anti-abortion agenda

while others, mainly on the coasts, have moved to protect it.

The closure of abortion clinics in about a dozen states has forced tens of thousands of women to travel elsewhere to terminate a pregnancy.

Biden also warned that Republicans were working to enact a nationwide abortion ban.

“Congressional Republicans want to ban abortion nationwide, but go beyond that, by taking FDA-approved medication for terminating a pregnancy, off the market, and make it harder to obtain contraception,” the president said, referring to the Food and Drug Administration.

At one small rally in Washington, protesters carried signs and T-shirts bearing phrases like “I am the post-Roe generation,” and “Unborn Lives Matter,” urging national-level restrictions on abortion.

Steve Karlen, an anti-abortion campaigner, and his wife, Laura, traveled to the capital from the Midwestern state of Wisconsin to “celebrate” Roe’s reversal, which also fell on their wedding anniversary.

“It’s a blessing to have the abortion decision going back to the states,” said Laura, a stay-at-home mother to five children. “But ultimately what we want is the unborn children to be protected (nationally)—that everyone in our country will have the right to live.”

With a divided US Congress, there is little Biden can do. Still, he said he would push for federal-level protections.

“My Administration will continue to protect access to reproductive health care and call on Congress to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal law once and for all,” he said.

Abortion rights proved a key issue for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, and are likely to be just as important in the 2024 presidential race.

They’ve also become an animating feature in Republican campaigns. Primary candidates are currently trying to outflank former president Donald Trump, the current frontrunner for the party’s nomination, who has been criticized for flip-flopping on his position. AFP

The Kremlin said it would not prosecute Prigozhin or the armed members of the Wagner group.

As US intelligence officials pinned down information that Prigozhin was preparing military action, they grew concerned about chaos in a country with a powerful nuclear arsenal, the Times reported.

US spy agencies believe that Putin himself was informed that Prigozhin, once a close ally, was plotting his rebellion at least a day before it occurred, the Post reported. AFP

WASHINGTON—He has been indicted over hush money payments to a porn star and found liable in a sexual abuse lawsuit in a tumultuous start to his reelection campaign—but America’s evangelicals just can’t quit Donald Trump.

The 45th president of the United States—who is vying to be the 47th— has spent years mired in legal and ethical scandals, from accusations that he abused his office and tried to subvert a free-and-fair election to alleged affairs.

Yet the 77-year-old Republican remains as popular as ever on the Christian right, his appeal abundantly evident at Road to Majority, a weekend gathering of 3,000 evangelicals from the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Washington.

“Together we’re warriors in a righteous crusade to stop the arsonists, the atheists, the globalists and the Marxists,” Trump said in characteristically apocalyptic language, as he delivered the keynote address at the closing gala to rapt applause.

“That’s what they are. And we will restore our Republic as one nation under God.”

It took some persuasion for white evangelicals to come around to Trump when he announced he was running for president in 2015. But once they were in, they were all-in.

Non-Hispanic white Republicans who attend church regularly backed him by 81 percent in 2016 and 76 percent in 2020—statistics that astonish those who question the former reality TV star’s religious credentials.

“It’s the difference between a representative and a leader,” Suzzanne Monk, a 50-year-old conservative political activist, told AFP as she attempted to explain Trump’s enduring popularity.

“Many of the politicians we have seen over decades are representatives... and they do the absolute minimum to keep themselves reelected. Donald J. Trump looks at situations and tries to rectify the situation.”

‘Cult of personality’?

CYAN MAGENTA YELLOW BLACK

Trump’s famously devout vice president Mike Pence, who is running a distant third in the race for the 2024 nomination, would seem the more obvious fit for evangelicals. But he was booed at the 2021 Road to Majority over his refusal to help Trump overturn his election defeat and received largely polite applause this year. AFP