MIAMI: Frontrunner Joe Biden faced repeated criticism on multiple fronts Thursday from his Democratic rivals for the 2020 presidential nomination, including calls to leave the battle to oust Donald Trump to a younger generation.
In a sometimes scrappy showdown of the Democratic heavyweights, Senator Kamala Harris landed several blows on Biden in the second of two nationally televised debates, putting the former vice president on the defensive as he argued that he is best-positioned to take on the Republican president.
Biden blasted Trump for his “horrible” policies that have exacerbated income inequality, while his chief rival for the nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders, took it directly to the “phony” president, calling him “a pathological liar and a racist.”
But 76-year-old Biden also found himself on the receiving end of a pointed attack from a lower-tier candidate half his age.
Congressman Eric Swalwell, 38, called on him to “pass the torch” to a new generation better equipped to tackle climate change, expand health care coverage and reduce gun violence.
“I’m still holding on to that torch,” Biden snapped back.
Several rivals were clearly seeking to wrench it from his grip, including Harris, the only black woman in the race, who made a stirring call for Biden to recognize his recent “hurtful” comments about being civil with avowedly segregationist US senators.
Biden, with the room dead quiet, insisted he does not “praise racists,” and denied he opposed initiatives in the 1970s to bus children from predominantly black communities to better schools in more prosperous neighborhoods.
“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bussed to school every day,” Harris said, in one of the evening’s most potent moments.
“That little girl was me.”
Another candidate in the upper tier, Pete Buttigieg, has also been on the back foot on racial issues following the fatal shooting of a black man by a white police officer in South Bend, Indiana, where he is mayor.
“When I look into his mother’s eyes, I have to face the fact that nothing that I say will bring him back,” Buttigieg said, adding that such tragedies are happening in communities across America.
“It’s a mess. We are hurting.”
With so many potential challengers to Trump, the party needed to split the top 20 candidates into debates over two nights in Miami, Florida.
Thursday’s session featured four of the race’s top five candidates in national polling, including Biden’s main challenger Sanders, the 77-year-old US democratic socialist senator whose high-spending policies have pushed the party leftward in recent years.
Harris, 54, may have vaulted herself into serious contention with her composed performance and steely showdown with Biden.
But after the debate she stressed it wasn’t personal.
“I otherwise have a great deal of respect for Joe Biden,” she said. “I do not believe he is a racist.”
Biden received no quarter from the old guard either.
When he was questioned about his support for the Iraq war and insisted that he took responsibility for getting 150,000 combat troops out of the country, Sanders pounced.
“Joe voted for that war, and I helped lead the opposition to that war, which was a total disaster.”
Biden, seeking a recovery in his closing remarks, called for restoration of “the “soul” of the country after Trump “ripped it out.”
“We have got to unite the United States of America,” he added.
All candidates savaged Trump for his immigration policy, including Senator Kirsten Gillibrand who said the president had “torn apart our moral fabric” by separating migrant children from their parents at the border.
Author Marianne Williamson, a surprise presidential candidate, branded the policies “state-sponsored crimes.”
When all contenders signalled support for undocumented immigrants’ access to health care, Trump, who has made stopping illegal immigration a centerpiece of his presidency, weighed in from the G20 summit in Japan.
In a tweet he accused Democrats of supporting “giving millions of illegal aliens unlimited health care. How about taking care of American Citizens first!?“
Debate also addressed whether the party should embrace a shift toward more liberal policies and government involvement in the economy.
On Wednesday third-placed Elizabeth Warren called out disparities in wealth and income and pledged to work to improve the lives of struggling families.
Sanders covered the same ground Thursday, but he also acknowledged that, in a shift to his Medicare for All platform, Americans would have to pay more taxes.
Biden under attack as 2020 Democrat rivals urge passing of torch
Biden under attack as 2020 Democrat rivals urge passing of torch
- Congressman Eric Swalwell, 38, called on him to “pass the torch” to a new generation better equipped to tackle climate change, expand health care coverage and reduce gun violence
- With so many potential challengers to Trump, the party needed to split the top 20 candidates into debates over two nights in Miami, Florida
Afghan returnees in Bamiyan struggle despite new homes
- More than five million Afghans have returned home since September 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan: Sitting in his modest home beneath snow-dusted hills in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province, Nimatullah Rahesh expressed relief to have found somewhere to “live peacefully” after months of uncertainty.
Rahesh is one of millions of Afghans pushed out of Iran and Pakistan, but despite being given a brand new home in his native country, he and many of his recently returned compatriots are lacking even basic services.
“We no longer have the end-of-month stress about the rent,” he said after getting his house, which was financed by the UN refugee agency on land provided by the Taliban authorities.
Originally from a poor and mountainous district of Bamiyan, Rahesh worked for five years in construction in Iran, where his wife Marzia was a seamstress.
“The Iranians forced us to leave” in 2024 by “refusing to admit our son to school and asking us to pay an impossible sum to extend our documents,” he said.
More than five million Afghans have returned home since September 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), as neighboring Iran and Pakistan stepped up deportations.
The Rahesh family is among 30 to be given a 50-square-meter (540-square-foot) home in Bamiyan, with each household in the nascent community participating in the construction and being paid by UNHCR for their work.
The families, most of whom had lived in Iran, own the building and the land.
“That was crucial for us, because property rights give these people security,” said the UNHCR’s Amaia Lezertua.
Waiting for water
Despite the homes lacking running water and being far from shops, schools or hospitals, new resident Arefa Ibrahimi said she was happy “because this house is mine, even if all the basic facilities aren’t there.”
Ibrahimi, whose four children huddled around the stove in her spartan living room, is one of 10 single mothers living in the new community.
The 45-year-old said she feared ending up on the street after her husband left her.
She showed AFP journalists her two just-finished rooms and an empty hallway with a counter intended to serve as a kitchen.
“But there’s no bathroom,” she said. These new houses have only basic outdoor toilets, too small to add even a simple shower.
Ajay Singh, the UNHCR project manager, said the home design came from the local authorities, and families could build a bathroom themselves.
There is currently no piped water nor wells in the area, which is dubbed “the dry slope” (Jar-e-Khushk).
Ten liters of drinking water bought when a tanker truck passes every three days costs more than in the capital Kabul, residents said.
Fazil Omar Rahmani, the provincial head of the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation Affairs, said there were plans to expand the water supply network.
“But for now these families must secure their own supply,” he said.
Two hours on foot
The plots allocated by the government for the new neighborhood lie far from Bamiyan city, which is home to more than 70,000 people.
The city grabbed international attention in 2001, when the Sunni Pashtun Taliban authorities destroyed two large Buddha statues cherished by the predominantly Shia Hazara community in the region.
Since the Taliban government came back to power in 2021, around 7,000 Afghans have returned to Bamiyan according to Rahmani.
The new project provides housing for 174 of them. At its inauguration, resident Rahesh stood before his new neighbors and addressed their supporters.
“Thank you for the homes, we are grateful, but please don’t forget us for water, a school, clinics, the mobile network,” which is currently nonexistent, he said.
Rahmani, the ministry official, insisted there were plans to build schools and clinics.
“There is a direct order from our supreme leader,” Hibatullah Akhundzada, he said, without specifying when these projects will start.
In the meantime, to get to work at the market, Rahesh must walk for two hours along a rutted dirt road between barren mountains before he can catch a ride.
Only 11 percent of adults found full-time work after returning to Afghanistan, according to an IOM survey.
Ibrahimi, meanwhile, is contending with a four-kilometer (2.5-mile) walk to the nearest school when the winter break ends.
“I will have to wake my children very early, in the cold. I am worried,” she said.
