Greene apologizes for Holocaust comparison
No connection known to Alabama factory victims
WASHINGTON – Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene apologized Monday for affronting people with recent comments comparing the required wearing of safety masks in the House to the horrors of the Holocaust.
“I’m truly sorry for offending people with remarks about the Holocaust,” the Georgia Republican told reporters outside the Capitol, saying she had visited Washington’s U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum earlier in the day. “There’s no comparison and there never ever will be.”
Greene’s comments were a rare expression of regret by the conservative agitator, a freshman whose career has included the embrace of violent and offensive conspiracy theories and angry confrontations with progressive colleagues.
Her apology came more than three weeks after appearing on a conservative podcast and comparing COVID-19 safety requirements adopted by Democrats controlling the House to “a time and history where people were told to wear a gold star.” She said they were “put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. This is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.” Pelosi, D-calif., is House speaker.
Greene’s comments were condemned by Republican leaders, including House Minority Leader Kevin Mccarthy, R-calif., who called the comparison “appalling.”
GOP leaders have often been reluctant to castigate Greene, a close ally of former President Donald Trump. After social media posts were unearthed in which Greene suggested support for executing some Democratic leaders, Mccarthy and most Republicans stood by her when the House took the unusual step of stripping her of her committee assignments in February.
But as House members returned to the Capitol on Monday after a threeweek break, Greene was contrite.
“Anti-semitism is true hate,” she said. “And I saw that today at the Holocaust Museum.”
In 2018, two years before her election to Congress, she speculated on Facebook that California wildfires may have been caused by “lasers or blue beams of light” controlled by a left-wing cabal tied to a powerful Jewish family.
On Monday, she told reporters that when she was 19, she visited the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in what during World War II was Nazi-occupied Poland.
“It isn’t like I learned about it today,” she said of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews and huge numbers of other people were killed. “I went today because I thought it was important,” she said, and wanted to talk about it as she apologized.
House leaders have recently said vaccinated people no longer must wear masks in the chamber.
Rep. Brad Schneider, D-ill., said he would introduce a resolution in the House this week to censure Greene.
In addition, Republicans may try forcing a vote to punish Rep. Ilhan Omar. The Minnesota Democrat recently made remarks criticized by top House Democrats and Jewish lawmakers for seeming to compare the U.S. and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban. Omar said she didn’t mean to draw that parallel.
ALBERTVILLE, Ala. – A worker wielding a handgun fatally shot two people and wounded two others at an Alabama fire hydrant factory early Tuesday before killing himself, police said.
The shooting – which happened about 2:30 a.m. at a Mueller Co. plant in Albertville – added to a slew of homicides around the country. Several hours later, gunfire in Chicago claimed four victims.
In the Alabama case, a manhunt ended when the shooter’s body was found inside a Jeep in Guntersville, about 15 miles away from the factory, shortly after daybreak. Multiple weapons were found inside the vehicle, Albertville Police Chief Jamie Smith said at a news conference.
Smith said the suspect appears to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. What prompted him to kill and maim his coworkers wasn’t immediately clear, the chief said. He called the shooting “completely unprovoked.”
The chief identified the dead men as Michael Dobbins and David Horton, and the shooter as Andreas Horton, 34. He said that as far as he knew, the Hortons were not related, and had “no ties other than co-workers.”
Two other people – Casey Sampson and Isaac Byrd – were hospitalized. Their conditions weren’t immediately known. They were taken to a nearby hospital and later transferred to a larger hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the chief said.
The body of Andreas Horton, who was sometimes called Andy, was found in his vehicle, parked along a road overlooking his mother’s grave in Guntersville City Cemetery. She died of cancer at age 40 in 2011. A distant relative of Horton’s, Sanchez Watkins, said he last saw Andreas a few months ago at a grocery store.
“Andy was a good guy. Very quiet, easygoing. You would never expect this from him,” Watkins said.
Cody Windsor, a Mueller employee who was at home at the time, told The Associated Press that he knew both Hortons, but didn’t know what might have prompted the shootings.
Windsor said friends working the overnight shift told him the shooting happened in a part of the plant where fire hydrants and pipes are painted, and that an announcement about an active shooter was made over a PA system at the factory, which occupies several buildings over a large area near a railroad track, with fire hydrants stored on racks outside.
The police chief said the crime
scene encompasses a large area inside the sprawling plant, and victims were found in two or three different locations inside.
Windsor said he and David Horton, a foundry helper who could do most any job in the plant, were buddies at work and often hung out together during breaks. “We’d sit in our cars and listen to music,” he said. “Andy” Horton was quiet and recently went through the death of his mother, Windsor said.
“We work together and we bond together. We’re here as much as we are at home,” he said. He added that the shooting made him nervous about going back to work for fear “that somebody is going to walk in the door and shoot you.”
Ann Walters told Al.com that Dobbins
was her grandson, and that he had been working at the factory for nearly a year, saving up to buy a home and a car. “He was a perfect gentleman, everybody will tell you. He was good to everybody and put his family first,” she said.
In a statement read aloud by the police chief, company officials said they were “shocked and deeply saddened by the horrific tragedy,” and “committed to providing help and support” to the victims’ families. The growing gun violence nationwide has police and criminal justice experts concerned. Within hours of the Alabama gunfire Tuesday, four women were killed and four other people were wounded in a pre-dawn shooting at a home in Chicago, police said. The toll from this past weekend included two people killed and at least 30 others wounded in mass shootings in Chicago, the Texas capital of Austin, and Savannah, Georgia.
Law officers had hoped that last
year’s spike in homicides would subside as the nation emerges from coronavirus restrictions, but they remain higher than they were in pre-pandemic times.
“There was a hope this might simply be a statistical blip that would start to come down,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. “That hasn’t happened. And that’s what really makes chiefs worry that we may be entering a new period where we will see a reversal of 20 years of declines in these crimes.”
Albertville is a tightknit community, and its people will come together to support the victims’ families, city spokeswoman Robin Lathan said.
“Everyone is absolutely heartbroken and devastated,” she said. “The Mueller Company is part of the lifeblood of who we are in the city of Albertville. It’s just a devastating blow.”
GENEVA – Buoyed by days of partnership-building sessions with America’s democratic allies, Joe Biden arrived in Geneva on Tuesday for the mostwatched and tensest part of his first European tour as president: talks with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Biden is seeking to restore European ties that were strained under former President Donald Trump, who dismissed longstanding alliances with America’s democratic partners and sought out Putin and other autocrats. Biden this week has held long days of meetings with global leaders at the Group of Seven, NATO and U.S.-EU summits, where he secured joint communiques expressing concern over Russia and China, and on Tuesday helped preside over a breakthrough agreement easing a long-running U.S. trade dispute with Europe.
But Biden’s Wednesday meeting with the Russian president is his most highly anticipated.
In answer to a reporter’s question soon after his arrival Tuesday on whether he was ready for Wednesday’s talks, Biden said, “I am always ready.”
Biden has called Putin a “worthy adversary” and has said he is hoping to find areas of cooperation with the Russian president. But he has also warned that if Russia continues its cyberattacks and other aggressive acts towards the U.S., “we will respond in kind.”
The U.S. and the EU issued a statement Tuesday following their summit bolstering Biden as he heads into the meeting with Putin. The two have agreed to set up a “high-level dialogue” together about Russia as part of “a renewed trans-atlantic partnership” between the U.S. and the 27-nation bloc.
A summit statement released Tuesday said that the two “stand united in our principled approach towards Russia and we are ready to respond decisively to its repeating pattern of negative behavior and harmful activities.”
They “urge Russia to stop its continuous crackdown on civil society, the opposition and independent media and release all political prisoners.”
Biden arrived ahead of Wednesday’s talks with Putin buoyed not only by the united front shown by the U.S. and EU but also the announcement of a major breakthrough in a 17-year trade dispute between the two global powers, centered on rival subsidies for aircraft manufacturers Boeing and Airbus.
To be certain, the U.S.-EU relationship faces other trade-related friction. The continent’s leaders are becoming impatient that Biden has not yet addressed Trump’s 2018 decision to impose import taxes on foreign steel and aluminum.
The White House on Tuesday announced the creation of a joint U.S.-EU trade and technology council, which is tasked with coordinating standards for artificial intelligence, quantum computing and bio-technologies, as well as coordinating efforts on bolstering supply chain resilience. Biden is appointing Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative Kataherine Tai to co-chair the U.S. side of the effort.
In addition to the statement out of the U.S.-EU summit, NATO leaders in their communique on Monday took a big swipe at Russia, deploring its aggressive military activities and war games near the borders of NATO countries as well as the repeated violation of the 30-nations’ airspace by Russian planes.
Both Biden and Putin have described the U.s.-russia relationship as being at an all-time low.
The Europeans are keen to set up a “high-level dialogue” on Russia with the United States to counter what they say is Moscow’s drift into deeper authoritarianism and anti-western sentiment.
At the same time, the 27-nation bloc is deeply divided in its approach to Moscow. Russia is the EU’S biggest natural gas supplier, and plays a key role in international conflicts and key issues, including the Iran nuclear deal and conflicts in Syria and Libya.
The hope is that Biden’s meeting with Putin might pay dividends, and no one in Brussels wants to undermine the show of international unity that has been on display at the G-7 and NATO summits, according to EU officials.
But Republicans in Washington reflected no such concerns. House Republican leader Kevin Mccarthy on Tuesday accused Biden of deferring to Putin on his current trip abroad and making America weaker.
“I don’t care about charming Europe and thinking you’re one of them,” he said. “Biden is making our adversaries stronger. Russia is stronger today under a Biden administration than he was under the past administration. China is stronger today.”