Hundreds of pro-Trump demonstraors gather outside the California Capitol building in Sacramento (AP Photo/Adam Beam)US Capitol Hill Siege Live Updates: A US Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick late on Thursday died due to injuries sustained fighting the pro-Trump rioters attacking the building on Wednesday, US Capitol Police said. In a statement the police said, “Officer Sicknick was responding to the riots on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, in the U.S. Capitol and was injured while physically engaging with protesters.”
Outgoing US President Donald Trump took a different tone on Thursday and strongly opposed the “heinous attack” on the Capitol, saying he was “outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem.” In a video address, Trump expressed his staunch opposition to the “intruders” and condemned the violence that threatened American democracy.
“America is and must always be a nation of law and order, to those who engage in the acts of violence and destruction you do not represent our country,” Trump said in his first public comments after Twitter blocked his account.
A swarm of resignations have surfaced since the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters. US cabinet members — Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Transport Secretary Elaine Chao– put in their resignations after being “deeply troubled” by the situation. A day earlier a number of senior White House staffers, including US Deputy National Security Advisor, first lady’s chief of staff among others resigned over the Capitol Hill violence. US Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund has too announced his resignation after facing criticism for failing to prevent the attack.
At least five people have now died in the violence, while 52 people were arrested. The US Capitol had to be locked down with lawmakers inside after protesters tore down metal barricades at the bottom of the Capitol’s steps and were met by officers in riot gear. Some tried to push past the officers, who held shields, and the police could be seen firing pepper spray into the crowd to keep them back, even as the crowd shouted, “traitors”. The violence soon moved inside the Capitol building, where offices were ransacked amid firing.
Smoke fills the walkway outside the Senate Chamber as supporters of President Donald Trump are confronted by U.S. Capitol Police officers inside the Capitol, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
A US Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick late on Thursday died due to injuries sustained fighting the pro-Trump rioters attacking the building on Wednesday, US Capitol Police said. In a statement the police said, “Officer Sicknick was responding to the riots on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, in the U.S. Capitol and was injured while physically engaging with protesters.”
Top Democratic leadership has urged Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution to remove President Donald Trump from office for his “incitement of insurrection”, a day after his supporters attacked the US Capitol in a violent breach. The 25th Amendment allows for the president to be removed from office by the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet.
“The president’s dangerous and seditious acts necessitate his immediate removal from office,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement on Thursday.
Earlier in the day, the two Democratic leaders tried to reach out to Pence on the issue but were unable to talk to him. “This morning, we placed a call to Vice President Pence to urge him to invoke the 25th Amendment which would allow the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to remove the president for his incitement of insurrection and the danger he still poses. We have not yet heard back from the vice president,” Pelosi and Schumer said in a joint statement.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos resigned on Thursday, joining a list of officials quitting President Donald Trump's administration in protest at the storming of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.Chao, the wife of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, said in an email to staff that the mob attack "has deeply troubled me in a way that I simply cannot set aside."
She said her resignation will take effect on Monday.In a letter to Trump, DeVos said the attack on the Capitol was unconscionable. "There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me," she wrote, adding here resignation would be effective Friday.The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on DeVos's resignation.
Four more senior advisers in the White House National Security Council have resigned following the storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, according to a senior administration official and a person familiar with the matter.The sources told Reuters that the officials who stepped down on Thursday, in a growing exodus of Trump aides, were: Erin Walsh, senior director for African affairs; Mark Vandroff, senior director for defense policy; Anthony Rugierro, senior director for weapons of mass destruction; and Rob Greenway, senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs. (Reuters)
Outgoing US President Donald Trump took a different tone on Thursday and strongly opposed the “heinous attack” on the Capitol building , saying that he was “outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem.” In a video address, Trump expressed his staunch opposition to the “intruders” and condemned the violence that threatened American democracy. “I immediately deploy the national guard and federal law enforcement to secure the building and expel the intruders. America is and must always be a nation of law and order, to those who engage in the acts of violence and destruction you do not represent our country.
Donald Trump supporters stormed Capitol Hill on Wednesday afternoon, but the Dow Jones Index was unruffled and ended the day at an all-time high of 30,829. Rather than being influenced by this, the markets were enthused by the news of the Democratic Party winning two Senate seats from Georgia and getting a slender majority (with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s vote), which could ease the path of a big stimulus announcement by President-elect Joe Biden after he takes charge on January 20.
Experts say while India will be a likely beneficiary of that stimulus package as some of that money will find its way into Indian equities, there are also risks involved.
Clearly, the markets are eyeing another stimulus, this time from Biden. While the Dow Jones rose 1.44% on Wednesday, the FTSE 10 in UK and DAX in Germany too rose 3.5% and 1.7% respectively. Asian markets rose on Thursday with the Nikkei 225 in Japan and STI Index in Singapore closing with gains of 1.6% and 1.65% respectively. Read More
US Ambassador to India Kenneth I Juster said Thursday that he was “very sad” to see the violence in Washington DC and described the storming of the US Capitol as a “horrific scene” that was “not America at its best”.
Speaking to The Indian Express during a detailed interview on his three-year stint in India, the outgoing US envoy also said that lawlessness and rioting is “always unacceptable” and has no place in any democracy.
“It was very sad to see the news coming out of Washington, D.C. when we woke up on Thursday morning. While protests in our country are part of our democracy, it is unacceptable for there to be violence associated with them, and the storming of the US Capitol was a horrific scene. This is not America at its best. Lawlessness and rioting in the United States — or in any country — is always unacceptable. It has no place in any democracy,” Juster said.
Four people died on the US Capitol grounds Wednesday and 52 people have been arrested, Metropolitan Police Department Chief Robert J. Contee said Wednesday evening, after supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol in an unprecedented effort to stop Congress from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory.
British Home Secretary Priti Patel on Thursday condemned the "awful" scenes of riots on the Capitol Hill in Washington DC and blamed US President Donald Trump for the violence that resulted in four deaths in clashes between protesters and American police.
The senior Cabinet minister told the BBC that it was the outgoing President's words that fuelled the violence and accused Trump of doing nothing "de-escalate that".
"His comments directly led to the violence, and so far he has failed to condemn that violence and that is completely wrong," said Patel.
"He basically has made a number of comments yesterday that helped to fuel that violence and he didn't actually do anything to de-escalate that whatsoever... what we've seen is completely unacceptable," she said.
Facebook has extended the block on US President Donald Trump's account indefinitely, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced. "We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great," he said in a post.
January 6, 2021: That seat from where the government of the people, for the people, by the people operated, was in the midst of certifying the victory of President-elect Joe Biden to fulfil its duty of carrying out the will of the people. Almost out of the blue, just like the tragedy that happened on September 11, 2001, America watched aghast as The Capitol was invaded (one of the terms used on national TV) by supporters of President Donald Trump, spurred on by his exhortations that the Presidential election had been stolen from American people. Law enforcement was overwhelmed, Vice President Mike Pence, Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi were whisked away to safe locations. Members of the Electoral College were taken into safekeeping and the members of the media were put under lockdown. The images one saw later on TV resembled a siege, and towards late evening Vice President Pence came on television to announce that The Capitol had been secured and the Electoral College would get back to its work.
Written by Sudipta Sarangi
Global Times, a media organisation affiliated to China’s ruling party, drew a parallel Thursday between the siege of Capitol Hill and the time protesters stormed the Hong Kong legislature building in 2019. It recalled how US Speaker Nancy Pelosi had referred to the Hong Kong protests as “a beautiful sight to behold”, and said “it remains yet to be seen whether she will say the same about the recent developments in Capitol Hill”.
Several social media users in China also responded to Thursday’s incident, calling it “karma”, “retribution” and “deserving”, reported Global Times. Social media in the country is heavily censored. Read more
Oil prices were steady on Thursday after hitting fresh 11-month highs on a fall in US stockpiles and in the wake of a pledge by Saudi Arabia to cut output by more than expected.
Brent crude was up 5 cents to $54.35 a barrel at 1231 GMT after touching $54.90, a fresh high not seen since before the first COVID-19 lockdowns in the West.
US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) was up 26 cents, or 0.5% to $50.89 after touching $51.28.
Wednesday’s storming of the US Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump appeared to have little impact, while a slight rise in global equities suggested investors believed President-elect Joe Biden would be empowered to spend more freely. (Reuters)
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis removed his red “Strong Czechia” hat inspired by US President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” cap from his social media accounts on Thursday after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building.
Babis had professed support for Trump and told him on a 2019 White House visit he had “a similar plan to make the Czech Republic great again”.
Early on Thursday Babis changed his longtime Twitter profile photo from an image showing him wearing his red cap to one with him wearing a respirator mask with the Czech flag on it, in an allusion to efforts to curb the coronavirus pandemic.
“After the unprecedented attack on democracy in the United States, which I have unequivocally condemned, I deemed it fit to express my stance also by changing my profile photo,” he said in the statement, which echoed comments against the assault that he had posted earlier on Twitter. (Reuters)
The chaos in the US Capitol on Wednesday unfolded after President Donald Trump spent weeks whipping up his supporters with false allegations of fraud in the Nov. 3 election, culminating in a call to march to the building that represents US democracy.
Trump, who has refused to concede his loss to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, had urged his supporters multiple times to come to Washington for a rally on Wednesday, the day the US House of Representatives and Senate were scheduled to certify the results of the Electoral College.
“Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” Trump, a Republican, tweeted on Dec. 20. “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
They turned out in the thousands and heard the president urge them to march on the Capitol building to express their anger at the voting process and to pressure their elected officials to reject the results. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and Congressmen and women,” Trump told the crowd, speaking with the White House as a backdrop. (Reuters)
The bloody chaos inside the US Capitol on Wednesday came after the police force that protects the legislative complex was overrun by a mob of Trump supporters in what law enforcement officials called a catastrophic failure to prepare.
While events such as a presidential inauguration involve detailed security plans by numerous security agencies, far less planning went into protecting the joint session of Congress that convened on Wednesday to ratify the results of the 2020 presidential election, the officials said. That lapse came despite glaring warning signs of potential violence by hardline supporters of President Donald Trump, who are inflamed by Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen election and hope to block the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.
And security initially was handled almost entirely alone by the US Capitol Police, a 2,000-member force under the control of Congress and dedicated to protecting the 126-acre Capitol Grounds. For reasons that remained unclear as of early Thursday, other arms of the US federal government’s vast security apparatus did not arrive in force for hours as rioters besieged the seat of Congress. The Capitol is a short walk from where Trump in a speech railed against the election just before the riot began, calling the vote an “egregious assault on our democracy” and urging his support.
The counting of the electoral votes of the presidential election by Congress, normally a formality, was preceded by weeks of threats in social media that planned pro-Trump protests could descend into violence. Despite those rumblings of danger, the Capitol Police force did not request advance help to secure the building from other federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, according to one senior official. And National Guard reinforcements, summoned by the city’s mayor, were not mobilized until more than an hour after protesters had first breached the barricades. In stark contrast, those agencies were aggressively deployed by the Trump administration during last summer’s police brutality protests in Washington and elsewhere in the United States. (Reuters)
President-elect Joe Biden has announced Merrick Garland as his pick for attorney general, saying the federal appeals court judge and three others he has selected for senior Justice Department positions will restore the independence of the agency and faith in the rule of law.
The four lawyers are to be introduced by Biden at an event Thursday afternoon in Wilmington, Delaware.
In picking Garland, Biden is turning to an experienced judge who held senior positions at the Justice Department decades ago, including as a supervisor of the prosecution of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Garland’s nomination will force Senate Republicans to contend with someone they spurned four years ago refusing even to hold hearings when President Barack Obama nominated Garland for the Supreme Court. Biden is banking on Garland’s credentials and reputation for moderation to ensure his confirmation. (AP)
On Wednesday, in an unprecedented step, the two companies temporarily suspended Trump from posting to their platforms after a mob of his supporters stormed the house of Congress. It was the most aggressive action either company has yet taken against Trump, who more than a decade ago embraced the immediacy and scale of Twitter to rally loyalists, castigate enemies and spread false rumors.
Twitter locked Trump out of his account for 12 hours and said that future violations could result in a permanent suspension. The company required the removal of three of Trump’s tweets, including a short video in which he urged those supporters to “go home” while also repeating falsehoods about the integrity of the presidential election. Trump’s account deleted those posts, Twitter said; had they remained, Twitter had threatened to extend his suspension.
Facebook and Instagram, which Facebook owns, followed up in the evening, announcing that Trump wouldn’t be able to post for 24 hours following two violations of its policies. The White House did not immediately offer a response to the actions.
While some cheered the platforms’ actions, experts noted that the companies’ actions follow years of hemming and hawing on Trump and his supporters spreading dangerous misinformation and encouraging violence that have contributed to Wednesday’s violence. (AP)
US media houses tore into President Donald Trump, calling him a “menace” and “unfit to remain in office” following the attack on the Capitol by Trump’s supporters on Wednesday. Both print and electronic media held Trump directly responsible for inciting the mob and demanded that he be held accountable through impeachment proceedings or criminal prosecution.
The New York Times carried the headline ‘Trump incites mob’ on its front page. In an editorial titled ‘Trump is to blame for Capitol attack’, the newspaper said, “President Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress incited a violent attack Wednesday against the government they lead and the nation they profess to love. This cannot be allowed to stand.” Read more