Headline
Biden Turns 81 As Voters Show Concern About Age

…poll says 54 percent of Americans say Biden no longer competence for the job
Joe Biden joked about his age as he celebrated his 81st birthday on Monday, but the issue is no laughing matter for many voters as he seeks reelection next year.
His birthday renews the focus on the fact that the Democrat is the oldest president in American history — and that if he wins a second term next year he will be 86 by the time he leaves.
While his aides regularly lash out at those who cast doubt on whether he is too old to be commander-in-chief, Biden likes to suggest that age brings wisdom, or simply takes a light hearted approach.
“It’s difficult turning 60,” the president said with a chuckle at the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardoning ceremony at the White House on Monday, the same day as his birthday.
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“This is the 76th anniversary of this event — and I want you to know I wasn’t there for the first one,” he quipped.
But a moment in which he mixed up US singers Taylor Swift and Britney Spears is likely to reinforce impressions among voters who have been concerned by a recent series of trips and slip-ups.
Footage of Biden losing his balance on the stairs of Air Force One has gone viral — he now uses a shorter flight of stairs — and he has occasionally given rambling answers during press conferences.
Worse for Biden, voters don’t so far have the same concerns about his likely election rival Donald Trump, despite the fact that Trump is 77 and has been known to make similar slip-ups.
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Trump warned in a speech in September, for example, that the United States was on the verge of “World War II,” and recently said Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was the leader of Turkey.
Lucid
Biden is “not doing a lot wrong” but is struggling to change perceptions on his age — as well as other issues like the economy — said David Karol, who teaches government and politics at the University of Maryland.
“He is lucid, but people just have this perception,” Karol told AFP.
The White House has been dismissive of opinion polls, with Democrats notching up a series of recent electoral successes. They also point to the fact that Biden beat Trump in 2020 despite Biden being 77 himself at the time.
Yet the numbers make grim reading for the party. Seventy-four percent of people said Biden would be too old to serve a second term, compared to 50 percent for Trump, a recent ABC/Washington Post poll showed.
A Yahoo/YouGov poll found that 54 percent of Americans say Biden no longer has “the competence to carry out the job of president,” up from 41 percent before the 2020 election.
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Some analysts say Biden’s age should not matter.
The issue in general has been unfairly “weaponized” in US politics, said S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“Aging is not what it used to be,” Olshansky told AFP.
“There are very large segments of the population that survive to their eighth decade perfectly capable of being president, or doing whatever they like.”
Super-Agers
Biden — and Trump for that matter — are both likely to be “Super-Agers,” a term coined by researchers to describe a small group of people who keep their full faculties until late in life, said Olshansky.
His research has also found that for US presidents, “biological time seems to tick at a slower pace” than for other people, as they apparently thrive on the stress of the job.”
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That said, Biden’s campaign has taken to highlighting Trump’s own slip-ups.
Nevertheless, the Democrat’s age is bound to come under even deeper scrutiny during a grueling election campaign.
Republicans have trained their fire on the person who is just a heartbeat away from the presidency, should the worst happen: Vice President Kamala Harris.
Harris blazed a trail as the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to hold the vice president’s office, but her approval ratings are as bad as her boss’s, at under 40 percent.
AFP
Headline
UK Is A Home, Not Hotel, Kemi Badenoch Tells Immigrants, Starmer’s Govt

UK Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has slammed Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government over its immigration policy, declaring that Britain is “a home, not a hotel.”
Badenoch accused Labour of weakening the country’s borders and enabling mass automatic citizenship.
In a 1:11-minute video posted on her official X account on Friday, Badenoch claimed Labour’s proposed reforms could allow up to two million immigrants to automatically qualify for British citizenship starting next year.
READ ALSO:Badenoch Unveils Strict UK Immigration Plan, Targets 150,000 Yearly Deportations
“From next year, two million immigrants can automatically claim British citizenship. Two million people! That’s nearly twice the population of Birmingham. That’s massive,” Badenoch said in the video.
Badenoch noted that the Conservative Party has introduced a deportation bill to bring immigration down.
NDLEA intercepts drugs hidden in snails, others meant for UK, US, DRC
Among the measures she endorsed in the video were deporting all foreign criminals, mandatory age checks, no more pretending to be kids, tougher visa rules and salary thresholds, disapplying the Human Rights Act to immigration cases, and no more abusing human rights laws to judge deportations. Make asylum support repayable, and no permanent right to stay in the UK if you’ve relied on benefits.
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“Until that’s law, we won’t fix this. Labour should adopt it now. It’s time to get tough. That’s what the Conservatives’ Deportation Bill delivers, and we’re going to go further. Our country is a home, not a hotel. And if we don’t defend it, no one else will.”
In the caption that came with the video, she tweeted, “Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.
“Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak; it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation Bill.”
Headline
King Charles To Pray With Pope Leo In Historic Vatican Visit

King Charles III will on Thursday meet Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican and make history as the first head of the Church of England to pray publicly with the pontiff for five centuries.
The 76-year-old monarch, who is the supreme governor of the Church of England, arrived in Rome on Wednesday evening with his wife, Queen Camilla, for what Buckingham Palace described as a “historic” state visit.
It will be Charles’s first meeting with Leo since the US-born pope took over as head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics in May, following the death of Pope Francis.
The royals will arrive at the Apostolic Palace at 10.45am (0845 GMT) for private talks with the pope.
READ ALSO:King Charles III To Visit Vatican Next Week
The king and queen will then join an ecumenical service at midday (1000 GMT) in the Sistine Chapel led by Pope Leo and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, currently the senior cleric of the Church of England.
Broadcast live by Vatican media, it will be the first time a reigning English or British monarch has prayed publicly with a pope since English king Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534.
Triggered by the pope’s refusal to annul the king’s marriage so he could marry another woman, the schism made the monarch head of the separate Church of England.
Thursday’s service, held beneath Michelangelo’s spectacular ceiling frescoes, will be centred on conservation and protecting the environment, a cause championed by Charles.
READ ALSO:King Charles To Knight David Beckham For Football, Charity Work
It will bring together Catholic and Anglican traditions, with the choir from the Sistine Chapel joined by that from Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences.
– Schism –
The religious break between London and Rome remains, even if there has been a significant rapprochement in recent decades.
In 1961, the late Queen Elizabeth II, Charles’s mother, became the first British monarch to visit the Holy See since the split.
The law was changed in 2013 so that marrying a Catholic would no longer disqualify someone from becoming monarch — although they still have to be a Protestant themselves.
The rapprochement is important because “Anglicanism was born in reaction to the Catholic Church, and therefore in opposition,” said Hyacinthe Destivelle, a French priest and member of the Vatican’s dicastery (department) for promoting Christian unity.
READ ALSO:King Charles III To Visit Vatican Next Week
This is no longer the case, despite “theological differences in recent decades”, he told AFP.
Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England — the mother church of the world’s 85-million-strong Anglican community — ordains women and allows priests to marry.
Sarah Mullally was recently named the first female archbishop of Canterbury, the Church’s top cleric, although she has yet to officially take up her post.
– Royal Confrater –
Charles and Queen Camilla are also set to take part in a service at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, one of four major papal basilicas, which has historic links with the English crown.
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The king will be made a “Royal Confrater” of the basilica and presented with a specially designed seat for use by him and future British monarchs.
Charles has visited the Vatican several times and met privately with Pope Francis on April 9, just days before the pontiff’s death.
The king sent his son and heir, William, to the funeral and his brother, Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh, to Leo’s inauguration mass.
The visit comes as the Catholic Church celebrates the Jubilee, a year-long event held every 25 years, which has drawn millions of pilgrims to the Vatican.
It also comes at a delicate time for Charles, following new revelations about his brother Prince Andrew, who is mired in a scandal surrounding late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Andrew announced on Friday that he would relinquish his title as Duke of York, reportedly under pressure from Charles. He had already stepped back from royal duties in 2019.
AFP
Headline
One Dies As Woman Trying To Kill Cockroach Sets House On Fire

South Korean police have stated that a woman in her 20s set her apartment building on fire while trying to kill a cockroach with an improvised flamethrower.
Local media reports that the woman attempted to burn the insect using a lighter and a flammable spray, saying she had used the same method before. However, items in her home caught fire on Monday, spreading to other parts of the building.
Police in the northern city of Osan said they will seek an arrest warrant for the woman, who could be charged with accidentally starting a fire and causing death by negligence.
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According to the BBC, one of the woman’s neighbours, a Chinese national in her 30s, died while trying to escape the blaze. The victim lived on the fifth floor of the building with her husband and their two-month-old baby.
When the fire broke out, the couple opened their window and called for help. They handed their baby to a neighbour on the adjacent block before attempting to escape. The husband managed to climb over, but the woman fell from the window. She was taken to the hospital and pronounced dead hours later.
Police said they believed the couple tried escaping through the window because thick smoke from the fire had blocked the stairway.
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The building houses commercial shops on the first floor and 32 residential units from the second to fifth floors. Eight other residents also suffered from smoke inhalation.
Using blowtorches or homemade flamethrowers to kill cockroaches has become a trend on social media. In 2018, an Australian man set fire to his kitchen while attempting to exterminate cockroaches with a similar device.
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