UNITED STATES
Biden criticizes ‘MAGA king’
President Joe Biden on Wednesday labeled former president Donald Trump “the great MAGA king” and criticized Republicans ahead of midterm elections this year. “I think it’s important that, as we go forward, you’re gonna hear me talking more about not only what we’ve done, but what they’re trying to do,” Biden told a fundraiser at a Chicago hotel. Biden has begun decrying “ultra-MAGA” Republicans — a reference to Trump’s “make America great again” campaign slogan. When an attendee’s cellphone rang, the president joked: “I know that’s Trump calling. He always does that.” Earlier in the day, Biden offered a new nickname for Trump. “Under my predecessor — the great MAGA king — the deficit increased every single year he was president,” he told the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers conference. “The first year of my presidency, the first year, I reduced the deficit.”
UNITED STATES
Trooper meets ex-president
A Connecticut state trooper who is a native of Poland on Wednesday got a surprise while responding to an SUV with a flat tire: A passenger in the vehicle was former Polish president Lech Walesa. State police said Trooper Lukasz Lipert arrived to the call in Tolland and was greeted by Walesa, who had spoken in Hartford on Tuesday as part of a tour advocating for aid for refugees who have fled Ukraine during the war with Russia. Lipert, 35, who moved to the US when he was 18, told the Hartford Courant that he spoke with Walesa in Polish about their homeland and the anti-communist movement Walesa helped lead. “It was definitely a great opportunity to meet the man who had a voice during those times,” Lipert said.
ITALY
Ukrainian circus stuck
A Ukrainian circus troupe is performing a never-ending “Alice in Wonderland” tour of Italy, caught in the real-world rabbit hole of having to create joyful performances on stage while their families at home are living through war. The acrobats and dancers of the Theater Circus Elysium of Kyiv were opening a limited engagement in Italy when the invasion began on Feb. 24. The tour, originally scheduled to end in the middle of March, has now been extended at least through next month as the performers seek to keep working to send money to relatives back home. On a recent weekend, the circus arrived in Pistoia. There was the Mad Hatter, sporting a green top hat and a purple beard; the White Rabbit with a red nose covered in silver glitter and Alice, with a little blue dress and long ringlets. However, behind their colorful costumes, cheerful smiles and fantastical story line of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, troupe members are struggling. “It is very hard to work and dance on the Italy stage because we know in our country now [there] is war, said Oleksandr Bandaliuk, who plays the Mad Hatter. “We can’t go to Ukraine because in my house now [there are] Russian soldiers.”
GUATEMALA
Judge says threats rising
A judge who last week ordered nine former police and military officers to stand trial for alleged crimes during the country’s civil war, on Wednesday said that death threats against him had increased since announcing his decision. “They send me messages, they call me on the phone, there’s vehicles following; all of that is happening,” Magistrate Miguel Angel Galvez said. Galvez once ordered former leader Efrain Rios Montt to be tried. “Before they had threatened me, but now they even come to hearings to photograph me,” he said.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country