Maddox: King will be removed from committee assignments
Monday, August 28th, 2023
A week after Representative Patty King (R-GA) falsely claimed that
The Diary of Anne Frank was a forgery, Speaker Daniel Maddox (D-IL) announced that he will introduce a motion to be remove from her committee assignments when Congress returns to its session after Labor Day.
"Congresswoman King's outrageous and untrue allegations about the authenticity of one of the most famous books about the Holocaust by one of its victims is offensive and despicable. Her refusal to apologize or conduct herself appropriately to standards expected of members of the United States Congress means that it is no longer appropriate for her to remain involved in the valuable and important work of congressional committees." Maddox said in a statement.
The move comes after many controversies from the outspoken Georgia congresswoman, who was reported to have been on Alan Duke's shortlist to join the Republican ticket for last year's presidential election. King had previously stated her belief that the Internet "turned children into slaves", that Hollis Foundation-funded vaccination clinics were implanting microchips in order to "catalogue every person in the world", blamed "Jewish and communist support" for President Seaborn's defeat of Duke, and praised the arming of school teachers and book burnings in Nazi Germany.
With a simple majority required to remove members from a standing committee, House Democrats are expected to be able to remove King with few, if any defections. Several Republican lawmakers spoke privately of their own dissatisfaction with King (one congressman describing King as "unhinged" and another saying the Georgia congresswoman was "Joe McCarthy with a sex change and severe head trauma"), although none indicated whether they would support the Democrats' motion to remove King from her committee assignments.
King, who serves on the House Budget Committee and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, called the move "an attempt at silencing one of the few free voices in government" and accused House leadership of "Bolshevik tactics."
House Minority Leader Mitchell Harris (R-IN) said in a statement that he denounced both King's comments and her removal from committee assignments.
"This is a major overreaction by the Democrat majority, and that violate the norms of the House," Harris said in an interview after Maddox's announcement. "A bipartisan consensus has kept this power limited only to members who have been criminally charged or indicted, not just members who say things the Speaker disagrees with."
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Monday, August 28th 2023
Mohammad secures second term as Pakistani president
Islamabad — President Wasim Mohammad easily secured a second term as Pakistan's president on Monday, taking 678 of a possible 706 votes in the country's electoral college, consisting of members of the federal and state legislatures.
Mohammad thanked the members of the electoral college, saying that he was grateful for his "overwhelming mandate" to "continue serving the peoples of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan...as I have for my entire adult life."
The news comes as protests grow over the delay for new elections to the country's National Assembly were announced simultaneously with the current national assembly, dominated by the pro-government PML (M) (Pakistani Muslim League - Mohammmad), passing legislation aimed at denying election resources to political parties that "foster separatism" or that "dispute the Islamic character of Pakistan."
Mohammad, who seized power in a military coup in 2016, won his first term unopposed in 2018, shortly before the first post-coup legislative election that has been widely described as neither free nor fair, with rampant voter intimidation and the leaders of opposition parties jailed or forced into exile. His government has been criticized for its poor human and civil rights record, and Mohammad, despite his pledge to "restore dignity to the government" by removing corrupt officials, was named in the 2021 Paradise Papers as one of several then-current or former heads of state who used hidden offshore bank accounts to conceal wealth and avoid taxation.
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Tuesday, 29 August 2023
Wallace sacked after Birmingham emails released
Former Minister of State for Security Tom Wallace has been shuffled out of his position after the public release of several emails sent by Wallace in the aftermath of June's attempted terrorist attacks in Birmingham caused outrage at Wallace's preoccupation with the political effects of the attack on the government.
Several leaked emails, sent between Wallace to Home Secretary Karen Purvis include statements blaming MI5 and GCHQ for "not acting in a timelier manner", saying that the six men, all of whom are in custody after two separate attacks that caused property damage and left two of the attackers with life-threatening burns, would have been "picked up earlier" had the security services not "mucked [the government] about."
But others, including some on the government benches, were angered by multiple remarks from Wallace to Purvis over what the former minister believed was the political perception of the attack.
"Bloody awful for this to happen now," Wallace wrote in one email shortly after the second attack, when the assailants threw Molotov cocktails outside the Birmingham New Street station before being tackled by onlookers . "Our crime [policy] is one area where we're topping Labour [in the polls] and then this bollocks has to happen days from an election."
"We would have picked up more seats if [the security services] hadn't faffed about on this," Wallace said in one email dated just after the election. "Truly infuriating."
The Prime Minister's Office issued a brief statement stating that Colin Havins, MP for Fareham, had replaced Wallace at the Home Office, but declining to cite a reason.
Shadow Home Secretary Oliver Kendrick called for a fundamental reassessment of the government's relation to the security services, citing what he called "trouble revelations" from the emails.
"Our nation's security concerns should not be viewed through the lens of what the effects of stopping terrorism has on our domestic politics," Kendrick said. "The government needs to reassure both the nation and its security services that it shares this same view."
