Agencies
WASHINGTON, OCTOBER 26
Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson called on Sunday for a ban on abortion in nearly all cases, and likened those seeking to terminate their pregnancies to slave owners, in comments certain to spark controversy.
Carson, 64, said it was illogical for mothers to believe they have the right to kill their unborn children.
“I’m a reasonable person, and if people can come up with a reasonable explanation of why they would like to kill a baby, I’ll listen,” Carson told “Meet the Press” on NBC television.
“In the ideal situation, the mother should not believe that the baby is her enemy and should not be looking to terminate the baby.”
While opposed to abortions for pregnancies due to rape or incest, the retired neurosurgeon said he would allow mothers to terminate pregnancy if necessary to preserve their own life and health.
But he stressed such cases are “extraordinarily rare.”
“Think about this - during slavery, and I know that is one of those words you are not supposed to say, but I’m saying it - during slavery, a lot of the slave owners thought that they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that slave, anything that they chose to do,” said Carson, who is African American.
“What if the abolitionist had said, ‘I don’t believe in slavery, I think it’s wrong. But you guys do whatever you want to do.’ Where would we be?”
Carson said he would “love” to see the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v Wade, overturned.
World would be better place if Saddam, Kadhafi were still in power: Trump
The world would be a better place if dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Moamer Kadhafi were still in power, top Republican US presidential hopeful Donald Trump said in comments aired on Sunday.
The billionaire real estate tycoon also told CNN’s “State of the Union” talk show that the Middle East “blew up” around US President Barack Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, his biggest Democratic rival in the race for the White House.
“100 per cent,” Trump said when asked if the world would be better off with Hussein and Kadhafi still at the helm in Iraq and Libya.
Both strongmen committed atrocities against their own people and are now dead. Saddam, the former Iraqi president, was toppled in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and was executed in 2006.
Kadhafi -- who ruled Libya for four decades -- was ousted and slain in October 2011.
“People are getting their heads chopped off. They’re being drowned. Right now it’s far worse than ever under Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi,” Trump said.
“I mean, look what happened. Libya is a catastrophe. Libya is a disaster. Iraq is a disaster. Syria is a disaster.
The whole Middle East. It all blew up around Hillary Clinton and around Obama. It blew up.”
Calling Iraq the “Harvard of terrorism,” Trump said the country had turned into a “training ground for terrorists.”
“If you look at Iraq from years ago, I’m not saying he (Saddam) was a nice guy. He was a horrible guy but it’s better than it is now,” Trump said.
Trump said his foreign policy strategy would be centered around beefing up the US military.
“All I know is this: we’re living in Medieval times ... We’re living in an unbelievably dangerous and horrible world,” Trump said.
“The Trump doctrine is simple,” he added. “It’s strength. It’s strength. Nobody is going to mess with us. Our military will be made stronger.”
Opted out because I ‘couldn’t win’: US Vice President Joe Biden
US Vice President Joe Biden has said he decided not to run for president because he realised he “couldn’t win”, days after announcing that there was too little time to “mount a winning campaign” for the 2016 polls.
“I’ll be very blunt, if I thought we could’ve put together the campaign that our supporters deserve and our contributors deserved I’ll — I would have gone ahead and done it,” Biden said on ’60 Minutes’ programme on CBS news.
“(I think, I) couldn’t win,” he said.
In the wide-ranging interview, his first since announcing he would not contest the presidential election, the 72-year- old Biden explained he took quite a time to take the decision.
“Because it took that long for us to decide as a family. Look, dealing with the loss of Beau, any parent listening who’s lost a child, knows that you can’t — it doesn’t follow schedules of primaries and caucuses and contributors and the like. It just– you– and everybody grieves at a different pace,” he said.
He is the second consecutive American Vice President to not run for presidency.
Biden’s predecessor, Dick Cheney, also did not run in the 2008 election to succeed George W Bush.
Biden, who lost his son Beau in May at the age of 46 of brain cancer, put his election plans on hold while grieving.
“I’ve said from the beginning that I don’t know whether our ability to deal with the loss of Beau would reach a point where we could do that before time ran out. And there was nothing we could control,” he said.
Biden also sought to dispel rumours that his late son had made a last-minute plea to him to run for president.
“Beau all along thought that I should run and I could win. But there was not what was sort of made out as kind of this Hollywood-esque thing that at the last minute Beau grabbed my hand and said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to run, like, win one for the Gipper. It wasn’t anything like that,” Biden said with wife Jill by his side during the interview.
Jill said she was disappointed about the decision.
“I think I was disappointed. I mean, I thought Joe would be a great president. And you know I’ve seen his — in the 40 years we’ve been together, I’ve seen, you know, the strength of his character, his optimism, you know, his hope,” she said.
Biden said President Barack Obama supported his decision and “he knew how close it was, what was going on. And I said, ‘I’m going to go out and announce it this morning or early afternoon.’”
Biden said that Obama told him that he would be “proud to stand with you.”
Biden, in a surprise announcement last week, said he would not run for president. The announcement cleared the decks for former secretary of states Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party nomination.
