Month: November 2022

He told a crowd in Sioux City, Iowa, that he will “very, very, very probably do it again” in 2024.

Mr Trump was speaking at the first of four rallies in five days as he campaigns for Republican candidates in next week’s midterm elections.

US President Joe Biden is also hopscotching across the country to get out the vote.

Neither Mr Biden nor Mr Trump is on the ballot next Tuesday when American voters will decide the balance of power in the US Congress and key state governorships.

But the midterms will set the US political landscape ahead of the presidential election in two years’ time.

On Thursday night, Mr Trump, a Republican, repeated his unfounded claim that he lost in 2020 because of widespread election fraud.

“I ran twice,” he said. “I won twice, and did much better the second time than I did the first, getting millions more votes in 2020 than I got in 2016.

“And likewise, getting more votes than any sitting president in the history of our country by far.

“And now in order to make our country successful, and safe and glorious. I will very, very, very probably do it again.”

“Very soon,” he told the cheering crowd. “Get ready.”

Mr Trump did win the most votes ever – 72 million – for a sitting president in 2020, but still lost to the challenger, Mr Biden, a Democrat, who pulled in 81 million.

Mr Biden – who campaigned on Thursday in New Mexico and California – has reportedly been meeting senior advisers to plan his potential 2024 re-election campaign, setting up a possible rematch with Mr Trump.

For his part, Mr Trump has teased for months about a potential third campaign for the White House.

In October, he told a rally in Texas: “I will probably have to do it again.” In Pennsylvania in September, he said: “I may just have to do it again.”

Mr Trump’s former senior counsellor, Kellyanne Conway, said earlier on Thursday at an event in Washington DC that her former boss would “announce soon” about his possible presidential plans.

She said she gave Mr Trump credit for resisting the temptation to declare a White House run already this year, as it would have distracted from Republican candidates in the midterms.

If he does run in 2024, he may not go unchallenged within his party.

Potential Republican rivals include Mr Trump’s former Vice-President Mike Pence and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, among others.

Holyrood’s public audit committee is following up on a damning Audit Scotland report.

The ships are five years late and could end up costing more than £300m.

The first minister has previously said that while former transport minister Derek Mackay approved the deal, the “buck stops” with her.

The £97m “fixed price” contract was awarded to Ferguson shipyard in Port Glasgow in 2015, a year after it was rescued by businessman Jim McColl, a prominent SNP supporter who sat on the first minister’s council of economic advisers.

The build for the two ships, Glen Sannox and the unnamed Hull 802, soon ran into trouble, with the yard going back into administration again in 2019.

It was later nationalised but neither ferry has yet been delivered.

An Audit Scotland report in March identified “multiple failings” including the lack of a “full builders guarantee”, a standard feature of major shipbuilding contracts which protects the buyer if things go wrong.

It also criticised a lack of record keeping on why the decision was made.

The Scottish government later published emails that confirmed Derek Mackay approved the deal, but in Holyrood exchanges Ms Sturgeon said that as first minister she took ultimate responsibility.

She said: “The buck stops with me and I have never tried to shy away from that on any issue. I am not defending the cost overruns or the delay to the construction of these ferries, it is completely unacceptable.”

Mr Mackay, who left government in 2020 over messages he sent to a 16-year-old boy on social media, appeared before the public audit committee in September.

He said he also took responsibility, but that he believed at the time that some of the financial risks had been mitigated by other means.

Since then, a BBC investigation has revealed a dossier of leaked documents which suggest the procurement process may have been rigged in favour of Jim McColl’s company, Ferguson Marine Engineering Ltd (FMEL).

The BBC’s Disclosure programme found evidence that FMEL was allowed to substantially modify its bid and reduce its price after the tender deadline, and that it has access to a key specification document that was not available to rival bidders.

The government’s ferries agency CMAL has said it found no evidence in its files to support the BBC allegations, and has defended the procurement process.

The Earthshot Prize is given to innovative ideas for the environment.

Five winners will be announced in Boston next month – each will be given £1m to develop their projects.

Prince William unveiled the shortlist, saying there are “many reasons to be optimistic” about the planet’s future.

He described the people in the shortlist for the prize – now in its second year – as “innovators, leaders and visionaries”.

Prince William said: “They are directing their time, energy, and talent towards bold solutions with the power to not only solve our planet’s greatest environmental challenges, but to create healthier, more prosperous, and more sustainable communities for generations to come.”

The Great Bubble Barrier, from the Netherlands, sees air pumped through a perforated tube to create a curtain of bubbles, which brings plastic up to the surface and into a waste collection system.

For the first time there are also finalists from the UK, including London start-up Notpla Hard Material, which makes packaging from seaweed and plants as an alternative to single-use plastic.

The company has already created a million biodegradable food boxes for online food ordering firm Just East.

Low Carbon Materials, from County Durham, uses unrecyclable plastic waste to make concrete blocks without carbon emissions.

“Until now, construction has been one of the hardest industries to decarbonise,” said Dr Natasha Boulding, co-founder of LCM.

“With LCM, that could all change. We’ve turned concrete net-zero and now we need the world to start using it.”

Other finalists include the City of Amsterdam Circular Economy group, which wants to see nothing wasted and everything recycled in the Netherland’s capital by 2050.

Mikuru Clean Stoves, from Kenya, provides cleaner burning stoves to reduce unhealthy indoor pollution and a safer way to cook.

Charlot Magayi, who used to sell charcoal for fuel, started the initiative after suffering repeated respiratory infections due to charcoal and her daughter was severely burnt by a stove.

Her eco-stoves use processed biomass made from charcoal, wood and sugar cane, and claims they cause 90% less pollution than an open fire. She hopes to create an even cleaner version which burns ethanol.

Also nominated are Fleather, a leather made of floral waste in India; Hutan which creates wildlife corridors for orangutans in Malaysia; Oman-based 44.01 who eliminate CO2 by mineralising it in rock, and the Indigenous Women of the Great Barrier Reef group from Australia who use a mix of ancient knowledge and digital technologies in their efforts to protect the land and sea.

Prince William, accompanied by the Princess of Wales, is set to meet the finalists and winners at the awards gala on 2 December.

The Earthshot Prize will see £50m handed out over 10 years.

There are five categories: protect and restore nature, clean our air, revive our oceans, build a waste-free world, and fix our climate.

Last year’s winners included a project in Costa Rica paying local citizens to restore natural ecosystems and an India-developed portable machine that turns agricultural waste into fertiliser.

“Things will be better now. When he’s the public security minister, they’ll be better still,” Julian, an enthusiastic backer of firebrand politician Itamar Ben-Gvir told me at his campaign headquarters.

“He wants the best for Israel. He wants the terrorists out,” said Noam from a settlement in the occupied West Bank. “We don’t want the Arabs, they throw rocks at us and take our spots in Israel,” he went on, before being hushed by a party activist.

While Mr Ben-Gvir – previously convicted as a racist in Israel – is now attempting to rebrand himself as a more conventional politician, he has not changed all his anti-Arab rhetoric.

“It’s time to be the landlords of this country again,” he said after exit polls were published on Tuesday night.

His cheering crowd in Jerusalem mostly kept to their new chant of “death to terrorists”, adjusted from the one we often previously heard from his supporters – “death to Arabs”.

Other journalists and I are used to covering Mr Ben-Gvir’s provocative actions in bitterly contested occupied East Jerusalem. More than once I have seen him jubilantly leading ultra-nationalist marchers through a sensitive site for Palestinians in the Old City on Israel’s Jerusalem Day.

Last month, he inflamed tensions in the flashpoint Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood by pointing a gun at Palestinians during clashes.

Now, as co-leader of the third biggest party, Religious Zionism, he hopes for a prominent cabinet position, overseeing the police.

One young female supporter of Mr Ben-Gvir’s Oztma Yehudit (Jewish Power) faction, Tzori Elmakiyes, 17, from Jerusalem, said the results were “very gratifying”, playing down critics’ fears.

“I don’t think the opponents of Oztma Yehudit should be worried because at the end of the day the party’s best interest are the people and the country of Israel.”

Speaking to his Likud party faithful, Benjamin Netanyahu smiled widely as he foresaw his comeback a year after he was dramatically ousted as prime minister by a broad coalition of his opponents.

The people want a government which projects “power, not weakness”, he said, his voice hoarse from days of campaigning. He was answered with shouts of “King Bibi” – his fans using his nickname.

If, as expected, final election results confirm that the veteran leader can now build a stable majority government with his ultra-nationalist and ultra-Orthodox Jewish allies, this will also end nearly four years of an unprecedented political stalemate.

The country has been deeply split over the corruption charges for which Mr Netanyahu remains on trial. He has consistently denied any wrongdoing, accusing his opponents of a political witch-hunt.

“This is a guy who doesn’t give up, no matter how bad it looks and however much he was disgraced by leaving the prime minister’s office,” says pollster Mitchell Barak.

He suggests Mr Netanyahu benefitted from the passage of time.

“Those who wanted to punish him, punished him,” he says, adding that they may have come to miss the “stability” that Mr Netanyahu believes he represented.

There are still many Israelis with a different vision of the country.

In Tel Aviv, there was a subdued mood overnight as the current caretaker Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, addressed his Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party, insisting that Israelis wanted politics “free of incitement and hatred”.

However, his experiment building an ideologically diverse coalition – made up of right-wing, centrist, left-wing and Arab parties – was ultimately short-lived.

His tenure also saw the deadliest year for Israelis and Palestinians since 2015, amid an upsurge in violence. Yet his government continued to pay little attention to ways of solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

That was disappointing for Haggai Mattar, editor of the progressive +972 Magazine.

These election results have also seen a further drop in support for Israel’s left-wing parties.

“Israelis on the left now need to take a moment to pause and think of how we’ve gotten to this state,” Mr Mattar says despondently.

“The left needs a reshuffle or rethink – new attitudes,” he goes on. “But it might also be a terrible crash that we’ll take a very long time to recover from.”

But Anshel Pfeffer, a journalist for Haaretz newspaper, says the latest election only exposed what was already a clear trend.

“There’s an internal identity or culture war in Israel between what some people would see as the more liberal and open sides of Israeli society versus the more religious and extreme sides of Israeli and Jewish society,” he observes.

“That’s not really new but [Mr Netanyahu] has now really ramped that up for his own political purposes.”

Mr Netanyahu was able to harness a shift to the right that I have observed covering politics here for the last 10 years. And that seems to have accomplished his goal to get back in office.

But now that the ultra-nationalists have been empowered they may prove difficult to control.

The ICBM launch is Pyongyang’s seventh this year, and comes amid concerns that it will soon test a nuclear weapon.

It comes a day after both Koreas fired missiles in an escalation of tensions.

That exchange saw the most number of missiles launched by the North in a single day.

North Korea’s multiple launches comes as the US and South Korea are staging their largest-ever joint air drills, which Pyongyang has strongly criticised as “aggressive and provocative”.

On Thursday North Korea fired a long-range missile at around 07:40 local time (23:40 GMT), according to a statement from South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. A source confirmed with the BBC that it was an ICBM.

It flew for about 760km (472 miles) and reached a height of around 1,920 km.

But it appeared to have failed mid-flight, according to Yonhap news agency citing sources.

Pyongyang also fired two short-range ballistic missiles.

The launches led the Japanese government to issue a rare emergency alert on Thursday morning to residents in some of its northern regions, telling them to stay indoors.

Tokyo initially said the missile had flown over Japan, but Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada later said it did “not cross the Japanese archipelago, but disappeared over the Sea of Japan”.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida later condemned North Korea’s “repeated missile launches”, calling them an “outrage”.

The US said the launch demonstrated the threat North Korea’s missile programme poses to neighbours and international peace and security.

“Our commitments to the defence of the Republic of Korea and Japan remain ironclad,” a State Department spokesman said.

Meanwhile South Korea’s Vice Foreign Minister Cho Hyun-dong and US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said the launches were “deplorable, immoral” during a phone call on Thursday, according to South Korea.

It comes just a month after North Korea launched a ballistic missile over Japan – the first time it had done so in five years.

The North has tested a record number of missiles this year as tensions have risen.

Despite crippling sanctions, Pyongyang conducted six nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017 and is believed to be planning a seventh.

It has continued to advance its military capability – in breach of United Nations Security Council resolutions – to threaten its neighbours and potentially even bring the US mainland within striking range.

Wednesday’s launch saw one of Pyongyang’s ballistic missiles cross the Northern Limit Line (NLL), a disputed maritime border between the Koreas.

It landed outside South Korea’s territorial waters but was the closest a North Korean missile got to the border.

Seoul responded with warplanes firing three air-to-ground missiles that also crossed the disputed maritime demarcation line. It fired a total of 23 missiles on Wednesday.

And they were launched from various points across the country, according to Kim Jong-dae, a visiting scholar of Yonsei Institute for North Korean Studies.

“South Korea and the US believe that if they find the starting point of the provocation, they can precisely strike it. But there are starting points all over North Korea, and North Korea is posing multi-dimensional, systematic and simultaneous threats that they can fire (missiles) anywhere in their land. This is a situation which I’ve seen for the first time,” he told local news channel YTN.

With accelerated activity from North Korea since late September, “the end of this is likely to be the seventh nuclear test, to prove their nuclear capabilities and determination,” Park Won-gon, North Korean studies professor at Ewha Woman University, told the BBC.

“It’s unrealistic to expect North Korea to denuclearise, as it wants de facto nuclear state status to sit on the negotiation table with the US.”

He also urged Americans to unite in opposition to “political violence” in the vote on 8 November.

Mr Biden, a Democrat, said former President Donald Trump and his supporters were peddling “lies of conspiracy and malice”.

Republicans hit back that Mr Biden was seeking to “divide and deflect”.

Control of both chambers of Congress and key state governorships are hanging in the balance in next week’s elections.

Most forecasts suggest Republicans will win control of the House of Representatives, while the Senate could go either way.

Mr Biden spoke in nationally televised remarks on Wednesday evening at Washington DC’s Union Station – just a few streets from where Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol last year in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Mr Biden blamed Mr Trump – whom he did not name, but referred to as “the defeated former president” – for inspiring threats by some Republican candidates to refuse to accept the outcome should they lose next week.

“That is the path to chaos in America,” said Mr Biden. “It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And it is un-American.”

The president also sought to link Mr Trump’s election rhetoric to a hammer attack last week on the husband of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

He argued that Mr Trump’s “big lie that the election of 2020 had been stolen” was the driving force behind both the assault on 82-year-old Paul Pelosi and the US Capitol riot.

“It’s a lie that fuelled the dangerous rise in political violence and voter intimidation over the past two years,” said Mr Biden.

The president spoke as a federal judge in Arizona issued a restraining order against a group of Trump supporters, sometimes armed or wearing ballistic vests, who have been accused of harassing voters near ballot boxes in the border state.

The US government last week distributed a bulletin to law enforcement agencies warning of a “heightened threat” of domestic violent extremism, adding that candidates and election workers could be targeted by individuals with “ideological grievances”.

Republicans reacted to Mr Biden’s remarks by arguing he was trying to distract Americans from his low approval ratings and US inflation.

House Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who would become speaker of the lower chamber of Congress should his party win control next week, tweeted: “President Biden is trying to divide and deflect at a time when America needs to unite – because he can’t talk about his policies that have driven up the cost of living.

“The American people aren’t buying it.”

A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll this week found that half of Americans believe voter fraud is a widespread problem, even though such cases are extremely rare.

According to the BBC’s US partner CBS, out of 595 Republicans running for state-wide office, just over half – 306 – have raised doubts about the 2020 presidential election.

The “reductions and reprioritisations” are in addition to another £560m of cuts that were announced in September.

John Swinney said the financial situation facing the Scottish government was by far the most challenging since devolution.

And soaring inflation meant this year’s budget was now worth £1.7bn less than when in was introduced last December.

Mr Swinney also said savings needed to be made to offset the impact of Brexit, public sector pay deals and help for Ukrainian refugees.

The measures he announced included reprioritising £400m from the NHS budget in order to provide a “fair pay deal” for health staff – although he stressed that the overall NHS budget was unchanged.

Some £116m of this had been due to be spent on Covid vaccines, testing and PPE, with a further £38m coming from the mental health budget and £63m from “re-phasing and pausing” programmes including the Scottish Trauma Network.

It also includes £65m from primary care services and £70m from “social care and National Care Service re-profiling”.

Money will also be taken from budgets across most other Scottish government departments, with Mr Swinney announcing £33m of resource budget savings and £180m of capital savings and financial transaction reductions in his emergency spending review.

The capital savings include delays to new college projects and housebuilding.

And the measures mean there will be £16m less for the broadband rollout to remoter parts of Scotland, while support for bus operators to upgrade their fleets to low emission vehicles will be reduced by £29m.

Mr Swinney said the Scottish government did not have the necessary borrowing powers to meet the increased costs that were facing it, or to change income tax rates before the start of the next financial year.

This meant that every additional pound that was spent in one area meant a pound less could be spent somewhere else, he said.

He added: “I must balance the books, but I am committed to doing so in a way that prioritises funding to help families, to back business, to provide fair pay awards and to protect the delivery of public services.”

The review was established in the summer to “assess any and all opportunities to redirect additional resources to those most in need, reduce the burdens on business and stimulate the Scottish economy”.

The figures being thrown around at Holyrood are not insignificant ones, when you consider the Scottish government’s total budget is in the region of £50bn.

A lot of money has gone towards public sector pay deals, which does at least help workers deal with rising prices themselves.

But a worrying amount of cash is simply being lost to inflation, which is wreaking havoc with government budgets as much as household ones.

And to make it worse, this is just the beginning.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has warned he will have difficult choices to make in his autumn statement in a fortnight’s time.

Mr Swinney then sets his budget for the coming year on 15 December, with many departments braced for real-terms cuts. Holyrood’s committees are already hearing grim talk of some services being “hollowed out” or shutting down entirely.

The coming weeks will be where that talk could become a reality, as ministers are forced to follow through on those difficult choices.

Scottish Conservative finance spokeswoman Liz Smith the global financial situation “do not absolve Mr Swinney or his colleagues of responsibility for the position Scotland finds itself in after fifteen years of their government”.

She said Mr Swinney had announced “more huge cuts to health, education and justice” but had not touched the budget for another independence referendum, and questioned whether now was the time to be introducing a new National Care Service.

Labour’s Daniel Johnson said “chaos” from the UK government had made the situation more difficult.

But he also criticised the number of foreign trips taken by the Angus Robertson, the Scottish government’s external affairs secretary.

Mr Johnson said: “I note that the cabinet secretary for external affairs has travelled to eight countries in as many months, clocking up almost 22,000 air miles.

“What cost control measures are being applied to the expenditures of members of the Government and civil servants?”

Mr Swinney’s review statement was initially expected within a fortnight of the UK government’s infamous mini-budget, which was announced on 23 September by then-Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.

Amid the resulting fallout at Westminster, which saw most of the plans reversed and both Mr Kwarteng and Prime Minister Liz Truss lose their jobs, the Holyrood update was delayed in anticipation of a UK government autumn statement scheduled for 31 October.

That was then pushed back to 17 November but the Scottish government decided it could not wait until then to announce its changes.

The Scottish government will announce its budget for next year on 15 December, which will include any changes it intends to make to income tax rates and bands.