policy

NANTUCKET, Mass. (AP) – Joe Biden is ending his final Thanksgiving holiday as president on Nantucket, a family tradition that appears to be a part of a broader farewell to his time within the White House this 12 months.

The Democrat's 4 years as president are being accomplished by Republican Donald Trump, whose Cabinet nominations, tariff threats and glitzy evenings at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club, have captured public attention because the November election. Biden dropped out of the presidential race in July and was replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump.

During his five days on the island of Massachusetts, with its picturesque clapboard houses and shell beaches, Biden, 82, still grappled with questions on his legacy. He planned to return to Washington later Saturday and leave for Angola the following day for his only visit to Africa as president.

As Biden and his family strolled Friday along the picturesque paved sidewalks and cobblestone streets which have made Nantucket an affluent and desirable summer vacation spot, passersby shouted “We love you, Joe.” The Biden contingent included the president's daughter, Ashley, and his son Hunter, and Hunter's four-year-old son Beau.

Last 12 months, Biden called Trump's falsehoods concerning the administration's hurricane relief “un-American” and repeatedly warned that the brand new president could undermine U.S. democracy and foreign alliances.

But when reporters asked on Thanksgiving Day what he was grateful for, Biden said: “I'm grateful for a peaceful transition of the presidency.”

Biden also said he was grateful for his family, the brand new ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the potential for further progress within the Middle East. The president, who has largely dodged reporters' questions of late, addressed plenty of topics related to Trump and his policies.

He suggested that “razor-thin” margins of power for Republicans in the following Congress would mean Trump would have to simply accept “a real compromise” as he advances his agenda.

“I think there might be a little bit of internal reckoning,” Biden said.

Biden also said he hoped Trump would “reconsider” his tariff threats against Mexico and Canada, America's top trading partners.

“We are surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean and two allies: Mexico and Canada,” Biden said. “And the last thing we need to do is destroy those relationships. I think we have them in a good place.”

Days earlier, Trump had vowed on his social media page Truth Social to impose 25% tariffs on each countries until they stop illegal immigration and block the flow of medicine across their border with the United States. The threat prompted Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to have a phone call with Trump and prompted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to fly to Florida to fulfill with him on Friday.

After that phone call, Trump claimed in a post that he was “effectively closing our southern border,” an announcement Sheinbaum disputed, although she was confident the tariffs could be averted. Mexico has already taken steps to handle the problems raised by Trump – a degree also raised by Biden.

Trump has also threatened a further 10% tariff against China unless the country stops exporting materials used to make the drug fentanyl.

Biden told reporters that Chinese President Xi Jinping understood the importance of avoiding missteps in relations with the United States.

“The one thing I’m confident about with Xi is that he doesn’t want to make a mistake,” Biden said. “And I'm not saying he's our best buddy, but he – he gets the point.”

On Thanksgiving Day, Biden went to a fireplace station along with his wife Jill and grandson Beau to deliver pumpkin pie. The first lady told firefighters and law enforcement officials that the family has been traveling to Nantucket for Thanksgiving since 1975, a visit the family now calls “Nana-Tucket” in reference to her central role in establishing the tradition.

The firefighters gave the Bidens a pair of baseball caps.

The president put his on and asked his grandson, “What do you think?”

“It looks good,” said the grandson, who demurred when the president asked him if he desired to be a firefighter.

On Friday, the Biden family had lunch on the Brotherhood of Thieves restaurant and stopped at Nantucket Bookworks, an art gallery and a number of other other stores. Their afternoon ended with the celebratory Christmas tree lighting and carols as the group snapped photos and videos of a grinning Biden.

This 12 months's holiday could have a special emotional resonance because it offers a respite from some family turmoil.

In December, Hunter Biden is scheduled to be sentenced on three felonies for purchasing a gun in 2018 when, prosecutors say, he lied on a federal form and said he had not used drugs illegally or was hooked on them. He also faces sentencing in California in December on federal tax charges to which he pleaded guilty in September.

The president had previously said he would neither pardon his son nor commute his possible sentence.

The leaders of Australia, India, Japan and the United States expanded their joint security measures in Asia's trade-rich waters as outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden hosted his counterparts from the Quad group, which was created over shared concerns about China.

Biden, who met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese near his hometown of Delaware on Saturday, stressed the importance of maintaining the Quad countries, which he sees as a towering foreign policy achievement. He will leave office after the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 5.

The leaders announced joint coast guard operations for next 12 months that may involve Australian, Japanese and Indian personnel deployed on a U.S. Coast Guard ship. The countries plan to extend military logistics cooperation, officials said. They didn’t comment on where the coast guard activities would happen.

The leaders also planned to expand the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Awareness, launched two years ago.

While the White House said the Quad summit was not directed at every other country and Beijing should not have any problem with the initiative, Biden began the summit's group session with a briefing on China. In a joint statement that didn’t mention the Chinese government by name, the leaders condemned “coercive and intimidating maneuvers in the South China Sea.”

Analysts said the brand new maritime security initiatives were a signal to Beijing and represented an extra shift in the main target of the Quad's activities towards security issues, reflecting growing concerns about China's intentions.

Chinese President Xi Jinping rejects the merger of the Quad states, arguing that it’s an try and encircle Beijing and escalate the conflict.

Biden described Beijing as a state that’s changing its tactics but not its strategy and continues to check the United States within the South and East China Seas and the Taiwan Strait.

“We believe Xi Jinping wants to focus on economic challenges at home and minimize turbulence in diplomatic relations with China. And I think he is trying to create diplomatic space to aggressively pursue China's interests,” Biden said in remarks broadcast on an official event feed.

Beijing claims almost all the South China Sea, including areas claimed by the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam. It also claims areas within the East China Sea claimed by Japan and Taiwan. China also considers democratically governed Taiwan to be its own territory.

The joint statement by the 2 leaders contained harsh words about North Korea, condemning its missile launches and “malicious cyber activities.” A US official said the leaders were concerned about Russian military aid to North Korea.

The group is intensifying its work to deliver critical and security technologies, including a brand new open radio access network, to the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia – regions where there is powerful competition from China.

A health initiative by politicians goals to combat cervical cancer.

Lisa Curtis, an Asia policy expert on the Center for a New American Security and a former government official, said India, which is just not a part of any military alliance, was concerned concerning the perception that the Quad could militarize the Indo-Pacific.

“But I think China's recent maritime aggression could change the situation for India and make India a little more open to the idea of ​​Quad security cooperation,” she said.

Analysts and politicians say Biden's invitation to host the Quad is an element of his efforts to institutionalise the body before he leaves office and that of Kishida, who’s stepping down after a leadership contest next week, and before elections in Australia next 12 months.

When asked concerning the group's endurance, Biden grabbed Modi by the shoulder and said the group would stay.

Albanese called the Quad coast guard plan “very important” since the “four countries will potentially have personnel on a single vessel, improving interoperability and cooperation,” in accordance with the transcript of a press conference he held in Philadelphia.

Before the summit, Albanese met with Biden at his home and discussed bilateral cooperation between the 2 close allies within the areas of defense and security, including within the Indo-Pacific.

The Quad met on the Secretary of State level under the previous administration of Donald Trump, who’s running against Vice President Kamala Harris in November, and enjoyed bipartisan support, reflected within the formation of a Quad caucus in Congress ahead of the summit. Biden elevated the Quad to the leadership level in 2021.

In In 1959, when Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev visited San Francisco and members of the International Longshoreman's Union greeted him with cheers, with newspaperman Frank Coniff quipping: “This is the damnedest town. They cheer for Khrushchev and boo Willie Mays.”

It was the peak of the Cold War and for Coniff and lots of of his readers there was no higher symbol of America than Mays. At that point, Mays was a 28-year-old center fielder of the San Francisco Giants and the most effective baseball player on the planet, and he was occasionally booed by his own team's fans.

A decade earlier Mays played for the Birmingham Black Baronsa Negro League team near his hometown of Westfield, Alabama, while still in highschool.

Mays, who died on June 18, 2024 on the age of 93, was not only the best baseball player of the last 80 years and possibly of all time, but in addition an enormously essential figure in American sports, culture and history. His journey from the segregated Deep South of his childhood to being honored by President Barack Obama with the Presidential Medal of Freedom encompasses much of American racial history within the twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

In 2009, Mays traveled to the All-Star Game, where he a record of 24 times (from 1959-1962 there have been two All-Star games per 12 months), on Air Force One, where He told an enraptured and smiling President Obama how much it meant to him to see an African American elected president after his childhood in Birmingham.

Mays repeated several times how proud he was of Obama. The president responded: “If it weren't for people like you and Jackie (Robinson), I'm not sure I would have ever been elected to the White House.”

“Racism and racist swear words”

Mays began his profession in 1951 with the New York Giants4 years after Jackie Robinson played his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers. He became generally known as the “Say Hey Kid” due to his youth, exuberant playing style and his habit of greeting individuals with “Say Hey.”

In these years, the mixing of the National and American Leagues was still in its early stages. There was an off-the-cuff rule Limiting the variety of non-white players per team to a maximum of three. Many teams, including the Yankees and the Red Sox, were still all-white.

Although the Giants played on the northern fringe of Harlem, where Mays lived early in his profession and was widely liked, Mays was subjected to the identical racism and racist abuse as Robinson in the course of the team's trips to southern cities and spring training in Florida.

The centrality of baseball in American culture on the time made Mays much more significant. At that point, baseball players were still by far essentially the most famous athletes within the United States, and far of the country watched the World Series every fall.

In the late FiftiesMays was, together with Mickey Mantle, America's most famous baseball player. For a long time, it has not been unusual for African-American athletes to be widely admired, but Mays was the primary. Mays' appeal to all fans was not only based on how good he was as a player, but in addition on the verve with which he played the sport. Excite fans with basket catches and daredevil baserunning, in addition to a public personality who was outgoing and friendly.

Representative … with “royal stature”

Robinson was a pioneering and unique figure in American history, but Mays's impact on the culture was broader and a minimum of as significant.

Frank GurdyProfessor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, summed it up as follows: “Mays was this black mega-superstar in this country who somehow managed to transcend his background as someone from the Jim Crow South and become attractive to white America. He could be black and represent black participation in sports while maintaining a majestic stature that appealed to all people.”

In the Nineteen Sixties, when Mays was the most effective and most famous baseball player on the planet, he was criticized by some because they weren’t radical or open enoughThis criticism seems somewhat unfair today.

Unlike many other great African-American athletes of that point, comparable to Bill Russell, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, Wilt Chamberlain, Jim Brown or Robinson, Mays was a product of the South and carried that trauma with him to some extent.

It is commonly missed that within the last decade of his profession he was deeply respected respected by nearly all African-American baseball players for his skill and his role as an early trailblazer. As the longest-tenured player on the San Francisco Giants within the Nineteen Sixties, he set the tone and kept the peace in what was by far essentially the most diverse clubhouse in baseball on the time.

Because Mays played for the Giants in San Francisco from 1958 until he was transferred to the Metsand back to New York in the course of the 1972 season, his off-field activities didn’t all the time receive the eye they deserved. For a long time He worked with youth in San Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point communitya predominantly African-American neighborhood that included Candlestick Park.

Overcoming racist history

Mays, who played his last game in the course of the 1973 World Serieswas a baseball star at the tip of the period when baseball was a vitally essential cultural institution and at a time when baseball was a pacesetter within the country in problems with civil rights and integration.

His exceptional statistical achievements speak for themselves, however the grace, joy, energy and intelligence with which he played the sport allowed him to face out from other great players of his – or any – era.

Mays' death shouldn’t be only a loss for baseball, but for all of America. Willie Mays is a reminder of what America can produce and that there remains to be hope that the country can put its ugly racial history behind it and embrace a graceful, talented and proud African American as a uniquely essential national hero.