Republican presidential hopeful Senator John McCain travels to Europe and the Middle East this week ahead -- including a stop in Iraq -- to burnish his senior statesman credentials while Democratic rivals brawl back home.
The Arizona senator, who touts his foreign affairs experience over Democratic rivals senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, will lead a congressional delegation starting tomorrow to meet the leaders of Jordan, Israel, Britain and France, his campaign office said.
But off the official schedule was a trip to Iraq yesterday, the Washington Post reported on Saturday, where he will see firsthand the effects of the troop "surge" for which he has been such a fervent advocate, even as US public support for the war in Iraq has slumped further.
The delegation was to meet with US military officials and Iraq's leaders to assess the success of the surge strategy that deployed more soldiers to Iraq, the Post said.
CLOSE LOOK
Observers said the trip would give several heads of state a closer look at one of the three candidates battling for the White House.
"The people he's going to meet with are going to try to find out from him what he would do as president," Jim Steinberg, a dean of public affairs at the University of Texas, told the Post.
McCain, who has staked his presidential hopes on Iraq, was making the latest of several trips to the war-ravaged country where more than 3,988 US forces have been killed since the March 2003 invasion.
OFFICIAL BUSINESS
He stressed that the overseas trip was part of his role as the top Republican in the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"I do want to emphasize again that the three of us are going as members of the Armed Services Committee," McCain was quoted as saying in Saturday's New York Times. "And we will emphasize that at every stop."
Yet there were political elements to the trip that were hard to ignore.
McCain's campaign will likely use the meetings with Jordanian King Abdullah, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy to convey that the senator is at home on the world stage.
STEPPING UP: Diminished US polar science presence mean opportunities for the UK and other countries, although China or Russia might also fill that gap, a researcher said The UK’s flagship polar research vessel is to head to Antarctica next week to help advance dozens of climate change-linked science projects, as Western nations spearhead studies there while the US withdraws. The RRS Sir David Attenborough, a state-of-the-art ship named after the renowned British naturalist, would aid research on everything from “hunting underwater tsunamis” to tracking glacier melt and whale populations. Operated by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the country’s polar research institute, the 15,000-tonne icebreaker — boasting a helipad, and various laboratories and gadgetry — is pivotal to the UK’s efforts to assess climate change’s impact there. “The saying goes
Police in China detained dozens of pastors of one of its largest underground churches over the weekend, a church spokesperson and relatives said, in the biggest crackdown on Christians since 2018. The detentions, which come amid renewed China-US tensions after Beijing dramatically expanded rare earth export controls last week, drew condemnation from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who on Sunday called for the immediate release of the pastors. Pastor Jin Mingri (金明日), founder of Zion Church, an unofficial “house church” not sanctioned by the Chinese government, was detained at his home in the southern city of Beihai on Friday evening, said
Floods on Sunday trapped people in vehicles and homes in Spain as torrential rain drenched the northeastern Catalonia region, a day after downpours unleashed travel chaos on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. Local media shared videos of roaring torrents of brown water tearing through streets and submerging vehicles. National weather agency AEMET decreed the highest red alert in the province of Tarragona, warning of 180mm of rain in 12 hours in the Ebro River delta. Catalan fire service spokesman Oriol Corbella told reporters people had been caught by surprise, with people trapped “inside vehicles, in buildings, on ground floors.” Santa Barbara Mayor Josep Lluis
The Venezuelan government on Monday said that it would close its embassies in Norway and Australia, and open new ones in Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe in a restructuring of its foreign service, after weeks of growing tensions with the US. The closures are part of the “strategic reassignation of resources,” Venezueland President Nicolas Maduro’s government said in a statement, adding that consular services to Venezuelans in Norway and Australia would be provided by diplomatic missions, with details to be shared in the coming days. The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it had received notice of the embassy closure, but no
RSS