Safety Board and other agencies were at the rural site within hours of the incident.
Former President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner have been subpoenaed by the special counsel to testify before a federal grand jury about Trump’s efforts to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election and his role in a pro-Trump mob’s attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The decision by the special counsel, Jack Smith, to subpoena Ivanka Trump and Kushner is the latest sign that no potential highlevel witness is off limits.
The disclosure about the subpoena comes two weeks after it was revealed that Smith had subpoenaed former Vice President Mike Pence to testify before the grand jury.
Pence plans to fight the subpoena.
Trump’s inner circle:
A central Florida television journalist and a little girl were fatally shot Wednesday near the scene of a fatal shooting from earlier in the day, authorities said.
Orange County Sheriff John Mina said during a news conference that they’ve detained Keith Melvin Moses, 19, who they believe is responsible for both shootings in the Orlando-area neighborhood.
Besides the Spectrum News 13 journalist and the 9-year-old girl, a TV crewmember and the girl’s mother were wounded
TV news crew attacked:
during the second shooting. The were in critical condition at a local hospital.
Mina said they don’t immediately have a motive for any of the shootings.
Deputies had initially responded to the Pine Hills area, just northwest of Orlando, on Wednesday morning following reports of a woman in her 20s being shot. According to witnesses, a man approached the news vehicle later Wednesday and opened fire and then walked to a nearby home and shot the mother and daughter.
Spectrum News 13 is not yet identifying the crew members who were involved in the shooting, according to a story on the TV station’s website.
A Los Angeles judge Wednesday sentenced the man convicted of gunning down Nipsey Hussle to 60 years to life in prison after hearing testaments to the immense cost of the killing of the hip-hop star and neighborhood leader.
Rapper’s killer sentenced:
Superior Court Judge H. Clay Jacke handed down the sentence to Eric Holder, who was found guilty of the 2019 first-degree murder of the Grammy-nominated hip-hop artist outside the clothing store Hussle founded in the South Los Angeles neighborhood where both men grew up in similar circumstances.
Jurors in July also convicted Holder, 33, of two counts of attempted voluntary manslaughter and two counts of assault with a firearm for gunfire that hit two other men at the scene who survived.
Hussle, whose legal name was Ermias Asghedom, and Holder had known each other growing up as members of the Rollin’ 60s in South LA. Both were aspiring rappers.
But Holder never found the same success as Hussle, who was also 33 and became a national celebrity.
Social media liability: The Supreme Court seemed skeptical Wednesday of a
lawsuit trying to hold social media companies responsible for a terrorist attack at a Turkish nightclub that killed 39 people.
During arguments at the high court, several justices underscored that there was no evidence linking Twitter, Facebook and Google directly to the 2017 attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul.
The family of a man killed in the attack contend that the companies aided and abetted the attack because they assisted in the growth of the Islamic State group, which claimed responsibility for the attack.
The companies have been shielded from liability on the internet, allowing them to grow into global giants.
If the court bars the lawsuit involving the attack in Turkey from going forward it could avoid a major ruling on the companies’ legal immunity. That outcome would leave the current system in place, but also leave open the possibility that the justices could
take up the issue again in a later case.
Debt limit: The U.S. could face an unprecedented default on its obligations as soon as June if Congress does not act to lift the debt limit, a Washington think tank said Wednesday.
The Bipartisan Policy Center, which forecasts the approximate “X-date” when the government will no longer be able to meet its financial obligations on time, said the U.S. will reach its statutory debt limit as soon as the summer or early fall of 2023.
That inches up from the center’s previous prediction in June 2022 that the “extraordinary measures” that U.S. Treasury uses to pay the government’s bills would not be exhausted before the third quarter of 2023.
Shai Akabas, the center’s director of economic policy, said the new projections reflect “considerable uncertainty in our nation’s current economic outlook.”